Middle school history teachers discuss their lesson plans for teaching about the Great Depression.
Credit: Allison Shelley / American Education
My first year of teaching was the worst year of my life.
I remember preparing for the new school year, prepping my classroom and making lesson plans. If you know the Central Valley of California, you know the summer heat and heavy lifting in a classroom are not the most desirable combination. However, I had hope in my heart, and I was so excited for my career to finally begin!
Then I made the grave mistake of going into the copy room packed with veteran teachers. I was eager to learn from them; they had the experience I lacked. One gave me a tip to “not smile until October” so the kids would know I was a tough teacher. One advised me to stick to worksheets so that I didn’t burn out.
While these bits of advice were well-intentioned, they were not what a budding teacher needed. Teaching is an extremely difficult profession, but it is also incredibly rewarding. There is an extreme learning curve for new teachers. Despite the credential program and a mentor teacher’s best efforts, nothing can thoroughly prepare you for your first classroom.
It’s no secret that there is a mass exodus of teachers leaving the profession. To keep people in the profession, we need to support them throughout. If the support is consistent and starts when a teacher first enters the school, there can be a shift in the number of people leaving and the school’s overall culture.
As I said, the copy room was a hot spot for negative talk. At every school I have worked in, this has reigned true. Instead of continuing to let the negative talk fester, I propose making the copy room a hub for ideas to be shared and support to be given. Dedicating a space on the wall where teachers can “shout out” each other can quickly change the room’s vibe. Having funny memes posted by the printer about how it’s always “jammin’.” A designated space where teachers can drop off or pick up extra supplies. Best yet, make every first Monday a little treat day. Each department takes turns bringing small treats. These little things can help build a culture and safe place for teachers, especially the newer ones, to feel supported.
Another method to support new teachers is to create a partnership between them and a veteran teacher. This veteran does not even need to be in the same content area. Instead, an experienced teacher that matches a new teacher in personality or classroom management style can be extremely beneficial. I distinctly remember the veteran teachers who guided me through my first few years, and I’m eternally grateful for them.
One important aspect, however, is that veteran teachers must volunteer for this. Pushing this vital role on somebody who doesn’t want it would not work. This partnership can look like once a week, 30-minute check-in meetings. It can be regular, short observations. Maybe the two teachers team-teach a lesson while an administrator covers one of their classes. This partnership, however it is laid out, can be rich in growth for the veteran and new teacher.
Teachers of all ranks need to continue to grow and update their methods. This can be done by creating a culture of observation without the “gotcha!” feeling. Administrators can simply pop in, offer compliments, support, and notes in general, and then leave. Teachers working on the same content can observe others, offer feedback, and see new methods. The frequency of observations can help spot any areas of growth and strengths. As new teachers learn their individual teaching styles, it’s important that they be observed constructively, and it should be done often.
Inundating new teachers with supplemental training, resource books and websites can be overwhelming and exhausting. The goal is to support new teachers so they stay in the profession and feel appreciated. They do not need to hear horror stories constantly, receive unhelpful criticism or feel isolated. This will only increase the number of teachers leaving the profession.
Teachers, administrators and support staff can all make an effort to openly welcome and support new teachers. Inviting a teacher to the staff outing, getting them the school shirt, helping them staple borders on the walls and supporting them however they need will make a difference in their career.
•••
Kati Begen is a high school biology educator and credential coach in Fresno and has earned a multiple-subject credential, a single-subject credential and a master’s degree in teaching.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Anand Girihadaras writes in his blog “The Ink” that the billionaire elite have given up their pretense of using their fortunes to make a better world. Two events stripped away the veil: one, the greedy gaudy wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in Venice and the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan that they are abandoning their lofty goals of curing the world of disease.
Naked greed is in, big-hearted philanthropy is out. The oligarchs revel in their splendor.
Anand writes:
Like bottomless mimosas and a mother’s unsolicited advice, eras don’t just end. The new thing elbows its way in, the old thing lingers like a houseguest, and they compete for primacy. Only eventually — sometimes long after — do you notice the eclipse.
No one was ever going to announce that the era of performative elite do-gooding had ceded to the era of naked oligarchy. But this week three events made that eclipse clear.
The first was the multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos’s wedding, in Venice, to Lauren Sánchez, who would surely float if she fell into a canal. As celebrities poured into a city already strained by tourism, and the happy couple was photographed frolicking in a literal foam party aboard a yacht, there was an almost refreshing, well, nakedness to the avarice, to the carelessness, to the not-giving of civic fucks.
There was a reminder of the omnipotence and the utter loneliness at the commanding heights: you can get anyone you want to your wedding, and the people you want are the people you’d invite if you told your assistant to run to the dentist’s office, pick up People magazine, write down names in it, and invite them. These are people who have everything, and who don’t have the thing everybody else does.
The third event was the passage today of Donald Trump’s and the Republicans’ budget, a document of searing meanness that former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the “Worst Bill in History” — a “giant budget-busting, Medicaid-shattering, shafting-the-poor-and-working-class, making-the-rich-even richer bill.” Like the Bezos wedding and the Zuckerberg-Chan pivot, the bill had one refreshing quality, though. It made zero effort to mask its ugliness. It said the cruel part out loud.
There is a nakedness to our oligarchy now, and it is pruny as hell. But at least there is this: As far as I can tell, the era of highly performative elite do-gooding is passing. The billionaires who felt the need to give TED talks about eradicating poverty while also causing poverty. The incessant blabbing about Africa by oligarchs who rarely left Connecticut. The pledges to save democracy, save the planet, and, yes, end all diseases. The buy-one-donate-one products. Red things involving Bono.Subscribe
I wrote a whole book about that era and its maneuvers and deceptions and costs, and it occurs to me now that the entire complex of activities I chronicled is giving way to something altogether different. What is ascendant now is nakedness — of greed, of sociopathy, of power thirst. Somewhere along the way, the professed goal of the elite morphed from fighting inequality from above to defending their castles in the sky.
There is a kind of progress in this, because what is naked is easier to see, even if pruny.
This eclipsing of performative virtue by pungent avarice, of fake billionaire “change” by real billionaire wolfishness, is part of why figures like Zohran Mamdani are rising. When I published Winners Take All in 2018, the things I was trying to deconstruct took explaining. That is, after all, why you write a book. I’m not sure a book is needed now.
The moves, the lust, the underlying goals — all of it is in the open. This era is less confusing. And people are voting accordingly.
It’s also why a generation gap is opening. The old guard power elite, seeing Mamdani’s rise, is terrified that the Soviet Union could soon be coming to a bodega near them, even though they probably don’t live near any bodegas and probably think the word “bodega” is Arabic. But their children and grandchildren are not afraid of free buses and childcare. They’re willing to take a chance on something that would switch their trajectory off the track from nothing to nowhere and on to a course of life.
When Estela Lopez was about 7 years old, her brother told her she could join in on an adventure — provided she stayed strong, followed instructions and didn’t cry.
After school one day, Lopez and her older brother trekked across the street to their local school in what used to be South Central Los Angeles and climbed over the walls, jumping from one room to the next despite hearing their mother calling their names.
