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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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  • Trump Wants to Erase the History He Doesn’t Like, But Historians Are Pushing Back

    Trump Wants to Erase the History He Doesn’t Like, But Historians Are Pushing Back


    Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post wrote about the efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite American history. Trump wants “patriotic history,” in which evil things never happened and non-white people and women were seldom noticed. In other words, he wants to control historical memory, sanitize it, and restore history as it was taught when he was in school about 65 years ago (1960), before the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and other actions that changed what historians know and teach.

    Dvorak writes:

    A section of Arlington National Cemetery’s website highlighting African American military heroes is gone.

    Maj. Lisa Jaster was the first woman to graduate from Army Ranger school. But that fact has been scrubbed from the U.S. Army Reserve [usar.army.mil] and Department of Defense websites. [search.usa.gov]

    The participation of transgender and queer protesters during the LGBTQ+ uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn was deleted from the National Park Service’s website [nps.gov] about the federal monument.

    And the Smithsonian museum in Washington, which attracts millions of visitors who enter free each year, will be instructed by Vice President JD Vance to remove “improper ideology.”

    In a series of executive orders, President Donald Trump is reshaping the way America’s history is presented in places that people around the world visit.

    In one order, he declared that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts “undermine our national unity,” and more pointedly, that highlighting the country’s most difficult chapters diminishes pride in America and produces “a sense of national shame.”

    The president’s orders have left historians scrambling to collect and preserve aspects of the public record, as stories of Black, Brown, female or LGBTQ+ Americans are blanched from some public spaces. In some cases, the historical mentions initially removed have been replaced, but are more difficult to find online.

    That rationale has galvanized historians to rebuke the idea that glossing over the nation’s traumas — instead of grappling with them — will foster pride, rather than shame.

    Focusing on the shame, they say, misses a key point: Contending with the uglier parts of U.S. history is necessary for an honest and inclusive telling of the American story. Americans can feel pride in the nation’s accomplishments while acknowledging that some of the shameful actions in the past reverberate today.

    “The past has no duty to our feelings,” said Chandra Manning, a history professor at Georgetown University.

    “History does not exist to sing us lullabies or shower us with accolades. The past has no obligations to us at all,” Manning said. “We, however, do have an obligation to the past, and that is to strive to understand it in all its complexity, as experienced by all who lived through it, not just a select few.”

    That is not to say that the uncomfortable weight of difficult truths isn’t a valid emotion.

    Postwar Germans were so crushed by the burden of their people’s past, from the horrors of the Nazi regime to the protection of war criminals in the decades after the war, that they have a lengthy word for processing it: vergangenheitsbewältigung, which means the “work of coping with the past.” It has informed huge swaths of German literature and film and has shaped the physical way European cities create memorials and museums.

    America’s version of vergangenheitsbewältigung can be found across the cultural landscape. From films to books to classrooms and museums, Americans are learning more details about slavery in the South, the way racism has affected everything from baseball to health care, and how sexism shaped the military.

    Trump, however, looks at the U.S. version of vergangenheitsbewältigung differently.
    “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” said the executive order targeting museums, called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

    That is what “fosters a sense of national shame,” he says in his order.

    Historians take exception to that. “I would argue that it’s actually weird to feel shame about what people in the past did,” Georgetown history professor Katherine Benton-Cohen said.
    “As I like to tell my students, ‘I’m not talking about you. We will not use ‘we’ when we refer to Americans in the past, because it wasn’t us and we don’t have to feel responsible for their actions. You can divest yourself of this feeling,’” she said.

    Germans also have a phrase for enabling a critical look at their nation’s past: die Gnade der spät-geborenen, “the grace of being born too late” to be held responsible for the horror of the Nazi years.

    Benton-Cohen said she honed her approach to this during her first teaching job in the Deep South in 2003, when she emphasized the generational gap between her students and the history they were studying.

    “They could speak freely of the past — even the recent past, like the 1950s and 1960s, because they weren’t there,” she said. “They were free to make their own conclusions. It was exciting, and it worked. Many told me it was the first time they had learned the history of the 1960s because their high schools — both public and private — had skipped it to avoid controversy. We did fine.”

    Trump hasn’t limited his attempt to control how history is presented in museums or memorials. Among the first executive orders he issued was “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” Another one sought to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion in the nation’s workplaces, classrooms and museums. His version of American history tracks with how it was taught decades ago, before academics began bringing more diverse voices and viewpoints into their scholarship.

