Students walk to class during passing periods at Pacifica High School, which is part of the Oxnard Union High School District.
Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
Last year, a Washington Post investigation identified more than 200 school police officers across the country “who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022.”
There are at least two ongoing court cases involving allegations of sexual misconduct against former school resource officers in California.
James Louis, who worked as a resource officer at Rodriguez High School in Solano County, was arrested on March 8, 2024, after parents told police that he had texted sexual images and messages to two students.
Solano County prosecutors charged Louis with “sending, distributing, or exhibiting harmful or obscene material to a minor,” court records show. Louis is free on bail. His attorney declined to comment. The Fairfield Police Department, which had employed Louis and assigned him to the high school, would not say whether he resigned or was fired after his arrest.
In Orange County, former deputy sheriff and resource officer Justin Raymond Ramirez pleaded guilty in 2023 to misdemeanor charges that he showed students at Trabuco Hills High School a video of a couple having sex that ended with a woman’s violent death. One of the students and her family are now suing Ramirez, the county, and the county sheriff for extreme emotional distress.
The state Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission stripped Ramirez’s policing certification last year, a move that permanently bans him from working as a law enforcement officer in California.
After Ramirez’s arrest, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer issued a statement saying, “School resource officers are in our children’s schools to ensure a safe learning environment and help build trust between law enforcement and our community. Ramirez had no business being in a position of trust around children, and he abused that position of trust in a truly disgusting way.”
The county and Sheriff Dan Barnes are also defendants in the lawsuit. Neither responded to requests for comment, and attempts to reach Ramirez were unsuccessful. Court records show he does not have an attorney for the civil case.
In December, after the Washington Post published its investigation, the U.S. Justice Department revised its recommendations for school resource officer programs and called for schools and law enforcement agencies to “develop clear policies and procedures about interpersonal contacts” between resource officers and students, including about touching, social media contacts, emails, cards and after-school interactions.
The Justice Department also recommends that “officers should take extra precautions to avoid any appearance of impropriety.”
A spokesperson for the National Association of School Resource Officers, which provides training for law enforcement, said that it is updating its recommendations to reflect the Justice Department’s recommendations.
Policing experts say that discipline is the responsibility of school administrators, not law enforcement.
Many California school districts’ contracts for policing services do not prohibit officers from involvement in routine student disciplinary matters, despite the federal government’s guidance that administrators are responsible for handling those issues, an EdSource investigation found.
EdSource obtained 118 contracts between 89 districts across the state and the cities and counties that provide them with school resources officers from local police, sheriff’s and probation departments. More than half either allow police to enforce school rules and code of conduct violations, such as using profanity or wearing inappropriate clothing, or don’t address disciplinary issues.
The U.S. Department of Justice advises that agreements for what are generally called school resource officers “clearly indicate” that officers will not be responsible for requests to resolve routine discipline problems involving students. That guidance aims to “prevent unnecessary law enforcement involvement in noncriminal student misbehavior.” (A spokesperson for the department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services did not respond to multiple requests to elaborate on the department’s recommendations.)
Jyoti Nanda, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said that officers lack the training necessary to respond to behavioral issues that can result in student discipline.
“Well-trained educators can handle all of the disciplinary issues,” Nanda said. “When police enforce school rules as opposed to criminal law, they are overreaching their footprint” in ways that are “deeply damaging to children.”
Many policing contracts also put resource officers in vaguely defined roles.
They are to act as “informal counselors,” “mentors,” “role models” and exemplars of “good citizenship.” Some contracts are meant to “promote a positive image of law enforcement.” One agreement refers to them as “youth development officers.” Another says their duties include serving as “a visual deterrent to aberrant behavior.”
Some give police authority to enforce school rules and code-of-conduct violations, such as using profanity or public displays of affection, that could result in a student being disciplined.
Some contracts say that officers will teach classes, without specifying the courses or training requirements.
The Anderson Union High School District’s contract with the Shasta County Probation Department requires resource officers to “provide class instruction as identified by the district and approved by the county.” Superintendent Brian Parker did not respond to questions about that requirement.
The varying roles officers play can result in legal risks to students, according to University of North Carolina law professorBarbara Fedders, who has argued for removing school resource officers.
“Relationship forming and being nice and all of that is misleading. Because if you then need to question the kids, you’re going to be able to take advantage of that relationship and use it for law enforcement purposes,” Fedders said in an interview.
‘Situations that arise from student conduct’
Some contracts don’t differentiate between officers’ roles in investigating school rule violations and potential crimes.
The Fullerton Joint Union High School District, which straddles Los Angeles and Orange counties, has policing contracts totaling more than $800,000 with the cities of Fullerton, La Habra and Buena Park. Each requires resource officers to “investigate situations that arise from student conduct at school.” The agreements also authorize officers to search students if they believe, or have reasonable suspicion, that something illegal occurred, or are “directed to do so by a school administrator.”
Fullerton Union High School in Orange County.Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Legal experts were critical of those terms.
The language in the contract “sends the wrong message not only to officers but to students and parents and teachers because it’s so vague,” said retired Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell, who also served as San Jose’s independent police auditor from 2015 to 2020.
“It’s pretty much at the discretion of an administrator, or even the officer, to just decide if there’s something suspicious, or they think may be illegal,” Cordell said. “We’re not talking here about probable cause. Who’s the reasonable person? The officer? The administrator? Who knows?”
District Superintendent Steven McLaughlin, Assistant Superintendent Ruben Hernandez, school board President Vickie Calhoun, and Dr. Chester Jeng, who was board president when the contracts were ratified on a consent agenda vote, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The city managers of Fullerton, La Habra, and Buena Park also did not reply to messages seeking comment.
Khadijah Silver, a supervising civil rights attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based Lawyers For Good Government, also criticized Fullerton’s contract language.
“It’s basically saying, anytime a kid acts up, you’re free to go violate their civil rights and interrogate them off of the school’s premises and all of that,” Silver said. “It’s unconstitutionally overbroad language that fails to define or delineate any bounds of appropriate police behavior whatsoever.”
