The Los Angeles Unified School District school board passed a resolution to support parent employees.
The district will gather data to help understand employees’ needs and what it will take to fulfill them.
This resolution is just the beginning — and a more detailed plan is expected in November.
The Los Angeles Unified School District’s school board unanimously approved at Tuesday’s meeting a resolution to support employees who are parents.
Currently, many LAUSD employees fail to qualify for California’s state-paid family leave, according to the resolution. During public comments at Tuesday’s meeting, several teachers and community members said they did not feel adequately supported by Los Angeles Unified when they had children.
“I’ve met countless educators, school staff members, who have had challenges with the whole parental package, with healthcare, with child care, with parental leave. And so this really, this resolution, really bore out of those stories and the opportunities to change L.A. Unified to be that employer of choice for parents,” said Ortiz Franklin, who introduced the resolution, alongside board members Karla Griego and Kelly Gonez.
“We have a big vision in this district for our kids to achieve at really high levels. And, we know that our staff needs to be well to be able to do that — and this is going to support them in their journey, to support our kids.”
The resolution — “Parental Package: LAUSD as an Equitable Employer of Choice for Thriving Families” — addresses various stages of parenthood, including family planning, pregnancy and parental leave and childcare.
It also aims to boost employee retention in a female-dominated field and make LAUSD a model for other districts across the nation.
Tuesday’s resolution is just the beginning of a longer process.
It calls for data collection on various factors, including employee demographics, the amount of time employees take off, the number of employees who have children enrolled in Los Angeles Unified’s early education programs, healthcare plan coverage and any financial impacts of providing over 12 weeks of family leave.
The district will also conduct a study to gauge employees’ interest in having children, family planning needs, access to LAUSD’s provided reproductive support, healthcare benefits, obstacles employees encounter in taking time off, information about childcare and the nature of employees’ current children’s education.
Based on their findings, the Los Angeles Unified School District will have to come up with a plan by November. And in the meantime, the district will be expected to work toward providing adequate lactation spaces, identify liaisons to support parent employees and find affordable childcare providers to consult on an as-needed basis.
“After the birth of my first daughter, I returned to the classroom happily, excited. I nursed my baby and during my unpaid lunch break, that was fine, until it wasn’t,” said Tanya Reyes, a veteran teacher with LAUSD, who created a support group within United Teachers Los Angeles, the district’s teacher’s union, to support other working moms. “After the disagreement with my administrator, I was told my daughter was a liability. My pay was docked. Not once. Not twice — but three times.”
“Mothers need paid leave — not sick time, not borrowed time. Paid leave,” Reyes added during public comment at Tuesday’s board meeting. “Families need policies that protect us, and those policies must be enforced.”
The start of the school year can be anxiety-producing. We get the anxiety. Believe us, we do. Between the three of us, we parent a kindergartner, a ninth grader and a freshman in college. We know how scary it is to feel like your child is falling behind in a game with life-shaping stakes. But, as this new school year gets started, we’re trying to worry less about our own kids and put our energy into a broader, collective educational enterprise.
To understand what that collective enterprise might look like, it helps to step back and think about the goals that motivate public education. Contemporary schools serve at least three crucial social goals: helping individuals flourish, sorting students into roles in our highly differentiated economy, and creating a broader sense of solidarity.
As we settle into our fall routines, we often focus on the first two goals at the expense of the third. Because we know that education shapes our children’s life chances, we want our kids to get into the advanced math class, make the honor roll, and claim the high-status educational positions that clear the way to high-status positions in the broader world. We start to see the whole educational system as a vast tournament, where students compete for access to learning opportunities that provide access to more advanced learning opportunities that, ultimately, open the way to elite positions in the adult world.
No wonder we’re all so stressed out. We’ve turned education into a zero-sum game and invested that game with high stakes. We once talked about education as a pathway to the middle class. But today, as educational debt loads rise and machine intelligences fuel job insecurity, that pathway feels like a tightrope without a net. And that’s just part of the story. In a meritocratic culture that sees educational success as a marker of worth, we feel like our children need to excel in order to prove they matter.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
In fact, America’s new favorite social studies teacher and high school football coach shows us how different schools can be. As a long-serving public school teacher, Tim Walz recognized the way sports can bring a community together and how school leaders can channel that community toward inclusion and belonging for all students. In the classroom, he developed learning experiences that challenged students to understand the recurring sources of conflict and genocide, helping them see connections between communities across the globe. As a politician, he resisted school choice policies that allow families to wall themselves off from one another and championed a vision of schools as places where everyone — regardless of their family income — can come together around a meal.
You don’t have to be a teacher, coach or policymaker to advance this vision.
Parents, you can choose to send your child to the most diverse public school available to them; leave the packed lunch at home and encourage your child to eat in the cafeteria; praise your child for encouraging a peer who is struggling to fit in; organize parents from throughout your school’s community to get involved; and advocate for policies that provide public schools with the resources they need to ensure that all kids thrive; and vote for leaders who will make those policies a reality.
This fall, as we post back-to-school photos to social media, we’d do well to remember — and celebrate — that school is the place where we learn how to play well with others. This key lesson in social solidarity requires a curriculum far more complicated than Calculus and more nuanced than AP Literature. School teaches us to see ourselves as individuals embedded in a complex set of relationships with others. It teaches us to respect those around us, to observe them with care and empathy in order to identify, and adjust to the intricacies of any given interaction.
Taking these lessons seriously opens us — and our children — up to a deep humility and a profound sense of responsibility. When we are aware of our connections to others, we can’t help but remember that each of the people we run into has an inner life every bit as rich as our own. That we are just one of 8 billion other humans — and countless other organisms — on this planet, each of which shares the same will to survive.
