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  • How to describe middling and poor test scores? State Board frets over the right words

    How to describe middling and poor test scores? State Board frets over the right words


    Students in a Fresno Unified classroom.

    Credit: Fresno Unified / Flickr

    Ending several months of uncertainty, the California State Board of Education on Wednesday chose new labels to describe how students perform on the four levels of achievement on its standardized tests.

    The decision was difficult. The 90 minutes of presentations and discussions offered lessons in the subtleties of language and the inferences of words.

    Board members said they were aware of the need to send the right messages to many parents, who had criticized the California Department of Education’s previous choices for labeling low test scores as vague euphemisms for bad news. 

    “Labels matter,” said board member Francisco Escobedo, executive director of the National Center for Urban Transformation at San Diego State. “Knowledge is a continuum, and how we describe students in different levels has a powerful impact.”’

    Researchers have warned that parents are getting confusing messages, with inflated grades on courses and declining scores on standardized tests of how well their children are doing in recovering from Covid setbacks in learning. The new labels will apply to scoring levels for the state science assessments and for the Smarter Balanced English language arts and math tests.

    Board members quickly agreed on “Advanced” for Level 4 and “Proficient” for Level 3 labels, the top two levels of scores. But their selection of “Developing” for Level 2 and “Minimal” for Level 1 differed from the consensus of parents, students and teachers who had been offered various options during focus groups in December and January.

    They had preferred “Basic” for Level 2 and “Below Basic” for Level 1.  The terms are clear, simple and familiar, a summary of the discussions said. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) classifies Basic as the lowest of its three levels, and California’s old state tests, which the state abandoned a decade ago to switch to Smarter Balanced, used Basic and Below Basic for scoring criteria as well.

    But for some veteran educators on the board, familiarity has bred contempt, or at least bad memories, of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal law under the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Schools were under heavy pressure to increase their math and English language arts scores, or potentially face sanctions.

    “I had a visceral reaction to the word Basic,” said board member and veteran teacher Haydee Rodriguez. “I remember NCLB and how finite that felt for students.” The feedback should be encouraging, not a label that discourages growth, as Basic did under NCLB, she said.

    She and Kim Patillo Brownson, a parent of two teenagers who served as a policy director at the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, also pointed out that “basic” has a different connotation for students in 2025. It’s slang for a boring and uninteresting person.  

    “Calling a student Basic is an absolute insult in 2025,” said Rodriguez. “It could shut a child down.”

    Board President Linda Darling-Hammond agreed. “If Basic is being used derogatorily, one can only imagine how Below Basic will be used. It is a real consideration; the meaning is different for adults.”

    Board members turned to other words that had been presented to the focus groups. They agreed the choices should be frank, not Pollyannaish or dispiriting.

    With Level 2, the purpose should be “trying to light a fire under parents to realize there is work to do,” said Patillo Brownson.

    Stating that “Below Basic” says a student is failing, Escobedo preferred “Developing” for Level 1 and “Emerging” for Level 2. These terms are consistent with labels used for scoring the progress of English learners.

    Patillo Brownson called Emerging “vague” and supported “Basic.”

    Board Vice President Cynthia Glover Woods, who was chief academic officer of the Riverside County Office of Education before her retirement, favored “Minimum” for Level 1 because “it is important we are clear for students and parents that students scoring at the level have a minimal understanding of grade-level knowledge.”

    Sharing the perspective of her peers, the student board member on the board, Julia Clauson, a senior at Bella Vista High School in Sacramento, recommended substituting “Approaching” for “Basic,” so as not to deter students from trying challenging courses. “Older students make academic decisions (based on what signals they get), so language matters,” she said.

    The County Superintendents association also endorsed “Approaching” for Level 2 and “Developing” or “Emerging” for Level 1.

    The board initiated what turned into a multi-month decision because of growing dissatisfaction with the labels that had been used since the first Smarter Balanced testing in 2015. They were Standard Not Met for Level 1, Standard Nearly Met for Level 2, Standard Met for Level 3 and Standard Exceeded for Level 4. Focus groups by the California Department of Education found that parents were confused about what “standard” meant. They found Standard Not Met as discouraging and Standard Nearly Met as unclear.

    But a coalition of student advocacy groups, including Teach Plus, Children Now and Innovate Public Schools, along with the County Superintendents association and the Association of California School Administrators, criticized the labels for Levels 1 and 2 that the California Department of Education recommended as their replacements as soft-pedaling euphemisms for poor scorers. The department had proposed Inconsistent for Level 1 and Foundational for Level 2.

    At its December meeting, the board told the department to try again with more focus groups.

    Changing the labels to Advanced, Proficient, Developing and Minimal won’t change how scores are determined; the individual scores within each achievement band have remained the same in all the 18 member states that take all or some of the Smarter Balanced tests, which are given to students in grades three through eight and once in high school, usually in 11th grade.

    However, additional work is needed to communicate the changes to parents and students. The department and its testing contractor, ETS, will spell out the differences between performing at the various levels in each subject and grade and the level of improvement needed to raise scores.

    Tony Alpert, executive director of Smarter Balanced, pointed out that performance differences are a continuum with students showing gaps in some grade-level skills but not others. A student scoring at Level 1 may have answered some questions showing knowledge at grade level. As scores progress from Levels 2 to 4, students demonstrate increasing accuracy and complexity in their knowledge and skills.

    Students who reach Level 3 have the knowledge to succeed in future coursework. Research has determined that for California high school students, Level 3 correlates with preparation for first-year courses at California State University.

    The state board hoped that the label changes and new explanations would be ready for this spring’s testing results. Instead, they will take effect in 2026.





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  • Make climate literacy a gen ed requirement across higher ed — before it’s too late

    Make climate literacy a gen ed requirement across higher ed — before it’s too late


    Local and state officials in mid-March piled 50,000 sandbags along the low-lying banks of the San Joaquin River when rising levels threatened to overtake Firebaugh.

    Emma Gallegos/EdSource

    Earlier this year, students across the country watched as wildfires devastated large parts of southern California. Yet even as they watched — and, in some cases, lived through — a very real example of what climate change can look like, many students don’t have a good understanding of why events like these are happening more frequently and with greater intensity. Without that foundational knowledge, they are ill-equipped to help mitigate the problem that is impacting their generation so significantly. Lack of climate literacy is a crisis — one that higher education has a responsibility to address.

    Acknowledging the problem is no longer enough. Although 72% of U.S. adults recognize that our climate is changing, only 58% acknowledge that it is human-caused and even fewer understand the scientific consensus — that over 97% of climate scientists affirm our role in the ever-warming planet. We need a climate-literate electorate if we want to drive effective climate action because the solutions we choose to support are based on our individual understanding of the problem. To do this, we need to make climate education part of general education. And we must move quickly.

    Many students know what is coming. Rising climate anxiety among 16–25 year-olds is telling but disempowering if they aren’t prepared to meet the moment because they hold misconceptions about the root causes. In a 2021 survey, students 14-18 years old overwhelmingly reported that climate change was real and human-caused, but follow-up questions showed large gaps between their conceptualization of Earth’s interrelated systems and reality. They also vastly underestimated the scientific consensus.

    These gaps in knowledge make sense: when climate change is taught in middle and high school classrooms, nearly one-third of science teachers are sending mixed messages about the cause, often because they themselves were never introduced to the subject during their higher education experience. Prioritizing climate literacy as part of general education at colleges and universities would reduce the perpetuation of these false narratives. 