‘What any reasonable adult would do’
Some legal experts say that by allowing officers to enforce school rules, districts create situations that are confusing and intimidating to students. Nanda said that officers’ involvement in discipline is often “ambiguous.” Students, she added, may not understand why an officer stops them in the hallway: Is it for an alleged crime or a violation of school rules?
“Are they just walking the child over to the principal’s office, or are they interviewing the child and taking police notes? How does that play out?” she said. The presence of resource officers can result in harsher discipline for students, “particularly for Black students, male students and students with disabilities,” according to a 2023 study by researchers at State University of New York, Albany, “even though officers are typically not trained to, and often do not intend to, become involved in minor disciplinary matters in the school.”
Although the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers recommends that districts prohibit officers from “becoming involved in formal school discipline situations,” its executive director, Mo Canady, said in an interview that he thinks officers should get involved in situations that could result in discipline.
When officers see a young person misbehaving and get involved, they’re doing “what any reasonable adult would do,” Canady said. “Adults should never walk by and ignore a situation like that. I don’t care if we’re at a shopping mall, whatever it is.”
Asked whether there is a difference between an adult and an armed police officer intervening when a juvenile misbehaves, Canady said: “That’s why one of the issues that we harp on constantly is the importance of good relationships that (officers) build with students.”
California’s Department of Education does not provide guidance on the use of school resource officers, Elizabeth Sanders, an agency spokesperson, said.
The California School Boards Association provides districts with what it calls a “sample policy” on policing contracts, which recommends that the duties of resource officers should “not include the handling of student code of conduct violations or routine disciplinary matters that should be addressed by school administrators or conduct that would be better addressed by mental health professionals.”
Troy Flint, spokesperson for the association, said district leaders are free to “interpret the sample policy in a way that captures their community’s desired approach to law enforcement on campus. We recognize there’s a diversity of opinion throughout the state about the role security personnel should play on campus or whether they should be there at all.”
‘Why are we policing our students?’
The Oxnard Union High School District has contracts with two law enforcement agencies that clearly prohibit resource officers’ involvement in disciplinary matters.
The district’s $2.33 million contract with the city of Oxnard states that police are to distinguish “between disciplinary misconduct to be handled by school officials from criminal offenses.” The contract also says that officers “are responsible for criminal public order offenses” and “should not get involved in school discipline issues.” A separate contract with the city of Camarillo contains similar language. Both contracts require officers to establish “clear probable cause” before searching a student.
Oxnard Union High District Superintendent Tom McCoy chats with school resource officers Alexus Santos,left, and Sgt. Hannah Estrada on the campus of Pacifica High School in Oxnard.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
But the district’s contract with Ventura County for one resource officer does not address discipline. Superintendent Tom McCoy said in an interview that it is “well understood and discussed in meetings” that resource officers provided by the county do not enforce discipline. It’s never been an issue. They are very aware of our policies.”
The district has a policy that is not in its policing contracts and that allows students to request “a person of the same gender or gender identity or a staff member familiar to them to be present” if they are questioned by law enforcement.
McCoy added that the district requires students who “are questioned or interviewed by police on campus also must be referred for counseling and wellness services on the same day to address any specific needs identified through the interview process.”
Karen Sher, the school board member whom McCoy credited with helping create the district’s policy, said her experience teaching at a school with resource officers led her to ask herself, “‘Why are we policing our children?’”
Oxnard Union High School District board member Karen Sher.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
Sher said she believes that officers have a role to play in school safety, but she also worries about how their presence might affect disadvantaged students. About 16% of district students lack stable housing, she said.
“How on earth does anyone believe those students have not had an interaction, both positive or negative, with police?” Sher asked. “We expect them to come to school, see police cars in front of their school, and expect them to feel good about that? That’s a very entitled perspective.”
Eric Wiatt, a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy who has worked at Adolfo Camarillo High School for the past three years, said adjusting to being a resource officer took time.
“The first year was a learning experience of communicating with (students) and developing a rapport. It wasn’t natural in me. You know, all the different social media platforms that are used and the different slang they use,” Wiatt said in an interview.
He says he spends a lot of time investigating bullying and threats made on social media.
School resource officer Eric Wiatt from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department patrols the campus of Adolfo Camarillo High School in Camarillo.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
“We actually dig into them. We take every threat very seriously. We do a full investigation,” Wiatt said.
When he’s not investigating threats, Wiatt walks the campus wearing a bulletproof vest over his uniform and a pistol holstered to his hip. He often eats lunch with students.
Riley Young, a 16-year-old junior whom school officials selected to be interviewed by EdSource, described Wiatt as calm and helpful.
“I’d been getting in trouble,” she said. “He helped me realize that being good in school and in life was important.”
‘Providing clarity’
District leaders provided a range of reasons why their policing contracts don’t address whether resource officers can be involved in disciplinary matters.
The Madera Unified School District’s contract with the city of Madera for resource officers doesn’t address disciplinary issues. Superintendent Todd Lile said the idea that officers would enforce discipline “has never been present and, as a result, has never been explicitly called out in contractual language.” Police are “not thought of or expected to keep control of a campus,” he said.
The Lucia Mar Unified School District has two contracts for resource officers. Its agreement with the city of Arroyo Grande prohibits officers from enforcing discipline. But its contract with San Luis Obispo County does not address disciplinary matters.
Amy Jacobs, a district spokesperson, said Lucia Mar has a policy prohibiting law enforcement’s involvement in discipline, but Jacobs didn’t provide an answer when asked why that policy wasn’t written into the contract with the sheriff’s office.
The Galt Union High School District board in Sacramento County agreed to a three-year contract with the city of Galt for three resource officers in 2023. The agreement did not address police involvement in discipline. But shortly after Anna Trunnell became district superintendent in 2024, the contract was revised.
