Heather Cox Richardson is a national treasure. she is also an exemplar of the value of studying history as a guide to today’s events and their meaning.
Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.
The administration sustained more losses today.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” The administration had tried to dismiss the case, but Chutkan ruled the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’” “The Constitution does not permit the Executive to commandeer the entire appointments power by unilaterally creating a federal agency…and insulating its principal officer from the Constitution as an ‘advisor’ in name only,” she wrote.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon struck down Trump’s March 27 executive order targeting the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, more commonly known as WilmerHale. This law firm angered Trump by employing Robert Mueller, the Republican-appointed special counsel who oversaw an investigation of the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
Leon, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, made his anger obvious. “[T]he First Amendment prohibits government officials from retaliating against individuals for engaging in protected speech,” Leon noted. “WilmerHale alleges that ‘[t]he Order blatantly defies this bedrock principle of constitutional law.’” Leon wrote: “I agree!” He went on to strike down the order as unconstitutional.
Today NPR and three Colorado public radio stations sued the Trump administration over Trump’s executive order that seeks to impound congressionally appropriated funds for NPR and PBS. The executive order said the public media stations do not present “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.” NPR’s David Folkenflik reported White House spokesperson Harrison Fields’s statement today that public media supports “a particular party on the taxpayers’ dime,” and that Trump and his allies have called it “left-wing propaganda.”
The lawsuit calls Trump’s executive order and attempt to withhold funding Congress has already approved “textbook retaliation.” “[W]e are not choosing to do this out of politics,” NPR chief executive officer Katherine Maher told NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. “We are choosing to do this as a matter of necessity and principle. All of our rights that we enjoy in this democracy flow from the First Amendment: freedom of speech, association, freedom of the press. When we see those rights infringed upon, we have an obligation to challenge them.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis today denied the administration’s motion for a 30-day extension of the deadline for it to answer the complaint in the lawsuit over the rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man sent to El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error.”
Despite five hearings on the case, the administration’s lawyers didn’t indicate they needed any more time, but today—the day their answer was due—they suddenly asked for 30 more days. Xinis wrote that they “expended no effort in demonstrating good cause. They vaguely complain, in two sentences, to expending ‘significant resources’ engaging in expedited discovery. But these self-described burdens are of their own making. The Court ordered expedited discovery because of [the administration’s] refusal to follow the orders of this court as affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court.”
Trump is well known for using procedural delays to stop the courts from administering justice, and it is notable that administration lawyers have generally not been arguing that they will win cases on the merits. Instead, they are making procedural arguments.
Meanwhile, stringing things out means making time for situations to change on the ground, reducing the effect of court decisions. Brian Barrett of Wired reported today that while Musk claims to have stepped back from the Department of Government Efficiency, his lieutenants are still spread throughout the government, mining Americans’ data. Meanwhile, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought will push to make DOGE cuts to government permanent in a dramatic reworking of the nation’s social contract. “Removing DOGE at this point would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water,” Barrett writes.
Political scientist Bonica notes that there is a script for rising authoritarians. When the courts rule against the leader, the leader and his loyalists attack judges as biased and dangerous, just as Trump and his cronies have been doing.
The leader also works to delegitimize the judicial system, and that, too, we are seeing as Trump reverses the concepts of not guilty and guilty. On the one hand, the administration is fighting to get rid of the constitutional right of all persons to due process, rendering people who have not been charged with crimes to prisons in third countries. On the other, Trump and his loyalists at the Department of Justice are pardoning individuals who have been convicted of crimes.
On Monday, Trump issued a presidential pardon to former Culpeper County, Virginia, sheriff Scott Jenkins, a longtime Trump supporter whom a jury convicted of conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and seven counts of bribery. Jared Gans of The Hill explained that Jenkins accepted more than $70,000 in bribes to appoint auxiliary deputy sheriffs, “giving them badges and credentials despite them not being trained or vetted and not offering services to the sheriff’s office.” Jenkins had announced he would “deputize thousands of our law-abiding citizens to protect their constitutional right to own firearms,” if the legislature passed “further unnecessary gun restrictions.” Jenkins was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Although Jenkins was found guilty by a jury of his peers, just as the U.S. justice system calls for, Trump insisted that Jenkins and his wife and their family “have been dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden D[epartment] O[f] J[ustice].” Jenkins, Trump wrote on social media, “is a wonderful person, who was persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters,’ and ‘left for dead.’ This is why I, as President of the United States, see fit to end his unfair sentence, and grant Sheriff Jenkins a FULL and Unconditional Pardon. He will NOT be going to jail tomorrow, but instead will have a wonderful and productive life.”
Today Trump gave a presidential pardon to Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to tax crimes in 2024. The pardon arrived after Walczak’s mother donated at least $1 million to Trump. The pardon spares Walczak from 18 months in prison and $4.4 million in restitution. Also today, Trump announced plans to pardon reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who were sentenced to 7 and 12 years in prison for conspiracy to defraud banks of $36 million and tax evasion. Their daughter spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Bonica notes that delegitimizing the judicial system creates a permission structure for threats against judges. That, too, we are seeing.
Bonica goes on to illustrate how this pattern of authoritarian attacks on the judiciary looks the same across nations. In 2009, following a ruling that he was not immune from prosecution for fraud, tax evasion, and bribery, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi railed about “communist prosecutors and communist judges.” In 2016, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye rejected the authority of his country’s highest court and purged more than 4,000 judges. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe pushed judges to stop protests, and the judiciary collapsed. In the Philippines in 2018, Rodrigo Duterte called the chief justice defending judicial independence an “enemy,” and she was removed. In Brazil in 2021, Jair Bolsonaro threatened violence against the judges who were investigating him for corruption.
But, Bonica notes, something different happened in Israel in 2023. When Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition tried to destroy judicial independence, people from all parts of society took to the streets. A broad, nonpartisan group came together to defend democracy and resist authoritarianism.
“Every authoritarian who successfully destroyed judicial independence did so because civil society failed to unite in time,” Bonica writes. “The key difference? Whether people mobilized.”
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block testifies during a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce regarding pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses on Capitol Hill on May 23, 2024, in Washington.
Credit: AP Photo / Mariam Zuhaib
This story was updated with additional quotes and information from Thursday’s hearing.
Testifying in front of a congressional committee Thursday, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said he regrets not acting sooner to remove the pro-Palestinian encampment that was violently attacked last month by counter protesters.
