Riverside County teachers collaboratively learn with the Riverside County Office of Education math team around increasing student thinking.
Credit: Riverside County Office of Education
When I became president of the California State Board of Education in 1975 for the first of two stints in this role (1975–82), three different offices created state curriculum frameworks, instructional materials and assessments, without much coordination or integration. In the five decades since, I’ve seen the state make significant progress in aligning K–12 policies — including those that govern finance, English learners, career/technical education, teacher preparation, accountability, postsecondary preparation, and more — to form a system where the various parts do work together.
But alignment alone is not enough for successful student learning and measurable academic growth. For example, Common Core math adopted by the State Board of Education in 2013 failed at the essential last mile of implementation by not providing the capacity for teachers and principals to teach the new math framework. As I reflected on my eight-year presidency of the board ending in 2019, I concluded we ended up with some islands of deeply rooted and changed math teaching, but mostly deserts where math teaching never changed significantly.
In 2014, the board approved the English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework and in 2023 a new math framework. Now, state educators must focus on the next step. To successfully implement both academic frameworks, we will need effective, aligned, sustained professional development that can reach and strengthen the entire teacher workforce.
Scaling up means ensuring that every teacher in California has, on an ongoing basis:
Adequate time to prepare lessons
Opportunities to continually learn in math topic areas as well as best practices in teaching
Opportunities to collaborate with other teachers while on the job
Access to models of effective teaching
Access to coaching and expert support
Time for reflection, feedback and revision
This kind of professional development has been implemented on a large scale in Ontario, Canada; Singapore; South Korea; and Japan.
To better serve our students and realize the goals of our math and English language arts standards requires substantial shifts on the part of teachers and instructional leaders. The state must make a sustained investment to make this happen. The new 2023 math framework, for example, calls for students to explain and justify their reasoning, grasp concepts, and make connections between different solutions in a much deeper manner than was the case in the No Child Left Behind era. Teachers’ instruction will likely improve only if they have developed relatively sophisticated visions of high-quality mathematics teaching. Teachers need rapid feedback mechanisms and the ability to continually measure how well each student is learning.
These are no small tasks to reach 9,700 principals and 319, 000 teachers in California. The local district is the first entity one would typically look toward in coordinating efforts to build teachers’ capacity to implement standards-aligned instruction. But most districts in California are quite small. Larger districts lack the necessary staff development capacity in-house, especially since staff support must be thorough and sustained.
Each state needs to devise its own strategies for how to best build and sustain the infrastructure for a dramatic upgrade in local instructional capacity. California has set policies and oversees the preparation of new teachers primarily through the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC). The state needs to expand the scope of the CTC, Department of Education, and California Collaborative for Educational Excellence to include current teachers starting with early career teachers, and scaling up to more experienced teachers. We can also learn from successful approaches that have taken hold in other states.
The Newsom administration has invested in service scholarships and residencies to recruit and retain better-prepared teachers and, while these show considerable promise, they were funded with one-time money and have thus far not increased in scale to provide a large enough supply of new teachers. Districts and county offices also need support to train and coach in-service teachers. The state has recently directed funds to a county office and the state Mathematics Project to train coaches for districts so that they can establish ongoing embedded professional learning for their teachers. This, too, is a promising start, but unlikely to be sufficient to meet the enormous statewide demand for assistance.
Because human and organizational capacity building at the local level is expensive and difficult to carry out, technology and digital platforms must be designed to lower the costs. For example, students could be taught using individualized technology packages during a part of a school day, while teachers are released to attend a few hours of professional development that would otherwise necessitate the hiring of substitute teachers. Online video coaching for math teaching has already proved effective in districts such as Lost Hills in Kern County, which has shown double-digit gains in math proficiency levels for their students following such coaching,
Some critics call for more state control of what happens after teachers close the classroom door. But there is no obvious path or mechanism to exert enough state control in hundreds of thousands of classrooms for top-down implementation of the series of complex instructional shifts called for by the curriculum frameworks. Advocating for the state to take an expanded interest in ensuring and coordinating local teacher training is not equivalent to explicit state control over how a teacher goes about delivering that instruction. The latter would likely achieve minimal local buy-in and could undermine the flexibility teachers need to meet the needs of different students with distinctive strategies. Instead, schools and teachers must internalize the new standards as their own and not perceive them as an intrusion. History and current research clearly demonstrate that standards-based implementation is unlikely to be advanced by additional regulations, mandates and sanctions from the top down. Teacher support for complex instruction instead must be constructed from the bottom up. California can achieve new policies that drive classroom improvement by supporting internal and revamped external school accountability, encouraging collaborative teamwork and funding sustained, ongoing professional learning.
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.
Ariane Tuomy, a social studies teacher at Palo Alto Unified’s Gunn High School, responds to school board members’ questions at a special board meeting on Jan. 23.
Credit: Palo Alto Unified / YouTube
In hour two of a meeting that stretched to nearly five, Josh Salcman, barely two months on the Palo Alto Unified School Board, said aloud what other school board members no doubt realize at some point in their first term: “I’m acutely aware that no matter how I vote, I’m going to deeply disappoint a large part of our community, including people whose friendship is important to me and whose opinions I hold in the highest regard.”
He was undoubtedly right. Whether to require ninth graders to take an ethnic studies course starting next fall was and likely will remain contentious this year, not only in Palo Alto but throughout California.
Palo Alto had become the latest skirmish in California’s ethnic studies war. Salcman, who founded two education-related tech startups, was in the middle, ultimately facing the awkward decision of choosing between the views of enthusiastic students and teachers and apprehensive parents.
Two decisions in 2021 all but guaranteed that. First, a battle-weary State Board of Education, after multiple rewrites, approved an ambiguously worded curriculum framework that challenged districts to determine what should be included in an ethnic studies course. Then, the Legislature mandated that schools offer an ethnic studies course in high school starting in 2025-26.
Or maybe not. This month, Gov. Gavin Newsom decided not to fund the implementation of ethnic studies in next year’s state budget without explaining why. This not only calls the mandate into question, at least for next year, but also gives an out to districts that are dreading arguing over the course.
But not Palo Alto. Last week, board President Shana Segal, a Palo Alto native and former high school teacher, called for a special board meeting to approve the course that Palo Alto high school teachers had developed. The district would offer it in the fall and mandate it for graduation, starting in 2028-29. Regardless of state funding, that would be one year ahead of the state mandate. She set the hearing for later in the week, Jan. 23.
To pause or not to pause?
For two years, at the board’s direction, a half-dozen veteran Palo Alto teachers persevered to create a first-year ethnic studies course. Last fall, they offered a pilot version to 20 students in each of the district’s two high schools in Palo Alto. The students’ survey results, all positive, were in.
At the center of the conflict is Liberated Ethnic Studies, a strain of ethnic studies that made the liberation of Palestine a prominent element of instruction. Critics characterize it as a left-wing ideology focused on the ongoing domination and oppression of white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism.
Ethnic studies faculty at California State University and University of California and activists created Liberated Ethnic Studies after the state board rejected the first draft of the curriculum that they had primarily authored in 2019. They have made spreading Liberated Ethnic Studies a lucrative side hustle and have contracted with at least several dozen districts to train teachers and guide instruction.