It now states that resource officers “will not be responsible for requests to resolve routine discipline problems involving students. They will not respond to incidents that do not pose any threat of safety or would not be considered crimes if they occurred outside of the school.”
Trunnell said the new language “assists in providing clarity when responding to student needs.”
The lack of clarity in many school policing contracts is “profoundly alarming,” said Nanda, the Southwestern law professor.
“It’s crucial,” she said, “for parents, educators and administrators to pay attention to the who, what and why of officers in our schools.”
John Thompson, historians and retired teacher, keeps us informed about the news from Oklahoma. In this post, he looks at the blame game surrounding the Tulsa public schools.
He writes:
As the Tulsa World recently explained, State Auditor Cindy Byrd issued a “scathing new forensic audit of Tulsa Public Schools” which “laid the blame on the administration of former Superintendent Deborah Gist, who served as Tulsa superintendent for the audited time of 2015-2023.” Byrd “also said multiple school district administrators ‘created and fostered a culture’ of noncompliance and systemic lack of internal controls that ‘potentially placed millions of taxpayer dollars in jeopardy.’”
I’m not qualified to comment on the financial side of the audit, but I strongly agree with the World that Byrd has an impeccable record as a financial auditor.
And as I completed this post, another impeccable institution, The Frontier, discovered, “Deborah Gist and her deputies were quietly arranging an exit plan for the official behind it (Fletcher) — and using secret payments to a private consultant to manage the transition, according to internal district records obtained by The Frontier.” It further explained:
The newly obtained documents — including auditors’ notes and memos, internal district emails, and procurement records — shed new light on these gaps. They show that Gist and her deputies began planning Fletcher’s departure as early as December 2021, more than six months before the district reported his scheme to the police.
Moreover:
Gist and former assistant superintendent Paula Shannon hired a New York-based human resources consultant, Talia Shaull, to manage Fletcher’s exit, paying her $175 per hour through the Foundation for Tulsa Schools, emails and contracts show. According to the documents, the arrangement to pay her directly through the foundation was designed “to avoid Board approval, keeping the project confidential” and violated district procurement policy.
Getting back to the history I witnessed, in 2019, a comment by a Tulsa teacher was posted on the Diane Ravitch blog with the title of Tulsa: Broadie Swarm Alert. It began with the teacher’s statement, “Welcome to my Hell in Tulsa.” The introduction explained that a Broadie “is someone ‘trained’ in the top-down management philosophy of Eli Broad at the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. They are known for setting high goals and meeting none of them.”
In other words, their methods foreshadowed those of today’s Elon Musk.
The Broad Center was a “venture philanthropy” committed to everyone being on the same page for test-driven accountability, mass firings of teachers, and charter schools. It had an extensive record of spreading disruption, imposing script-driven instruction, and driving teachers out of the profession, while failing to improve student outcomes.
Byrd’s audit found that during the Gist administration the TPS “received payments totaling $554,772 from the Broad Center. It “utilized at least 23 different vendors with Broad Academy connections. The majority of these vendors did not have a relationship with [the] TPS prior to the hiring of the Broad related alumni.” Moreover, the “TPS retained 33% of the employees who received the recruitment or retention bonus payments, 40% of these employees did not continue their employment for more than five years, with 25% remaining for less than two years.”
The audit and reporting on the Gist administration are consistent with my experience with Broadies, and their questionable approaches to data. During the first meeting I had with a consultant hired to implement their agenda, I showed him scatter-grams from the TPS web site that showed how difficult (or completely impossible) it would be to take into account the effect of the district’s segregation when trying to measure individual secondary school teachers’ effectiveness. He replied in a scientific manner, “Oh Sh__!” I repeatedly spoke with consultants who, like him and like me, could not get Gist or her Broadies to listen to social and cognitive science, or to teachers.
Similarly, when the OKCPS hired John Q. Porter, a Broadie from an affluent district’s finance department, he would blow off concerns expressed by my students, colleagues, and researchers. He was adamant in demanding frequent surprise visits by administrators and, then, placing a camera in every classroom so he could see if each teacher was teaching the same lessons in the same way according to the same schedule. Porter was forced to resign in less than a year due to seemingly small violations of district policy, but the Washington Post later reported that he had not properly divested from “Spectrum International, the document management company he founded in 1993.”
Finally, I’m not in a position to comment on the Tulsa World’s concern that Cindy Byrd, who is running for lieutenant governor, was being political when investigating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and whether its funds could be “associated with violations of House Bill 1775.” The World acknowledged that Byrd “stops short of saying any law, such as the mean-spirited House Bill 1775 or Gov. Kevin Stitt’s order to report school DEI expenses, was violated.” It properly noted that, “Classifying DEI or HB 1775 programs is subjective, but it’s already being seized upon by anti-TPS and anti-public education critics.”
And that brings me back to the real harm done to Tulsa by the ideology-driven “Billionaires Boys Club” – not DEI. Back when Deborah Gist and her funders were imposing test-and-punish on schools, I found that many or most conservative legislators who I knew were opposed to the campaign to run schools like venture capitalist institutions. I hope they will remember that the real scandals that fostered a destructive culture that the audit documented were linked to corporate school reformers, not DEI or the efforts to defend meaningful teaching and learning in public schools.
Conservative groups and LGBTQ+ rights supporters protest outside the Glendale Unified School District offices in Glendale on June 6, 2023. Several hundred people gathered at district headquarters, split between those who support or oppose teaching that exposes youngsters to LGBTQ+ issues in schools.
Credit: Keith Birmingham/The Orange County Register via AP
Conflicts between parents, teachers and school leaders over parental rights policies focusing on LGBTQ+ students, limitations on teaching about race and racism, and book bans have come with a cost — both socially and financially.
The conflicts are disrupting school districts, negatively impacting schools and classrooms, and costing districts money that could be used to better serve students, according to “The Costs of Conflict, The Fiscal Impact of Culturally Divisive Conflicts on Public Schools in the United States,” released last month.