    Maurice Jackson, a history professor at Georgetown University who specializes in jazz and Black history, said Black Americans have fought hard to tell their full story.

    Black history was first published as “The Journal of Negro History” in 1916, in a townhouse in Washington when academic Carter G. Woodson began searching for the full story of his roots. A decade later, he introduced “Negro History Week” to schools across the United States, a history lesson that was widely cheered by White teachers and students alongside Black Americans who finally felt seen.

    “Black history is America’s history,” Jackson said. And leaving the specifics of the Black experience out because it makes some people ashamed gives an incomplete picture of our nation, he said.

    After Trump issued his executive orders, federal workers scrambled to interpret and obey them, which in some cases led to historical milestones being removed, or covered up and then replaced.

    Federal workers removed a commemoration of the Tuskegee Airmen from the Pentagon website, then restored it. They taped butcher paper over the National Cryptologic Museum’s display honoring women and people of color, then uncovered the display.

    Mentions of Harriet Tubman in a National Park Service display about the Underground Railroad were removed, then put back. The story of legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson’s military career was deleted from the Department of Defense website, then restored several days later.

    Women known as WASPs risked their lives in military service — training and test pilots during World War II for a nation that didn’t allow them to open a bank account — is no longer a prominent part of the Pentagon’s digital story.

    George Washington University historian Angela Zimmerman calls all the activity. which happened with a few keystrokes and in a matter of days, the digital equivalent of “Nazi book burnings.”

    In response, historians — some professional, some amateur — are scrambling to preserve information before it is erased and forgotten.

    The Organization of American Historians created the Records at Risk Data Collection Initiative, which is a callout for content that is in danger of being obliterated

    This joins the decades-long work of preserving information by the Internet Archive, a California nonprofit started in 1996 that also runs the Wayback Machine, which stores digital records.

    Craig Campbell, a digital map specialist in Seattle, replicated and stored the U.S. Geological Service’s entire historical catalogue. His work was crowdfunded by supporters.

    “Historical maps are critical for a huge range of industries ranging from environmental science, conservation, real estate, urban planning, and even oil and gas exploration,” said Campbell, whose mapping company is called Pastmaps. “Losing access to the data and these maps not only destroys our ability to access and learn from history, but limits our ability to build upon it in so many ways as a country.”

    After astronomer Rose Ferreira’s profile was scrubbed from, then returned, to NASA’s website, she posted about it on social media. In response, an online reader created a blog, Women in STEM, to preserve stories such as Ferreira’s.

    “Programs that memorialize painful truths help ensure past wrongs are never revived to harm again,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nevada), said on X, noting that presidents are elected to “run our government — not rewrite our history.”

    Authoritarian leaders have long made the whitewashing of history a tool in their regimes. Joseph Stalin expunged rivals from historic photographs. Adolf Hitler purged museums of modernist art and works created by Jewish artists, which he labeled “degenerate.” Museums in Mao Zedong’s China glorified his ideology.

    While this may be unfamiliar to Americans, Georgetown University history professor Adam Rothman says that in the scope of human history, “these are precedented times.”

    It’s not yet clear what the real-world effect of Trump’s Smithsonian order will be or exactly how it will be carried out. Who will determine what exhibits cause shame and need to be removed? What will the criteria be? Will exhibits that discuss slavery, for instance, be eliminated or altered?

    “Our nation is an ongoing experiment,” says Manning, the Georgetown history professor, who has written books about the Civil War. “And what helps us do that now in 2024 compared to 1776 is that we do have a shared past.

    “Every single human culture depends upon, grows out of, and is shaped by its past,” she said. “It is the past that has shaped all of us, it is our past that contains the bonds that can really hold us together.”

    It’s what makes the study — and threat to — American history unique among nations. Benton-Cohen said that is what she sees happen with her students.

    “The American striving to realize the democratic faith and all the difficulties it entailed and challenges overcome should inspire pride, not shame,” she said. “If you feel shame, as the kids would say, that’s a ‘you’ problem. That’s why I still fly the flag at my house; I’m not afraid of the American past, I’m alive with the possibilities — of finding common cause, of fighting for equality, of appreciating our shared humanity, of upholding our freedoms.”