“With the benefit of hindsight, we should have been prepared to immediately remove the encampment if and when the safety of our community was put at risk,” Block said during prepared remarks to the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Block, who himself is Jewish, testified before the committee in Washington, D.C., as part of a hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. It was the third time the committee had called on university leaders to testify about antisemitism since last fall, and the first time that a chancellor or president from California has testified.
Testifying alongside Block were Michael Schill, the president of Northwestern University, and Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers University.
For the most part, Block avoided harsh questioning during the hearing, with lawmakers spending more time grilling Holloway and especially Schill. Some of his most insightful remarks came during his opening statement, when he addressed the encampment that sprang up on the UCLA campus on April 25.
Block said he initially followed UC system guidance, which is to only use law enforcement to remove protesters “when absolutely necessary” to protect the safety of the campus.
But as the encampment grew to more than 500 protesters, “some of whom were not even affiliated with UCLA,” Block said he decided on April 28 to remove the encampment. He then gave the protesters written notice on April 30, but it was too late. Later that night, a violent mob of counter demonstrators attacked the encampment, resulting in injuries and hospitalizations.
Later during Thursday’s hearing, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) questioned Block about the violent attacks, which she said he could have prevented.
“The recent images from UCLA are appalling. What is more appalling is that it was completely preventable. You could have prevented this by protecting the diverse groups of pro-Palestinian students that were peacefully gathered on campus,” she said.
“Are any of these people in jail?” Omar then asked, referring to the counter protesters who attacked the encampment.
Block said Los Angeles police are still working to identify the assailants from that evening.
“It’s been over a month,” Omar responded.
Block also faced questions over allegations that the UCLA encampment was blocking Jewish and pro-Israel students from parts of campus. Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) shared a video that he said showed Jewish students being blocked by encampment protesters from getting to class.
“After we learned about that, I sent a message to all our student affairs people to make sure the pathways were open for everyone. And I sent the message out to our community,” Block said when Kiley asked if the encampment protesters were disciplined, an answer that did not satisfy Kiley.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, the Republican chair of the committee from North Carolina, also criticized Block for that incident. In her closing remarks, Foxx said there was “horrifying footage of encampment members setting up illegal checkpoints, denying Jewish students access to central parts of campus.”
Republicans spent more time questioning Schill, the Northwestern president. They criticized him for coming to an agreement with pro-Palestinian protesters on his campus, but Schill defended himself and said he “rejected the main student demand of divestment.” Northwestern’s agreement did include a promise to disclose more information about its investments.
“We had to get the encampment down,” Schill said Thursday. That answer, however, did not satisfy lawmakers.
Outside the hearing, faculty members from Rutgers, Northwestern and UCLA criticized Republican lawmakers over the hearing and said it was an attack on higher education.
That included Mia McIver, an English professor at UCLA who during a live streamed press conference called the hearing a “shameful farce.”
“Instead of focusing on learning, teaching, inquiry, understanding, analysis, and argumentation, which are the primary functions of higher ed, the committee’s perverse obsession with harsh discipline and bizarre thirst for punishment revealed that the real goal is to shut down repress, suppress and criminalize constitutionally protected speech and action,” McIver said.
A student holds a flash card with the sight word ‘friend’ during a class at Nystrom Elementary in the West Contra Costa Unified School District in 2022.
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
The “science of reading” confuses and confounds many of us. It’s understandable. There is much misleading and outright false information floating around.
On one hand, too many science of reading advocates claim an unwarranted degree of certainty, for example, that we know from the science how to get 95% of all students on grade level. Vague and unhelpful definitions make matters worse. I’ve even heard advocates say we should treat all children as if they were dyslexic, a claim for which there is zero evidence.
On the other hand, science of reading skeptics spread mischaracterizations and outright fictions. An egregious example was a recent California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE) webinar intended to “debunk” the brain science behind the science of reading by claiming that a key tool used to study the brain (functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI) could not detect brain activity that involved meaning or comprehension. The world’s foremost reading neuroscientist debunked the would-be debunker by pointing out that 20 years of research have shown that writing and speaking “activate extremely similar brain circuits for meaning.“
How can we ever make progress when we’re locked in an eternal game of whack-a-false-mole?
We can all agree learning to read is complicated, and so is the teaching. But there are also a few straightforward and irrefutable findings from research that should constitute the foundations for reading policies. This is particularly important for the students who are most harmed when we fail to use the best knowledge available: low-income students and students who have difficulty learning to read.
Learning to speak and understand oral language is fundamentally different from learning to read and write. A first language is typically acquired effortlessly if we’re with people who speak it. Learning to read requires explicit teaching to one degree or another.
Oral language is foundational to reading, because reading requires visually accessing the oral language centers in our brains. Our brain is prepared from birth to make sense of what we hear when people talk, but to read we must learn how to see written language (print), connect it to oral language, and then make sense of it. Neuroscientists have identified the transformation of brain centers and the development of neural pathways that enable an individual to connect print to speech and speech to print.
Without those connections, literacy is difficult, if not impossible. Foundational literacy skills — usually called “phonics” or “decoding” — are essential for connecting spoken English to written English. Teaching these skills is “nonnegotiable,” and explicit, systematic instruction in how the sounds of the language (“phonemes”) are represented by letters is the approach most likely to lead to individuals’ learning to read.
In contrast, “balanced literacy” (sometimes called “3-cueing”) is far less effective and even counterproductive — particularly for students who benefit most from direct and clear instruction — because it does not clearly and systematically teach the necessary reading skills described above. (“Balanced literacy” is a misappropriation of the National Reading Panel’s use of “balanced” to mean phonics instruction balanced with language and comprehension-oriented instruction.)
After acquiring decoding skills, word recognition must become automatic. Decoding a word each time it’s encountered is an obstacle to comprehension. Individuals must know and apply spelling (orthographic) rules, including the exceptions, then practice and apply the rules to words they know orally as they encounter words in print. This creates a growing bank of words that are instantly recognizable once readers have connected each word’s sounds, spelling and meaning several times. This is very different from memorizing whole words. Connecting (“binding”) individual sounds to corresponding letters, then to the word’s meaning is critical. Once readers can read words they didn’t already know, reading becomes a way to learn new words.
The importance of language development, comprehension, knowledge and other skills is widely acknowledged by those who actually understand the research into how people learn to read. These skills and attributes must be a focus of attention even before reading instruction commences and should continue as children develop foundational literacy skills and throughout their school careers. (See Scarborough’s iconic “Reading Rope” depicting much more than phonics and decoding, and including background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning and literacy knowledge.)
