Cerritos College students honing their skills in ironworking during hands-on training.
Credit: Courtesy Cerritos College
A college degree or certificate is a proven pathway to higher earnings, job stability and economic mobility. Yet, nearly half of California’s adults have not pursued higher education due to barriers like cost, rigid schedules and a lack of local options.
California set an ambitious goal: By 2030, 70% of working-age adults should hold a college degree or certificate. However, instead of making it easier to achieve this, public universities are blocking one of the most promising solutions — community college bachelor’s degree programs.
Cerritos College is leading the way with its first-of-its-kind field ironworker supervisor bachelor’s degree, which was developed with the California Field Ironworkers. The program creates a direct path from apprenticeship to high-paying supervisory roles. Designed for working professionals, it offers flexible online coursework that fits the schedules of full-time ironworkers.
With over 1,300 supervisor job openings annually in Los Angeles County alone, this program helps close critical workforce gaps while fostering regional social and economic mobility. First-line supervisors with a bachelor’s degree earn an average of $34,000 more in their annual salary than those with a high school diploma or associate degree. At under $11,000 in total tuition costs — less than half the price of even the most affordable public universities, our students can recoup their investment in as little as four months, making this program a powerful tool for upward mobility.
Beyond the numbers, programs like these change lives. Rocio Campos, an ironworker and mother, defied societal expectations to pursue a career in construction. While balancing work, family and education, Rocio gained the training and resources to grow her career in ironworks through the field ironworker apprenticeship program at Cerritos College. She aims to earn a bachelor’s degree in ironworker supervision once the program receives full approval, giving her a chance to advance into a supervisory role.
Community college bachelor’s degrees are game-changers, especially for underrepresented communities. At Cerritos College, 73% of students in the ironworker apprenticeship program come from diverse backgrounds, and active recruitment efforts are bringing more women into this historically male-dominated field. These programs don’t just increase wages; they provide economic mobility by helping workers build stability, advance their careers, and lift their families into greater financial security.
Several community colleges have received provisional approval to launch bachelor’s degree programs in health care, technology and public safety — fields where California urgently needs skilled professionals. However, many of these proposals remain under review because of objections from public universities, particularly within the CSU system. Despite meeting workforce demands and serving students who might not otherwise pursue a four-year degree, these programs face unnecessary roadblocks. The final approval ultimately rests with the California Community Colleges board of governors, but these initiatives risk being delayed indefinitely without broader policy support.
California cannot rely on four-year universities alone to meet its growing workforce needs. Expanding community college bachelor’s degree programs will strengthen industries, create more opportunities and solidify California’s leadership in workforce innovation. It’s time for policymakers, industry leaders and educators to support these programs and invest in the future of our state.
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Jose Fierro is the president/superintendent of Cerritos College in Norwalk. Cerritos College serves as a comprehensive community college for southeastern Los Angeles County.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Wildfire smoke fills the air over the 110 freeway in Los Angeles.
Credit: AP Photo / Etienne Laurent
Before the Eaton fire this January, Alexander Ballantyne lived in Altadena, just a few minutes away from his Pasadena City College campus.
That all changed on Jan. 7 when the fire reached the home he’d lived in the past three years with his aunt and uncle, forcing them to quickly evacuate. He left with only the clothes he was wearing and the school backpack he had left in his car.
The home burned down later that day, and he was suddenly homeless, a situation he’d been in just a few years prior.
Among the people who lost their homes, livelihoods, and lives in the fires that ravaged Los Angeles early this year is a subset of young people who are in the foster care system and already knew the trauma of losing a home.
Ballantyne’s recovery from the devastation of the fire has not been easy, but it has been remarkably quick, a feat that highlights how imperative it is to pair stable housing with consistent, individualized support.
“I had stable housing with my legal guardians (in high school) and I had stable housing with my aunt. If it was just the stability, theoretically, I should have gotten through all of high school amazingly, flying colors,” he said. “I think it’s more so the type of support you get — you know it’s unconditional.”
Ballantyne, 25, was in the final stretch of transfer applications as the Eaton fire started. He was preparing the supplemental application for UC Berkeley’s business school, a highly competitive program. Less than 24 hours after it became available, however, he was fleeing from his family’s home, pushing finishing the application down his list of priorities.
Alex Ballantyne is a student at Pasadena City College, where he’s finishing his last semester before transferring to a four-year university.
“I almost felt like I was in my element, in the sense that it really wasn’t the first time I had nothing,” Ballantyne said in a recent interview. “And even though I say it feels pretty similar to how it was when I was homeless at 18, just having the support of my family … I feel like I landed on my feet.”
As soon as his friends and network found out that he had lost his home, they stepped in to help him rebuild. A friend started a GoFundMe donation page for him, and it quickly reached its goal. One Simple Wish — an organization that directly funds any need or want a foster youth might have — crowdfunded additional money to replace the school and office supplies he’d lost.
This quick support came from networks that Ballantyne had built over the years. He’s been part of organizations like First Star, a college readiness program for foster youth, where he met people like the founder of Jenni’s Flower, an LA-based organization that organizes events to empower foster youth. He is part of the foster youth programs at Pasadena City College, and he’s on the board of two nonprofits.
What mattered to Ballantyne, more than anything else, was that the support he received came with no strings attached and from people he knew truly cared for him.
“It’s really not the money that will get a foster kid through school or training or whatever they want to do,” Ballantyne said. “It’s the support, it’s the human connection, and it’s the feeling like they have somebody to lean on. That’s the most important part.”
In the months since the fires, One Simple Wish has provided thousands in funding to 12 foster youth in Los Angeles alone, including Ballantyne.
“Especially for minor children moving through the system, there’s not a lot of choice. You don’t often get to choose the neighborhood or the church you go to, the school you go to, the friendships that you can or can’t maintain, whether or not you get to stay with siblings; there’s just so much choice already being removed,” said Danielle Gletow, founder of One Simple Wish.