This sense of solidarity is a badly needed antidote to the preening and divisive rhetoric that will dominate the news this election season. Solidarity allows us to step back and gain some perspective on our grievances, reminding us to consider our own wants in light of the wants and needs of others.
If we don’t want the divisiveness that defines our politics to define our society, we need to work together to turn away from educational competition and build schools that create solidarity.
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Emily K. Penner, Ph.D., is associate professor of education in the school of education at the University of California, Irvine.Her research focuses on K-12 education policy and considers the ways that districts, schools, teachers and families contribute to and ameliorate educational inequality.
Thurston Domina is associate dean for academic affairs and director of graduate studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Education.
Andrew Penner is a professor in the sociology department at the University of California, Irvine and director of the Center for Administrative Data Analysis.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. We welcome guest commentaries with diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Every year, by May 15, the governor has to revise his proposed budget, and this is when the budget season really kicks off.
So, just as individuals are concerned about personal finances, retirements, the impacts of inflation, and uncertainty about government services, the state is facing those same sorts of uncertainties. And in this case, uncertainty really rolls downhill. There’s national uncertainty, which is causing state revenue uncertainty and budget uncertainty, which then impacts the state’s education budget decisions, that will then impact what school districts are facing as they head into adopting their budgets by the end of June.
So, we know that the revenue outlook for the current year that ends June 30 looks pretty good, so will that protect us?
I’d sort of hoped that they would, but the short answer is no, and that’s because of some nuances in how Prop 98 works. A lot of those extra revenues that have come in are actually going to count against last year, the 2023–24 fiscal year. And in that year, the Legislature actually suspended the constitutional guarantee for a year. So even though there are extra revenues, none of those revenues will go to schools.
As we look to the future, to the 2025–26 school year, the forecasts are looking much more pessimistic. The Legislative Analyst’s Office just came out with a projection of revenues for next year being down around $8 billion. That would trickle down to schools getting about $3.5 billion less compared to what their current programs receive.
I would expect schools to get the program that’s in place for the current year, plus a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), which is currently expected to be about 2.3%. That probably seems pretty low to most folks, especially given some of the costs districts might face—salary increases that have already happened due to inflation, the rising costs teachers are facing, plus pensions and other obligations. So, the costs districts are facing may be going up more than the 2.3% COLA they’re getting.
Your tax dollars could soon lift a rainbow of religious educators — from Christian academies to pro-Palestinian classrooms — as the U.S. Supreme Court teeters on forcing states to aid sectarian schools.
In oral arguments last month, the high court’s conservatives voiced eagerness to reverse an Oklahoma ruling that blocked public funding for a virtual charter school infused with Catholic teachings, an online scheme designed by the Tulsa diocese.
Oklahoma’s far-from-woke Supreme Court agreed with the state attorney general in Drummond v. Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board that taxpayer funding for religious web-based classes would violate America’s sacred separation of church and state. This key element of our Constitution insulates all faiths from state intrusion, while vesting shared civic duties, like education, within a tolerant and secular government.
But muddled logic ruled this day in the high court among jurists like Samuel Alito, a self-described “practical originalist,” long insisting that judges must abide by the Constitution’s original intent. Alito at one point attacked Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, claiming that he “reeks of hostility towards Islam.”
This odd allegation stemmed from Drummond’s point that “while many Oklahomans undoubtedly support charter schools sponsored by various Christian faiths, the precedent … will compel approval of similar applications by all faiths.” Alito mangled the argument, alleging that Drummond is “motivated by hostility toward particular religions.”
Alito dodged the bedrock question of whether taxpayer support of religion is permitted by the nation’s founding covenants. Instead, his tortured reasoning claimed that public programs cannot “discriminate” against religious schools.
California hosts more charter schools than any other state. In districts like Los Angeles Unified, one-fifth of all students attend a charter school, which did help lift student achievement for two decades before the pandemic. Still, Alito is not alone in negotiating the shifting ideologies and ironic surprises that mark the charter school movement.
These publicly funded but independently run campuses were first authorized by Minnesota’s Legislature in 1991, founded on the rather Christian yearning for fairness, allowing poor families to escape mediocre public schools and shop for effective teachers. California’s charter law, approved one year later, emphasized how these small hot-houses of innovation would hurry reform of regular public schools.
But few advocates foresaw how the rapid spread of charters would drive religious schools into the ground. Why pay even modest tuition for parochial school when a free charter has opened nearby? Enrollment in Catholic schools has fallen by one-third nationwide since the advent of charter schools; more than one thousand campuses have closed. Small Christian schools have taken a hit as well, with nearly one hundred shuttered in Los Angeles alone.
So, the pushback by religious educators is understandable, with some (not all) sects eager to tap into public funding. If the Supreme Court now rules that states must subsidize faith-filled charter schools, Alito could realize his apparent wish for more Catholic or Confucian schools.
But do spiritual leaders desire a messy entanglement with government? States typically require local school boards, when chartering independent educators, to ensure safe buildings, enforce shared curricular goals, and demonstrate that schools elevate student learning. Conservative jurists may well invite the state to squash evangelical charters that exclude Jewish kids, or protect the errant Presbyterian pupil who refuses to chant from the Quran.
The high court has already permitted limited public financing of religious schools. This includes taxpayer-financed vouchers in select states that help parents pay tuition for sectarian schools, along with tax credits that mostly benefit affluent families enrolling children in private schools. (Los Angeles Unified recently settled with the Catholic archdiocese, reimbursing the church $3 million to cover Title I services required by related court decisions.)