Researchers from UCLA, the University of Texas at Austin, American University and UC Riverside conducted a national survey of K-12 public school superintendents from 46 states — 467 in all — and found that these conflicts are prevalent.
Since the 2020-21 school year, uncivil discourse and hostile political rhetoric at school board meetings and on school campuses has been an ongoing problem. Two-thirds of the school superintendents surveyed for the study said they have experienced moderate to high levels of culturally divisive conflict in their districts, including misinformation campaigns, violent rhetoric and threats.
Cultural conflicts cost U.S. school districts about $3.2 billion last school year, according to the study. Researchers estimate that districts with high levels of conflict spent about $80 per student. Districts with moderate levels of conflict spent $50 per student, and districts with low conflict spent $25 per student.
“This is costing us general fund dollars,” said a superintendent from a midsize school district in a Western state. “In the 2023-24 school year, the district spent an additional $100,000 on security, hiring armed plainclothes off-duty officers … because people coming to the board meetings are unpredictable and sometimes violent.”
Researchers allowed superintendents to remain anonymous in the report.
The superintendent also said the district spent more than $500,000 in legal fees on lawsuits associated with a board member and a campaign against the LGBTQ+ community, and lost $250,000 in outside funding from social services organizations because of the dispute. It also spent $80,000 on recruiting and training new staff to replace teachers, counselors and administrators who left because they did not want to work in such a divisive setting.
“Culturally divisive conflicts have substantial costs to the public and to our capacity as a state to mount quality learning experiences for all students,” said John Rogers, director of the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education and Access and lead researcher on the report. “It has a fiscal cost that we’ve tried to lay out with some specificity, and it has broader social costs as well — there’s an undermining of social trust, there’s a deepening sense of stress and all of this is hugely consequential for how educators experience public schools and how young people are experiencing public schools.”
Costs of conflict can’t always be counted in dollars
Average-sized school districts of about 10,000 students spent about $811,000 each last school year to cope with cultural division, according to the study. The money was spent on legal fees, added security, additional staff time and on community, school board and government relations. Districts also incurred indirect costs because of staff turnover related to the conflict and because staff had to take time away from their other duties to deal with discord.
According to the survey, the largest expense for districts with cultural conflict came from staff turnover, with districts of about 10,000 students spending between $148,000 and $461,000, depending on the level of conflict.
One superintendent said that cultural conflict has caused “incredible stress on leaders and teachers as they navigate imaginary slights and online drama in the community.” A Pennsylvania superintendent called the emotional stress and anxiety “nearly crippling.”
“This research makes clear that culturally divisive conflicts in the nation’s schools are generating fear, stress and anxiety that is disrupting school districts and taking a personal toll on the educators and staff members who work in them,” Rogers said.
The stress has also led to increased staff absenteeism at schools, even in districts with lower levels of conflict, according to the report.
Half of the superintendents surveyed said they had been personally harassed at least once during the school year. Ten percent reported being threatened with violence, and 11% had their property vandalized.
As a result, superintendent turnover has also increased — from 14.2% to 17.1% — over the past four years. More than 40% of the superintendents who left their jobs in the last year said their decision was related to conflict, stress and politics, according to the report.
“The relentless demands of leading a district can easily overshadow their own well-being, which, if neglected, not only affects their personal health but also the health and stability of students, educators, and families they serve,” said Rachel S. White of the University of Texas at Austin in a statement. “Reducing the extent to which superintendents experience unwarranted divisiveness is an important step to change the trajectory of increasing superintendent churn.”
Superintendents who were surveyed expressed concern that the time they spent managing cultural conflict, including responding to Freedom of Information Act requests, and unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation, is keeping them from focusing on improving instruction.
California not immune to divisive conflict
Rogers said that while cultural conflict wasn’t as common in California as in other parts of the country in 2021-22, it has grown over the last few years.
Donald Trump’s election is likely to bring more cultural division to school campuses, Rogers said.
“I think that a Trump victory will lead some on the right to take a message that these sorts of cultural attacks, that have been playing out across the United States and across California in the last couple of years, are an effective strategy for mobilizing the base and for energizing the electorate,” said Rogers, in an interview the day before the election.
“A Trump victory will mean that Donald Trump will have more of a presence in our public life in the months to come. And so, that too will mean that he will be using language and framing that will further activate attacks on public schools around these culturally divisive issues.”
Credit: Katie Schneider Gumiran and Rosa Gaia for Conway Elementary
An instructional leader in a Bay Area school district told me last week that while they are a bright spot in improving reading for the last three years, they still haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels. “Our biggest pain point is writing. Our gaps start in ELA, but we see them in science and social studies too.”
This district isn’t alone; schools throughout California are struggling to improve writing across the curriculum. What might we do differently?
In their new book, Learning Together, Elham Kazemi and colleagues suggest school leaders work with teachers to analyze student writing more regularly. Reviewing a set of informational essays, or an extended project in biology, could be the center of more grade-level planning meetings or districtwide professional learning days.
The pioneer in this approach has been Ron Berger, one of the co-founders of EL Education, a national non-profit that partners with K-12 educators to transform their schools. Berger has been a mainstay of High Tech High’s Deeper Learning conferences in San Diego and has taught more than 300 workshops around the country, all of them closely examining examples of student work.
In Leaders of Their Own Learning, the instructional guide he co-authored, Berger tells the story of coaching a high school physics teacher who says, “The students’ lab reports are terribly written and it’s driving me crazy.”
Ron asks if she’s ever shown her students a model of a good lab report and she replies that she has not.
When given the chance to closely study an exemplary lab report, her students are surprised at the vocabulary and level of precision in it. A number laughed at how low their own standards had been.
“For all the correcting we do, directions we give, and rubrics we create about what good work looks like,” writes Berger, “students are often unclear about what they are aiming for until they actually see and analyze strong models.”
Ron Berger used to lug around a giant black bag of student essays, labs, and video presentations to discuss at workshops. Eventually, with support from the Hewlett Foundation, and collaborating with Steve Seidel at Harvard University, Berger built an online museum for displaying student work.