Her organization’s mission is to fill the gaps that other groups might leave: Instead of asking someone if they need a backpack, her team leaves the question open-ended, asking, “What would you like to put your belongings in?”
“Our goal is to just make sure that … what an individual needs in a time of crisis or challenging times, we put that power back in their hands,” said Gletow, who said the majority of funds come in as donations from supporters across the country.
Ballantyne knows that lack of choice firsthand. He entered the foster system during middle school after an unstable childhood, andmoved through four placements during his freshman year of high school, before being placed with a family who became his legal guardians until the age of 18. He said that despite having housing stability through most of high school, he earned a 2.9 GPA.
Today, weeks after his home burned down along with all of his belongings, coupled with the stress of waiting to hear back from colleges he applied to as he finishes his spring semester, he has maintained a 3.6 GPA.
It’s all in the support
At 18, shortly after graduating from high school, Ballantyne said he was kicked out of his foster home of three years and was homeless, couch surfing and working four jobs to get by, until he landed in transitional housing.
He enrolled in community college shortly after, but left before the semester was over, right as the Covid-19 pandemic was starting. He fell into a deep, long-lasting depression, and for the next three years, he spent most days playing video games, drinking, smoking weed and taking pills, he said.
His “wake-up call,” as he calls it, came in March 2021, when he received a text notifying him his grandmother was dying in the hospital. “I just remember feeling so helpless. I didn’t have the money to get an Uber to go see her,” he said. “I didn’t drive. I was doing nothing with myself.”
Ballantyne’s grandmother had been like his mother, he said, and she’d just died in the same hospital he’d been born in about two decades earlier. She was his champion, always reminding him how much she loved him.
While in the foster system, he had been estranged from his family for years, but as he helped his aunt prepare his grandmother’s home for sale, he told her about his living condition.
It was around this time that Ballantyne’s life started turning around. His decision to get a job at a Best Buy “changed everything.” He initially wanted the job just for the discounts on video games, but he came away with companionship, which he needed after having been isolated in his depression for years.
His aunt soon invited him to move in with her rent-free as long as he worked or attended school full-time and helped out around the house. He grabbed the opportunity and enrolled at Pasadena City College, where he is now just months from transferring to a four-year college.
He learned what it was like to receive unconditional support when he moved in with his biological family as an adult.
“I don’t think I was ever dumb,” he said, referring to the many years in which he didn’t excel academically. “I just don’t think I ever was in a situation where I truly, 100% felt comfortable and secure with where I was at.”
Ballantyne is currently living in Burbank, renting a room in a classmate’s apartment, while his uncle and aunt are staying with family farther north in Los Angeles County.
He’ll be there through the end of the summer, at which point he’ll be moving to whichever university he chooses among the four that accepted him so far. His rent is paid through August, thanks to the funding he received after the fires.
The network of friends and resources that stepped up to support Ballantyne is there for all other foster youth, both he and Gletow emphasized.
“We really do stress the importance of making connections wherever you can because it will matter as you get older. And as you become an adult, you have less and less of a network or safety net,” said Gletow, whose organization also has an educational wish fund where school staff can submit requests for flexible funding to use as needed.
Ballantyne did eventually submit his supplemental application to UC Berkeley’s business school on time when he was sheltering at a family member’s home. The application had a video component requiring applicants to record themselves answering prompt questions, but the desk in the room he was staying in was inside a closet — not an ideal setting for such an important video.
But Ballantyne knew he had everything he needed, including a newly replaced laptop, thanks to his friends and network, so he hit the record button and got to work making his goals a reality.
California’s most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores revealed troubling trends in student achievement. Despite significant financial investments, student performance continues to struggle to reach full academic recovery. Worse, achievement gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students widened even further.
The timing of these results couldn’t be worse. With California districts spending the last of their $23 billion in federal relief funds last year, schools are now facing a critical juncture. With declining enrollment reducing their budgets and only modest new state investments coming this year, it will be tough for districts to dramatically scale up promising initiatives like high-dosage tutoring or extensive summer programming.
So, what levers do state and local policymakers have at their disposal? By looking at the data and learning from other successful low-cost interventions, the state has an opportunity to reverse its slide and drive student gains.
First, kids have to be in school to learn. In California, chronic absenteeism rates have come down significantly from their pandemic levels, but they’re still nearly twice as high as they were five years ago. Black students, English learners, students with disabilities, and other marginalized groups are missing too much school.
Fortunately, there are low-cost, high-impact strategies that schools can adopt to ensure students are present and engaged. For example, a research study looking at a large California district found that missing a part of the school day — for referrals for in-school discipline or participation in extracurricular activities — predicted short- and long-run outcomes for students. Many school districts are already tracking these measures; the next step is using them to inform and implement interventions such as parent notifications or individualized support.
Second, once kids are back in school, the next step is ensuring that classroom time is used well. This is especially critical in California, given that it ranks in the bottom 10 states in terms of total instructional hours per school year. Last year’s law to ban or limit the use of cell phones during school hours should help reduce digital distractions, but the research on attention is clear that humans are not good at multitasking and can take a long time to refocus when our thinking is interrupted.
For schools, that means that every little interruption counts. Students being pulled out of class for special interventions or testing, outdoor noise and intercom announcements are all important in their own way, but they also add up. One study found that a typical classroom might be interrupted 2,000 times per year and that these disruptions can result in the loss of 10 to 20 days of instructional time. School district leaders could conduct attention audits to maximize and better understand how schools are using time and all of their technological tools.
Last but not least is the question of what students are (and are not) learning. California’s test results suggest that reading is a particular problem area. Since 2019, California’s reading scores on NAEP are down 4 points in fourth grade and 5 points in eighth grade. But those are averages. Last year, just 7% of California’s Black students met the “Proficient” benchmark and 72% fell below “Basic” in fourth grade reading.
