Campus tour guide Owen Short speaks to a group during a tour at Sonoma State university.
Credit: Emily Uhrich / EdSource
“First impressions are everything,” according to Sonoma State University tour guide Jennifer Garcia. “For a while, I didn’t really think about how important my first impression impacts tour guests.”
As a first line of engagement for colleges, a campus tour can be a game-changer for a student who is deciding between schools. Everything a tour guide says can impact the school, and ultimately it makes a difference for a university trying to maintain or increase its enrollment. An enthusiastic tour guide can sway students and families to that institution, while a good tour can confirm an already positive impression.
Garcia said she realized her first impression really mattered “when a family recognized me at Seawolf Decision Day a year after they toured the school with me. The family was super friendly, and I [imagine] my good first impression made them feel comfortable even a year later.”
Added Sonoma State tour guide Olivia Kalogiannis, “I think the most important part when meeting prospective students for the first time is making a true connection. As a campus tour guide, I want to make the campus feel as personable as I can.”
Most college campus tour guides are current students themselves; their main goal while on tour is to convince prospective students to come to the school by presenting some of the same reasons that lured them.
To become a student campus tour guide at Sonoma State, applicants need to show they have a passion for the institution and a willingness to learn. The tour script, the route and the mannerisms are all predetermined and can be taught, as long as enthusiasm and effort are evident.
Besides giving one-hour tours, shifts for guides might include answering phones in the welcome center, greeting incoming visitors and making gift bags for tour guests. In the spring, when tour season is busiest, guides sometimes lead two or three tours during a shift.
Tours happen rain or shine, and guides have to be able to pivot at any point during their tour, such as when there’s an obstacle blocking the traditional tour path, or noise necessitates a new route.
“Nothing really changes for me when it comes to an obstruction with a tour. I just try to make the tour seem as normal as possible. For example, if I have to change the route because it’s too loud, I’ll just direct my group into a space that is quieter, but I make it seem like it’s just part of the tour,” said tour guide Daniel Beglin.
The guides see a variety of visitors. There are people who come in by themselves, some bring a parent, guardian or friend, and others bring their whole families. Connecting with everyone matters.
Kalogiannis understands that the decision on where to attend could be influenced by others on the tour. “I believe interacting with the whole family is just as important as interacting with the student. My favorite part about doing this is getting people excited about college, whether that is a younger sibling, cousin or even the grandparents.”
The most common tour-takers are those who are excited, have many questions and can’t wait to be a part of the campus community. These types of tour-takers are some of the easiest to spot for guides because they come very eager and excited to be on tour. But plenty of tour-goers are more reserved people who may have a lot of questions but don’t ask them, at least not in front of the whole group.
And occasionally, guests come in with negative attitudes about the school or are loaded with difficult questions. Guides still try to convince those tourists that Sonoma State is worth considering — answering tough questions truthfully — while trying to showcase the school in a positive light.
“When it comes to people with negative attitudes, it automatically makes it more difficult for me. No matter how hard I try, they still can just deny or put down everything I say. Nevertheless, I try not to let it affect me. My goal is to make the tour as enjoyable as I can for everyone,” Beglin said.
For people with difficult questions, Beglin said, “I try to answer them to the best of my ability, but I don’t want to give anyone the wrong information. So if I can’t answer it, I direct them to where they can get the correct information.”
Kalogiannis assesses the personality types on her tours quickly. “I try to talk to everyone; after that first interaction, I get an idea of what their vibes are for the tour.”
When tour guests aren’t as interactive as she would like, she pulls back a bit. “If people still aren’t engaging with me, I will kind of just let them be, [hoping] that the small interaction with me will lead to them being more receptive and asking questions later on the tour.”
Sonoma State tour guide Emily Uhrich sees her role as that of a mentor. “My favorite part about being a campus tour guide is meeting and helping (the visitors). I like being a mentor, especially for those who are first-generation, like I am. I want to help them navigate college because I know it can be very confusing if you are the first in your family to go to college.”
Former tour guide Sean Kenneally has parlayed his role, post-graduation, into a job as an outreach and recruitment counselor for Sonoma State.
“Growing up in Southern California, people tend to lean toward ‘big brand name’ schools like Harvard, USC and NYU,” Kenneally said. “I took this job because I truly enjoy talking to prospective students and showcasing the opportunities a state education can provide. I think it’s important to show that the CSU system is a viable and accessible option for higher education.”
Javier Hernandez graduated in May with a degree in communications and media studies from Sonoma State University. He is a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps and has worked as a campus tour guide since the fall 2021.
On Oct. 7, Gov. Gavin Newsom boldly vetoed a bill that purported to increase accountability for charter schools in high-needs communities that receive funding from the Charter School Facility Grant Program. The bill’s labor sponsors, the California School Employees Association and Assemblymember Mia Bonta claimed that this bill “will safeguard hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from wasteful and improper spending by charter schools.”
Despite passing through the Democratic party’s supermajority in both the Assembly and Senate, Gov. Newsom thoughtfully centered the needs of students and families in historically underserved communities over party politics and labor endorsements, and vetoed this bill, noting in his veto message of Assembly Bill 1604 that “provisions could have unintended consequences, including increasing facilities costs or limiting financial options for charter schools.”
Unlike school districts, charter schools cannot pass general obligation bonds to finance their facilities. Instead, charter schools that serve a majority low-income student population can access funding through the Charter School Facility Grant Program to invest in facilities in the communities they serve and secure necessary financing to modernize classrooms and make campus safety improvements. Assemblymember Bonta’s bill would have increased their facilities costs and limited their long-term financing capacity — and prevented students from having access to safe and equitable facilities. This was her second failed attempt at legislation against the charter school facilities program alongside her partners at CSEA (AB 2484 in 2022 was a similar bill that died in Senate Appropriations).
Under the current system, thoughtfully and thoroughly managed by the state treasury, charter schools can borrow money through the bond market for their facilities. The report from a 2022 audit of the Charter School Facility Grant Program noted the positive effect of the existing bond program and that the programs are “generally achieving their purpose of increasing charter schools’ access to facility funding” and did not find any improper use of the program. However, Bonta wanted to increase accountability and recoup public facilities funding in the event a charter school were to close.
