Surrounded by education leaders from around the state, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond reacts to President-elect Donald Trump’s education agenda at a news conference in Sacramento on Nov. 8, 2024.
Credit: California Department of Education
California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond vowed on Friday to fight President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, which he said represented a “clear threat to what our students need to have a good education and a great life.”
“We cannot be caught flatfooted,” Thurmond said, during a news conference.
Thurmond made his pronouncement in Sacramento on Friday while flanked by legislators and education and labor leaders holding up signs saying “Education Is For Everyone” and “Protect All Students.”
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has vowed to abolish the department, a long-standing and so far unfulfilled pledge made by Republican leaders dating back to former President Ronald Reagan.
Thurmond said there are concerns that abolishing the department would put at risk some $8 billion that California receives in federal funds for programs serving students with disabilities and those attending low-income schools, both public and private.
“We will not allow that to happen,” he said. “The law will not allow that to happen.”
He observed, for example, that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, known as IDEA, guarantees students in special education programs a “free and appropriate education,” and to receive a range of special education services in an individualized education program drawn up for every special education student.
Thurmond said Trump’s plan to defund the Department of Education would also harm students whose civil rights are violated and investigated through the Office of Civil Rights, including victims of racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, hate and bias toward LGBTQ students.
“To tear down and abolish an organization that provides protections for our students is a threat to the well-being of our students and our families and of Americans,” Thurmond said.
It was also not clear what would happen to student financial aid that the department administers, Thurmond said.
The first line of defense in the fight against Trump’s education plan is the Congress, Thurmond said. He said his department is reaching out to legislators to affirm their commitment to public education — an issue that he says surpasses partisan labels.
“Let me be clear,” Thurmond said. “This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue of continuing to assure that students have access to the resources that they are entitled to under the law. And we will continue to do that, and we will work with the members of Congress to ask them to stand and support our students.”
But Thurmond said that the California Department of Education is also preparing for a worst-case scenario: large-scale cuts to federal funding. In that case, he said, he is working with the California Legislature on a backup plan.
“If it comes to it, as a contingency, we are prepared to introduce legislation that would backfill funding for special education programs, Title I programs and programs that are similar in its scope,” Thurmond said. Title I money supplements state and local education funding for low-income students.
Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, the chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said that the state is prepared to stand up for all the students who are targeted by Trump’s policy proposals and rhetoric. He pointed to the threat of deportations of undocumented immigrants that would hurt large numbers of children of immigrants, as well as threats to other student populations.
“It is the job of every teacher, every school board member, every principal, every elected representative in the state of California who believes in public education, it is time for us to stand up to protect all of these kids,” he said. “When we are facing a bully who is targeting our most vulnerable students, we all need to stand up.”
“We need to get ready now for what is going to start on Jan. 20,” Muratsuchi said, referring to Trump’s second inauguration.
In the wake of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Cruz-Gonzalez said it is important to remind school staff of those protections so that students and families will continue to feel safe and protected when they attend school.
“It’s not enough to know that we have laws on the books,” Cruz-Gonzalez said. “We have to work together in coalition and ensure our superintendents, our school board members and our teachers know what to do to protect these rights.”
The right to public education is the “cornerstone of democracy,” said Chinua Rhodes, school board member at Sacramento City Unified School District.
“This is not just a political battle, it is a moral one,” Rhodes said. “Our schools should not abandon the most needy.”
Those three little words uttered by my principal at the first staff meeting, my first day back at work, three days before the start of the school year. Excessed. Numbly, I stumble out of the meeting and make my way back to my classroom. I sit in the new green chair I had just purchased to match the decor for my universal transitional kindergarten class. I sit and stare at my classroom, trying to process what has just happened. Excessed. I have to pack my personal belongings and supplies. Excessed. I have to take everything off the walls. Excessed. Where am I going to put all these boxes? What school and grade will I be moving to, and when? Excessed.
Excessing, also known as involuntary transfer, occurs when schools have a lower number of enrolled students than were projected, and now there are too many teachers at one site. Districts move teachers between schools to fill vacancies that can open, partially due to higher/lower than expected enrollment, funding shifts, teacher retirement, etc. Excessing a teacher from their site usually happens in the spring, at the end of the school year.
Fall excessing, or being transferred to a new school/grade in the time after the new school year has begun, is rarely voluntary. It is a heartbreaker and destroys a teacher’s spirit due to the emotional investment that teachers put into their classrooms and their future students at the start of each new school year.
I explained fall excessing to my husband, a retired school bus driver, like this: “Imagine someone tells you that they have too many bus drivers and they need you to now drive a dump truck in a brand-new city. You know how to drive, you’ve been doing it for ages, and you are well trained to drive vehicles. However, you’ve never driven a dump truck before, and you’ve never driven in this new city. There is no new training for driving a dump truck, and you are expected to master the new vehicle, new city and its rules within two days.”
Sounds great, right?
In the spring of 2024 my union, San Diego Education Association, and my district came to an agreement to “minimize fall staffing movement.” This signed and approved contract agreement is supposed to encourage the district to sort out their enrollment numbers well before the start of the school year. The idea behind the agreement is to reduce the chances of a teacher being moved after school has already started. But it wasn’t enough to keep me from being excessed.
So I call for reinforcements. A teacher friend whose district hasn’t started yet gets busy packing up my old classroom. My husband loads my new green chair into his truck and takes it home. Eight hours later, my personal classroom items are making their way onto two pallets, headed to the school’s multipurpose room, while a stunned teacher who has been moved down two grade levels is making his way into the classroom to now teach transitional kindergarten.
My former classroom looks like it’s been pillaged, with leftover boxes, rolls of tape and a steady stream of boxes from the new teacher. The once sunny and bright room looks sad and forlorn, like she’s having trouble letting me go, as I am struggling to let her go as well.
I grapple with the hopes and dreams I had for these new students, whose names were already written on their tables, and etched on my heart. The students will be fine, they will only know one teacher, the one taking my place, three days before the official start of school. But I will always know that they were mine first.
The next few days are a blur of packing the last few boxes, crying, showing the new teacher the curriculum, crying and talking to union reps and the human resources department at my district. I feel crushed, unimportant, deflated. I am dismayed to hear that I have to stay on my campus for, a minimum of three weeks, but likely more like six or seven weeks. As a newly excessed teacher, I have to wait until the official fall excess date, typically the third or fourth Friday of September, before I know where the district will place me. In the meantime, I will remain on my campus as a support teacher. It is a painful reminder of who I am to the school district. A body, an ID number. A bus driver who can be told to drive a dump truck.
In an ironic plot twist, only half of the district’s excessed teachers were moved to new school sites. The other half, myself included, were allowed to stay at our current schools. To reduce the number of combo classes, I was directed to teach a newly created first grade class. At this point, I felt like a pawn in a mysterious chess game, with the rules only known to the upper administration.
