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Temecula Valley Unified can continue enforcing transgender policy, CRT ban, for now
Community member Kayla Church stands in support of LGBTQ+ community and in opposition to Temecula Valley Unified curriculum ban.

Credit: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource

While litigation moves forward, the Temecula Valley Unified District can keep enforcing its transgender notification policy as well as its ban on critical race theory, which restricts instruction on race and gender more broadly, Riverside County Judge Eric A. Keen ruled Friday.

In what seemed to be a contradiction to this decision, Keen had ruled on Feb. 15 that the case — Mae M. v. Komrosky — filed on behalf of the district’s teachers union, teachers, parents and students, in August by Ballard Spahr and the country’s largest pro-bono law firm Public Counsel LLP — will move forward. The plaintiffs had asked Keen to temporarily block enforcement of the policies while the case was fought out in court, but did not get it.

“We are deeply disappointed with the denial of the preliminary injunction, primarily for the students and teachers and parents that we represent,” said Amanda Mangaser Savage, supervising attorney for Public Counsel’s Opportunity Under Law project.

“While these policies remain in effect, students in Temecula’s classrooms are being denied access to an accurate and fact-based education and, instead, are receiving an education that is dictated entirely by the board members’ ideological preferences.”

Supporters of the board’s policy, including Joseph Komrosky, the Temecula Valley Unified school board president, have claimed that the policies do not discriminate against transgender students or students of color.

“The diversity that exists among the District’s community of students, staff, parents, and guardians is an asset to be honored and valued,” Komrosky said in a news release by Advocates for Faith and Freedom, a Murrieta-based law firm, “dedicated to protecting religious liberty in the courts,” that is representing the district for free.

“These policies were enacted by the school board to ensure our district puts the needs of students and their parents above all else,” adding that Temecula Valley Unified is committed to providing students with a well-rounded education devoid of “discrimination and indoctrination.”

A board guided by conservative values

The turmoil in Temecula Unified started in December 2022, when the school board, with a newly elected conservative majority, banned critical race theory. The following spring, the board fired the former superintendent, Jodi McClay, without cause and temporarily banned the Social Studies Alive! textbook due to a mention of LGBTQ+ activist Harvey Milk in the supplemental material.

In August, the board passed a policy that percolated through about a half-dozen other districts, requiring that school administrators notify parents if their child shows signs of being transgender.

Since then, teachers have voiced concerns about more widespread curriculum censorship and negative impacts on students’ mental health — which have drawn attention and scrutiny from state officials.

Edgar Diaz, president of the Temecula Valley Educators Association, the district’s teachers union, criticized Keen’s ruling, stating that it “does not consider the ripple effects” of the district’s policies.

Diaz added that wooden blocks have since been placed on library shelves in lieu of books because teachers and staff fear “there may be some banned concept in them.”

“We shouldn’t be banning anything; we’re an educational institution. If children are curious about something, they explore it; they talk to the teachers. And especially in high school, they’re old enough to form their own opinions about what’s real and what’s not real,” said Temecula Valley Unified school board member Steve Schwartz.

He added that if an LGBTQ+ student “doesn’t feel safe enough in their home to tell their parent but needs to share it with someone and shares it with a teacher, it doesn’t seem like a good idea for the teacher to have to tell that parent.”

Widespread divides over critical race theory

The transgender notification policies and critical race theory ban supported by the Temecula Valley board are part of a larger movement driven by conservative organizations like Reform California. These groups formed to counter widespread calls from the left for racial justice following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020.

Nearly 800 measures in 244 local, state and federal entities have been taken against critical race theory, according to CRT Forward, an initiative of the UCLA School of Law’s critical race studies program.

In California alone, 13 measures have been introduced at the local level, nine of which have been passed or implemented.

As of April 2023, however, 60% of anti-CRT measures were adopted in predominantly conservative states.

“Today’s ruling unfortunately means that Temecula will continue amongst the ranks of Texas and Florida,” Mangaser Savage said.

“While California is obviously a liberal state, I think that the fact that this is happening in our districts demonstrates how pernicious this is.”

While the nearly 4,000 U.S. adults surveyed by researchers at the University of Southern California largely agreed on the importance of public education and the core functions of literacy, numeracy and civics, they are more polarized on topics about race and LGBTQ+ issues.

The survey specifically found that between 80% and 86% of Democrats support the idea of high school students learning about LGBTQ+ topics compared with less than 40% of Republicans. Introducing LGBTQ+ topics at the elementary level garnered less support on both sides of the aisle.

Over half of those surveyed also supported discussion of topics about race at the high school level. But at the elementary level, Democrats were much more likely to support the idea of students learning about slavery, civil rights and racial inequality.

Critical race theory is usually taught at the college level, and Schwartz said it has not been taught in Temecula Valley Unified.

“But if I were a teacher today, and a student came to me and said, ‘What do you think about CRT?’ my response would be: ‘Why don’t you do some research and see what you think about it, and then we can have a discussion,’” Schwartz said.

“My thought is not to tell kids not to investigate things that they’re interested in. That’s what learning is all about.”

The lead-up in Temecula

California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a court brief in support of the plaintiffs in December. According to Mangaser Savage, that brief marked the first time in recent history that the state got involved with litigation to limit ideological censorship in schools.

Following Bonta’s brief, more than 20 civil rights and LGBTQ+ rights organizations — including American Civil Liberties Union’s chapters in Southern and Northern California — have also filed briefs in support of the preliminary injunction.

Those organizations include:
- Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California
- California LGBTQ Health & Human Services Network
- Equal Justice Society
- Equality California
- Family Assistance Program
- Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network
- GLSEN
- Inland Empire Prism Collective
- Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc.
- LGBTQ Center OC
- LGBTQ Community Center of the Desert
- Legal Services of Northern California
- Los Angeles LGBT Center
- Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest
- Public Advocates, Inc.
- Public School Defenders Hub
- Rainbow Pride Youth Alliance
- Sacramento LGBT Center
- Safe Schools Project of Santa Cruz County
- Transgender Law Center
- TransFamily Support Services
- Trevor Project
Penguin Random House and PEN America have also announced their support for the preliminary injunction.

As pressure has mounted on the district to stop its enforcement of allegedly discriminatory and illegal policies, the school board’s makeup has also changed — and more could shift in the coming months.

In December, One Temecula Valley PAC, a political action committee, lodged a recall effort against the board’s three conservative members and gathered enough signatures to move forward with a recall election this spring against Komrosky, the board president.

Conservative board member Jennifer Wiersma, however, will remain on the board, while Danny Gonzalez announced his resignation in December with plans to move to Texas.