Had this bill passed, charter schools would have faced the unfair burden of increased borrowing rates for facilities in high-needs communities, or it could have even made access to financing untenable. In Oakland specifically, the district Bonta represents, charter schools, unfortunately, do not have access to high-quality, safe and equitable facilities, and require access to these bonds for long-term community investment. Oakland’s charters already face barriers, often political, to getting Proposition 39 offers (a state law requiring districts to allow charters to share space in their unused facilities or classrooms) or funding under Proposition 51 to improve existing facilities (a grant program that allows for bond-funded improvements at available district facilities for charter schools).
Newsom’s veto should signal to Bonta and her labor partners that they should focus on more pressing educational issues that public school families care about, like increasing literacy rates, aligning investments in community school programming, improving public and school safety, and ensuring college readiness and career pathway completion.
It is not surprising that about half of the students in East Oakland, from the Fruitvale to the San Leandro border, choose charter schools. Over the last three years, Oakland’s charter high schools have had college readiness A-G completion rates of 67% for African American and Latino students, compared with 34% at district high schools. Bonta is well aware of this, given her previous role as CEO of the Oakland Promise, an organization that provides college scholarships to Oakland Unified and charter school graduates. Many in the Oakland community were confused as to why she was attacking charter schools and their access to facilities financing given the positive college readiness rates that charter high schools have shifted locally.
Many charter schools in Oakland exist to counter the systemic challenges of educational redlining — as children attending schools in the affluent hills receive a dramatically different educational experience and set of outcomes than children in the flatlands — and to give students and families quality public school options. A third of Oakland’s families exercise this choice and choose charter schools for their children. According to Oakland Enrolls, a nonprofit that helps families choose the best school for their child, in each of the last three years, there have been an average of 8,000 unique student applications to charter schools in Oakland.
The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the educational inequities that existed before the pandemic. Assemblymember Bonta’s repeated attempts to pass legislation that could harm charter schools are out of touch with the needs of students and families in Oakland and of high needs communities across California. However, the governor’s strong veto of AB 1604 is a welcome sign that he is committed to educational equity and to providing all students with access to high-quality educational opportunities, and recognizes that charter schools are a vital part of the educational landscape in California.
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Rich Harrison is CEO of Lighthouse Community Public Schools, which operates two K-12 public charter schools serving more than 1,600 students in East Oakland.
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 on Oct. 18 to include comments from districts and on Oct. 25 to describe kindergarten absentee data as including students enrolled in transitional kindergarten.
In the second year fully back in school after remote learning, California school districts made negligible progress overall in reversing the steep declines in test scores that have lingered since Covid struck in 2020.
There was a slight improvement in math while English language arts declined a smidgeon, and the wide proficiency gap between Black and Latino students and whites and Asians showed little change.
Only 34.6% of students met or exceeded standards on the Smarter Balanced math test in 2023, which is 1.2 percentage points higher than a year ago. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, 39.8% of all students were at grade level. Only 16.9% of Black students, 22.7% of Latino students, and 9.9% of English learners were at grade level in 2023.
Year-over-year scores in English language arts dropped less than 1 percentage point to 46.7% for students meeting or exceeding standards in 2023; in 2019, it was 51.7%. The large proficiency gaps between Black and Hispanic students compared with Asian and white students showed little change. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, about 4 in 10 students in the state and 3 out of 4 Asian students, the highest-scoring student group, were at grade level in English language arts.
Among the state’s nearly 1,000 districts, small districts tended to show more gains, results show.
Smarter Balanced tests are given to students in grades three to eight and grade 11.
English language arts scores dropped slightly in every grade except 11th and third grades, which showed slight growth. The 0.8% percentage point increase in third grade may reflect that students had two years of face-to-face instruction, which is critical for learning how to read. It could also reflect concerted efforts to focus on and change reading instruction to phonics-focused curriculums in districts like Long Beach, up 4.1 points over 2022 for all third graders, and Palo Alto, where reading scores for low-income Latino students increased 47 percentage points above pre-pandemic levels.
Fewer English learners met or exceeded standards in English language arts this year. In 2023, 10.9% of English learners met or exceeded the standard for English language arts, down from 12.5% in 2022. Among students who were ever English learners, including those who are now proficient, 35.7% met or exceeded the standard in English language arts, down from 36.5% in 2022.
In math, English learners were about the same as last year, with 9.9% meeting or exceeding the standard. Among those who were ever English learners, including those who are now proficient, 24.2% met or exceeded the standard, up from 23.4% in 2021-22.
A slightly larger share of English learners achieved a proficient score this year on the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC): 16.5%. Students who speak a language other than English at home are required to take the ELPAC every year until they are proficient in English.
Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, strategic adviser to Californians Together, an organization that advocates for English learners, said the fact that a higher percentage of English learners are not achieving proficiency each year shows that California needs to invest more in training teachers in how to help students improve their English language skills, especially within other classes.
“That’s when we see a big bump in students’ language proficiency — when they’re using language to learn about something, when their language development is taught while they’re learning science, while they’re learning social studies, while they’re doing art,” Spiegel-Coleman said. “There’s been no major funding and no major effort to do this kind of work. It’s time now.”
Shifting demographics
In its news release, the California Department of Education stressed that over the past year, the proportion of low-income students statewide rose from 60% to 63% of all students and the increase in homeless students who took the test by 2,000 to 94,000, the equivalent of the third-largest district in California.
Given “the relationship between student advantage and achievement, California’s statewide scores are particularly promising as the proportion of high-need students has also increased in California schools,” the department said.
Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust–West, an advocacy organization, viewed the results differently.“Seeing only slight improvements in already alarmingly low levels of student achievement is cause for concern, not celebration. In recent years, as in this year’s results, the state’s progress on student outcomes in English and math has been marginal at best. In fact, at no point in the past 9 years have we seen more than 1 out of 5 Black students at grade level in math.