I’m just a teacher who was excited to get ready for going back to school, but instead was delivered a big dose of fall excessing. I took my green chair with me to my new classroom, but it wasn’t the same. I left a little piece of me in that former classroom and with those students who were supposed to be mine.
•••
Kelly Gonzales is a primary grade teacher at a Title 1 school in San Diego, and a teacher leader with the California Reading and Literature Project.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Black students and English learners were disproportionately placed in special education in Pittsburg Unified, according to a lawsuit recently settled.
Alison Yin/EdSource
A Bay Area school district has settled a lawsuit claiming that Black students and English learners were denied a proper education and were disproportionately suspended, expelled or funneled into special education classrooms offering poor instruction.
Pittsburg Unified School District in Contra Costa County reached the settlement on Oct. 23 in a suit filed in 2021 by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.
As part of the agreement, the district agreed to hire two independent consultants to help address the issues raised in the case — the district’s disciplinary practices, special education placement and literacy education for students with disabilities, especially English learners.
“This is an excellent settlement that is an important step in the right direction for Pittsburg Unified,” said Linnea Nelson, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “It seeks to dismantle past practices that have marginalized students, particularly Black students, English learners and disabled students.”
The case
The lawsuit claimed that the district illegally denied meaningful instruction to Black students, students with disabilities and English learners; that special education teachers were not trained to teach disabled students grade-level standards, and that general education teachers were not trained to differentiate their instruction for disabled students.
According to the complaint, one plaintiff, special education teacher Michell Redfoot, claimed that the district dissuaded teachers from holding special education students to the same standards as general education students. Another plaintiff, Mark S., an English learner with autism, spent his school days doing arts and crafts and watching Disney movies, instead of learning to read and write.
Pittsburg Unified meted out discipline, including suspensions and expulsions, to disabled students and Black students at disproportionate rates, the complaint stated. The district had one of the largest disparities between Black and white students in the state for days of instruction missed due to disruption or defiance, according to the suit. It also claimed that Black students were transported to psychiatric wards at three times the rate of other students.
Jessica Black says her daughter, who has since graduated from high school, is still traumatized from an incident when she was in the sixth grade and the school called police, strapped her to a gurney and transported her to a psychiatric ward.
“The fact that the state sanctions this level of violence — that we pay for with tax dollars — is egregious,” Black said.
After the approval of the settlement at a meeting on Oct. 23, Pittsburg Unified board President Heliodoro Moreno read a statement on behalf of the board, stating that district practices affecting Black students, English learners and disabled students were not consistent with a district that views itself as a champion of equity and inclusivity.
“For instance, Black/African American students have and continue to have suspensions at a disproportionate rate than their peers,” according to the statement. “Our system requires consistent courage, honest dialogue, and continuous growth to interrupt practices that lead to disproportionate outcomes for our scholars, especially for some of our African American scholars and scholars receiving special education services.”
The settlement
Superintendent Janet Schulze said the district had been working to address issues even before the suit was filed and that the settlement process will ultimately improve the district in the long run.
“The settlement agreement is focused on areas where we still have work to do, and I see it as a positive outcome of a hard process,” Schulze said in a statement to EdSource.
The district agreed to hire two independent experts who will create a plan to address the issues.
One expert, Mildred Browne, will address how the district disciplines students and places students into special education, while the other, Linda Cavazos, will address the district’s early literacy program for special education students with an emphasis on English learners.
The district had previously been working with Browne and recognized the importance of retaining her.
“It will allow us to continue and deepen the work we have been doing and were already doing when we were served with the lawsuit,” Schulze stated in an email to EdSource.
Under the agreement, working with the district, Browne and Cavazos will create a plan by next May, and then, through 2028-29, monitor the district’s progress in implementing their recommendations. They will submit reports twice a year that will be publicly presented to the board.
The district had previously come under scrutiny for its special education practices. The 2021 suit alleges that the district failed to implement recommendations to improve special education evaluations made in 2016 by Frances Stetson, another consultant.
According to Stetson’s report, “the positives to report are few and the concerns are many.” It noted that the district fell below the state requirement that disabled students spend at least 80% of their day in a general education classroom — a concern echoed in the 2021 suit.
Nelson, the ACLU attorney, is hopeful that the district will address the issues this time because the settlement agreement is legally binding with accountability measures.
She added that the district has already taken important steps demonstrating good faith, such as eliminating “willful defiance” as a reason for suspension, ahead of a statewide requirement.
Pittsburg Unified was flagged by the California Department of Education for having significant “disproportionality“, which happens when students of a certain race or ethnicity in a district are three times more likely to be identified as having a disability, receiving discipline or being placed in special education for three years in a row.
Black students at Pittsburg Unified were more likely to be identified as having an emotional disability or other health impairment. But Schulze said the district is no longer flagged for significant disproportionality.
Malhar Shah, an ACLU attorney who previously worked on the case as an attorney for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, said the settlement could create a program that is a model for other districts.
Literacy is a hot-button topic in education right now, but Shah said that literacy instruction in California doesn’t always address the individual needs of a student. For instance, plaintiff Mark S. has unique needs as both an English learner and a student with autism. Teachers in California need training on how to best support all students with evidence-based literacy instruction, Shah said.
However, Black, one of the parent plaintiffs in the suit, is not optimistic that the settlement will result in the serious change that students like her daughter would have needed. Her daughter’s time at Pittsburg Unified was marked by fighting to get her daughter the social-emotional support and tutoring she needed, Black said. But even under the threat of litigation, her daughter’s education didn’t improve. She said she lost faith in the district and the state of California.
Ultimately, Black pulled her daughter out of Pittsburg Unified and sent her to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with family members. She thrived in the school system there, graduating from high school early. A teacher at Pittsburg Unified told her daughter that welding or manual labor were her only career options. Black is proud that her daughter is currently studying to be a registered nurse.
She said educators in Minnesota “stopped, paused and listened” to her daughter, and “considered what she needed.”
The case against Pittsburg Unified also named the state of California as a defendant, claiming that, by not intervening, the state failed to protect students’ fundamental right to an education. The state settled its part of the case separately this summer.
Shah said the state previously took a “hands-off approach,” relying on school districts to monitor themselves when data showed that certain racial or ethnic groups were disproportionately harmed by school practices.
The state agreed in a settlement to monitor districts much more closely by reviewing individual student files, observing classrooms and conducting interviews.
Malhar said this is important because there are plenty of problems in school districts that don’t “pop up on paper.”
The Foothill-De Anza Community College District is one of many across the state trying to combat bad actors who enroll to steal financial aid. The district, which includes Foothill College, shown above, is now using artificial intelligence to sniff our scammers.
Credit: Barbara Kinney
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, California’s community colleges have been plagued by scammers who pose as students and enroll to steal financial aid — and now it’s getting even worse.
The state’s 116-college system has lost more than $7.5 million to financial aid fraud this year, state data shows. That’s already much higher than the colleges reported losing all of last year. Most of it is federal aid, in the form of Pell Grants intended for low-income students.