    Ideally, institutions would offer multi-dimensional climate education for all students; realistically, the pace of climate change far outstrips the pace of change in higher education. However, a general education requirement for climate literacy is possible — and necessary. These central concepts do not rely on additional college-level coursework, making a first- or second-year course on the topic accessible to students in any major.

    Given the monumental challenge before us and what the best physical science tells us we are headed toward (e.g. heat waves, sea level rise, drought and more), it would be easy to put together a fairly depressing curriculum. A solutions-focused approach to climate education is not only kinder to our young people, but also cuts against the temptation to spread anxiety. It’s easy to miss out on the momentum building in the clean energy sector, the climate leadership of local communities, and international efforts to build climate resilience. Resources like Project Drawdown and the Solutions Journalism Network can provide curricular materials that remind students that they are not alone, and that they are not starting from square one. 

    Additionally, we need students to understand that policy, psychology, and art are just as important at shifting our trajectory as atmospheric science and clean energy technology. In this way, we make room for every student in the climate movement, no matter their professional aspirations. At Harvey Mudd College, we have developed a course to help students think critically about the impact of their work on society through an interdisciplinary look at the climate-fueled challenge of fire in the North American west. Our teaching team is intentionally broad, so we can cover California’s legacy of fire suppression, the depictions of nature in media, and the religious roots of environmental attitudes, as well as fire ecology and the greenhouse effect. While we do lay the groundwork for understanding the problem, fully 50% of the course is dedicated to analyzing proposed or current interventions.

    In addition to a solutions-focused curriculum, basic climate education also needs to prepare students emotionally and mentally to keep engaging in the work. Nearly 60% of respondents in a recent global survey of youth indicated “extreme worry” about climate change. Considering students’ emotions doesn’t mean we shy away from hard truths — that would not serve our students well and undermine their trust in faculty. In fact, those hard truths can tap into students’ deeper motivations for learning, so long as we also help them build emotional resilience through reflection. Programs like the All We Can Save Project can offer resources and even course materials. And efforts to wrap this “affective approach” into climate education are already underway, as with the Faculty Learning  Community in Teaching Climate Change and Resilience at California State University in Chico. 

    The world is currently on track for nearly twice the rise in global average temperature that leading climate experts warn is safe. The kind of climate education we need is appearing, but not at the scale or speed required. Higher education leaders must prioritize climate literacy by integrating climate education into the general curriculum. Institutions must ensure students are prepared academically, socially, and emotionally to address climate change. We need empowered graduates who have both climate knowledge and a solutions-focused mindset in uncertain times. Their world literally depends on it. 

    •••

    Lelia Hawkins is a professor of chemistry and the Hixon Professor of Climate Studies at Harvey Mudd College. She is currently serving as the Director of the Hixon Center for Climate and the Environment, a new program expanding climate education for Mudd’s scientists and engineers. 

    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.





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  • California educators nervous about federal plan to investigate schools with diversity initiatives

    California educators nervous about federal plan to investigate schools with diversity initiatives


    Flags fly outside of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building in Washington.

    Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images

    The Trump administration doubled down on its plan to end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the nation’s schools last week by opening an online portal where parents and other community members can report educators and schools that use the programs.

    The announcement about the EndDEI.Ed.Gov portal came on Feb. 27 — the day before a deadline for schools to end diversity and equity programs or risk losing federal funding. The DEI prohibition was issued in a Valentine’s Day missive from the U.S. Department of Education.

    The online reporting tool has teachers and other school staff nervous.

    “I can say, in general, that there’s a sense of concern (among educators),” said Steven Frazer, president of Associated Chino Teachers, Chino Valley Unified’s teachers union. “… A tool to report teachers, who could just be making sure that their classroom is a safe place for all students, who could potentially be vilified. So, it’s certainly a unique and uncertain, unfortunate climate right now for educators.”

    The San Bernardino County school district, which has a conservative school board, has little diversity, equity and inclusion programming, Frazer said. Despite that, teachers in the district feel susceptible to being reported to federal authorities.

    The district’s board has already been at odds with the teachers union and the state over a board policy that required teachers and school staff to notify parents if they believe a child is transgender.

    Frazer is concerned that the White House effort to end diversity, equity and inclusion will embolden the school district to disregard a California law requiring ethnic studies classes to be offered next school year. There is also concern for the future of clubs that support students of color and LGBTQ youth, among others, he said.

    “Things like that, outlets like that, are what make school a safe place for many students,” Frazer said. “A lot of students don’t get recognized enough at home, and so school is an outlet for them. And really, what keeps their mental state positive, what encourages them to learn and be happy and successful, is being able to meet in groups like this.”

    Definitions of DEI vary

    DEI has become a divisive issue in recent years, with the term’s definition and value dependent on a person’s political ideology. 

    “For me, it means ensuring that the marginalized are included and that equity is served, in that everyone can receive what they need to thrive, especially in a school district,” said Janice Rooths, executive director of the Center Against Racism and Trauma, which serves the state’s Inland Empire region. “And so, when you say that everyone should get what they need to thrive, it applies to every student.”

    Schools with successful DEI programs offer teachers and administrators cultural sensitivity training and ensure students understand that using negative racial epithets or other threatening words is unacceptable, Rooths said. 

    On the other side, critics of DEI see it as dividing students, or making white students feel uncomfortable or bad about themselves. They say DEI focuses on race and ethnicity over merit.

    “For years, parents have been begging schools to focus on teaching their kids practical skills like reading, writing, and math, instead of pushing critical theory, rogue sex education and divisive ideologies, but their concerns have been brushed off, mocked, or shut down entirely,” said Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, in a statement included in a U.S. Department of Education news release announcing the portal. 

    Moms for Liberty is a far-right organization that has advocated against school curricula that include LGBTQ rights and instruction on race and ethnicity.

    Portal opens just before deadline

    The End DEI portal is separate from a webpage that already collects complaints of discrimination on the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights website.

    “The U.S. Department of Education is committed to ensuring all students have access to meaningful learning free of divisive ideologies and indoctrination,” according to a media release announcing the portal.

    In its Feb. 14 letter, the U.S. Department of Education letter claims that white and Asian American students have been discriminated against, and that “educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism.’ ”

    The letter states that schools must cease using race preferences in their admissions, hiring, promotion, scholarship, prizes, administrative support, sanctions, discipline and other programs and activities, including race-based graduation ceremonies and dorms.

    On Feb. 21, the California Department of Education and State Board of Education issued a joint statement to reassure state residents and school officials that federal laws regarding public education have not changed, and that executive orders from the White House and memos from the U.S. Department of Education cannot modify or override them.

    “We advise continued compliance with state and federal laws, and recommend that administrators and governing boards consult legal counsel regarding the impact of any potential federal actions,” the statement read. “If federal laws or regulations do change, we will provide guidance and take action as needed in continued support of California’s students and local educational agencies.”

    In his own letter to school district leaders, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said the California Department of Education and other state agencies will consider legal action if the federal government attempts to freeze or cut funding because districts have diversity, equity and inclusion programs in place.

    Teachers unions file lawsuits

    The U.S. Department of Education letter and its demands have already resulted in at least two lawsuits. Both include the nation’s largest teachers’ unions. The American Federation of Teachers and American Sociological Association filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education on Feb. 25, and the National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union did the same on Wednesday. 