By chance, Lopez stumbled on a recycling bin packed with paper worksheets. She grew excited and rummaged for more.
“I went into the trash cans, and I started looking at different worksheets, and I started taking them out,” Lopez said. “I had a younger sister, I was like, ‘You know what, we’re going to play school. I’m going to be the teacher. You guys are going to listen to me.’”
What started out as play that day — with her sisters sometimes complaining, “You always want to be the teacher; you always want to have us doing work” — led Lopez to begin her journey as an educator, as she began to notice the positive effects of her methods at home.
“One of my sisters was very strong in reading, but I saw that my other sister was struggling,” she said, so she just helped them with their homework. “The expectation, since I was the oldest, was to get home, help my sisters with homework, help around the house while both of my parents were working 12 hours a day.”
The community Lopez grew up in lies in what is now South Los Angeles — and she still lives and works just a five-minute drive from where she was raised on 49th Street. But since she took over as the principal of Dolores Huerta Elementary, Lopez has gone beyond teaching reading and writing — working her way from being a coordinator who supports English learners, to assistant principal, to a principal who extended her reach far beyond the classroom to help families secure housing and deliver critical supplies during the height of the Covid pandemic.
Ryan J. Smith, the chief strategy officer at the LA-based organization Community Coalition that works to “upend systemic racism,” said Lopez has worked diligently with LAUSD and has established various community partnerships to help create safe passage routes near the school.
And when a parent can’t take their child to school, Lopez and assistant principal Sandra Sandoval step in.
“We had a kiddo last year who is being raised by grandpa, and he was having a hard time picking her up from school. He was going through chemo treatment. … And so we took turns walking her home and picking her up in the morning so she would get to school safely,” Sandoval said.
“We will do whatever we need to do to make sure that our kids are safe and getting to school and … at least being kids and not dealing with big people problems for six and a half, seven hours a day.”
Supporting students’ families
Virtual learning due to Covid was particularly challenging, Lopez said, as many students did not log onto their online coursework.
So, she and her fellow administrators began going door to door, but they quickly realized that a lot of the families also did not have masks to stay healthy.
“We would get to the homes, and we would ask them to come out, and they were like, ‘We don’t have any face masks,’ some of the essential things,” Lopez said. “So we started carrying them in the cars, and we started giving them to the families because these are the families we’re supporting. They don’t have face masks. They’re not protecting themselves.”
Around that same time — as rents skyrocketed — Lopez helped organize town halls and workshops for parents to learn about housing security in an attempt to avoid eviction.
“We find sometimes when we’re looking at enrollments, we see the same address three or four times,” Lopez said. “That means there’s three or four families living under one roof. And sometimes we find out it’s only a two-bedroom, and that’s what our kids deal with on a daily basis.”
According to Ryan, that level of community outreach is critical, and Lopez has acquired a “profound” understanding “that students need all things to thrive.”
A time to heal
For Lopez, however, that period of seclusion wasn’t just about supporting families in her community. It was also about healing herself.
Lopez missed the students when they were home during the pandemic. “I really did. I missed that laughter outside. I was only hearing the little birds,” she said. “But I think I needed that time because, during that time was when my son (Mauricio) passed away, and I wasn’t in a good place to be their school leader. I needed that time to cope, but I also needed that time to heal.”
Mauricio was the eldest of Lopez’s three sons, born when she was a 17-year-old high school senior.
She recalled that Mauricio was only 4 months old when he watched her take the stage as a high school graduate. And he watched her again, as an adult with a daughter of his own, when she shared her story for the first time at a celebration of the school’s 10th anniversary in 2019 — when Lopez also met civil rights icon Dolores Huerta in person for the first time and began her yearslong relationship with her.
“Sharing about becoming a teenage mom, sharing about the LA riots, sharing about the challenges of being a parent that was raising three Latino boys and the conversations with them. Sharing that I left (home) when I was only 15 years old. Sharing how difficult it was to grow up in a home where my dad was an alcoholic and how my ex-husband became an alcoholic and I didn’t want to continue that cycle with my son,” Lopez said.
While Ryan eventually convinced her to speak at the event, Lopez said, that was one of the hardest decisions she has had to make — but that it was ultimately an opportunity to honor the five most important people in her life who continually motivated her to keep going: her parents and her three sons, Mauricio, Ivan and Julian.
Lopez said that after she spoke, Huerta embraced her and said, “You’re strong, mi hija. You’re a strong woman.”
But in the wake of Mauricio’s death, Lopez questioned whether she should remain an educator.
“I went back and thought about the times that I wasn’t with him and the times that I felt that I invested so much on me and not on him … or my last conversation with him,” Lopez said.
“I was working on the main office to make it look pretty for our students, and he called me that Saturday, and he said, ‘Mom, are you coming home?’ And I said ‘Not yet, mi hijo.’ I said I want to finish painting the office because I don’t want to be here on Sunday. And he said, ‘That’s cool, mom. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’”
Ultimately, Mauricio’s wife, Alejandra, showed Lopez her son’s social media posts, which reminded her of her purpose.
“I’m very proud of you, mama. You make me strong,” Mauricio had written. “Keep the work going. You’re helping the little kids out.”
Life at Dolores Huerta Elementary
Despite having had three sons and a granddaughter (who attends Dolores Huerta Elementary) of her own, Lopez has regarded the students as her “other children.”
“All I have to do sometimes is look at that window … and when they pass by, and they’re showing me their little cards or they’re smiling, that’s worth it,” she said.
When a student arrives late, Lopez said she immediately takes them to the cafeteria to eat something. When a student cries, she offers comfort. And when a student doesn’t seem responsive in the morning, she and her staff check on them throughout the day.
“I know how challenging it can be out there,” said Lopez, who views the school as a shelter for children from some of their difficulties. “I want to make sure that when we open the doors in the morning, everything is left outside.”
Students at the school, including Samantha Estrada Flores, said she has admired Lopez as an “amazing woman” who organizes fun activities for the children. And, Ernesto Gallardo, a fifth-grader running for student council president, said when he walks through the gates each morning, “I’m always happy.”
“At the beginning, when (Mauricio) passed away, it was hard for me to say I have three sons, but now, I have three sons: two with me, and one that’s not with me right now — but the one that taught me how to be a mom,” Lopez said. “And with that learning, I learned to be a strong leader and for my community to know that I’m here to support them in any way that I can. That’s my mission.”
The center photo features Tom Boroujeni, Fresno City College academic senate president.
Credit: Mark Tabay, Fresno City College & Fresno State/Facebook
A Fresno City College communication instructor and president of the school’s academic senate was found to have committed an “act of sexual violence” against a professor and former colleague at nearby Fresno State University, where he taught for years until he resigned under pressure last year, documents show.
The allegations against Tom Boroujeni stayed hidden from public view, EdSource found, before surfacing in 2020, when Fresno State opened an investigation based on the federal anti-discrimination law known as Title IX, records show.
That investigation determined that Boroujeni committed the sexualviolence in 2015, when he was a graduate student and part-time instructor at Fresno State. The case wasn’t fully resolved until February, when the alleged victim reached a $53,300 settlement with the university after claiming it hadn’t done enough to protect her, university records show.