Colleges have increased their efforts to detect and deter the fraud through both more human interaction and automated detection.Officials believe they are getting better at doing so, but the increasing losses show that the college system is still vulnerable to scammers, who are often part of sophisticated crime rings, some overseas.
Community colleges have long been susceptible to fraud, since they are generally open access and usually don’t deny admission to students who meet basic requirements as the more selectiveUniversity of California and California State University do. The problem was made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic. The shift to remote instruction“created fertile ground” for fraudsters, said Paul Feist, a spokesperson for the chancellor’s office overseeing California’s community colleges. The scammers wanted to get their hands on the nearly $2 billion in federal stimulus dollars available for emergency student aid available across the colleges.
That stimulus aid is now depleted, but the fraudsters aren’t slowing down, according to the data EdSource obtained through a public records request. In 2024, through September, community colleges in California reported disbursing more than $7.6million in aid that they later wrote off as fraud. The data was provided to EdSource in late October, but the system did not yet have October data available.
The $7.6 million is up from about $4.4 million that was reported lost all of last year. And that was much larger than the $2.1 million that was reported lost between September 2021 and the end of 2022. September 2021 is when the state chancellor’s office asked colleges to begin reporting monthly about application, enrollment and financial aid fraud. EdSource requested those reports via the state’s Public Records Act. In response, the state shared data on the amount of fraud reported each month but redacted the names of individual colleges.
Pretending to be legitimate students, the fraudsters apply online for admission. Some frauds are caught there, but those who successfully get admitted and enroll in classes can request financial aid, which colleges often distribute to personal bank accounts via direct deposit.
Some colleges, as a result, are going back to the old-fashioned method of requiring students to show up in person and prove they are real before they can become eligible for aid. Others, acknowledging the possibility of human error, are also turning to automated methods, including using artificial intelligence to detect suspicious applicants.
It is also likely that the colleges are more consistently reporting the fraud. When the chancellor’s office first began asking the colleges to report monthly, there was only “modest participation,” a chancellor’s office official said in a 2022 memo. Now, colleges are reporting at higher rates, though some have still not submitted their reports for months. College officials also believe they have improved at detecting fraud over the past three years.
Feist said it can take more than six months from when a scammer applies online for colleges“to detect, investigate and confirm” the fraud. He added that he expects the college system to have better information about the scope of the fraud by the end of this year.
The scams can have consequences for actual students. With a finite number of seats for each course, real students are often left on waiting lists and unable to enroll in necessary classes because fraudsters are taking up space.
For the colleges, combating the fraud is a never-ending battle. They have to constantly adapt to the fraudsters, who themselves evolve and come up with new tactics.
“This past year, essentially, we would think we’re a step ahead and then the next day we would be a step behind. We were always playing cat-and-mouse,” said Nicole Albo-Lopez, vice chancellor of educational programs for the Los Angeles Community College District.
Fraud going up
In total, colleges since fall 2021 have reported distributing $14.2 million in financial aid that they wrote off as fraud. Federal aid has accounted for the majority of that, but colleges have also distributed more than $3 million in state and local aid to the scammers.
Feist noted that is a small percentage — less than 1% — of the total aid the colleges have distributed to students in that time.
The fraud initially spiked in 2021, when the colleges had billions of dollars available in emergency financial aid grants for students. Between March 2020 and March 2021, the federal government passed three pandemic relief bills and awarded California’s community colleges $4.4 billion, of which $1.8 billion was allocated for emergency grants.
The financial aid office at East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park.
Distribution of emergency grants ended in 2023, but the fraud did not. Some colleges have reported eye-popping losses of federal aid, leading to the $7.6 million the system has lost so far this year.
One college, its name redacted in the data shared with EdSource, reported losing $405,395 in April, $344,296 in July and $119,262 in May. Another college lost $193,286 in April and $76,303 in June.When colleges write off aid distributions as fraud, it’s typically because the recipient stops attending classes altogether after receiving the aid.
At the same time, dozens of colleges did not report fraud numbers for at least one month this year, raising the possibility that the actual amount of aid lost to fraud is even higher than what has been reported.
Some officials theorized that the federal government’s relaxed FAFSA verification requirements could be playing a role. Typically, about a quarter of FAFSAapplications are selected for verification, which involves the colleges verifying the information a student reports on their application. Under the new rules, colleges are now required to verify a much lower share of FAFSA applications — even lower than during the pandemic, when rules were also relaxed, according to the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
Victor DeVore, the dean of student services at the San Diego Community College District, said it is likely that the relaxed FAFSA verification led to more scams.
“It’s letting people know that, ‘Oh look, they’re relaxing their verification rules, so now I have a better chance of trying to get some aid fraudulently,’” he said.
At the same time, colleges have also been have getting better at identifying the fraud.
This year, about 25% of applications have been flagged as possible fraud, up from 20% last year. “Part of the reason is that our systems are becoming more effective at detecting fraud, even as the attempts become more sophisticated,” Feist said.
‘Nobody’s trained in this’
There are three stages of fraud: Application fraud, when scammers try to get admitted to the college; enrollment fraud, when they attempt to get a spot in a class; and financial aid fraud, when they successfully receive aid after enrolling.
Fraudsters often target classes with no prerequisites, since those are easier to access, said Tina Vasconcellos, vice chancellor of the Peralta Community College District, which is based in Oakland and has four colleges in Alameda County.
Spencer O’Bosky, a computer science major at Los Angeles Pierce College, tried several times in the spring to enroll in online math classes, only to see them fill up shortly after they opened for registrations.
When he eventually was able to enroll in one, some of the other students listed on the course roster didn’t turn in any work and were dropped as suspected scammers.
“I always thought I was the only one experiencing this, but then I heard about it happening a lot,” O’Bosky said. “I think it’s terrible. It stops people from being able to sign up for these classes.”
To keep the fraudsters out, several college officials said they have turned to a simple yet effective tactic. When a student is flagged as suspicious, staff ask them to either come to campus in person or join a video meeting to prove they are a legitimate student.
But some still slip through the cracks, especially as scammers get more sophisticated.
“Nobody’s trained in this. We have humans doing this all over the state, all over every state trying to figure out how to mitigate this issue that nobody’s trained for,” Vasconcellos, the Peralta vice chancellor, said.
To reduce human error, colleges have looked for ways to automate fraud detection.
The state chancellor’s office last year piloted a new ID proofing system, working with the online platform ID.me to verify identities of applicants. Feist said the verification system “has been effective in helping to reduce the amount of fraud and help mitigate local workloads” but added that “bad actors continue to shift their attacks.”
Some fraudsters now steal identities and submit the stolen but legitimate information — like a real address and real forms of identification — when applying, said Jory Hadsell, the vice chancellor of technology for the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. When the fraudster sets up direct deposit, they only need a bank account and routing number, not a name to match the one on their application.
Scammers also changed their approach at the San Diego district after officials there successfully started sniffing them out by detecting that they were using virtual private networks (VPNs), which create a connection between the user’s computer and a network in another location, making it appear like the fraudster is in that location. For example, one student applied with their VPN set to a Los Angeles location, but their IP address showed they were actually in China.