    The lawsuits urge the court to block the Department of Education from enforcing a directive that they say undermines civil rights, stifles free speech and dictates what educators can teach.

    “Across the country, educators do everything in their power to support every student, no matter where they live, how much their family earns, or the color of their skin — ensuring each feels safe, seen, and is prepared for the future,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. 

    “Now, the Trump administration is threatening to punish students, parents and educators in public schools for doing just that: fostering inclusive classrooms where diversity is valued, history is taught honestly, and every child can grow into their full brilliance.”





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  • Too much test prep? Inside Compton Unified’s frequent assessments 

    Too much test prep? Inside Compton Unified’s frequent assessments 


    A tutor helps students at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton last week.

    Credit: AP Photo/Eric Thayer

    On paper, the Compton Unified School District has soared in its academic performance in the last decade. 

    District Superintendent Darin Brawley has, in part, attributed the upswing to regular assessments and the use of standardized test scores to help determine academic strategies at individual school sites. 

    But some teachers question whether the improved scores should be celebrated — and have claimed that the scores are higher because the district puts all of its emphasis on preparing students for tests, rather than educating them completely, a tactic they claim impedes rather than helps students. 

    “We’re testing in September, October, November, December, January, February, March — like we’re testing every month, so that the district has the numbers,” said Kristen Luevanos, the president of the Compton Education Association, the district’s teacher’s union. 

    “But as a classroom teacher, you know how to assess your kids as you go. We don’t need these huge standardized tests once a month. And so we’re wasting precious instructional time.”

    According to the Nation’s Recovery Scorecard, the district’s performance in math has risen in the past decade from 2.54 grades below the national average to only -0.86 behind — a difference of 1.68. And in reading, Compton increased scrores by 1.37 to 1.04 grades below the national average. 

    Brawley maintains that assessing students’ progress is critical to the district’s progress.

    “Our testing is aligned to state standards that determine whether or not kids have mastered the information. And for a teacher or anyone, an administrator, a politician, to say that you are prepping kids for a test, I think it’s laughable,” Brawley said in an interview with EdSource. 

    “Because those same people: What did they do for the SAT? What did they do for the GRE? What did they do for the LSAT? What did they do for their driver’s test?”

    The role of test prep

    In a given semester, teachers in Compton Unified are expected to administer dozens of exams. 

    Credit: Kristen Luevanos

    “You’re going to look at these lists and go, ‘When does education happen?’ And that’s the exact question that teachers are having,” Luevanos, who said she recognizes the importance of some test preparation.

    “[The district will] say, we’re using it to teach,” she said. “Anyone who’s ever been in education and has taken courses knows that’s not how it works. You don’t use the end goal to help. You start with scaffolding. You start where the kids are at. You start with the basics. You start with the vocabulary. You work your way up.”

    Going Deeper

    On top of indicating students’ progress, assessments can be a critical tool for teachers to reflect on their own quality of instruction, according to Julie Slayton, a professor of clinical education at the University of Southern California. 

    “If a student didn’t perform on an assessment, or depending on how a student performed on an assessment, or a class performed on an assessment, we can use that information to ask ourselves: What did I do that set the kids up for the outcome that they experienced?” Slayton said. “That would be good. That would be what we would want.” 

    She added that assessment should also be used by students to help gauge their own progress, which would improve student learning — and by extension, student outcomes. 

    Drilling students on what an exam will assess, on the other hand, “is not meaningful in terms of actually acquiring the knowledge and skills,” she said. 

    Slayton said “having a test prep orientation is more the norm than it is exception” — and that it comes as a result of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, where more schools have incorporated more test preparation to boost performance and minimize punishments for failing to do so. 

    “If we start with what do we want a kid to learn within five months or two weeks, or whatever the time period is, and how does that align with what the teacher is doing, we have a nice relationship,” she said. “And testing would just be an extension of a regular, appropriate assessment process that was embedded in a learning process.” 

    Despite the hard work of staff and students alike, Luevanos said the standardized test results aren’t revealing students’ academic struggles — from fourth graders who are struggling to read to eighth graders who haven’t yet mastered their multiplication tables. 

    But Brawley believes that preparations for standardized tests are supposed to help students better understand the language they might encounter on the exams — and that there are also equity concerns involved. 

    “Every kid whose parents has the means, they participate in that, they have tutors, they have specialized courses that they take that preps them for the assessments to get into college and everything else,” Brawley said. “So, why is it bad for Black kids, Latino kids, English language learners, to learn the academic vocabulary that’s necessary for them to do well?”

    Kendra Hatchett, a literacy specialist at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, agreed that getting students used to the language that appears on exams is critical. 

    “I have been in the classroom and have refused to do test prep years ago as a brand-new first year teacher because I thought, ‘Oh, it’s against my philosophy. We shouldn’t do test prep.’ But then, the kids didn’t pass a test, and it wasn’t because they didn’t have the information,’” Hatchett said. 

    “I may have taught them that five plus 10 equals 15,” she said. “That’s straightforward. We’ve got it. We’ve nailed it. But I didn’t teach them: 15 minus happy face equals five. So, that threw them off. I had to rethink my strategy, and that’s when I decided I’ve got to find a way to weave in test prep while still doing hands-on activities.” 

    Broader impacts 

    Luevanos said pressures to do well on exams have led some teachers to stop teaching novels and prioritize excerpts and short stories, which are more likely to appear on tests instead. Novels also aren’t listed on pacing guides reviewed by EdSource for eighth or eleventh grade. 

    The district said in an email to EdSource that it has not issued any directives to limit the teaching of novels. 

    Teaching students novels “takes you on a journey,” Luevanos emphasized, noting that certain standards — whether indirect characterization or motivation — cannot be taught just through excerpts. 

    “The kids are amazing,” she said. “They deserve to be able to read novels. They deserve to be able to play math games. They deserve to be able to just struggle with the work and create.” 

    Luevanos said that because students are spending more time on test prep and less on regular materials, they are not as interested in what they’re learning — and she has noticed more challenges with student discipline over time. 

    “They’re not learning how to think critically, how to be rational, how to be lifelong learners,” Luevanos said. “They’re learning how to read and answer questions.” 

    She also said she has heard about instances of alleged cheating. 

    Helida Corona, a district parent, said she had approached one of her children’s schools every year to express concerns about them being behind, beginning in second grade. 

    She was surprised, years later, when her child received an award for her performance in mathematics in the sixth grade. Corona said she “found it kind of odd,” especially as her child still struggles with regular addition.  

    The next year, Corona’s child got the award again, yet the child still struggled with everyday math, such as accurately adding up the value of money using simple single digits.

    Suspecting that her child might have been involved in some cheating, Corona said she learned more when she spoke with her child about the multiple-choice test. 

    “‘Our teacher sometimes helps us,’” Corona’s child told her, explaining that students would first guess — and if wrong, be instructed to try again, until they landed on the right answer. 

    “It’s terrible because it does not help you. They use those tests [to] place you in a class that’s appropriate for you,” Corona said. “If you continue this way, you’re going to end up going to high school, and they’re going to put you in a higher level math class, and you’re going to go in there blindsided.”

    The district, however, said they do not have knowledge of instances where students have received assistance on standardized tests. 

    Although Hatchett now believes in the importance of preparing students for tests, she also believes in having a balance — and says that the district could be more balanced in its approach as a whole.  