“This trend is an indictment not of the efforts of California’s K-12 students but of the efforts and choices of the state’s adult decision-makers,” he said in a statement.
The latest test results, he said, “are as unsurprising as they are disappointing. What they mean is that California’s most disadvantaged students are falling further and further behind their more affluent counterparts, in large part because the state failed to assure the delivery of remote instruction to their communities during the pandemic and compounded that failure by failing to assure meaningful remediation once schools reopened.”
The latest test statewide results will disappoint others who had hoped to appreciably reclaim some of the lost academic ground. That has not happened in California or in neighboring states that also give the Smarter Balanced assessment. In Oregon, English language arts scores also fell less than 1 percentage point to 43% proficient, and math scores increased less than point to 31.6%. In Washington, it was the same story: English language arts scores were flat at 48.8% while math scores rose 1.8 percentage points to 40.8%.
A handful of states reached pre-pandemic levels on their state tests. They include Iowa and Mississippi in both reading and math, and Tennessee, which created a statewide tutoring program in reading, according to the COVID-19 School Data Hub, an effort led by Brown University economics professor Emily Oster.
Before Covid struck, changes in California’s test scores occurred slowly, a percentage point or two annually, said Heather Hough, executive director of PACE, a Stanford-based education research organization. “It took years of dedicated effort, with investments in education and the workforce, with steady increases in achievement over time, and then we had this huge drop. We can’t afford another 10- to 20-year period of slow incremental change, especially when what we know we’re facing is huge inequities in student achievement,” she said. “We have to keep that intensity that we have not fixed this problem, despite investments and despite good intentions.”
Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district with 429,000 students, is representative of where most districts are. It has seen widespread improvement in math scores across most grade levels, with 30.5% of students meeting or exceeding state standards. Its English language arts scores have been a “mixed bag,” said district Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at Tuesday’s board meeting. Forty-one percent of students in the district met or exceeded standards in English language arts – a drop of less than point from the past year.
Carvalho said he was pleased to see third- and fourth-grade English language arts scores moving in the “right direction” — but stressed the need for improvement among upper elementary grades and middle schools. The district has found small-group instruction and “high dosage tutoring” to be critical, and hopeschanges to the district’s Primary Promise program will help, he said.
Infusion of funding
California school districts received record levels of one-time and ongoing funding since the start of Covid and had wide discretion on how to use it. This includes the last $12.5 billion in federal pandemic relief, which districts must spend by next September. At least 20% must be spent on learning recovery.
Some districts, mainly small ones, saw double-digit gains in 2023. Escondido Union High School District in San Diego County, with 7,000 students, saw its English language arts proficiency rise from 43.5% to 53.7%. The 800-student Wheatland Union High School District in Yuba County raised its proficiency level in English language arts by 21.5 percentage points, to 60%; its math scores rose 13.3 percentage points to nearly the state average for meeting state standards. Math scores in Healdsburg Unified in Sonoma County, with 1,200 students, rose 11.9 percentage points to 39.3% at grade level.
But in most districts, record student absences and staff shortages — not only among STEM and special education teachers but also vacant positions for aides and counselors and unfilled jobs for substitute teachers — undermine strategies for recovery. And the problems linger.
Stubbornly high chronic absences
Along with test scores, the state released chronic absenteeism data on Wednesday showing nearly a quarter of all students chronically absent in 2023, double the 12.1% rate in 2019.
While the 2023 chronic absenteeism rate is high, it’s a drop from 2022, which saw an unprecedented high rate of nearly a third. Students are counted as chronically absent for missing 10% or more of school days. The rates of the state’s minority groups and most vulnerable students remain disproportionately high: 34.6% for students with disabilities, 40.6% for homeless youths and 28.1% for English learners.
“The staffing has been a huge struggle for us, but so has absenteeism,” said Rick Miller, chief executive officer of the CORE districts, a school improvement organization that works with eight urban districts, including Los Angeles, Long Beach, Fresno and Sacramento City. “There was the notion that kids go to school every day. The pandemic changed that. And there’s a mindset we’re working through that you don’t need to be in school every day. You be there when you can.”
That appears to be the case in kindergarten, where the chronic absenteeism rate was 40.4% in 2021-22 and 36.3% in 2022-23, compared with 15.6% in 2018-19. Unlike many states, California includes excused absences in its chronic absentee rate calculations. The kindergarten data includes students enrolled in transitional kindergarten, a program for 4-year-olds whose 5th birthday will fall between Sept. 2 and April 2.
Other factors are working against student learning, PACE’s Hough said. At the same time, teachers need to accelerate learning, they are backfilling the needs of absent students. Some students come to school with mental health issues or lack socialization. Political disputes at school board meetings are diverting attention from districts’ learning priorities.
“The basic work of educating kids and running school districts has gotten a lot more complicated,” she said.
Amy Slavensky, interim deputy superintendent of San Juan Unified, agreed. “When you’re in schools every day, or nearly every day like we are, we can see the direct impact of that on our students,” she said. “It’s just not the same as it was before. So it’s going to take time.”
San Juan Unified, in Sacramento County, has sharply increased training for teachers, added intervention teachers and improved attendance at its schools, but its students’ test scores still have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.
Nearly 42% of the 49,000 students met or exceeded state standards in English language arts in 2023, down about 1 percentage point from 2022. Math scores were stagnant with 29.6% meeting or exceeding state standards, down 7.5 percentage points from 2019.
The district has used multiple tactics to increase achievement, including hiring intervention teachers and expanding training for teachers in reading and math. The district is training grade-level cohorts of teachers using some of the latest research to strengthen their strategies around reading instruction, Slavensky said. The district is seeing gains in kindergarten and first grade at Dyer-Kelly Elementary School, which has been focusing intensely on early literacy, she said.
“Anytime you implement a new change initiative, it takes four or five years to really see the impact of that, and especially on a summative assessment like CAASPP,” Slavensky said.
To increase math scores, the district is also adding math sections in middle and high school master schedules to reduce class sizes so teachers can offer deeper instruction and differentiated instruction, Slavensky said.