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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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  • Chinese schools use Wowzers to help students learn remotely during Coronavirus crisis

    Chinese schools use Wowzers to help students learn remotely during Coronavirus crisis


    eLearning student

    As the number of Coronavirus cases rises in China, many schools are temporarily closed to prevent the disease from spreading. To preserve a sense of normalcy and keep students from falling behind, schools are using eLearning to continue students’ education. Schools from the Wuhan, Jinjiang, and Hexi districts, all part of the International Schools Consortium (iSC), are successfully using the Wowzers with their students.

    Wowzers works with schools in the Sichuan Province that use NWEA’s MAP Growth assessments to customize a personalized learning path. By linking these assessments with Wowzers’ content, educators feel confident that students have the correct curriculum to meet their goals. Since the program is automatically individualized, educators find that remote learning through Wowzers is effective.

    Principal John Ross Jones from Chengdu International reports that his students are continuing their learning through Wowzers. The students are engaged, and teachers can see their students’ progress in real-time, even adjusting their curriculum remotely and assigning homework and test prep work.

    Wowzers has been very beneficial for us at this time as we are practicing home-based learning in our schools currently.

    John Ross Jones, Principal of Chendu International

    Many teachers use Wowzers’ dual-path system to create a new curriculum path for students as they learn from home. This way, the curriculum path they use in the classroom is undisturbed. SuJung Ham, of Tianjin International School, reports that his students are engaged and showing results. 

    It has been a real help during this time because not only are our students at home because of the virus but many of us teachers are also either at home or even in other countries. I personally came back to the States for a time and this has helped keep my students on track with Math remotely while they are in China, Korea, or one even in France.

    Brandon Hoffman, Teacher of Tianjin International

    The power of digital technology, combined with artificial intelligence, is invaluable during this time of crisis in China. As the threat of the virus spreads throughout the world, Wowzers has demonstrated that eLearning from home works.



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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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  • Anand Talks to a Therapist: How to Survive the Abuser-in-Chief

    Anand Talks to a Therapist: How to Survive the Abuser-in-Chief


    The Ink “sees” a therapist to explore the links between narcissism and authoritarianism — and get some advice for the next four years

    THE INK AND NASTARAN TAVAKOLI-FAR

    Anand Giridhadaras is a brilliant thinker and writer. He did all of us a service by seeing a therapist to get advice about how to survive the return of Trump, the Abuser-in-Chief. His blog is called “The Ink,” where this post appeared.

    We’ve gotten ourselves into an abusive relationship, and it’s one we can’t escape.

    The abuser in question is Donald Trump. And by abuse, we’re not talking about abuse of power, real as that may be. We’re talking about emotional abuse, doled out by a narcissist with an unstoppable need to rebuild the world in his image and to use the most powerful office in human history as a treatment center for his wounded ego.

    Whether Trump suffers from a real disorder — malignant or traumatic narcissism has been floated — is a matter of debate among psychiatrists and psychologists. Most professionals have refused to make a diagnosis without a clinical interview (the so-called “Goldwater rule”), though before the 2024 election 225 experts felt Trump presented clear enough signs that they published an open letterwarning of his threat to the nation since, in their estimation, if it quacked like a duck, it was a duck:

    Trump exhibits behavior that tracks with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM V) diagnostic criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder,” “antisocial personality disorder,” and “paranoid personality disorder,” all made worse by his intense sadism, which is a symptom of malignant narcissism. This psychological type was first identified by German psychologist Erich Fromm to explain the psychology of history’s most “evil” dictators.

    We’ve talked often in the newsletter about the way autocrats can build support even without offering anything to their supporters by way of real material improvements, playing on the same deep emotional needs exploited by abusers within relationships and families. 

    The real battleground of 2024 is emotion

    Earlier this year we also looked back to Erich Fromm’s work to understand how Trump’s cultlike appeal depended on a bond of mutual emotional dependence between abuser and abused and against a threatening world — a bond Fromm called “group narcissism.”

    “Even if one is the most miserable, the poorest, the least respected member of a group, there is compensation for one’s miserable condition in feeling ‘I am a part of the most wonderful group in the world. I, who in reality am a worm, become a giant through belonging to the group,”

    Donald Trump, Victim King

    The situation today is even more complex — and dire — than most expected early in the campaign, as Trump competes for power and attention with fellow narcissists: the oligarchs. And chief among them is the shadow president, Elon Musk, whose sense of his own omnipotence and importance is even stronger than Trump’s, and his vision of the future far more dystopian, and his disregard for humanity even more total.