    “I know everybody’s struggle is different, and their perspective of what that should look like is different,” Hatchett said. “Each person should try their best to try to mix it up. You can’t just be all or nothing, all one direction or the other direction.” 





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  • West Contra Costa makes big push to get kids to class – and raise revenue while doing it

    West Contra Costa makes big push to get kids to class – and raise revenue while doing it


    Verde Elementary School in West Contra Costa Unified School District

    Top Takeaways
    • Raising attendance would improve student outcomes and help the district achieve a balanced budget.
    • The district will focus on boosting attendance of all students, not just those who are “chronically absent,” using a range of attendance-improvement strategies.
    • Improving attendance will require an investment of funds and offering incentives, experts say.

    To boost student attendance, the West Contra Costa Unified School District has launched a comprehensive plan to increase attendance by 2 percentage points this school year. 

    The plan will be reviewed by the school board at its meeting on Wednesday.

    The challenge is in part an educational one. If students aren’t in class, they’re far less likely to succeed. It is also a financial strategy that is crucial to the district’s attempts to fend off insolvency and a state takeover for the second time in 30 years. 

    That’s because the main source of state funding for schools in California is based not just on how many students are enrolled, but on how many students actually show up each day for class.  

    But bumping up attendance, even by a few percentage points, is not as easy as it might seem, regardless of the district.  

    So what happens in this 29,000-student district in the San Francisco Bay Area, which includes Richmond and several adjacent communities, also holds lessons for numerous other financially struggling districts in California and nationally. 

    According to interim Superintendent Kim Moses, the math is simple: For every 1 percentage point increase in attendance, the district can raise $2.75 million in additional state funding. 

    Raising attendance by nearly 3 percentage points would generate over $7 million — about the same amount the district is projecting it will have to reduce its budget during each of the coming two years to achieve a balanced budget. 

    “It’s the biggest lever that we have,” board President Leslie Reckler, who is fully behind the attendance strategy to avert even more cuts in programs and staff than the district has already made, said in an interview. “We get paid by who shows up.”

     Moses told the school board at a recent meeting, “If we are successful in increasing our attendance, that is a way to increase revenue. Then we can rescind the reductions we are proposing.”

    Until now, the district’s attendance improvement plan has focused on “chronically absent” students — those who miss 10% or more instructional days per year. That has yielded results, pushing overall attendance rates in the district to 92.3% last fall, just below the state average. 

    But over the last few months, attendance rates in the district have started to drift down again, to 89.5% in February, according to district figures. 

    Natalie Tovani-Walchuk, vice president of local impact for Go Public Schools, an advocacy organization working in several Bay Area school districts, including West Contra Costa, speculates that some of the decline could be related to illnesses — the flu, Covid, norovirus and RSV — that simultaneously struck the district in recent months. It could also be that some immigrant parents fear bringing their children to school because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.  

    “All of this creates conditions which you can’t control,” said Tovani-Walchuck, a former school principal born and raised in Richmond. 

    Aiming to boost attendance of all students

    After initially focusing on chronically absent students, the district is now aiming to boost the attendance of all students, and to focus on schoolwide attendance-improvement strategies, including:

    • Targeting schools with the lowest attendance and developing “individualized action plans” for those schools.
    • Expecting schools to implement activities that reinforce positive attendance habits, such as recognizing students whose attendance improves and working more closely with families “to build stronger connections between school and home.”  
    • Helping schools use a toolkit developed by the district, including prepared scripts in communicating with parents, along with “action plans” for targeting lagging attendance to promote “Stronger Together: Show Up, Rise Up,” the theme of the attendance campaign. 
    • Recruiting more parents, representatives of community-based organizations and community members to participate in the district’s Student Attendance Review Board, to which students who are repeatedly absent or truant can be referred.   

    But Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, an agency set up by the state to help districts in difficult financial straits, said, “There is a limit to how much improvement in attendance can be made.” 

    A year ago, his agency issued a report concluding that, despite financial and other improvements, West Contra Costa faced a high risk of insolvency.  

    A realistic goal, Fine said, would be to increase attendance by 1 percentage point each year over the next three years. He pointed out that the district will probably have to spend money on extra staff time and incentives to generate interest among students, parents and schools. 

    “Programs like this cost money, so you have to spend to be successful,” Fine said. 

    Fine recalls that when he was a deputy superintendent at Riverside Unified, the district persuaded local businesses to award a used car to high school seniors who achieved perfect attendance across their entire K-12 careers, or other incentives like computers and bicycles for meeting less ambitious goals. His district spent about $250,000 a year on the program, but generated $1.2 million in increased attendance revenue.  

    Increasing attendance is especially challenging because there are many reasons why students don’t show up for school, all detailed in a presentation to be considered by the board at its monthly meeting this week. These include lack of transportation, illness, parent work schedules, child care constraints, and students feeling disengaged, unsupported and bored at school, plus, in some cases, severe mental health issues. 

    As a result, any initiative to reduce absenteeism demands a range of strategies to address its underlying causes. 

    Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit organization focusing on attendance, said West Contra Costa Unified appears to be on the right track by surveying parents and identifying why individual students don’t come to school. Another plus, she said, is the district’s creation of so-called community schools, which already work with social service organizations that can also help. 

    “It looks like the district has some things in place,” she said.  But she also cautioned that schools with large numbers of low-income students, like many in West Contra Costa, will likely experience higher absenteeism rates and have to come up with multifaceted responses to overcome them. 

    Building positive relationships with parents

    The district says one school that has made notable strides is Verde Elementary, a community school serving transitional kindergarten through eighth grade students in North Richmond, an unincorporated area of the district. 

    The efforts of Martha Nieto, Verde’s “school community outreach worker,” have been central to the school’s efforts to boost attendance. 

    Nieto, a mother of six who was born in Mexico, says that a key to getting kids to school is building positive relationships with parents. Each day, the school systematically records which students are absent. Attendance clerk Patricia Martines then calls parents’ homes, sometimes with the assistance of school secretary Patricia Farias, who attended the school and still lives in the neighborhood. 

    Each Friday, Nieto  offers what she calls a “School Smarts” class for parents to learn how to get involved in the school. As for students, Nieto provides incentives to improve attendance with modest gifts like a soccer ball, or free ice cream or nachos, which she also hands out on Friday mornings. Students with perfect attendance are awarded medals at “Celebration of Learning” events held regularly in the school cafeteria. 

    The challenge, Go Public Schools’ Tovani-Walchuk says, is to extend efforts like these across the entire district. 

    “These are moments of real strength, and we’re seeing what is truly possible,” she said, referring to Verde Elementary. “But it has not been yet systematized where every school has their school community outreach worker doing this work. That’s really determined site by site, depending on its priorities.”

    Verde Elementary school secretary Victoria Farías, who attended the school as a student, assists with keeping track of attendance.
    Credit: Louis Freedberg / EdSource

    School board member Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy says that in addition to boosting the attendance of existing students, there needs to be more emphasis on attracting new ones to the district. That’s because the district’s financial plight is largely due to student enrollment that has declined by an average of 3.1 percentage points over the previous four years, according to the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team report. 

    “It has to be a two-pronged approach,” he said. “We need to get families moving into our community to come to our schools. We don’t want to be a place where we have to be closing schools.”

    “If we want to continue to thrive as a district, we have no other option,” he said. 