When students lack foundational reading skills, the impact compounds across subjects. All students need and deserve evidence-based literacy instruction, with sustained focus on the relationships between sound and print, exposure to rich text, thought-provoking content, and both general and domain-specific vocabulary that builds knowledge of the world.
Improving reading scores is hard work, and other states are dealing with similar challenges. But California — unlike many other states — has not yet passed a comprehensive reading bill.
This is where California could stand to learn from some of the higher-performing states on NAEP, sometimes called “the nation’s report card.” Specifically, it might surprise some readers to learn that Mississippi made the largest reading gains over the last 10 years. Last year, Mississippi ranked seventh overall but third for Black students and first for low-income students. California, in contrast, came in 37th, 33rd and 28th, respectively.
How did Mississippi make this turnaround? It took a long-term, systematic approach to its literacy efforts. It invested in teacher development and coaching, identified and supported struggling readers as early as possible and equipped teachers with high-quality instructional materials.
This combination of high-quality instructional materials with diagnostic data and student supports has the potential to improve outcomes for California’s most vulnerable students, and to create a more equitable education system for all. By leveraging data it already tracks and focusing on the delivery of core instruction, California can build a stronger foundation for student success.
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Lindsay Dworkin is senior vice president of policy and government affairs at NWEA, a K-12 assessment and research organization.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
UC Davis scientists Marcelo Prado and Katie Zegarski load samples onto trays to test for the coronavirus in 2020. UC officials say cutting-edge research will be threatened if federal funds are reduced.
Courtesy of UC Davis Health
More crowding in undergraduate classes. Worse patient care at health centers. Harm to academic and scientific research.
Those are some of the impacts officials fear will result from an across-the-board hiring freeze announced Wednesday by the 10-campus University of California in response to threatened cuts in federal funding and worries about state budget support. But given those uncertainties, UC leaders said they had no choice but to act now to conserve funds.
The potential decline in federal contracts and grants would “threaten our ability to deliver on our core missions, education, research, patient care, and student support services, and our work to expand educational access for all Californians,” UC President Michael Drake said in announcing the freeze and other austerities.
Thousands of vacancies that already exist across UC would remain unfilled under the new policy. In addition to the hiring freeze across all UC campuses, six academic health centers and 20 health professional schools, Drake directed every UC location to implement additional cost-saving measures, such as delaying maintenance and reducing business travel when possible. All that would “help the university manage its costs and conserve funds,” Drake said, also noting a cut in state financial support for UC.
UC receives about $6 billion annually in federal funds for research and other program supports, with the National Institutes of Health being the largest source. That does not include more than $8 billion the university gets through Medicare and Medicaid for patient care, funding that Drake noted Wednesday is also at risk. Cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, he said, “would have significant impacts on the UC Health enterprise and on the patients we serve.”
UC is the latest of a growing number of universities nationwide to pause hiring in the wake of new policies and threats to funding from the Trump administration. Other institutions that have taken similar steps in recent weeks include Harvard, Stanford and North Carolina State University.
President Donald Trump’s administration has threatened to slash university research funding and other money for what he says is needed streamlining and in response to what he has labeled illegal race-based programs, such as cultural graduation ceremonies or racially themed dormitory floors. UC Berkeley is among three California campuses, along with Cal Poly Humboldt and Cal State San Bernardino, that are currently being investigated for running programs that the administration alleges hurt white and Asian students.
Trump has also threatened campuses over the handling of pro-Palestinian protests last year. His administration has sent letters to 10 California colleges, including four UC campuses, threatening to pull funding if they weren’t doing enough to protect Jewish students on their campuses. The four UC campuses were Berkeley, Davis, San Diego and Santa Barbara.
Potential federal funding cuts would be especially consequential for research-heavy institutions like UC.
Jesse Rothstein, director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, said he had been expecting the hiring freeze because the Trump administration has “dramatically threatened the kind of funding” on which research universities depend.
The ramifications of the hiring freeze and possible funding cuts could be felt for decades to come, Rothstein said. “It’s going to be harder to persuade people to be scientists in the future if they know that their careers can be upended at any moment,” he said. “It’s going to create problems in terms of attracting the best researchers from around the world. All of that is going to damage the scientific enterprise in this country.”
Further complicating the matter is that UC is separately facing a nearly 8% cut to its state funding as part of this year’s budget process. In a typical year, that level of funding reduction would be “alarming,” said Drake, the UC president. Pairing it with the prospect of federal funding cuts makes it even more worrisome, he said.
Leaving vacancies unfilled for service and health care workers will have far-reaching consequences on UC campuses and hospitals, said Todd Stenhouse, a spokesperson for AFSCME 3299. That union represents tens of thousands of workers across UC, including patient care technical employees, security guards, parking attendants, custodians, food service workers and others.
Even before Wednesday’s announcement, union leaders were already irritated by the growing number of vacancies across the system and blamed UC for not investing in those employees. The hiring freeze will exacerbate the problem, Stenhouse said. UC hospital patients, for example, will face longer wait times when they press their call buttons and need a worker to come to their aid, Stenhouse said.
“UC is a world-class institution, but you have to have enough staff to deliver the services,” he added. “Our members are what make it run.”
The announcement of the hiring freeze was disappointing to Constance Penley, a professor of film studies at UC Santa Barbara and president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations.
Penley said she sees the hiring freeze as part of a “wave of capitulation” on the part of universities toward the Trump administration. She noted, for example, that Columbia University was reportedly planning to yield to the Trump administration’s demands to change, among other things, the handling of student protests and discipline to get $400 million in federal funding restored.
“If there were a hiring freeze or other tactics within some kind of overall plan, then I could understand it,” she said “But this seems to just be totally defensive.”