But these earlier rulings “involved fairly discrete state involvement,” Chief Justice John Roberts said during oral arguments, while warning that Oklahoma’s potential oversight of religious schools “does strike me as much more comprehensive involvement.” His vote will likely decide whether public dollars flow to religious schools.
Perhaps it’s reassuring that right-wing judges like Alito remain so protective of religious liberty, sniffing out unlikely opponents of Islam or the Vatican. But telling states and taxpayers we must subsidize sectarian schools, then inviting government inside churches, synagogues and mosques, will only fracture the once common cause of public schools.
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Bruce Fuller is an emeritus professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley and author of “When Schools Work.”
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.
Singing the ABC song. Learning the days of the week from a nursery rhyme. Making a finger-painted collage of little handprints.
Arts education has always been center stage in early education because little children are naturally creative, filled with wonder and the burning desire to express themselves. Arts and crafts not only help nurture a child’s natural imagination, they also boost small motor skills, sharpen hand-eye coordination and feed the insatiable need to play.
“Children don’t just play, they learn fundamental skills through play,” said Daniel Mendoza, a Placer County-based visual artist and specialist in early childhood education art practices. “Children are in a creative mindset all the time.”
While this may well be as true for teenagers as it is for toddlers, there is far more time and space allotted for playfulness in the early grades, when the crucial role of play in particular and creativity in general has long been a matter of common sense.
“Really, I’m just a common-sense professor, and somehow it became rogue,” said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and an expert in the key role of play in learning. “What if we taught children the way we know the brain learns?”
Bringing joy back into the classroom is also what motivates Cindy Hoisington, an early childhood expert who specializes in reaching out to children from historically marginalized communities at the Education Development Center (EDC), a national education nonprofit.
“This is not anything new, knowing that play is so critical to children, whether it’s dramatic play, building play, creative arts play or physical play,” said Hoisington, a STEM expert who taught preschool for decades. “But as soon as they hit kindergarten and first grade, there’s this dichotomy that sets in. Play is something you get to do after you do the learning when, in fact, we know that play is an incredible vehicle for learning.”
Play, some experts suggest, may be the superpower of the young. A growing body of research suggests that play may even be a way to help close achievement gaps. One report, analyzing 26 studies from 18 countries, found that in communities from Rwanda to Ethiopia, children got higher learning boosts in literacy, motor skills and social-emotional development when attending child care centers that use a mix of instruction and free play as opposed to those focused solely on academics.
“Children are so naturally, intuitively ready with their curiosity, their motivation to explore the world and everything in it, to the point where that’s why the twos are so terrible, because you’re constantly chasing after them,” said Hoisington, who helps evaluate digital media for PBS. “Science, for instance, tends to have a bad rap as this dry body of knowledge that we have to learn, but really it’s a process of exploration that is very much integral with play.”
Tapping into that spirit of discovery with hands-on experiences is often best, experts say. Curiosity burns brightest in the early years, so letting kids loose to investigate the world is part of building a rich, play-based learning environment.
“Where young children are free to investigate by observing, touching and acting on the objects in their world,” said Deborah Stipek, an expert in early childhood at Stanford University. “This is how they learn about the world — for example, that some objects float and some sink. Through their own experimentation and observation, they may even arrive at hypotheses about the qualities that differentiate the two.”
From “The Wheels on the Bus” to “Baby Shark,” kiddos love to sing and love to learn, so why not teach through music? Singing the “Old MacDonald had a Farm” song can be educational, experts say, as well as a ritual for community building. Children can take turns deciding on which animal to pick, which builds vocabulary as well as sharing skills.
“Young children learn best by doing,” said Stipek. “Counting objects is better than counting dots on a worksheet because they can move the objects to help them keep track of how many they have counted. Worksheets are not all bad. They can provide opportunities to practice and consolidate skills. But children don’t develop new skills doing worksheets, and they are typically not nearly as engaging and fun.”
Tracing the alphabet in shaving cream or making tin-foil sculptures may seem like basic exercises, but they often teach sophisticated concepts. Playing make-believe games can teach numerous skills at once. Pretend restaurants need someone to write a menu, calculate a bill and greet diners, fostering literacy, numeracy and special-emotional learning all in one game, Hoisington notes.
Songs are a clever way to remember stuff because they make memorization easy and fun for little ones. Melodies and rhymes make the most of our limited working memory to help children embed basic facts into their long-term memory, bolstering depth of cognition.
“I still sing the ABC song in my head sometimes, if I want to know which letter comes before which letter,” admits Hoisington.
What’s often missed in the discussion of the role of play is that older children also need time for creativity and free play, as well as the arts. While there is much talk about the need to engage students, there is little focus on low-hanging fruit like increasing time for arts, sports and recess. Putting too much emphasis on academic skills in isolation undercuts the love of learning, some warn.
“Kids try to buck it, but certainly by first grade we’ve started to ruin them,” said Hirsh-Pasek. “We pound the curiosity right out of kids.”
Mendoza firmly believes teachers should be guides to adventure instead of taskmasters.
“You don’t have to be a dictator,” as he puts it, “you can be a Sherpa.”
So, why doesn’t the role of play get more respect in education? Why do we emphasize test scores over deep learning?
“We got to this place because people are scared,” said Hirsh-Pasek. “They’re feeling like they’re losing control, and they want to make sure their kid is ahead. We push it younger and younger and younger, and as we do that, we’re creating a situation where our kids are anxious wrecks and the parents are anxious wrecks.”
Some experts suggest that children need more time for play and creativity in the wake of the pandemic, not less. Credit: Lillian Mongeau / EdSource
Too few teachers and parents are aware that play helps build the architecture of the growing brain, experts say.