    What Elon Musk really wants

    To better understand the situation facing Americans (and, to be honest, everyone around the world) our Nastaran Tavakoli-Far talked to therapist Daniel Shaw about how we can use the techniques that have helped people survive cults, abusive relationships, and toxic families to face and process and maybe even transcend the second Trump administration.

    As someone who’s done a lot of reporting on topics involving narcissists and cults, something that’s really striking to me is that the advice given to the people suffering is to get out, go “no contact,” or have as little contact as possible. If you need to speak to this problematic individual do it via a lawyer, you know that kind of thing of just staying as emotionless as possible and not getting involved.

    Now, what I always wonder is, because I think a lot of people when they look at Trump and MAGA, I mean a lot of people have said to me, “This is similar to what happened in my family.” A lot of these dynamics, if you’ve been exposed to narcissism, it’s actually very relatable to a lot of people.

    But this isn’t a situation where you can go “no contact” because these are the people in power. You’re in a situation where you actually have to engage with these people. You can’t just leave the cult and try and heal. So what is your advice in this sort of scenario?

    Stay sane, stay humane, and don’t isolate, would be the three phrases I would use.

    Going “no contact” is sometimes a very good idea, but not always. And it’s also an idea that’s been turned around by abusive narcissists who isolate victims from their own families. You know, it’s the same thing that happens in Jehovah’s Witnesses. If you criticize the community, you are disfellowshipped and nobody, not your children, your spouse, your parents, or anybody is allowed to ever talk to you.

    In terms of going “no contact” in a political situation, well, you don’t have that option. What are you going to do if, for example, the government benefits that you’ve paid into the system are suddenly turned off and there’s no more Social Security? Are you just going to say “Well, I’m not going to have anything to do with that bad president who just did that to me?” Or are you going to get involved in whatever way possible to fight against it?

    Going “no contact” in this situation could be enabling the perpetrator, enabling the autocrat and I think that’s important to understand. If we’re enabling the autocrat, we’re complicit in the autocrat’s abuse.

    So what can we do right now? If I wanted to ask for some practical advice?

    One of the things that I’ve taken to heart about the current situation is the advice of Timothy Snyder, the historian who has studied the rise and fall of democracies and autocracies in Eastern Europe. One of the things he says is to not submit in advance.

    Now, in the case of traumatizing narcissists, having managed a successful seduction they will begin to then create more dependence and they do that paradoxically through becoming more belligerent and belittling and more humiliating or shaming. What that does is create a state of constant intimidation at the same time increasing the sense of dependence the victim has on the narcissist.

    In the current situation, it’s clear that everyone who is an opponent of the Trump administration is meant to feel horrified, shocked, belittled, and intimidated. That is what I believe is important: not to submit to the intention to terrify, intimidate, and make people feel powerless and small. So not to submit to that means that I don’t allow myself to be paralyzed with fear. I don’t allow myself to be boiling with rage, and I don’t isolate myself. I remember and connect to what I love about being in the world, about being a person, what I love about other people, and to the people who love me. Staying connected, not isolating, and not allowing yourself to drown in fear or rage is not submitting in advance.

    So that’s my sense of what’s important right now.

    You mentioned staying sane and about keeping connections. This time around it seems a lot of people are either kind of checking out or not checking the news every day. A lot of people are saying “I just want to do something positive in my community or be there for my family.” and things like that. What do you think about that? Why aren’t people protesting?

    Right. I think everybody got exhausted, those who voted against Trump were exhausted by the amount of energy and effort spent hoping to elect Harris. I do limit my exposure so that I can keep my sanity for the time being. I don’t think that’s wrong and I encourage people who need to do that to do it.

    So staying sane and humane, having those connections, and speaking up, speaking to our political representatives and pushing them.

    People who care about these issues, who do not want to enable autocracy in this country or in general, exist at every level of society, and each of us has a certain amount of power. 

    I speak primarily to other psychotherapists but some of my ideas can be useful in thinking about the political, so I try to speak where possible within my community. Each of us has a community, and if we can be vocal within our communities at least we can hope to make an impact, even on one person.

    Groups will form that we may want to lend our support to, either financial support or volunteer support. I’m currently supporting Democracy Docket, for example, where Mark Elias has been conducting so many successful lawsuits against a lot of abuses of government. I am not a millionaire elite, so I make small donations on a regular basis. People can do that.

