Riverside County teachers collaboratively learn with the Riverside County Office of Education math team around increasing student thinking.
Credit: Riverside County Office of Education
When I became president of the California State Board of Education in 1975 for the first of two stints in this role (1975–82), three different offices created state curriculum frameworks, instructional materials and assessments, without much coordination or integration. In the five decades since, I’ve seen the state make significant progress in aligning K–12 policies — including those that govern finance, English learners, career/technical education, teacher preparation, accountability, postsecondary preparation, and more — to form a system where the various parts do work together.
But alignment alone is not enough for successful student learning and measurable academic growth. For example, Common Core math adopted by the State Board of Education in 2013 failed at the essential last mile of implementation by not providing the capacity for teachers and principals to teach the new math framework. As I reflected on my eight-year presidency of the board ending in 2019, I concluded we ended up with some islands of deeply rooted and changed math teaching, but mostly deserts where math teaching never changed significantly.
In 2014, the board approved the English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework and in 2023 a new math framework. Now, state educators must focus on the next step. To successfully implement both academic frameworks, we will need effective, aligned, sustained professional development that can reach and strengthen the entire teacher workforce.
Scaling up means ensuring that every teacher in California has, on an ongoing basis:
Adequate time to prepare lessons
Opportunities to continually learn in math topic areas as well as best practices in teaching
Opportunities to collaborate with other teachers while on the job
Access to models of effective teaching
Access to coaching and expert support
Time for reflection, feedback and revision
This kind of professional development has been implemented on a large scale in Ontario, Canada; Singapore; South Korea; and Japan.
To better serve our students and realize the goals of our math and English language arts standards requires substantial shifts on the part of teachers and instructional leaders. The state must make a sustained investment to make this happen. The new 2023 math framework, for example, calls for students to explain and justify their reasoning, grasp concepts, and make connections between different solutions in a much deeper manner than was the case in the No Child Left Behind era. Teachers’ instruction will likely improve only if they have developed relatively sophisticated visions of high-quality mathematics teaching. Teachers need rapid feedback mechanisms and the ability to continually measure how well each student is learning.
These are no small tasks to reach 9,700 principals and 319, 000 teachers in California. The local district is the first entity one would typically look toward in coordinating efforts to build teachers’ capacity to implement standards-aligned instruction. But most districts in California are quite small. Larger districts lack the necessary staff development capacity in-house, especially since staff support must be thorough and sustained.
Each state needs to devise its own strategies for how to best build and sustain the infrastructure for a dramatic upgrade in local instructional capacity. California has set policies and oversees the preparation of new teachers primarily through the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC). The state needs to expand the scope of the CTC, Department of Education, and California Collaborative for Educational Excellence to include current teachers starting with early career teachers, and scaling up to more experienced teachers. We can also learn from successful approaches that have taken hold in other states.
The Newsom administration has invested in service scholarships and residencies to recruit and retain better-prepared teachers and, while these show considerable promise, they were funded with one-time money and have thus far not increased in scale to provide a large enough supply of new teachers. Districts and county offices also need support to train and coach in-service teachers. The state has recently directed funds to a county office and the state Mathematics Project to train coaches for districts so that they can establish ongoing embedded professional learning for their teachers. This, too, is a promising start, but unlikely to be sufficient to meet the enormous statewide demand for assistance.
Because human and organizational capacity building at the local level is expensive and difficult to carry out, technology and digital platforms must be designed to lower the costs. For example, students could be taught using individualized technology packages during a part of a school day, while teachers are released to attend a few hours of professional development that would otherwise necessitate the hiring of substitute teachers. Online video coaching for math teaching has already proved effective in districts such as Lost Hills in Kern County, which has shown double-digit gains in math proficiency levels for their students following such coaching,
Some critics call for more state control of what happens after teachers close the classroom door. But there is no obvious path or mechanism to exert enough state control in hundreds of thousands of classrooms for top-down implementation of the series of complex instructional shifts called for by the curriculum frameworks. Advocating for the state to take an expanded interest in ensuring and coordinating local teacher training is not equivalent to explicit state control over how a teacher goes about delivering that instruction. The latter would likely achieve minimal local buy-in and could undermine the flexibility teachers need to meet the needs of different students with distinctive strategies. Instead, schools and teachers must internalize the new standards as their own and not perceive them as an intrusion. History and current research clearly demonstrate that standards-based implementation is unlikely to be advanced by additional regulations, mandates and sanctions from the top down. Teacher support for complex instruction instead must be constructed from the bottom up. California can achieve new policies that drive classroom improvement by supporting internal and revamped external school accountability, encouraging collaborative teamwork and funding sustained, ongoing professional learning.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Ariane Tuomy, a social studies teacher at Palo Alto Unified’s Gunn High School, responds to school board members’ questions at a special board meeting on Jan. 23.
Credit: Palo Alto Unified / YouTube
In hour two of a meeting that stretched to nearly five, Josh Salcman, barely two months on the Palo Alto Unified School Board, said aloud what other school board members no doubt realize at some point in their first term: “I’m acutely aware that no matter how I vote, I’m going to deeply disappoint a large part of our community, including people whose friendship is important to me and whose opinions I hold in the highest regard.”
He was undoubtedly right. Whether to require ninth graders to take an ethnic studies course starting next fall was and likely will remain contentious this year, not only in Palo Alto but throughout California.
Palo Alto had become the latest skirmish in California’s ethnic studies war. Salcman, who founded two education-related tech startups, was in the middle, ultimately facing the awkward decision of choosing between the views of enthusiastic students and teachers and apprehensive parents.
Two decisions in 2021 all but guaranteed that. First, a battle-weary State Board of Education, after multiple rewrites, approved an ambiguously worded curriculum framework that challenged districts to determine what should be included in an ethnic studies course. Then, the Legislature mandated that schools offer an ethnic studies course in high school starting in 2025-26.
Or maybe not. This month, Gov. Gavin Newsom decided not to fund the implementation of ethnic studies in next year’s state budget without explaining why. This not only calls the mandate into question, at least for next year, but also gives an out to districts that are dreading arguing over the course.
But not Palo Alto. Last week, board President Shana Segal, a Palo Alto native and former high school teacher, called for a special board meeting to approve the course that Palo Alto high school teachers had developed. The district would offer it in the fall and mandate it for graduation, starting in 2028-29. Regardless of state funding, that would be one year ahead of the state mandate. She set the hearing for later in the week, Jan. 23.
To pause or not to pause?
For two years, at the board’s direction, a half-dozen veteran Palo Alto teachers persevered to create a first-year ethnic studies course. Last fall, they offered a pilot version to 20 students in each of the district’s two high schools in Palo Alto. The students’ survey results, all positive, were in.
At the center of the conflict is Liberated Ethnic Studies, a strain of ethnic studies that made the liberation of Palestine a prominent element of instruction. Critics characterize it as a left-wing ideology focused on the ongoing domination and oppression of white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism.