In a May 2024 FAQ it published, the Palo Alto parent group cited language tying Liberated Ethnic Studies to the proposed course.
Superintendent Don Austin has reiterated that Palo Alto’s course is not Liberated Ethnic Studies and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict won’t be part of a course on California racial and ethnic groups.
But in October, Linor Levav, an attorney and co-founder of the parent group, filed a Public Records Act request for curriculum materials that the district had largely ignored. Eventually, the district provided a PDF that contained links that couldn’t be opened.
The rejection has fueled suspicions. “And so the question is, why are they teaching materials that they’re not willing to even tell us about?” she told EdSource.
The parent group called for a “pause” from proceeding with a mandated course.
While running campaigns for their first term on the five-member board, Salcman, Rowena Chiu and Alison Kamhi supported a delay. Now, the new majority’s campaign position would be put to a test.
The audience in the boardroom was not particularly friendly to the three dissenters. The room seated about 80, with some standing room. By board rules, students get to speak first, and they filled most of the room. The adults lined up outside to address the board for one minute via Zoom or enter to do so individually. Forty-five were set aside for one-minute comments. Students, all supporting ethnic studies now, clapped enthusiastically at comments they liked.
During the hearing, the three board skeptics said they shared some of the public’s concerns about the course’s content. They questioned its timing and sharply criticized the district for not being forthright about what would be taught in the course.
“I believe we have to be very transparent about what we are teaching, provide an opportunity for meaningful feedback, and not push through classes that make people and communities, including communities of color, feel unsafe, targeted, or disrespected,” said Kamhi, who is the legal program director for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
Watch Palo Alto Unified board member Josh Salcman discuss his concerns regarding ethnic studies.
Two hours into the hearing, when he was still advocating a delay, Salcman explained his dilemma, mixing high praise for the teachers’ work with well articulated reservations about some of the content.
He congratulated the teachers who developed the pilot course and the initial students who took it. Their presentation “underscored what I’ve heard from many community members who have emphatically urged me to vote yes.”
“I find myself agreeing with most of what they say,” he said. “About how one-sided our current history classes are, about how little our students are currently learning about the experiences of historically underrepresented communities. How our students from those communities can feel so marginalized as they question why their family histories are nowhere to be found in our classrooms.”
And “how they wish we could have more challenging conversations about topics like power and privilege and structural inequity.”
Then he switched and laid out his concerns and those he had heard in the community:
“insufficient communication, which I share”
“ideologies that could increase a sense of division among students, which could lead to fixed mindsets or scapegoating”
“a lack of guardrails”
“widespread confusion about why, if there’s nothing to worry about, almost no details were shared about the course until yesterday.”
One thing he knows for certain, he said, is: “We do not have a shared understanding of what the phrase ‘ethnic studies course’ means.”
“Is an ethnic studies course primarily about the histories, cultures, and contributions” of the main ethnic and racial groups in California?” he asked, or “Is it primarily about concepts like ethnicity, identity, intersectionality, power, privilege, oppression and resistance? Is it a mix of both?”
Striking a balance
At least on paper and in student testimonies, Palo Alto’s course would appear to strike a balance. The teachers’ eight-page course description — the form that board members have used to approve all previous courses — states that the course “examines social systems, social movements, and civic participation and responsibility through a local lens. … By fostering empathy and belonging, the course prepares students to engage meaningfully in our communities.”
The four units in the course would be Identity; Power, Privilege and Systems of Oppression; Resilience and Resistance; and Action and Civic Engagement, in which students would create their own projects aligned to the course.
Each of the four units in the course would contain sample essential questions, learning objectives, and examples of assignments and assessments. Students would keep a journal of reflection throughout. Each unit calls for reading, analyzing and evaluating multiple and diverse sources.
Palo Alto High history teacher Ben Bolanos acknowledged that privilege and systems of oppression “are triggering for certain people” but said it “is important to look at the shadow side of the human experience in order to understand what needs to be changed and how to look at and change the world for a better place.”
The word “oppression” appeared more than 100 times in the state framework, observed Ander Lucia, a Teacher on Special Assignment.
Watch student testimonies regarding ethnic studies at Palo Alto Unified.
All the student evaluations of the course — 27 of the 40 who completed one — were positive. A half-dozen ninth graders elaborated at the hearing.
“I’ll admit I had some reservations going into this course,” said Gunn High student Quinn Boughton. “I wasn’t sure how much it would apply to me as a white student or whether the topics might make people feel divided or uncomfortable, but those fears turned out to be completely unfounded. This course didn’t just teach history; it built empathy.”
Gunn student Gabriel Lopez’s takeaway from the course was: “When one group of people takes power from another, I think it is the responsibility of school to teach us about the injustices people face. So, in the future and in our lives, we can strive for more equality.”
For his final project, Palo Alto High student Amaan Ali organized Palo Alto students to volunteer at tutoring programs for less well-off students in East Palo Alto. “These projects go beyond academic exercises. They empower us to turn knowledge into action,” he said.
Boughton examined homelessness in the Bay Area “in a new light” to dissect the problem and “discuss the causes and impacts of the unhoused with my peers.”
The presentation impressed board President Segal, a Palo Alto native who taught high school for more than a decade. “So teachers, I just, I want to say these words,” she said. “You did it right. I just want to make sure you know it. You did it right.”
Transparency questioned
Chiu and Kamhi repeatedly stressed that they strongly support ethnic studies.
“Ethnic studies is critical to me personally, but it is also something that I very much believe we need as a society,” said new board member Chiu, a consultant to the World Bank and an ethnic studies instructor who, she said, is scheduled to lecture on “Asian American Women and Difficult Conversations” at UC Berkeley.
But they remained unpersuaded, not because of what the teachers presented, but because of what the district had not provided. The district waited until two days before the meeting to send out an agenda with information, and it didn’t contain detailed information about the curriculum and the materials that teachers had used in the pilot.
“I also have very specific questions about the curriculum that was sent to us,” said Chiu. “I’m sorry to say, while I’m sure you have an excellent course and the students all say so, I did find your materials difficult to navigate around. I couldn’t open some of the links.”
As it turned out, Austin had included an outdated, detailed curriculum outline called a “scope and sequence” that included the broken links and sites requiring permission to open. Austin blamed the Public Records Act request that required providing outdated material. But Chiu found that explanation wanting. She had spent 48 hours poring over a document under the assumption it would be taught in the pilot. That, she said, “causes more confusion and more calls for lack of transparency.”
Neither Austen nor other district officials explained why the document did not include more information than the presentation.
“I will say it’s quite possible that your course is not going to incite any of these incidents that we’ve seen in other school districts,” Chiu said. “However, it’s connected to the issue of transparency. So if the community has not had, in their view, sufficiently transparent instructional materials, that fear is only going to grow.”
Kamhi put it differently. “What I feel really uncomfortable doing is saying every single student should take a course that we know is controversial, that based on the materials we’ve seen, some of which are problematic. Maybe they’re being taught in the classroom; maybe they’re not — without more information about what the course actually is.”
Dissenters’ dilemma
The three board members found themselves in a Catch-22. Pressed to say what in the course needed to be changed, they couldn’t provide answers without more information.