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  • No compromise on literacy bill as hearing deadline looms

    No compromise on literacy bill as hearing deadline looms


    A Fresno Unified student reads a book during class.

    Credit: Fresno Unified / Flickr

    TOP Takeaways

    The sponsors and opponents of a comprehensive, statewide approach to teaching early literacy are no closer to a deal than a year ago.

    The latest bill would require the State Board of Education to designate courses in research-based methods of teaching reading, also known as the science of reading, and for all K-5 teachers to take them. The board would approve textbooks and materials for teachers to use.

    The ongoing feud pits the bill’s sponsors — the NAACP, Coding Dyslexia CA, EdVoice and Families in Schools — against the California Teachers Association, Californians Together, and the California Association of Bilingual Education.

    Phonics instruction is again at the center of the debate. Opponents say an excessive amount would harm English learners; supporters say the bill is clear: Decoding is essential for all students, but so are other elements of reading.

    Last April, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas pulled a bill on early literacy instruction and asked proponents and adversaries to reach a compromise on legislation for improving the reading skills of California students, which overall are dismal.  

    That hasn’t happened. After several broad discussions yielding little, the three main opponents — the California Teachers Association, the California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE), and Californians Together — released statements within the past month opposing the latest version of the legislation. 

    Both sides say they are willing to keep talking. However, the April 30 deadline for an initial hearing of bills is fast approaching, and with it, the rising level of frustration of the revised bill’s author, Assemblymember Blanca Rubio, D-Baldwin Park.

    “The kids don’t have unions. They only have us. We can’t keep kicking the can down the road. Our kids are not achieving, and not doing anything different is not working,” Rubio said.  “We have a great opportunity right now so we don’t keep falling behind.”

    Like its 2024 version, Rubio’s Assembly Bill 1121 would require state-funded training of all K-5 teachers in reading instruction grounded in decades of evidence-based studies and brain research known as the science of reading. The bill would require the State Board of Education to approve a choice of textbooks and materials aligned to those practices.

    The advocacy groups sponsoring AB 1121 — Decoding Dyslexia CA, EdVoice, Families In Schools, and the California NAACP — insist that failure to approve the bill would stall the piecemeal progress by the Newsom administration and the Legislature. It would leave big holes vital to establish a coherent statewide system of teaching reading.

    “Teachers are doing their best with what they know and can’t figure out why their kids are not reading at grade level,” said Yolie Flores, president and CEO of Families in Schools, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that advocates for parents.

    The state’s approach of creating academic frameworks and letting districts implement them as they want is harming children, she said. “Guidance isn’t cutting it. This bill is about taking it to the next level and making sure that teachers get this training and have the right materials.” 

    Wide disparities in proficiency

    On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the 41 percentage point gap in proficiency between economically and non-economically disadvantaged students was among the widest in the nation — and growing. Only 8% of Black and 23% of Hispanic fourth graders in California were proficient in reading, compared with 56% of white and 67% of Asian students.

    On the 2024 results from California’s standardized tests, only 43% of all students were proficient in English language arts in third grade, a critical predictor of future academic success; a third of low-income students were proficient, compared with 63% of non-low income students. Of the third-grade English learners taking the initial English Language Proficiency Assessments for California, 14% were proficient.

    The opposing groups say they share concern over low test scores but that AB 1121 is not the solution. Their disagreement appears deep-seated and perhaps unbridgeable.

    The opponents are centering their criticism on phonics, a contentious issue for 40 years. They assert the bill overemphasizes decoding skills of phonics and phonemic awareness at the expense of developing other foundational skills needed by all children, but especially English learners: oral fluency, vocabulary, background knowledge, and comprehension. Phonics refers to explicit instruction on how to connect letters to sounds. Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to recognize elements of sound. 

    Rubio and the bill’s supporters say the opponents are mischaracterizing the intent of the bill and what it actually says.

    “I don’t know anyone who advocates for just a phonics-based approach. That would be ridiculous,” said Leslie Zoroya, reading project director for the Los Angeles County of Education. “Why would you teach them just to decode and not work on vocabulary and background knowledge and fluency and all the other pieces that are included?”

    With a $5 million state grant, more than 8,000 teachers have taken “Getting Reading Right,” a short course on the principles of the science of reading offered by Zoroya’s office; they include all K-2 teachers in Long Beach, the state’s fourth-largest district.

    “It’s not either-or. We do decoding work, vocabulary work, oral language, knowledge building, the whole kit and caboodle,” Zoroya said. “There’s been more of a heavier emphasis on phonics over the last couple of years in California because our teachers don’t understand it. They weren’t taught it in their teacher ed programs. I got a reading certificate from USC, and I didn’t get it.”

    David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association union, stated that the union opposed the bill in its current form because “it negatively impacts locally made decisions to set priorities that meet the instructional needs of their students.”  

    Adding an unlikely precondition for supporting the bill, Goldberg insists that “any comprehensive, statewide approach to literacy must include fully funded and staffed schools with qualified educators and staff.”  

    Californians Together, an organization that advocates for the spread of bilingual education as well as the needs of English learners — who make up a fifth of California’s students — wrote in its three-page opposition letter that “without a clear emphasis on meeting the needs of multilingual learners, the bill’s professional development requirement is inadequate and misaligned with the needs of California’s diverse student population.”

    The letter also criticizes the bill for taking “an overly narrow approach that prioritizes foundational reading skills at the expense of other critical components of literacy.”

    An authority in English learner education who disagrees is Claude Goldenberg, a Professor of Education, emeritus, at Stanford University, who said that passage of the bill would be “an important, even if  modest, step forward.”

    “The fact is that the research that applies to kids who know English already applies to kids who are learning English, it’s just that they also need English language development,” he wrote. 

    State policy’s shift toward the science of reading

    Under Newsom, the state has implemented pieces of a coherent, evidence-based system of reading instruction that shifts from a “balanced” and “whole” language approach to reading instruction. Balanced language downplays phonics in favor of teaching words through looking at pictures and guessing based on a word’s context in a paragraph.

    • Starting next fall, the state will require kindergarten through second grade teachers to test students for potential reading challenges like dyslexia with a multi-language screening tool.
    • The Legislature passed a law that requires teacher credentialing programs to teach science of reading instruction. 
    • Using one-time money, Newsom appropriated $500 million to train reading coaches in lowest-income schools in the science of reading.
    • The Department of Education is creating guides and instruction modules for a “literacy road map.” It emphasizes “explicit instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, and other decoding skills” in the early grades. 

    While the new guidance is helpful, Zoroya said, “we have not put the same amount of effort into wide-scale professional learning for teachers. And that’s a disservice to them.”

    ‘It only makes sense, Rubio and allies argue, to take the next step and universally provide the same evidence-based instruction to all elementary school teachers and textbooks that support it. Otherwise, newly trained teachers face the confusing prospect of working in a “balanced language” district where instruction will contradict what they just learned.

    Rubio and the sponsors had assumed they answered opponents’ main concerns in writing AB 1121. They deleted the previous bill’s numerous references to the “science of reading,” a source of contention. Instead, they tied the bill’s wording to the existing, but unenforced, requirements for evidence-based reading instruction in the state’s English Language Arts and English Language Development instructional frameworks and in the California Education Code.

    Their opposition letters showed that the opponents were not at all mollified.

    The sponsors said they have repeatedly asked CABE, Californians Together and CTA for further changes to AB 1121 but haven’t received any.