During his remarks Wednesday, Drake said that groundbreaking advancements in medicine, such as learning to diagnose and treat HIV, is in “large part due to research discoveries made at universities,” including UC. That kind of work, he said, “is at risk today.”
“I recognize that this is frightening for many people in our UC community, and these feelings can make it hard to study and to work and to teach,” Drake said. “But still, I can say unequivocally that the University of California will be here. At the end of the day, the rules of engagement may have changed, but our foundational values have not.”
The UC Student Association and the faculty’s Academic Senate leaders did not return requests for comment Wednesday.
The Covid-19 pandemic amplified long-standing inequalities; there are no quick fixes to high chronic absentee rates and other challenges.
A return to “normal” won’t address post-Covid students feeling disengaged – nor should it.
Unlike other states, California districts have a $6 billion Covid block grant to replace federal relief that expired.
In March 2020, the Covid pandemic shut down schools, creating havoc, particularly among California’s most vulnerable children. Five years later, despite unprecedented funding from the state and federal governments, most districts continue to struggle to recover the ground they lost amid multiple challenges: more disgruntled parents and emotionally fragile students, a decline in enrollment, and uncertain finances.
According to calculations by researchers at Stanford and Harvard universities, most California school districts remain below pre-pandemic levels in standardized test scores — 31% of a grade equivalent below in math and 40% of a grade equivalent in reading. These averages understate the widening gaps in living conditions as well as test scores between the lowest-income and least-impoverished districts and schools.
The drop in the average scores in California and the nation on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2024 “masks a pernicious inequality,” said Sean Reardon, faculty director of the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford.
Scores are a shorthand measurement of learning, and they do not address the deeper, latent impact of the pandemic.
“We tend to overlook the longer-term effects of the delay in socialization and self-discipline — things that schools nurtured in young people,” said Vito Chiala, principal of William C. Overfelt High, whose 1,400 primarily low-income Hispanic and Vietnamese American students live in East San Jose. “Young people becoming adults at the high school level seem to be maybe two or three years behind where it used to be.”
In the first year of returning from remote learning, the focus was on school-related behaviors and self-management, Chiala said. “Students who had spent over a year saying whatever they wanted on social media had to face people in person, and that was super-uncomfortable sometimes. Now it’s much more about endurance, being willing and able to do hard academic work for longer periods of time.”
Overfelt High is far from unique. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2021-22, 87% of public schools said the pandemic harmed student socioemotional development, and 56% reported increased incidents of classroom disruptions from student misconduct.
Educators, in turn, have taken a more holistic approach to building students’ mindsets and meeting families’ basic needs, said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California Berkeley, who is studying nine California districts’ post-Covid responses.
Recognizing that Covid amplified the harsh conditions of living in poverty, Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators put $4 billion into creating community schools in low-income neighborhoods to strengthen ties to parents and open health clinics at schools. The state began to fund free universal school breakfasts and lunches.
With state grants, Rocketship Public Schools hired care coordinators in all of its charter schools, most in East San Jose, to cope with the aftermath of Covid.
Fabiola Zamora, a mother of four children from ages 2 to 10, described the support from the care corps coordinator for her school when she became homeless. “We received blankets, diapers, warm clothes. Mrs. Martinez guided me to a shelter and helped get my daughter to school,” she said. “It was hard. I was scared; it made me feel I wasn’t alone.”
Mental health responses
The proportion of students experiencing mental health issues had been rising before Covid. It accelerated during remote learning and coincided with an explosion of social media and cell phone use. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the incidence and prevalence of depression among 1.7 million 5- to 22-year-olds served by Kaiser Permanente in Southern California rose by about 60%, and the incidence of anxiety increased 31% from 2017 to 2021.
School districts in turn hired more counselors and psychologists using mental health funding and $13.4 billion the state received from the federal American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the last and biggest installment of the $23.4 billion in Covid aid from Congress. Savvy districts have tapped Medi-Cal, the California version of Medicaid, to reimburse school mental health services, although Republican plans for massive cuts to Medicaid could jeopardize the funding.
Addressing the whole child makes sense. Disengaged and depressed students can’t focus; chronically absent students fall behind, complicating efforts to catch them up while moving others ahead.
But have these added responsibilities overburdened and preoccupied districts? In a fifth-year Covid reassessment, Robin Lake, director of the Center for Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, and Paul Hill, the center’s founder, raised that issue. “By easing up on graduation requirements” (which the California Legislature did), “making it easier for students to earn good grades, excusing frequent absences, and prioritizing social-emotional learning curricula over core academics,” they wrote, “the pendulum has swung too far away from the core business of schooling.”
Stubbornly high chronic absenteeism
The persistently high rates of chronic absences in California since Covid underscore complex challenges. In the first full year back from remote learning, chronic absenteeism nearly tripled statewide from 12% in 2018-19 to 30%, mirroring that of other states.
Just as with test scores, the averages masked yawning differences between ethnic and racial groups and levels of poverty: 35% for Hispanics, 42.5% for Black students, and 46% for homeless and foster youths, compared with 11% for Asian and 23% for white students. Students are chronically absent when they miss 10% or more days of school.
By 2023-24, the statewide rate declined, first to 25% in 2022-23 and then to 20% — still two-thirds higher than pre-Covid. An analysis by researchers Heather Hough of Policy Analysis for California Education and Hedy Chang of Attendance Works helps explain why learning recovery has been slow in impoverished schools. Only 2% of schools with the fewest low-income students had high or extreme levels of chronic absences, compared with 72% of schools in which three-quarters or more of students were low-income. The disparity isn’t new; the dimensions of the divide are.
“If you want to reduce chronic absence, you need to solve the root causes that result in kids not showing up to school in the first place,” said Attendance Works founder Chang. “The barriers — poor transportation, homelessness and food insecurity — are huge, and these issues are hard to solve.”