    People can volunteer, they can protest and demonstrate. All of these things are happening. They will happen, I believe, to a greater extent. 

    We may be under the threat of martial law in Trump’s world. We’re under the threat of having the National Guard tear-gas us if we take to the streets. He’s already demonstrated that he will do that and he’s saying he’ll do it again. But to whatever extent possible we need to speak, whatever our community might be, no matter how small. If you hold beliefs about injustice, it’s worth speaking out.

    So what, exactly, is a traumatizing narcissist?

    The traumatizing narcissist is a person who — for various reasons, based on their developmental history — has developed what starts out as a fantasy of omnipotence.

    Did you ever buy a lottery ticket? That’s a fantasy of omnipotence. We all have them. It was said by Freud that we start out as babies with a sense of omnipotence because everybody adores us. And that we have to grow up and lose that sense of omnipotence so that we don’t become narcissists.

    A traumatizing narcissist doesn’t lose that infantile omnipotence. They go through some kind of traumatic humiliation growing up, and that leads them to the fantasy that they can be the most powerful person in the world and nobody can hurt them or humiliate them or make them feel small or weak. As that fantasy becomes a delusion, they start to be absolutely convinced of their superiority, of their infinite entitlement, and of their greatness.

    Some traumatizing narcissists focus on an individual or a family. There they can exercise their delusion of omnipotence over a small group of people or over just one person. But their delusion can be so powerful that it invites others to join in. Often the delusion makes them charismatic and persuasive. They can become, in some cases, autocratic politicians. In other cases, they can become gurus, or they can become internet influencers. They have so much conviction in their own delusion of their own omnipotence that they persuade others to join.

    Could you briefly describe the kind of people who join in? Who get into these kinds of relationships?

    When people speak to me about having been in this kind of a relationship, they’re often full of shame and trying to understand what’s wrong with them. What I’ll say is, “Well, you were being vulnerable, which is very human.”

    There is nobody who volunteers to be groomed and the traumatizing narcissist grooms people. We don’t volunteer for that. Some people may be more vulnerable to grooming than others but I’ve seen some very together, high-functioning people who got groomed by traumatizing narcissists, it’s not about being weak or unstable as a person. Look at Bernie Madoff, who convinced some of the most wealthy, creative, high-functioning people in the world that they should give him all their money.

    I was very inspired when I left the cult I had been part of when I was younger by Erich Fromm’s book Escape from Freedom. He tried to understand what was happening in Germany which led people to believe that Hitler was a savior.

    I think in a similar vein, people believe that Donald Trump is a savior, and part of the problem is that they are only being exposed to the information that Donald Trump wants them to have, which is the propaganda that is funded by millions and millions and millions of dollars by fossil fuel oligarchs and digital oligarchs. There is extraordinary support for Trump as the CEO and them as the board of directors of the new world they think they’re creating. It’s frightening because it is like they read Orwell’s 1984 and decided the hero was Big Brother.

    I would call these people malignant narcissists rather than traumatizing narcissists because they’re not just narcissistic, they’re also sociopathic and they believe that there is no law that they should have to obey, that they make the laws.

    Sorry, when you say these people, do you mean Trump, or do you mean Trump and the tech bros and fossil fuel bros?

    The group of elites who support autocrats. The autocrat and the elites that support the autocrat are people who see themselves as a superior race of people, entitled to rule over everyone else. Their solution for poor people is to create a jail system.

    One of the major thinkers in the tech world has proposed that poor people be made into biofuel, that the prison system could become a factory for creating biofuel out of human beings. These things sound unbelievable. But they are being said publicly.

    Is this Curtis Yarvin you’re thinking of?

    Yes, that’s the person. He’s extremely influential over Vice President JD Vance, and Peter Thiel is a big disciple of his, as are quite a few other billionaires in the tech world. 

    So we have an elite oligarchy in support of an autocrat. But why do people view Donald Trump as a savior?

    There are a lot of reasons. But what Erich Fromm said is that people are afraid of freedom. They are uncertain of how to be free. And when they feel that there is a powerful leader, it’s like that becomes a magical person who they can feel safe and protected by. The allure of somebody promising absolute total protection, who seems very strong and very powerful and very certain, that is a very powerful allure.