Boroujeni was also a part-time instructor at Fresno City College while finishing a master’s degree at Fresno State in 2015, records show.
Boroujeni, 38, of Clovis, is also known as Farrokh Eizadiboroujeni and Tom Eizadi, documents show.
City College’s parent agency, the State Center Community College District, became aware of the matter in August 2021 when the alleged victim, who also teaches there part-time, “requested a no-contact order” against Boroujeni “as a result of a sexual misconduct investigation” at Fresno State, according to an internal district document obtained by EdSource.
The district granted the order based on a report by its former general counsel, Fresno attorney Gregory Taylor, who conducted interviews and combed through Fresno State’s investigation. Taylor concluded Fresno State’s finding was “well-reasoned and supported by sufficient evidence.”
In 2023, despite the findings and stay-away order, the State Center Community College District gave Boroujeni tenure. A district spokesperson said laws governing the granting of tenure were followed.
In both Fresno State’s investigation and in interviews with EdSource, Boroujeni denied committing what Fresno State concluded was “an act of sexual violence.”
Asked if he raped the alleged victim, Boroujeni replied in a sharp tone, “No, I did not.”
Boroujeni claimed he and the alleged victim, who was a professor at Fresno State at the time, had consensual sex in her apartment in June 2015,shortly after they started dating. But the investigation found that she told Boroujeni “no” when he asked if they could have sex. He then “pinned down (her) upper region” and she “zoned out” during what followed, according to the 2021 university report.
EdSource doesn’t identify sexual-abuse victims. The alleged victim declined to be interviewed for this story.
Boroujeni appealed the findings to the California State University’s Chancellor’s Office in June 2021. The appeal was denied a month later.
EdSource sought documentation about the case from Fresno State earlier this year.
“Given that Mr. Boroujeni remains active in the educational community and is teaching at a local community college, there is strong public interest in knowing that a college instructor has been previously found to have committed an act of sexual violence at another university.”
John Walsh, the CSU system’s general counsel
Walsh wrote in an Aug. 4 letter to Boroujeni’s lawyer, Brooke Nevels, informing her the report would be released as “a matter of public interest.”
Boroujeni said his 2015 graduate-student status should have blocked the release of the investigative report to EdSource under the state’s public records act. He also was a part-time instructor at the time. But in a decision made at the CSU system’s Chancellor’s Office, the report was released over his objections.
Boroujeni complained to the U.S. Department of Education’s Student Policy Privacy Office, claiming the release violated the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, according to a generic confirmation email he provided to EdSource. The response states the complaint wouldn’t be answered for at least 90 days. The department didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A tale of two colleges
January 2015 – Graduate student Tom Boroujeni begins working as a substitute instructor and teaching assistant at Fresno State University.
May 2015 – Boroujni begins working as an instructor at Fresno City College
June 21, 2015 – Boroujeni allegedly commits an “act of sexual violence” against a Fresno State professor.
June 22-30, 2015 – The alleged victim confides in friends that she was assaulted. She declines to call police, telling a friend she is afraid making a report would negatively impact her at Fresno State, where she is working toward tenure.
2016 – Boroujeni finishes his master’s degree at Fresno State and continues working at the university, becoming coach of the school’s debate team.
2016 -The victim of the alleged sexual violence begins teaching as an adjunct at Fresno City College in addtion to working at Fresno State.
Aug. 2019: Boroujeni gets a tenure track instructor position in Fresno City College’s Communication Department.
Oct. 2019 – Boroujeni is told he will be assigned to non-debate classes and removed as debate team coach at Fresno State.
July 9, 2020 – Boroujeni files a complaint with Fresno State alleging that the alleged victim had made “unwelcome advances of a sexual nature” to him in 2015. He claimed he entered into a relationship with her only because he feared that not doing so would hurt his chances of receiving his master’s degree and full-time employment at the university. He further claims his removal as debate coach and change in teaching assignments is retaliation for her rebuffing further advances in 2016.
Oct. 6, 2020 – While being interviewed about Boroujeni’s complaint against her, the alleged victim tells an investigator that on June 21, 2015, Boroujeni allegedly committed an act of sexual violence against her. Fresno State opens an investigation.
May 2021 – Boroujeni becomes president-elect of Fresno City Colleges academic senate for a two-year term, meaning he will ascend to the senate presidency in 2023.
May 18, 2021 – Investigator Tiffany Little issues two findings. She rejects Boroujeni’s claims of sexual harassment and finds that, based on a preponderance of the evidence, Boroujeni committed an act of sexual violence against the victim.
May 25 2021 – The alleged victim is notified that the university’s remedy is that she and Boroujeni have no contact with each other. A no-contact order is issued by Fresno State.
June 16, 2021 – Boroujeni appeals the finding to the CSU Chancellor’s Office of Investigations Appeals and Compliance. His appeal was rejected on July 29, 2021.
August 2021 – The alleged victim asks Fresno City College – where she and Boroujeni both still teach – for a no-contact order on campus, similar to what was put in place at Fresno State. The order is issued months later.
2022 – The alleged victim tells Fresno State that it “failed to take adequate actions” to address her safety concerns with Boroujeni. She threatens to take legal action against the university.
Feb. 8, 2022 – Boroujeni files a grievance with Fresno State over a decision to place the report on the act of sexual violence in his personnel file as he approaches a performance review for a three-year lecturer contract.
March 7 2022 – Boroujeni tells Fresno State that he intends to resign at the end of the academic year.
March 11, 2022 – Fresno State placesBoroujeni on administrative leave, pending the outcome of an unrelated allegation of misconduct.
May 5, 2022 – Boroujeni resigns from Fresno State, agreeing that he “will not apply for, seek, or accept employment with CSU Fresno or any other campus or department of California State University or its auxiliaries.”
Nov. 14 2022 – Boroujeni received a letter of reprimand from the dean of Fresno City College’s Division of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts in part for unprofessional conduct including an allegation he referred to a colleague with an apparent racial slur and threatening “to get” that person.
Feb. 8, 2023 – The alleged victim settles her claim with Fresno State over her safety concerns. She is paid $53,300 and is given a paid year off from teaching to do academic research.
March 7, 2023 – the State Center Community College District board of trustees grants tenure to Boroujeni and 24 other faculty members at Fresno City College.
May 10, 2023 – Boroujeni becomes academic senate president of Fresno City College
“It was in the greater good of the public to disclose it,” Debbie Adishian-Astone, Fresno State’s vice president for administration, said of the heavily redacted 43-page document. “The public has a right to know.” EdSource obtained an unredacted copy of the report.
CSU’s Title IX history
In May 2023, Boroujeni started a two-year term as Fresno City College’s academic senate president, a position that gives him input on behalf of the faculty on academic policy and personnel matters and puts him in frequent contact with college and district leaders. “I am a politician. I am a public figure,” he told EdSource.
The revelations about Boroujeni come as Fresno State attempts to move past a CSU-sanctioned report released earlier this year that said the school had “the most high profile and incendiary Title IX issues plaguing the CSU.” That’s a reference to the scandal that took down former CSU Chancellor Joseph Castro, who resigned in 2022 after it was revealed that while serving as Fresno State’s president, he ignored years of sexual misconduct allegations against Frank Lamas, his vice president of student affairs.
