Palo Alto Unified School District Special Education Metrics
Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) Special Education / Students With Disabilities Demographics (2019,2022)
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Total Student Population | Students With Disabilities Population | Percentage Students with Disabilities |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2021 | 10754 | 1087 | 10.1% |
| PAUSD | 2019 | 11992 | 1144 | 9.5% |
| California | 2019 | 6,186,278 | 725,412 | 11.7% |
| PAUSD | 2022 | 10509 | 1069 | 10.2% |
| California | 2022 | 5,892,240 | 745,513 | 12.7% |
Question – is PAUSD under-identifying SWD
Issue – data is not available on students who only have 504 plans
PAUSD Chronically Absent
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Total Students | Total Absentee Percentage | Total Absentee | Students With Disabilities | Absentee Percentage SWD | Absentee SWD | SWD Absentee Percent of Total Absentee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | 7996 | 5.9% | 471 | 867 | 9.5% | 78 | 16.5% |
| California | 2019 | 4,279,575 | 10.1% | 429207 | 559,824 | 16.3% | 91251 | 21.3% |
| PAUSD | 2022 | 6785 | 10.1% | 685 | 766 | 18.8% | 144 | 21% |
| California | 2022 | 4,009,260 | 30% | 1202778 | 560,749 | 39.6% | 222056 | 18.46% |
This is depressing across the board. There is a substantial excess number of SWD absentee students.
PAUSD Suspension Data
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Total Students | Total Suspension Percentage | Total Suspensions | Students With Disabilities | Suspension Percentage SWD | Suspensions SWD | SWD Suspension Percent of Total Suspensions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | 12347 | 0.9% | 111 | 1313 | 3.1% | 41 | 36.7% |
| California | 2019 | 6,362,507 | 3.4% | 216325 | 823,805 | 6.2% | 51075 | 23.6% |
| PAUSD | 2022 | 10933 | 0.7% | 77 | 1216 | 3% | 36 | 46.75% |
| California | 2022 | 6,066,021 | 3.1% | 188047 | 847,770 | 5.4% | 45780 | 24.3% |
This number usually surprises people by how high it is. The proportion of SWD suspensions vs. total suspensions is appalling and should be addressed. You’ll note the lack of an “issue” in the California data as they don’t capture disproportionality problems.
PAUSD English Language Arts Data
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Overall Performance Relative to State Standard | SWD Performance Relative to State Standard | Performance Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | +78.8 | -17.9 | 96.7 |
| California | 2019 | -2.5 | -88.1 | 85.6 |
| PAUSD | 2022 | +76.6 | -43.4 | 120 |
| California | 2022 | -12.2 | -97.3 | 85.1 |
Compared to the state, Palo Alto SWD are doing well.
However, their performance gap grew from 2019 to 2022.
Unfortunately, the state performance is DISMAL.
The Gap analysis shows (or attempts to show) how PAUSD is serving its SWD relative to its general education peers.
PAUSD Mathematics Data
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Overall Performance Relative to State Standard | SWD Performance Relative to State Standard | Performance Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | +83.2 | -25.7 | 108.9 |
| California | 2019 | -33.5 | -119.4 | 85.9 |
| PAUSD | 2022 | +68.3 | -57.7 | 126 |
| California | 2022 | -51.7 | -130.8 | 79.1 |
Same assessment as for ELA. California overall is DISMAL (when are people going to be ashamed of this?).
The gap between the performance of SWD in Palo Alto is also notably larger than for the state as a whole.
It has also gotten worse in 2022 from 2019.
PAUSD College/Career Readiness
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Overall Readiness Percentage | SWD Readiness Percentage | Performance Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | 74.2% | 24.7% | 49.5% |
| California | 2019 | 44.1% | 10.8% | 33.3% |
This metric is kind of cryptic. It does serve as an interesting alternative to graduation data. Some other states are actually tracking students after graduation which is an excellent idea (notably, Arizona).
Again, the big issue is the gap between general education and SWD.
(Sigh… California as usual. No data on this in 2022).
NOTE: I haven’t gone through and de-duplicated SWD in the overall population which will increase all of these gaps in performance.
PAUSD Graduation Rate
| Jurisdiction | School Year | Overall Graduation Rate | SWD Graduation Rate | Graduation Rate Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUSD | 2019 | 95.4% | 81.8% | 13.6% |
| California | 2019 | 85.8% | 64% | 21.8% |
| PAUSD | 2022 | 96.3% | 83.9% | 12.4% |
| California | 2022 | 87.4% | 75.2% | 12.2% |
There was a huge improvement in state graduation rates for SWD. They also improved slightly for PAUSD.
Yay!… though with California, one wants to ask more questions.
Final Comments
- This shouldn’t have to be so hard. We should be able to pull out data on students with disabilities and parse them both between each school and the state as well as with other schools.
- The data is not cleanly separated between “students with disabilities” and their general education peers. This winds up under-counting the gap between the two student populations (I can go back and do this by hand.. but not today)
- The other largest population across California, and in PAUSD, that has a massive performance gap are English Learners (who are still learning English). We do not currently have any way to include the overlap between these students and students with disabilities (though the school district could do this analysis).