Schools also had a messaging problem. “During the pandemic, we said, ‘You should stay home for any reason for illness, any symptom.’ I don’t think we had counter-messaging when we wanted kids to come back.”
“The imperception was maybe missing school doesn’t matter so much if I think my kid might be sick,” Chang said.
Some high school students reached the same conclusion, added Overfelt principal Chiala. “We always said school is mandatory, school is important. And then we said for a year and a half (during remote learning) it wasn’t,” he said. “I think psychologically, a lot of young people are like, ‘”If it was really important, you would’ve made me keep coming.’”
Computers for all students
There is an unmistakable positive legacy of Covid: the equitable spread of technology after initial chaos.
Covid caught the state flat-footed, without a plan or the capacity to switch on a dime to remote learning; in many districts, this did not go well, as kids with home computers but spotty internet drove to fast-food parking lots to download the week’s homework assignments and to upload their answers.
In June 2020, the California Department of Education estimated that 700,000 students lacked a home computer — which soon rose to 1 million, or about 17% of students — and that there were 322,000 hot spots for internet service.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond created the Bridge the Divide Fund. With $18.4 million in donations, it distributed 45,000 Chromebooks, plus 100,725 hot spots.
The difference-maker arrived in 2021 with $7 billion as California’s share of the Biden administration’s Emergency Connectivity Fund. Federal funds have enabled more than 75% of schools nationwide to provide a computer for every student, and more than 80% of schools have high-speed broadband service, said Evan Marwell, the founder of the San Francisco-based nonprofit EducationSuperhighway.
Soon, it will be time to recycle personal computers. The good news, Marwell said, is a Chromebook can now be bought for $200.
Low return on federal investment?
On the 2021-22 Smarter Balanced tests, low-income students fell back after years of slow improvement. The overall 35% proficiency in English language arts was 4 percentage points lower than in pre-pandemic 2018-19. The 21% proficiency in math was a drop of 6 percentage points. Two years later, low-income students had regained half of what they had lost on both tests.
During these three years, per-student spending in California mushroomed by about 50% per student because of federal Covid relief and one-time state funding due to record-setting revenues, according to data assembled by Edunomics Lab, an education finance organization. The combination of high spending and lower test scores earned California one of the nation’s worst “returns on investments.”
However, a newly released deeper analysis of district-by-district Smarter Balanced results by researchers at UC San Diego, American Institutes of Research, UC Berkeley and Public Policy Institute of California showed that two years of federal Covid spending had a statistically significant effect in 2021-22. It was equivalent to a gain in math and English language arts of about 10 days of learning, said economics professor Julian Betts of UC San Diego.
Schools that reopened a year earlier from remote learning than most schools in California showed a bigger gain: about 20 days of learning.
However, those positive factors were not big enough to offset the effects of poverty — a loss of a quarter year of learning for schools with a high percentage of low-income students.
Researchers also looked at the results of the California Healthy Kids Survey that students fill out annually to see if there was a correlation between widespread bullying and student harassment with test scores. The effect was large: the equivalent of a half-year of lost learning in math and a third of a year in English language arts in 2021-22. The data document what socio-emotional learning advocates have preached for years: School climate matters in recovering academically from Covid declines.
One last source of funding
Starting with the 2021-22 state budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature invested more than $10 billion in TK-12 in the post-Covid years. The bulk of it went to transitional kindergarten (TK) and extended learning programs. What Newsom didn’t direct funding to were comprehensive, statewide, early reading and numeracy programs and high-intensive tutoring — two strategies that other states like Louisiana funded to respond Covid-era declines in test scores. Newsom had proposed $2.6 billion for “high-dosage” in-school tutoring; it vanished in the final budget.
What did survive was a $6 billion Learning Loss Emergency Block Grant program. Apparently unique among states in providing substantial money beyond the expiration of the $23.4 billion federal Covid funding, it directs most money to heavily low-income districts through 2026-27. In settling the Cayla J. lawsuit filed by Oakland and Los Angeles families over the state’s failure to meet their children’s education needs during remote learning, the state agreed to require that districts use the block grant for evidence-based strategies, like high-dosage tutoring. Districts must also conduct a needs assessment study, create a plan for the money, and present it to the public.
The learning recovery block grant provides an opportunity to ask questions raised by the Center for Reinventing Public Education in its five-year reassessment:
What worked and didn’t work over the last five years?
How are the students most in need going to get extra time and attention?
What skills and new work habits are required of teachers?
Authors Robin Lake and Paul Hill concluded that the needed systemic changes would be “a heavy lift.” The necessary changes “probably can’t be done unless state officials seriously consider major waivers of regulation and teacher unions allow experimentation with new teacher roles and school staffing rules.”
Vito Chiala
Bruce Fuller, the UC Berkeley professor who is analyzing the learning recovery plans of 700 California districts, agrees. “It’s hard to sustain anything that’s seriously innovative,” he said.
Vito Chiala at Overfelt High in San Jose, however, said Overfelt is becoming a different place. “When we came back (from remote learning), we really spent a lot of time radically dreaming about how will we treat our kids? How will we grade work? How, what will we be teaching them? How will we embrace our students’ humanity?”
The result: “We don’t grade the same way we used to. Classes aren’t rushing through curriculum like they used to. Teachers aren’t feeling they have to move on, even though half the class hasn’t learned. We’re really trying to motivate students to feel the intrinsic need to learn and get better.”
“We’re still finding our footing in sort of this post-pandemic world,” he said.
Employee Retention Statistics You Should Know In 2025—Infographic
Employee retention is crucial for businesses, as 31% of new hires leave within six months. This infographic examines statistics around it, revealing the reasons behind turnover, such as poor management, lack of advancement opportunities, compensation issues, and job insecurity. In 2024, nearly 46% of employees reported considering quitting, which could lead to significant loss of institutional knowledge and costs ranging from 30% to 400% of an employee’s annual salary for replacements.