Language, vocabulary, knowledge and other skills must merge with automatic word recognition skills to produce fluent reading and comprehension, which then must be continuously supported and improved as students progress through school. Continued practice and development of skilled fluent reading is particularly critical for students most dependent on schools for successful literacy development. Neither word recognition nor language comprehension alone is sufficient for successful reading development. Both are essential.
All of the above is true for students in general, and especially true for vulnerable populations. Some students require additional consideration. For example, English learners in all-English instruction must receive additional instruction in English language development, such as vocabulary, since they are learning to read in English as they simultaneously learn to speak and understand it.
English learners fortunate enough to be in long-term bilingual programs can become bilingual and biliterate. The processes involved in becoming biliterate are essentially the same in each language: Building on spoken language skills, foundational literacy skills link print to the sounds of the language, then to the oral language centers in the brain. Ongoing development of language, vocabulary, knowledge, and other skills and dispositions is essential for continued biliteracy development, as it is for literacy development in a single language or in any language.
California has a long way to go if we are to develop useful policies around reading education for every student. All relevant parties, including teachers and parents, must have a voice in formulating such policies.
But those voices must be well-informed. Misinformation and falsehoods must be eliminated from the conversation, replaced by clear understandings of the best knowledge we have.
Claude Goldenberg is Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education, emeritus, in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and a former first grade and junior high teacher.
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.
Mildred Garcia, chancellor of the California State University System.
Credit: Cal State Fullerton/Flickr
In October 2023, Mildred Garcia stepped into her role as chancellor for the California State University, becoming the first Latina in the nation to lead a four-year public university system. Formerly the president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, Garcia joined the CSU system at a time of post-pandemic turbulence.
Garcia sat down with California Student Journalism Corps reporter Alexcia Negrete in early May for an interview to discuss Garcia’s leadership goals, with student concerns being the primary focus.
The discussion ranged from underrepresented groups having increased access to the CSU system, to Title IX (sex discrimination) issues, to enrollment and tuition challenges.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
What are the main goals that the CSU, or the main goals that you have to continue supporting students in the next school year?
My North Star is student success, equity, affordability, graduation, retention, everything. The reason I am here is because of the students we serve. We serve the first-generation, the low-income, the students of color, and the adults in the majority in California, with a four-year degree and beyond.
And we are going to be the role model — or we are the role models — on how we graduate students from diverse backgrounds to reach their highest potential. Everything I do is centered on that — how does this affect the students, the families and their goals to reach where they want to be?
And sometimes that goes against people’s perceptions; but this is mine, right? Because I am a first-generation college student. I know how it changes lives. I know we came from a very poor family. And I know how now people that come after me — my nieces and nephews and family members — will say not ‘Will I go to college?’ The question is, ‘What college am I going to go to?’ And so for me, it’s part of my passion, my mission and my life’s work.
You have been president of two Cal State universities, Dominguez Hills and Fullerton, and you have been able to work with students one-on-one during that time. But as a chancellor, that can sometimes feel a little separated. What would you want students to know about you?
I think No. 1 is that I had a similar background that they had. … I grew up in a very poor neighborhood. Then my father died when I was 12, and we had to move to the housing projects of Brooklyn.
I had to work my way to college. We were seven children, and my mother had to support us on a factory salary. … Everybody has a different story, but it’s a story of having the hunger to do better, because we want out of poverty, we want to live a satisfying life (with) economic independence.
I marvel and congratulate each student that is struggling to get that degree and go on and be whatever they want to be — whatever that goal is — and go off and help others and reach their highest potential and be engaged citizens in our communities and cities in California. … It’s not just the college degree, but it’s a path, it’s a chapter in your journey of your book of life.
As a whole, the CSU has faced Title IX scandals, which have led to some students expressing concerns about the overall Title IX process. How will you work to repair the trust lost by the students, and overall, change the image of the process by the CSU?
Well, first of all, we had a huge report by Cozen O’Connor, and also the state auditor, and we are following those steps. Every president has a committee now on how to implement steps, and (they) are supposed to be communicating with their campuses how to really have a voice and have nobody be afraid, with no retaliation on issues of Title IX.
Every campus now is going to have a committee, someone in charge, and we at the Chancellor’s Office are going to monitor that. … Every president of every university in the CSU has a goal (of) reporting to me that Title IX is a priority, and that they are implementing the recommendations of the Cozen O’Connor report, and they will be held accountable for that.
What my hope is, is that each of the campuses is working with their vice president for student affairs, the provost and … human resources, (and explaining) our process. Yes, you can come forward; we will make sure that there is a process, and it’s documented, and that we follow the procedure to do the investigations.
In the CSU, there have been some campuses facing some declining enrollment, and some campuses have been forced to cut classes or faculty members. Are you currently working to ensure that students are still getting the education that they need, regardless of the classes (and faculty) being cut? And if so how?
The answer is yes. Each president is working with their teams to ensure that the students that we have admitted will be able to get the classes and graduate. That is their No. 1 goal.
My No. 1 goal is for the students to have a wonderful experience on their campus and graduate, get the classes and go off and do great things and then come back and tell us about it and become great alumni.
Our No. 1 priority with our team — which is all the presidents and the vice chancellors — is student success. It’s going to be different on each campus, right? So each president has to work with their teams to set up structures and practices, and then hold themselves accountable to watch how students are progressing to graduation.
Before you officially started as chancellor, CSU trustees voted to increase tuition for the next five years. A lot of students have disagreed with the decision and have had protests, saying that the Cal States will now become too expensive for them, or they won’t get enough financial aid support. What kind of reassurance can you provide students who are currently working to pay their tuition and who are concerned about the tuition increase?
First of all, let me go to the data — I don’t have any exact numbers in front of us, but 60% of students have their tuition completely covered. So for the students, it’s not the tuition that’s giving them the problem, it’s the cost of living. What we have to figure out is how do we help and bring together Pell [Grants], State University grants and scholarships to be able to help each of the students really reach the cost of living as much as possible.
While I understand the students — I had to pay my way through college, and I worked three to four, multiple jobs, during the year — our tuition is one of the cheapest in the country. If most of our students are getting their tuition paid, what’s really hurting them is the cost of attendance.
And so we’re trying to figure out ways that we can help the students — that’s No. 1. No. 2, I have been lobbying — even before I came here, at my former job in Washington, D.C. — to double Pell. No. 3, we need to work with our state legislators, who have been good to us, about telling them the need for more resources, for state universities like the California State University system.