After hours debating unsuccessful amendments to Segal’s motion, and amendments to those amendments, the original motion was back on the table.
To the teachers, Segal and the fifth member, Shounap Dharap, the issue came down to trust. The founding teachers had held listening sessions for the public when the course was being developed, and had made changes in response.
“I want to reiterate my thanks, gratitude and trust in our teachers. These teachers are choosing to do extra work in addition to their daily teaching, lesson planning and grading. I know from firsthand experience the amount of time and dedication it takes to create curriculum,” Segal said.
“When we are sitting here hearing that there are concerns about the course and the way the course is being presented to students, I, we can’t help but take that personally, right?” said Jeff Patrick, social science instructional leader at Gunn, “because that, that is our job and that’s the job we thought we had the trust of the board to do, right? We think we’ve done our job, and we don’t know what a pause is going to do.”
Dharap, a personal injury attorney and law professor, encouraged board members to base their decision on what they heard from teachers and students, not the unsubstantiated fears of the public. “We really need to sit down and consider whether a decision that we’re going to make now is valuing adult inputs over student outcomes.”
The final vote
Salcman sought a solution in the minutes before the vote. He pointed to San Dieguito Union High School District as a model for involving the public. It posted each ethnic studies unit on a website as it was developed with a form inviting comments.
“I’m not saying now that we need to go back and do that. We are where we are” but is there a way to move the course forward and involve people in the process? he asked.
Dharap said the board already has liaisons with schools to convey concerns and frustrations and serve as a “conduit” for community feedback. He said the board can set course goals, measurements and expectations for public input.
“How do I know that I have a commitment from folks in this room to try to address the concerns that I raised?” were Salcman’s last words before the vote.
Segal and Dharap said yes quickly. Chiu and Kamhi hesitated before voting no.
The silence surrounding Salcman was unsettling. Twice during that time, Segal said, “There’s time; we can all take a breath. We have time.”
Three and a half minutes seemed like hours passed before Salcman said his next word, “Yes.”
Segal immediately announced the motion passed 3-to-2 and ended the meeting and the webcast.
One can only speculate what went through his mind during the long pause that followed — wondering perhaps which friend or close adviser he would please or disappoint or whether he made the right vote? Salcman didn’t respond to EdSource’s repeated invitations to share his thinking.
At Sonoma State University, lower enrollment is worsening financial cutbacks.
Credit: Ally Valiente / EdSource
When Kaitlin Anderson committed to play golf for Sonoma State University, she posed proudly in a Seawolves sweatshirt.But last week, school officials announced that they plan to end all NCAA sports next year, part of a bid to balance the school’s budget amid sliding enrollment and anticipated cuts to state funding. Anderson, a business marketing major from Peoria, Arizona, now is thinking that she might leave the campus.
“I will not be coming back here” if the golf program is eliminated, said Anderson, a first-year student. “I think this school will not do well after doing all this because half the reason we have so many people is because of athletics.”
Sonoma State, one of the 23 campuses in the California State University (CSU) system, is perhaps the most extreme example of how public universities in the state are tightening their belts in the wake of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s January budget proposal and troubling enrollment drops at some campuses. The governor’s plan calls for a nearly 8% reduction in state funding in 2025-26 for both CSU and the University of California (UC), while also deferring previously promised budget increases of 5% until 2027-28.
The governor’s proposal is not final, and later revisions could paint a rosier financial picture for higher education. But CSU leaders have warned that the plan, if implemented, couldresult in fewer course sections and larger class sizes, along with some cuts in student services.
Sonoma State has been taking in less money from tuition and fees as its student body has shrunk 39% over the past decade due to changes in local demographics and some continuing fallout from wildfires in the region. In addition to the sports closures, it is also planning to close six academic departments and eliminate two dozen majors in an effort to plug a nearly $24 million budget deficit.
Several other CSU campuses are warning about possible impacts of the governor’s proposal.Stanislaus State, which serves more than 9,000 students in the San Joaquin Valley, could face a $20 million deficit after accounting for the January budget proposal, a Jan. 22 email from the president’s office said. Sacramento State, with a student body of more than 30,000, anticipates making a $45 million one-time cut. CSU Channel Islands officials have outlined plans to permanently reduce the Ventura County campus’s budget by $17 million in recurring expenses in 2025-26, saying that expenses per-student exceed the state average by thousands of dollars.
Reduced state support could be missed most at schools like Sonoma State, one of 11 CSU campuses where enrollment has dropped over the last decade, reducing revenue from tuition and fees. Enrollment this fall was also a mixed bag, rising year-over-year at 15 CSU campuses and falling at eight.
At the Sonoma State campus in Rohnert Park, students responded to the news about the end to NCAA Division II intercollegiate sports and academic cuts with a mixture of anger and disbelief. A video published by the Press Democrat newspaper in nearby Santa Rosa shows an emotionally charged town hall meeting among student-athletes, coaches and university leaders. “So you think that we’re easily replaceable?” one attendee asked interim President Emily Cutrer. (“No, that’s not what I was saying,” she replied.) As tensions escalated, students erupted into bitter laughter and shouted interjections. “Do we get our money back for the semester?” one student asked, prompting applause.
A group called Save Seawolves Athletics has filed a federal civil rights complaint arguing that Sonoma State’s plan to end the school’s NCAA Division II athletics program will impact minority students disproportionately, spokesperson and assistant men’s soccer coach Benjamin Ziemer said. The group is also considering filing a lawsuit.
Signs of belt-tightening were also common this fall at San Francisco State, where enrollment is down 26% over the decade. Students and faculty members in December protested academic job cuts by staging a mock funeral march. Earlier in the fall, the university’s J. Paul Leonard Library announced that it expects to trim its budget 30% over the next two years, reducing its spending on resources like books and journals. The university offered 443 fewer course sections in fall 2024 than in fall 2023, a decline of nearly 11%, according to university data. President Lynn Mahoney said in a December message to the campus that the school is planning for “significant reductions in the 2025-26 budget” totaling about $25 million.
Leaders at California State University, Dominguez Hills — where enrollment has fallen a slighter 3% since 2015, but 20% from its peak in fall 2020 — have already whittled $19 million from the school’s base budget since the 2023-24 school year. If state funding is slashed in 2025-26, campus officials have outlined plans to shave another $12 million, and have contemplated reducing the number of course sections, among other things.
“I don’t want to cut out Psych 101, but if we have a thousand less students here, then maybe I don’t need 20 sections of Psych 101; maybe I only need 12,” President Thomas A. Parham said at a Nov. 7 budget town hall. “What we are trying to do is reduce the number of sections and, in some cases, fill those higher, so that instead of 15 students there might be 25 in them. But we are still trying to keep the academic integrity intact, even as we work smarter around the limited resources we have.”
Some faculty and students at Dominguez Hills are worried. Elenna Hernandez, a double major in sociology and Chicano studies entering the last semester of her senior year, said the tighter finances have been evident at La Casita, a Latino cultural center where she works on campus. She said La Casita, which receives campus funding, isn’t staying open as late as it has in the past and received less funding for its Day of the Dead celebration. The center is important to her because it runs workshops where students can learn about Latino history and culture.