But what is employee retention? It refers to an organization’s ability to keep its employees, measured by the percentage who stay versus those who leave. For example, an annual retention rate of 80% indicates that 80% of employees remained with the company over the past year. While some turnover is normal due to various reasons like career changes or retirement, organizations should strive for a retention rate above 90%. Beyond just a statistic, employee retention is a strategy focused on ensuring workforce satisfaction and engagement. High turnover can lead to unexpected costs, loss of skills, decreased productivity, and can negatively impact company culture, making it difficult for employees to build relationships and collaborate effectively.
Let’s be honest: many of us don’t use our Yondr pouches.
In the age of social media and being chronically online, smartphones have become extensions of our bodies and Los Angeles Unified’s attempt to minimize classroom distractions through the Yondr phone ban has sparked considerable debate.
While the intention behind locking away devices is commendable, the execution has been less than effective, calling into question the practicality of such measures.
We’ve all seen them, the gray and green pouches with magnetic locks. The Yondr pouches, designed to lock students’ phones during school hours, have faced significant challenges. Despite their widespread adoption, many students have found ways to bypass the system.
Students have hacked the pouches, purchased their own magnets, banged them against tables, used fake phones or have simply avoided using them altogether. Not only does this undermine the policy’s effectiveness, but it also highlights a glaring oversight in anticipating student ingenuity.
LAUSD spent no small amount on this program, allocating around seven million dollars for equipment to enforce the policy, with about 80% of eligible middle and high schools opting for Yondr pouches.
Funds that could have gone to hiring new teachers, improving facilities or enhancing school meals were blown on pouches that many students don’t even use.
While the benefits of reducing distractions is clear, the practicality of such bans remains questionable.
The effectiveness of the pouches relies heavily on constant administrative enforcement and student integrity. Overpowering cell phone addictions, student opposition to the phone ban and the inability of administrators to constantly breathe down our necks have diminished compliance with the policy.
Investing in education staff, infrastructure and student welfare programs might have yielded more tangible benefits than attempting to enforce a policy that students are adept at undermining.
Banning phones is not inherently flawed. In fact, it aims to foster a more focused and interactive learning environment. However, the district’s Yondr approach has been unrealistic and financially imprudent.
A more practical strategy, such as creating phone-free zones in classrooms and study areas while allowing usage during lunch or passing periods, would be a more feasible solution. Though no system is perfect, a more flexible structure can reduce the temptation to sneak phones out during class.
Technology is inescapable. Rather than waging an unwinnable war against phones, LAUSD should lead the way in creating a more balanced approach, one that truly prepares students for success in the real world.
•••
This commentary was originally published in the Mirror, Van Nuys High School’s student-run journalism publication.
Abigail Kim is a 10th grader at Los Angeles Unified’s Van Nuys High School and is a staff writer for The Mirror’sopinion section.
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.
$600 million in federal grants for teacher preparation is in limbo while the court decides whether the Trump administration can cancel the funding.
Some California university and school district leaders are unsure whether programs can continue without help from the federal government.
The loss of the programs, which sometimes offer stipends and other financial help to teacher candidates, could worsen an already dire shortage of teachers for hard-to-fill jobs.
The number of teachers on emergency-style waivers and permits has tripled in the last decade. Teachers on emergency-style permits aren’t required to have completed teacher training.
The abrupt termination of $600 million in federal teacher-training grants by the Trump administration — and the uncertainty that remains while their cancellation is contested in court — have left teacher candidates and university and school district leaders worried about whether the programs they fund can continue.
The Teacher Quality Partnership grant and the Supporting Effective Educator Development grant have been used to help recruit and train teachers for high-needs schools and for hard-to-fill jobs, such as teaching science, special education and math.
At least $148 million in grants go to California teacher preparation programs.
“CSU simply does not have the resources to sustain these programs without funding from the U.S. Department of Education,” said Amy Bentley-Smith, director of strategic communications and public affairs for the university, in an email.
The loss of the grants, which fund programs at both universities and school districts, could worsen the state’s teacher shortage and force school districts to hire more teachers on emergency-style permits that don’t require them to complete teacher training.
“There’s still acute shortages of credentialed teachers in California,” said Dana Grayson, director of West-Ed’s Teacher Workforce team. “Numbers show that, in the past decade, the number of teachers who aren’t fully credentialed has tripled. So, really making sure we have fully credentialed teachers in classrooms is especially important.”
During the 2023-24 school year, the most recent year state data is available, 5% of California teachers were on emergency-style permits and waivers, according to newly released state data.
CSU can’t sustain programs alone
Without the grants, programs at four CSU campuses — Chico State, Cal State LA, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and CSU Monterey Bay — could lose a total of $29 million. The funds provide stipends for teacher candidates, pay for professional development for student residents and their mentor teachers, pay staff salaries and for faculty release time, and support college preparation for K-12 students, Bentley-Smith said.
Terminating the teacher preparation grants before the end of their terms — usually five years — would likely result in many teacher candidates delaying or abandoning plans to become credentialed teachers, she said.
“The high-needs, high-poverty schools these programs support, which have historically experienced difficulty in recruiting and retaining teachers, will lose support, collaboration, and access to new and future teachers,” Bentley-Smith said. “Further, teachers in these schools will lose out on professional development opportunities that support them in meeting the needs of their students.”
Among the grants in danger of being eliminated is a five-year grant to address a chronic shortage of qualified teachers in rural northeastern California. The $2.4 million grant to Chico State supports a teacherresidency program that recruits, trains and prepares teachers to work in high-poverty, hard-to-staff rural communities, according to the California Attorney General’s office, which has sued to stop the terminations.
Residencies allow teacher candidates to work alongside a mentor teacher in a classroom while completing their teaching credential.