Ethnic studies faculty at California State University and University of California and activists created Liberated Ethnic Studies after the state board rejected the first draft of the curriculum that they had primarily authored in 2019. They have made spreading Liberated Ethnic Studies a lucrative side hustle and have contracted with at least several dozen districts to train teachers and guide instruction.
In a May 2024 FAQ it published, the Palo Alto parent group cited language tying Liberated Ethnic Studies to the proposed course.
Superintendent Don Austin has reiterated that Palo Alto’s course is not Liberated Ethnic Studies and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict won’t be part of a course on California racial and ethnic groups.
But in October, Linor Levav, an attorney and co-founder of the parent group, filed a Public Records Act request for curriculum materials that the district had largely ignored. Eventually, the district provided a PDF that contained links that couldn’t be opened.
The rejection has fueled suspicions. “And so the question is, why are they teaching materials that they’re not willing to even tell us about?” she told EdSource.
The parent group called for a “pause” from proceeding with a mandated course.
While running campaigns for their first term on the five-member board, Salcman, Rowena Chiu and Alison Kamhi supported a delay. Now, the new majority’s campaign position would be put to a test.
The audience in the boardroom was not particularly friendly to the three dissenters. The room seated about 80, with some standing room. By board rules, students get to speak first, and they filled most of the room. The adults lined up outside to address the board for one minute via Zoom or enter to do so individually. Forty-five were set aside for one-minute comments. Students, all supporting ethnic studies now, clapped enthusiastically at comments they liked.
During the hearing, the three board skeptics said they shared some of the public’s concerns about the course’s content. They questioned its timing and sharply criticized the district for not being forthright about what would be taught in the course.
“I believe we have to be very transparent about what we are teaching, provide an opportunity for meaningful feedback, and not push through classes that make people and communities, including communities of color, feel unsafe, targeted, or disrespected,” said Kamhi, who is the legal program director for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
Watch Palo Alto Unified board member Josh Salcman discuss his concerns regarding ethnic studies.
Two hours into the hearing, when he was still advocating a delay, Salcman explained his dilemma, mixing high praise for the teachers’ work with well articulated reservations about some of the content.
He congratulated the teachers who developed the pilot course and the initial students who took it. Their presentation “underscored what I’ve heard from many community members who have emphatically urged me to vote yes.”
“I find myself agreeing with most of what they say,” he said. “About how one-sided our current history classes are, about how little our students are currently learning about the experiences of historically underrepresented communities. How our students from those communities can feel so marginalized as they question why their family histories are nowhere to be found in our classrooms.”
And “how they wish we could have more challenging conversations about topics like power and privilege and structural inequity.”
Then he switched and laid out his concerns and those he had heard in the community:
“insufficient communication, which I share”
“ideologies that could increase a sense of division among students, which could lead to fixed mindsets or scapegoating”
“a lack of guardrails”
“widespread confusion about why, if there’s nothing to worry about, almost no details were shared about the course until yesterday.”
One thing he knows for certain, he said, is: “We do not have a shared understanding of what the phrase ‘ethnic studies course’ means.”
“Is an ethnic studies course primarily about the histories, cultures, and contributions” of the main ethnic and racial groups in California?” he asked, or “Is it primarily about concepts like ethnicity, identity, intersectionality, power, privilege, oppression and resistance? Is it a mix of both?”
Striking a balance
At least on paper and in student testimonies, Palo Alto’s course would appear to strike a balance. The teachers’ eight-page course description — the form that board members have used to approve all previous courses — states that the course “examines social systems, social movements, and civic participation and responsibility through a local lens. … By fostering empathy and belonging, the course prepares students to engage meaningfully in our communities.”
The four units in the course would be Identity; Power, Privilege and Systems of Oppression; Resilience and Resistance; and Action and Civic Engagement, in which students would create their own projects aligned to the course.
Each of the four units in the course would contain sample essential questions, learning objectives, and examples of assignments and assessments. Students would keep a journal of reflection throughout. Each unit calls for reading, analyzing and evaluating multiple and diverse sources.
Palo Alto High history teacher Ben Bolanos acknowledged that privilege and systems of oppression “are triggering for certain people” but said it “is important to look at the shadow side of the human experience in order to understand what needs to be changed and how to look at and change the world for a better place.”
The word “oppression” appeared more than 100 times in the state framework, observed Ander Lucia, a Teacher on Special Assignment.
Watch student testimonies regarding ethnic studies at Palo Alto Unified.
All the student evaluations of the course — 27 of the 40 who completed one — were positive. A half-dozen ninth graders elaborated at the hearing.
“I’ll admit I had some reservations going into this course,” said Gunn High student Quinn Boughton. “I wasn’t sure how much it would apply to me as a white student or whether the topics might make people feel divided or uncomfortable, but those fears turned out to be completely unfounded. This course didn’t just teach history; it built empathy.”
Gunn student Gabriel Lopez’s takeaway from the course was: “When one group of people takes power from another, I think it is the responsibility of school to teach us about the injustices people face. So, in the future and in our lives, we can strive for more equality.”
For his final project, Palo Alto High student Amaan Ali organized Palo Alto students to volunteer at tutoring programs for less well-off students in East Palo Alto. “These projects go beyond academic exercises. They empower us to turn knowledge into action,” he said.
Boughton examined homelessness in the Bay Area “in a new light” to dissect the problem and “discuss the causes and impacts of the unhoused with my peers.”
The presentation impressed board President Segal, a Palo Alto native who taught high school for more than a decade. “So teachers, I just, I want to say these words,” she said. “You did it right. I just want to make sure you know it. You did it right.”
Transparency questioned
Chiu and Kamhi repeatedly stressed that they strongly support ethnic studies.
“Ethnic studies is critical to me personally, but it is also something that I very much believe we need as a society,” said new board member Chiu, a consultant to the World Bank and an ethnic studies instructor who, she said, is scheduled to lecture on “Asian American Women and Difficult Conversations” at UC Berkeley.
But they remained unpersuaded, not because of what the teachers presented, but because of what the district had not provided. The district waited until two days before the meeting to send out an agenda with information, and it didn’t contain detailed information about the curriculum and the materials that teachers had used in the pilot.
“I also have very specific questions about the curriculum that was sent to us,” said Chiu. “I’m sorry to say, while I’m sure you have an excellent course and the students all say so, I did find your materials difficult to navigate around. I couldn’t open some of the links.”
As it turned out, Austin had included an outdated, detailed curriculum outline called a “scope and sequence” that included the broken links and sites requiring permission to open. Austin blamed the Public Records Act request that required providing outdated material. But Chiu found that explanation wanting. She had spent 48 hours poring over a document under the assumption it would be taught in the pilot. That, she said, “causes more confusion and more calls for lack of transparency.”
Neither Austen nor other district officials explained why the document did not include more information than the presentation.