When the allegations were finally investigated, Castro agreed to let Lamas resign in exchange for a $260,000 settlement, retiree benefits and a promise of a glowing letter of recommendation.
The Boroujeni case also raises questions regarding the State Center Community College District’s response after learning of Fresno State’s determination of sexual violence and how Boroujeni went on to receive tenure and become academic senate president.
The Fresno State case was not taken into account as Boroujeni became senate president at Fresno City College and achieved tenure in 2023, even after the district investigated the alleged victim’s request for a stay-away order and found that sexual violence occurred.
The president of the State Center Community College District’s board of trustees, Nasreen Johnson, declined to talk to EdSource, and Chancellor Carole Goldsmith declined to be interviewed and answered questions through a district spokesperson.
Other than the no-contact order, the district “took no other action as there were no civil or criminal findings, judgments and/or convictions surrounding (Boroujeni) at Fresno State, nor were there accusations or reports of similar misconduct” at Fresno City College, district spokesperson Jill Wagner wrote in an email to EdSource. The no-contact order requested by the alleged victim wasn’t effective until the spring of 2022, in part because the process of obtaining records from Fresno State was “slow and arduous.”
Wagner said the tenure committee assigned to Boroujeni “considered multiple factors in favor of granting tenure. Areas of concern were not identified” at the time Boroujeni was reviewed. Asked if the committee that considered Boroujeni’s tenure had access to or was aware of Taylor’s report confirming that an act of sexual violence had occurred, Wagner did not respond directly. She wrote that the district followed state law and the district’s union contract, “which prescribes what information can be included in tenure review.”
Boroujeni told Edsource that he “got tenured with the district’s knowledge of everything that had happened.”
Boroujeni resigned from Fresno State on May 9, 2022, agreeing to a demand that he never apply for, or accept employment, in the 23-campus California State University system again, according to the resignation document.
When he accepted those terms, he was being investigated for other unrelated misconduct allegations that were later found to be not substantiated, documents show.
Despite its findings about the 2015 incident, Fresno State couldn’t discipline Boroujeni — such as suspending or firing him — because he was a graduate student when the alleged act of violence occurred, Adishian-Astone, the school’s vice president for administration, said in an interview.
Boroujeni started working for Fresno State as a teaching assistant and part-time instructor in January 2015, nearly six months before the incident, records provided by the university show. But Adishian-Astone said his status at the time was as a graduate student.
The university can’t “discipline an employee for something he did as a student,” she said. But the findings still contributed to Boroujeni leaving his faculty position at Fresno State.
Boroujeni told EdSource that he agreed to resign because if he hadn’t, the act-of-sexual-violence report would have been placed in his personnel file. He said he was up for a performance review at the time and a three-member committee of communication-department academics would have had access to the report. He said he was concerned his reputation would be harmed and his contract not renewed.
“They threatened me, basically,” Boroujeni claimed. “They said, ‘If you don’t (resign), we’re going to hand this over to your department for review.’ They said, ‘It becomes part of your employment record.’”
Although the university couldn’t directly discipline Boroujeni, Adishian-Astone said placing the report in his personnel file was allowable. If Boroujeni hadn’t resigned, the university would have done that, “particularly given the egregious nature of this incident,” she said.
Information sharing limited
California has no mechanism for its three public higher-education systems — CSU, the University of California and the California Community Colleges — to share information about employees with sexual misconduct-allegation records.
In response to EdSource’s questions, Wagner, the State Center Community College District spokesperson, said the district is now calling on the state to require that “educational institutions have a mechanism to share information about employee misconduct, harassment and sexual violence.”
The practice of someone in higher education being employed at another college despite sexual misconduct allegations is dubbed “Pass the Harasser,” which the Chronicle of Higher Education once called “higher education’s worst kept secret.”
Boroujeni’s employment at Fresno City College after resigning from Fresno State is a variation of that, said Michigan State University professor Julie Libarkin. She tracks alleged offenders through the Academic Sexual Misconduct Database, which aggregates abuse cases based on news reports. It contains nearly 1,100 cases nationwide, which she said is just a fraction of what occurs.
Too often, she said, faculty members move to another institution after being disciplined or fired. “It’s a problem all over the country,” she said, enabled by secrecy and schools that “don’t want to have their names sullied” by publicly identifying an abuser. If an accused person quietly resigns, they’re often able to keep their records confidential, she said.
In Boroujeni’s case, he was already working as a Fresno City College instructor when Fresno State made its findings. There was no communication between the schools about the matter until the alleged victim asked for the stay-away order.
Adishian-Astone said Fresno State “would not have advised (the State Center Community College District) about this matter on our own as it was a confidential personnel matter and at that time the respondent was already an existing (district) employee. If (the district) had reached out about a reference for the hiring of a new employee, we would have advised them accordingly. Our system does not track if faculty also teach at other institutions.”
Shiwali Patel, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said the alleged victim could be “in a vulnerable position” at Fresno City College with Boroujeni serving as president of the academic senate.
Boroujeni “shouldn’t have any impact on her experience there, promotions or anything to do with her employment. If he holds this position of power over the victim who told the community college about what happened at the other institution, she could be in a vulnerable position,” she said.
The district “should have checked with the victim to see what impact that could have on her, given that she’s employed by the same institution,” Patel said.
Asked about the alleged victim, Wagner wrote in an email that the district “unequivocally supports survivors of violence.”
A dean’s complaint
Boroujeni told EdSource he is also facing allegations regarding his interactions with three other women at Fresno City College. They have each filed pending complaints against him, which he characterized as allegations of “gender discrimination.”
Wagner, the district spokesperson, said she could not discuss the complaints because they are personnel matters. Boroujeni said one is a Title IX investigation and the others are being treated as grievances. The women declined to discuss their complaints.
He identified one of the women as Dean Cyndie Luna of the college’s Fine, Performing and Communication Arts Division. He declined to provide details of her complaint.
Last year, Luna reprimanded Boroujeni for incidents of unprofessional conduct that she wrote were “becoming more frequent and aggressive” and “causing me grave concern as your supervisor,” according to a November 2022 letter of reprimand, which EdSource obtained from a source.
Luna also wrote that in a conversation with her, Boroujeni referred to a colleague with an apparent racial slur and, in a “menacing and threatening” tone, said he “will get” the colleague for gossiping about him.
Boroujeni told EdSource that Luna fabricated the accusations in the letter. “She makes up a lot of things,” he said. Luna declined to discuss his allegation or the letter of reprimand.
Boroujeni said other aspects of the reprimand challenge actions he’s taken as senate president, which he claims cannot be subject to a reprimand. The senate’s executive committee, which he heads, filed a lengthy response to the portion of the reprimand dealing with administrative matters. More than a year later, Boroujeni is trying to get the reprimand withdrawn.
Luna’s “using my employment as a way to mitigate a political situation,” he said, claiming that she is trying to reprimand him for positions he has taken on behalf of the faculty.
“She’s punishing me for doing my job when she’s not even my supervisor as the president of the academic senate. We don’t have supervisors,” Boroujeni asserted.