Rather than VPNs, the fraudsters this past year started using burner phones, which come with a business IP address, said DeVore, adding that it’s harder to determine whether those are legitimate. “They switched up their game,” he said.
To add another layer of fraud detection, the Foothill-De Anza district is one of two in a trial test with an artificial intelligence platform, Lightleap, to identify potential scammers by analyzing “key data and behavioral elements,” according to a report presented to the state’s board of governors this summer.
The AI platform, for example, can identify “fraud clusters,” such as when many applications are coming from the same IP address, Hadsell said.
Vasconcellos, who wants to similarly use AI at the Peralta district, said she is hopeful it will become a more common fraud detection tool, both at her district and across California.
“We just need to keep learning and keep trying to get ahead of it,” Vasconcellos added. “They keep changing, and we have to keep changing to address whatever new things, new ways they’re trying to get through.”
Delilah Brumer, a former member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps, contributed reporting.
Catherine Rampell is an opinion writer for The Washington Post who writes often about economics. She focuses here on the expansion of data collection by the Trump administration, even as it ceases to collect anonymous data about health trends. What worries me is the invasion of privacy by the DOGE team, who scooped up personally identifiable data from the IRS and Social Security about everyone, including you and me. Why did they want it? What will they do to it?
She writes:
It’s rarely comforting to appear on a government “list,” even (or perhaps especially) when compiled in the name of public safety.
It was alarming in the 1940s, when the U.S. government collected the names of Japanese Americans for internment. Likewise in the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee catalogued communists. And it’s just as troubling now, as the Trump administration assembles registries of Jewish academics and Americans with developmental disabilities.
Yes, these are real things that happened this past week, the latest examples of the White House’s abuse of confidential data.
Last week, faculty and staff at Barnard College received unsolicited texts asking them whether they were Jewish. Employees were stunned by the messages, which many initially dismissed as spam.
Turns out the messages came from the Trump administration. Barnard, which is affiliated with Columbia University, had agreed to share faculty members’ private contact info to aid in President Donald Trump’s pseudo-crusade against antisemitism.
Ah, yes, a far-right president asking Jews to register as Jewish, in the name of protecting the Jews, after he has repeatedly accused Jews of being “disloyal.” What could go wrong?
The same day, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya announced a “disease registry” of people with autism, to be compiled from confidential private and government health records, apparently without its subjects’ awareness or consent. This is part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vendetta against vaccines, which he has said cause autism despite abundant research concluding otherwise.
This, too, is disturbing given authoritarian governments’ history of compiling lists of citizens branded mentally or physically deficient. If that historical analogue seems excessive, note that Bhattacharya’s announcement came just a week after Kennedy delivered inflammatory remarks lamenting that kids with autism will never lead productive lives. They “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job,” he said, adding they’ll never play baseball or go on a date, either.
This all happened during Autism Acceptance Month, established to counter exactly these kinds of stigmatizing stereotypes. Kennedy’s comments and the subsequent “registry” set off a wave of fear in the autism advocacy community and earned condemnation from scientists.
Obviously, advocates want more research and support for those with autism. They have been asking for more help at least since 1965 (when what is now called the Autism Society of America was founded in my grandparents’ living room). But few in this community trust political appointees hostile to scientific research — or a president who has publicly mocked people with disabilities — to use an autism “registry” responsibly.
(An unnamed HHS official later walked back Bhattacharya’s comments, saying the department was not creating a “registry,” per se, just a “real-world data platform” that “will link existing datasets to support research into causes of autism and insights into improved treatment strategies.” Okay.)
These are hardly the administration’s only abuses of federal data. It has been deleting reams of statistical records, including demographic data on transgender Americans. It has also been exploiting other private administrative records for political purposes.
For example, the Internal Revenue Service — in an effort to persuade people to pay their taxes — spent decades assuring people that their records are confidential, regardless of immigration status. The agency is in fact legally prohibited from sharing tax records, even with other government agencies, except under very limited circumstances specified by Congress. Lawmakers set these limits in response to Richard M. Nixon’s abuse of private tax data to target personal enemies.
Trump torched these precedents and promises. After a series of top IRS officials resigned, the agency has now agreed to turn over confidential records to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement locate and deport some 7 million undocumented immigrants.
The move, which also has troubling historical echoes, is being challenged in court. But, in the meantime, tax collections will likely fall. Undocumented immigrant workers had been paying an estimated $66 billion in federal taxes annually, but they now have even more reason to stay off the books.
This and other DOGE infiltrations of confidential records are likely to discourage public cooperation on other sensitive government data collection efforts. Think research on mental health issues or public safety assessments on domestic violence.
But that might be a feature, not a bug, for this administration. Chilling federal survey participation and degrading data quality were arguably deliberate objectives in Trump’s first term, when he tried to cram a question about citizenship into the 2020 Census. The question was expected to depress response rates and help Republicans game the congressional redistricting process.
Courts ultimately blocked Trump’s plans. That’s what it will take to stop ongoing White House abuses, too: not scrapping critical government records, but championing the rule of law.
Ultimately, the government must be able to collect and integrate high-quality data — to administer social programs efficiently, help the economy function and understand the reality we live in so voters can hold public officials accountable. None of this is possible if Americans fear ending up on some vindictive commissar’s “list.”
When I decided to enroll in community college, my goal wasn’t to get a degree — I wanted a new job.
I have my bachelor’s degree in acting and was a professional actor until the pandemic. At 25, I was happy with my life as an actor. My calendar was even booked out for the entire year, performing in theaters across the state of Washington.
A week before I was laid off from a theater contract, I saw a video of NPR host Korva Coleman reading the hourly headlines. I watched her effortlessly move through the segment as she held her script and pressed play on audio clips, while simultaneously keeping herself to time. It felt like watching live theater for the first time.
“I wish I could do that,” I thought.
I never got another acting contract after the pandemic, and all of a sudden, I was 28. My acting resume suddenly looked useless to me and my other resume was just a list of odd jobs I did to support myself as an actor.
My plan before the pandemic was to move to Los Angeles to further my career. I still made the move even though I let acting go. The only thing I still had in common with my previous life was my commute to work as a waitress — listening to the news. I thought about Korva Coleman operating a radio board.
I wasn’t alone in having an existential career change crisis at this time. In 2021, a U.S. Catalyst/CNBC poll said that 50% of employees wanted to make a career change because of the pandemic. I spent my days off looking at job postings for my local NPR affiliate stations that I wasn’t qualified for. I would get frustrated that I couldn’t intern because I wasn’t a student.
That’s when I decided to enroll at Pasadena City College. I started last spring with the goal of landing an internship — being a student was just a title to qualify.
Everything I did during my first semester was strategic. I picked Pasadena Community College because it offered internships directly with LAist (formerly KPCC), a non-profit newsroom. I enrolled only in classes that would give me resume-building skills and certificates. By the end of my first semester, with only a couple completed courses, I networked my way to landing the internship position at LAist.