“I will say it’s quite possible that your course is not going to incite any of these incidents that we’ve seen in other school districts,” Chiu said. “However, it’s connected to the issue of transparency. So if the community has not had, in their view, sufficiently transparent instructional materials, that fear is only going to grow.”
Kamhi put it differently. “What I feel really uncomfortable doing is saying every single student should take a course that we know is controversial, that based on the materials we’ve seen, some of which are problematic. Maybe they’re being taught in the classroom; maybe they’re not — without more information about what the course actually is.”
Dissenters’ dilemma
The three board members found themselves in a Catch-22. Pressed to say what in the course needed to be changed, they couldn’t provide answers without more information.
After hours debating unsuccessful amendments to Segal’s motion, and amendments to those amendments, the original motion was back on the table.
To the teachers, Segal and the fifth member, Shounap Dharap, the issue came down to trust. The founding teachers had held listening sessions for the public when the course was being developed, and had made changes in response.
“I want to reiterate my thanks, gratitude and trust in our teachers. These teachers are choosing to do extra work in addition to their daily teaching, lesson planning and grading. I know from firsthand experience the amount of time and dedication it takes to create curriculum,” Segal said.
“When we are sitting here hearing that there are concerns about the course and the way the course is being presented to students, I, we can’t help but take that personally, right?” said Jeff Patrick, social science instructional leader at Gunn, “because that, that is our job and that’s the job we thought we had the trust of the board to do, right? We think we’ve done our job, and we don’t know what a pause is going to do.”
Dharap, a personal injury attorney and law professor, encouraged board members to base their decision on what they heard from teachers and students, not the unsubstantiated fears of the public. “We really need to sit down and consider whether a decision that we’re going to make now is valuing adult inputs over student outcomes.”
The final vote
Salcman sought a solution in the minutes before the vote. He pointed to San Dieguito Union High School District as a model for involving the public. It posted each ethnic studies unit on a website as it was developed with a form inviting comments.
“I’m not saying now that we need to go back and do that. We are where we are” but is there a way to move the course forward and involve people in the process? he asked.
Dharap said the board already has liaisons with schools to convey concerns and frustrations and serve as a “conduit” for community feedback. He said the board can set course goals, measurements and expectations for public input.
“How do I know that I have a commitment from folks in this room to try to address the concerns that I raised?” were Salcman’s last words before the vote.
Segal and Dharap said yes quickly. Chiu and Kamhi hesitated before voting no.
The silence surrounding Salcman was unsettling. Twice during that time, Segal said, “There’s time; we can all take a breath. We have time.”
Three and a half minutes seemed like hours passed before Salcman said his next word, “Yes.”
Segal immediately announced the motion passed 3-to-2 and ended the meeting and the webcast.
One can only speculate what went through his mind during the long pause that followed — wondering perhaps which friend or close adviser he would please or disappoint or whether he made the right vote? Salcman didn’t respond to EdSource’s repeated invitations to share his thinking.
Under the misguided policies of Trump and Hegseth, censorship and book banning have been widespread, especially by the Defense Department. Hegseth is eager to please Trump and has stripped recognition from anyone of distinction who is female and/or non-white. Even a photograph of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, was taken down–because of its name. The Navajo Code Talkers were put into storage. The first women to achieve military feats and honors were mothballed. The U.S. Naval Academy removed almost 400 books from its library because of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) themes.
Ryan Holiday was invited to lecture at the Naval Academy a few weeks ago, as he had in the past. Shortly before he was to speak, he was asked not to mention the books that had been removed from the Academy’s library. When he refused, his speech was canceled.
Question: if the men and women of the U.S. Navy are brave enough to risk their lives, aren’t they brave enough to read a book about race and gender?
For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.
Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151(“Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing”).
When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with which my books on Stoicism are popular — was canceled. (The academy “made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service,” a Navy spokesperson told Times Opinion. “The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.”)
Had I been allowed to go ahead, this is the story I was going to tell the class:
In the fall of 1961, a young naval officer named James Stockdale, a graduate of the Naval Academy and future Medal of Honor recipient who went on to be a vice admiral, began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he recounted later, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.”
It might seem unusual that the Navy would send Stockdale, then a 36-year-old fighter pilot, to get a master’s degree in the social sciences, but he knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”
At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America’s greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high. The Soviets were pushing a vision of global Communism and the conflict in Vietnam was flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. “Marxism” was, like today, also a culture war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues.
Just a few short years after completing his studies, in September 1965, Stockdale was shot down over Thanh Hoa in North Vietnam, and as he parachuted into what he knew would be imprisonment and possibly death, his mind turned to the philosophy of Epictetus, which he had been introduced to by a professor at Stanford.
He would spend the next seven years in various states of solitary confinement and enduring brutal torture. His captors, sensing perhaps his knowledge as a pilot of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident,” a manufactured confrontation with North Vietnamese forces that led to greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sought desperately to break him. Stockdale drew on the Stoicism of Epictetus, but he also leveraged his knowledge of the practices and the mind-set of his oppressors.
“In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did,” Stockdale explained. “I was able to say to that interrogator, ‘That’s not what Lenin said; you’re a deviationist.’”
In his writings and speeches after his return from the prison known as the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale often referred to what he called “extortion environments,” which he used to describe his experience as a captive. He and his fellow P.O.W.s were asked to answer simple questions or perform seemingly innocuous tasks, like appear in videos, and if they declined, there would be consequences.
No one at the Naval Academy intimated any consequences for me, of course, but it felt extortionary all the same. I had to choose between my message or my continued welcome at an institution it has been one of the honors of my life to speak at.
As an author, I believe deeply in the power of books. As a bookstore owner in Texas, I have spoken up about book banning many timesalready. More important was the topic of my address: the virtue of wisdom.
As I explained repeatedly to my hosts, I had no interest in embarrassing anyone or discussing politics directly. I understand the immense pressures they are under, especially the military employees, and I did not want to cause them trouble. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.
Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, used a military metaphor to make this very argument. We ought to read, he said, “like a spy in the enemy’s camp.” This is what Stockdale was doing when he studied Marxism on the Navy’s dime. It is what Seneca was doing when he read and liberally quoted from Epicurus, the head of a rival philosophical school.
The current administration is by no means unique in its desire to suppress ideas it doesn’t like or thinks dangerous. As I intended to explain to the midshipmen, there was considerable political pressure in the 1950s over what books were carried in the libraries of federal installations. Asked if he would ban communist books from American embassies, Eisenhower resisted.
“Generally speaking,” he told a reporter from The New York Herald Tribuneat a news conference shortly after his inauguration, “my idea is that censorship and hiding solves nothing.” He explained that he wished more Americans had read Hitler and Stalin in the previous years, because it might have helped anticipate the oncoming threats. He concluded, “Let’s educate ourselves if we are going to run a free government.”
