A football player stood in uniform before the Pasadena school board last month begging the members not to eliminate his high school team. A teacher, clutching an Emmy statue he won for work related to his teaching field, warned that eliminating career and technical education positions like his would harm students. Administrative staff, librarians and parents held back tears or spoke with trembling voices as they pleaded to keep their jobs or their kids’ cherished programs.
“I’m wearing red for solidarity, but I feel like wearing black for a funeral,” said one parent.
The Pasadena Board of Education’s Nov. 20 meeting marked a sad inflection point for a school district long beset by declining enrollment and campus closures. It may also offer a preview of things to come for other public school districts in California – as wealthy parents abandon public education, and enrollments fall off because the housing crisis forces middle- and low-income families to leave increasingly unaffordable cities.
By the end of the night, the board voted to cut nearly $25 million from next school year’s projected $189 million general fund. Some of the pleas appear to have worked, because by a one-vote majority, the board opted to reverse reductions to career and technical education programs and concentrate more cuts (about $5 million, instead of the originally proposed $3.6 million) in the district’s central office. The budget for athletic programs, slated to be cut by half, had some funding restored.
Still, dozens of teachers will be laid off, an unavoidable consequence of slashing 16% from the budget. And the quality of Pasadena Unified schools will take a hit.
While exactly where to make cuts was up for debate, the need to do so in the district – which enrolls about 13,000 non-charter students in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre – wasn't. Last year, Pasadena voters approved a parcel tax that adds $5 million a year for STEAM programs and higher staff wages, but was not enough to close the $30.5 million budget gap and avoid receivership by the county.
Missed opportunities, systemic problems
Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College and former board member of the nonprofit Pasadena Educational Foundation, has closely watched the financial woes at the district where he sent his own children to school. Nearly two decades ago, Dreier told me, he persuaded the foundation to commission a report by education scholar Richard D. Kahlenberg to suggest ways the district could retain enrollment in a city with a long history of racial segregation.
In an introduction that has aged remarkably well (for all the wrong reasons), the 2006 report described “two Pasadenas”: one with “wealth and fame” and institutions such as Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the other made up of “a struggling low-income population, that is disproportionately Latino and African American … largely separated from the rest of the community.”
It’s the latter Pasadena, Kahlenberg wrote, that’s concentrated in public schools.
Dreier laments that Kahlenberg’s idea for a math-science magnet school run in partnership with Caltech never came to pass. He believes it would have spawned more involvement in public schools by Pasadena’s civic leaders and intellectual class, likely boosting enrollment and stemming segregation. But he sees Pasadena as a victim of systemic forces harming public education, including Proposition 13, the 1978 law that capped property tax, and a school funding formula that punishes districts struggling with declining enrollment.
Jane Ganahl
Bruce Fuller, a sociologist and professor emeritus of education at UC Berkeley, also told me there are larger trends undermining public education.
"If parents don't want to stay in the civic square and they want to opt out for segregated private situations, then you just have less political support for things like parcel taxes," he said. "I think that's what is super worrisome, especially in the current political climate. People just saying, 'We don't believe in public anything, just go out into the market.'"
But he cautions that not all school districts are managed equally and cites Glendale Unified as an exemplar on enrollment retention.
Glendale has seen some enrollment decline, but not nearly on Pasadena's level. Last school year, it had just over 25,000 students, a small uptick since 2020 but down slightly from its 2009 level of about 26,500. Fuller cites Glendale's expansion of dual-language programs and "consumer-oriented" childcare options as keeping families in the district.
By comparison, Pasadena Unified had a non-charter enrollment of about 19,200 in 2009. That number dipped below 14,000 in 2023 and has continued to fall since, exacerbated by the displacement of hundreds of students in January's Eaton fire.
Exactly who is opting out?
Fuller's observation resonated with me; my wife is a social studies teacher at a private school, and my three children attend public schools in nearby Alhambra. Similar to Pasadena, the Alhambra Unified School District educates predominantly lower-income students and has seen enrollment drop by about 15% since 2015.
Demographic data in Alhambra show a clear picture of who, to borrow Fuller's words, has abandoned “the civic square.” My children account for roughly 1% of all non-Latino white students in the district. Fifteen percent of Alhambra's 80,000 residents are white; less than 2% of the district's students are. Furthermore, about 55% of students are from low-income families and qualify for free or reduced-price meals.
Minerva Canto
You can find similar patterns elsewhere in the state. Public schools in Santa Barbara, a majority Anglo city with a median household income greater than $100,000, have seen enrollment drop by about 2,000 students, from 15,593 in 2015 to 13,336, in the last 10 years. An increasing portion of its public school students is economically disadvantaged.
It's hard to fault parents choosing private schools for making decisions they feel are in their kids’ best interest. But those decisions matter: As long as funding is tied to enrollment, opting out of public education undermines the entire system. If you take the view that the kid down the street matters just as much as your own – and that the health of the whole community matters just as much as the health of your own household – the question of school choice takes on a different dimension.
We can improve school district management, and we can fix the housing crisis over time to make cities more affordable for families that rely on public education. But the pervasive attitude among whole segments of the population that the local public school just isn't for them – something I've seen take firm hold among many parents – could be a tough spell to break.
If it persists, expect more tearful begging by students, parents and teachers, as we saw in Pasadena last month.
