High school redesign, dropping enrollment’s silver lining plus more budget miscellany

Credit: Allison Shelley for EDUimages

Inside every governor’s voluminous state budget are items that, while not headline-grabbing, are newsworthy and illuminating. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s May budget revision for 2025-26 is no exception, as four examples illustrate. One invites districts to redesign high schools; another adds a billion dollars to spur growth in learning. A third is a quick fix for a legal obstacle to help young English learners; a fourth reveals an important long-term funding trend. Here are the details. 

Reimagining high school

Asked to describe how they felt about high school, 3 out of 4 students chose “tired,” “stressed” or “bored” in a 2020 nationwide survey by Yale University. Closer to home, about 4 out of 10 students in the 2024-25 California Healthy Kids Survey reported they lacked a relationship with a caring adult in high school.

State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond has read those numbers and similar data. She has also seen schools, like MetWest High School in Oakland Unified, and districts like Anaheim Union High School District, that have explored project-based learning, work internships, team teaching, and individual learning plans with alternative measures of achievement. One of the challenges has been scaling models within a learning system that measures learning in terms of periods, course credits, and minutes of seat time.

That’s why Darling-Hammond encouraged Newsom to include $15 million in the May budget revision for a pilot program to redesign middle and high schools “to better serve the needs of all students and increase student outcomes.”

“If public schools are to survive, they will have to be transformed to be more responsive,” Darling-Hammond said. “Students should not have to leave public schools for microschools and school pods to get a personalized environment.”

Newsom is proposing that a yet-to-be-chosen county office of education guide a network of between 15 and 30 districts in a multi-year program to examine innovations, propose alternatives, and learn from each other. 

State law allows districts to seek waivers from state requirements, and existing independent study regulations permit some flexibility for experimentation. But an independent study was designed to accommodate individual schedules, not a systemic response that reorients the school day to a changing vision for a high school graduate, Darling-Hammond said. 

“The state board can’t spend time doing workarounds for 2,000 districts,” she said.

Ron Carruth, the retired superintendent of the El Dorado Union High School District, said he is encouraged by the proposal. This month, he helped establish the California High School Coalition, which will hold its first conference in Sacramento on Oct. 26-28. 

Anaheim Union High School District Superintendent Michael Matsuda said that “in the age of AI, we need to be more innovative than ever, considering tectonic shifts in jobs and employment. If we’re not preparing students for that world, shame on us.”

The state-funded network will be “an opportunity to innovate,” he said, while noting that changing systems and culture are a lot harder than people think. “School leaders need to think more like entrepreneurs.”

Ideas for accelerating learning?

Parents and community members with ideas for moving districts beyond their post-pandemic learning lag will have a chance to share them under the May budget revision, with an extra $1.1 billion for districts to spend on them.

Newsom is proposing to add $378 million in each of the next three fiscal years to the Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant program — a massive, five-year state grant program approved in 2022-23. The grant program, targeted for the most struggling students, provides what districts in other states lack: state money to replace federal Covid funding that expired in September 2024.

It’s unclear how much of the original $6.8 billion remains. As of a year ago, $4.8 billion hadn’t been spent, according to an analysis of the most recent state data by School Services of California. The proposed $1.1 billion would add to what’s left.

Under the terms of the program, districts must solicit community views on spending the money on “evidence-based practices,” like tutoring or investing in teacher residences to retain new teachers. Districts will then have to spell out uses for the funding as a new entry in their annual Local Control and Accountability Plans.

The timing is good. For example, the Legislature is likely to move districts toward adopting effective early literacy textbooks and effective ways to teach them. This new block grant money could amplify the more than $700 million that Newsom is also proposing for districts to improve early math and reading instruction.

More districts are also indicating interest in high-impact tutoring, with additional research showing its effectiveness. Along with providing districts with a free, step-by-step guide and counseling for setting up a program, Stanford University-based National Student Support Accelerator is cosponsoring an effort for 40 California districts to design their own tutoring programs over the next year (go here for information on signing up).

TK English learner funding workaround

A decision by the Legislature that 4-year-olds in transitional kindergarten (TK) are too young to be tested for English proficiency could delay funding for services the children need before kindergarten. 

Recognizing the problem, Newsom proposes a temporary fix in the May budget revision by providing $7.5 million in one-time money for 2025-26 and 2026-27.

All students who speak a language other than English at home are required to take the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC) when they enroll in school to determine if they are English learners. But the law that legislators passed last year exempts students in transitional kindergarten from taking the test because of concerns that it was not age-appropriate. Without identifying English learners and providing funding for them under the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, schools are not required to provide unidentified students with language services or report their academic progress on the state dashboard.

“It’s critical that we have funding to support our children, that we have the requirement to support our children, and that we’re doing so in the age and developmentally appropriate way that really keeps their assets in mind,” said Carolyne Crolotte, director of policy for Early Edge California, an organization that advocated for the exemption of TK students from ELPAC testing.

Crolotte said Early Edge California has been researching what other states do to identify young English learners and is working with the State Board of Education and the National Institute for Early Education Research to identify alternative assessments.

Newsom is also proposing $10 million for selecting and making available a new screener for schools to use with TK students to identify their language needs. However, there is a catch. The language the governor is suggesting for the budget bill states that the screener should not be used to identify students as English learners. Unless the Local Control Funding Formula is changed, schools would still not receive funds specifically for these students or be required by law to provide them with help to learn English.

Declining enrollment’s ‘dividend’

There’s a silver lining to the continued decline in TK-12 student enrollment in California. Per-student funding could grow statewide during much of the next decade if, according to state projections, student enrollment statewide drops by nearly 10%, to 5.25 million by 2033-34.

That’s because the state will be apportioning money through what’s called Test 1 under Proposition 98, the formula that determines the minimum portion of the state’s General Fund that must be spent on TK-12 schools and community colleges. Under Test 1, that’s about 40% of the total. If state revenues grow at the same time as the number of kids shrinks, the result will be more money per student.

The increase won’t be enough to prevent spending cuts or school closures in those districts with big drops in enrollment. But it should help ease the pain, and for districts with flat or growing enrollment, provide a modest increase in their share of the Local Control Funding Formula, which provides the bulk of their state funding; it is tied to average daily attendance. 

Funding through Test 1 is a relatively recent development. In 1988, when they wrote Prop. 98, its authors didn’t foresee a period of declining enrollment. For the first 25 years, as student enrollment grew by more than 1 million, growth in student attendance, along with increases in personal income (Test 2) or increases in General Fund revenue plus 0.5% (Test 3), determined funding levels above or below the previous year.

First invoked in 2011-12, Test I has been used in seven of the past eight years and will be in effect in 2025-26, and likely in the coming years. 

The extra money systemwide will also give the Legislature and future governors new options. They could decide which new programs with soon-to-expire one-time funding, such as community schools, should receive permanent support. Or they could choose to phase in much-talked-about changes to the Local Control Funding Formula. These could include raising the base funding for all districts or building in a regional cost adjustment. Those are among the ideas in Assembly Bill 1204, which will get serious attention next year.

The declining enrollment “dividend,” as it’s been called, “is kind of a boon for the education system,” said Julien Lafortune, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.