‘Unwelcome advances’
Born in Iran, Boroujeni said he lived in Greece before eventually coming to the United States and enrolling at Fresno State. In Greece, he said he started using Tom as a first name instead of Farrokh and continued using it in America. He also began shortening his last name to Boroujeni — although Eizadiboroujeni remains his legal last name, according to voter registration and other public records.
Boroujeni was ambitious about a career in academia. He began working in Fresno State’s communication department as “substitute instructional faculty,” in 2015, records show, while finishing his master’s degree, and beginning to climb the teaching ranks.
By 2020, Boroujeni was worried that a job within Fresno State’s communication department was being taken away from him, Fresno State records show.
He was the coach of the school’s nationally prominent debate team, the Barking Bulldogs. But he was losing the job, and the classes he was assigned to teach were being changed in a communication department shakeup, documents show. The publication Inside Higher Ed reported on Boroujeni losing the debate coach job in October 2020.
A few months before the Inside Higher Ed story was published, he retroactively filed a complaint stating that in 2015, when he was a graduate student, a professor lured him into a romantic relationship — the same professor he would eventually be found to have committed an act of sexual violence against.
Boroujeni claimed she sexually harassed him with “unwelcome advances.” But he began a relationship with her because “he feared rejecting (the) advances would jeopardize both his ability to graduate from Fresno State with his master’s degree and his future employment opportunities because (the professor)” taught in the communication department, the investigative report states.
Five years after the alleged harassment, he claimed “the personnel changes were made because of the termination of the relationship with” the professor. But the investigator assigned to Boroujeni’s complaint found communication department leaders had “legitimate reasons” for the personnel shakeup and that no harassment occurred.
But the harassment complaint led to revelations about a deeply held secret.
The investigator, Tiffany Little, found that the alleged victim had confided in a conversation with a close friend “in which (she) described the experience as rape,” Little’s report shows.
Little met with the alleged victim. She confirmed what she had told her friend in 2015, making “an allegation of sexual violence” against Boroujeni, Little wrote.
Boroujeni told EdSource that the alleged victim fabricated the claim as retaliation for his harassment complaint.
Dating colleagues
Boroujeni and the alleged victim were the same age — 30 — when they began dating in 2015, after he had taken one of her classes as a graduate student.
On the night of June 21, 2015, they were at her apartment. Both were married. She was in the process of divorcing. He told her he had worries about his own marriage, documents show.
Both acknowledged that during a make-out session, Boroujeni asked her if they could have sex. He claimed she said yes and that she provided a condom in a pinkish wrapper, according to documents.
But the alleged victim told Little that she didn’t consent. She first said she couldn’t remember if there was a condom, then later said she was sure she hadn’t provided one, as Boroujeni claimed, because she did notkeep condoms in her apartment.
Little’s report states that when the alleged victim told her friend what happened, the friend wanted to call the police. But the alleged victim did not want to make a criminal complaint because “she did not want any of this to come out to the university because she was this young tenure track professor,” Little wrote.
In his statement, Boroujeni said he asked the alleged victim if she wanted to have sex and she replied “mhm,” which he understood as consent.
The alleged victim continued to see Boroujeni, the report states. As she did, the alleged victim described to a friend how he “disregarded (her) boundaries sexually,” Little wrote. That friend told Little that the alleged victim had told her there were times she did not want to have sex with Boroujeni, but “he pressured her until she did.”
Another person told Little that the alleged victim confided in 2017 that Boroujeni “forced me to have sex with him.”
Boroujeni refused to speak with Little, choosing instead to answer her questions in writing. Those answers, Little noted, were written “with the benefit of first having seen (the alleged victim’s) account and the details she provided and didn’t provide.”
Boroujeni said he didn’t speak to Little because “I was seriously worried about criminal exposure.”
He said he couldn’t get legal representation for an interview because of scheduling problems.
He described Little as untrained and “just somebody who works in an office in CSU who is now in charge of a very serious allegation. … How do they hire these people? They are not an attorney. (sic) They are not an investigator. (sic) They go through minimal training.”
Little, who received a law degree from the University of Illinois in 2014, is now the director of civil rights and Title IX Compliance at Northwestern University. She didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Unlike Boroujeni, the alleged victim spoke with Little.
She “didn’t have time to reflect upon, ponder, deliberate about, and compose her answers. Instead, she answered this investigator’s questions in the moment, and based only on her personal recollection. Put simply, a reasonable person could find that (her) manner of testimony supports a finding that her account was credible.”
Little wrote that Boroujeni told her “there are text messages that corroborate his account and requested that (the victim) submit these materials.” But the alleged victim told Little she had already submitted all the texts she had. There was nothing in them that matched what Boroujeni described, Little wrote.
“Told this,” Boroujeni “never submitted or described the messages” himself, Little wrote. Boroujeni told EdSource he’d deleted the messages.
“A reasonable person could find Boroujeni‘s assertion that there is evidence to corroborate his account, and his failure to produce or describe such evidence … to diminish the likelihood that his version of events can be corroborated and therefore the credibility of his account,” Little wrote.
Little concluded that she found the alleged victim had proven herself credible. Boroujeni, she wrote, “did not likely obtain consent for sexual intercourse.”
Fresno State ordered Boroujeni and the alleged victim to avoid each other on campus. He continued teaching.
The alleged victim wasn’t satisfied that the university was doing enough to protect her. She then filed a grievance and gave notice to CSU “of her plans to pursue litigation,” records show.
She reached a settlement in February. The university paid her $53,300 with a paid year off from teaching to conduct research.
In March 2022, Fresno State notified Boroujeni about a new allegation of misconduct against him. The university placed him on administrative leave. He was notified on July 25, 2022, that the complaint was not substantiated.
By then, he had resigned from Fresno State and was pursuing his career at Fresno City College.
As part of his war on “woke,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis packed the board of New College with likeminded right wingers intent on purging the small college’s progressive character.
Two financial officers who were ousted during the transition revealed that the DeSantis board dipped into restricted gifts to pay the bloated salary of DeSantis-selected President, Richard Corcoran, a politician with no academic credentials. In other words, one of DeSantis’s cronies.
Suncoast Searchlight reported:
Two former top finance officers at the New College Foundation say they were ousted in 2023 after pushing back against college administrators who sought to use donor-restricted funds to cover President Richard Corcoran’s salary and benefits — a move they said would violate the terms of the donations.
Ron McDonough, the foundation’s former director of finance, and Declan Sheehy, former director of philanthropy, said they warned administrators not to misuse a major gift — the largest donation in the school’s history — which they said was not intended to fund administrative salaries.
Both said their contracts were terminated after they raised concerns internally.
“The college was trying to find the money to pay the president,” McDonough said. “And I kept on going back, saying, ‘We don’t have this unrestricted money.’”
The accounts of their final days on the job, shared publicly for the first time with Suncoast Searchlight, come as former foundation board members and alumni demand greater transparency and accountability from New College amid rising costs and sweeping institutional change.
Since Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed a new slate of trustees in early 2023, the small liberal arts college has undergone a dramatic transformation — eliminating its Gender Studies program, reshaping student life, and launching a costly new athletics department. Critics say the administration has also sidelined financial safeguards, raising questions about whether the college is honoring donor intent and maintaining public trust.