    “The author has been clear; the sponsors are clear. We are very open to improving the bill if there are improvements,” said Marshall Tuck, CEO of EdVoice, who has participated in the discussions with opponents.

     In an email responding to questions about her group’s opposition to the bill, Martha Hernandez, executive director of Californians Together, wrote, “We understand that amendments to AB 1121 may be forthcoming, and we remain committed to engaging in the process with a focus on ensuring that any policy advances equitable access to effective, research-based literacy instruction for English learners.”  

    ‘Rubio was blunt. “I  can’t guess what they’re thinking. That’s the whole point of a negotiation. They have to bring something to the table. I can’t negotiate against myself.” 

    Rubio said she expects the bill to get a hearing before April 30 and will ask Speaker Rivas for a way forward, regardless of the continued opposition.

    Meanwhile, Assembly Education Chair Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, is discussing a compromise with individuals he wouldn’t name through a separate bill he is authoring. It would create incentives but not require school administrators to take similar early literacy training that teachers would receive under AB 1121. But, like CTA, he said he favors “local control of allowing local school districts to determine what works best for their kids.”

    Rivas was noncommittal. Stating he was tracking negotiations, a statement from his office said, “The Speaker looks forward to legislation that reflects greater consensus on this issue, and one that supports all students, including multilingual learners.”





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  • How to improve California’s school funding formula

    How to improve California’s school funding formula


    Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

    Top Takeaways
    • The Local Control Funding Formula must be more responsive to enrollment trends to ensure funds serve the high-needs students for whom they are targeted, rather than filling gaps in the district budget.
    • Policymakers must create incentives for districts to improve coordination and merging of services for students with multiple needs.
    • In making adjustments to the formula, policymakers must avoid introducing too many new, disparate factors that can further burden school systems.

    California has an opportunity to ensure that its school funding formula fully delivers on its goals to improve student outcomes, especially for those who need the most support. The key to success will be accounting for shifts in enrollment and creating incentives for districts to blend student programs.

    The 2013 Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, represented a dramatic shift from a complicated morass of centralized funding requirements that often resulted in large variations in per-pupil funds delivered in and across districts.

    Under LCFF, higher overall student outcomes have resulted, thanks to localized decision-making and additional funding to ensure that high-needs students also have the opportunity to succeed in schools. However, progress to close achievement gaps — a central intention of the funding formula — remains slow.

    Last year, the California State Assembly held a series of LCFF panels with researchers and educators from across the state. Though divergent views were expressed, multiple experts recommended improving the distribution of supplemental grant funds to the highest-needs students and factoring in geographic cost differences — points underscored by WestEd’s evidence-based review of the funding system.    

    However, two significant dynamics, which we have frequently seen, received little airtime during the hearing. They may hold clues for further optimizing the use of taxpayer dollars.

    First, funding formula updates must meaningfully account for future enrollment declines that could cause changes in the proportions of high-needs students to be served as well as the mix of funding available to school systems.

    California’s public schools have lost a substantial number of students, and forecasts project further declines ranging from half a million to nearly 1 million students by 2032-33.

    Because many students leaving California public schools — often due to the high cost of living — are English learners, economically disadvantaged and white students, the total and mix of available revenues for school systems is changing, and changing differently by region.

    The math is clear: As each student leaves, so does a fraction of the base revenue available to the school system to cover foundational expenses, including teachers, secretaries, utilities and the like. Meanwhile, concentrations of high-needs students, like English learners and students requiring special education services, continue to rise where they are left in greater proportions than their peers, requiring more resources per student to provide equitable opportunities and access.      

    Reducing expenses for school systems proportional to revenue loss is difficult. School systems often make small, marginal changes that don’t lower expenditures to meet available revenues. This may undercut more meaningful, necessary steps — whole system re-evaluation of resource investments that match student need to the skills and expertise of educators. As a result, resources that should be dedicated to additional supports for students may instead get redirected to support basic school costs. This could leave high-needs students out in the cold instead of achieving the state’s intention to equitably allocate funds.

    To avoid this, policymakers must ensure that any future LCFF adjustments include triggers that reconcile the base, supplemental and concentration grants to ensure proper alignment with enrollment and shifts in student need. School systems will also need guidance and support to analyze, design and manage these larger shifts. The formula for special education should be re-evaluated, given that funds are tied to overall student enrollment and not students with individualized education plans (IEPs).

    Second, following any further LCFF adjustments, school systems will need policy, regulatory and funding incentives to seamlessly blend student programs like special education and English learner programs where such services are needed for the same multidimensional students.    

    Eighty-five percent of English learners are economically disadvantaged, as are 67.5% of students with disabilities. California’s high population of students with multiple needs requires additional support to successfully navigate school.

    When supports are smartly combined — such as when English learner development support is integrated into a general education classroom — the result is the simultaneous delivery of good instruction and scaffolding for English learners in all general education classrooms. Directing funding to support one identified student need or a specific program sends a message to local school systems about where to direct resources. However, it can go too far. Unchecked, the system begins to look more like what we set out to get away from in the first place: layers of “categorical” programs funded with money that could only be spent in very restricted ways.

    Policymakers must write policy that incentivizes and supports local educators to build programs that work together to address the multiple needs of students simultaneously. This includes reevaluating existing education funding to reduce its complexity, which would then allow local school systems to achieve coherent programs that seamlessly support the needs of the array of students being served on school campuses — from learning and instruction to collaborating with other agencies to provide supports such as food, health care and more.

    Panelists at the Assembly hearing also noted the need to account for missing factors like geographic cost and economies of scale. While these factors are meaningful adjustments to account for school systems’ costs, introducing too many new, disparate factors can further burden school systems when they are required to track how each of those funding streams is being used. In fact, the governor just signed a bill to conduct a comprehensive review of the overwhelming amount of district reporting already required. Accountability and transparency are important, but too much will limit school systems’ ability to wisely blend and braid funding sources to construct coherent programs that support a wide range of student needs.

    The Local Control Funding Formula has already helped California make significant headway to improve public education. By paying attention to changes in the student population and meaningfully accounting for them in funding and policy, the state will be better poised to deliver on its promise to close achievement gaps.

    •••

    Jason Willis is with the strategic resource allocation and systems planning team at WestEd, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research, development, and service agency that works to promote excellence, achieve equity, and improve learning for children, youth, and adults.

    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.





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  • California’s ‘Career Passport’ would spend tax dollars on unproven technology

    California’s ‘Career Passport’ would spend tax dollars on unproven technology


    Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

    Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed “Career Passport” aims to streamline job seekers’ credentials into a digital portfolio, making it easier for employers to recognize individuals’ skills and experiences.

    While the concept may seem promising, the reality is that learning employment records (LERs) — the foundation of the Career Passport — are still in the early stages of development and adoption. Few employers and job seekers currently use them, and the technology remains largely unknown and untested.

    Before the government spends $100 million in taxpayer dollars on technology that lacks meaningful adoption and trust, the focus should be on allowing innovators to first develop LER technology that is valid, reliable and useful for both employers and job seekers.