“Play is not frivolous; it enhances brain structure and function and promotes executive function (i.e., the process of learning, rather than the content), which allow us to pursue goals and ignore distractions,” as an American Academy of Pediatrics report put it. “When play and safe, stable, nurturing relationships are missing in a child’s life, toxic stress can disrupt the development of executive function and the learning of prosocial behavior; in the presence of childhood adversity, play becomes even more important.”
Some experts fear that the laser focus on falling test scores in recent years has led to a decrease in playful learning. They suggest that children need more time for play in the wake of the pandemic, not less. Amid the crisis of chronic absenteeism, engaging students on a compelling level may be more vital than ever.
Creativity is the secret formula, experts say, in a world where machines will always compute faster than humans. Drill and kill won’t help children master high-level intellectual inquiry and conceptual analysis.
“You have to ask yourself, what’s it going to take to outsmart the robots?” as Hirsh-Pasek put it. “We need kids who don’t just memorize and take tests well, which AI will do better than our kids ever will. We need kids to be explorers and problem solvers.”
A silent crisis is unfolding in our schools and impacting millions of California students: chronic absenteeism. The consequences of unchecked absenteeism are severe and far-reaching.
It starts innocuously with a few missed days, but can quickly spiral, decimating a child’s future prospects. When dropout rates increase and college readiness declines, the ripple effects harm entire communities.
Traditionally, students and their families are penalized for missing school, but this hasn’t resolved the issue and instead, targets marginalized student groups. As an educator with years of experience in the classroom and administration, I propose a radical shift in our approach — treating chronic absenteeism as a public health emergency.
The rise in social isolation, health concerns and economic hardships have dramatically increased the number of students consistently missing school nationwide. In California, we are seeing consistent, distressing high chronic absence rates, particularly among high school studeents and historically marginalized populations.
We can’t simply discipline our way out of this crisis. Instead, we need a comprehensive strategy that addresses the complex roots of absenteeism, from persistent health issues to limited transportation access, from heightened stress to trauma.
Imagine if schools treated chronic absenteeism with the same urgency and collaboration used during the Covid-19 pandemic. We mobilized resources to fight a global crisis, and we can apply that same level of commitment to ensuring every child attends school regularly.
By framing chronic absenteeism as a public health crisis, we open the door to more effective interventions. One crucial strategy for dealing with public health emergencies is risk communication, which helps convey urgency, provide accurate information, and mobilize stakeholders to take collaborative action. The impact of proactive attendance management has shown to improve attendance rates threefold for chronically absent students.
Here are strategies schools can implement, drawing from public health approaches:
Convey urgency: Research shows attendance is the most crucial predictor of school success. Schools must create a “relentless drumbeat” about the importance of attendance through daily text messages, visual aids, public recognition and personalized follow-ups with absent students.
Provide accurate information: Transparency is key. Schools should share clear data on absenteeism and its effects. Implementing user-friendly attendance management systems can automate positive intervention letters and free up staff for more personalized outreach. Training teachers to analyze attendance data enables early, tailored interventions.
Mobilize stakeholders: Thirty-seven percent of K-12 families want actionable steps to improve their children’s attendance. Schools must provide specific, consistent messaging about attendance importance to all stakeholders — students, families, educators, board members and policymakers. Offer concrete ways for everyone to contribute to the solution.
Advocate for prevention: Positive messaging encourages attendance; punitive actions deter it. A multilevel approach works best:
District level: Superintendents should regularly communicate about the importance of attendance.
Building level: Principals should celebrate good attendance and offer incentives.
Classroom level: Teachers should reach out personally to families, highlighting successes and addressing issues promptly.
Foster two-Way, equitable communication: A Harvard study found that students with the best outcomes for remote learning during the pandemic were in communities with high levels of trust. Schools must establish open dialogues with families in their preferred languages and communication channels. This approach helps identify root causes of absenteeism and builds the trust essential for consistent attendance.
The responsibility for addressing chronic absenteeism extends beyond individual schools or districts — it requires a unified national effort. However, we needn’t wait for a grand solution. By prioritizing consistent, positive communication in our classrooms, schools and communities, we can make significant strides in reducing absenteeism.
Treating chronic absenteeism as a public health emergency isn’t just a metaphor — it’s a call to action. It demands we recognize the severity of the issue and respond with the urgency, coordination and comprehensive strategies that have proven effective in addressing other public health crises.
By reframing our approach, we can foster healthier educational environments and brighter futures for our students, one attendance record at a time.
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Kara Stern, Ph.D., is the director of education and engagement at SchoolStatus, a provider of K-12 data-driven communication, attendance and professional development solutions.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. We welcome guest commentaries with diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
For 30 years, California has experimented with a school choice program that let parents enroll their children in nearby districts that opened up seats for outsiders.Now the little-known District of Choice program, which the Legislature has renewed seven times, will become permanent through the passage of Senate Bill 897, authored by Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, if the governor signs the bill.
Only about 10,000 — about 0.2% — of the state’s students annually have taken advantage of the program. Most attend a half-dozen, primarily small districts in Southern California.
Districts of choice must be open to all who apply, including students with disabilities, who may be more expensive to serve. To prevent wealthier, primarily white families from exiting their home districts, SB 897 adds some stipulations to existing restrictions to prevent racial disparities and financial impacts. After accommodating siblings of transferees, the next priorities will be foster, homeless and low-income children. Up to 1% of students in districts with more than 50,000 students and a maximum 10% of students in districts with fewer than 50,000 will be able to transfer annually. Districts with a negative or qualified financial status can limit the number of students who can leave under the program.