Models of Excellence showcases 500 examples of great student writing and other projects from around the U.S. and the world. California students have contributed sixty pieces, including a Kids Guide to California National Parks created by 2nd graders from Big Pine, and an analysis by 6th graders on the water quality of Lake Merritt in Oakland.
Here are three ways districts and schools across California can improve writing by studyingtheir own student work:
First, form a study group. In grade-level meetings or working across the district, teachers and a coach can assemble their own models of excellent student writing. The group can link the models to criteria which guide students’ efforts; the more concrete, the better. The study group can use the rubrics and student checklists developed by the Vermont Writing Collaborative for all genres of writing at all grade levels.
After teaching a lesson where third graders critiqued a fantasy story, Berger reflects, “It’s much more powerful to bring in models of great work. Then have the kids be detectives and have the excitement of discovering and naming the qualities of great writing — humor, powerful words, well-drawn character — in their own words.”
Second, get the feedback right. Dylan William writes in Embedded Formative Assessment that most feedback in schools is accurate, but falls short of showing the learner how to move forward. He tells of a science student who reads he needs to be more systematic. “If I knew how,” the student tells his teacher, “I would have done it the first time.”
Students can resist revising their work, so Berger suggests teachers and peers follow this mantra about feedback: “Be Kind, Be Specific, Be Helpful.” Keeping this in mind, writing three or four drafts of an essay becomes a part of the school culture.
Finally, make the writing visible. Tina Meglich, principal of Conway Elementary in Escondido, transformed her school by displaying curated student work throughout the library and hallways. “Kids will ask, ‘Who wrote that essay on Esperanza Rising?’ They’re fascinated by each other’s work, and they inspire one another to do better because of it.”
Analyzing student writing in this way not only raises the quality of the work, but it also instills in students a vision of what’s possible. “I believe that work of excellence is transformational,” Berger writes. “After students have had a taste of excellence, they’re never satisfied with less; they’re always hungry.”
•••
David Scarlett Wakelyn is a consultant at Upswing Labs, a nonprofit that works with school districts and charter schools to improve instruction. He previously was on the team at the National Governors Association that developed Common Core State Standards.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Since Trump invited Elon Musk and his DOGE team to cut the federal budget, the federal government has been subject to a bloodbath of firings, layoffs, and closed agencies. Some of the most shocking budget cuts have focused on scientific research. Reckless cuts have been imposed on the National Science Foundation and on every part of the Department of Health and Human Services, where the Secretary–conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.–is crushing genuine research and prioritizing his obsession with vaccines as the cause of autism, which has been debunked.
Trump has blocked the payment of millions of dollars to universities that fund basic science research. He is using those blocks to force universities to stop DEI programs.
We can understand why Kennedy wants to destroy science: it has an annoying tendency to undercut his pet conspiracy theories. No matter what science says, he will continue to warn the public that vaccines are dangerous, that fluoridating water is dangerous, and anything that contradicts his ideology is fake, regardless of how many scientists disagree. WHO you gonna believe? The addled RFK Jr. or the world’s top scientists? Or Ghostbusters?
But we do not know why Trump put the nation’s public health agencies into the hands of a man who does not respect science.
Why does Trump want more children to die of measles? Why does he allow Elon Musk to shut down agencies like USAID that have saved millions of lives? Why he is cancelling grants to universities for basic scientific research? Why does he want to stop the work of scientists who are seeking cures for cancer, tuberculosis, AIDS, and other lethal diseases? I don’t know.
Frankly, the cuts are coming so fast that I can’t keep track of them all. I hope soon to find a comprehensive summary of the destruction of federally-funded scientific research.
In the meanwhile, this is the best overview I have seen.
Late yesterday, Sethuraman Panchanathan, whom President Trump hired to run the National Science Foundation five years ago, quit. He didn’t say why, but it was clear enough: Last weekend, Trump cut more than 400 active research awards from the N.S.F., and he is pressing Congress to halve the agency’s $9 billion budget.
The Trump administration has targeted the American scientific enterprise, an engine of research and innovation that has thrummed for decades. It has slashed or frozen budgets at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA. It has fired or defunded thousands of researchers.
The chaos is confusing: Isn’t science a force for good? Hasn’t it contained disease? Won’t it help us in the competition with China? Doesn’t it attract the kind of immigrants the president says he wants? In this edition of the newsletter, we break out our macroscope to make sense of the turmoil.
An investment
American research thrives under a patronage system that funnels congressionally approved dollars to universities, national labs and institutes. This knowledge factory employs tens of thousands of researchers, draws talent from around the world and generates scientific breakthroughs and Nobel Prizes.
It’s a slow-moving system, because science moves slowly. Discoveries are often indirect and iterative, involving collaboration among researchers who need years of subsidized education to become expert. Startups and corporations, which need quick returns on their investment, typically can’t wait as long or risk as much money.
President Trump is less patient. He has defunded university studies on AIDS, pediatric cancer and solar physics. (Two prominent researchers are compiling lists of lost N.I.H. grants and N.S.F. awards.) The administration has also laid off thousands of federal scientists, including meteorologists at the National Weather Service; pandemic-preparedness experts at the C.D.C.; black-lung researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. A next-generation space observatory, already built with $3.5 billion over a decade, awaits a launch that now may never happen.
Alienating scientists
Administration officials offer various reasons for the crackdown: cost-cutting, government efficiency, “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” Many grants were eliminated because they contain words, including climate, diversity, disability, trans or women. Some drew the administration’s ire because the applications included D.E.I. statements required by the previous administration.
It doesn’t take a telescope to see where this leads. American leaders have historically seen science as an investment in the future. Will this administration foreclose it? One-third of America’s Nobel Prize winners have been foreign-born, but an immigration crackdown has swept up scientists like Kseniia Petrova, a Russian who studied aging at Harvard and now sits in a Louisiana detention center. Australian academics have stopped attending conferences in the U.S. for fear of being detained, The Guardian has reported.