“A lot of students don’t have access to this education,” she said, noting that more than 60% of the student body is Latino. “The classroom doesn’t teach it, necessarily, unless you’re in an ethnic studies class.”
Stanislaus State University President Britt Rios-Ellis said last week in an email to the campus that the university is considering several ways to balance its budget, including reducing the number of courses and looking to save money on utility costs.
Miranda Gonzalez, a fourth-year business administration major at Stanislaus State and president of the school’s Associated Students student government organization, said she initially was surprised that CSU would need to trim its budget at all in light of a decision to increase tuition 6% each year starting this past fall and ending in the 2028-29 school year. Full-time undergraduate students currently pay $6,084 for the academic year, plus an additional $420 per semester if they are from out of state.
“It was kind of a shock that the CSU was going to be cutting their budget when they just raised tuition as well,” she said, adding that lawmakers and campus leaders should remember that any reduction “ultimately impacts the lives of our students, faculty and staff.”
State funding is not the only source of revenue for the CSU and UC systems, which also get money from student tuition and fees, the federal government and other sources like housing, parking and philanthropies.
The revenue picture is not gloomy at every Cal State campus.
Cal State Fullerton, which has the largest student body in the system, saw enrollment grow 4% to roughly 43,000 students between 2023 and 2024. The steady growth provides the campus with a revenue cushionthat has potentially saved jobs, campus President Ronald S. Rochon said.
“We are at a record enrollment, and because of the enrollment, we continue to have the kind of revenue to keep our lights on, people employed and our campus moving forward,” Rochon said in a Nov. 7 presentation to the university’s Academic Senate. “This is something that we all should be taking very, very seriously. We should not rest on our laurels with regard to where we are with enrollment.”
The California Faculty Association, which represents CSU employees including tenure-track faculty, lecturers and librarians, argued last spring that the university system should tap its financial reserves to balance shortfalls. CSU officials, however, say that reserves leave them only enough money to cover 34 days of operations systemwide.
UC’s fiscal outlook is less dire. Enrollment is stable across its 10 campuses and is even increasing at several. Some campuses, like UC Berkeley, may not have to make cuts at all to department budgets. A Berkeley spokesperson cited increased revenues from investments and noted that Berkeley will benefit from a systemwide 10% tuition hike for out-of-state students that kicks in this year. Berkeley enrolls about 3,300 undergraduates from other states and another 3,200 international students.
Other campuses, however, likely would have to make cuts under Newsom’s proposed budget, including to core academic services. The system as a whole faces a potential $504 million budget hole,due to the possible drop in state funding paired with rising costs. “I think this budget challenge does require us to focus more on some campus budgets than we have perhaps traditionally,” Michael Cohen, who chairs the finance committee of UC’s board of regents, said at a meeting last week.
UC Riverside has already saved some money on salariesbecause of retirements and other employee turnover, said Gerry Bomotti, vice chancellor for budget and planning at the campus. Still, the campus could face a deficit next year because ofincreasing compensation costs on top of possible cuts in state funding. Bomotti said the campus will try to minimize anyharm to academic units if reductions are needed.
“Our priority obviously is serving students and supporting our faculty and our enrollment. We tend to always give that priority,” he said.
California’s 116 community colleges, which enrolled more than 1.4 million students as of fall 2023, could face a more favorable 2025-26 budget year than the state’s two university systems. The colleges would get about $230 million in new general funding through Proposition 98, the formula used to allocate money from California’s general fund to K-12 schools and community colleges.
By some measures, the past decade has seen more state and local dollars flowing into California’s public colleges and universities. State and local spending on higher education in California has been at a historic high in recent years on a per-student basis, hitting $14,622 per full-time equivalent student in 2023, up from $10,026 in 2014, according to an analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, which takes into account funding for both two-year and four-year institutions. Looking at four-year schools alone, the association calculated that California spent $3,500 more per student than the U.S. average in 2023. Living costs and salaries, however, are often higher in California than in many other states.
Marc Duran, a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps, contributed to this story.
This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Kaitlin Anderson’s last name and to clarify her plans if the golf program is eliminated.
People protest against a funding freeze of federal grants and loans following a push from President Donald Trump to pause federal funding near to the White House in Washington on Jan. 28, 2025.
State leaders spent much of Tuesday trying to determine the potential impact of a White House freeze on federal grants and loans that could potentially affect millions of California students and their families.
A White House memo released Monday from the Office of Management and Budget called for the freeze to begin Tuesday at 2 p.m. PST. But, just minutes before 2 p.m., U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan in Washington, D.C., blocked the order until next Monday at 2 p.m. PST to give courts more time to consider its impact, according to Politico.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Tuesday that the freeze could cut $3 trillion in federal funding from programs that help the homeless, veterans, seniors, disaster victims and school children nationwide.
The order has thrown state programs into chaos and created uncertainty around their administration, said a media release from Bonta’s office.
“I will not stand by while the president attempts to disrupt vital programs that feed our kids, provide medical care to our families, and support housing and education in our communities,” Bonta said in a statement. “Instead of learning from the defeats of his first administration, President Trump is once again plowing ahead with a damaging — and most importantly, unlawful —agenda.”
Bonta joined 22 other state attorneys general to file a lawsuit calling for a temporary halt to implementation of the memo. The White House directive called for advancing the Trump administration’s policies and called “the use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies a waste of taxpayer dollars.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office called the White House memo a violation of federal law. “We are confident funding will be restored,” officials there said in an email to EdSource.
California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said the White House action is misguided. “(It) serves nothing more than to hurt the most vulnerable students and people in our nation,” he said.
Early Tuesday, state education leaders expressed concern that student loans, special education, Head Start, and Title 1 programs could be impacted by the freeze.
But by late Tuesday afternoon, conflicting information from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Department of Education made it unclear which programs would be affected, according to a letter from the California Department of Education to county and district superintendents scheduled to be sent Tuesday night.
According to the letter, the U.S. Department of Education assured state departments of education that Title 1 programs for low-income schools, special education and other formula grants will not be frozen. But, officials at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said these programs will be subject to the same scrutiny as others regarding compliance with the Trump administration’s executive orders.
“We hope to gain more clarity on affected programs before Feb. 3 and plan to communicate this information to the field as soon as possible in case the OMB directive becomes effective,” said the California Department of Education guidance signed by David Schapira, chief deputy superintendent.
Officials in the U.S. Department of Education said only discretionary grants would be affected and not formula grants, according to Troy Flint, spokesperson for the California School Boards Association.
A list of discretionary grants on the U.S. Department of Education website includes grants for educator development, charter school programs, early learning programs, school and community improvement programs, as well as grants for arts and literacy education.
California School Boards Association officials will be watching to see how the issue is resolved in the courts, Flint said. “This is a fluid and fast-moving topic, and we don’t think we have heard the end of it.”
University leaders are also waiting to see what the freeze could mean for them. University of California staff and lawyers are “working diligently to clarify the potential impacts” on the university, said President Michael Drake in a statement.
He noted that the White House has said federal student loans and Pell Grants would not be impacted.
“We are in contact with key policymakers in Congress and at federal agencies, as well as association partners and other higher education institutions. We are evaluating what actions we are able to take and will keep you informed,” Drake added in a message to the UC community.