Temecula Valley Unified’s school board met on Feb.13 to appoint a replacement but was unable to and decided to move forward with an election. Whoever replaces Gonzalez in that seat will determine whether the board retains its conservative majority.

“Despite the small but vocal opponents that seek to rewrite history and indoctrinate students,” Komrosky said, “I am very optimistic for our school district.”

Editors’ note: This story has been updated to add a statement from Public Counsel’s Opportunity Under Law project supervising attorney, Amanda Mangaser Savage.
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11/06/2025
Legislature rejects ‘draconian’ cuts to UC and CSU, keeps TK-12 funding intact
Students study in the main lobby of Storer Hall at the University of California, Davis.

Credit: Gregory Urquiaga / UC Davis
Top Takeaways

The Legislature has until June 15 to present their budget bill to the governor.

The proposal received praise from speakers grateful to see more funding for higher education.

Student teachers would receive $600 million in new funding in legislators’ plan.
The Legislature is challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed funding cuts to higher education for next year, while largely leaving intact the relatively more generous TK-12 spending the governor called for last month.

“In many ways, it’s a tale of two budgets,” said Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, chair of the education subcommittee, who characterized Newsom’s higher-ed cuts as “draconian.”

In 2025-26, schools and community colleges will receive a record $118.9 billion under Proposition 98, the state formula that determines the minimum portion of the state’s General Fund that must be spent on schools and community colleges. Laird credits the law for “protecting schools from the hard decisions of what is happening to the other side of the ledger with higher education.”

Legislators would nix Newsom’s proposal to cut next year’s funding to the University of California and California State University by 3% and instead restore that money as part of a joint agreement of the Assembly and Senate.

The Assembly and the Senate published their version of a spending plan for education on Monday. The Legislature has until June 15 to present their budget bill to the governor, who then has until June 27 to sign, veto, or line-item veto the bill.

Higher education

The latest version of the 2025-26 budget may provide some relief to the state’s college students and public universities, who in January were told by Newsom to expect an 8% ongoing cut, a figure he revised down to 3% in May. Uncertainty regarding federal funding for higher education has compounded budget anxieties in California, as the Trump administration proposes reductions to programs like the Pell Grant and TRIO.

“I think many of you recognize that we’re facing some pretty devastating budget challenges this year,” said Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, D-Pasadena, at a budget subcommittee hearing on June 10. “It has been incredibly, incredibly tough, and we are continuing to face ongoing challenges with potential cuts coming from the federal administration that will impact our higher education systems, and so we are going to be having ongoing conversations about the budget.”

While the Legislature’s take on the budget may seem more generous, it is not without asterisks. By forgoing the 3% ongoing cut, the Assembly-Senate recommendations would reinstate $130 million to the 10-campus UC system and $144 million to CSU’s 23 campuses. However, the Legislature would defer those payments until July 2026, giving the universities permission to seek short-term loans from the General Fund to tide themselves over.

Additionally, lawmakers parted ways with the governor on a plan to defer a 5% increase in base funding from 2025-26 to 2026-27. The legislative proposal instead splits the deferral, offering the universities a 2% ongoing increase in 2026-27 and the remaining 3% in 2028-29.

The legislative proposal was met with praise from many speakers attending the subcommittee hearing. Representatives from the California State University Employees Union, which represents non-faculty and student assistants, the Community College League of California and the Cal State Student Association all spoke in support of the Legislature’s version.

Eric Paredes, the legislative director of the California Faculty Association, which represents professors at CSU, thanked the Legislature for restoring funding to the university system. “We know it’s been a difficult budget year, and just are really appreciative of the Legislature’s ongoing commitment to higher education,” he said.

The legislative proposal also alters a plan to defer nearly $532 million in community college apportionment funding from 2025-26 to 2026-27, instead offering a smaller deferral of $378 million.

To pare back the 2025-26 deferral, the Legislature’s plan would reappropriate $135 million from the 2024-25 part-time faculty insurance program. A representative of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, speaking at the budget subcommittee hearing opposed that move, calling the funds for the part-time health care pool “necessary.”

The Legislature is also turning down a Newsom proposal to provide $25 million in one-time Prop. 98 dollars to the Career Passports initiative, which would help Californians compile digital portfolios summarizing the skills they’ve built through work and school.

The Legislature’s plan, in addition, calls for a variety of one-time Prop. 98 funding for community colleges, including $100 million to support college enrollment growth in 2024-25, $44 million to fund part-time faculty office hours and $20 million for emergency financial aid for students.

For the state’s public universities, the budget bill would set in-state enrollment targets, asking UC and CSU to enroll 1,510 and 7,152 more California undergraduates, respectively, in 2025-26.

The current draft of the budget bill would also require CSU campuses that have experienced “sustained enrollment declines” to submit turnaround plans to the chancellor’s office by the end of 2025, outlining how they will increase enrollment and any cost-saving strategies they have planned. The chancellor’s office, in turn, will summarize those plans in a report for the Legislature by March 2026.

Finally, the Legislature’s proposal also includes a sweetener for the state’s financial aid budget by restoring funding for the Middle Class Scholarship program. It provides grant aid to more than 300,000 recipients and would receive $405 million in one-time funding in 2025-26 and $513 million ongoing.

TK-12 spending

A stipend for aspiring teachers is the single largest difference in spending between the governor and the Legislature’s version of the TK-12 budget for next year. California would go all-in on paying student teachers working on their credentials if the Legislature can persuade Newsom to build in the $600 million expense in the 2025-26 state budget. Newsom is proposing $100 million for what would be a new program.

To make room for this and other changes, the Legislature would cut a one-time Student Support and Discretionary Block Grant that Newsom is proposing, from $1.7 billion to $500 million.

Brianna Bruns, a representative with the California County Superintendents, expressed concern, noting that this is an important funding source for “core educational services” in light of the expiration of one-time pandemic-related federal funds.

Lawmakers are recommending two other significant changes that reflect their worry that state revenues may fall short of projections amid an uncertain economy.

It would put $650 million into the Prop. 98 rainy day fund that would otherwise be depleted, under the expectation that it will be needed next year. And in a proposal that districts and community colleges may welcome, they would substantially cut back on late payments from the state, called deferrals, under Newsom’s May budget revision.

The governor is proposing to push back $1.8 billion that the state normally would fund in June 2026 by a few weeks to July 2026, the first month of the new fiscal year; the Legislature would reduce the deferral to $846 million. As a debt that must be repaid to make districts fiscally sound, the Legislature would pay most of it back in 2026-27 and the rest in 2027-28.