Last month, a group of former foundation board members sent Corcoran and New College Foundation executive director Sydney Gruters a demand letter requesting an audit of how restricted donor funds were used and threatening legal action if they do not comply. The letter follows a string of high-profile board resignations and dismissals, including those who held key financial oversight roles.
Their exits, and the college’s move last year to hand Corcoran the unilateral power to fire foundation board members, have deepened fears that independent checks on the foundation’s spending are being systematically dismantled.
A “direct support organization” with close ties to New College, the foundation has never operated independently of the school. But in giving the college president the power to unilaterally remove board members last year, the Board of Trustees further eroded its autonomy.
“Good governance is not a side item,” said Hazel Bradford, a former foundation board member who sat on the organization’s investments committee and resigned in April, citing concerns about the college’s handling of the foundation. “It’s the beginning and end of any foundation handling other people’s money…”
After the DeSantis-backed overhaul of the Board of Trustees, New College named Corcoran president in early 2023, approving a compensation package that made him the highest-paid president in the college’s history —earning more than $1 million a year in salary and perks.
Because state law limits taxpayer funding for university administrator compensation to $200,000 — an amount that covered only the first four monthsof Corcoran’s salary — New College has turned to its foundation, which manages the school’s endowment and donor funds, to make up the difference.
“Corcoran’s salary is not a one-time thing,” said McDonough. “It’s not sustainable…”
So the new leadership had to find money to pay Corcoran’s lavish salary, and they turned to the College’s foundation. Most of its funds were restricted by donors for purposes like scholarships. Donor intent is a crucial concept. If a donor give $1 million for scholarships, it should not be used to pay the College president’s salary. Future fundraising will be crippled by violation of that trust.
The older alumni, graduates of the only progressive college in the state, are not likely to make new donations to New College. The new alumni do not yet exist. Maybe Betsy DeVos will bail out New College, which is no longer “new.”
Former governor Jerry Brown headlines a party next week toasting the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), California’s ten-year-old reshaping of school finance, the nation’s most ambitious effort to target public investment toward narrowing disparities in student achievement.
In 2013, Brown and the Legislature recast state funding to shift dollars toward districts that serve greater shares of low-income and non-English-speaking children. The logic remains compelling: educators labor to bring all children over proficiency hurdles in reading and math, so greater resources must go to students who have the farthest to climb.
Party goers in Sacramento do have cause to celebrate. The extra funding has worked to lift performance among students living in areas of concentrated poverty. Test scores, graduation rates, and college readiness have all seen increases stemming from the extra funding, according to research from the Learning Policy Institute and the Public Policy Institute of California.
Education funding also soared under both Brown and Gov. Gavin Newsom, fueled by a robust economy, the voter-approved Proposition 98 set aside for schools, and pandemic-era aid from Washington. State funding for K–12 education has grown more than 40% since 2017.
But California’s schools still produce grossly unequal results among racial and economic groups. While reading proficiency among fourth graders climbed from 40% to 49% between 2014 and 2019, with slightly greater gains for low-income students, racial disparities failed to budge. White children in California have continued to achieve at three grade levels above Latino peers over the past quarter century, according to the National Assessment of EducationalProgress — gaps were even larger for Black children. The picture is similar for math.
The good news: Brown’s funding formula helped sustain progress made by educators and kids since 2002, continuing to boost average test scores, especially in districts with concentrated poverty. The sobering news: inequalities among students remained unmoved despite gains for all demographic groups in reading and math.
So, what have we learned over the past decade that could inform more potent school finance policies?
First, only a small slice of local control funding — just 7% — is dedicated specifically to districts serving the largest concentrations of low-income families. For some, the impact was eye-popping: districts in which nearly all students are from impoverished families enjoyed a 13% gain in the share meeting grade-level standards. But most low-income students do not attend schools in these districts and so receive much less targeted funding. And schools with concentrated poverty in economically mixed districts lose out on this additional funding.
Policy makers and researchers remain in the dark over whether local boards mirror the spirit of the formula when allocating dollars between schools, and this holds consequences for kids. If districts spend dollars equally across all students, then low-income kids only partially benefit, even as the formula targets districts with more high-need students.
Newsom did target fresh funding to low-performing schools this year, dubbed the equity multiplier. The dollar augmentation is modest, but the new mechanism recognizes “that we have not sufficiently structured the reform to get dollars to highest-needs schools in a consistent way,” Jessenia Reyes, a policy analyst at Catalyst California in Los Angeles, told us.
Second, how districts choose to deploy their funding matters. Local control funding operates like a dump truck, unloading extra dollars to the district — it’s not a backpack, where targeted dollars follow the child. Districts do not always target extra funds to the students who generate them: for each dollar a school generates due to its socioeconomic “need,” spending goes up only by 63 cents in the average district; the rest is spread more equally across all other schools in the district. Data suggest this targeting, or lack thereof, varies considerably across districts.
Los Angeles Unified — pressed by equity advocates — has pioneered a Student Needs Equity Index that pinpoints the most challenged schools, then distributes $700 million in flexible dollars to their principals and teacher leaders. Despite equaling less than 5% of the district’s yearly budget, this progressivity among schools has helped to boost reading scores for English learners.
When local boards award extra funding to their most hard-pressed schools, contentious politics may come to light. Spreading new dollars across all schools holds broad appeal to labor leaders and parents. But “if we are really trying to implement equity, some kids may not need the [additional] resources,” said Ana Teresa Dahan, managing director of GPSN, the nonprofit formerly known as Great Public Schools Now.
Third, as we learn more about how spending varies among schools, we arrive at the effects of something quite sacred: teacher seniority. More experienced and highly qualified teachers tend to migrate to more affluent schools. So, serious efforts to equalize school budgets require incenting the best teachers to remain committed to poor communities.
Even when districts focus extra resources on their most challenged schools, principals often assign more senior teachers to high-achieving kids, as we found in Los Angeles. More robust targeting of funds among schools may fail to narrow gaps within schools until principals are better coached to weigh strategic options.
Yes, policy leaders deserve to pause and party on, celebrating a decade of high hopes and discernible progress in elevating disadvantaged students. But avoid the hangover. Fresh policy options and sober attention to school-level spending and staffing are urgently needed.
A student sounds out the word ‘both’ during a 2022 summer school class at Nystrom Elementary in the West Contra Costa Unfified School District.
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
West Contra Costa Unified School District has set up a new literacy task force to answer long-held questions about the best ways to teach students how to read.
The task force, which had its first meeting in September, is looking at academic research to examine literacy and the best ways to foster highly-literate students, according to former district spokesperson Liz Sanders.
“It’s really important to us that our efforts to support students’ literacy are really rooted in building and generating community-wide best practices, and that we are looking at literacy instruction through a really holistic lens to make sure that we’re understanding what best practices are,” Sanders said.
The task force is a small, internal team of 13 leaders who are developing initial recommendations for a comprehensive literacy plan, the district communications team said in an email. The main goal of the task force is to create a framework and make recommendations for WCCUSD that will guide the district’s Local Control and Accountability Plan and School Plan for Student Achievement.