But pulling dozens of teachers out of their classrooms for training isn’t always possible during a teacher shortage, said Superintendent Melissa Bassanelli. Training schedules often fall apart when there aren’t enough teachers to fill the classrooms.
Garden Grove Unified in Orange County, with 79% low-income students and 94% students of color, has scored well above state averages on Smarter Balanced tests and ranks highest among the CORE districts, but saw its math scores fall 7.5 percentage points from pre-pandemic 2019. In 2023, it clawed back half of the difference, though it wasn’t easy, Superintendent Gabriela Mafi said. Many families still struggled financially; resurgent Covid kept students at home; and a lack of subs strained schools.
But Garden Grove, a highly centralized district, stayed true to its system of deploying teacher coaches to schools and encouraging conversations around math concepts in elementary grades. It is using extended learning time at Boys and Girls Clubs and summer programs for academic interventions and supports, Mafi said. “We haven’t quite rebounded to our pre-Covid, but we’re getting close,” she said.
Perhaps no district high-achieving in math took a bigger hit to its Smarter Balanced scores than Rocketship Public Schools, a network with 13 K-5 Title I charter schools in the Bay Area. In 2018-19, 60% of students were at or above standard. By 2021-22, the proficiency rate, while still above the state average, had fallen to 40%. In 2023, overall scores increased by 2 percentage points with variations among schools.
Recovery will entail a multipronged, multiyear strategy, said Danny Echeverry, Rocketship’s Bay Area director of schools. It started with using its community schools funding to hire a Care Corps worker, akin to a social worker, at each site to help families who experienced housing and food insecurity during Covid. “We’ve seen ourselves as a hub of connecting at-risk families with social services in the community,” he said. Chronic absenteeism fell 10 percentage points, and attendance increased 7 percentage points in 2022-23.
Students in kindergarten, first grade or second grade during the pandemic had foundational skill gaps that had to be filled before students could handle grade-level content and move to proficiency on state tests, Etcheverry said. The Rocketship model builds in flex time so that teachers can provide one-on-one interventions.
Scores increased 2 percentage points overall on the 2023 math test, with variations among schools from a decline of 7.4 percentage points to a gain of 15.8 percentage points. Rocketship Los Sueños in San Jose, which piloted the Eureka Math curriculum, gained 5.4 percentage points in 2023, leading to a decision to adopt it in all Bay Area schools.
“We’re building traction, and we have no reason to believe that we’re not going to continue that momentum and see greater gains this year,” Etcheverry said.
Twin Rivers Unified, in Sacramento, made incremental gains this year but still has a long way to go before catching up to 2019 scores. More than 80% of the students are from low-income families.
“Our scores might be below the state average, but our growth is ahead in both English and math,” said Lori Grace, associate superintendent of school leadership.
In 2023, 31.9% of its students met or exceeded state standards in English language arts, up 0.5 points from 2022. In math, 22.7% of the district’s students met or exceeded state standards, an increase of 2.7 points. In 2019, 37% of students were proficient in English language arts and 29% in math.
To combat pandemic-related learning loss, the district added a multitiered system of support at schools, a framework that gives targeted support to struggling students, Grace said. To improve literacy skills, the district began a reading intervention program focusing on the science of reading for kindergarten throughthird grade. The district also tapped its best teachers to offer coaching on the subject to fourth through sixth grade teachers.
Central Valley strategies
Most students in Fresno Unified, the state’s third-largest school district with over 70,000 students, are not meeting standards. Last year, 33.2% of Fresno Unified students met or exceeded English language arts standards, a 1 percentage point gain from a year ago. In math, 23.3% met or exceeded state standards, a 2.5 point increase.
“We are definitely not satisfied with our results,” said Zerina Hargrove, the Fresno Unified assistant superintendent of research, evaluation and assessment. “While we had many students grow in their achievement, we had just as many who slid backward, contributing to very little change overall.”
Fresno Unified plans to focus on ensuring that every child shows growth, specifically targeting the needs of historically underserved student groups, Hargrove said.
One way to do that is by evaluating the “shining stars,” the schools that made significant progress. For example, at Jefferson Elementary, 6.9% more students met or exceeded standards in English, and 15.6% more students met or exceeded math standards. At Bullard High School, 17.6% more students met or exceeded English standards; at Patiño School of Entrepreneurship, 27.5% more students met or exceeded math standards.
“We desire to learn from the schools that have made significant gains and dig deeper into the why of those who didn’t,” she said.
Fresno Unified’s neighbor, Clovis Unified, has some of the highest student achievement scores in the area.
With more than 40,000 students, 72.7% were at or above state standards for English language arts in 2019. By 2022, that percentage dropped to 66.2% and remained flat in 2023. In 2019, 58.7% of Clovis Unified’s students met or exceeded math standards, and in 2022, 49.3% did so. The nearly 2 percentage-point growth in math in 2023 puts the proficiency level at more than 51%.
Still, the numbers haven’t returned to their pre-pandemic proficiency levels.
“Some of our schools saw student achievement grow by anywhere from 15 to 22% at certain grade levels. We must now work together to replicate that level of achievement across every grade level and school in our district,” said Superintendent Corrine Folmer.
The pandemic’s impact persists, district spokesperson Kelly Avants said, citing continuing challenges to learning. They include, she said, “restoring classroom behavior expectations; re-developing the interpersonal relationships between students and between students and their teachers that equates to success in the classroom and facing the impact of decreases in attendance rates has on learning.”
EdSource reporters also contributed to this report: Diana Lambert, Lasherica Thornton, Mallika Seshadri and Zaidee Stavely.
“I was considering a master’s program through Cal Poly,” Monreal said. “But with the tuition increase, I might just consider getting a master’s degree anywhere else.”
For students like Monreal, who already manage student loans to take on college tuition costs, the 6% yearly tuition increases will have a profound impact on their education choices.
As an older sister to several high school-age siblings, Monreal said that she would encourage them to take into consideration these tuition increases when applying to colleges.