The men and women at the Naval Academy will go on to lead combat missions, to command aircraft carriers, to pilot nuclear-armed submarines and run enormous organizations. We will soon entrust them with incredible responsibilities and power. But we fear they’ll be hoodwinked or brainwashed by certain books?
Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was not one of the books removed from the Naval Academy library, and as heinous as that book is, it should be accessible to scholars and students of history. However, this makes the removal of Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” inexplicable. Whatever one thinks of D.E.I., we are not talking about the writings of external enemies here, but in many cases, art, serious scholarship and legitimate criticism of America’s past. One of the removed books is about Black soldiers in World War II, another is about how women killed in the Holocaust are portrayed, another is a reimagining of Kafka called “The Last White Man.” No one at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious overreach, let alone those tasked with defending our freedom. Yet here we are.
The decision by the academy’s leaders to not protest the original order — which I believe flies in the face of basic academic freedoms and common sense — has put them in the now even stickier position of trying to suppress criticism of that decision. “Compromises pile up when you’re in a pressure situation in the hands of a skilled extortionist,” Stockdale reminds us. I felt I could not, in good conscience, lecture these future leaders and warriors on the virtue of courage and doing the right thing, as I did in 2023 and 2024, and fold when asked not to mention such an egregious and fundamentally anti-wisdom course of action.
In many moments, many understandable moments, Stockdale had an opportunity to do the expedient thing as a P.O.W. He could have compromised. He could have obeyed. It would have saved him considerable pain, prevented the injuries that deprived him of full use of his leg for the rest of his life and perhaps even returned him home sooner to his family. He chose not to do that. He rejected the extortionary choice and stood on principle.
At Sonoma State University, lower enrollment is worsening financial cutbacks.
Credit: Ally Valiente / EdSource
When Kaitlin Anderson committed to play golf for Sonoma State University, she posed proudly in a Seawolves sweatshirt.But last week, school officials announced that they plan to end all NCAA sports next year, part of a bid to balance the school’s budget amid sliding enrollment and anticipated cuts to state funding. Anderson, a business marketing major from Peoria, Arizona, now is thinking that she might leave the campus.
“I will not be coming back here” if the golf program is eliminated, said Anderson, a first-year student. “I think this school will not do well after doing all this because half the reason we have so many people is because of athletics.”
Sonoma State, one of the 23 campuses in the California State University (CSU) system, is perhaps the most extreme example of how public universities in the state are tightening their belts in the wake of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s January budget proposal and troubling enrollment drops at some campuses. The governor’s plan calls for a nearly 8% reduction in state funding in 2025-26 for both CSU and the University of California (UC), while also deferring previously promised budget increases of 5% until 2027-28.
The governor’s proposal is not final, and later revisions could paint a rosier financial picture for higher education. But CSU leaders have warned that the plan, if implemented, couldresult in fewer course sections and larger class sizes, along with some cuts in student services.
Sonoma State has been taking in less money from tuition and fees as its student body has shrunk 39% over the past decade due to changes in local demographics and some continuing fallout from wildfires in the region. In addition to the sports closures, it is also planning to close six academic departments and eliminate two dozen majors in an effort to plug a nearly $24 million budget deficit.
Several other CSU campuses are warning about possible impacts of the governor’s proposal.Stanislaus State, which serves more than 9,000 students in the San Joaquin Valley, could face a $20 million deficit after accounting for the January budget proposal, a Jan. 22 email from the president’s office said. Sacramento State, with a student body of more than 30,000, anticipates making a $45 million one-time cut. CSU Channel Islands officials have outlined plans to permanently reduce the Ventura County campus’s budget by $17 million in recurring expenses in 2025-26, saying that expenses per-student exceed the state average by thousands of dollars.
Reduced state support could be missed most at schools like Sonoma State, one of 11 CSU campuses where enrollment has dropped over the last decade, reducing revenue from tuition and fees. Enrollment this fall was also a mixed bag, rising year-over-year at 15 CSU campuses and falling at eight.
At the Sonoma State campus in Rohnert Park, students responded to the news about the end to NCAA Division II intercollegiate sports and academic cuts with a mixture of anger and disbelief. A video published by the Press Democrat newspaper in nearby Santa Rosa shows an emotionally charged town hall meeting among student-athletes, coaches and university leaders. “So you think that we’re easily replaceable?” one attendee asked interim President Emily Cutrer. (“No, that’s not what I was saying,” she replied.) As tensions escalated, students erupted into bitter laughter and shouted interjections. “Do we get our money back for the semester?” one student asked, prompting applause.
A group called Save Seawolves Athletics has filed a federal civil rights complaint arguing that Sonoma State’s plan to end the school’s NCAA Division II athletics program will impact minority students disproportionately, spokesperson and assistant men’s soccer coach Benjamin Ziemer said. The group is also considering filing a lawsuit.
Signs of belt-tightening were also common this fall at San Francisco State, where enrollment is down 26% over the decade. Students and faculty members in December protested academic job cuts by staging a mock funeral march. Earlier in the fall, the university’s J. Paul Leonard Library announced that it expects to trim its budget 30% over the next two years, reducing its spending on resources like books and journals. The university offered 443 fewer course sections in fall 2024 than in fall 2023, a decline of nearly 11%, according to university data. President Lynn Mahoney said in a December message to the campus that the school is planning for “significant reductions in the 2025-26 budget” totaling about $25 million.
Leaders at California State University, Dominguez Hills — where enrollment has fallen a slighter 3% since 2015, but 20% from its peak in fall 2020 — have already whittled $19 million from the school’s base budget since the 2023-24 school year. If state funding is slashed in 2025-26, campus officials have outlined plans to shave another $12 million, and have contemplated reducing the number of course sections, among other things.
“I don’t want to cut out Psych 101, but if we have a thousand less students here, then maybe I don’t need 20 sections of Psych 101; maybe I only need 12,” President Thomas A. Parham said at a Nov. 7 budget town hall. “What we are trying to do is reduce the number of sections and, in some cases, fill those higher, so that instead of 15 students there might be 25 in them. But we are still trying to keep the academic integrity intact, even as we work smarter around the limited resources we have.”
Some faculty and students at Dominguez Hills are worried. Elenna Hernandez, a double major in sociology and Chicano studies entering the last semester of her senior year, said the tighter finances have been evident at La Casita, a Latino cultural center where she works on campus. She said La Casita, which receives campus funding, isn’t staying open as late as it has in the past and received less funding for its Day of the Dead celebration. The center is important to her because it runs workshops where students can learn about Latino history and culture.
“A lot of students don’t have access to this education,” she said, noting that more than 60% of the student body is Latino. “The classroom doesn’t teach it, necessarily, unless you’re in an ethnic studies class.”
Stanislaus State University President Britt Rios-Ellis said last week in an email to the campus that the university is considering several ways to balance its budget, including reducing the number of courses and looking to save money on utility costs.