This past summer marked the end of my yearlong internship and, through no fault of my own, I do not have a job.
It still takes all my willpower not to count this as a defeat.
I told myself the title of student was just a qualifier for the internship, but I still made sure I got straight A’s. I took on leadership positions at the school newspaper while I was doing my office work for LAist in class. Anytime I wasn’t at school or at my internship, I was working as a server at a restaurant to pay my bills.
More than 65% of community college students are working more than part-time, according to recent research. And, according to a survey by the RP Group, a nonprofit research center affiliated with the California community colleges, one-third of would-be returning community college students haven’t re-enrolled because they’ve prioritized work.
After this year, I wasn’t planning on enrolling back in school for the fall. But then my journalism professor approached me to be editor-in-chief for the campus newspaper, The Courier. I didn’t respond to him for weeks because I was still in the mindset that my return to college was strictly for the career. Being a student doesn’t pay for my rent, gas and food.
When I was a student in my undergraduate theater program, a professor told me that you should only take an acting job if it meets two of three requirements:
It is a paid job and it pays well,
It offers an opportunity to network and grow as an actor,
And/or it is a dream role.
In other words, should an opportunity only fulfill one of these requirements, don’t bother with it. However, you should not expect every opportunity in your life to meet all three points. Those are few and far between.
I thought about her advice a lot when I returned to college at PCC. Taking the role of editor-in-chief barely makes two out of the three requirements — but then I remembered that this list was to help you with taking jobs in your career, not for being a student.
Being the editor-in-chief this semester has allowed me to push myself to be a better reporter, a stronger editor and a peer to turn to if a student needs help. I get weekly joy from reading work from my classmates who chose to show up simply because they want to learn.
For the first time in this academic journey to change careers, I have found myself at peace being a student learning in a classroom. While I’m still anxious about the unknown, I’m allowing myself to appreciate that I made the first step on this long journey towards a new career.
•••
Laura Dux is a second-year journalism and radio broadcast major at Pasadena City College and editor-in-chief of the student-run newspaper, The Courier. She is a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
This story was updated to note that the full board of regents voted to approve the tuition increase.
The University of California will increase annual tuition by $3,402 for out-of-state undergraduate students who enter the university next fall, under a plan approved Thursday by the system’s board of regents. That will bring the total cost of tuition for nonresident students to $52,536.
Tuition for incoming California residents will not be impacted by the policy, but those students still face separate, inflation-based increases that UC previously approved. Next year’s incoming class of Californians will pay about $500 more in tuition than the 2024-25 cohort, bringing the total to $14,934 before campus fees.
The supplemental tuition charged to UC’s nonresident undergraduates will go from $34,200 to $37,602 — a 9.9% increase. The supplemental portion is on top of UC’s base tuition charged to in-state students. The total $52,536 price for nonresidents will be frozen for that cohort of incoming students for up to six years.
The hike, which was opposed by student leaders, was approved by the full board Thursday. It had cleared the regents’ finance and capital strategies committee on Wednesday.
Nonresident students in fall 2023 made up 16.6% of UC’s total undergraduate enrollment, or 38,701 students from other states and nations. More than half of those, just under 21,000, are international students.
The share of out-of-state students varies greatly across the campuses, with Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego campuses enrolling the most. In recent years, however, those three campuses have started to reduce enrollment of nonresident students at the direction of state lawmakers, who have provided UC funding to replace spots for nonresidents with Californians at those campuses.
The increase for now is a one-time hike, but UC could raise tuition further for future entering classes when it sets its budget for future years. Short of that, those future cohorts could also still be subject to inflation-based tuition increases, thanks to the plan UC previously approved for annual tuition hikes that apply to both resident and nonresident undergraduates.
In defending the tuition raise, Nathan Brostrom, UC’s chief financial officer, cited a challenging 2025-26 budget outlook for the university. As part of this year’s state budget agreement, UC was told to prepare for annual budget cuts of 7.95% beginning in 2025-26. “So that was why the timing made sense,” he said.
UC officials also said UC’s tuition for nonresident students is relatively low compared to peer institutions. At public universities in Virginia and Michigan, out-of-state students pay $7,000 and $11,500 more in nonresident fees than students at UC, according to UC officials.
“We were quite a bit behind. And so that’s why we looked at whether we had some headroom to raise it,” Brostrom said in an interview.
Separately, a UC spokesperson said in a statement that the increase will “support core operations” amid anticipated state budget cuts “without raising costs for current students and California residents.”
The cost of UC’s supplemental nonresident tuition has steadily increased over the years. The regents approved a $762 hike in 2019, and the supplemental portion has been subject to further increases since the 2022-23 academic year as part of the annual tuition increases UC approved in 2021. But the increase approved Thursday represents by far the largest of those hikes.
The approval of the tuition hike came over the objections of several students, including Eduardo Tapia, who is the university affairs chair for the UC Student Association.
“Opportunity to higher education should not face any more barriers,” Tapia said during the Wednesday’s public comment period. “Instead of increasing the salaries of UC administrators, let’s make sure college is more affordable for all.”
Francis Villanueva, an undergraduate student at UCLA, expressed concern that the tuition increase would impact the “most underserved, underprivileged, and marginalized” students across UC.
“UC claims that the UC system is already cheaper than other institutions across the nation,” Villanueva added during Wednesday’s public comment period. “But in such a crucial time as this one where futures are on the line, how can the UC claim to care about students and making higher education affordable?”
Brostrom, the UC chief financial officer, said he appreciates the students’ “passion” about the policy, but added that UC’s out-of-state students skew toward higher income brackets. Nonresident students aren’t eligible for Cal Grants, the financial aid awards available to California residents. Domestic out-of-state students can qualify for federal Pell Grants, but international students do not.
Jonathan V. Last writes for and edits one of the liveliest and most informative sites on the Internet: The Bulwark. That is home base for a significant number of Republican Never Trumpers. In this post, he explains that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not only unqualified in medical issues but his ignorance puts all of us in danger.
America has never been healthier. Going backwards is going to mean more people getting sick and dying.
(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)
1. The Past Sucked
I had a great conversation with Your Local Epidemiologist, Katelyn Jetelina, yesterday. It’s here if you missed it.
As she was explaining the state of play with measles outbreaks and falling vaccination rates, I asked her if there was any analog to this moment in the history of public health. She couldn’t think of one.
What America’s new public health establishment—by which I don’t mean actual public health experts but their dilettante conspiracist bosses—is doing is choosing to move the country backwards. Less medical research, a pull-back on life-saving vaccines, turning away from science and embracing folk medicine.
Our new health establishment is explicit about wanting to go backwards. It’s right there on the hat: Make America Healthy Again.
Again.
Meaning: America used to be “healthy” and now is not.
I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to meet people where they are and give them a loving truth sandwich, but this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.