Walnut Valley Unified, a 14,000-student district in the San Gabriel Valley, has been the most active proponent, with 2,774 students –30% of the total –transferring there in 2023-24, likely drawn to its Chinese immersion schools and emphasis on the arts. Pomona Unified, in opposing the bill, argued it lost wealthier families in Diamond Bar, which borders both districts, to the program.
The California Department of Education has not promoted the program, and many neighboring districts appear to have taken a don’t-poach-on-me, I-won’t-tread-on-you approach to interdistrict transfers.
But in an era of declining enrollment, the district of choice program is an option to shore up finances and fill up seats. It’s an open question whether districts will seize the opportunity.
National surveys have determined that parents significantly understate how far behind children are academically because of pandemic learning setbacks. The A’s and B’s that their kids have been getting on their report cards don’t tell the full story, concluded a survey of 2,000 parents .
States’ websites that annually report the scores on standardized tests and other valuable data, like chronic absenteeism, could provide a reality check by clearly and easily displaying performance results over time. However, the California School Dashboard, the public’s primary source for school and district performance data, has failed to do that. The Center on Reinventing Public Education concluded this in the report State Secrets: How Transparent Are State School Report Cards About the Effects of COVID? issued Thursday. California was one of eight states to receive a D grade on an A-F scale, behind the 29 states that did better, including 16 states with an A or B.
The report focused on how states handled longitudinal data — showing changes in results over multiple years — from pre-Covid 2018-19 or earlier to now. In most states, that multiyear look would show a sharp drop on the first testing after the pandemic, followed by a slow recovery that has not made up for lost ground. For California, the decline in 2021-22, following two years of suspended testing, wiped out gradual gains since the first dashboard in 2014-15.
“The (California) dashboard makes it hard to identify longitudinal results,” said Morgan Polikoff, professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education and the lead author of the report. “Because the dashboard never puts yearly data next to each other; you have to pull up multiple years, download the data, and put the data in Excel or something like that if you want to look at longitudinal trends.”
By contrast, one of seven states to receive an A, Connecticut shows five years of results in bar charts and line graphs for 11 measures.
Connecticut’s dashboard, praised in the report, shows changes over time for multiple performance measures. Source: Connecticut’s Next Generation Accountability Report
“If we had rated states on something else (e.g., how clearly they presented data for the given year), we would have arrived at different ratings,” the report said.
Researchers examined longitudinal data for seven metrics: achievement levels in English language arts, math, science and social studies, achievement growth in English language arts and math, chronic absenteeism, high school graduation rates and English learner proficiency and growth. Teams of evaluators from the center, which is based at Arizona State University, used a point system for each metric based on whether it was easy, somewhat difficult, much too difficult or impossible to find longitudinal data.
“It’s not about having the data — it’s about presenting the data to the public in a way that’s usable,” Polikoff said of California’s dashboard.
California collects the data for five of the seven metrics. It no longer administers a statewide social studies test. It also doesn’t compile achievement growth using students’ specific scores over time, although the state has been considering this approach for more than six years. Instead, it compares scores of this year’s students with different students’ scores in the same grade a year earlier.
Some other states also don’t give a social studies test; California could still have gotten an A grade without it, Polikoff said.
The California Department of Education said that the dashboard undergoes an annual review for refinements to make sure it is “genuinely accessible and useful to our families.”
“We always remain open to the feedback and needs of our families, and we look forward to understanding more about the approach taken by the Center for Reinventing Public Education,” Liz Sanders, director of communications for the department, said in a statement.
She added that School Accountability Report Cards and DataQuest supplement the dashboard and can readily answer questions raised by the Center for Reinventing Public Education. “The dashboard serves a specific purpose to help California’s families understand year-over-year progress at their students’ schools, and the user interface is simplified based on feedback from diverse and representative focus groups of California families,” Sanders said.
Not a priority
At the direction of the State School Board, the California Department of Education chose to focus on disparities in achievement as its top priority for the dashboard. For every school and district, it has made it easy to see how 13 student groups, including low-income students, students with disabilities, English learners, and various racial and ethnic groups performed on multiple measures.
The state developed a rating system using five colors (blue marking the highest performance and red the lowest). Each color reflects the result for the current year combined with the growth or decline from the previous year. The colors send a signal of progress or concern.
However, without reporting longitudinal results for context, the color coding can prove problematic. The statewide chronic absence rate in 2022 was a record high of 30%. Declining 5.7 percentage points in 2023 to 24.3% earned a middle color, yellow signifying neither good nor bad. Yet the chronic absence rate was still at an alarmingly high level. Viewers would have to look closely at the numerical components behind the color to understand that.
No ability to compare schools and districts
Unlike some other states’ dashboards, the California School Dashboard also does not permit comparisons of schools and districts. That was by design. Reflecting the view of former Gov. Jerry Brown, the state board focused on districts’ self-improvement and discouraged facile comparisons that didn’t consider the data behind the colors.
However, both EdSource’s annual alternative dashboard and Ed-Data, a data partnership of the California Department of Education, EdSource, and the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team/California School Information Services, encourage multi-school and district comparisons.
Ed-Data has a five-year comparison of test scores and other metrics. Although this year it no longer starts with 2018-19, the pre-Covid base year for comparisons, viewers can use the year slider above the charts to view data for earlier years.
EdSource has created graphics showing longitudinal statewide results in math and English language arts, including breakouts for student groups, dating to the first year of the Smarter Balanced testing.
“If California had reported all of the outcomes in a format like that, it would’ve gotten an A because that’s exactly the kind of comparison we are looking for,” Polikoff said.