“I have younger siblings, and I think I would encourage them not to go to four-year college,” she said. “As a first-year, I would recommend any junior college so they can get some units under their belt at first, if the cost is increasing so much.”
Gabriela’s story gathered by California Student Journalism Corps member Arabel Meyer
credit: the Staff at CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency)
Merryl Goldberg knows nothing if not how to improvise.The 64-year-old could make music before she could walk. She started beating out rhythms on the bongos as a toddler and never stopped, eventually becoming a saxophonist who toured for 13 years with Boston’s Klezmer Conservatory Band.
During her time on the road, she also moonlighted as a spy of sorts. At 26, she traveled to Russia in 1985 to meet with dissident musicians and hoodwinked the KGB by encrypting secrets in music. Along with her saxophone and sheet music, she packed stacks of spiral-bound notebooks crammed with handwritten notations embedded with hidden information.
“I came up with a code where different notes equal different letters and when it came to numbers, I would just correlate the numbers to notes in the scale and memorize the tune,” said Goldberg, an arts advocate and veteran music and arts professor at Cal State San Marcos. “When we got into the Soviet Union, they searched everything. With my music, they opened it up and there were some real tunes in there. If you’re not a musician, you wouldn’t know what’s what. They went page by page through everything — and then they handed it back.”
This kind of audacious inventiveness has become her calling card, colleagues say. She is the sort of woman who makes things happen, in and out of the classroom.
She “brings the best of creativity and artistic excellence into her approach to training future educators. Her enthusiasm for teaching and being a lifelong learner is contagious,” said Tom DeCaigny, former executive director of Create CA, an arts advocacy group. “She infuses humor and a knack for storytelling with intellectual rigor resulting in a dynamic classroom.”
credit: Albert Rascon
Merryl Goldberg’s class at CSU San Marcos
Her cloak-and-dagger drama further reinforced her profound belief in the transformative power of the arts. She has long been a fierce champion for the arts as part of a comprehensive education.
“What happened in the big No Child Left Behind push (2001) is that they began only testing for math and reading to the detriment of all the other subjects, which is just horrible,” Goldberg said. “Before that, the disciplines were not so separate, and education was far more comprehensive. In fact, music education was brought on board because the Founding Fathers wanted people to be able to sing hymns. Visual art started because of the Industrial Revolution, they needed people who could draw.”
Teaching the whole individual, integrating arts and social-emotional learning with academic rigor, is her mission. Indeed, in one of her signature courses, Learning Through the Arts, aspiring teachers learn how to teach reading, math, science and social studies through music, dance, theater, visual and media arts.
“There’s been such a big myth about the arts as fluff. They’re not. Art changes lives,” Goldberg said. “There is more to learning than facts. You can look up facts. You can’t look up how to be creative, how to improvise, how to innovate. You have to cultivate those skills over time, and the arts teach you that.”
Raised in Boston in a music-obsessed family, Goldberg is known for her chutzpah and her willingness to get creative to solve problems, such as the lack of arts educators in the state just as Proposition 28, the state’s groundbreaking 2022 arts initiative, ramps up. That’s why she created a new undergraduate pathway for arts teachers at Cal State San Marcos.
“Merryl Goldberg has a grand vision,” said Alison Yoshimoto-Towery, executive director of the UC/CSU Collaborative for Neuroscience, Diversity, and Learning. “Joy is an integral part to learning, and Merryl embodies this exuberance in her work with teachers, educators, and artists. Her work demonstrates the power of using arts to accelerate acquisition of other content areas such as literacy and language for all students.”
Goldberg is that rare academic who can build bridges between departments and disciplines at a time when many scholars exist in a silo of their own scholarship.
“She’s been a mainstay in the arts education field in California for many years,” said Jessica Mele, former program officer specializing in arts education at the Hewlett Foundation, a charitable foundation. “Merryl’s track record and relationships with both the undergraduate programs and the teacher preparation programs were key in making the case. Rarely do these two departments at any given university talk to each other, let alone collaborate in this kind of way. These sets of relationships are rare and valuable, and make her work very impactful, drawing together education decision-makers, teacher trainers, and prospective teachers.”
While some may associate the arts with an air of elitism, Goldberg is down-to-earth, quick to smile and unassuming, describing herself as a “big goofball.” Oh, and did we mention she’s a big Red Sox fan and also a boxer with a wicked left hook? As you might expect, when she gets in the ring, she finds the tempo in the pugilism.
“Merryl has so much going for her,” said Eric Engdahl, professor emeritus at CSU East Bay and past president of the California Council on Teacher Education. “I am impressed by the artful way in which she combines her high-level professional music skills and creativity so unassumingly with her passion for teaching. … I am also impressed with how humbly she is willing to learn from partners and collaborators. She asks questions from a genuine sense of curiosity and wonder.”
As it happens, her espionage was also rooted in her musical acumen. Goldberg developed a code that looked like musical notation, like melodies, to the untrained eye, when in reality it contained the names and addresses of the dissident musicians known as the Phantom Orchestra. The plan was to meet with, and jam with, these musicians and then smuggle out information about defectors to supporters in the West.
This proved to be more of an ordeal than Goldberg had anticipated. The KGB (today known as the FSB) remains notorious for the brutality of its intelligence gathering. She remembers being searched exhaustively, with agents going so far as to unwrap her Tampax. She and the other musicians were tailed, interrogated and often terrified, but the ruse seemed to work until one fateful day when the band found itself arrested, surrounded by soldiers toting machine guns.
“It was scary,” she said. “They locked us up and interrogated us, and they kept us hidden. They took away our passports. They didn’t let us call an embassy or family members or anything. In hindsight, they were probably debating whether they should lock us up for a long time. It was a close call.”
The band ended up being summarily deported. They later learned that some of the musicians they met with had been arrested and beaten.
“That was unimaginable to me,” she said. “It was very hard for me to cope with. The people we met were so heroic. They risked so much to fight for human rights.”