EdSource reporters Emma Gallegos, Michael Burke, Mallika Seshadri, Betty Márquez Rosales, Amy DiPierro, Vani Sanganeria contributed to this story.
Like most of the nation, California students were stuck in low gear again in 2024. On the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), they performed significantly below their pre-pandemic scores in math and reading.
The gaps between the lowest-performing students, between low-income and well-off students, and among some racial and ethnic groups continued to widen overall, an ominous sign that many students are unprepared for high school and beyond.
“Our nation is facing complex challenges in reading,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, noting that nationwide, the percentage of eighth graders reading Below Basic, the lowest achievers, was 33% and the highest in the assessment’s history. The 40% of fourth graders scoring Below Basic was the highest in 20 years.
On the fourth grade reading assessment for NAEP, scores in five states, in light blue, declined compared with 2022, no states’ scores improved, and 47 states, including California, saw no statistically significant change.Credit: National Assessment of Educational Progress
Also known as The Nation’s Report Card, NAEP is the only assessment that a representative number of students in fourth, eighth, and 12th grades in every state and Washington, D.C., take every two years—and thus, the most reliable measure of performance among states. The results for fourth and eighth graders were released today.
On NAEP’s 500-point scale, where one or 2-point gains are common, and movement of 3 or more points are notable, California’s scores have consistently trailed the nation in both reading and math, although the gap in reading has narrowed. That had been especially so for eighth graders, whose score equaled the nation’s in 2022.
But that result was the exception in a year in which scores fell sharply nationally and to a lesser extent in California in the aftermath of the pandemic and slow recovery. Nationally, math scores in 2022 dropped 8 points in eighth grade and 5 points in fourth, the largest drop in NAEP’s 25-year history.
The latest scores show mostly no progress. Scores in fourth and eighth grade reading fell again, leaving California 9 points and the nation 8 points below 2017. Math was mixed — up in fourth grade, but not enough to catch 2019, with eighth grade taking another dip.
The average scores, however, mask widening disparities between the highest and lowest-performing students. On fourth grade reading, student scores at the 90th achievement percentile fell 1 point between 2019 and 2024, and scores at the 75th percentile fell 3 points. However, scores for students in the 10th percentile fell 10 points, and for students in the 25th percentile, they fell 8 points.
The pattern looks about the same throughout the nation, with a serious long-term impact, said Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who also was provided an early peek at the scores. “The top scorers are coming back, and the bottom is doing worse, which will affect income distribution over a lifetime,” he said.
On fourth grade reading, California scored higher than three states (West Virginia, New Mexico, and Alaska), statistically about the same as 35 other states and behind 13 states. Only two states, Louisiana in reading and Alabama in math, scored above pre-pandemic levels of 2019.
NAEP scores fall within four bands of achievement: Advanced, Proficient, Basic and Below Basic. The differences by race and ethnicity remained stark on all the tests. For example, on the fourth grade reading test, 7% of Black students and 19% of Latino students scored Proficient and Advanced, while 50% of Asian and 44% of white students scored that high.
For all students, only 31% of California’s fourth graders scored Proficient or Advanced, compared with 32% nationally.
NAEP defines students performing at the Basic level as having partially mastered knowledge and skills required to perform at a Proficient level. Proficient students have demonstrated a grasp of challenging material and can apply the knowledge to real-world situations and analytical skills. Advanced students showed superior performance.
Scoring Below Basic doesn’t mean students in fourth grade can’t read. “We’re saying that they’re unlikely to be able to determine the meaning of a familiar word using context from the text. That’s a critical skill that students will really need for entering middle school,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent body that Congress created to set policy for NAEP.
Once education experts and advocates have had a chance to review the results and findings of surveys that the National Center for Educational Statistics conducted of students and teachers, there will be theories for the low scores and calls for efforts to address them.
In The 74 earlier this week, columnist Chad Aldeman evaluated a half-dozen explanations for declining scores nationwide. They include less reading and more TikTok; the abandonment of federal accountability for school performance, starting in the latter years of the Obama administration; the adoption of Common Core state standards a decade ago; and soaring student absenteeism rates post-Covid. While they have come down, the rates remain disproportionately high for the lowest-performing students, contributing to widening gaps in achievement.
Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research and one of a few education experts who got an early look at the NAEP results, would add another cause to the mix: emerging evidence of grade inflation, connected to the pandemic, and perceptions parents have of their own children’s learning.
“So the most immediate information that parents get is not state or NAEP tests. It’s (high) grades that are not showing parents where their kids stand in real time, to allow them to provide feedback to their kids and encourage them.”
Goldhaber said there is evidence that teacher quality is largely what moves students; he’d focus on the inequitable distribution of schools with less qualified and credentialed teachers.
Not comparable to Smarter Balanced
Students also take annual state tests in math and English language arts, but NAEP officials warn not to make comparisons since each state’s measurements and standards are different. California aligns its tests to the Common Core standards, while NAEP’s tests are based on what experts say students in each grade should know. It’s harder to score Proficient or above on NAEP than on most state tests. In 2024, 44% of all California fourth graders students scored at or above Proficient on the Smarter Balanced test.
About 11,000 students in California took NAEP, and only portions of it. That’s too few for individual students, schools, and districts to receive scores, with one exception. Annually, a representative number of students in 25 large districts, including Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified, take the Trial Urban District Assessment or TUDA. They provided one of the few bright spots in 2024.
Los Angeles was one of three districts whose fourth grade math scores didn’t drop during the pandemic; it rose slightly from 2019 to 2024, and San Diego’s fell less than 2 points, a statistically insignificant amount. In eighth grade, Los Angeles dropped less than a point, and San Diego’s 8-point drop was lower than the national average for the districts. Los Angeles’ reading scores in fourth and eighth grade didn’t decline at all post-pandemic; San Diego’s increased a statistically insignificant amount in fourth grade, and its decline of 3 points was about the average for the TUDA districts.
California’s low percentage of students scoring Proficient or better on fourth grade reading and math (34% Proficient in fourth grade, 29% in eighth grade) will likely lead to calls for funding for teacher training on the new standards and evidence-based practices in kindergarten through second grade.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed allocating $500 million in the 2025-26 budget for teacher training and to encourage districts to use discretionary funding on summer programs and tutoring to make up for lost Covid learning. Some states whose scores exceeded California’s on fourth-grade reading, including Mississippi, Connecticut and Colorado, adopted comprehensive reading plans grounded in the science of reading.
Fabian Debora uses art as a tool for gang prevention at Homeboy Art Academy in LA.
Credit: Courtesy of Fabian Debora
As a restless eighth grader at Dolores Mission Catholic School in Los Angeles, Fabian Debora often drew pictures at his desk. One day the teacher confiscated his artwork and ripped it up in front of the whole class. Debora, who cherishes his drawing, felt betrayed. He lost his temper, threw a desk at the teacher and got expelled.
The incident led to an epiphany. Debora was summoned before Father Greg Boyle, the beloved parish priest who runs Homeboy Industries, a renowned gang intervention program in East Los Angeles. Instead of chastising him, Boyle asked Debora to draw him something and later persuaded his probation officer to let him work as an apprentice to Wayne Healy, a pioneer in the city’s Chicano mural movement. Art became his lifeline.