    The Career Passport is not the state’s first attempt at a large-scale education and workforce data initiative. The Cradle-to-Career (C2C) data system, which was supposed to create a seamless record of Californians’ educational and career progress, remains years behind schedule and is still largely theoretical. Furthermore, the effort is a prime example of the state’s poor track record in this space. C2C marketed itself as a system that would stitch together “data from multiple education systems” only to deliver none of that to date. If the state cannot successfully deliver on even the first leg of the C2C system, why should we expect better results from a Career Passport? Rather than spreading thin, already dwindling resources and distracting an overburdened state workforce with another massive set of promises, the state should focus on completing the work it has already spent money on and not yet delivered.

    Before attempting to implement the Career Passport, California should wait until the innovation sector has figured out how to make learning employment records that work at scale, demonstrate real value in the hiring process and earn buy-in from employers and job seekers. Pouring state funds into largely experimental technology at this point risks wasting taxpayer money during a $68 billion budget deficit.

    Moreover, the state government is the wrong entity to drive innovation at this stage. The bureaucratic inefficiencies associated with public-sector initiatives — lengthy procurement processes, cumbersome regulations, and political red tape — will not ensure success. Instead, the state’s involvement will disrupt and possibly undermine existing voluntary collaborations already making headway in developing learning employment records and similar technology. The state’s proposal to put itself as the driver of this work risks turning what is currently a collaborative ecosystem, into a competitive battle for state dollars, stifling innovation rather than fostering it.

    California should allow the innovation sector to do what it does best — collaborate, experiment and refine solutions until they are proven effective. What needs to happen — and is already happening — is that learning employment records companies, educational institutions, employers, and other innovators are working together to figure out how to develop and refine these technologies in ways that employers and learners trust, which will lead to adoption. This process of collaboration and iteration is essential to ensuring that they become a useful and reliable tool in the job market.

    Government intervention at this stage, particularly a massive infusion of public funds, risks disrupting collaboration, creating unnecessary noise and slowing down true innovation. During this crucial innovation phase, the government needs to stay out of the way and allow the private and nonprofit sectors to innovate freely. Only after learning employment records have demonstrated their value and reliability in effectively matching talent to jobs, should the state consider spending money on their widespread adoption.

    If Gov. Newsom genuinely wants to improve how Californians translate their education and experiences into career opportunities, he should wait until the technology is ready rather than disrupting innovation and placing a massive bet on an experiment. And, he should recognize that it is far too early to invest state dollars in such a venture.

    Job hunting may be awful, but California’s employers and job seekers deserve better than just another set of unfulfilled promises.

    •••

    Alex Barrios serves as president of Educational Results Partnership, a nonprofit data science organization that developed Cal-PASS Plus, California’s first intersegmental longitudinal data system, and founded the ERP Institute to promote educator and employer collaboration to improve the efficiency of talent to job matching.

    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.





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  • Renewed push to reshape ethnic studies with oversight and new standards

    Renewed push to reshape ethnic studies with oversight and new standards


    A student shares her research results during a class presentation.

    Credit: Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages

    Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

    TOP TAKEAWAYS
    • A new Assembly bill aims to swap a voluntary curriculum with academic standards that would direct what should be taught.
    • The focus would remain teaching the triumphs, struggles and perspectives of Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and Black Americans.
    • The bill would restrict an alternative Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum, which focuses on the power of white supremacy and condemns Israel as an oppressive colonial state.

    Thirty-one legislators, led by the Legislative Jewish Caucus, are calling for a do-over on teaching ethnic studies after a half-dozen years of strife.

    The authors are convinced that flaws in a voluntary model curriculum have led to complaints and lawsuits alleging that some districts are using biased and antisemitic course content and instruction. Therefore, they propose starting again by creating academic standards that would direct what is taught in the course and how.

    Assembly Bill 1468 would require the State Board of Education to restart a curriculum process that was highly contested six years ago. It resulted in multiple drafts and an uneasy compromise of language and goals reflected in a nearly 700-page California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. Since its adoption in 2021, school districts have had the responsibility to create their own curriculum based largely on interpretations of ambiguities of what constitutes an ethnic studies course.

    “When California believes in something, we write standards for it,” said Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, a former teacher. “Whether it’s English language arts, English language development, history, social science — there are different sets of standards. It creates a common understanding of what kids are supposed to be able to learn and do, and what teachers are supposed to teach.”

    “What’s happened in our schools is, one, antisemitism. But two, it’s tearing a lot of communities apart over something that is supposed to be really beneficial to children when done right.”

    In addition to creating academic standards, the bill would create new disclosure and oversight measures that don’t apply to the current model framework or academic standards for other subjects. They would require:

    • school districts to submit ethnic studies curricula to the California Department of Education for review
    • the Instructional Quality Commission, which advises the State Board of Education, to recommend a framework and instructional materials aligned to the new standards;
    • the California Department of Education to report annually on compliance with state laws;
    • providers of content and standards trainers to submit their materials to the state to ensure compliance with the standards.

    Opposition will likely be intense.

    “The bill’s push for increased oversight and censorship is deeply concerning, restricting students’ ability to engage in critical discussions on human rights, globalism, and social justice,” said Tricia Gallagher-Geursten, a lecturer in ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. “Furthermore, it diminishes the intellectual integrity of ethnic studies by dismissing the foundational theories and pedagogies that define all academic disciplines, violating the principle of academic freedom.”

    “AB 1468 is driven by those seeking to regulate educational content by silencing perspectives they oppose,” she said. “At this crucial moment, the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council stands with California students and our diverse communities in urging legislators to oppose AB 1468 and protect the integrity of ethnic studies.”

    Last year, the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) ethnic studies faculty and the California Teachers Association led the opposition to a less sweeping bill that would have required more disclosure of a proposed ethnic studies course and a review by a committee of teachers and parents. The California Teachers Association and UC and CSU ethnic studies faculty members criticized it as unwarranted and unprecedented interference with instruction.

    Addis and Assemblymember Rick Zbur, D-Los Angeles, introduced the bill late in the session and withdrew it because of a lack of support. This year’s 32 co-authors include legislators outside the 18-member Jewish Legislative Caucus, including Assemblymembers David Alvarez, D-San Diego, and Sharon Quirk-Silva, D-Fullerton.

    “Jewish students are facing a very difficult environment in the community at large, certainly on college campuses,” said Alvarez. “It’s important that we acknowledge that and that we have curriculum that’s standards-based, as we do with other curriculums, reflects California’s values and steers away from antisemitism.”

    Targeting Liberated Ethnic Studies

    The legislation would curtail districts that have adopted Liberated Ethnic Studies, although it doesn’t name the curriculum or the consortium identified with promoting it. UC and CSU ethnic studies professors and instructors developed the Liberated version as an alternative after the State Board largely rejected the first draft of the model curriculum, which they had written, as ideological and biased against Jews.

    The state’s final version of the model curriculum presents a multiperspective exploration of the culture, achievements and struggles, past and ongoing, of the four primary racial and ethnic groups in California. They are Native Americans, Black Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans.

    The Liberated version takes a perspective that stresses the ongoing oppression of people of color through white supremacy and capitalism. It directs students to examine their own self-identities as to how their race, ethnicity, sexuality, and wealth and privilege intersect with others. Ethnic studies teachers say students find the courses uplifting, not pessimistic.

    To date, the state has kept no records on curricula that districts have adopted, but more than two dozen districts have contracted with groups affiliated with Liberated trainers and leaders.

    Charges of antisemitism

    Legislators made an explicit reference to that first draft when they passed Assembly Bill 101, which established the as-yet unfunded mandate for districts to offer a one-semester ethnic studies course in high school starting in fall 2025 and to require taking it for a high school diploma starting in 2029-30.