The CSU as a whole is anticipating more universitywide budget cuts due to less state aid, and some campuses, because of those cuts, have made cuts to their programs and positions. How will you continue to make sure that students feel supported during this time when we’re getting less state aid?
Each campus has to look at what are core necessities for students so that they can grant what it is that they need the most. Each campus has to look at, ‘What is it that our students need in order to graduate, and how do we do that in a limited budget?’
It’s very much like your budget at home — you have a budget, you’ve got to pay rent, you’ve got to pay your electricity, you’ve got to pay whatever it is that you pay — and you use your paycheck and the fringes have to go. You may not be able to go to dinner three times a week.
It’s the same thing with a university, you take your budget, and you say, ‘What’s our No. 1 priority?’ The No. 1 priority is our students graduating, our students getting their classes, and our students getting the support services they need in order to be doing well in classes and graduate.
Is there anything else that you would like to tell us?
I think that the CSU has to understand they’re a very special place. I worked with 400 institutions across this country when I was in Washington, D.C., and we have to be working together to tell our powerful story saying what the value of the CSU is. Eighty percent of our students stay within a 50-mile radius of where they live after they graduate. That means (they) are the entrepreneurs, the journalists, the people who are going to run businesses, the people who go on to graduate school, the people who become medical doctors. This is what we’re doing for California, this is what we’re doing for the cities.
It’s a private good, I’ll give you that. It helps you and your family for generations to come. But it also helps the city and communities in the state because you pay taxes, you are engaged in your community, you are leaders, you vote, you’re healthier, all of that.
Look, I’m the first one to say nobody’s perfect; we have a lot to do to be better. But we are engaged in such a way that so many of our students are doing great things. … That’s what we need to be talking about. (We need to) continue to do better, improve performance, learn from our mistakes and get better.
Ashley Bolter is a fourth-year journalism major and French and ethnic studies minor at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Alexcia Negrete is a fourth-year communications major at California State University, Fullerton. Both are members of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.
That “One Big Beautiful Bill” is supposed to be about the budget and taxes but tucked into it are a variety of dangerous items that Trump partisans hope will go unnoticed.
The most dangerous item of all undercuts the rule of law.
Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger noticed it. They posted this warning on Twitter:
Our blog contributor called Quickwrit noticed the innocuous but dangerous insertion into the bill.
Quickwrit write here:
DANGER!!! DANGER!!! DANGER!!!
Buried at the bottom of Page 562 in the Republicans’ 1,116-page “Big Beautiful Bill” is a provision that will end all federal court challenges to anything that Trump orders and that will allow Trump to declare null and void all previous rulings against his orders.
It will be the beginning of genuine dictatorial rule.
The provision on Page 562 invokes enforcement of Federal Rules of Civil Procedures Rule 65(c) which says that a federal court can ONLY issue an injunction AFTER a plaintiff has posted a bond to cover the costs of damages that an injunction could have on the party against which the injunction was issued if subsequent appeals overturn the injunction.
Because Trump and his federal agencies could claim billions of dollars in damages if an injunction is overturned by the pro-Trump U.S. Supreme Court, there is NO ONE WHO CAN AFFORD to seek any future injunction against Trump’s orders or those of his agencies.
IN ADDITION: Rule 65(c) will be applied RETROACTIVELY to all the injunctions issued so far against Trump and his agencies, and all those injunctions will be removed because no bond was posted with any of them.
THE EFFECT WILL BE that everything that has been blocked by the federal courts will be unleashed and there will be NO FUTURE INJUNCTIONS issued against ANYTHING that Trump orders to be done.
Even if none of the many other odious things are removed from the Big Beautiful Bill, this provision to invoke Federal Court Rule 65(c) MUST BE ELIMINATED or there will be no future restraints on Trump. He will be free to dictate anything he wants with NO COURT INTERFERENCE. Rule by law will end in America.
Alexis Ayala, left, goes over plans for the construction of a tiny house with instructor Rodney Attkisson at Fresno City College’s Career and Technology Center.
Credit: Ashleigh Panoo / EdSource
Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to transform career and technical education to help students get training for lifelong work and careers.
Progress has been made in recent months toward creating a new state master plan for career education that goes beyond traditional concepts of vocational and technical training, according to the governor’s top education adviser.
The aim is a report that will say, “Here’s how we can move from where we are now, which is a mishmash of systems, to a more coherent set of systems that align towards supporting careers,” said Ben Chida, Newsom’s senior adviser to develop the state’s Cradle-to-Career Data System, which aims to track students’ progress through data collected from birth into jobs.
The goal is to get a plan written and released to the public by the end of this calendar year that would create “more equitable access to living wage, fulfilling work,” according to the website for the Governor’s Council for Career Education.
Then the governor and Legislature are expected to work on bills and funding measures that could make a splintered education and training system better organized and better connected to employers.
A document released in January listed “core concepts” the upcoming master plan should address. Those include establishing a new coordinating council that will try to better link high schools and colleges with each other and with employers and will allocate state and federal funds for training. Another concept is to increase opportunities for work-based and hands-on learning, with the possibility of financial aid and other benefits for adult learners too.
The process began last August when Newsom signed an executive order calling for the state to create a master plan for career education. That would aim to remove barriers students face as they move from K-12 to trade school, colleges and beyond into their employed years.
Public meetings were held around the state in recent months to get input from educators, industry and the public on turning ideas into action. Nominations from various constituencies are being sought to participate in online meetings in the fall to further discuss the state’s needs and to “identify missing topics and red flags,” according to the website.
The early “concepts” document does not specify the types of technical training most needed and what is available in California now. Officials say that is because the future master plan should be open-ended and flexible enough to adapt to changes in the job markets and technologies.
Its focus appears to be well beyond the traditional notion of teaching skills like welding, robotics and cooking. It calls for “training systems over an individual’s lifetime” at schools and workplaces that include “21st century skills.”
One goal is to not force students so much into education tracks that so strictly separate college-bound students from those aiming for vocational/career paths. ”One of the biggest things that we’re going to tackle in this master plan is how do you start thinking about high school and post-secondary in a way that doesn’t require you to basically track students into one or the other path,” Chida said.
Noé C. Crespo, a professor of Health Promotion & Behavioral Science, poses outside the School of Public Health at San Diego State University.