Miranda Gonzalez, a fourth-year business administration major at Stanislaus State and president of the school’s Associated Students student government organization, said she initially was surprised that CSU would need to trim its budget at all in light of a decision to increase tuition 6% each year starting this past fall and ending in the 2028-29 school year. Full-time undergraduate students currently pay $6,084 for the academic year, plus an additional $420 per semester if they are from out of state.
“It was kind of a shock that the CSU was going to be cutting their budget when they just raised tuition as well,” she said, adding that lawmakers and campus leaders should remember that any reduction “ultimately impacts the lives of our students, faculty and staff.”
State funding is not the only source of revenue for the CSU and UC systems, which also get money from student tuition and fees, the federal government and other sources like housing, parking and philanthropies.
The revenue picture is not gloomy at every Cal State campus.
Cal State Fullerton, which has the largest student body in the system, saw enrollment grow 4% to roughly 43,000 students between 2023 and 2024. The steady growth provides the campus with a revenue cushionthat has potentially saved jobs, campus President Ronald S. Rochon said.
“We are at a record enrollment, and because of the enrollment, we continue to have the kind of revenue to keep our lights on, people employed and our campus moving forward,” Rochon said in a Nov. 7 presentation to the university’s Academic Senate. “This is something that we all should be taking very, very seriously. We should not rest on our laurels with regard to where we are with enrollment.”
The California Faculty Association, which represents CSU employees including tenure-track faculty, lecturers and librarians, argued last spring that the university system should tap its financial reserves to balance shortfalls. CSU officials, however, say that reserves leave them only enough money to cover 34 days of operations systemwide.
UC’s fiscal outlook is less dire. Enrollment is stable across its 10 campuses and is even increasing at several. Some campuses, like UC Berkeley, may not have to make cuts at all to department budgets. A Berkeley spokesperson cited increased revenues from investments and noted that Berkeley will benefit from a systemwide 10% tuition hike for out-of-state students that kicks in this year. Berkeley enrolls about 3,300 undergraduates from other states and another 3,200 international students.
Other campuses, however, likely would have to make cuts under Newsom’s proposed budget, including to core academic services. The system as a whole faces a potential $504 million budget hole,due to the possible drop in state funding paired with rising costs. “I think this budget challenge does require us to focus more on some campus budgets than we have perhaps traditionally,” Michael Cohen, who chairs the finance committee of UC’s board of regents, said at a meeting last week.
UC Riverside has already saved some money on salariesbecause of retirements and other employee turnover, said Gerry Bomotti, vice chancellor for budget and planning at the campus. Still, the campus could face a deficit next year because ofincreasing compensation costs on top of possible cuts in state funding. Bomotti said the campus will try to minimize anyharm to academic units if reductions are needed.
“Our priority obviously is serving students and supporting our faculty and our enrollment. We tend to always give that priority,” he said.
California’s 116 community colleges, which enrolled more than 1.4 million students as of fall 2023, could face a more favorable 2025-26 budget year than the state’s two university systems. The colleges would get about $230 million in new general funding through Proposition 98, the formula used to allocate money from California’s general fund to K-12 schools and community colleges.
By some measures, the past decade has seen more state and local dollars flowing into California’s public colleges and universities. State and local spending on higher education in California has been at a historic high in recent years on a per-student basis, hitting $14,622 per full-time equivalent student in 2023, up from $10,026 in 2014, according to an analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, which takes into account funding for both two-year and four-year institutions. Looking at four-year schools alone, the association calculated that California spent $3,500 more per student than the U.S. average in 2023. Living costs and salaries, however, are often higher in California than in many other states.
Marc Duran, a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps, contributed to this story.
This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Kaitlin Anderson’s last name and to clarify her plans if the golf program is eliminated.
People protest against a funding freeze of federal grants and loans following a push from President Donald Trump to pause federal funding near to the White House in Washington on Jan. 28, 2025.
State leaders spent much of Tuesday trying to determine the potential impact of a White House freeze on federal grants and loans that could potentially affect millions of California students and their families.
A White House memo released Monday from the Office of Management and Budget called for the freeze to begin Tuesday at 2 p.m. PST. But, just minutes before 2 p.m., U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan in Washington, D.C., blocked the order until next Monday at 2 p.m. PST to give courts more time to consider its impact, according to Politico.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Tuesday that the freeze could cut $3 trillion in federal funding from programs that help the homeless, veterans, seniors, disaster victims and school children nationwide.
The order has thrown state programs into chaos and created uncertainty around their administration, said a media release from Bonta’s office.
“I will not stand by while the president attempts to disrupt vital programs that feed our kids, provide medical care to our families, and support housing and education in our communities,” Bonta said in a statement. “Instead of learning from the defeats of his first administration, President Trump is once again plowing ahead with a damaging — and most importantly, unlawful —agenda.”
Bonta joined 22 other state attorneys general to file a lawsuit calling for a temporary halt to implementation of the memo. The White House directive called for advancing the Trump administration’s policies and called “the use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies a waste of taxpayer dollars.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office called the White House memo a violation of federal law. “We are confident funding will be restored,” officials there said in an email to EdSource.
California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said the White House action is misguided. “(It) serves nothing more than to hurt the most vulnerable students and people in our nation,” he said.
Early Tuesday, state education leaders expressed concern that student loans, special education, Head Start, and Title 1 programs could be impacted by the freeze.
But by late Tuesday afternoon, conflicting information from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Department of Education made it unclear which programs would be affected, according to a letter from the California Department of Education to county and district superintendents scheduled to be sent Tuesday night.
According to the letter, the U.S. Department of Education assured state departments of education that Title 1 programs for low-income schools, special education and other formula grants will not be frozen. But, officials at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said these programs will be subject to the same scrutiny as others regarding compliance with the Trump administration’s executive orders.
“We hope to gain more clarity on affected programs before Feb. 3 and plan to communicate this information to the field as soon as possible in case the OMB directive becomes effective,” said the California Department of Education guidance signed by David Schapira, chief deputy superintendent.
Officials in the U.S. Department of Education said only discretionary grants would be affected and not formula grants, according to Troy Flint, spokesperson for the California School Boards Association.
A list of discretionary grants on the U.S. Department of Education website includes grants for educator development, charter school programs, early learning programs, school and community improvement programs, as well as grants for arts and literacy education.
California School Boards Association officials will be watching to see how the issue is resolved in the courts, Flint said. “This is a fluid and fast-moving topic, and we don’t think we have heard the end of it.”
University leaders are also waiting to see what the freeze could mean for them. University of California staff and lawyers are “working diligently to clarify the potential impacts” on the university, said President Michael Drake in a statement.
He noted that the White House has said federal student loans and Pell Grants would not be impacted.
“We are in contact with key policymakers in Congress and at federal agencies, as well as association partners and other higher education institutions. We are evaluating what actions we are able to take and will keep you informed,” Drake added in a message to the UC community.