Now some American scientists are looking for the exits. France, Canada and other countries are courting our researchers. In a recent poll by the journal Nature, more than 1,200 American scientists said they were considering working abroad. The journal’s job-search platform saw 32 percent more applications for positions overseas between January and March 2025 than during the same period a year earlier.
Redefining ‘science’
These are mechanical threats to science — who gets money, what they work on. But there is a more existential worry. The Trump administration is trying to change what counts as science.
One effort aims at what science should show — and at achieving results agreeable to the administration. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wants to reopen research into a long-debunked link between vaccines and autism. He doesn’t want to study vaccine hesitancy. The National Science Foundation says it will no longer fund “research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens.” A Justice Department official has accused prominent medical journals of political bias for not airing “competing viewpoints.”
Another gambit is to suppress or avoid politically off-message results, even if the message isn’t yet clear. The government has expunged public data sets on air quality, earthquake intensity and seabed geology. Why cut the budget by erasing records? Perhaps the data would point toward efforts (pollution reduction? seabed mining limits?) that officials might one day need to undertake. We pursue knowledge in order to act: to prevent things, to improve things. But action is expensive, at a moment when the Trump administration wants the government to do as little as possible. Perhaps it’s best to not even know.
One sure way to shut down knowledge is to question who can gather it. The administration is painting scientists with the same liberal brush it has applied to academics more broadly — what Project 2025 describes as “the ‘enlightened,’ highly educated managerial elite.” The N.I.H. is controlled by “a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders,” the Project 2025 authors write. The regulatory work of the Environmental Protection Agency “should embrace so-called citizen science” and be left “for the public to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct.”
In science, as in a democracy, there’s plenty of room for skepticism and debate. That’s what makes it work. But at some point, calls for “further research” become disingenuous efforts to obscure inconvenient facts. It’s an old playbook, exploited in the 1960s by the tobacco industry and more recently by fossil-fuel companies.
Now it’s being weaponized by the government against science generally. Facts are elite, facts are fungible, facts are false. And once nothing is true, anything can be true.
California needs to mandate bilingual education in districts with significant numbers of English learners and invest much more to support districts to offer it, according to a new report released Thursday.
The authors said California is far behind other states in enrolling students in bilingual programs, despite having published documents like the English Learner Roadmap and Global California 2030, that lay out a vision for significantly expanding bilingual education in the state.
“It’s particularly significant because of the loud promises the state has made on behalf of bilingual education,” said Conor P. Williams, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and one of the authors of the report. “When it comes down to actual resources devoted, they’ve come so far short.”
The authors of the report recommend three main actions for California state leaders to take: Expand bilingual education programs with more funding and requirements for districts to offer them; prioritize enrollment of English learners in bilingual programs; and invest more in bilingual teacher preparation programs.
In order to expand bilingual education programs, the authors said California should follow the lead of Texas and pass legislation that requires districts to offer bilingual education if they have at least 20 students in any grade level that speak the same home language. In addition, they recommend the state provide districts more funding for every student enrolled in a bilingual program.
The authors said this “carrot and stick” approach in Texas has helped the state enroll a much higher percentage (36.7%) of English learners in bilingual programs. In contrast, California has enrolled only 16.4 % of English learners in bilingual programs.
The report cites research that shows bilingual education improves academic achievement, progress in learning English, retention of home language, high school graduation and college attendance, in addition to other benefits.
“Bilingual education should not be a partisan issue, because of the vast and wide-reaching benefits of it,” said Ilana Umansky, associate professor of education at the University of Oregon and one of the authors of the report. “It’s very telling that a state like Texas mandates bilingual education in a lot of circumstances and incentivizes bilingual education and has twice the enrollment of English learners in bilingual education as California.”
In addition to expanding the number of bilingual programs, the authors also called on state and district leaders to make sure there are spaces set aside in bilingual programs for English learners, that they are located in neighborhoods where English learners live or that they can easily reach by transportation.
“It’s critical to prioritize English learners, because it’s English-learner-classified students that most need and benefit from bilingual programs,” Umansky said.
Umansky said many dual-language immersion programs are often located in neighborhoods where most families speak English, because English-speaking parents are often the loudest advocates pushing for them. And she said some districts outright bar recent immigrant students from enrolling in bilingual programs, incorrectly assuming they are not beneficial for them.
Finally, the report’s authors are recommending the state also invest more in bilingual teacher preparation programs and in making such programs more affordable for students. They pointed out that after voters passed Proposition 227 in 1998, limiting bilingual education in California, many bilingual teacher preparation programs were closed.
“Prop 227 had such a devastating effect on traditional bilingual teacher programs, we have got to invest in them. They have to be bigger, they have to be stronger, and we have to have support for the programs and support for the students,” Umansky said.
Proposition 227 was overturned in 2016, when voters passed a separate measure, Proposition 58.
“California has put its foot down about saying, ‘We believe in multilingualism, we’re going to get students to be multilingual,’” Umansky said. “Now is the moment to really start putting money and efforts behind those intentions.”
Kindergarten teacher Carla Randazzo watches a student write alphabet letters on a white board at Golden Empire Elementary School in Sacramento.
Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / AP Photo
California’s students have struggled in the five years since the pandemic closed schools across the state. But kids in many schools are bouncing back, returning to pre-Covid achievement levels. What’s working? How have some districts innovated to turn kids’ learning curves upward once again?
After analyzing student-level statewide data and visiting nine districts in each of the past three years, our team has made these discoveries:
Mindful policies make a difference
Nationwide, the pandemic erased nearly two decades of progress in math and reading. In California, average math proficiency decreased by 6.4 percentage points between 2019 and 2022, and reading proficiency dropped by 4 percentage points. Our work shows a modest positive effect of early reopening and federal recovery investments over this period. This highlights the importance of keeping schools open when it is safe to do so and prioritizing high-need students in reopening. Federal stimulus dollars also helped during this period.