Advocates for paying teachers at the daily rate of a substitute teacher while they are student teaching say it is critical to encourage more people to become teachers. During a one-year graduate program to earn a teaching credential, candidates are required to spend 600 hours in the classroom. Many candidates earn no income while accumulating between $20,000 and $40,000 in debt, based on the program they attend, according to an analysis of a bill proposing the stipends before the Legislature.

“California is facing a persistent teacher shortage that disproportionately affects our most vulnerable students,” said Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, the bill’s sponsor. “Many aspiring teachers struggle to complete their required student teaching hours due to financial hardship.”

The proposed $600 million in the budget would cover two years of stipends for all teachers seeking a credential, according to an analysis of the bill.

The Legislature would support Newsom’s $200 million to support reading instruction for K-2 teachers and $100 million for training teachers in literacy and math instruction, although that would be $400 million less than Newsom favors. The Legislature also rejected $42 million to establish a math professional learning partnership and a statewide math network.
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11/06/2025
Let’s make STEM opportunity achievable, not illusory, for California community college students

A student uses a drill press to work on an engineering project.

Credit: Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages

The design of California’s higher education system has been influential for its twin goals of high-quality undergraduate education and broad access to college. Though our public universities are renowned for their research prowess, the focal point for access has been our extensive network of community colleges — now comprising 116 — offering students first- and second-year courses with the opportunity to transfer and earn a four-year degree at a university.

But for students seeking to transfer in STEM fields, that opportunity borders on illusory: While 16% of community college students nationally complete a bachelor’s degree, only 2% earn a degree in a STEM field. Misaligned math policies play a role in unnecessarily narrowing that path. Absent a coordinated statewide approach, that is unlikely to change.

It’s not just that a student seeking to transfer in, say, computer science has to take three to six semesters of math, depending on the transfer destination. Before even taking those courses, many community college students must first complete two or three math prerequisites. And, because the actual requirements may vary from campus to campus, some have to take extra courses to ensure they are eligible for junior status at more than one university.

To make matters worse, there are inconsistencies in whether four-year campuses articulate — or recognize — a given community college course. Plus, the tools available to students to navigate their options tend to be clunky and outdated. Some students have been forced to enroll at a different college to repeat an already completed math course when one of their prospective transfer campuses doesn’t accept the first college’s course.

This maze of inconsistent and opaque math requirements is among the barriers to STEM transfer identified in our recent report, “A Complex Equation: Confronting Math Barriers on the Path to STEM Transfer.” Because these barriers are often out of students’ control, it is up to institutions to fix them. But, under current state policies, the state’s higher ed systems have little apparent incentive to alleviate them and increase transfer access to some of the state’s most popular STEM majors.

In fact, it appears that at some campuses, it is not a priority to admit even those students who do clear the math hurdles and other STEM requirements, according to the California State Auditor. The education code requires universities to provide “adequate” space for transfer students — generally interpreted as meaning at least one-third of upper-division enrollments — in all “colleges or schools.” But some high-demand majors at some campuses are balanced heavily against transfer students.

In biology, for example, for academic years 2018-19 through 2022-23, only 14% of Cal State LA’s juniors and seniors were transfer students, with Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo enrolling just 12% and UC Santa Barbara 14%, the auditor found. UC Berkeley’s transfer enrollment in two highly ranked departments was even lower: 11% of enrollments in computer science and 9% in environmental science are transfer students. Many of these campuses appear to be turning away eligible students, the auditor found: For example, in 2022, Berkeley denied 95 transfer computer science applicants whose preparation was considered “best prepared” or “strongly prepared.”

Added oversight is currently the only mechanism for shifting such patterns. A legislated pilot program requires UC campuses, beginning with UCLA, to create paths to STEM transfer. But UCLA chose to focus the program on relatively low-enrollment majors — atmospheric sciences, geology, math, and environmental science — not popular ones such as biology, computer science or engineering that are already at capacity.

Barriers in articulation also prevent community college students from benefiting from pioneering instructional approaches. Take, for example, a redesigned math sequence at UCLA. The new course, which has been offered to UCLA undergraduates since 2013, covers some traditional calculus topics in the context of modeling dynamical biological systems. Students taking the innovative course earned “significantly” higher grades in subsequent STEM courses than students who took the traditional course, and their interest in the topic doubled.

The two-course sequence is the primary math requirement for UCLA’s biology undergrads. But community colleges have not been able to offer the course. Since it is not available within the CSU system or at other UC campuses, if a community college were to offer it, only students who successfully transfer to UCLA could apply it toward a life sciences degree. UCLA allows students to transfer with a traditional calculus course, but this means that transfer students are deprived of the benefits of the modernized curriculum.

Both UC and CSU can take steps to better prioritize transfer students in high-demand STEM majors, as the auditor recommends. But to set and achieve statewide goals for transfer participation and completion — including STEM-specific goals — and improve success for historically underrepresented groups requires a greater degree of coordination across all three higher education systems.

One step toward achieving that is establishing a coordinating body in line with a proposal currently circulating in Sacramento. Another is ensuring that students have up-to-date, accurate and actionable information about transfer and course articulation through modernized transfer planning tools. A third is supporting innovation in STEM education through the California Education Learning Lab.

These would be minor investments toward ensuring more efficient, transparent, and evidence-based use not only of the billions of dollars our state invests in education, but also of another precious resource: our students’ time.

•••

Pamela Burdman, Alexis Robin Hale, and Jenn BeVard work for Just Equations, a policy institute dedicated to enhancing the role of math in education equity.

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.

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11/06/2025
Florida: College Presidencies Go to Grifters and GOP Cronies. Merit Doesn’t Count.

Scott Maxwell is an opinion columnist for The Orlando Sentinel. He tells the truth about the state’s sordid politics and backs it up with facts. Learn here how the state chooses college and university presidents.

He writes:

You probably know that Florida’s GOP politicians have taken a wrecking ball to the state’s university system. And the narrative is that they’re on a noble crusade to exorcise evil, “woke” ideology from college campuses.

But if you believe that’s the only goal here, you’ve been duped. This isn’t about politicians going after liberal doctrines nearly as much as it’s about them going after tax dollars.

They’ve turned the university system into a political spoils system where politicians with no higher-ed experience can score lucrative higher-ed jobs for themselves.

It’s been going on for a while now, but the grift was fully exposed this past week. That’s when it was revealed that one of the political has-beens fuming about diversity — as a supposed reason to deny the University of Florida presidency to a qualified applicant — had secretly made a play to try to get the $3 million-a-year job for himself.