EdSource
Noé Crespo, a professor of public health at San Diego State University, was on the verge of cracking a question he had spent years trying to answer.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Crespo and his colleagues applied for a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study ways to boost vaccination rates among Latinos. They designed a community outreach plan, paid a team to implement it, and collected results. All that remained this spring was to analyze their hard-earned data.
But in April, Crespo’s grant was terminated by the Trump administration as part of a controversial pullback on research funding in both the sciences and humanities nationwide.
Crespo has all the data he could want,but no money to pay a statistician to analyze it.
“We invest so much — time, energy, resources — to implement a project that is meant to help the public,” he said, “and so it does feel discouraging that we’re put in a position where we can’t continue that work.”
Around the country this spring,many faculty members who rely on federal funding for research have received similarlyabrupt termination notices. The moment is particularly poignant for Crespo’s institution, San Diego State, which this year accomplished the long-awaited goal of joining a prestigious club of top-tier research universities known as R1s.
While a dip in federal support is unlikely to jeopardize that coveted recognition, it has disrupted research at San Diego State into subjects like mental health care and HIV/AIDS. The university’s research and development spending hit $158 million in the year ending June 2023, much of it fueled by federal dollars.
The cancellations are part of efforts under President Donald Trump to cut federal funding and align it more closely with the president’s political objectives. The White House has targeted grants related to a wide range of areas, from climate change to gender and sexuality. Critically for Crespo, Trump’s NIH has also axed research related to racial inequities in health, vaccine hesitancy and Covid.
California’s colleges and universities have much at stake when it comes to federal research funding. The state’s higher education institutions notched $7.2 billion in federal research and development (R&D) spending in 2023, according to the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey.
That figure includes more than $250 million spent at California State University campuses like San Diego State and more than $4.6 billion across the University of California system. The state’s private universities, including Stanford University and the University of Southern California, spent a combined $2.3 billion in federal R&D.
Fear of ‘losing a whole generation of scientists’
Putting an exact figure on grant cancellations nationwide has proven elusive, in part because the federal spending databases that track such spending sometimes contradict each other.
One recent analysis by researchers at Harvard, Yale and associated teaching hospitals estimated that $1.8 billion in NIH grants were terminated in a one-month period. Meanwhile, as selected grants get reinstated — and as attempts to block terminations advance through the courts — the number of canceled grants has become a moving target.
The impact on California could be substantial, even counting terminations at NIH alone. Grant Watch, a project tracking the cancellation of federal scientific research grants since Trump returned to office in 2025, estimates that California researchers have lost $273 million in NIH grants, counting funding that was not paid out because of terminations.
At San Diego State, Hala Madanat, the university’s vice president for research and innovation, estimates that the university typically receives about 70% of its research funding from the federal government, though that can vary from year to year. The university has so far identified 50 terminated federal grants with about $26 million remaining to be spent, she said, many of them related to climate change, LGBTQ communities and workforce pipeline programs.
“If we halt doctoral education because there’s no funding for three to four years, you are losing a whole generation of scientists,” Madanat said.
San Diego State has appealed virtually every grant termination, Madanat said. So far, none have been restored, though two subcontracts were reinstated outside the formal appeal process.
With appeals still pending, two federal grant recipients reached while reporting this story declined to comment, saying they are worried speaking out could endanger their chance of having funding reinstated. That potential risk is on Crespo’s mind, too.
“Do I have concerns? Yes,” he said. “At the same time, I was trained in public health to speak the truth, and that’s what scientists do.”
A poster on the campus of San Diego State University advertises the university’s new status as an R1 research institution.EdSource
A ‘soul-crushing’ loss of federal funding
As Trump took office in January, San Diego State was capping off an ambitious campaign to become an R1, a distinction requiring it to spend at least $50 million on R&D and confer at least 70 doctoral research degrees.
The university saw research funding rise 64% in just three years. It conferred 123 doctoral degrees in 2022-23. And to cement its R1 bona fides, it plans to invest in a multiuse “innovation district” with technology and research facilities.
But funding for some of the university’s vaunted research projects is starting to vanish as the White House slashes selected grants and contracts.
In 2023, for example,the university celebrated the establishment of the SDSU Center for Community Energy and Environmental Justice. Equipped with $10 million in federal funding from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), San Diego State would guide historically underserved communities to apply for grants that could help them weather environmental threats like droughts and pollution.
“What we were doing was sort of the ‘teaching to fish,’” said Rebecca Lewison, a professor of biology at San Diego State who led the center, one of more than a dozen EPA Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centersnationwide.
But then came some bad news. In February, EPA terminated the center’s funding, citing an obligation to ensure its grants do not support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The center is likely to lose an estimated $8 million it left unspent.
The funding reversal came as the White House has moved to roll back environmental justice-related initiatives. An EPA spokesperson said in an email that the San Diego State grant had given “radical [non-governmental organizations] millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars” and that those groups were“forcing their agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing on the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment.”
For Lewison, the loss of federal support for San Diego State’s center has been “soul-crushing.” She said such technical assistance is “really a bipartisan initiative” and that the EPA statement appears to misunderstand the nature of the center’s work.
“I appreciate that we were in the environmental justice sort of program umbrella and that that’s become a word that is associated with something negative,” Lewison said. “But honestly, ‘Thriving Communities’ is really what it sounds like: it’s wanting communities all over to thrive.”
Lewison is now exploring options to keep the center alive. San Diego State has set aside $1 million to sunset certain projects, Madanat said, and is also turning to private philanthropy.
‘I would love to know that answer’
At the time that Crespo filed a project summary for his vaccine grant, Covid had taken a dire toll on Latinos in California. UCLA researchers would later confirm that Latinos had experienced a disproportionate rate of Covid cases and deaths during the pandemic’s first year.
“If there’s a wildfire in a particular part of town, we would want to send the firefighters over there to put out that fire,” Crespo said. “And that’s what we do also in public health and in research: we identify where there are problems, and in some cases, there are subgroups of people that are disproportionately affected.”
NIH awarded Crespo and his colleagues a grant of $1.8 million in 2022, as highly transmissible subvariants of the Covid virus circulated. The team finally could put in motion the study they had planned at 10 San Diego-area health clinics.
There was still $314,690 remaining in the grant at the time it was canceled, according to data on grant terminations published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Without the ability to use those funds, the team will have to seek other ways to pay collaborators with data analysis expertise.
In the meantime, Crespo is left wondering: What worked and what didn’t?
“The data are there,” he said, “so I would love to know that answer.”