The uncertainty around the grant “has led to significant disruptions in the program, including the inability to confidently plan for the upcoming year,” said Rebecca Justeson, a professor at Chico State’s School of Education.
Termination of the grant would result in two employees being laid off and another having their hours reduced, said Jennifer Oloff-Lewis, a professor at the College of Communication and Education at Chico State.
California State University officials would not comment on how many employees systemwide might be laid off if the grants are eliminated, saying only that the positions funded by the grants are usually terminated when grants end.
More than 1,000 students have completed CSU programs funded by the grants and have gone on to become credentialed teachers working in local school districts, said Bentley-Smith. About 300 teacher residents are in programs now. Some campuses have already committed funding and resources to support students for the upcoming school year.
Grants terminated with form letter
The two federal grants were terminated in early February by the U.S. Department of Education with a form letter that offered no specific reason, except to say that the program might promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; violate civil rights law; be fraudulent, abusive, or duplicate other programs; or otherwise fail to serve the best interests of the United States, according to the lawsuit filed by the state of California and a multi-state coalition.
When asked if California State University’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies may have put it at odds with the Trump administration, Bentley-Smith said the university complies with all federal and state nondiscrimination laws.
“We regret that programs that promote equity in learning are being misconstrued as beinginconsistent with federal priorities,” she said. “We can think of few greater priorities than ensuring all our youth are taught by skilled and qualified teachers.”
Credential programs for school staff also at risk
University programs aren’t the only ones under threat of losing grant funding. Some school districts and nonprofits have also won federal grants for programs to train and recruit teachers to fill hard-to-hire positions.
The Lindsay School District began a residency program in 2021 in an attempt to recruit and retain teachers. The district had been losing about 25% of its teaching staff each year, according to the National Education Association. Residents are paid $31,400 a school year, and their mentors $7,000.
Its $8 million federal teaching grant is among those canceled.
Special education is a shortage area that would be hit hard if it loses the grants.
“The sudden loss of federal funding for teacher residency grant programs will have a significant and profound impact on an already fragile system,” stated a letter from the Tulare Office of Education to state and federal lawmakers. “In 2020-21, 40 percent of schools hiring for open positions in special education reported having difficulties filling vacant openings as compared to 17 percent a decade earlier.”
Cases make their way through courts
The plaintiff state attorneys general argue in their lawsuit that termination of the grants, issued without warning, violates the Administrative Procedure Act, would impact teacher preparation programs, and immediately reduce the number of teachers and teacher trainees serving in schools.
The coalition won a temporary restraining order on March 10 from the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, requiring the grants be restored temporarily while the case is being litigated. The reprieve was brief. The Supreme Court ruled on April 4 to allow the U.S. Department of Education to terminate the grants while the court case is being heard.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday ruled on a separate lawsuit filed by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the National Center for Teacher Residencies and the Maryland Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. The court also lifted the temporary restraining order, citing the Supreme Court ruling, effectively freezing the grant funds for the plaintiffs in this suit.
Teacher preparation programs have an administrative appeals process that allows them to respond by letter to the allegations in the termination missive, according to Reach University President Joe Ross.
University leaders sent appeals for each of its three federal grants and received acknowledgment that their appeal had arrived, but otherwise have not heard back.
“As far as I know, I don’t know of any institution who has heard back on their efforts to engage with the Department of Education directly,” Ross said.
Program reaches out to high-poverty areas
Reach University had three federal grants totaling $14.7 million over five years that would be eliminated if the court ultimately agrees with the Trump administration. Although the nonprofit university is based in Oakland, it has been using the grants to support teacher candidates in high-poverty communities in rural Arkansas and Louisiana, where there are no universities within commuting distance.
The federal grant money was used to start partnerships with school districts and to recruit community college graduates who want to complete a bachelor’s degree while working in a classified position, such as a para-educator, after-school tutor, office clerk or bus driver, in a public school. After earning a degree, teacher candidates can become interns or residents in the district while earning their credential through the university.
Reach University has had to make immediate cuts, including laying off some staff members and suspending third-party evaluations of the program. The evaluations were used to determine the efficacy of the program and to allow grant programs to share best practices.
Ross is trying to find local funding to help sustain the work, but there are no plans to reduce the number of teacher candidates the program supports. He is afraid that staff cuts may impact teacher recruitment.
But Ross is optimistic about the long-term sustainability of these programs. He believes the funding will be replenished somehow because of broad bipartisan support for building a robust teacher pipeline across the country.
“I think that if you travel through rural communities in California, rural communities in eastern Arkansas, or rural communities in northwest Alabama, you will see lots of different kinds of people, but they’re all trying to figure out how to find enough teachers to serve their kids,” he said.
This story was updated at 3:15 p.m. with additional reactions.
The University of California will no longer require diversity statements for faculty applicants, university leaders announced. The change comes as the Trump administration has threatened to withhold funding from universities that have programs or initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Many UC academic departments and programs for years have required applicants seeking faculty positions to describe how they have or would contribute to campus diversity, such as racial diversity. But the system’s board of regents has directed UC President Michael Drake to “ensure that diversity statements are no longer required” for new applicants, Provost Katherine Newman wrote in a letter Wednesday to campus provosts.
“The requirement to submit a diversity statement may lead applicants to focus on an aspect of their candidacy that is outside their expertise or prior experience,” Newman said. She added that UC “can continue to effectively serve communities from a variety of life experiences, backgrounds, and points of view without requiring diversity statements.”
The letter did not explicitly mention the Trump administration. But at an emergency meeting earlier this week of the university’s systemwide Academic Council, Drake told faculty the change was being made and said UC “needed to show signs it was listening to the Trump administration,” according to Sean Malloy, an associate professor of history at UC Merced who sits on the council and was present for Drake’s presentation.