See, you have to separate the theater from the grift. The theater was a bunch of privileged guys griping about the concept of diversity and inclusion. The grift was one of those same guys making a secretive play for the very job he was griping about.

More about that in a moment, but first, let’s remember where this all started — at New College of Florida with Richard Corcoran. Two years ago, the former House Speaker craved a fat, higher-ed paycheck. The problem was that Corcoran had as much higher-ed experience as my dead cat, Furball.

So to distract from his lack of qualifications, Corcoran fumed — about DEI, CRT and other scary-sounding acronyms. It was red meat for the trolls. And Corcoran laughed all the way to the bank. He got a $1 million deal to run a tiny college with 698 students. Elementary school principals oversee more pupils.

Then Corcoran and Co. invited other political has-beens to feed at the New College trough. They gave a former Senate president a $500-an-hour legal contract, the governor’s former spokesman a $15,000-a-month PR contract and the wife of the former Republican Party of Florida chairman $175,000 to run the school’s foundation.

With the chow bell rung, the politicians came running. Former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska scored a $10 million deal for a short-lived and disastrous tenure at UF where the student newspaper discovered he’d quickly blown through $17 million in public money, including $38,000 he spent on a sushi bar.

Lieutenant Gov. Jeanette Nunez snagged the top spot at Florida International University. A cable-company lobbyist friendly with the administration is in line to lead FAMU.
At one college, they had to actually remove the requirement that the president have an advanced degree so that they could give the job to Fred Hawkins, a GOP legislator who lacked one.

But then this past week, the scheme was fully exposed in cringe-worthy fashion.

The scene was the Board of Governors meeting in Orlando where appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis were once again fuming about the alleged evils of diversity and inclusion. Their reason this time was to try to deny the UF presidency to former University of Michigan President Santa J. Ono.

Somehow, a qualified candidate had actually advanced through the secretive application process — and that would not be tolerated.

So the political appointees accused Ono of all kinds of terrible things like embracing equality and believing in science. Former House Speaker Paul Renner led the anti-woke war.

But then one board member who’d apparently heard enough posturing went off-script.
Eric Silagy, the former CEO of Florida Power and Light, asked if any of his fellow board members — the ones savaging Ono for being too woke — had applied for the very job Ono was seeking.
Yes, responded board chairman Mori Hosseini. “Paul Renner.”

It turned out the very guy claiming Florida needed an anti-woke warrior in this $3 million-a-year position had been salivating over the post.
Renner became visibly enraged when exposed. He indignantly responded that he’d only inquired about the job because other people suggested he do so and that he’d since decided not to accept the high-paying job even if it was offered to him. Sure, Mr. Speaker. Your nobility is noted.

Most of the time, qualified candidates like Ono don’t even get a shot. But occasionally, well-intentioned leaders at individual schools try to give them one — as trustees at Florida Atlantic University did two years ago when they nominated Vice Admiral Sean Buck, the superintendent of the United States Naval Academy, to be FAU’s president.

That’s how these folks treat these positions.

DeSantis would later admit in a moment of surprising candor that he only supported Fine because other GOP legislators disliked Fine and wanted him gone. “They wanted to get him out of the Legislature,” DeSantis said. “So they asked me to put him up for Florida Atlantic president, and I did.”

But Buck didn’t stand a chance in this environment. DeSantis allies savaged the respected admiral’s reputation so that yet another GOP legislator, Randy Fine, could have a shot at the job.

Fine and DeSantis later had a falling out, and Fine didn’t get the gig. But the rules of the game were clear: Qualified applicants need not apply.
An irony is that former politicians actually can become impressive university leaders. Florida State University President John Thrasher, a former GOP house speaker, was one of them. I respected him. So did many others.

But Thrasher, who sadly passed away last week, was a different kind of man than the Florida politicians of today. He was a statesman — not someone willing to savage others’ reputation simply to enrich himself.

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11/06/2025
Legislative analyst projects bigger funding drop for schools, community colleges

Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

The Legislative Analyst’s Office is warning superintendents and school boards working on their next year’s budget that more storm clouds are on the fiscal horizon.

In a Feb. 15 report, the LAO forecast that further erosion of state revenues will likely reduce state funding for TK-12 by an additional $7.7 billion — $5.2 billion in 2023-24 and $2.7 billion in 2025-26. That would be on top of the $13.7 billion shaving that Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in his proposed budget for the current budget cycle that he released just a month ago.

When he presented the proposed state budget in January, Newsom built in a small cost-of-living increase and vowed to preserve funding commitments for schools and community colleges, but the deteriorating revenue estimates may force him to reconsider that promise when he revises the budget in May.

The California Department of Finance, which disagrees with the LAO’s financial projections for this year and next, won’t revise its budget forecast until the May revision. However, its report on January revenues, also released in mid-February, confirmed that revenues were heading in the wrong direction. Receipts from the personal income tax, the largest source of state revenue, were down $5 billion — 25% — from the $20.4 billion that the state had forecast. For the full fiscal year that started July 1, total state revenues are down $5.9 billion from a forecast of $121.5 billion.

About 40% of the revenues to the state’s general fund is directed to schools and community colleges through a 4-decade-old formula, Proposition 98.

The single biggest fiscal challenge facing Newsom and the Legislature is how to resolve a massive shortfall in Proposition 98 funding for 2022-23. Newsom and the Legislature were mostly in the dark when they passed that state budget based on a revenue estimate in June 2022. Because of storms and floods the previous winter, the U.S. Treasury delayed the tax filing date for 2022 from April 15 to Nov. 16. Thus, officials lacked reliable data, and it turned out they were way off. The shortfall for Proposition 98 was $12 billion.

Because school districts have already spent that money, Newsom is proposing to hold them and community colleges harmless without counting the overfunding as part of the Proposition 98 minimum guarantee. In a trailer bill that his administration released, he calls for a one-time $9 billion supplemental payment that, due to the unique, delayed tax deadline, would be paid from the general fund, not out of current or future funding for Proposition 98. It would be repaid over five years, starting in 2025-26.

Opposition of the Legislative Analysts’s Office

The LAO is skeptical of the legality and wisdom of pushing off the solution for the 2022-23 deficit into the future; it’s recommending the Legislature reject the ideas and instead use the $9 billion cushion in the Proposition 98 reserve account to cover the shortfall.

“The Governor’s proposed funding maneuver is bad fiscal policy, sets a problematic precedent, and creates a binding obligation on the state that will worsen future deficits and require more difficult decisions,” it said in a report issued last week.