EdSource reporters Emma Gallegos, Michael Burke, Mallika Seshadri, Betty Márquez Rosales, Amy DiPierro, Vani Sanganeria contributed to this story.
If your memory is good, you may recall Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top, which had $5 billion of unrestricted funds with which to spur education reform. Duncan had a contest in which states competed for a piece of that big pie. To be eligible to compete, states had to pass a law authorizing charter schools, and almost every state did. They had to agree to adopt national standards, which meant the unfinished, untried Common Core State Standards, as well as the tests based on the standards. They had to agree to evaluate individual teachers based on the rise or fall of the test scores of their students.
Eighteen states “won.”
The biggest winner was Tennessee, which won $500 million. Tennessee’s biggest new program was the creation of its so-called Achievement School District. The ASD would gather the lowest performing schools in the state into a non-contiguous district and turn them into charter schoools.
The ASD hired Chris Barbic, leader of Houston’s YES Prep charter chain, to run the ASD. Barbic pledged that he would raise the state’s lowest-performing schools into top-performing schools in five years.
He failed. The state’s lowest performing schools continued to have low scores. In 2015, he resigned, saying he needed to focus on his health and family.
The ASD limped along for another decade, without success. Nonetheless, some other states–including Nevada and North Carolina–copied the model, creating their own all-charter districts. They also failed.
The ASD removed low-performing schools from local control and placed them under a state-run district, with the goal to push Tennessee’s bottom 5% of schools to the top 25%. Many of the schools were turned over to charter operators to run under 10-year contracts.
Research showed the ASD led to high teacher turnover, and did not generate long-term improvements for students. The district also faced community backlash for taking over schools in districts that served mostly low-income communities and predominantly Black student populations. The ASD cost taxpayers over $1 billion. Only three schools remain in the ASD.
Every other part of Race to the Top failed. Evaluating teachers by test scores was a disaster: it rewarded teachers in affluent districts and schools while penalizing those who taught the neediest students. Charter schools did not have higher scores than public schools unless they chose their students carefully, excluding the neediest. The Common Core standards, with which tests, textbooks and teacher education were aligned, had no impact on test scores. The U.S. Department of Education evaluated Race to the Top and declared it a failure., in a report quietly released on the last day of the Obama administration.
On to vouchers! Since voucher students don’t take state tests, no one will know that this is a boondoggle that benefits those already in private and religious schools.
The search for miracles and panaceas goes on.
Trump’s answer. Parents know best.
Next time you get surgery, make sure the surgeon is not licensed. Next time you take a flight, be sure to fly with an unlicensed pilot.
Like most of the nation, California students were stuck in low gear again in 2024. On the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), they performed significantly below their pre-pandemic scores in math and reading.
The gaps between the lowest-performing students, between low-income and well-off students, and among some racial and ethnic groups continued to widen overall, an ominous sign that many students are unprepared for high school and beyond.
“Our nation is facing complex challenges in reading,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, noting that nationwide, the percentage of eighth graders reading Below Basic, the lowest achievers, was 33% and the highest in the assessment’s history. The 40% of fourth graders scoring Below Basic was the highest in 20 years.
On the fourth grade reading assessment for NAEP, scores in five states, in light blue, declined compared with 2022, no states’ scores improved, and 47 states, including California, saw no statistically significant change.Credit: National Assessment of Educational Progress
Also known as The Nation’s Report Card, NAEP is the only assessment that a representative number of students in fourth, eighth, and 12th grades in every state and Washington, D.C., take every two years—and thus, the most reliable measure of performance among states. The results for fourth and eighth graders were released today.
On NAEP’s 500-point scale, where one or 2-point gains are common, and movement of 3 or more points are notable, California’s scores have consistently trailed the nation in both reading and math, although the gap in reading has narrowed. That had been especially so for eighth graders, whose score equaled the nation’s in 2022.
But that result was the exception in a year in which scores fell sharply nationally and to a lesser extent in California in the aftermath of the pandemic and slow recovery. Nationally, math scores in 2022 dropped 8 points in eighth grade and 5 points in fourth, the largest drop in NAEP’s 25-year history.
The latest scores show mostly no progress. Scores in fourth and eighth grade reading fell again, leaving California 9 points and the nation 8 points below 2017. Math was mixed — up in fourth grade, but not enough to catch 2019, with eighth grade taking another dip.
The average scores, however, mask widening disparities between the highest and lowest-performing students. On fourth grade reading, student scores at the 90th achievement percentile fell 1 point between 2019 and 2024, and scores at the 75th percentile fell 3 points. However, scores for students in the 10th percentile fell 10 points, and for students in the 25th percentile, they fell 8 points.
The pattern looks about the same throughout the nation, with a serious long-term impact, said Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who also was provided an early peek at the scores. “The top scorers are coming back, and the bottom is doing worse, which will affect income distribution over a lifetime,” he said.
On fourth grade reading, California scored higher than three states (West Virginia, New Mexico, and Alaska), statistically about the same as 35 other states and behind 13 states. Only two states, Louisiana in reading and Alabama in math, scored above pre-pandemic levels of 2019.
NAEP scores fall within four bands of achievement: Advanced, Proficient, Basic and Below Basic. The differences by race and ethnicity remained stark on all the tests. For example, on the fourth grade reading test, 7% of Black students and 19% of Latino students scored Proficient and Advanced, while 50% of Asian and 44% of white students scored that high.
For all students, only 31% of California’s fourth graders scored Proficient or Advanced, compared with 32% nationally.
NAEP defines students performing at the Basic level as having partially mastered knowledge and skills required to perform at a Proficient level. Proficient students have demonstrated a grasp of challenging material and can apply the knowledge to real-world situations and analytical skills. Advanced students showed superior performance.
Scoring Below Basic doesn’t mean students in fourth grade can’t read. “We’re saying that they’re unlikely to be able to determine the meaning of a familiar word using context from the text. That’s a critical skill that students will really need for entering middle school,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent body that Congress created to set policy for NAEP.
Once education experts and advocates have had a chance to review the results and findings of surveys that the National Center for Educational Statistics conducted of students and teachers, there will be theories for the low scores and calls for efforts to address them.
In The 74 earlier this week, columnist Chad Aldeman evaluated a half-dozen explanations for declining scores nationwide. They include less reading and more TikTok; the abandonment of federal accountability for school performance, starting in the latter years of the Obama administration; the adoption of Common Core state standards a decade ago; and soaring student absenteeism rates post-Covid. While they have come down, the rates remain disproportionately high for the lowest-performing students, contributing to widening gaps in achievement.
Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research and one of a few education experts who got an early look at the NAEP results, would add another cause to the mix: emerging evidence of grade inflation, connected to the pandemic, and perceptions parents have of their own children’s learning.
“So the most immediate information that parents get is not state or NAEP tests. It’s (high) grades that are not showing parents where their kids stand in real time, to allow them to provide feedback to their kids and encourage them.”