The hope is that this will lead to improved student outcomes, especially for marginalized communities — specifically Multilingual English Language Learners, Black and neurodiverse students, who are currently being underserved, according to the district.
WCCUSD has struggled with stagnant literacy scores for over a decade. Since 2014, no more than 17% of students read above grade level, according to Smarter Balanced results. But Superintendent Chris Hurst has named improving elementary reading test scores as a top priority. The district has primarily used a balanced literacy approach, which focuses on whole language instruction.
One of the district’s schools, Nystrom Elementary, however, received funding in 2021 from the state’s Early Literacy Support Block Grant and replaced balanced literacy with the “science of reading” approach, which focuses on systematic phonics instruction.
Sandrine Demathieu, a kindergarten teacher at Nystrom, is in her second year of using the science of reading approach. As a student teacher, she used the balanced literacy method, which, according to her, made her feel like there was “a missing chunk in our instruction.”
Demathieu explained that balanced literacy focuses more on experiential learning and getting students excited about reading, leaving less time for data tracking on student progress. Meanwhile, the science of reading specializes in progress tracking, and offers a predictable curriculum with specific instructions for both students and teachers.
“They don’t have to even think twice about what they need to do,” Demathieu said. “They don’t have to put any energy into it. They can focus on the academic piece.”
For students with gaps in their learning in particular, Demathieu said the science of reading approach is “life changing” because of its predictability and organized structure.
In 2022, WCCUSD also introduced Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics and Sight Words, or SIPPS, in all of its elementary schools. SIPPS is a “research-based foundational skills program” which provides a structured-literacy approach through explicit routines.
Gabby Micheletti, who taught at Verde Elementary for seven years and is now on-release to work full time for the United Teachers of Richmond, said it was “simultaneously remarkable and distressing” to see how quickly kids picked up on reading when using SIPPS as opposed to the previous curriculum.
“Just like the difference in the reading growth I had using SIPPS versus trying to use Teachers College — it’s one of those things where you’re just like, man, I feel bad about those days and those kids, when I was trying to follow the curriculum faithfully,” Michelletti said. “They were trying really hard and it just wasn’t working.”
Michelletti said she hopes the task force re-evaluates the curriculum and pushes the use of SIPPS. She said the current curriculum is “extra non-responsive” to students, especially for English Language Learners. This is particularly important for WCCUSD, where 34% of students are English Language Learners.
The literacy task force will be using data and effective research to make recommendations to the district. The development of the framework is guided by a set of principles and beliefs:
“Schooling should help all students achieve their highest potential.
The responsibility for learners’ literacy and language development is shared.
ELA/literacy and ELD curricula should be well designed, comprehensive, and integrated.
Effective teaching is essential to student success.
Motivation and engagement play crucial roles in learning.”
The implementation of the task force’s framework and recommendations is currently projected for the 2024-2025 school year.
Yuba City’s Tutoring Program by Fullmind Drives Sustained Student Growth
Yuba City Unified School District announced end-of-year results from its tutoring partnership with Fullmind, showing students identified as needing additional support consistently outperformed their non-tutored peers across nearly 200 participants.
The program expanded from 24 to 194 students while maintaining effectiveness. English Language Arts participants achieved 16 points of growth compared to 10.63 points among non-participants, a 50% advantage. Mathematics participants gained 8 points versus 7.93 points for non-participants.
“When students identified as at-risk of underperformance outperform the general population, we know we’ve found an approach that truly accelerates learning,” said Dr. Nicholas Richter, the program lead.
Exceptional Individual Results
Twelve ELA students gained 50 or more points between mid-year and end-of-year assessments, with one student achieving over 100 points of growth in a single semester. Students completed 93,349 minutes of tutoring with a 71% attendance rate.
Scale Without Compromise
The eightfold expansion maintained program quality and student engagement. ELA participants averaged 9 hours each while math students averaged 7 hours, aligning with research on effective tutoring dosage.
2025 Expansion Plans
Based on strong results, the district plans to expand ELA participation to 250-plus students and expand math tutoring to over 100 students. The program will extend beyond lowest-performing students to include those just below grade level.
“We’ve proven this model works at scale,” said Richter. “Now we’re expanding access to reach even more students who can benefit from this intensive support.”
The partnership represents a commitment to evidence-based interventions that address achievement gaps through high-quality tutoring services, using continuous monitoring to maintain effectiveness as it scales.
California enrolls a far lower percentage of English learners in bilingual education programs than other states, according to a report released in October from The Century Foundation.
The authors also found that California is investing less than other states in bilingual education. They recommend the state significantly expand investment in multilingual instruction, particularly dual-language immersion programs; prioritize enrollment in those programs for English learners; and invest more in recruiting and preparing bilingual teachers.
Prioritizing enrollment for English learners in bilingual and dual-language immersion programs is important, the authors stated, because research has shown these programs help English learners.
“New studies show every year that English learners, and especially young English learners, do best when they’re in some form of bilingual setting,” said Conor P. Williams, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and one of the authors of the report. “They do best at everything, they do best at maintaining their home language, of course, they do best at learning English over time, and they do best in academic subjects.”
The Century Foundation is a progressive public policy think tank based in New York City and Washington, D.C.
California has more English learners than any other state. About 40% of students in California schools are now or were once English learners; about half of them are learning English currently while the other half have now mastered the language.
Yet, only 16.4% of English learners in the state were enrolled in bilingual or dual-language immersion programs in 2019-20. That percentage is more than three times lower than the percentage of English learners enrolled in those programs in Wisconsin (55.9%) and more than two times lower than in Texas (36.7%), Illinois (35.9%) and New Jersey (33.4%).
Williams recognized that California is still rebuilding its efforts to expand bilingual instruction, after a voter-approved measure, Proposition 227, significantly limited it from 1997 to 2016. Still, he said, “The efforts to rebuild have not been significant.”
“California is not committing very significant resources for a state of its size,” Williams said. “The investment in new or expanded bilingual education programs is pretty modest. It’s $10 million in a one-time grants competition. Delaware puts in a couple million a year and has been doing it for the past 10 years. Utah spends $7 million a year on dual language.”
The report finds that the funding invested in expanding bilingual education lags far behind the state’s stated goals. “Global California 2030,” written in 2018, for example, recommended expanding the number of dual-language immersion programs to 1,600 and enrolling half of California’s K–12 students by 2030, making at least 75% of graduating students proficient in two or more languages by 2040. There are currently about 750 dual-immersion programs in California, according to the California Basic Educational Data System.
The report’s authors stated it is also crucial for California to expand bilingual education in transitional kindergarten classrooms, where English learners could benefit from it at a younger age. Transitional kindergarten is an extra year of school before kindergarten. The state is gradually expanding access to the grade each year until 2025, when all 4-year-olds will be eligible.
The new report recommended changing credential requirements for transitional kindergarten in order to recruit more preschool teachers, since many more preschool teachers speak Spanish and other languages, compared with K-12 teachers.
Anna Powell, senior research and policy associate at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley, said she and many other early education advocates agree that current preschool teachers face an “uphill battle” to become TK teachers.