It recommends balancing the budget by cutting billions of uncommitted dollars for new programs, the largest of which is $2.8 billion for creating more community schools; eliminating the $1 billion cost-of-living adjustment for the Local Control Funding Formula; cutting $500 million for low-emissions school buses and reducing costs and restructuring other programs. One is the Expanded Learning and Opportunities Program, which provides free after-school activities for low-income students.

Newsom would use $5 billion of the Proposition 98 rainy-day fund to cover the budget shortfall this year and next while paying for the 1% cost-of-living adjustment next year. That would leave $4 billion in the reserve to cover at least part of a bigger deficit that the LAO is predicting.

Lurking in the background is the option of deferrals — issuing IOUs for funding that would be repaid in subsequent years. That tactic was used extensively after the Great Recession when state revenues plunged. It requires that districts and charter schools borrow short-term to cover the delay in state funding.

School advocates clearly prefer Newsom’s approach and are critical of the LAO’s recommendations, although they aren’t ready to suggest further cuts if revenues remain slow.

“We don’t want to start negotiating with ourselves over which programs to cut, but need to be prepared for a challenging budget if revenues do not rebound in the second half of this fiscal year,” Kevin Gordon, president of Capitol Advisors Group, an education consultancy, wrote in a letter to his clients last week.

Edgar Zazueta, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators, criticized the LAO and called on Newsom and legislators to protect their investments in schools.

“The LAO’s recommendations in response to the fiscal picture are potentially devastating to schools and especially students,” he said. “The programs that could be impacted are good for students, and we’ll be urging the Legislature and governor to do everything to protect California students.”

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11/06/2025
California’s Youth Job Corps offers a second chance at career, higher education

Rubicon Landscape Group, which has a community beautification program in the city of Richmond, hires California Volunteers’ Youth Job Corps service members.

Credit: Courtesy of Ebony Richardson/Rubicon Landscape Group

One of Kaelyn Carter’s ongoing challenges these days is working early hours as a landscaper through the cold, often rainy San Francisco Bay Area weather — a world away from the stagnation he remembers feeling when he first arrived in California less than two years ago.

Then, Carter had just been released from prison after three years of incarceration in Virginia, where he was born. He had made his way to California, which he heard might have more job opportunities.

He’d tried working, but he’d run into more trouble and once again had a warrant out for his arrest. So he turned himself in.

That decision led to significant changes in his life, he said, because his probation officer connected him with his current workplace, which is part job and part rehabilitation program.

The job is with Rubicon Landscape Group, a landscaping company in the city of Richmond that has multiple branches, including a Reentry Success Center which offers a structured 18-week vocational training program where young adults under age 30 who’ve been impacted by the justice system learn about horticulture and landscaping.

Working at Rubicon, Carter said, offered him a community and the means to provide for himself and rebuild his life.

Kaelyn Carter, right, works is part of a community beautification program in the city of Richmond as a service member with California Volunteers’ Youth Job Corps.
Credit: Courtesy of Ebony Richardson/Rubicon Landscape Group

“It feels comfortable to be able to provide, to buy stuff that you need, (like) hygiene products. You don’t have to go and ask someone to do it for you. You can just go and get it yourself,” he said, and “being able to go to work every day and see a check or some kind of payment at the end of the week, it’s comfortable.”

The program is part of a larger state effort led by California Volunteers, called the #CaliforniansForAll Youth Jobs Corps, that provides employment opportunities for Californians ages 16 to 30.

Job placements for service members range from a few months to about a year, a timeline that’s set by each participating city or county depending on the region’s needs. The idea is to create a pathway to careers that may have been previously out of reach for them.

Priority consideration is offered to youth who are in, or transitioning from, foster care, or have been justice system-involved, or in the mental health or substance abuse system. Participants must also be low-income, unemployed and not enrolled in school. They must also not have participated in an AmeriCorps program.

Out of over 8,000 total service members to date, about 400 were either in foster care or transitioning out of it, and 702 have identified as justice-involved.

The #CaliforniansForAll project includes other service programs, such as College Corps, which in its first year included 3,250 students from 46 California community colleges and state universities.

While the Youth Job Corps prioritizes young people who may not be on a college track, it encourages them to pursue higher education.

“That’s a goal of the program, and it’s why we focused on those populations,” said Josh Fryday, chief service officer of California Volunteers. “The idea here is creating an opportunity for our young people to serve their community, to make a difference, stabilize them, and then get them on the path to a successful career, which we hope higher education is part of for many of them.”

Service members are paid at least the state hourly minimum wage, now $16, but their city or county of residence can increase their wages.

The corps launched in 2022 with $185 million in state funding, with $78.1 million in ongoing funding approved in the 2023-24 state budget.

Since then, about 8,000 young people have worked in nearly 30 cities and counties that applied to join the list of participating locations, which range from Nevada County to the city of South Gate in Los Angeles County to the city of San Bernardino and more in between.

Each location either hires the service member directly or works with local community-based organizations that provide connections to careers in city government, climate efforts such as fire mitigation, community beautification by way of landscaping, and more.

“We really wanted to provide a lot of flexibility for local communities to decide how they were going to engage young people, depending on the needs of the community and what was appropriate for that area,” said Fryday.

For example, most of the service members in the Los Angeles County city of Maywood were high school seniors or in their early college years, and one was a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in political science.

These participants were given the flexibility to choose placement in a career they were interested in pursuing. Their interests ranged from working at City Hall — which is where the college graduate was placed — to the local YMCA. Even some neighboring cities benefited from this flexibility: a service member worked at a technology center in the next-door city of Bell, which is not on the list of participating locations.

Maywood, one of the most densely populated cities in the state, is home to a predominantly low-income and immigrant population that most often commutes to work in other regions of Los Angeles County. But at the end of their Youth Job Corps service time, many of the city’s service members were offered full-time jobs in their community.

“The pay is helpful, the exposure they appreciate, but what I hear that, just to me, is so incredible and inspiring is when they say, ‘I just never thought I had something positive to contribute to my community. I never thought that I had something of value where I could give back, and I could lift up the community I love while also supporting my family at the same time,’” Fryday said. “I remember hearing that specifically in Maywood.”

It’s a sentiment also shared by Carter in Richmond.

“It might sound crazy, but Rubicon has been basically a safe haven for me because it helped me with dealing with … I want to say poverty, if that makes sense,” said Carter, now 29.
His job also helps him address his depression. Rubicon’s wraparound services — such as mental health support, resume workshops — help with housing and transportation, and working with plants helps him feel more grounded, Carter said.

All Youth Job Corps service members at Carter’s job with Rubicon are justice-impacted, which has given him a community of others with similar life experiences.