For many years, “Balanced Literacy ” was considered the gold standard of reading instruction; it encouraged students to use context clues, Then came the fervor for the “Science of Reading,” which emphasized phonics. The reading wars dominated the education world for nearly two decades. Reading instruction across the nation changed to reflect the pro-phonics emphasis.
But then a group of parents went to court to close down the teaching of Balanced Literacy, and they sued Dr. Calkins. They blamed her for students’ test scores and their poor reading skills.
Sarah Schwartz of Education Week reported:
A first-of-its-kind lawsuit against three influential reading professors and their controversial literacy curricula has been dismissed, after a U.S. District Court declined to wade into the murky landscape of curriculum quality and education research.
Last year, a group of parents filed the lawsuit, which alleged that the professors and their publishers used “deceptive and fraudulent marketing” to sell their popular reading materials.
The case, brought by two parents from separate families in Massachusetts, centers on two sets of reading programs, one created by Lucy Calkins, an education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the other by reading researchers Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, of Lesley University and The Ohio State University, respectively.
The parents argued that the creators, publishers, and promoters of the curricula—Calkins’ Units of Study for Teaching Reading and a suite of Fountas & Pinnell branded materials—violated consumer protection law in the state by making false claims about the research supporting their programs.
Publishers said that the programs were backed by research even though, the plaintiffs claimed, they omitted or diminished the role of phonics instruction, which decades of reading research has demonstrated is a key component of teaching young children how to decode print.
On Thursday, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts determined that the court could not grant a decision in the case, because it would require passing judgement on the quality of the reading programs in question—a task that the court said it is not equipped to perform.
Three high school Linked Learning pathway students don lab coats as they collaborate on a hands-on science experiment, bringing classroom learning to life through real-world application.
Courtesy: Linked Learning Alliance
California’s Golden State Pathways Program is a historic commitment to career-connected learning.
In January 2025, $470 million in grants began flowing to hundreds of school communities across the state. These are huge investments, based on a proven approach to education called Linked Learning, which carefully integrates rigorous, college-bound academics with hands-on career learning experiences and strong student supports — all connected by an industry theme that meets workforce needs within the local community.
For example: In Porterville Unified School district, which serves California’s rural central valley, nearly every high school student is enrolled in a Linked Learning college and career preparatory pathway related to thriving local occupations, including those in energy, aviation, agricultural technology, and other fields. The district has an impressive 99% graduation rate, 94% of its alumni enroll in postsecondary education, and 25% percent of students earn industry-recognized certificates while still in high school. Similarly, by offering Linked Learning pathways focused on health sciences, information technology, child development and other high-growth careers, the more urban Oakland Unified School District has boosted its rates of high school graduation and completion of college-preparatory credits, and reduced absenteeism and discipline issues.
Both the extraordinary new Golden State Pathways Program (GSPP) funding and the California Master Plan for Career Education, recently released to guide educators and labor market leaders across the state, empower school leaders to build such learning pathways for their students. We wholeheartedly affirm this work.
But truly effective Linked Learning practice — the kind that extensive third-party research links to excellence and equity — requires more than working through a checklist of courses and activities. It takes intentional integration of each aspect of student experience, thoughtful measurement and supportive policy.
To this end, we offer three key recommendations:
1. District leaders should push for true college and career integration. Rather than maintain the long-standing divide between college prep curricula and career-technical education, Golden State Pathways Program resources can be applied to make core academic subjects more engaging and useful by connecting them to themed pathways focused on the high-opportunity, high-wage careers that correspond to real workforce needs in each region. Classroom learning should sync with similarly themed sequential career-technical education courses and work-based learning, like internships and apprenticeships. Districts should engage students and families to ensure pathway options are well understood, aligned with student interests, and connected to workforce demands. As modeled in Porterville and Oakland, the right industry themes bring learning to life in very tangible ways, and they build skills and mindsets that translate to success in any field of future study or employment.
2. Researchers should inform and strengthen program implementation. Rather than wait for parents and legislators to ask, “did this pathways investment work?” participating regions should develop a robust and proactive research agenda in coordination with local communities to begin generating evidence that improves outcomes along the way. Understanding student experiences, opportunities and outcomes in pathways is essential for strengthening the program over time. Research on the conditions that return the strongest results can help spread best practices across rural, suburban and urban communities.
3. Policymakers should remove barriers to effective implementation. We cannot keep asking high schools to do everything they currently do and layer additional tasks on top of it all. State and local policies that enable waivers, flexibility, or alternatives to A–G requirements for UC/CSU admissions would increase time and space in students’ schedules to engage in work-based learning. Policymakers should also build in incentives for collaboration and coordination between K–12 and postsecondary institutions to enable purposeful dual-enrollment opportunities that accelerate all students toward a valuable credential. To further our recommendation in point two above, policymakers should also ensure data systems that tag students in pathways to lower the barriers and costs of high-quality research on program outcomes.
Washington DC and California are moving in dramatically different directions on education. Where the nation is pulling back, we are charging ahead. We must continue to see this progress through. By acting on these recommendations, we prove a point: that government can respond in good faith to the public it serves. And we do not fail to miss the point of it all: that our future depends on getting education right for young people.
•••
Ash Vasudevais president and CEO of ConnectED: The National Center for College and Career, an organization that partners with school, district, and community leaders to transform education through Linked Learning pathways.
Anne Stanton is president and CEO of the Linked Learning Alliance, an organization that leads the movement toward educational excellence and equity for every adolescent through high-quality college and career preparation.
Editors’ note: Anne Stanton is a member of the EdSource board of directors. EdSource maintains sole editorial control over the content of its coverage.
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.
Across the 11 campuses of the Texas State Technical College system, the recruiting motto proclaims: “Life is hands-on. Your education should be too.”
The reality of that was evident during a recent visit to its sprawling flagship campus in Waco, where students were creating robots, repairing hybrid cars, welding pipelines, baking fancy cakes, flying airplanes and climbing utility poles.
That goal,administrators say, is to get students ready for the workforce as quickly as possible and then be hired into well-paying jobs in the growing Texas economy.
And it is done with extra — some would say unusual, even excessive — focus on what industry needs and what pays best.
As a result, some students choose Texas State Technical College’s Waco campus — which offers about 30 majors and campus housing — even if some similar programs are offered at traditional Texas community colleges closer to their home.
For example, Ethan Hernandez, 19, said he was not interested in a traditional, academic college education and wanted to learn more about the repairs he enjoyed helping his grandfather with on family cars. Now he is pursuing a two-year associate degree in automotive technology and probably will add an extra certificate in collision repairs.