Does anyone remember what “health” looked like in America a generation or two ago? Half the country smoked. People dropped dead at 50 on the reg. Child birth was dangerous. Seatbelts were suss. Drug use was off the charts.
Dangerous communicable diseases were still around. Cancer was a death sentence. AIDS looked like an unstoppable tsunami.
Food? Do remember what grocery stores looked like in 1980? Aisles of canned vegetables, processed foods, and frozen TV dinners. Fresh produce? Good luck. That section of the Acme was a shoebox.
But that’s all anecdotal. Let’s look at the data. Because it shows—absolutely, unequivocally—that this is the healthiest period in American history.
Let’s start with the dumbest possible metric: life expectancy.
We’ve had a slight downtick in the last year or two largely driven by COVID. You know why a lot of people died from COVID? Because they refused to follow public health advice during the pandemic and then refused to get vaccinated once we had vaccines in hand. So it was precisely the MAHA idiocy that moved our life expectancy backward.
Let’s zoom out and look at America compared to the rest of the developed world:
You want to “Make America Healthy Again”? Get the fucking COVID vaccine like everyone else in the civilized world did.
How about infant mortality? That’s another excellent marker of health in a society. Oh, look—it’s incredibly low: 5.61 deaths per 1,000 live births. This is up slightly from 2020 because, again, COVID. But it’s still a historic low.
When do you think the golden, “healthy” past was? In 1980, the infant mortality rate was more than double what it is today (12.0). In 1960 it was more double that number (25.9).
Real problems do exist. For instance: Access to healthcare for African-American women. The black infant mortality rate is double that of white Americans and the maternal mortality rate for African-American women has been rising sharply for a generation.
These statistics are absolutely shameful. Yet you don’t hear a lot about them from the beef-tallow crowd, do you?
How about infectious diseases? In 1900 half of all deaths in America were from communicable diseases. Through medical advances—especially vaccines—we got that number down to about 5 percent—until COVID. All by itself COVID accounted for 12 percent of all deaths in the United States in 2021.
So again: If you want America to be healthy you’d do exactly the opposite of what the Trump administration is doing and urge everyone to get vaccinated.
And while we’re talking about healthy habits: Americans don’t smoke like they used to.
Also, forty years ago less than a fifth of people in cars used seatbelts. Today that number is well over 90 percent.
2. The Big C
Let’s talk about cancer. You ever feel like, “Man, people are getting cancer like crazy these days?”
Here’s what happened. There was a huge spike in the incidence of cancer diagnoses from 1975 to 1995. Why? Two things.
First, people were living longer and you have to die of something. Since people weren’t dying from polio, measles, and communicable diseases, they were living long enough to get cancer.
Second, medical science developed more tools to detect cancer. Inventing effective tests and screenings means finding more incidences. Donald Trump knows this.
So when you look at this graph the solid lines are cancer incidences. You see that they go up, and then down. But I want you to look at the dotted lines:
The dotted lines are the cancer mortality rates. And what you see is that in the early 1990s, people started surviving cancer at higher rates even as the incidences of cancer increased. And from 1995 to 2000, as the cancer incidence rate peaked, the mortality rate fell off a cliff.
Why?
Because better tests = more cancer diagnoses = earlier interventions + therapeutic advances = much higher survival rates.
The pattern we see with cancer incidence describes a lot of our health challenges today. Why do so many people get dementia or Alzheimer’s now? Because they’re surviving cancer and—again—something is going to get us eventually.
Why so many autism diagnoses? Because 40 years ago doctors didn’t understand what they were seeing in kids who had ASD. Now they do. Once medical science understands what it’s looking at, you’re going to get more diagnoses. This isn’t hard to understand.
What’s the answer? Diet and exercise, which you may recall Michelle Obama talking a lot about (and getting ridiculed by Republicans for her trouble). Semaglutide drugs show tremendous potential for helping curb obesity and reduce the incidence of diabetes.
You may be surprised to hear that MAHA does not like this class of pharmaceuticals.
So what’s going on here? Why does the “Make America Healthy Again” movement romanticize the health outcomes of the past (which were worse) and misunderstand the health outcomes of the present (which are significantly better along the most important vectors and continue to improve over time)?
Why do people like RFK Jr. oppose medical practices that create better outcomes (vaccines; the Ozempic-class drugs)?
I don’t know. Maybe you have a theory and can discuss it in the comments.
But at the end of the day, the “why” doesn’t matter. What matters is the results. And the results are going to be bad.
3. Worse Than Fraud
Buildings used to catch on fire all the time in America. It was a serious problem. That’s why cities had as many fire stations as churches.
Over time, we cut way down on the number of fires. We switched construction materials. We came up with safer mechanisms for delivering gas and electricity. We developed best-practices and enshrined them in building codes. The big thing was the invention of the sprinkler system.
The result was that even as the total number of buildings in America kept growing, the annual number of structure fires kept going down. Dramatically.
Imagine a movement that looked at this data and decided America didn’t need sprinkler systems anymore.
Modern building costs are too high. There’s too much red tape. We spend billions on sprinkler systems every year that are never used. Let’s go back to the old ways. Make Buildings Great Again.
After all, we don’t have to worry about fires anymore.
The MAHA movement is like that. Except that while trying to get rid of sprinkler systems and building codes, they are also walking around carelessly tossing lit matches.
These people aren’t just frauds. They’re arsonists. And right now they run the U.S. government, the CDC, the NIH, and the fire department, too.
EdSource file photo courtesy of Oakland School for the Arts
Raising the curtain on California’s landmark arts education initiative, funded by voter approval of Proposition 28 two years ago, has been a highly complex endeavor marked by a lack of arts educators, classroom space and free time in school schedules, according to a new report.
These challenges are among the key issues schools must address to make Proposition 28’s ambitious vision of arts education a reality, according to a new report studying the impact of the groundbreaking statewide initiative on schools in the Los Angeles area. Passed by voters in 2022 by a wide margin, the measure sets aside roughly $1 billion a year toward TK-12 arts education programs statewide.
“Given the historic nature of this investment in arts education, all eyes are on California and our schools, and so we want to make sure that we get it right,” said Ricky Abilez, director of policy and advocacy at Arts for LA, the arts advocacy organization that commissioned the report. “I also know that there are a lot of really tough challenges that schools are facing on the ground.”
Accountability is among the most critical issues in building trust with families, according to this analysis, which focuses on 10 Los Angeles school districts. The report recommends creating a statewide oversight and advisory committee of administrators, teachers, families and community partnersto make sure that arts education funds are properly spent. It also calls for subsidizing teacher credential programs to combat the teacher shortage.
“We hear these resounding calls for transparency from our community members, but many district arts leaders also share those same interests and concerns,” said Lindsey Kunisaki, the Laura Zucker fellow for policy and research, who wrote the report. “They wanted to make sure that they’re putting their best foot forward with Prop 28 implementation, but they also had questions about their peers and neighboring districts and wanted to make sure that ultimately everyone is doing their best work and using these funds responsibly.”