Goldhaber said there is evidence that teacher quality is largely what moves students; he’d focus on the inequitable distribution of schools with less qualified and credentialed teachers.
Not comparable to Smarter Balanced
Students also take annual state tests in math and English language arts, but NAEP officials warn not to make comparisons since each state’s measurements and standards are different. California aligns its tests to the Common Core standards, while NAEP’s tests are based on what experts say students in each grade should know. It’s harder to score Proficient or above on NAEP than on most state tests. In 2024, 44% of all California fourth graders students scored at or above Proficient on the Smarter Balanced test.
About 11,000 students in California took NAEP, and only portions of it. That’s too few for individual students, schools, and districts to receive scores, with one exception. Annually, a representative number of students in 25 large districts, including Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified, take the Trial Urban District Assessment or TUDA. They provided one of the few bright spots in 2024.
Los Angeles was one of three districts whose fourth grade math scores didn’t drop during the pandemic; it rose slightly from 2019 to 2024, and San Diego’s fell less than 2 points, a statistically insignificant amount. In eighth grade, Los Angeles dropped less than a point, and San Diego’s 8-point drop was lower than the national average for the districts. Los Angeles’ reading scores in fourth and eighth grade didn’t decline at all post-pandemic; San Diego’s increased a statistically insignificant amount in fourth grade, and its decline of 3 points was about the average for the TUDA districts.
California’s low percentage of students scoring Proficient or better on fourth grade reading and math (34% Proficient in fourth grade, 29% in eighth grade) will likely lead to calls for funding for teacher training on the new standards and evidence-based practices in kindergarten through second grade.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed allocating $500 million in the 2025-26 budget for teacher training and to encourage districts to use discretionary funding on summer programs and tutoring to make up for lost Covid learning. Some states whose scores exceeded California’s on fourth-grade reading, including Mississippi, Connecticut and Colorado, adopted comprehensive reading plans grounded in the science of reading.
Fabian Debora uses art as a tool for gang prevention at Homeboy Art Academy in LA.
Credit: Courtesy of Fabian Debora
As a restless eighth grader at Dolores Mission Catholic School in Los Angeles, Fabian Debora often drew pictures at his desk. One day the teacher confiscated his artwork and ripped it up in front of the whole class. Debora, who cherishes his drawing, felt betrayed. He lost his temper, threw a desk at the teacher and got expelled.
The incident led to an epiphany. Debora was summoned before Father Greg Boyle, the beloved parish priest who runs Homeboy Industries, a renowned gang intervention program in East Los Angeles. Instead of chastising him, Boyle asked Debora to draw him something and later persuaded his probation officer to let him work as an apprentice to Wayne Healy, a pioneer in the city’s Chicano mural movement. Art became his lifeline.
“I realized that I’m an artist,” said the soft spoken Debora, 49. “I discovered it young enough to know that this is something that belonged to me, and no one’s gonna take that from me. And I held onto it.”
That drive led him to co-found Homeboy Art Academy, a group that uses arts education to empower formerly gang-involved and incarcerated youth.
“Man, as a formerly incarcerated, gang-involved individual, there aren’t many spaces for me,” he said. “I don’t have the means to go join an art school of some sort. So I’ll have to create a space where these kids can come and all services are free.”
A mural titled “The Power of the Woman,” by Fabian Debora.Credit: Courtesy of Fabian Debora
Part sanctuary, part vocational training center and part studio, the academy resists the notion that art is a precious and rarified pursuit for the elite. Here art is raw and real. You learn to paint your truth, to be unblinking about what you see, but also to feel the freedom of a blank canvas.
“They are the absolute best, completely authentic, devoted to helping people,” said Diane Luby Lane, founder of the poetry education group, Get Lit. “Fabian teaches people to be artists. He respects and utilizes real life experiences and perspectives.”
The recipient of the prestigious National Endowment of the Arts Heritage Fellowship, Debora believes art has the power to change lives. In addition to working as an artist, he is also a teacher and mentor to others seeking to find purpose through art.
“Let’s flip arts education on its head,” said Debora, as he walked around his studio at the art academy. “Let’s take the language and the vocabulary of the arts and tailor it to the lived experiences of this population while introducing relevant information such as in hip hop and street art.”
Born in El Paso, Texas, Debora first discovered art as a little boy weathering a tumultuous childhood in Boyle Heights, which he describes as “one of the roughest projects east of the Mississippi.” The tension bled into his family life, he said. He remembers hiding when his parents fought.
“I used to blame myself,” he recalled wistfully. “I would go and hide under a coffee table, and I would start to sketch, and I would just create my own world to escape my reality. That’s when I found art to be more than just a gift. It was almost like a big brother who held me.”
Violence was embedded in the ecosystem he grew up in, with eight gangs jostling for supremacy and few safe spaces from crime and addiction. By 12, he joined a gang, began to deal drugs and got addicted to them. He wrestled with substance abuse for years before trying to commit suicide at 30, by running across the freeway. That’s when he found his spiritual center and his salvation, his cause.
Now he tries to bring the succor of art to young people who feel hopeless to shape their own destiny.
Artist Fabian Debora teaches the art of painting, graffiti and street murals to students at LA’s Homeboy Academy.Credit: Courtesy of Homeboy Academy
“Art is a vehicle for healing, art is motivating,” says Debora. “It gives you a sense of breathing room, you’re escaping from your realities, as you’re creating. You feel inspired when you realize what beautiful work of art has come out of this. It opens up senses in the brain that haven’t been tapped into.”
While Debora specializes in visual art, the academy also offers classes in everything from creative writing and photography, to coding and poetry. He takes on those who believe they have nothing to lose. That’s who he used to be.
“I want the kids who are hanging out in the basketball court smoking weed all day, kids who are overlooked,” he says, lingering in front of the academy’s altar to indigenous gods. “If you’re gang related and struggling with a drug problem, if you’ve been incarcerated, that’s what qualifies you for this program.”
The impact of Debora’s work resonates throughout the Los Angeles arts community. It’s been a formidable example of how creativity can transform the arc of a person’s life.
“It’s astounding what they do at Homeboy,” says Austin Beutner, former LAUSD Superintendent and author of the arts education mandate, Prop. 28. “It’s hard work but they save lives, one by one. It shows you the power of art. You can be 8 or 28 and the arts can change your life.”
As a young man in ‘80s Los Angeles, Debora responded to the siren song of hip-hop music and graffiti art, the vibrancy of youth culture. The murals became portals to often forgotten Chicano history and culture.
A portrait of the Madonna by Fabian Debora. credit: Fabian Debora
The ancient meets the now in this audacious body of work, from graffiti to fine art. Debora delights in juxtaposing the eye of the masters with a modern urban vibe. Some of his most well-known paintings are fashioned after the manner of Italian master Caravaggio but rooted in the grit of Boyle Heights, such as a portrait of a girl from the barrio striking the pose of the Madonna. He’s now working on a project that deconstructs the Sistine Chapel.