    To be a free person means that you have to provide yourself with a sense of safety and you have to create safety in your community.



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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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  • Aaron Tang: The Supreme Court Threatens Public Schools Even More Than Trump

    Aaron Tang: The Supreme Court Threatens Public Schools Even More Than Trump


    Aaron Tang, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, explains how the U.S. Supreme Court is more dangerous to the future of public schools than Trump’s policies.

    He writes in Politico:

    The greatest threat to public education in America isn’t Donald Trump.

    Yes, he’s moving to dismantle the Department of Education, and yes, he’s trying to restrict what schools can teach about race. But the most dangerous attack on the horizon isn’t coming from the president, it’s coming from the Supreme Court.

    This is a particularly disheartening reality because the Supreme Court has often been one of public education’s greatest champions. As far back as 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the court described public schooling as “the very foundation of good citizenship” and the “most important function of state and local governments.” Just four years ago, in an 8-1 opinion involving a Snapchatting cheerleader, the court proudly declared that “Public schools are the nurseries of democracy.”

    Later this month, however, the court will hear oral argument in a pair of cases with the potential to radically destabilize public schools as we know them. And there is reason to be deeply worried about how the conservative majority will rule.

    The first case, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, poses the question of whether the 46 states with charter schools must offer public funds to schools that would teach religious doctrine as truth. The second case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, involves the claim that religious parents should have a right to opt their children out of controversial public school curricula.

    Takentogether, Drummond and Mahmoud threaten the twin cornerstones of the American education system that Brown affirmed six decades ago: Since Brown, America’s public schools have operated under a norm of inclusive enrollment, and they’ve offered all children a shared curriculum that reflects the values that communities believe are essential for civic participation and economic success.

    If the court tears down these foundational norms, the schools that remain in their wake will be a shell of the democracy-promoting institution the court itself has long lionized — and that healthy majorities of parents continue to support in their local neighborhoods. And although there’s a way to avoid the worst outcome in both cases, the path ahead is uncertain: It will require the court to follow history in an evenhanded manner (in Drummond) and progressives to accept a middle ground (in Mahmoud).

    The legal challenges presented in Drummond and Mahmoud did not arise out of thin air. They are part of a long-term conservative movement strategy aimed at eroding public education.

    A major component of this strategy has been a consistent call to fund school choice, a broad umbrella term that encompasses various programs such as school vouchers and educational savings accounts that channel taxpayer dollars away from traditional public schools and into private ones. Drummond’s call for a constitutional right to taxpayer-funded religious education can thus be thought of as a major front in Project 2025’s “core principle” of “significantly advanc[ing] education choice.”

    Conservatives have likewise sought to brand public schools as purveyors of “woke” ideology rather than facilitators of a shared set of community values. The claim at issue in Mahmoud — a parental right to opt out of curricular choices that some find religiously objectionable — is accordingly another salvo in the broader culture wars, and one in which conservatives are asking the court to grant them a legal trump card.

    Ultimately, to a significant cross-section of the Republican Party, public schools are now the “radical, anti-American” enemy. And viewed from that perspective, Drummond and Mahmoud may represent the greatest chance for delivering a knockout blow.

    Drummond and Inclusive Enrollment

    Technically, the Drummond case is just about Oklahoma. That’s because it arose out of Oklahoma’s refusal to fund a religious charter school named the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. (According to St. Isidore’s handbook, “the traditions and teachings of the Catholic Church and the virtue of Christian living permeate the school day.”)

    But make no mistake: It is blue states that have the most to lose in this case. For if St. Isidore has a right to public funding in Oklahoma, that same right would exist for religious charter schools in California and New York — places where, until now, taxpayer funds have never been used to teach religion as truth to K-12 students.

    It is hard to overstate how big a sea change this would be. Nonreligious charter schools currently receive more than $26 billion in public funds and educate some four million children. So a ruling in favor of religious charter schools could mean billions of dollars for religious education — a prospect that one Catholic school executive called “game-changing” for how it would enable religious schools to “grow [their] network.”

    But the implications are far more than monetary. They strike at the very vision of public schools as places where children come together from all walks of life to learn what the Supreme Court once called the “values on which our society rests.” Bankrolled by taxpayer dollars, Drummond would transform the American education system into a taxpayer-funded mechanism for transmitting each family’s preferred religious tenets.