Goldberg later went back to graduate school at Harvard and majored in education, homing in specifically on the role of arts in learning and cultural exchange. She explores the topic in her book, “Arts Integration: Teaching Subject Matter Through the Arts in Multicultural Settings.”
The Soviet skullduggery also opened her eyes to the connection between musical notation and all other forms of code, including high-tech coding. To create her code, Goldberg assigned the notes in the chromatic scale, a 12-tone scale that includes semi-tones (sharps and flats), to the letters of the alphabet.
One takeaway for her is that while the relationship between musical education and math achievement has been fairly well established, far too few music students recognize the connection between the complex patterns inherent to both music composition and computer programming and the employment opportunities it may afford, particularly in the booming cybersecurity sector.
Goldberg is also a staunch champion of arts equity, seeing the arts as a vital connection to our shared humanity and not just an extra enjoyed by the privileged.
Most of her students at CSU San Marcos are the first in their families to go to college. Many have grown up lacking basics like food. They often juggle long hours at work with school just to make ends meet, all to pursue the enlightenment promised by the arts. She sees this enrichment as a basic right, part of the bedrock of education, alongside literacy and numeracy.
“The arts are an essential aspect of human development, that is, of knowing and being in the world,” as she puts it, “the arts are fundamental to education.”
Recently, board meetings have become a political arena for issues such as banned books, critical race theory and Pride Month. In June, while I was serving as superintendent of Glendale Unified School District I, recommended that the board adopt a resolution to designate June 2023 as LGBTQ+ Pride Month. But this exact resolution — adopted without issue for three consecutive years — now faced backlash from some in the community.
The controversy contributed to my decision to retire, although I had recently received a stellar evaluation from the board and signed a four-year extension to my contract. How do democratic values show up when angry individuals interrupt public meetings, invade private lives and threaten the safety of leaders? How can students advocate for themselves? How do educators and school administrators navigate public forums where our students’ opportunity to learn is at stake?
Students, listen up. Here is a final message from your superintendent: You have a voice and you have agency. Schools belong to you, so be thoughtful and organized, engage in civil discourse to improve conditions for learning and teaching. These words stand in sharp contrast to the lesson played out at the Glendale board meetings. What students observed was far from the civil discourse I encouraged Glendale students to practice.
Practice civil discourse and engage in dialogue, not just with those who are alike in their thinking, and always show courage. Finding common ground makes us a more united and powerful community.
To teachers: With the support of school leaders, site leaders, and superintendents — uphold our democratic values and prepare students to become responsible and productive citizens. Teachers deliver lessons about democracy that center on citizenship and encourage individuals to respect diverse perspectives and opinions.
However, what played out in Glendale reminds us that we must step back and ask what lessons we teach our children. How do they make sense of the rhetoric that adults model for them? What does this mean in a nation committed to respect for the individual’s rights and commitment to the common good?
To parents: Get involved and volunteer at your student’s school site for student well-being. Trust the teachers and administrators. The way you build trust is by building a relationship. Relational capital is the prerequisite or foundation for building trust within the school community and beyond.
Relationships established among the district’s stakeholders stem from a strong sense of belonging and a highly developed cooperation capacity. Trust is earned through the display of relational and interpersonal skills. Meaningful engagement with stakeholders requires the exchange of lived experiences to address challenges by generating solutions and building common ground.
For fellow superintendents who had similar experiences with their boards, I emphasize the following priorities:
Ensure a positive, collaborative and productive relationship with the board built on trust and communication.
Earn public trust, welcome community support and honor student voice.
Build positive and productive relationships with political and community leaders, parents and business organizations.
Celebrate the community and our diversity, culture, traditions, history and expectations.
Our kids are watching! What lessons will they learn? Is there a place where we can find common ground, model respectful discourse and promote the common good? There are at least two sides to any debate. Let us cherish our freedoms and those differences of opinion. This is what makes our society strong and preserves trust in public education.
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Vivian Ekchian served as the superintendent of Glendale Unified School District and was named Los Angeles County Superintendent of the Year for 2022-23. She has an Ed.D. from USC Rossier. Maria Ott, USC Rossier professor of clinical education and an expert on school administration, contributed to this commentary.
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.
Nearly 100 parents, former students and educators filled the Sept. 20 Clovis Unified school board meeting to voice their opinions on the prospect of a parental notification policy.
Credit: Lasherica Thornton / EdSource
Recent Clovis Unified school board meetings have been filled with posters bearing contrasting messages. “Support parental notification in schools. Stop keeping secrets from parents” as well as “Stop forced outing.”
With those starkly different messages in the background, nearly 100 people spoke at the Sept. 20 board meeting, joining a debate that’s sweeping the state: parents’ right to know how their children identify at school versus students’ right to privacy about gender identity and expression.
The contentious discourse came to Clovis Unified not because of a proposed school board policy — as has been the case in other school districts, including Chino, Temecula, Anderson Union High, Murrieta Valley and Rocklin — but because of a Student Site Plan, an optional form that, some say, could undermine students’ right to privacy by outing them to their parents. The district says it uses the form to gauge students’ needs for access to facilities such as restrooms and locker rooms.
Under a 10-year-old law known as Assembly Bill 1266, students in California have the right to access school facilities that are consistent with their gender identity, regardless of what’s listed on their school record.
The district spokesperson said that while the form could help facilitate a conversation with parents, students can opt out of completing it.
“While there is no hard and fast ‘yes’ or ‘no’,” about whether parents must be notified for students to access facilities aligned with their gender identity, said Kelly Avants, spokesperson for the district, “in general, we would work with the student about parental notification.”
Internal Clovis Unified guidance for administration details notifying parents if students want to access a facility aligned with their gender identity, but officials would not deny them access because of AB 1266.
“Access will be provided while informing those with educational rights (typically parents/guardians for minors),” according to the district guidance documents.
“They’re notified whether or not the SSP (Student Site Plan) is in place,” said Drew Harbaugh, chapter president for PFLAG Fresno, an organization that supports and advocates for LGBTQ+ people and their families, including many Clovis Unified parents.
What’s on the Student Site Plan form?