“We are reclaiming the universal language of art,” he said.
Troubled souls often find solace in the universality of dark feelings, the way a painting from the Renaissance can capture how we feel today. That is the power of art as activism.
“Carravagio was also an outcast,” he said. “He was a thug, a killer, a murderer yet he found his spirituality through art.”
Debora uses art like a scalpel to cut away the layers of posturing and pretense that many of his students protect themselves with. He uses art to get at the truths they try to hide, even from themselves.
“The work of Homeboy Art Academy is transformational in providing youth a pathway, learning how to take ownership of their own stories, which are often negated by others who deem themselves more powerful,” says Merryl Goldberg, a veteran music and arts professor at Cal State San Marcos. “Lifting up voices at risk of being suppressed could not be more fundamental to a just and compassionate society.”
Art opens a window to another life, Deborah says. In addition to his work at the academy, he also teaches drawing to inmates at Tehachapi state prison. He cherishes his work with “the lifers,” because they need the solace of art the most.
“People need to be seen, they need to be heard,” he said. “It’s a sense of hope. When we come in, we paint windows on those ceiling walls so they can escape for the time being.”
Louise Simpson, superintendent of Mark Twain Union Elementary School District in Angles Camp, near Yosemite, is frustrated by state rules restricting how small rural districts like hers can spend expanded learning funding.
That was such a well-intentioned and important program for so many districts. It’s known by the acronym ELOP, and it was designed to make additional learning and enrichment opportunities in the school day. But it brought some really burdensome requirements with it, including a 9-hour day and 30 extra days of school.
And while that sounds really great, what’s happened for our small rural districts, is the reality of creating a program just isn’t feasible. And I’ll tell you why:
First, my kids are on the bus for more than an hour each way. They already have a big long day, and adding academics after school for enrichment is not super feasible for two reasons: One is we have a very difficult time finding qualified staff to run it. And the second one is, with the bus-driver shortage, we just don’t have the transportation.
So, many kids that would benefit from this program really don’t have the opportunity, and they are being left behind.
Our budget situation is so, so dire with steep declining enrollment, and we need to use the money that we’re already allocated for super-effective programs.
I came out of retirement this year because this little system was struggling, and only one in 10 kids are proficient in math and only one in four can read — and that’s unconscionable.
And I can fix it, but I need some help using the money that’s already been given to me to use during the day. We have a really cool program that we built with the Sierra K-16 Collaborative Partnership involving peer tutors. It allowed me to get $320,000 to fund an intervention teacher and pay 20 high school kids to come in and tutor my kids. And it’s working, but those funds expire in a year.
I need that ELOP money to be made flexible so that I can teach our kids the core foundational skills they need to be successful. That includes being able to use it during the school day. So many folks can’t find a way to make this funding effective that they’re actually giving it back, and that’s not okay.
We need to come to some agreements where it can be working for everyone. Let me take and share with you what unrestricting these funds could really do for kids.
This is our peer tutoring program. It’s funded in conjunction with Sierra K16.
(short video of tutors working with students)
I hope you’ll join me in reaching out to all of our legislators and asking them to provide small rural districts flexibility in how we use those funds.
Randi Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers. She is my friend.
Randi wrote:
President Donald Trump has declared war on America’s colleges and universities, demanding they bow to his demands on what they can teach and whom they can admit or hire. Trump’s illegal and autocratic actions are tantamount to a war on knowledge intended to force schools to bend the knee to his ideology and chill free speech and academic pursuit.
Weingarten announcing a lawsuit to stop the federal funding cuts at Columbia University. CREDIT: AFT
Trump says much of his attack on higher education is in response to antisemitism on campuses. Without a doubt, there was antisemitism before the heinous actions by Hamas on Oct. 7 and the ensuing war, and it has grown since. We need to address antisemitism on campus and ensure Jewish students, and all students, feel safe. But Trump is weaponizing antisemitism investigations to attack disfavored speech and stoke culture wars, distrust and division, and to undermine higher education as a bulwark of democracy and an engine of our economy. It’s wrong, antidemocratic and unconstitutional. The administration is using Jews as an excuse to disappear students who are here legally, with immigration officials arresting and attempting to deport students who have committed no crimes—without due process, a linchpin of American democracy.
This may help Trump’s aim to divide Americans, but it won’t make campuses safer for Jewish students or answer the real issues around antisemitism. That’s one reason that a coalition of Jewish organizations released a statement saying that Trump’s actions make Jewish students and the Jewish community less safe.
Trump has launched investigations into dozens of colleges and universities and stripped billions in research grants from schools. The administration has issued demands ranging from direct government oversight of academic programs—or in the case of Columbia University, oversight of the whole institution—to dictating disciplinary policies and controlling hiring decisions. It is targeting students for exercising their First Amendment rights, and revoking visas for faculty and staff. The administration’s intent is to remake America’s higher education system in its image through blunt force.
The freedom to pursue knowledge, the freedom of expression and the freedom of speech are fundamental American rights that are foundational to a functioning democracy. America’s public schools, colleges and universities cultivate the exploration of knowledge and free expression and empower students to become engaged citizens. One of their hallmarks is that they are a marketplace of ideas where free and open discussion and disagreement is encouraged. That is enabled by ensuring our education institutions are independent from government control or coercion. When a government asserts control over what can be taught, thought or said, democracy itself is at risk.
The free pursuit of knowledge empowers Americans.
Stripping research and innovation funding to force compliance will hurt America’s competitiveness and help our adversaries outpace us in technological and other advancements. America’s university research and innovation centers have long been the envy of the world. The federal government, through federal agencies and grants, is a fundamental powerhouse and supporter of health, scientific, technology and other research. The U.S. is the world leader in this research—research that the private sector cannot and will not do on its own and that leads to discoveries, innovations, cures and advances that benefit the common good and move our society forward. Colleges and universities are also anchors of their local communities, supporting local jobs and small businesses, providing community gathering spaces, and growing industries tied to university research and innovation.
This war on knowledge and expression must be opposed in the courts, on the streets, and by our colleges and universities.
As the largest union of higher education staff and faculty, the AFT joined our affiliate, the American Association of University Professors, to sue the Trump administration on behalf of our members for unlawfully cutting millions in federal funding for public health research at Columbia.
Last week, Harvard University boldly rejected Trump’s unlawful and unprecedented demands for government control over it. Harvard’s president wrote that “no government … should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
Americans have also taken to the streets to oppose this war on knowledge and freedoms. The attacks on higher education were a major focus of the April 5 Hands Off actions that mobilized tens of thousands of Americans across the country to reject Trump’s chaotic and cruel agenda.
The free pursuit and availability of knowledge empowers Americans, strengthens our economy and democracy, and is foundational for opportunity. That’s why we all must take a stand against this war on knowledge.