    What is more, religious charter schools will likely argue that they have a further Free Exercise right to restrict enrollment only to adherents of their particular faith (indeed, a religious private school in Maine has already advanced this claim). At the end of that argument is a publicly funded K-12 education system that tribalizes the American people at a time when we need to be doing exactly the opposite: forging bonds of connection across our differences.

    Justice Thurgood Marshall once cautioned that “unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.” If the court rules for the religious charter schools in Drummond, we will come one giant — and regrettable — step closer to the world Marshall feared.

    Mahmoud and the Attack on Curriculum

    The Mahmoud case emerged out of a 2022 Montgomery County, Maryland, school board policy that introduced a new set of LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks into its pre-K through 12th-grade language arts curriculum. In general, the books aimed at instilling respect and civility for people from different backgrounds. In practice, though, the books led to controversy. One of the books, entitled Pride Puppy, was directed at pre-K students and invited students to search for images of a lip ring and a drag queen.

    Montgomery County initially permitted parents to opt their children out of reading these new books. But the district soon changed course, which is what led the Mahmoud family to sue. Their argument was that the Free Exercise Clause grants parents like them the “right to opt their children out of public school instruction that would substantially interfere with their religious development.”

    This is a truly difficult case, even for someone who, like me, holds an unyielding commitment to ensuring that all LGBTQ students feel safe at school. But one can hold that commitment while also acknowledging that the choice to force children as young as five years old to read books like Pride Puppy over their parents’ objection is not an obvious one. Indeed, Montgomery County has since removed Pride Puppy from its curriculum — a reasonable concession.

    The great danger in this case, though, is not about the parental right to opt 5- and 6-year-olds out of controversial curricula. It’s that a decision recognizing a parental opt-out right would be difficult to contain via a sensible limiting principle. Would parents of middle or high school children enjoy a similar right to opt their children out of any assignment or reading that espouses support for LGBTQ rights? How about a right to opt out of science classes that teach biology or evolution? And what of history classes that some religious parents may find too secular for their liking?

    In all of those contexts, lower federal courts had unanimously rejected the contention that simply because a parent finds something to be religiously objectionable, they can excuse their child from a shared curricular goal. Mahmoud could upend that settled consensus and replace it with a world in which public schools are forced to offer bespoke curricula to all different families based on their particular religious commitments.

    That’s a recipe for an education system that would certainly teach some values to our children. But this much is for sure: They would no longer be shared ones.

    How to Save Public Education at the Court

    The plaintiffs in both Drummond and Mahmoud may be optimistic that the 6-3 conservative supermajority will side with them. After all, religious litigants have fared remarkably well at the Supreme Court of late.

    But a surprising obstacle exists in the Drummond case — and Maryland officials, if they are smart, may yet have the final word in Mahmoud.

    In Drummond, the best argument against the claimed Free Exercise right to taxpayer-funded religious schools comes from the very place that the conservative Supreme Court has lately looked to move the law right on abortion and guns: history and tradition.

    As Ethan Hutt, a leading historian of education, and I show in a forthcoming paper, it turns out the denial of funding that St. Isidore complains of today is something that happened routinely during the founding era. Yet no one — no parent, no religious leader, not even a religious school that was denied funds on equal terms with its nonsectarian counterparts — ever filed a lawsuit (much less won one) arguing that the right to Free Exercise demanded otherwise.

    This is precisely the historic pattern that the Supreme Court relied on to reject the right to abortion in Dobbs: “When legislators began to [ban abortion in the 19th century], no one, as far as we are aware, argued that [they had] violated a fundamental right.”

    If the absence of legal contestation in the face of government action 200 years ago shows that the Constitution’s original meaning does not encompass a claimed right to abortion, it’s hard to see why that logic should differ when the claimed right involves religious school funding. Put simply, the court can be consistently originalist, or it can recognize the religious charter school funding right claimed in Drummond. But it can’t do both.

    The legal argument to protect public education is less clear in Mahmoud. But in that case, there is another way to steer clear of a Supreme Court ruling that would imperil evolution, biology, history and LGBTQ-inclusive lessons in the upper grades: Maryland officials can override the Montgomery County policy and extend an opt-out choice to parents of young children like the Mahmouds.

    There would be clear precedent for such an action by the state. After New York officials took a similar step to eliminate a policy dispute in a major gun case in 2020, the court dismissed that case as moot — putting off a dangerous ruling for at least the time being.