Malloy, in an interview, called the decision cowardly and naive. “It is a catastrophic misreading of the current political dynamic,” he said. “We are dealing with people who want to punish political enemies. And the University of California is a political enemy. Offering concessions, particularly unasked-for concessions, only invites further repression.”
Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot measure, bans California’s public colleges from giving preferential treatment based on race, sex or ethnicity, including in employment decisions. But the diversity statements, which have existed for years, were not believed to violate that law.
The statements are typically up to two pages and allow an applicant to describe their track record of advancing various types of diversity — such as race, gender or sexual orientation — or how they expect their work would promote diversity. UC was considered a leader in the practice, with supporters saying the statements were helpful in understanding how prospective faculty would contribute to campuses and diverse student bodies.
The use of diversity statements also faced criticism, with opponents often arguing that they served as an unfair political test of applicants. Other prominent universities, including Harvard and the University of Michigan, have also recently stopped requiring the statements.
The Trump administration last week opened investigations into more than 50 colleges nationwide, including UC Berkeley, and accused them of running programs that discriminate against white and Asian students. Trump has separately threatened to withhold funding from Berkeley and three other UC campuses — Davis, San Diego and Santa Barbara — if his administration deems they aren’t doing enough to protect Jewish students.
Citing the threats of federal funding cuts, UC earlier on Wednesday announced it is implementing a hiring freeze across its campuses, hospitals and health professional schools.
In a separate statement Wednesday, the chair of UC’s board of regents, Janet Reilly, maintained that UC’s “values and commitment to our mission have not changed” despite no longer requiring diversity statements. She said UC would “continue to embrace and celebrate Californians from a variety of life experiences, backgrounds, and points of view.”
Even though standalone diversity statements won’t be permitted, faculty applicants can choose to refer to accomplishments related to diversity “in other parts of an application or during interviews and discussions,” Newman said in her letter. Hiring committees can then “consider these contributions alongside the applicants’ other qualifications,” she added.
The move to no longer require those statements “was the wrong decision at the wrong time and sends the wrong message to students and families,” said Jessie Ryan, the president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit organization that has advocated for more diversity among faculty and students.
The campaign has previously published studies highlighting the disparities in the racial demographics of students at California’s public universities compared with the racial makeup of faculty. The 2024 report found that 60% of UC’s tenure-track faculty are white, but only 19% of UC’s undergraduates are white.
Having a diverse faculty encourages more students to stay in school and succeed, Ryan said.
“When you take away a statement that centers diversity and offer nothing as a replacement, it sends a message to students that we are walking away from this work,” she said.
President Donald Trump, left, holds up a signed executive order as young people hold up copies of the executive order they signed at an education event in the East Room of the White House in Washington on March 20, 2025.
Credit: Ben Curtis/AP Photo
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to work toward eliminating the Department of Education, pushing forward a campaign promise to dismantle an agency that has long been maligned by conservatives.
With a group of students as a prop busily working on school desks behind him, Trump said, “My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department.”
The order instructs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
The federal government funds less than 10% of public school budgets, though much of that money supports especially vulnerable students. The department also oversees programs that help students pay college tuition, including Pell grants for low-income students.
The White House has already taken steps to gut the Education Department by roughly halving its workforce of 4,100, but officially eliminating the Cabinet-level agency would require congressional action.
The administration has also vowed to ship other critical functions to other federal departments — services for students with disabilities and low-income students to the Department of Health and Human Services and student loans to the Treasury Department.
“Closing the Department does not mean cutting off funds from those who depend on them — we will continue to support K-12 students, students with special needs, college student borrowers, and others who rely on essential programs,” McMahon said in a statement. “We’re going to follow the law and eliminate the bureaucracy responsibly by working through Congress to ensure a lawful and orderly transition.”
Children’s advocates were skeptical. The executive order “could result in a catastrophic impact on the country’s most vulnerable students and cutting much-needed funding will specifically impact students of color, students with disabilities and students in low-income communities,” the Association of California School Administrators said in a statement.
Over the decades, Republicans have repeatedly called for shutting down the department, although doing so would require 60 votes in the Senate — unlikely because Republicans now hold only 53 seats.
Nonetheless, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, chairman of the Senate education committee, said in a statement, “Since the Department can only be shut down with congressional approval, I will support the President’s goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, praised the order in a post on X “President Trump is keeping his promise and returning education to the states,” but didn’t pledge to bring the issue to a vote. David Cleary, who worked on education issues on Capitol Hill for two decades, indicated he wouldn’t be surprised if Johnson didn’t.
“Leaders don’t like to spend time on things they know can’t get over the finish line,” he told the Washington Post.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has sued the administration over the wholesale firing of federal employees and abrupt cancelation of research contracts, said he would monitor how the executive order is carried out.
While acknowledging the obligation to go through Congress, “the Administration continues to do everything it can to destroy the department’s ability to carry out its most vital, congressionally mandated functions — with the clearly stated ‘final mission’ of shuttering the Department for good,” he said in a statement. “My office will be looking at what this executive order actually does — not what the President says it will do.”
Trump used the executive order to continue his attack on equity-focused education programs. The Secretary of Education will ensure that Department of Education funds will follow federal law and administration policy, it states, “including the requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”
In response, Jessie Ryan, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, said the continued attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion and dismantling of the department “will leave millions of students and their families vulnerable to discrimination and deny them the opportunity to succeed in school, achieve their individual potential, and prepare for the future workforce. We cannot allow this administration to steamroll students and communities to achieve its agenda.”
Guillermo Mayer, President and CEO of the nonprofit Public Advocates, attributed the executive order to the Administration’s larger aim.
“Nobody should be fooled,” he said. “While this order purports to reduce federal bureaucracy, it’s part of a longer-term plan to eliminate federal oversight in education and give states free rein to redirect billions of dollars away from public schools and towards private school vouchers. The ultimate goal is to erode the public’s trust in our system of public education.”