The Student Site Plan asks students for their legal and chosen names, pronouns, gender assigned at birth, gender identity and gender expression.
Students provide information on their programs and activities and indicate whether they want to access restrooms and locker rooms by their gender at birth, gender identity or a gender-neutral space, such as the nurse’s office.
Parents or guardians must consent to or participate in completing the form.
“The SSP is our district’s process by which a student and parent have the opportunity to sit down with school staff and arrive at a plan to support the student,” the guidance documents say.
Though the process for facility usage has changed over time to meet state laws and requirements, the Student Site Plan was first established in the school district last school year, Avants said. According to the district’s internal document, the form replaced the Gender Acknowledgement Plan, which had involved parents, but only at the student’s discretion.
Clovis Unified, Avants said, created the form in an attempt to address the “complexities of meeting the unique needs of individual students and families.”
What’s the process for accessing facilities if students do not complete the form?
For students who want to access different facilities but do not want to complete the form, they’d inform the school, Avants said. Trained school staff and the student then discuss how to accomplish that.
Using a gender-neutral space doesn’t require parental notification. However, “parents must be informed,” district guidance says, if a student seeks the use of a facility that’s different from the gender assigned at the student’s birth or what’s listed on records. Such students are granted access in either event, the guidance states.
“The student is allowed access in accordance with AB 1266 and California Education Code, but not at the expense of or superseding parents’/guardians’ educational rights to be informed,” the district guidance states.
So, “the guidance still directs staff to out them,” even though students have the right to access their preferred facilities, Harbaugh said.
If telling their parents causes students to be concerned about their safety, the district guidance spells out how staff should report suspected child abuse to Child Protective Services — if evidence exists. While the guidance directs staff not to complete the Student Site Plan in that scenario, it instructs staff to offer the student a meeting with the school’s psychologists or safety team about those concerns and to help the student communicate with their parents or guardians. The guidance also tells staff to attempt to facilitate the Student Site Plan with students and parents, if that’s appropriate.
Legislation isn’t ‘well-established’
AB 1266 is “silent” on practical application and implementation, Avants said, so the Student Site Plan attempts to balance facility access, parent rights to information, student needs and parental involvement.
“We do look at every child individually and work to make sure they’re supported and safe at school,” said Clovis Unified Superintendent Corrine Folmer, emphasizing the “balance” of the site plan.
“It’s not an area of law that’s well-established,” said Maiya Yang, Clovis Unified in-house counsel, adding that current lawsuits are proof of that.
Avants said other districts’ policies seem to be “a black-and-white treatment of a nuanced topic.”
And comparing Clovis Unified to those districts that have adopted parental notification policies is a “miscategorization of our process,” she said. “Our process is individualized, customized (and) looks at every child individually.”
Even though Clovis Unified hasn’t proposed a policy, people are already advocating for or against the prospect of one.
On one side of the issue, many Clovis Unified parents and other members of the school community urged the school board to adopt a parental notification policy to involve parents in the decision-making of their children’s education and to provide them access to all information that affects student well-being.
“My rights matter,” said Ashley Williams, parent of two Clovis Unified students. “I’m a parent, and my rights to my children trump people’s concerns” about possible abuse by parents and self-harm of students who are outed.
Many other parents, former students and educators say the school district should allow students to come out in their own way, when they’re ready, while protecting students who don’t feel safe to do so.
“While I value the parent-child relationship and would hope children feel safe to share this part of themselves with their parents, it remains a reality that that is not the case for many CUSD students,” said Clovis Unified teacher Laramie Woolsey.
Woolsey said many of her students told her about their sexuality and gender identity, rather than their parents.
“Many of these students struggled with suicidal thoughts because they imagined that death would be easier than being someone other than who their parents wanted them to be,” Woolsey said. “Why did these students come to me and not to their parents? Because they knew I was a safe person to talk to who wouldn’t judge them, invalidate them or otherwise harm them.”
“ I earned their trust.”
In Clovis, there is no policy and won’t be one anytime soon
At a Sept. 13 meeting, where two dozen people also spoke and the Sept. 20 meeting, neither the site plan form nor a proposed policy was on the agenda, so board members could not address community members on the topic.
But Clovis Unified School District and its board do not and will not have a policy until there is legal clarity, Avants said.
“They (the school board members) have said, publicly several times, they have no interest in putting on their agenda a policy that is under legal challenge,” Avants said. “We’ll visit this when there’s more legal clarity.”
Concerned community members, such as Harbaugh, say that the district’s insistence that the Student Site Plan is not a board policy makes it impossible to address the subject.
“By not making it a policy, they take away any options we have for recourse,” Harbaugh said. “But if they’re still putting it in place regarding these students … whether or not they’re calling it a policy, they’re implementing it as a policy.”
Because legislation is developing and evolving, Yang, the district’s general counsel, said it will take several years for local, state and federal courts to give school districts guidance on handling situations where the rights of students and parents conflict.
“Unfortunately, for school districts like us that are trying to navigate this very important issue,” Yang said, “we don’t have a lot of guidance.”
California State University’s four-year graduation rates remain flat for the 23-campus system just two years before the end of a 10-year deadline to dramatically improve them.
The system announced Monday during its Graduation Initiative 2025 symposium in San Diego that rates remain unchanged from last year for first-time students. Preliminary data shows the four-year graduation rate remains unchanged from last year at 35%. The system’s 2025 goal is 40%. The six-year graduation rate for first-time students also remains the same as last year at 62%. The 2025 goal is 70%.
Graduation rates for transfers also remain flat this year, although the two-year transfer rate increased by 1 percentage point from last year to 41%. The 2025 two-year transfer goal is 45%. However, four-year transfer rates slightly decreased from 80% last year to 79% this year. The 2025 four-year transfer goal is 85%.
Despite the stall, Cal State has doubled its four-year graduation rates from 19%, when the 2025 graduation initiative was created in 2015. And since 2016, the CSU has contributed to an additional 150,000 bachelor’s degrees earned.