The need to build bridges between schools, communities and families is part of what drives that recommendation. Roughly 66% of respondents to the survey were uncertain whether Proposition 28 was being implemented in their school, according to the report.
“One of the central insights of the report is the link between confidence in Prop 28’s success and public involvement,” said Kunisaki, a research and evaluation specialist at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture’s visual and performing arts education program. “Respondents expressed less skepticism when they believed their communities were actively involved.”
Arts education in schools can help foster a sense of social connection that has frayed in the wake of the pandemic, many experts suggest. The rub is that many community members express passion for arts education (89%) but have not yet gotten involved with their schools for a variety of reasons. Only 20% of respondents have been actively involved.
Districts with vibrant arts advisory councils make it easy to participate, Kunisaki notes, but other paths also exist.
“If it isn’t clear how to get involved,” said Kunisaki, “then even just showing up at a school board meeting, getting to know the school site leaders, principals, that could be a great way to start the conversation.”
Proposition 28 represents an attempt to bring arts education back into California schools after many decades of budget cuts eliminated many such programs. Before this influx of funding, only 11% of California schools offered comprehensive arts education, research suggests. Wealthier schools were far more likely to be able to fundraise enough to foot the bill for arts education.
Spearheaded by former Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent Austin Beutner, the measure is an attempt to give all students access to the arts, which has long been associated with everything from higher test scores to greater social-emotional learning.
All the money must go to arts education, but that is very broadly defined. The disciplines include, but are not limited to, dance, media arts, music, theater and such visual arts as folk art, painting, sculpture, photography and animation. Film and video pursuits are also encouraged, from script writing to costume design. Each school community is invited to design the program to meet the needs of its students.
The report also notes that some districts are falling behind others. While some districts quickly launched new arts ed programs, from music to dance, others are still in the planning phase, according to the report. Districts with preexisting arts councils and strategic arts plans have the upper hand. Proposition 28 funds are allocated based on enrollment, so larger schools get more money. Also, schools with more low-income students receive extra money.
Uncertainty and confusion about the rules, heightened by a lack of clarity from the California Department of Education (CDE) on spending, have significantly complicated this process, the report suggests.
“One of the recommendations that I heard was basically for CDE to take more of a central leadership role,” said Kunisaki, “especially when it comes to oversight and accountability.”
The long-standing teacher shortage also remains a critical obstacle. In 2022-23, California schools employed about 11,113 full-time arts teachers, primarily teaching music and visual arts. Another new Proposition 28 report, commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation’s Performing Arts Program and conducted by SRI Education, concluded that California must increase the arts teacher workforce by roughly 5,457 teachers to meet the new demand. Many experts estimate a much higher number.
The need for greater transparency in the rollout of Proposition 28 is another key concern. At the core of Proposition 28 is the rule that funds are designed to supplement, and not supplant, existing funding, which means that you can’t use the new money to pay for old programs. Nevertheless, there have been reports of districts using the funds to pay for existing programs. Amid these allegations, State Superintendent Tony Thurmond issued a letterreminding superintendents of the law’s requirements.
One potential fix, the study suggests, would be a statewide oversight committee charged with monitoring the rollout and settling disputes on key issues.
“There’s a real need for CDE to step in here, to create a more formal advisory and oversight committee, and most importantly, to include practitioners,” said Kunisaki.
“That’s administrators at the district level, at the school site level, teachers, parents and guardians, families, students and community partners, because we know how important community involvement is.”
CDE has provided guidance in FAQs and webinars to help districts navigate the rules. Thurmond has also established a new task force to clarify the issues facing the field. It remains unclear whether the task force will provide the depth of oversight that many experts suggest is needed.
“The California Department of Education commends the districts represented in this report who have approached Prop 28 implementation with urgency, care, and a commitment to expanding all students’ access to arts education,” said Elizabeth Sanders, spokesperson for the department. “Especially as California’s local educational agencies are still in the beginning of this implementation process, CDE will continue to provide guidance and technical assistance to support effective and robust implementation.”
Beutner, the former LAUSD Superintendent who authored Proposition 28, is also calling on the department to hold districts accountable for how they spend the money.
“CDE needs to provide more leadership on the proper implementation of Prop 28,” said Beutner. “They’re understaffed to handle the implementation of a new law like this, but some of the confusion and misinterpretation that is happening is because CDE hasn’t been on top of this. CDE should be pursuing public enforcement action now against school districts that are alleged to have violated the law.”
The guidance for math placement at community colleges has changed since this article was written. For more current information, visit this article.
If you’re a student at one of California’s community colleges and you plan to study a STEM field, you’ll typically have to pass calculusfirst before diving into many of the other required classes in physics, engineering, computer science, biology or chemistry.
A decade ago, you might have started college by taking algebra, trigonometry or precalculus class — or even a remedial class like prealgebra — before getting to calculus. But a body of research has suggested that having to complete a string of prerequisites before enrolling in calculus wasn’t working for many students and that too many never made it to calculus. That finding wasbolsteredby evidence showing that Black, Latino and Pell Grant students were overrepresented in community colleges’ remedial courses.
Two recent California laws try to address this problem. Assembly Bill 705 allows most students to skipall sorts of remedial classes in favor of full credit courses that can transfer to a four-year college; AB 1705 additionally requires colleges to place more STEM students directly into calculus rather than lower-level courses like precalculus or trigonometry.
AB 1705 has sparked fervent opposition from some math educators, who worry that less-prepared students who skip traditional prerequisites will fail in calculus and abandon plans to study STEM. They’ve also voiced concern that students who want to take courses like trigonometry and precalculus will no longer be able to do so because the classes will be dropped by colleges.
But defenders say AB 1705, which math departments have until fall 2025 to implement, will prevent students from getting detoured or derailed by long course sequences.
They note that colleges are swapping out the old prerequisite-heavymodel of calculus for new calculus courses with extra support for students who need to learn concepts from algebra and trigonometry as they go. Colleges are also investing in tutoring. In addition, colleges have two years to develop revamped precalculus courses.
This guide seeks to answer some of the most common questions about what the law means for STEM students and how colleges plan to implement it.
What’s the problem AB 1705 is trying to solve?
Community colleges regularly used to place students deemed to be underprepared in remedialclasses that can’t be transferred to a four-year university. That started to change after AB 705 took effect in 2018. The Public Policy Institute of California found that between fall 2018 and 2022, the share of students starting in transfer-level math rose, as did the percentage of first-time math students completing such a course in one term.
Still, racial equity gaps persisted, with white students completing courses at higher rates than Black and Latino students. Advocates also worried that some community colleges were not implementing AB 705 correctly.
AB 1705 builds on AB 705. As a result of its passage, the state education code now requires U.S. high school graduates to begin community college in courses that meet a requirement of their intended major, though there is an exception if a college can prove a prerequisite course would benefit students. Colleges also have to provide extra help to students who want or need it, such as tutoring or concurrent support courses.
“Students should be aware that they have the right to access calculus and, if they want support while they’re in that course, that they’re entitled to get support,” said Jetaun Stevens, a senior staff attorney at the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates.
