October 25, 2012
The NRS Deadline is around the corner which means that I get a fresh batch of data to play with. It seemed like the right time to look back over the years to see how our enrollment has changed (or not). Let's look at some charts. ABE stands for Adult Basic Education (reading, writing, math) and ESL stands for English as a Second Language instruction.
This one shows how the enrollment has dropped over the years from a high of 159,408 in fiscal year 2005 to the current 122,833 in fiscal year 2011. The actual numbers are below.
One possible reason for this drop in enrollment are increased costs (while funding has remained the same). However, it is also true that students are receiving better instruction as evidenced by the rise in educational gain percentages. In Fiscal year 2005, the educational gain that we reported, as a state, an overall ed gain percentage of 31% (for the NRS newbies, this means 31% of enrolled students were able to move to a higher educational level based on standardized test scores). In 2011 the overall state ed gain percentage was 54%.
Below are some additional charts looking specifically at enrollments by level for ABE and ESL instruction separately. Again, for the NRS uninitiated, there are 6 ABE levels and 6 ESL levels. Where a student is reported depends on the pre test score she or he received at the beginning of the fiscal year.
To get an overall sense of trends look at how the different levels stack up on the left of the chart. Then look at how they stack up on the right side of the chart. For example, you can see how the ABE 4 level which had the most student in FY05, drops below ABE 3 enrollment in FY11.
Below is ESL enrollment by level across the years.
Any comments or suggestions for further study are welcome.