“I want to know how to do the interiors of cars as well as the exteriors of cars”, said Hernandez, who went to high school in Keller, Texas, 100 miles north of Waco. He also may apply for a separate 16-week program on the Waco campus that Tesla runs to teach electric repairs for its electric vehicles.
Too many young people go to a four-year college to party, while their “parents waste a lot of money” on a degree that has nothing to do with future employment, Hernandez said during an interview at his Waco campus dorm. In contrast, he said, getting a certificate or degree from a school like Texas State Technical College (TCSC) “gives you a big jump” in the job market.
The Texas technical education system — which is separate from community colleges and their wider missions — last fall enrolled 11,400 full-time students, including about 3,100 at Waco, seeking certificates or diplomas that take between one semester and two years to complete.
On the surface, that may not sound that different from the many technical and career programs offered at California’s public community colleges or other trade schools around the country. But TSTC contrasts in several crucial ways.
Some experts say that California could look to Texas for career education ideas as families andstudents increasingly question the long-term value and costs of a traditional four-year college diploma.
The entrance to Texas State Technical College in Waco.
While higher education enrollments suffered pandemic-era drops nationally, community colleges that concentrate on vocational programs showed a 16% increase last fall.
That’s a sizable rise compared with two-year public schools that transfer students to universities — those saw an increase of less than 1%, federal statistics show.
More than anything, some experts say, TSTC’s focus almost entirely on job training and career preparation gives it a leg up and has boosted its enrollment much faster than regular community colleges since the pandemic losses.
Traditional two-year public colleges have a dual mission of both getting technical students to work, whether in medical technology or agribusiness, and to provide academic classes, such as political science, biology and music, for transfers.
‘A lesson for California’
Of California’s 116 community colleges, the only bricks-and-mortar one thoroughly devoted to technical and career education is Los Angeles Trade-Tech college, which offers more than 80 career tracks and certificates, significantly more than TSTC.
Yet, the L.A. school, which enrolls 13,500 full- and part-time students, also has transfer programs and is part of a nine-campus district with other missions. Adult workers needing skills can turn to the state’s online Calbright College, which opened in 2019 but had a slow start and now enrolls 3,700 students. Private, for-profit schools have a big footprint as well.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration is trying to bolster career and trade education and is drafting a new master plan for that type of learning. But, the Texas State Technical College’s “intentionality” gives it an advantage in job training and placement and could be “a lesson for California,” according to Eloy Ortiz Oakley, who was chancellor of the California Community Colleges system for six years until 2022 and now is president and CEO of the Oakland-based College Futures Foundation,which encourages more students to earn vocational certificates or college degrees.
At comprehensive community colleges, technical education is often at a disadvantage because “there’s a competition for resources” with traditional academics, Oakley told EdSource. Texas’ technical colleges allow “more time and attention paid to career advising, to bringing in faculty who are working in the field … and I think those students get a higher level of service.”
TSTC students, however, risk being in “dead end programs” since there are few courses with transferable credits if they decide to pursue a bachelor’s degree, Oakley said. That may particularly hurt Black and Latino students who were not on the college-going track in high school, he added.
Only about 6% of TSTC students complete university transfers, but school leaders emphasize that is not the mission. All TSTC academic classes — mainly in English and math — that its students take for associate degrees are online.
TSTC loudly and explicitly embraces industries.Some of that is philosophical, and some is caused by funding: For the past decade, much of TSTC’s state financing has been based on an unusual formula tied to graduates’ average job pay up to five years out. TSTC Waco has killed off programs — such as computer repair, dental hygiene, golf course maintenance — when graduates’ pay was not high enough.
TSTC has “a strong reputation for preparing students for jobs and really for being nimble and flexible in how they go about that,” explained Charlotte Cahill, an associate vice president for education at Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit that works to expand well-paid employment opportunities. Community colleges nationwide also start new programs and kill older ones, but TSTC is “faster than most community colleges are when it comes to that,” she said.
An instructor at a flight simulator for pilot training at Texas State Technical College in Waco.Credit: Larry Gordon/EdSource
Culinary arts student William Corujo in the kitchen at Texas State Technical College in Waco.Credit: Larry Gordon/EdSource
The precision machine shop at TSTC.Credit: Larry Gordon / EdSource
Students learning to be utility linemen at Texas State Technical College in Waco.Credit: Larry Gordon/EdSource
Auto shop at TSTC in Waco, Texas.Credit: Larry Gordon / EdSource
Student Cristian Ramirez,works in the precision machine shop at Texas State Technical College in Waco.Credit: Larry Gordon/EdSource
The airplane hangar at Texas State Technical College in Waco.
(Click the arrows above to view the slideshow.)Credit: Larry Gordon / EdSource
In another difference from many community colleges elsewhere, the Waco school offers a lot of on-campus housing. And, sharply contrasting to California, TSTC faculty are not unionized and can not receive job-protecting tenure.
“We don’t exist to serve faculty. We exist to serve Texas industry and the students who want to go to work and live lives of prosperity,” said Jonathan Hoekstra, the TSTC executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer.
“We have a talent line of production we are trying to develop for industry,” he added. We want to help students make good decisions about what are their passions, their skills and how they want to develop them and become part of a talented workforce.”
TSTC’s smaller scale may help it concentrate on well-paid jobs in such fields as computer programming, avionics, cybersecurity, plumbing, solar energy and diesel engines. About 40% of its full-time students seeking a credential obtain one after three years, which is slightly more than at peer schools, according to Texas state statistics.
At California community colleges, officials concede that progress and completion in career/vocational programs are much lower but attribute that tothe many students who dabble by taking only one or two classes a year.
California’s system of spreading vocational training around the state is more convenient for students and also allows them to take a variety of academic courses in case they decide to transfer to a university, said Paul Feist, the California community college system’s vice chancellor for communications. The system offers many successful examples, including Chaffey College’s InTech Center (in the Inland Empire) that trains students in welding, automation and robotics and Rio Hondo in Whittier and Evergreen Valley in San Jose which both offer Tesla electric car programs similar to TSTC’s.
An important difference is that many California students are limited to the vocational program close to their homes, since on-campus housing is rare and the cost of moving to another city for off-campus housing can be prohibitive. Only 13 of California’s 116 community colleges have housing althoughseveral more are trying to build them.