The report separately analyzed the usability of states’ dashboards to determine whether they are easy to use and well-organized. California is one of 16 states rated “fair,” with 23 states rated “great” or “good,” and 11 states, mainly small states like Vermont, but also Texas and New York, rated “poor.”
“We were struck by how difficult it was to navigate some state report card websites,” the report said. “We found many common pitfalls, ranging from the relatively mundane to the massive and structural.”
Kansas, for example, lacked a landing page with overall performance data, while Texas school report cards “offer a wealth of data broken down by every student group imaginable” in massive data tables but no visualizations.
“California’s dashboard is far from the worst out there,” said Polikoff. “The reality is little tweaks are not going to cut it. That probably means a pretty substantial overhaul to be usable for longitudinal comparisons. Now, the state might say, ‘We don’t care about longitudinal trends’ and that’s their prerogative, but what purpose is the dashboard trying to serve, and who’s it trying to serve?”
Answer those questions, he continued, “and then design the dashboard accordingly.”
A burned sign at Oak Knoll Montessori School (Loma Alta School) from the Eaton fire on Jan. 9 in the Altadena neighborhood of Pasadena.
Credit: Kirby Lee via AP
Top Takeaways
More than 100 volunteers helped provide “psychological first aid” to students in the Pasadena Unified School District following the Eaton fire.
Mental health professionals say normalcy remains far away for many students impacted by January’s fires, and long-term trauma is expected.
The volunteer effort has died down, but the district is looking for ways to provide ongoing support to students with greater needs.
In a classroom that smelled like a campfire, a student at Pasadena Unified’s Sierra Madre Elementary School broke down when he saw a student-made stuffed rabbit that had X’s for eyes.
His art teacher called for help from Tanya Ward, a project director for the mental health and school counseling unit at the Los Angeles County Office of Education.
Ward arrived immediately and pulled the student aside.
“That’s a dead bunny. That’s a dead bunny,” the student repeated, sobbing.
“What does that make you feel?” Ward asked him. “What do you think about that bunny with X eyes? Could it be something else?”
The student began to breathe and seemed less agitated. He started talking haltingly about how the stuffed rabbit — in reality, a sock wrapped around a rice-filled balloon — made him feel.
Sad. And scared.
“Then he was able to go back,” Ward said. “I sat with him for a little bit longer, just to help him get going with his project. … The other students didn’t tease him or make fun of him. They just embraced him.” …
Ward is one of roughly 100 volunteers from the Los Angeles County Office of Education, or LACOE, and beyond, who have provided mental health support at Pasadena Unified School District school sites and enabled hundreds of students to get back on track in the months following the Eaton Fire, which displaced about 10,000 of the district’s 14,000 students.
“We’ve always been ready. But to be able to be welcomed and ushered into this work — and be able to have solutions — and to know that you have people who’ve got your back, it’s pretty unbelievable,” said Julianne Reynoso, Pasadena Unified’s assistant superintendent of student wellness and support services. “I would never have imagined this level of support.”
Supporting families
Shortly after the Eaton fire burned more than 14,000 acres, John Lynch, a community schools initiative coordinator for LACOE, started making phone calls to check in on families and find out what support they needed, from economic needs requiring gift cards to housing.
He called 100 about families at Altadena’s Eliot Arts Magnet alone — all while dealing with his own long-term displacement from the region.
“It was a way for me to really know, to be in community with other people who live in my community, and we’re kind of going through something similar, even though we’ve all experienced this differently,” Lynch said.
“Families that are displaced, I think they — we — … have maybe felt a little bit forgotten, as the rest of the world kind of goes back to their everyday life,” he added. “People are just like, “Wow! Thank you for calling, and for remembering that we’re kind of going through this tragedy.”
Supporting students
When students returned to school after the fire, many had been separated from their peers for months.
“Some hadn’t even really come back from Christmas break. And then the fires closed down their school, so they had not seen peers, their friends, for several weeks,” said Anna Heinbuch, a school counseling coordinator at LACOE.
“A lot of our students were just happy to be in a space where they were with their peers and able just to talk about something other than the fires.”
Within weeks of the fires, Heinbuch facilitated a “psychological first aid” session in the gym of Marshall Fundamental Secondary School — gauging students’ wellness, helping them through whatever they were dealing with and providing them with suggestions for next steps, such as access to a school social worker.
She brought coloring books to help comfort the students and taught them breathing exercises they could do by themselves. She asked whether they had been sleeping well and eating properly.
The initial period of assessing students’ needs lasted a few weeks, and then the effort rolled back. But Kim Griffin Esperon, a LACOE project director of mental health and school counseling, who organized the volunteer effort, began hearing from principals who expressed an increased need for longer-term support.
And Griffin Esperon worked to bring in longer-term support, which lasted until the end of March.
Volunteers said students’ grief had started to deepen. Some longed for their lost pets and missed the other animals that made Altadena home. Others, whose homes survived, felt survivor’s guilt.
Some students began to act out in the classroom. Others felt less engaged academically. Many struggled when they were away from their parents or siblings.
“This is going to take a long time for some of these kids to work their way through,” Griffin Esperon said. “There’s no rushing back to normal for these students because their lives will not probably feel normal to them for quite a while.”
The road ahead
More transitions lie ahead for some students — from potential housing changes to friends who may move elsewhere.
And with the volunteer effort having achieved as much as it can for now, Reynoso said the goal is to connect students who need it with longer-term care and support.
Pasadena Unified is continuing to monitor students’ well-being, Griffin Esperon said, and has recently received funding to hire two crisis counselors. The district will also rely on parents who have health insurance to provide support for their children, she added.