Our statewide work further shows that districts blended, braided and sequenced multiple funding sources to extend instructional learning time, strengthen staffing and provide learning supports.
We also studied the impact of recovery investments and specific district recovery programs. We did not find that increased federal Covid funding to schools increased student test scores post-pandemic. However, districts that devoted funds to teacher retention efforts and extended learning time showed more improvement in student attendance, a key to improving academic outcomes.
Cross-sector partnerships advance whole-child development
Prolonged school closure, social isolation, economic anxiety, housing and food insecurity, Covid-19 infection, and the loss of loved ones exacerbated a national mental health crisis already underway before the pandemic. In 2021, 42% of high school students nationwide experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and 32% attempted or seriously considered attempting suicide. As schools reopened, educators found themselves dealing with not just academic learning, but also support for basic needs (such as food and health care), mental health, and life skills (such as relationship skills).
Some districts pivoted to fostering whole-child development. For example, Compton Unified partnered with community health providers to offer health care services (such as vaccinations and check-ups), and Del Norte Unified leveraged Medi-Cal reimbursements to provide mental health counseling and therapy sessions. Educators will still need to deal with the academic, behavioral and life-skills needs for years to come. More cross-sector partnerships with public health, social services and housing would better equip schools to address these challenges.
School innovations foster a rebound in learning
Overall spending infusions have helped students rebound, but the impact has been relatively small. More important is how Covid relief funds were spent by districts. Our longitudinal case study of nine districts revealed some substantial organizational changes — reforms that may stick over time.
One large structural reform was the investment in student well-being. Before the pandemic, student well-being was considered mostly secondary to instruction and academic achievement. However, the pandemic highlighted the need to integrate life skills into instruction. As a result, districts invested in new program materials and moved resources to hire counselors, social workers, psychologists, and increased student access to school-based supports. Some even built new community centers where students and families come together.
A smaller scale, yet key, reform is districts’ investment in career pathways. Districts like Compton and Milpitas Unified offer a wide variety of pathways — from E-sports to computer science to early education — that are tied to on-the-job internships and certificates. These pathways have played an important role in engaging students and connecting them with employment opportunities.
Districts also tried new approaches to the structure of schooling and classroom practices. For example, Glendale Unified shifted to a seven-period block schedule that allowed middle and high school students to add an elective course that sparked their interest. In Poway Unified, small groups of students meet with teachers and classroom aides to focus on specific skill areas.
Digital innovations engage students, but gaps remain
Many districts have turned to digital innovations to motivate kids. In Poway, coaches embedded in the classroom work with teachers to build learning stations, where stronger students work in teams, freeing teachers to provide more direct instruction to kids at risk of falling behind.
Unfortunately, since the pandemic, the digital divide has narrowed, but it has not been eliminated.
In spring 2020, when schools abruptly shifted online, 40% of California households with school-age children did not have reliable internet or devices for distance learning. Over time, the state has made remarkable progress in device access, but not as much progress with internet access. The lack of progress could be attributed to multiple factors, including the absence of pre-existing infrastructure and affordability challenges. Federal and state governments provided unprecedented investments (such as the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program and California Senate Bill 356) to address barriers to universal broadband access; however, communities face significant challenges in building out infrastructure and improving affordability.
The pandemic provided an unprecedented opportunity to rethink and restart public education. Given the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters, learning disruptions will become the new norm for many communities throughout the U.S.
By learning from the example of districts that have demonstrated resilience and success in pandemic recovery, we can better prepare for future disruptions and build a more resilient public education that supports all students.
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Niu Gao is a principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research. Julian Betts is a professor at UC San Diego. Jonathan Isler and Piper Stanger are administrators at the California Department of Education.
Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, was part of the research team and contributed to this report.
This collaboration research is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through grant R305X230002 to the American Institutes for Research (AIR). Any errors or misinterpretations belong to the authors and do not reflect the views of the institute, the U.S. Department of Education or the California Department of Education.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Trump will leave no independent board untouched by his political venom, as he demonstrated by his hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, where he removed every Biden appointee and replaced a bipartisan board with an all-Trump board. He also removed the nonpartisan director of the Kennedy Center and replaced her with a Trump loyalist. And he named himself President of the Kennedy Center.
The Trump administration has begun firing at least some of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s appointees to the board that oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, including Douglas Emhoff, the husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris, and other senior Biden White House officials.
“Today, I was informed of my removal from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council,” Mr. Emhoff said in a statement on Tuesday. “Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized. To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous — and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”
Mr. Emhoff is Jewish and an outspoken critic of the rise in antisemitism. His appointment to the council was announced in January; presidential appointments are typically five-year terms.
The other officials who were dismissed include Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s first chief of staff; Tom Perez, the former labor secretary and senior adviser to Mr. Biden; Susan Rice, the national security adviser to former President Barack Obama and Mr. Biden’s top domestic policy adviser who led a major national strategic effort to counter antisemitism; and Anthony Bernal, a senior adviser to Jill Biden, the former first lady.
Theresa Montaño, a professor in Chicano/a Studies at CSU Northridge and a member of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee, is a defendant in the lawsuit.
Credit: Luis Garcia / California State University, Northridge
A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit against the United Teachers Los Angeles and the organization that created a controversial ethnic studies curriculum adopted by at least two dozen school districts in California.
U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin’s scathing ruling on Nov. 30 criticized what he concluded was a lack of evidence and unpersuasive arguments made on behalf of the two Jewish teachers and parents in Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles, the group that brought the litigation.
The plaintiffs’ complaint “is difficult to understand and contains a morass of largely irrelevant — and sometimes contradictory — allegations, few of which state with any degree of clarity precisely what plaintiffs believe defendants have done or, more importantly, how plaintiffs have been harmed,” wrote Olguin of the Central District of federal court in California. His 49-page pretrial ruling dismissing the lawsuit “with prejudice” precludes the plaintiffs from refiling another similar lawsuit in federal court. The lawsuit was filed in 2022.