Housing magnet
In contrast, TSTC ranks high in national listings of two-year schools with housing. Four of its 11 campuses do, attracting students from around Texas and the nation. Waco has about 1,100 beds, some in a complex run by a private firm. The school requires students from outside the area to live on campus the first year. There are also 126 duplexes, renovated former Air Force barracks, catering to older students who have children.
Amanda King, who studies cybersecurity at TSTC, says campus housing is important.
Being able to rent a two-bedroom house on campus was a benefit for Amanda King, who is 27 and a single mother of two young children. She is expecting soon to finish more than two years of study for an associate degree in cybersecurity and an extra certificate in digital forensics.
“It’s easier for families here,” said King, who is from McGregor, about 30 miles away. “Having housing available here makes it a little bit more possible.”
Now she hopes to be hired by a police department and earn about $55,000 a year to start as a digital investigator, cracking into cellphone records and emails of criminal suspects. That grew out of her love of television mystery shows and her desire to deter bad guys.
“There is a lot of scamming going on, child predators, human trafficking. All kinds of cases and a lot of digital footprints,” she said.
Ready to work
About 20 of the 75 employees at Fallas Automation firm in Waco are TSTC graduates, mainly in robotics, according to company Vice President of Operations Daniel Maeyaert. The firm, which creates robotic equipment that packs food products, said the school does “a really good job of getting employees trained to be ready to work. That’s really their strength.” New hires from TSTC “understand the terms we are using and understand the industry.”
A new employee might start with a $60,000 annual salary with room to grow, he added.
However, while technical skills are strong, TSTC should teach more “soft skills,” such as showing up to work on time, conducting job interviews and presenting yourself in writing and speaking, Maeyaert said. “I think they need to focus on it a little bit more,” he added.
Texas State Technical College began in 1966 at the former 2,000-acre Air Force base 8 miles north of downtown Waco and across the Brazos River. Now at the outer edge of the suburbs, the school was at first part of Texas A & M university but later became independent and added locations around the state, some full campuses, some just a building.
The Waco campus still has an active air field and looks like an industrial park, so spread out it is difficult to walk between buildings. The amount of equipment, such as robots, welding machines, flight simulators, airplanes and cars, is impressive — sometimes funded by corporate donations.
Plain and practical, it’s nothing like the ritzier Baylor University a few miles away. TSTC has no big-time sports teams, no fraternities or sororities. The on-campus recreation center includes a gym, a weight room, ping pong tables and spots to socialize, but those are relatively modest.
Yoselin Merlo, a TSTC robotics student. working with equipment at the lab. Credit: Larry Gordon/EdSource
Tuition and fees for most TSTC students will average about $7,200 over two semesters for 2024-25 (much higher than California’s Community Colleges’ $1,200). A majority of students come from low-income families and receive substantial federal and state aid.
About 43% of Waco’s students are Latino, 38% white, 6% Black and 1% Asian/Pacific Islanders. The vast majority are traditional college age but some students are in their 40s and 50s. Women comprise only about 10% of the students. Other TSTC campuses have higher numbers of women drawn to nursing and education studies.
Yoselin Merlo, 19, who is among the few women studying robotics at Waco, said “it can definitely be challenging to be in a room full of guys who are thinking I don’t have the answers” and to keep proving herself. Merlo emigrated from Honduras to Houston in 2016 and became the first in her family to learn English and finish high school.
Helped with financial aid, she said that coming to TSTC Waco “was the best decision I ever made.” She plans for a career designing industrial robots, earning a strong wage to help her family and to donate school uniforms and shoes to poor kids in Honduras.
Most TSTC programs allow open enrollment with just a high school diploma or equivalency. Admission to the airplane pilot training and allied health programs are more competitive.
Kaleb Sanders, 20, is following a family tradition of lineman studies and work. With his safety belt attached, Sanders skillfully scaled to the high top of one of the many 35-foot-high practice poles on a campus field. The lines are not electrified, but students are supposed to treat them as if they are “hot.”
Student Kaleb Sanders practicing to become a utility linemen during training at Texas State Technical College in Waco.Credit: Larry Gordon/EdSource
Sanders has seen many classmates quit. “A lot of people come to (the lineman program) because they see the good pay, the high demand. They don’t realize there is a reason for that. It’s dangerous, it’s hard. You might not have the guts for it,” he said. Instructors say linemen can start out earning $80,000 a year with overtime and get much more with experience.
All about pay
TSTC graduates’ pay is crucial for the school’s health. Since 2013, the largest pot of state revenue relies on a so-called returned-value formula linked heavily to alumni earning levels — not to the usual enrollment. For the upcoming year, that is expected to provide about $95 million in state funds, 30% of its overall budget. Tuition payments rank next in size, at about $60 million or 19%.
The TSTC funding formula “is seen as a bellwether because of its boldness,” said a 2016 report by the Lumina Foundation. While the college’s revenues have remained solid since then, the model may not work for other colleges with broader missions, one of that report’s co-authors recently told EdSource.
It would be politically difficult to abandon older departments and fire tenured faculty to “chase the new hot major and industry,” said Martin Van Der Werf, who is director of education policy and partnerships at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. And it would be hard to evaluate future earnings for community college graduates if they transfer to earn bachelor’s degrees, he added.
While Texas and California reforms now factor in some outcomes — such as degree completions, job placements and wages — in calculating the state revenue community colleges receive, California still relies mostly on enrollment.
TSTC’s strong emphasis on graduates’ pay “definitely helped drive expanded opportunities for students. And it’s also created powerful incentives for TSTC to focus their programs,” said Harrison Keller, who is commissioner of higher education and CEO of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, a state agency. TSTC competes with regular community colleges in Texas in some majors, but TSTC’s is “more readily positioned to provide opportunities for folks to reskill and upskill than many of the community colleges,” Keller added.
TSTC system enrollment declined slightly in the pandemic but now surpasses pre-Covid levels, while many Texas community colleges struggle with continuing enrollment drops.
Despite TSTC’s increased state funding, some faculty complain that there are shortages in instructors because pay is not enough to attract technical experts from industry who want to move to Waco. Students are divided on TSTC’s recent shift in some majors to what is called performance-based education, in which students can proceed at their own pace, mastering skill by skill. Some think it is great, but others contendthere is too much reliance on online material and not enough team spirit.
Still, in what can be viewed as a sign of confidence or a marketing stunt, TSTC offers a money-back guarantee in nine majors — including precision machining, heavy truck diesel equipment, robotics and welding — if a student does not find a job in that field within six months of graduation. So far, no one has asked for that refund, officials said.