“I realized that I’m an artist,” said the soft spoken Debora, 49. “I discovered it young enough to know that this is something that belonged to me, and no one’s gonna take that from me. And I held onto it.”
That drive led him to co-found Homeboy Art Academy, a group that uses arts education to empower formerly gang-involved and incarcerated youth.
“Man, as a formerly incarcerated, gang-involved individual, there aren’t many spaces for me,” he said. “I don’t have the means to go join an art school of some sort. So I’ll have to create a space where these kids can come and all services are free.”
A mural titled “The Power of the Woman,” by Fabian Debora.Credit: Courtesy of Fabian Debora
Part sanctuary, part vocational training center and part studio, the academy resists the notion that art is a precious and rarified pursuit for the elite. Here art is raw and real. You learn to paint your truth, to be unblinking about what you see, but also to feel the freedom of a blank canvas.
“They are the absolute best, completely authentic, devoted to helping people,” said Diane Luby Lane, founder of the poetry education group, Get Lit. “Fabian teaches people to be artists. He respects and utilizes real life experiences and perspectives.”
The recipient of the prestigious National Endowment of the Arts Heritage Fellowship, Debora believes art has the power to change lives. In addition to working as an artist, he is also a teacher and mentor to others seeking to find purpose through art.
“Let’s flip arts education on its head,” said Debora, as he walked around his studio at the art academy. “Let’s take the language and the vocabulary of the arts and tailor it to the lived experiences of this population while introducing relevant information such as in hip hop and street art.”
Born in El Paso, Texas, Debora first discovered art as a little boy weathering a tumultuous childhood in Boyle Heights, which he describes as “one of the roughest projects east of the Mississippi.” The tension bled into his family life, he said. He remembers hiding when his parents fought.
“I used to blame myself,” he recalled wistfully. “I would go and hide under a coffee table, and I would start to sketch, and I would just create my own world to escape my reality. That’s when I found art to be more than just a gift. It was almost like a big brother who held me.”
Violence was embedded in the ecosystem he grew up in, with eight gangs jostling for supremacy and few safe spaces from crime and addiction. By 12, he joined a gang, began to deal drugs and got addicted to them. He wrestled with substance abuse for years before trying to commit suicide at 30, by running across the freeway. That’s when he found his spiritual center and his salvation, his cause.
Now he tries to bring the succor of art to young people who feel hopeless to shape their own destiny.
Artist Fabian Debora teaches the art of painting, graffiti and street murals to students at LA’s Homeboy Academy.Credit: Courtesy of Homeboy Academy
“Art is a vehicle for healing, art is motivating,” says Debora. “It gives you a sense of breathing room, you’re escaping from your realities, as you’re creating. You feel inspired when you realize what beautiful work of art has come out of this. It opens up senses in the brain that haven’t been tapped into.”
While Debora specializes in visual art, the academy also offers classes in everything from creative writing and photography, to coding and poetry. He takes on those who believe they have nothing to lose. That’s who he used to be.
“I want the kids who are hanging out in the basketball court smoking weed all day, kids who are overlooked,” he says, lingering in front of the academy’s altar to indigenous gods. “If you’re gang related and struggling with a drug problem, if you’ve been incarcerated, that’s what qualifies you for this program.”
The impact of Debora’s work resonates throughout the Los Angeles arts community. It’s been a formidable example of how creativity can transform the arc of a person’s life.
“It’s astounding what they do at Homeboy,” says Austin Beutner, former LAUSD Superintendent and author of the arts education mandate, Prop. 28. “It’s hard work but they save lives, one by one. It shows you the power of art. You can be 8 or 28 and the arts can change your life.”
As a young man in ‘80s Los Angeles, Debora responded to the siren song of hip-hop music and graffiti art, the vibrancy of youth culture. The murals became portals to often forgotten Chicano history and culture.
A portrait of the Madonna by Fabian Debora. credit: Fabian Debora
The ancient meets the now in this audacious body of work, from graffiti to fine art. Debora delights in juxtaposing the eye of the masters with a modern urban vibe. Some of his most well-known paintings are fashioned after the manner of Italian master Caravaggio but rooted in the grit of Boyle Heights, such as a portrait of a girl from the barrio striking the pose of the Madonna. He’s now working on a project that deconstructs the Sistine Chapel.
“We are reclaiming the universal language of art,” he said.
Troubled souls often find solace in the universality of dark feelings, the way a painting from the Renaissance can capture how we feel today. That is the power of art as activism.
“Carravagio was also an outcast,” he said. “He was a thug, a killer, a murderer yet he found his spirituality through art.”
Debora uses art like a scalpel to cut away the layers of posturing and pretense that many of his students protect themselves with. He uses art to get at the truths they try to hide, even from themselves.
“The work of Homeboy Art Academy is transformational in providing youth a pathway, learning how to take ownership of their own stories, which are often negated by others who deem themselves more powerful,” says Merryl Goldberg, a veteran music and arts professor at Cal State San Marcos. “Lifting up voices at risk of being suppressed could not be more fundamental to a just and compassionate society.”
Art opens a window to another life, Deborah says. In addition to his work at the academy, he also teaches drawing to inmates at Tehachapi state prison. He cherishes his work with “the lifers,” because they need the solace of art the most.
“People need to be seen, they need to be heard,” he said. “It’s a sense of hope. When we come in, we paint windows on those ceiling walls so they can escape for the time being.”
Louise Simpson, superintendent of Mark Twain Union Elementary School District in Angles Camp, near Yosemite, is frustrated by state rules restricting how small rural districts like hers can spend expanded learning funding.
That was such a well-intentioned and important program for so many districts. It’s known by the acronym ELOP, and it was designed to make additional learning and enrichment opportunities in the school day. But it brought some really burdensome requirements with it, including a 9-hour day and 30 extra days of school.
And while that sounds really great, what’s happened for our small rural districts, is the reality of creating a program just isn’t feasible. And I’ll tell you why:
First, my kids are on the bus for more than an hour each way. They already have a big long day, and adding academics after school for enrichment is not super feasible for two reasons: One is we have a very difficult time finding qualified staff to run it. And the second one is, with the bus-driver shortage, we just don’t have the transportation.
So, many kids that would benefit from this program really don’t have the opportunity, and they are being left behind.
Our budget situation is so, so dire with steep declining enrollment, and we need to use the money that we’re already allocated for super-effective programs.
I came out of retirement this year because this little system was struggling, and only one in 10 kids are proficient in math and only one in four can read — and that’s unconscionable.
And I can fix it, but I need some help using the money that’s already been given to me to use during the day. We have a really cool program that we built with the Sierra K-16 Collaborative Partnership involving peer tutors. It allowed me to get $320,000 to fund an intervention teacher and pay 20 high school kids to come in and tutor my kids. And it’s working, but those funds expire in a year.
I need that ELOP money to be made flexible so that I can teach our kids the core foundational skills they need to be successful. That includes being able to use it during the school day. So many folks can’t find a way to make this funding effective that they’re actually giving it back, and that’s not okay.
We need to come to some agreements where it can be working for everyone. Let me take and share with you what unrestricting these funds could really do for kids.
This is our peer tutoring program. It’s funded in conjunction with Sierra K16.