“Despite what crisis or trauma they’ve been through, we want (students) to feel connected,” Reynoso said. “We’re definitely seeing the need … for long-term care, and we’re looking at every opportunity we possibly can.”
Stockton Unified Superintendent Michelle Rodriguez talks about how she arrived at her goals and plans for improving student achievement.
Credit: Lasherica Thornton/ EdSource
Stockton Unified, a mostly poverty-stricken community in San Joaquin County, has become known for its legal troubles, financial issues and superintendent turnover, which have, for years, distracted the low-performing school district from addressing student achievement. Most of the district’s nearly 40,000 students have failed to meet state standards in English and math.
Becoming superintendent in July 2023, Michelle Rodriguez knew those facts to be true. Rodriguez, the 14th superintendent to lead the district in less than two decades, said she was determined to change SUSD’s troubled reputation by focusing on students, creating stability, restoring public trust and engaging the community “one interaction, one decision, one day at a time.”
But without “actually digging in to find out what is happening,” Rodriguez refused at the start to make assumptions about what the district faced, especially its barriers to student achievement.
“Until I get in the classroom, I probably won’t be able to answer the question about lack of student achievement here,” Rodriguez told EdSource last year.
“What I knew was that because I was the 14th superintendent in 19 years, and because of just the headlines that we had seen, we knew that we needed to make sure that we solidified the system,” she said in a recent sit-down. “Instead of making the assumption that I knew specifically what was happening, I identified four key areas that effective systems have”: quality assurance, high expectations, continuous improvement and community trust.
A little over a year since her start — aligned with those areas and guided by an initial 100-day plan, over 40 school visits and dozens of listening sessions and town halls — Rodriguez is implementing a public accountability system, 44 priority recommendations, and a district culture in which data and feedback drive change.
“Something that I’m trying to do is create new traditions and new systems to hear feedback, make changes and, kind of, move the work forward,” Rodriguez said.
A system of accountability
At the start of her superintendency, Rodriguez hosted meet-and-greets and community listening sessions in English and Spanish to identify concerns that the district needed to address; based on the sessions, there were in-person and virtual town halls to create priority recommendations with “fingerprints” of community feedback.
“We want to reach the hardest-to-reach parent. We want to reach the hardest-to-reach student,” Rodriguez said a year ago about listening and collaborating with the community to develop a plan. “And within those priority recommendations, you will see your fingerprints.”
As a result, all 44 priority recommendations, including a goal to create student success plans for certain student groups, came from those engagements.
Setting those goals was merely one part of Rodriguez’ approach.
Visit Stockton Unified’s Pubic Accountability Dashboard, here
Read the 2023 State of District, here, which detailed last school year’s priorities
The dashboard includes each goal, its complexity, which of the four areas it falls under, the department(s) responsible, actions, whether it’s completed or not, outcomes and the impact of those outcomes.
Simply put, the dashboard shows the district’s progress and holds the superintendent and the other officials accountable to the goals.
Rodriguez said she didn’t want the Stockton Unified community to feel as though “we did all this work, we did all these 21 listening sessions, and now nothing happened.”
44 goals is a lot. What’s been accomplished?
Within weeks of setting the goals, Rodriguez and the district completed “easy wins.”
An easy win, for example, was providing radios for special education classrooms to address student safety. Since the pandemic, dozens of teachers and staff had reported high numbers of “elopers,” mostly special education students but also young learners, running from the classroom — a recurring problem that “no one necessarily was able to solve, or chose to solve, until now,” she said.
For each radio purchased, a staff member felt better equipped to support students, Rodriguez said.
“Things like that seem insignificant, but to the system, they had a lot of impact because now those teachers feel more at ease that if they do have a student leave the classroom, there’s a way to get help to retrieve them,” she said.
Rodriguez, also in her first few weeks, formed a student advisory group of 90 students from the district’s high schools.
The formation of the Superintendent’s Student Advisory, the first of its kind in Stockton Unified, allowed her to listen to students, such as Emily Gomez Valle, a Chavez High School junior, who said the advisory was a way for her to advocate for her peers.
Then, the district tackled short-term goals, accomplishing them in three months. The district, for instance, started conducting thorough exit interviews to understand why staff were leaving the district.
The easy wins and short-term goals were intentional, so that “people knew the superintendent was getting things done,” Rodriguez said.
In the 2023-24 school year, under Rodriguez’ leadership, Stockton Unified’s graduation rate increased to 83.9% — the highest in the district’s history.
Long-term goals completed in the 2023-24 school year included increased access and participation in Educators Thriving, a program that provides social-emotional support and training for teachers and other school staff. Stockton Unified is set to have two program cohorts with up to 100 educators participating this school year, according to its accountability dashboard.
Based on the need to “focus on our most vulnerable students and have an action plan that is linked to them,” Stockton Unified created specific student success plans for Black students, English learners, homeless youth and students with special needs.
Other long-term goals have addressed the district’s legal and financial woes. The San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office, with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI, launched a criminal investigation into Stockton Unified in April 2023, after a state audit by the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) found evidence that fraud, misappropriation of funds or other illegal fiscal practices may have occurred between July 2019 and April 2022.
Millions of dollars in federal one-time Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding, which school districts received to address the impacts of the pandemic, was the subject of the investigation. Under Rodriguez’ leadership, the school district didn’t have to repay the federal government the $6.6 million in ESSER funding that was improperly awarded for a contract.
Rodriguez’ challenge was spending the ESSER funds by their timeline.