According to CSCCE, an estimated 17,000 workers in preschool and child care programs have a bachelor’s degree, a teacher’s child development permit and at least six years of teaching experience in early childhood settings. However, Powell said the new credential proposed for pre-K to third grade would only allow work as a preschool teacher to be counted toward part of the required hours.
“Experienced educators would be required to go back to school and/or obtain additional qualifications first — likely while juggling a full-time teaching job,” Powell said. “Meanwhile, a public school teacher in a middle school could potentially teach TK without any new clinical hours or other time-consuming requirements, so long as they have taken 24 units of ECE or child development (or equivalent).”
“There is still time for California to right this wrong,” she added.
Martha Hernandez, executive director of Californians Together, an organization that advocates for English learners statewide, praised the report.
“Our state currently possesses an exemplary policy framework, but what’s lacking is a concrete, systemic plan, adequate, targeted funding for effective implementation and accountability for better educational opportunities and outcomes for English learners,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez said the California Department of Education should lead a coordinated, statewide effort to implement the English Learner Roadmap, a guide approved by the State Board of Education in 2017 for school districts to support English learners better.
One way to recruit more bilingual teachers both for TK and other grades would be to encourage high school graduates who were awarded the State Seal of Biliteracy to join teacher preparation programs, Hernandez said. To receive the State Seal of Biliteracy, graduates must show proficiency in both English and another language.
“A modest target of 5% from the over 400,000 candidates could significantly reduce the shortage,” Hernandez said. “The time for translating vision into action is now.”
Note: The research discussed in this article was supported by a grant from Sobrato Philanthropies. EdSource receives funding from many foundations, including Sobrato Philanthropies. EdSource maintains sole editorial control over the content of its coverage.
During the 2024 Presidential campaign, “60 Minutes” invited both Trump and Harris to sit for an interview. Harris accepted, Trump declined. The interview took about an hour. As is customary, the editors cut the interview back to 20 minutes, the customary time slot.
CBS used a short response from Harris about the war in Gaza to promote the show. In the show itself, the promotional clip was replaced by a different response. To the editors, it was a distinction without a difference, a routine editorial decision.
Trump, however, saw the switch in the short clip and the longer one as a financial opportunity. He sued “60 Minutes” and CBS for $10 billion (later raised to $20 billion) for portraying Harris in a favorable light, interfering in the election, and damaging his campaign.
Since he won the election, it’s hard to see how he could demonstrate that his campaign was damaged. Most outside observers thought it was a frivolous lawsuit and would be tossed out if it ever went to trial.
But Trump persisted because the owner of CBS and its parent company Paramount, Shari Redstone, needed the FCC’s approval to complete a deal to be purchased by another company. Trump could tell his friend Brendan Carr to approve the deal or to block it. Shari Redstone would be a billionaire if the deal went through.
A veteran producer at “60 Minutes” resigned in anticipation of corporate leaders selling out their premier news program. The president of CBS News followed him out the door.
As expected, corporate caved to Trump. CBS will pay $16 million towards the cost of his Presidential library. He once again humbled the press. He did it to ABC, he did it to META, he did it to The Washington Post.
The show is almost over for National Amusements, the entertainment conglomerate with humble beginnings as a Dedham drive-in movie theater chain.
Unlike most Hollywood endings, this one is a downer.
Shame on Shari Redstone.
Recap: Redstone is the daughter of Sumner Redstone, the larger-than-life dealmaker who transformed the theater company started by his father into the holding company that owns CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, and the Paramount movie studio.
On Tuesday, Paramount Global, controlled by Shari Redstone, said it agreed to pay $16 million to settle President Trump’s widely criticized lawsuit stemming from the “60 Minutes” interview of Vice President Kamala Harris during last year’s election campaign. The payment, after legal fees, will go to Trump’s presidential library.
Why it matters: It’s impossible not to see this as an unabashed payoff intended to win the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of Redstone’s multibillion-dollar deal to sell Paramount to Skydance Media, the studio behind movies including “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.”
Everyone involved denied the settlement was a quid pro quo. If you believe that, I have some Trump meme coins to sell you.
In a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS last year, Trump alleged that “60 Minutes,” part of CBS News, deceptively edited the Harris interview in order to interfere with the election.
Legal experts said Trump’s chances of winning the case were slim to none given CBS’s First Amendment protections for what was considered routine editing. But his election victory in November gave him enormous leverage over Redstone.
Reaction: “With Paramount folding to Donald Trump at the same time the company needs his administration’s approval for its billion-dollar merger, this could be bribery in plain sight,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement after the settlement was announced.
“CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle,” a spokesperson for Trump’s lawyers said. The president was holding “the fake news accountable,” the spokesperson said.
Of course, the lawsuit was all about putting the news media under the president’s thumb.
“The enemy of the people” — Trump’s words — is a power base Trump wants desperately to neutralize, along with other perceived foes such as elite universities and big law firms.
Columbia University and law firms including Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison have already caved. Harvard University had no choice but to come to the negotiating table, though it also is battling the White House in court.
“The President is using government to intimidate news outlets that publish stories he doesn’t like,” the conservative editorial board of The Wall Street Journal wrote.
For what it’s worth: The two points I’d like to make here may seem obvious but are worth repeating.
First: The ownership of news outlets by big corporations is a double-edged sword.
Yes, they can provide financial shelter from devastation wrought by Google and Meta — and the brewing storm coming from artificial intelligence.
But they also own bigger — and more profitable — businesses that need to maintain at least a civil relationship with the federal government.
That’s why Disney ended Trump’s dubious defamation case against ABC News by agreeing to “donate” $15 million to the presidential library, and why Meta, the parent of Facebook, coughed up $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit over the company’s suspension of his accounts after the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Second: Private sector extortion — multiple law firms promised $100 million in pro-bono work for causes favored by Trump — dovetails with the president’s use of the power of the office to make money for himself and his family.
Trump’s crypto ventures, including the shameless $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, have added at least $620 million to his fortune in a few months, Bloomberg reported this week. Then there are all those real estate deals in the Middle East, the Qatari jet, and the licensed products, from bibles to a mobile phone service.
Shari Redstone’s $16 million payment is chump change by comparison. And it makes perfect business sense. It smooths the way for National Amusements to salvage at least $1.75 billion from the sale of its stake in Paramount. Sumner Redstone, a consummate dealmaker, would have done the same thing.
Skydance, by the way, was launched by another child of a billionaire, David Ellison.
His father, Larry Ellison, founded software giant Oracle and is worth nearly $250 billion. Oracle is negotiating to take a role in the sale of TikTok by its Chinese owner, a transaction being orchestrated by Trump.
Small world, eh?
Final thought: After nearly 90 years in business, National Amusements, now based in Norwood, is going out with a whimper, not a bang.
The company has struggled with heavy debt, declining cable network profits, and huge costs for building out its streaming business. Paramount’s market value has dropped to $9 billion from $26 billion when Viacom recombined with CBS to form the new company in 2019.
To get the Skydance rescue deal done, Redstone, 71, sold out the journalists at CBS News — the onetime home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and still one of the most respected names in the business.
Yuba City Unified School District announced end-of-year results from its tutoring partnership with 