(short video of tutors working with students)
I hope you’ll join me in reaching out to all of our legislators and asking them to provide small rural districts flexibility in how we use those funds.
Eighth grade students discuss women’s history during a social studies class at Mira Vista Elementary in Richmond, one of two K-8 schools in West Contra Costa Unified.
Theresa Harrington/EdSource Today
The West Contra Costa Unified School District is joining about a dozen other California school districts in search of its next leader. The superintendent position is the district’s highest-paid job, and filling it is one of the most crucial decisions a school board can make.
School board members approved a $45,000 contract with Leadership Associates during last week’s special board meeting to recruit the East Bay district’s new leader. The firm has conducted superintendent and other school leadership searches for 28 years and is currently also searching for superintendents for Las Lomitas Elementary School District, Tamalpais Union High School District, San Pasqual Valley Unified School District and the Santa Clara Office of Education.
At West Contr Costa, interim Superintendent Kim Moses replaced Chris Hurst in December after he announced his retirement. Hurst led the district for more than three years and stepped down to care for a family member with health challenges.
The new leader will face daunting challenges, including making sure the district doesn’t run out of cash and is placed under state control. Also, like other California districts, the district is dealing with teacher shortages, low test scores and meeting the needs of its diverse and large low-income student population.
“One thing that would be very crucial, given our current circumstances as a district, would be crisis management,” said student board member Jorge Espinoza Jr. during the special meeting. “That would include not only advocacy for our students as well as our staff and teachers and principals, but transparency when communicating.”
Students and families deserve a leader who will drive academic gains and “have the courage to disrupt the status quo,” said a Go Public Schools West Contra Costa official, a nonprofit advocating for quality education, in a statement.
“This is a chance for the district to either repair or deepen the wounds caused by years of broken trust and stagnant progress,” said Natalie Walchuk, Go Public Schools’ vice president of local impact. “The next superintendent must be someone who can restore transparency, rebuild accountability and deliver real results for all our students.”
Board member Cinthia Hernandez said the next superintendent should be someone who commits to equity and is culturally competent. Nearly 59% of the student population was Hispanic or Latino in the 2023-24 school year; about 12% of students were Black or African American, while 10% were Asian and 9% white.
About 63% of West Contra Costa students qualified for free or reduced lunch in 2023-24 and 32% were English learners, according to state data. Nearly 26,000 students are enrolled in the district’s 54 schools across Richmond, San Pablo, Pinole, Hercules and El Cerrito.
“They (the next superintendent) have to be innovative, inclusive and bilingual in whatever language —the more languages the better,” said board member Guadalupe Enllana. “They have to know how to listen, not just hear.”
For board member Jamela Smith-Folds, however, understanding diversity, equity and inclusion is not enough.
“I want an anti-racist leader,” she said during the special meeting. “Understanding our district is not just knowing the data of our district. Understanding our district is really understanding who we are and what we need. I want someone who chooses us.”
Smith-Folds said the district needs someone who understands the budget and has proven to improve academic outcomes and school culture. She urged those who haven’t attended a West Contra Costa board meeting or other committee meetings to not apply.
“There is a difference between transparency and honesty,” she added. “Transparency is, ‘If you ask me I’m going to tell you.’ Honesty is, “I’m going to tell you before you ask.’ I want an honest leader.”
Many districts are also searching for leaders
The goal for West Contra Costa is to hire a superintendent by June — about two months before the 2025-26 school year begins. It’s typical for districts to want superintendents to start before the start of the school year. Community engagement with stakeholders, surveys of communities, and listening sessions will ramp up in the coming months.
Hiring leaders is difficult at a time when many superintendents have retired or left because of heightened political climates at board meetings, stress and threats. Districts across the state are also dealing with dwindling enrollment, school closures, budget cuts, and leftover effects of the pandemic, including lower test scores and the need for more social-emotional support.
These challenges have caused veteran superintendents to retire early and be replaced with less experienced educators. Newly elected board members have also pushed out superintendents. And districts are willing to pay top dollar to find a fit for the high-stress job.
At least six open superintendent positions in California are posted through the Association of California School Administrators Career Center. More than a dozen open positions are posted on EdJoin.
Superintendent search timeline
Prior superintendent searches show that the West Costa Unified School District community wants to be involved.
Last time Leadership Associates searched for the superintendent, about 5,000 survey responses were submitted — the most the firm has received from a district, said Jim Brown, a partner with the firm.
“One of the reasons is the communication office and the principals and the teacher leaders did a really good job at making sure at almost every meeting that was held, there were copies of the survey and computers available, so people can fill out the survey,” Brown told the board during the special meeting. “We’re hoping for repetition of that.”
Typically, 1,000 survey responses is a good sign of community engagement, said Sandra Sánchez-Thorstenson, partner at Leadership Associates.
Board member Smith-Folds reiterated the importance of surveys being representative of different areas of the community.
Leadership Associates will begin engaging the West Contra Costa community, staff, educators and students in the middle of February. A survey will be sent out to the various communities from Feb. 17 to March 3.
Leadership Associates will identify potential candidates in February and March. The deadline for applications is March 24. Applications will be reviewed in April, and interviews will be conducted in May.
The district’s next superintendent is slated to be hired at the end of May or the beginning of June with a start date of July 1.
Nothing about being a home-hospital teacher is normal.
A Los Angeles Unified educator drives nearly 22 miles from one student’s home in Venice Beach to another’s in East Los Angeles — and another 20 miles to Maravista, lugging tote bags with school supplies, books, plants and paintbrushes.
Each bag is dedicated to one of her students — from transitional kindergartners to high school seniors gearing up for graduation and new beginnings.
What her students have in common is illness, ranging from leukemia to eating disorders. And she is one of many teachers tending to their education at the one-of-a-kind Berenece Carlson Home Hospital School.
“In a student’s very, very trying times,” said the teacher who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), “no matter what kind of condition the student is in or has been diagnosed with, we become part of the students’ weekly or daily” life.
The school, established in 1970, is intended to provide an education for LAUSD students who are ill or receiving medical treatment and unable to stay in school, sometimes for several years.
It also enables students to receive a more individualized education; teachers can meet students at home or in the hospital for roughly five hours each week.
Classes usually focus on math and English, but sometimes they extend to other subjects or topics that students are interested in.
“She really went above and beyond for both of us,” said Karina Rodriguez, the mother of one of the anonymous teacher’s students. “What she did for my daughter, she did for me. She’s my child.”
But the school has been engulfed in conflict between some teachers who teach in person and those who taught through an online option called the Carlson Home Online Academy, or CHOA, which, according to a district policy bulletin, was established in 2018 to give “homebound students synchronous home instruction in a web-based classroom setting.”
Conflict surrounding the online academy
Despite the work of dedicated instructors, both the in-person and online programs at the Berenece Carlson Home Hospital School have struggled for years with waves of instability, including the recent closure of the online program (CHOA), which has deprived some students who are ill of the individualized education they need.
In 1999, when the California Department of Education began tracking campuses by school type, Carlson was classified as a special education school, according to a spokesperson for the agency. A decade later, the Department of Education added a designation for home-hospital schools, but LAUSD did not reclassify Carlson as a “Home and Hospital” program until last July.