“This cohort, they just really lean on each other a lot,” said Ebony Richardson, a reentry coach with Rubicon. “I feel like they look out for each other as a whole, and it shows in the work they are doing.”

This community and support is part of what has kept Carter working at Rubicon, rather than returning to the life that led to his incarceration.

“It helped me build structure as far as my character, as far as my work skills,” he said. “It’s really a rehabilitation program basically for those who need a second chance.”

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11/06/2025
Brookings Analysis: Trump’s “School Choice” Plan Enables Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Jon Valant is doing a great job as Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D. C. He keeps close tabs on federal legislation. What follows is an excellent analysis of Trump’s legislation to use federal funds to underwrite the privatization of federal education funding. The potential for fraud, waste, and abuse is huge, he writes.

He writes:
- The Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) would create a $5 billion federal tax-credit scholarship program through a tax shelter for wealthy individuals.
- The bill would provide minimally regulated scholarship-granting organizations with a great deal of discretion over how federal education funds are spent.
- A hypothetical scenario illustrates the possibility of waste, fraud, and discriminatory behaviors.
The Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) continues to move, quietly, towards becoming one of America’s costliest, most significant federal education programs. Now part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ECCA would create a federal tax-credit scholarship program that’s unprecedented in scope and scale. It has flown under the radar, though, and remains confusing to many observers.

Recently, a colleague and I showed how ECCA is poised to redistribute funds from poor and rural communities to wealthy and non-rural communities. A study from the Urban Institute drew similar conclusions. Since those pieces were published, ECCA—then a standalone bill—has passed through the House of Representatives and now moves to the Senate. ECCA’s fate remains uncertain, which makes this as good a time as any to examine its potential implications.

How would ECCA work?

ECCA’s stealthiness is partly due to the confusing nature of tax-credit scholarship programs. These programs move money in circuitous ways to avoid the legal and political hurdles that confront vouchers. Tax-credit scholarship programs like ECCA aren’t quite private school voucher programs, but they’re first cousins.

In a voucher program, a government gives money (a voucher) to a family, which the family can use to pay for private school tuition or other approved expenses. With a tax-credit scholarship, it’s not that simple. Governments offer tax credits to individuals and/or corporations that donate to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs). These SGOs then distribute funds (“scholarships”) to families.

The U.S. already has 22 tax-credit scholarship programs, but they’re relatively modest, state-level programs. ECCA is different. ECCA would create a massive, federal tax-credit scholarship program, operating across all 50 states, with a current price tag of about $5 billion in the first year (down from $10 billion in the bill’s earlier draft). It offers an extremely generous tax credit. Individuals get a full, 1:1 tax credit (not just a deduction) for their contributions, which fully offsets their contributions. In other words, these “donors” don’t actually give up any money—hence the quotation marks. On top of that, ECCA allows individuals to donate marketable securities (e.g., stocks) rather than cash. This provides an avenue to treat ECCA as a tax shelter and avoid paying capital gains taxes. More on that in a moment.

Most students would be eligible for a scholarship, with the exception of those from households that earn more than three times their area’s median gross income. (More on that in a moment, too.) The list of qualified expenses covers everything from private school tuition to online educational materials.

Rather than go through all of the bill’s details, let’s take a look at a scenario that illuminates what this program could do. Remarkably, this scenario appears—to my eye, at least—fully compliant with the House bill (even if the characters are a bit overstated).

A hypothetical scenario to illustrate some of ECCA’s risks

A ‘donor’ who benefits from ECCA’s tax shelter

Let’s imagine a billionaire, Billy, who couldn’t care less about K-12 education but cares a whole lot about his own wealth. Billy hears about ECCA from an acquaintance who tells him about how much money Billy could save by “donating” to an SGO. Billy’s adjusted gross income (AGI) was $20 million last year. That means, according to ECCA, that he’s eligible to donate $2 million to an SGO this year (10% of his AGI).

Let’s walk through the math for Billy’s donation. Billy is looking to give $2 million in stock shares to an SGO. He bought these shares a few years ago for $1 million and then they doubled in value. That means that Billy’s earnings are subject to long-term capital gains tax if he sells the stock. With his AGI, that would be 23.8% in federal taxes plus another 4.7% or so in state taxes (depending on where he lives). In other words, if Billy sold the stocks today and kept the funds for himself, he’d owe about $285,000 in combined federal and state taxes on his $1 million in earnings (28.5% of $1 million).

By donating the $2 million in stock to an SGO, not only does Billy get his entire $2 million back as a tax credit; he also dodges those capital gains taxes. He’s a billionaire who is $285,000 wealthier for having made this supposed donation. (For a detailed illustration of how this works—and some nice figures—I’d recommend this piece from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.)

A scholarship-granting organization with extraordinary leeway in how to direct ECCA funds

Now, let’s get back to that SGO. Billy’s acquaintance, Fred, lives in the same town as Billy, which is one of the wealthiest areas in the United States. In fact, Fred set up the SGO, looking to capture ECCA funds within their shared community—and, just maybe, for himself. Like Billy, Fred doesn’t particularly care about K-12 education. He does have a penchant for fraud, though, along with a strong distaste for Republicans.

It might seem that Fred’s SGO couldn’t distribute funds to families in their ultra-wealthy area, since ECCA has income restrictions for scholarship recipients. That’s not the case. ECCA restricts eligibility to households with an income not greater than 300% of their area’s median income. In Fred and Billy’s town, with its soaring household incomes, even multimillionaire families with $500,000 in annual income are eligible. In more modest (and rural) areas, the cutoffs aren’t nearlyso high.

So, Fred is looking to give scholarship money to some wealthy families in his hometown. Notably, ECCA doesn’t limit the amount of money that he can give to any one recipient. ECCA just requires that he provide scholarships to at least two students—who, between them, attend at least two different schools—and that he not earmark the funds for any particular student. Fred offers students $100,000 apiece for supplemental tutoring. That might seem like a lot, but, hey, this is high-end tutoring.

A vendor with little oversight or accountability

In fact, Fred stipulates that the funds must be spent at a new tutoring shop, High-End Tutoring, just created by his buddy, a former teacher. ECCA seems to allow that. ECCA also allows Fred to take a nice cut for himself for running the SGO: 10% of the SGO’s total receipts.

No one really knows the arrangement that Fred and his tutoring friend have, if they have one, because there are hardly any transparency or accountability provisions in ECCA (aside from a requirement to obtain annual financial and compliance audits). We also won’t know if High-End Tutoring provides any educational value, because that’s not part of ECCA either. ECCA’s proponents have claimed there’s accountability to the SGO donors, who want to see their generous donations being put to good use. Billy, though, is enjoying his $285,000 money grab and content to leave Fred alone until it’s time for next year’s donation.