“We have no shortages of challenges ahead,” CSU Chancellor Mildred Garcia said during the symposium. “Persistent opportunity gaps continue to shortchange our students and our state. There is a greater need now, more than ever, to expand access and affordability, to proactively recruit and serve students of all ages and stages. Not only to elevate lives but to power California’s economic and social vitality.”
However, graduation equity gaps persist throughout the system. The gap between Black, Latino and Native American students and their peers increased by 1 point this year to a 13% difference. The graduation rate for Black students is at 47%. And the socioeconomic gap in graduation rates between low-income and higher-income students increased to 12%, said Jeff Gold, assistant vice chancellor for student success in the chancellor’s office.
“Graduation rates, although they are at all-time highs, have stagnated,” Gold said, adding that the system has been stuck at a 62% six-year graduation rate since 2020.
Jennifer Baszile, Cal State’s associate vice chancellor of student success and inclusive excellence, said the system is proud of its work to increase rates since 2015, but “we still know there is more work ahead.”
“Across the country, institutions have seen a growth in equity gaps,” Baszile said, adding that much of that is due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the pressure on students to work or take care of their families.
But the chancellor’s office is also working on strategies to understand and intervene where it can to improve the college experience for low-income and students of color, she said. For example, former interim Chancellor Jolene Koester assembled a strategic workgroup on Black student success to study trends and improve education for that group of students.
Cal State will release more data, including graduation rates by campus and race, over the next several weeks.
“While the CSU’s collective focus on our ambitious goals has resulted in graduation rates at or near all-time highs, there is still much to accomplish in the coming years,” Chancellor Garcia said. “We will boldly re-imagine our work to remove barriers and close equity gaps for our historically marginalized students — America’s new majority — as we continue to serve as the nation’s most powerful driver of socioeconomic mobility.”
San Diego State University’s Equitable Access textbook program costs students $19.75 per credit, but some opt for cheaper textbooks outside of this program.
One student who opted out is Kimberly Watkinson, leading her to search for textbooks on her own.
“I do it through my own means. I buy them on Chegg or Amazon, or sometimes I look for students who have the same class as me, and maybe they can sell me their books,” she said.
Some of her professors offer the class materials for free, through PDFs and other alternatives.
“There are some classes, mostly in childhood development, where we only look at articles and they are usually free and posted on Canvas. Or they use books that are from friends of them,” Watkinson said.
She added that collaborating with classmates is a good way to lower individual costs.
“I’ve had classes where I even share a book with another person to do the assignments because it’s so expensive that I cannot afford it,” Watkinson said.
While her textbook plans are constantly shifting and the costs are demanding, they haven’t had a bearing on her academic ambitions.
“I learn about how much the books cost when I am in the class because there’s some professors who post how much they are,” Watkinson said. “But I haven’t dropped out because I find my ways around and maybe share with another person, buy it somewhere else, or rent it.”
Kimberly’s story gathered by California Student Journalism Corps member Noah Lyons.
Justice Spears is a senior at Sacramento Charter High School, who is enrolled in the Panther Pipeline Program.
Credit: Arrows Digital / St. HOPE Public Schools
College enrollment was declining even before the pandemic. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, “the overall college enrollment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds decreased from 41% in 2010 to 38% in 2021.” In 2021, the college enrollment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds was highest for Asian students (60%) compared to 37% for Black students and 33% for Hispanic students.
One important way to increase college attendance is through dual enrollment programs in which high school students take college classes and receive college credit. According to a recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California, participation in dual enrollment programs is associated with higher high school completion, college readiness and higher academic achievement.
While the benefits of dual enrollment are clear, not all students have the bandwidth to take college classes on top of their high school coursework. In order to reduce barriers and increase access to college-level courses, we have taken dual enrollment one step further at St. HOPE Public Schools. Our Panther Pipeline program brings the college experience to our high school campus. Through our partnership with the Los Rios Community College District, college professors come to Sacramento Charter High School and teach our juniors and seniors in person. Scholars enrolled in the Panther Pipeline program take rigorous college courses and receive both high school and college credit.
This program is unique because our scholars do not have to leave our high school campus to take college courses. Two days a week, college professors come to Sac High to teach in person, and the other three days, scholars complete their college work in class with their Sac High instructional aide. By bringing college to our scholars and allowing them to receive both high and college credit we are making dual enrollment more accessible and an option for scholars who may not otherwise be able to take high school and college classes at the same time.
The benefits of bringing college courses to our scholars are far-reaching. Our student population is predominantly low-income minority students, and many of our scholars are the first in their families to go to college. By exposing them to college before they need to apply in fall of their senior year, we hope to spark their interest in pursuing higher education and expand their worldview of what opportunities are available in college. Providing our upperclassmen with multiple college course offerings while they are in high school helps them home in on what major they may want to pursue in college as well as think about what career might be the best fit for them.
Dual enrollment programs provide students with an opportunity to graduate from high school with college credits, which helps them save money on college tuition by reducing the number of college classes they need to graduate. High school juniors enrolled in our dual enrollment program could potentially take four college courses before they graduate from high school, saving them time and money while in college.
Bringing college classes to our high school campus also helps reduce transportation barriers for students who may not be able to travel to a college campus. Many of our scholars have after-school commitments — jobs, sports, and responsibilities at home — that might prevent them from taking courses at a college campus, but when they are part of their high school day, those barriers are removed.
An important part of our dual enrollment program is that it provides students with a multitiered system of support. We have high school teachers who help students navigate and manage their college coursework, and students have access to the Los Rios College campuses, facilities and tutoring resources. This is critical for preparing students for university-level expectations and ensuring they have the study skills to succeed in college.
As we collectively work on increasing access to college and career pathways, I encourage high schools around the state to offer dual enrollment programs that provide students with both high school and college credit. Taking college courses in addition to high school classes can be daunting, but combining college and high school credit is much more doable for many students, especially those we are trying to get into the college pipeline.
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Lisa Ruda is superintendent of St. HOPE Public Schools, a tuition-free, college prep public charter school network in Sacramento.
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.