That reclassification came amid pressure from a group of teachers teaching in-person, who began sounding alarms, claiming during the fall of 2023 that Carlson’s online program violated the state’s education code requiring home-hospital schools to operate in person.
The teachers also claimed in emails to district officials that many students in need of in-person instruction were automatically funneled into the online program — and that more than 80 students went without adequate instruction for about two months. EdSource reviewed the emails.
“They tell families there are no teachers available,” said Lisa Robertson, who, since 2009, has taught in the homes of students from kindergarten through 12th grade.
“The families are dealing with the crisis of having a sick child,” she said. “And then, they’re lost in the system.”
Conflict between some home-hospital teachers and those who supported the online program mounted. Another criticism of the online program is that several of its teachers rely on lessons from Edgenuity, an online learning platform, which some hospital-home teachers say places excessive demands on some students with severe illnesses.
Online instructors maintained that their program enabled students to take classes in more subject areas than the in-person program, providing them with a better track to graduate — all while giving them additional flexibility beyond what is provided through LAUSD’s other virtual academies.
“I’ve had cancer,” Robertson said. “There is no way I could have gotten up at 8 in the morning and sat through six hours clicking away at a computer.”
But Kevin Byrd, who taught in the online program, said the program allowed educators to support several students taking different subjects — say, biology, chemistry and health — simultaneously, adding that even though students worked remotely, the online program helped students build camaraderie among their peers.
“There was an understanding about the students, even in middle school, that we’re all kind of supporting each other,” Byrd said. “And just because we have this condition doesn’t really affect our ability to learn.”
The aftermath of CHOA’s closure
Amid the claim that the online program violated California’s education code, the Los Angeles Unified School District closed the online program altogether in July. The closure, however, left about 170 sick students and several educators unsure of where to go next.
“Programming previously offered through the Carlson Home Online Academy was discontinued for the 2024-25 school year as CDE (California Department of Education) clarified that virtual instruction is not part of a home hospital program,” an LAUSD spokesperson wrote in a statement to EdSource. “Home hospital instruction is to be provided on an individual basis aligned with the hours set forth by law.”
Online teachers caught a whiff of their program’s impending closure in late March and immediately started a petition to keep it open; that petition received more than 600 signatures.
“It’s good to have several options, especially for these students who need to be accommodated and have special circumstances,” said Byrd, who started the petition.
“The fact that the second-largest district in the country and the largest in the state is limiting an option for these types of students is really discouraging.”
Since the online program’s closure, most of its former teachers like Rene Rances have become home-hospital teachers — but others have opted to leave Carlson altogether and teach elsewhere. Rances said he is considering leaving the district, too.
“It’s very, very demoralizing,” he said.
A spokesperson for LAUSD maintained, however, that the district’s changes are in keeping with California’s laws; they also said in a statement to EdSource that families whose children were in the online program were informed of their options “through letters, emails, phone calls, and several community meetings.”
Those options included Carlson’s home-hospital programs or enrolling at one of the district’s virtual academy schools, which don’t always provide the same level of flexibility to take varying course loads, said Tammy Koch, Carlson’s counselor.
Koch confirmed that some students left the online program — only to be referred back to the in-person home-hospital program.
“We had students that sometimes can’t handle a full course load. … Sometimes, I had students taking three classes. Sometimes, they took four,” Koch said, referring to her students who used to be enrolled in the online program. “But you don’t have that flexibility at a virtual academy,” she said, because students have to take a full course load there. “It’s just not the same.”
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
As Gov. Gavin Newsom stood near a burned-down school, Pacific Palisades mom Rachel Darvish pleaded with Newsom: “That was my daughter’s school, what are you going to do?” Newsom offered no real answer for the distraught parent at the time.
Well, here’s the answer he should have given: All families affected by the Los Angeles fires should be eligible for emergency education savings accounts that parents can use to pay for education alternatives for their children.
The Los Angeles fires have not only destroyed people’s homes and businesses, they have also razed neighborhood schools. Initial reports indicate at least a dozen schools in the Los Angeles area have burned, affecting more than 5,700 students.
In the Altadena area, which was devastated by the Eaton fire, nearly 2,000 students are school-less.
“I’m just really sad,” one 7-year-old Altadena girl told a CBS-TV reporter, “because I love that school.”
Describing the impact of losing her children’s neighborhood school, an Altadena mom said: “School is a big part of it because it’s the foundation of a family’s daily life. Now we don’t have that anymore.”
The sad reality for affected families is that rebuilding schools, like rebuilding homes, will take a lot of time and money, and only $1 million of Newsom’s $2.5 billion wildfire relief bill was designated for rebuilding schools.
Even in normal times, it takes two years or more to build a school, and school construction costs range from $70 million to $100 million per school.
What are families to do in the meantime?
Many affected families have been dispersed to various parts of Southern California and beyond. Since their homes will not be rebuilt soon, government leaders can address the individual needs of children in this diaspora by giving every child affected by the fires a publicly funded education savings account.
According to the school-choice organization EdChoice, education savings accounts “establish for parents publicly funded government-authorized savings accounts with restricted, but multiple uses for educational purposes,” to be used in-state.
Parents can use these funds to cover “school tuition, tutoring, online education programs, therapies for students with special needs, textbooks or other instructional materials, and sometimes save for college,” whatever policymakers determine. Some programs cover home school costs.
California leaders can model on Arizona, where education savings accounts are funded at 90% of the state’s per-pupil funding, with special needs students receiving higher amounts.
In Newsom’s proposed 2025-26 budget, $83 billion from the state’s general fund would go to K-12 education. Using Arizona as a guide, $12,800 could be made available for these accounts for each affected child.
With thousands of affected students, the total cost for an emergency education savings account program would be around $73 million — a drop in the bucket compared with the billions of dollars in aid being discussed for other aspects of the affected areas.
For example, after talking with Arizona State Board of Education member Jenny Clark about the state’s education savings account program, one family said, “We continue to utilize the … program to tailor our son’s education to meet both his great strengths and real challenges.”
Public schools could be held financially harmless during the existence of these accounts. As EdChoice noted, in states with school choice programs, “many have funding protection policies.” In California’s case, districts could continue to receive their current average daily attendance funding.
Education savings accounts could be funded through the billions of dollars in aid the state will surely receive from the federal government. President Donald Trump would likely look favorably on this program since he proposed a similar program at the federal level in his first administration.
The education savings account program should be reevaluated after a few years to ensure it’s working as designed and improved as needed.
While the catastrophe of the Los Angeles fires has created great uncertainty, one thing is certain: Parents affected by the fires will need the flexibility to pivot and choose educational alternatives that best suit the individual needs of their children.
Parents cannot wait for bureaucratic processes to rebuild the schools that had been. These families need tools right now to pay for and provide for educational services to meet their immediate needs.
“We are so thankful for the educational freedom,” said another Arizona family that used their account funds for a home school hybrid program.
With National School Choice Week upon us, it is a perfect time to give fire-affected Los Angeles parents the freedom and flexibility they so desperately need.
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Lance Izumi is senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute, a Pasadena-based think tank advocating for free-market policy solutions, and author of “The Great Classroom Collapse.”
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.