An invitation to discriminate—and an attempt to keep local and state governments from intervening

Fred does have one requirement of his own for High-End Tutoring that he doesn’t need to hide. High-End Tutoring isn’t going to serve any children of Republican parents. All students must complete an attestation form—stating that they and their parents are progressive—before receiving any tutoring services from this publicly funded vendor. Across town, another SGO leader is formally excluding LGBTQ+ children and children of LGBTQ+ parents from their pool of scholarship recipients.

ECCA, in its current form, seems to allow all of this, as objectionable as it may seem. And it’s not just an issue with SGOs funding tutoring companies or other supplemental services. Similar issues could arise with private schools, especially in states without strong anti-discrimination protections.

From hypotheticals to reality

The scenario above might seem ridiculous or caricatured, and to some extent it probably is. But the point is, it’s allowable under the proposed legislation, and we should be realistic about how much fraud, waste, and bad behavior a program like ECCA would invite.

Should we not expect wealthy stockowners to jump at the opportunity to exploit ECCA’s tax shelter? Is it unreasonable to think that many of these wealthy donors will look to benefit their own communities through their donations? Have we not seen bad actors creep in when governments offer large checks with hardly any accountability or strings attached?

This isn’t some tiny, insignificant program either. This is a $5 billion federal program that, because of a “high-use calendar year” provision in ECCA, is almost certain to grow 5% annually. In fact, the cost is likely to be considerably higher than thatdue to the foregone capital gains tax revenue. That’s not quite the size of the behemoth federal K-12 programs—Title I ($18.4 billion in FY 2024) and IDEA ($15.5 billion)—but it’s not all that far off.

And let’s be clear about cost, because ECCA certainly isn’t paid for by the contributions of generous donors. Tax credits are would-be revenue that the IRS is no longer collecting. That money is coming from somewhere else in the budget, whether it’s cuts in education spending, cuts to Medicaid or other social services, tax hikes, or increased debt.

This bill would introduce the most significant and costliest new federal education program in decades. It has virtually no quality-control measures, transparency provisions, protections against discrimination, or evidence to suggest that it’s likely to improve educational outcomes. It’s very likely to redirect funds from poor (and rural) areas to wealthy areas.

And, in its current form, ECCA leaves a whole lot of room for waste, fraud, and abuse.
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11/06/2025
California should follow Mississippi’s lead on reading instruction

Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource (2017)

Parents of young kids starting to learn to read in California should consider moving to Mississippi. No doubt, this advice is jarring. Decades ago, Southern families migrated to California in search of better opportunities. Mississippi’s child poverty rate today is nearly twice that of California.

Yet, when it comes to teaching children to read, Mississippi is a bright spot, one of three states whose gains in reading achievement put their schools ahead of where they were before the pandemic. California is one of ten states where reading scores continue to fall.

Data shown above from Stanford and Harvard universities’ Education Recovery Scorecard reveals the stark contrast. Mississippi’s students were below California’s in 2016, and half a year behind the national average in reading. Mississippi made steady progress until 2019, but both states suffered similar-sized learning losses during the pandemic.

Their paths to recovery have diverged sharply: Mississippi students now read above average while California students are worse off than those in 2016. A student in Jackson now reads a quarter of a school year ahead of a similar student in Sacramento. This is the result not of a short-term fix but from a decade of intensive focus on reading throughout the state.

California policymakers may be angered by the comparison, but they can’t ignore or dismiss the data. There are three things they could learn from Mississippi’s progress:

First, Mississippi’s leaders, from governors to district superintendents, have articulated a common mission to improve reading achievement. A decade ago, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant set a reading improvement goal for the state, in support of legislation passed by his predecessor. Then in 2015, he said, “If we confront dyslexia aggressively, we can see a dramatic decrease in our state’s dropout rate and help turn around our reading scores.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has dyslexia, has not mentioned reading once in his State of the State speeches, nor did his predecessor Jerry Brown. To be fair, Newsom has talked about reading in his budget remarks, and the state has approved a new screening tool for dyslexia, but leaders across California lack a common goal to improve reading.

Second, Mississippi has placed reading curriculum at the center of its reform efforts. Like California, Mississippi has an approved textbook list, with the difference being that the choices in Mississippi are all highly rated for alignment to college and career-ready standards by EdReports. One of those curricula, Wit and Wisdom, is also well-regarded for its knowledge-building features. Students read whole texts of fiction and non-fiction that showcase diverse perspectives and topics.

California last released a textbook adoption list in 2015. Districts aren’t required to pick from California’s current list, nor does the state keep track of which curricula are being used. The California Reading Coalition has carried out the most comprehensive review to date and finds that one of the more popular series used in California districts is poorly rated and negatively correlated with student achievement.

In the last nine years, publishers have created high-quality English language arts curricula that are well aligned with college-ready standards. Now, there are also well-regarded curricula such as Bookworms and EL Education, whose publisher has made them openly accessible to districts and schools. This helps districts save on costs and frees up resources to support teachers’ implementation.

Third, Mississippi has worked to strengthen the professional expertise of teachers.

Mississippi added literacy coaches in its 75 lowest-performing schools to help teachers learn how to implement new curriculum and offer feedback to improve instruction. California added the exact same number as part of the settlement in the civil rights lawsuit. Research from Stanford found the coaches had a positive effect on early reading achievement. But California’s coaches only reached 1% of schools. If the policy had operated at the same scale as Mississippi’s, the state would have added 800 coaches, not 75.

Historically, most university teacher preparation programs have had a high amount of autonomy, with tenured faculty highly resistant to change. Mississippi redesigned its teacher prep program requirements so universities must offer three common courses for all aspiring early literacy teachers. Last year, the National Council of Teacher Quality gave high ratings to two-thirds of Mississippi’s nine colleges training teachers, as their courses now address all five components of scientifically based reading instruction. In California, 60% of university programs scored an “F” for not addressing any of the five components.

California has taken some important steps on teaching quality. It has created a new PK-3 teaching credential based on new literacy standards and is developing a performance-based reading licensure test for new teachers. But a world of minimal oversight of teacher preparation programs, which are allowed to teach anything they want, fails to ensure all students have expert teachers.

Some policymakers and journalists dismiss Mississippi’s progress because the state has a third-grade promotion gate. Students have three attempts to pass the state test but are retained a year if they score below the state’s threshold. But those students don’t receive more of the same the next year. Instead, they are provided with an extra 90 minutes a day of intensive reading instruction, an individualized plan, and are guaranteed a high-quality teacher. A recent Boston University study found that students who repeated third grade scored higher on the state reading exams by sixth grade than fellow students who barely passed the third-grade test.