What guidance has the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office provided colleges on implementing the law?
All STEM students must be given the option to take STEM calculus starting on July 1, 2025, according to California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office guidance.
Only students who either had a high school GPA of 2.6 or less, or who did not pass high school trigonometry, precalculus or calculus with at least a C have the option to take preparatory courses for calculus. Traditionally, that would include courses like precalculus.
To comply with the law, the chancellor’s office says colleges can drop or redesign existing preparatory courses like precalculus. If they want to continue offering an existing preparatory course, they’ll need to get the chancellor’s office approval. Colleges must show a student is deemed “highly unlikely to succeed” in STEM calculus without the prep course and meetadditional criteria.
What’s the evidence in favor of overhauling the traditional STEM math prerequisites?
Supporters of AB 1705 often point to studies that tracked howmuch betterSTEM students performed when they enrolled directly in calculus.
RP Group, a nonprofit that conducts research on behalf of the California community college system, reported that students who started in STEM calculus completed the course in two years at higher rates than students who entered a preparatory course for calculus instead and then later tackled calculus, regardless of students’ high school math preparation.
Controlling for multiple factors, RP Group also reported that the probability of completing a first STEM calculus course was lower for students who started in a prerequisite as opposed to students who went straight into calculus.
AB 1705’s proponents also highlight Cuyamaca College as an early adopter. A brief by the California Acceleration Project, one of AB 1705’s backers, reports that 69% of Cuyamaca students who had not studied precalculus and also enrolled in a two-unit support course completed STEM calculus in one term, compared with 30% of students who completed precalculus and then calculus in two terms. Cuyamaca observed improved calculus rates across races; gaps between students of different races were also smaller.
What are math professors’ concerns about AB 1705?
Many math educators said they’re worried about STEM majors with the least math experience — such as students whose highest high school math course was algebra — enrolling directly into calculus. They fear that students will fail those courses at high rates, then drop out of their major or college altogether.
“I feel like the state might just be giving up on those students, to be honest,” Rena Weiss, a math professor at Moorpark College said. “They’re wanting to be a STEM major, and they’re going to get put right into Calculus 1. I just can’t imagine a situation where that student would be successful.”
Professors are also concerned about students who have been out of school for a long time. Students older than the age of traditional college-goers make up a large portion of the students at California’s community colleges.
“To be dropped right into calculus, that’s a pretty significant heavy lift for many of those students,”said Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges.
Some faculty members also question the RP Group’s research. Both the statewide Academic Senate for the community college system and the academic senates of at least two colleges — Modesto Junior College and San Joaquin Delta College — have passed resolutions calling for a “comprehensive audit” of the data. The CSU Math Council, a forum for the chairs of the university system’s math and statistics departments, also passed a resolution calling for a peer review of research used to back AB 1705.
Can STEM students still take calculus prerequisite courses before taking calculus?
Yes, in some cases, at least until 2027.
Students at several colleges will have the option to take reshaped, so-called “innovative preparatory courses,” which may includecontent from college algebra, trigonometry and precalculus.
Since the chancellor’s office has not specified what those preparatory courses should include, there is likely to be a lot of variation across the system. At Modesto Junior College, faculty are developing a class that will include curriculum from all three traditional prerequisite courses, said Tina Akers-Porter, a math professor at the college.
Weiss said Moorpark College’s redesigned precalculus course will follow a flipped model, in which students watch lecture videos and complete exercises at home, apply the material to activities in class and then practice the same concepts again after class. Streamlining is another approach; Ohlone College math professor Andy Bloom said colleagues are removing content from an existing precalculus course that students won’t need for their first calculus class.
Colleges have until July 2027 to test out the newly revamped preparatory courses. Then, the chancellor’s office will assess the courses again to see if they meet student performance benchmarks.
Weiss said she and her colleagues “decided that it was really important to have a precalculus option for students who need it.”
Beyond the new innovative preparatory courses, it’s unclear how many colleges will continue to offer prerequisite calculus classes for STEM majors.
Tim Melvin, a math professor at Santa Rosa Junior College, is hoping that students can still enroll in calculus prerequisites to get more prepared, even if they have to sign a form acknowledging that the courses aren’t required. “We want to give students more options,” he said. “No requirements, but options.”
Brill-Wynkoop said the faculty association is in talks with some legislators and may push for additional legislation that would clarify that colleges can still give STEM majors the option of taking prerequisite classes, without requiring them. The association opposed AB 1705 when it was originally proposed.
Chancellor’s office officials, however, would likely oppose such an effort. John Hetts, an executive vice chancellor for the office, said in an email that arguments in favor of giving students a choice are often used “to persuade students to take a slower path or to allow students to self-select into a slower path,” despite the potential for negative consequences.
What are corequisite courses and how are colleges planning to implement them?
Chancellor’s office guidance now says colleges should offer a corequisite course alongside and linked to the calculus class. The corequisite is an additional course of at most two units designed to integrate topics from areas like algebra and trigonometry into calculus.
The idea is that with extra course time, instructors can see where students are struggling and offer extra help.
Colleges including Chaffey College and Sierra College, for example, now plan to link together corequisite and calculus courses explicitly. Students would sign up for a corequisite scheduledimmediately before or after their calculus course. The two courses would feel to students like a longer, continuous course — one that gives their professors time to review or introduce skills students might have missed.
Melvin, at Santa Rosa, said his department is developing a seven-unit calculus class with corequisite support for next fall, which will take up more than half of a given student’s course load.
“But for students that maybe need precalculus and a little algebra help, we definitely think it’s going to be effective,” Melvin said.
How are some early calculus corequisite courses going so far?
There are mixed opinions at colleges that already allow STEM students who have not taken precalculus to enroll in calculus courses with a corequisite.
Southwestern College math professors Kimberly Eclar and Karen Cliffe said that in fall 2023, the campus opened a calculus course with a two-unit support course for students who had not taken precalculus, offering students additional tutoring and non-credit refresher material, too. They were troubled by the results: Of the students who had not taken precalculus, less than 5% passed the class in its first semester.
Some students who do pass calculus without having taken precalculusat college turn out to have learned precalculus while attending high school outside the U.S., Eclar and Cliffe added.
Ohlone College is also allowing students who haven’t taken precalculus to enroll directly in calculus with corequisite courses.
“I’m not seeing this huge underperformance of my students this semester compared to last semester,” said Bloom, who has presented about STEM calculus support at an RP Group conference.
Bloom said that though some students have dropped the course, there are also positive indicators, including that the average score on the first test of the semester exceeded last year’s average.
What other changes are math departments planning alongside AB 1705?
Professors said their campuses are experimenting with technology (like guiding students on how to use AI or using homework software that gauges students’ math skills as they answer questions) and different approaches to testing (like allowing students to retake tests or to choose which questions to answer). Others said they’re aiming to create smaller class sizes, use embedded tutors and tailor calculus courses to meet the needs of life sciences students.