    Of course, doing so would require lawmakers in Maryland to accept parents of young children choosing to withdraw their children from reading controversial LGBTQ-inclusive books. But perhaps lawmakers can see a principled distinction between the desire to make schools a safe space for LGBTQ children — a nonnegotiable, core value — and the desire to use elementary school classrooms as a tool for changing hearts and minds on controversial topics more generally.

    In truth, progressives were probably never going to win that battle in kindergarten classrooms, especially with the present political climate. Progress on social attitudes concerning the transgender community was always more likely through the same mechanisms that produced rapid change for the gay and lesbian community — mainstream media, social media and the critical realization that our friends, family and other loved ones are members of these different communities and deserve equal respect.

    In the end, the Supreme Court may choose simply to ignore history and tradition in Drummond, where it is inconvenient for a movement conservative cause. And a policy change in Maryland could simply delay the inevitable, as new cases could always be brought advancing

    The bigger takeaway, then, is about the war against public education and its likely toll. Public schools were a major part of what made America great. So in seeking public education’s demise, the Drummond and Mahmoud cases could portend staggering consequences: less social tolerance, reduced international competitiveness and continued inequality along economic and racial lines.

    But the greatest cost may be for our democracy. After all, the Supreme Court reminded us just four short years ago that public schools are where our democracy is cultivated. That’s why the timing of these cases could not be any worse. In a moment when American democracy is being tested like never before, the court should be the last institution — not the leading one — to dismantle our public schools.



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  • A Teacher’s Guide to Visual Planning

    A Teacher’s Guide to Visual Planning


    Jeffrey D. Bradbury
    Latest posts by Jeffrey D. Bradbury (see all)

    Are your students struggling to understand complex historical timelines? Many history teachers face a common challenge – helping students grasp and visualize interconnected historical events, especially during pivotal periods like World War II. Traditional textbooks, with their dense paragraphs, often leave students overwhelmed and disconnected from the material.

    Here’s where Google Sheets comes to the rescue with its powerful timeline feature. This versatile tool transforms complex historical data into clear, interactive visual timelines that enhance student comprehension and engagement. Through hands-on experience with several history classes, I’ve seen how this simple yet effective tool helps students better understand historical relationships and concurrent events.

    In this comprehensive guide, I’ll walk you through creating dynamic, engaging timelines using Google Sheets. Whether you’re a history teacher mapping out World War II events, a curriculum planner organizing yearly objectives, or an educator helping students manage project deadlines, you’ll discover how to create interactive timelines that make learning more accessible and engaging.

    What You’ll Need

    • A Google account (your school account works perfectly)
    • Basic familiarity with Google Sheets
    • Events or milestones you want to visualize

    Let’s Create Your Timeline

    Step 1: Setting Up Your Data

    First things first – let’s organize our information in a way that Google Sheets can understand:

    • Open a fresh Google Sheet (I like to name mine right away to stay organized)
    • Create three columns: Date, Event Title, and Description
    • Pro Tip: I always freeze my header row to make scrolling easier later

    Step 2: Creating Your Timeline Chart

    Here’s where the magic happens:

    • Highlight your data range (including headers)
    • Click Insert > Timeline
    • Watch your data transform into a visual timeline!

    Step 3: Making It Look Professional

    Let’s make your timeline pop with some educator-friendly customizations:

    • Use different colors to categorize events (great for visual learners!)
    • Add detailed tooltips to provide additional context
    • Adjust the date format to match your needs (especially helpful for historical events)

    Classroom Application Ideas

    • Historical Event Mapping: Perfect for showing cause and effect relationships
    • Project Management: Help students track group project milestones
    • Curriculum Planning: Map out your units across the school year
    • Literary Timeline: Track events in a novel or play

    Troubleshooting Tips

    After helping dozens of teachers implement this in their classrooms, here are the most common issues I’ve encountered and their solutions:

    • Dates not showing correctly? Double-check your date format consistency
    • Timeline too crowded? Try creating separate timelines for different themes or periods
    • Need more visual impact? Experiment with different colors and font sizes in the Chart Editor

    What Can You Do with Google Sheet Timelines?

    Remember, the goal isn’t just to create a pretty timeline – it’s about making information more accessible and engaging for our students. I’d love to hear how you’re using timelines in your classroom! Reach out on social media to share your ideas.

    Happy teaching!

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