The lawsuit alleged that the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, the teachers union, its president Cecily Myart-Cruz, and two members of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee encouraged the adoption of instructional materials used in several LAUSD classrooms, that they also “covertly” trained teachers in the “liberated” ethnic studies curriculum, which condemns capitalism, white privilege, and Zionism, and characterizes Israel’s existence as “based on ethnic cleansing and land theft, apartheid and genocide,” according to Olguin’s summary of the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also alleged that teachers who identified as Jewish or Zionist were not welcome in classrooms where ethnic studies was taught and “personally experienced the official hostility” of UTLA to Israel and to the concept of Zionism.”
Denying they are antisemitic, educators affiliated with the consortium — mainly instructors and professors in ethnic studies departments at California State University and University of California — have made anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel a focus of their curriculum. They characterize Israel as a settler, colonialist nation, similar to European nations’ oppressive occupations of Africa and Asia in the 19th and 2oth centuries.
The “liberated” approach to ethnic studies has drawn scrutiny since its leaders formed the consortium in protest after the State Board of Education rejected as ideological and one-sided a draft curriculum that some of them had authored. In passing Assembly Bill 101, creating a mandate requiring high school students to take ethnic studies to graduate, the Legislature, at the encouragement of the Legislative Jewish Caucus, specified that school districts should not use unadopted portions of earlier drafts of the model curriculum.
Advocates of liberated ethnic studies charged the clause and other “guardrails” in the law were intended to squelch their free speech. The largely unfunded graduation mandate is set to take effect in 2029-30.
In an online celebration Monday, Theresa Montaño, a defendant in the lawsuit who is also a member of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee and secretary of the consortium, said, “The end of this two-and-a-half year lawsuit means vindication, affirmation, and victory.”
“This is a win for liberatory critical ethnic studies and academic freedom. It’s a testament to the power of solidarity and liberation, whether that be in South Los Angeles or in Gaza,” said Montaño, a professor of Chicano/a Studies at CSU Northridge. “And so it’s a signal to us that we will not stop, that we will persist until authentic ethnic studies is guaranteed to every student in this state.”
The attorney representing the defendants, Mark Kleiman, told teachers on the press call, “The moral of this story for people in the other school districts is, you don’t have to be afraid of these kinds of attacks. Given half a chance in a fair courtroom, you will be vindicated.”
Meanwhile, the legal director for the Deborah Project — the law firm that filed the lawsuit — said, “We absolutely will be appealing the decision and are confident that the decision will be reversed on appeal.” The appeal must be filed by Dec. 30.
The ruling, said Lori Lowenthal Marcus, “is deeply flawed, as it ignores crucial allegations in plaintiffs’ complaint, fails to address arguments plaintiffs made in their briefs, and even ignores binding precedent from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.”
“We are in the midst of soaring antisemitism in education throughout the U.S., and this is no time for anyone — much less a federal court — to allow publicly funded public schools to be used to indoctrinate children to hate the Jewish commitment to Israel,” she said. “Contrary to the ruling, that’s not ‘education’ about a ‘controversial’ issue. It’s prejudice, pure and simple.”
Uncertain implications
It’s unclear what impact, if any, the ruling might have on other litigation in California involving ethnic studies and allegations of antisemitism and indoctrination which include a potentially stronger lawsuit that the Deborah Project filed last month against the Sequoia Union High School District in Menlo Park, its superintendent, and administrators at two high schools. The plaintiffs in this case are the parents of Jewish students who claim that the district ignored parents’ repeated complaints of antisemitic taunts and bullying by students and biased lessons on the Israeli-Gaza conflict, taught by two history teachers.
On Friday, an Orange County Superior Court judge will consider a motion to invalidate four ethnic studies courses in Santa Ana Unified. In their lawsuit, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law claims that district staff wrote the courses, with the participation of school board members, in violation of the California open meetings law. They did so in order to hide the content from Jewish community members who had repeatedly offered to participate in the process and offer their perspectives. Documents reveal that staff members referred to the Jewish Federation of Orange County as “racist Zionists” and made other bigoted remarks about Jews.
The lawsuit against UTLA and the consortium did not include LAUSD as a direct defendant, which may have weakened the case because the district has not adopted the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum, and there is no indication if and when it would. That made the plaintiffs’ concerns speculative and, therefore, their proposed remedies invalid, Olguin wrote, noting that the participation of Montaño and Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, an LAUSD teacher and a member of the consortium’s leadership team, in an advisory committee is not evidence of the district’s endorsement of the curriculum.
Olguin further ruled that the plaintiffs could not substantiate that teachers and other plaintiffs had yet faced any actual harm, nor did they demonstrate that the eventual adoption of the curriculum would violate civil rights. The judge continued that although plaintiffs claimed the curriculum was “infected from top to bottom with racism,” they didn’t show any evidence to support their assertion.
“It is far from clear that learning about Israel and Palestine or encountering teaching materials with which one disagrees constitutes an injury,” Olguin wrote.
The plaintiffs had asked Olguin to issue injunctions prohibiting LAUSD from including language critical of Israel or Zionism in teaching materials; preventing the district from paying teachers who used the liberated curriculum; and prohibiting the district from using materials from liberated curriculum in classrooms and teacher training paid for by public funds.
Olguin ruled that the plaintiffs had not substantiated claims that their First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom and their right to equal protection under the U.S. and California constitutions were impeded. However, their request for an injunction would have raised an unconstitutional prior restraint on the defendants’ First Amendment speech rights, he concluded.
While a district can “reasonably” curtail teachers’ speech rights in a classroom, “those limitations are fundamentally different from speech restrictions imposed by a court at the behest of a group of private citizens,” he wrote.
In language certain to alarm Jewish organizations worried that antisemitic and anti-Israel bias is gaining a foothold in California schools, Olguin wrote, “It would be of great concern for the educational project and for academic freedom if every offended party could sue every time they did not like a curriculum or the way it was taught.”