As of March 2023, just months before she started, Stockton Unified had spent only 1.84% (over $5 million) of the more than $156 million it received in ESSER III, which must be returned to the federal government if not budgeted this month and spent by January 2025. According to Rodriguez, the district has now used all the funding, completing over 40 projects.
But the allegations about the misuse of ESSER funding triggered a 2021-22 grand jury investigation into the district’s overall spending as well. Stockton Unified, Rodriguez said in 2023, relied on and spent a lot of money on consultants, which the grand jury attributed to district staff lacking the “necessary training and guidance to execute complex district business needs.”
Stockton Unified has since identified and evaluated the consultants and increased staff expertise to take over the work, leading to a reduction in consultant costs from $886,561 last school year to an estimated $275,000 this year.
And as of June, the district has finalized 32 of 44 priority recommendations, including the easy wins, short-term goals and long-term priorities.
Still there are larger systemic and structural projects and objectives that are taking more than a year to accomplish, up until this school year or longer.
What’s left to do
Three weeks after school started in the 2023-24 school year, Rodriguez said she met a homeless student who hadn’t attended school at all. She told the student about district supports, such as transportation to school and other available resources once on campus.
“And what she said to me is, ‘How do you expect me to come to school when I haven’t bathed in a week?’” the superintendent recalled.
Such encounters highlighted the need to expand family and community partnerships, increase expectations and develop equitable action plans, all of which are among the remaining priorities meant to support students and improve their experience in Stockton Unified, Rodriguez said.
More than 82% of Stockton Unified students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, according to EdData, with many facing challenges such as the student Rodriguez encountered. Even so, there must be increased expectations for students to perform at high levels with strong support.
Using her saying, “You change experiences to change beliefs to change expectations,” Rodriguez said, “I actually have to reframe your experiences so that it changes your beliefs about students, and, then, that changes your expectations for students.”
The district will also conduct an equity audit to develop a three-year action plan. The equity audit is meant to evaluate district and school policies, practices and procedures that are inequitable and create barriers “that are getting in the way of our students,” Rodriguez said. The goal requires the district to form teams of employees from each school, which will develop a multiyear action plan.
In fact, Stockton Unified’s 2024-2027 LCAP goals are to increase student academic achievement; center the whole child; provide systemic and innovative programs aligned to students’ passions, interests and talents; create meaningful partnerships; provide access and opportunities to ensure success for students with disabilities; and provide positive learning conditions and experiences for Black students to thrive.
Some of the other district priorities include:
Investing in facilities by putting $50 million of ESSER funding into schools so that students have access to amenities such as classrooms with science labs.
Equitably offering arts programs at the district’s 55 schools and for all students, specifically those who are Black, English learners, homeless, have special needs and/or are foster youth who benefit from “differentiated instruction,” Rodriguez said.
Launching school and district administrator classroom visits, allowing classroom staff to get feedback and administrators to gain a better knowledge of the adopted curriculum.
Resolving the remaining findings and corrective actions reported by the California Department of Education and the San Joaquin County Office of Education as well as the findings of grand jury, FCMAT and audit reports.
Knowing if and when to change course
In some areas, such as chronic absenteeism, Stockton Unified identified a systemic goal and improved that metric in a year’s time, but still must find solutions to continue addressing the problem. In this case, the goal was to identify solutions to chronic absenteeism, in which students miss 10% or more days in a school year. Stockton Unified data shows that chronic absenteeism, though still higher than prepandemic numbers, decreased by 3.1 percentage points from the 2022-23 to the 2023-24 school year.
“How can we celebrate that?” Rodriguez asked, “but at the same time say, ‘OK, well, what we’re doing is working. Is it working fast enough? Are there any shifts that we could continue to do?’”
Chronic absenteeism, performance indicators and other data measured over time create the challenge of knowing if, when and how to pivot a district response.
For example, even though there isn’t a specific district goal about it, Stockton Unified has been adding an intervention teacher to each K-8 school based on district data. Seventeen of 41 such teachers have been hired so far.
“When we’re looking at our KPI (key performance indicator) data, what we know is that our students aren’t making the growth that we need them to make,” Rodriguez said. The district is now using iReady data, which allows teachers to deliver adaptive lessons and includes data on student progress.
Based on fall 2023 iReady data, 35% of fourth graders were one grade level behind in English, 13% were two grade levels behind and 39% were three or more grades behind, meaning that just 12.6% were on grade level. In math, 35% of fourth graders were one grade level behind, 25% were two grade levels behind and 32% were at least three years behind, meaning only 8.4% of students were on grade level.
“What is our data actually telling us? Every quarter we’re looking at the data because we want to be able to pivot and shift quicker than just yearly,” she said.
And the district was able to do that by the end of the 2023-24 school year. In the spring 2024 semester, 24.3% of fourth graders were on grade level in English – an 11.7 percentage point increase from the previous semester. In math, fourth graders on grade level grew from 8.4% to 29% — an improvement of 20.6 percentage points.
Maintaining focus
The priorities that Stockton Unified has identified are what the district has and will continue to focus on moving forward, Rodriguez said. While the equity audit will identify needed changes over the next three years, and while the district will respond to data, the district won’t shift much from the priorities it has identified.
“If you aren’t actually focused on what you need to do, then you can be too scattered and not really have the impact that you want,” she said, adding that, “Some of these changes will not change in one single year.”
Rodriguez maintains her pledge to make those changes by dedicating the last eight years of her career to Stockton Unified — a plan that became more attainable when the school board extended her contract until 2028, or year five.
“Why aren’t kids being successful?” she said. “That cannot happen until people even believe that I’m going to stay put. I won some people over at the six-month mark. I (won) some people over at the year mark. Some people will take the two-, three- year mark.”