    They wrote, “it is the intent of the Legislature that (districts) not use the portions of the draft model curriculum that were not adopted by the Instructional Quality Commission due to concerns related to bias, bigotry, and discrimination.”

    Both Attorney General Rob Bonta and Brooks Allen, executive director of the State Board of Education and an adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom, have sent separate memos reminding districts to follow that prohibition. Nonetheless, proponents of the Liberated curriculum point to references to oppression and “intersectionality” included in the final framework to argue that their approach is consistent with the state framework.

    The Liberated curriculum also emphasizes solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle against domination by Israel, a modern “settler colonial state” oppressing people of color.

    The slaughter of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas fighters in communities bordering Gaza in October 2023, followed by more than a year of fighting and bombings that have displaced hundreds of thousands of Gazans and caused the deaths of an estimated 40,000,  have heightened tensions in the classroom. Jewish organizations and parents have complained that one-sided lessons against Zionism and the Israeli government have blended into overt antisemitism.

    The federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating discrimination allegations against Berkeley Unified. The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has filed complaints against Fremont High School, Santa Clara Unified, and, in its latest filing, against Etiwanda School District in Rancho Cucamonga.  It alleges that a seventh grade girl’s middle school failed to intervene to stop physical abuse and repeated antisemitic slurs, including a Hitler “joke,” by other students. Last month, Santa Ana Unified agreed to discontinue three Liberated-affiliated ethnic studies courses after a lawsuit over public meetings violations revealed antisemitic bias and slurs by staff members.

    The proposed bill does not prohibit discussions of the Israel-Palestine issue, avoiding a trespass on free speech. However, it calls for ethnic studies to “focus on the domestic experience and stories of historically marginalized peoples in American society.”

    Like Assembly Bill 101 before it, the bill would ensure that ethnic studies “remains true to its original intent — promoting inclusivity, respect, and historical accuracy for all communities with a domestic focus,” said Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park.

    The 2016 law that authorized the creation of a model curriculum framework called for a committee consisting of faculty members of university ethnic studies departments, K-12 teachers, and administrators experienced in teaching the subject. The committee members whom the State Board appointed ended up writing the disputed first draft. AB 1468 also calls for a similar advisory committee, the majority of whom would be experts in ethnic studies.

    Wouldn’t that possibly lead to standards similar to those in the model curriculum’s first draft — and a repeat of the animosities of the first process?

    Bill author Zbur disagrees. The governor, not the State Board of Education, would name the members, and the language of the bill’s intent would make clear that the experts would be more “traditional” and not proponents of the Liberated curriculum. The advisory committee would also include representatives of communities most frequently targeted by hate crimes, thus assuring a voice from the Jewish community.

    Newsom would appear sympathetic to the effort. In April 2024, he pledged in his Golden State Plan to Counter Antisemitism that he “will work with the Jewish Caucus and Legislature to pursue legislation strengthening the guardrails established by AB 101.”

    His administration has not commented on the new bill.





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  • California’s chronic literacy crisis requires solutions drawn from research

    California’s chronic literacy crisis requires solutions drawn from research


    Third graders read along as teacher Patty Lopez reads a text about plastic straws aloud.

    Credit: Zaidee Stavely / EdSource

    A few years ago, I met a first-grade English learner in a bilingual program who was learning to read in Spanish. The student, who I’ll call Elena, and her mother were from Guatemala. Elena’s mother only had a second-grade education, but she knew that one facet of Elena’s education was the gateway to all future opportunities: learning to read. 

    Elena had started school late, and her mother was taking no chances. She worked with Elena to teach her some basics — how letters formed syllables and syllables formed words. Elena was able to read by the end of first grade, but the outcome could have been very different without her mother’s efforts. Whether she knew it or not, what Elena’s mother taught Elena aligns with decades of reading research on how the brain learns to read — regardless of native language.  

    Unfortunately, most children from low-income communities like Elena’s do not share her story. Millions of California students fail to make adequate progress in reading. Today, only one-third of economically disadvantaged Latino students and one-fourth of economically disadvantaged African American students meet or exceed grade-level standards in English language arts. This is not because they are incapable of learning, but largely because they are not taught using effective practices supported by a broad consensus of reading researchers and experts.

    These practices include a strong emphasis on foundational literacy skills, typically known as phonics and decoding, and an emphasis on developing language, comprehension and knowledge.

    But foundational literacy skills are not given enough attention in California, leaving too many students with a weak or nonexistent foundation for literacy development and academic success.

    Literacy achievement in California is alarming. Fewer than half of California students meet or exceed grade-level standards in English language arts. For decades, California students have been either smack in the middle or, more often, trailing national reading achievement. In the most recent national assessments, California’s fourth-grade students’ scores were below 36 other states in reading proficiency. And, according to research from the Stanford Education Data Archive, California has one of the largest gaps in fourth-grade reading proficiency between low-income and non-low-income students in the nation.

    The real-world consequences of poor literacy skills are devastating for both individuals and society as a whole:

    Our state has invested millions of dollars in literacy over the past decade, but we are still not seeing an adequate return. This is, in part, because much of the policy to date has consisted of mixed and confusing recommendations from the state. We have failed to put into practice the best knowledge we have about promoting literacy development. 

    Meanwhile, states like Mississippi have gone from significantly below average in reading proficiency and among the worst in the nation to significantly above the national average and one of the most improved, after passing comprehensive early literacy policies that align with reading research. The average low-income California fourth grader is a full year behind their counterpart in Mississippi. 

    California now has the potential to make similar progress and take a positive step forward if elected leaders in Sacramento choose to vote for Assembly Bill 1121. The bill could help align decades of interdisciplinary reading research with reading instruction by providing paid professional development for elementary school educators in more effective literacy practices and requiring school districts and charter schools to adopt English language instructional materials from a new State Board of Education list aligned with evidence-based means of teaching literacy (identified in current law). 

    For too long, we’ve debated whether reading should be taught as decoding, emphasizing phonics (letters, sounds), or as meaning-based, emphasizing “whole language” or so-called “balanced literacy.” In reality, decoding, language comprehension skills, and knowledge development are all necessary to achieve reading success. 

    Even with advanced language skills and vast knowledge, you can’t be a successful reader if you can’t pull words off a page quickly, effortlessly and accurately. Similarly, you can’t be a successful reader if you lack the language and knowledge to make sense of words. 

    AB 1121 will help move us toward a more comprehensive approach to reading instruction, emphasizing the importance of developing the neural pathways between sounds, letters, and meaning that are necessary for the brain to learn to read. 

    Building these pathways is essential for those learning in any language. Research around the world demonstrates there are many commonalities in learning and teaching to read in any language, whether it’s a language one already knows or is simultaneously learning. English learners have much to gain from implementing known effective approaches to teaching reading, which include what Elena’s mother did instinctively to help her build a strong foundation of literacy.

    In the Information Age, reading is the gateway to all future opportunities. Our students don’t have time to waste while we, the adults they’ve entrusted with their education, continue to fight fruitless “reading wars.” If we care about our children’s futures, and our state’s, we must push for effective reading instruction in all classrooms by passing AB 1121.

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    Claude Goldenberg, a former first grade and junior high teacher, is Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education, emeritus, at Stanford University. His areas of expertise are literacy education and English language learners.

    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.





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