Assembly Bill 2222, recently proposed by Assemblymember Blanca Rubio, would initiate important changes in how reading is taught in California. A new textbook cycle would adhere to research-based methods for teaching reading. All current teachers, specialists and literacy coaches would have nearly a week of training to bring them up to speed on the latest research-based teaching. Most importantly, the bill borrows ideas from Colorado — a state whose policies are also rated highly by the National Council on Teacher Quality — on how to strengthen accountability for teacher prep programs that have not taught effective reading strategies.

Some policymakers have expressed concern that the proposed legislation infringes on local control of schools. Look at where local control has gotten California: only 43% of third graders read proficiently, while other states taking a stronger role show dynamic growth. It’s worth remembering that the responsibility for ensuring educational equity and excellence resides not in the Covina Valley or Chula Vista school districts but in California’s state constitution and the plenary power of the Legislature.

•••

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.

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11/06/2025
What California college students think about online classes

“I don’t really like asynchronous or online classes. Yes, it’s convenient for me, but it’s not convenient for my learning,” Chase said. “It’s not conducive to any learning.”

Chase is currently taking a statistics class asynchronously with recorded lectures from Zoom and optional lab sections with a graduate student instructor. He feels these lab sections are helpful, but ultimately wished that his statistics lectures could also be in-person.

Chase doesn’t seek out online classes because he feels the opportunity to ask his professor questions is lost. He said although online lectures have benefits, including being able to rewind, edit and speed up lectures, he ultimately feels that interaction with classmates during lectures is more valuable for his learning.

“Sometimes a few things might slip that I can’t hear the teacher saying that I can’t get back, but I’m willing to sacrifice like a sentence or two for just a general overall interaction,” Chase said.

Despite the downsides of asynchronous learning, Chase does enjoy completing homework and exams online because he feels less pressure and is more comfortable. The flexibility in completing assignments on his own time and in a place of preference is an aspect of online class that Chase appreciates.

Ultimately, he doesn’t prefer online classes because he learns best in an in-person environment. Chase expressed the value in talking to and collaborating with a variety of classmates on problems.

“I get better understanding, especially when I’m mixing with my peers to ask for help. When everyone is separated, there’s no creativity, there’s no new ideas,” Chase said. “When everyone’s together mingling, that’s the spark of new ideas, new creations.”

By Kelcie Lee

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11/06/2025
Teachers alone can’t address the literacy crisis

Credit: Alison Yin/EdSource

Improving literacy instruction is once again in fashion among America’s policy circles. Between 2019 and 2022, state legislatures passed more than 200 bills that sought to push and pull public schools to embrace the “science of reading.”

But one year into closely following a big city school district’s effort to remake literacy instruction as part of a project with the Center on Reinventing Public Education, I can’t help but think these well-intended legislative efforts ignore the larger problem: teachers working alone in their classrooms are ill-positioned on their own to provide the support children most need to learn to read.

CRPE’s report on this project suggests that addressing the literacy crisis requires more than papering over the harms of bad curricula. It means rethinking the traditional teaching model, long a hallmark of public education in the United States, that leaves one adult in charge of supporting 25 or more children who arrive with wildly different levels of preparation and uneven or absent literacy support at home.

Thanks to the work of organizations like The Oakland REACH and the Oakland NAACP, the Oakland Unified School District started quietly overhauling its approach to literacy instruction two years ago. That work involved familiar investments in new curriculum and professional development.

But the real stars of the strategy were early literacy tutors, community members — including parents and grandparents — who were trained and paid to support small groups of students working to develop foundational literacy skills.

Thanks to the investment in early literacy tutors, Oakland schools were able to offer significantly more targeted and differentiated instruction than they would have otherwise. One school we visited used an “all hands on deck” approach that leveraged eight classroom teachers, two tutors, and two non-classroom educators to ensure that every student was getting the targeted literacy instruction they needed. Another school described using tutors to support literacy instruction in a first-second combination class, where students’ instructional needs varied by multiple grade levels.

In interviews, teachers and principals alike described the importance of having an additional adult to support reading instruction. A teacher we spoke to said having a trained tutor in her classroom meant she could support five literacy groups instead of two and provide extra support to children who were furthest behind. Without the tutor, this teacher said she would have had to rely more on whole-group direct instruction, pushing children who didn’t yet know their letter sounds to learn alongside those already reading.

A parent contrasted her child’s experience in an Oakland school supported by a tutor with her own experience: “I think back to when I was in school. If you were behind where the class was, you were really left behind, or if you were ahead, then maybe you were bored and your mind was wandering and you weren’t paying attention. I feel like with (early literacy tutors) … (students) get special time with an adult who is working with them. And I think that is really impactful.”

Importantly, in shouldering some of the work of literacy instruction, early literacy tutors provided a critical well of support for beleaguered educators, whose jobs have become ever more difficult coming out of the pandemic. Increasing behavioral challenges, an attendance crisis and larger variation in students’ learning needs are putting extraordinary demands on teachers at a time when public attitudes about work and the prestige of teaching are also evolving and eroding teachers’ commitment to their jobs.

Early literacy tutors could meaningfully help shoulder the load of reading instruction in large part because they were fully integrated into the district’s larger strategy around literacy. Unlike other tutoring programs that largely operate on the periphery of schools, Oakland’s early literacy tutors worked hand-in-hand with school staff charged with supporting literacy instruction.

Two years after they embarked on the new strategy, Oakland can’t yet claim to have solved the literacy problem, but there are glimmers of hope. Our study found that students who had access to evidence-based, differentiated literacy instruction — whether tutor- or teacher-provided — made statistically significant learning gains in reading and these gains were especially large in kindergarten. These results were achieved despite the fact that schools told us they needed additional tutors to fully optimize small-group reading instruction. Imagine what might be possible if every child had access to differentiated instruction that met their individual needs.

Expecting teachers, working alone in their classrooms, to provide both all the individualized support students most need was probably always a fool’s errand; continuing to embrace it as students struggle and deal with the lifelong consequences of illiteracy is simply irresponsible. As schools look to make up ground lost during the pandemic, those that support them should understand the limitations that come with investing too little into the effort.

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Ashley Jochim is a principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, where her research focuses on identifying opportunities and obstacles to addressing systemic challenges in K-12 schools. She co-authored a report on the organization’s work in Oakland Unified School District.

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.

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10/06/2025