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For former foster care students, college help exists long after exiting the system

Deborah Vanessa Lopez, left, is a program manager that works with students formerly in the foster system at Rio Hondo College. She has worked with Faylen Bush, right, who is set to transfer out of Rio Hondo College this year.

Credit: Faylen Bush and Deborah Vanessa Lopez

When Faylen Bush returned to college in 2023 after being laid off from work, he planned to pursue construction management to build on the skill set he had acquired over several years in that field as a concrete carpenter and protect himself from future layoffs.

He was married and had three young children, and he had little time to spare as he pursued a more stable future for his family. He knew that to succeed in college, he needed to remain more focused on his career goals than he was when he had been in college about a decade earlier, when he was first entering adulthood after leaving the foster system amid a cycle of housing instability and juvenile detention.

Faylen Bush

And so, when a program at his school, Rio Hondo College in Los Angeles County, reached out to Bush with resources for students with experience in the foster system, he paid little attention. He was unsure that the resources would apply to him at all because he was in his early thirties.

But the program, Guardian Scholars, was persistent. They tried to reach him multiple times until he finally decided to go to their office and learn more. He learned that Guardian Scholars is a chapter-based organization across California’s college campuses that supports students who have foster care experience. It is an organization that, since its inception in 1998 at Cal State Fullerton, has sought to increase college enrollment, retention, and graduation rates among former foster youth as a pathway toward overall stability in their lives.

“I can honestly say that stepping into the office, sitting with Deborah, and having that conversation opened up a whole world of opportunities for me,” said Bush of his first meeting with Guardian Scholars staff.

“Deborah” is Deborah Lopez, a Guardian Scholars program manager. She and her team connect students with access to counselors who are trained to support former foster youth, grants to purchase textbooks, meal vouchers, on-campus jobs, access to conferences to further students’ professional networks, and more.

“Our students experience a tremendous amount of trauma even if it was one day or 15 years of their life” in foster care, Lopez said. This thinking serves as the foundation for their program: They extend support to every single Rio Hondo College student with experience in the foster system, no matter when or how long their experience was.

Bush said he is aware of the statistics he is up against given his upbringing. According to a national 2020 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, far fewer students with experience in foster care have a bachelor’s degree — nearly 5% for men and about 9% for women, than students without foster experience, about 31% for men and close to 36% for women.

Deborah Lopez

These rates persist despite several studies showing that the majority of current and former foster youth report an interest in attending and graduating from college.

But Lopez knows the statistics of the students who have received support targeted to their foster care background. For example, across the California community colleges, students are more likely to enroll in credit-bearing courses and to remain enrolled in school if they are enrolled in foster-specific support programs, according to a 2021 report from John Burton Advocates for Youth, an influential nonprofit that advocates for California’s homeless and foster youth.

“One of the things that has worked for us as a program is consistency,” said Lopez, who has worked with the program for nearly a decade.

While many of their students have graduated and transferred from Rio Hondo, some have needed to cut back on classes or drop out altogether. “But eventually, they come back, and we’re here,” said Lopez.

With the support he has received, Bush has not only remained on track to transfer to a four-year university later this year — he has applied to several Cal State and University of California schools, though he is particularly interested in UCLA. His career goal has also changed in the year-and-a-half since he returned to school. He is now pursuing psychology and a career in counseling, and, while the career change might seem abrupt, it’s a return to the goals he had about a decade ago.

Foster youth also need a blueprint

As Bush tells it, the consistent instability throughout his childhood played a critical role in how his life unfolded as he entered adulthood.

“The system is trying to help … and it’s providing homes, but I still feel like a necessary component is to provide that blueprint for success after you age out,” said Bush of the foster system.

He went on to describe the blueprint that a teenager without foster experience might have: If their parents went to college, they might also attend college; if their parents were part of the workforce, they might decide to pursue a similar path after high school.

“Someone who has experienced the foster system, they don’t have that blueprint and, sadly, the statistics show there’s a small percentage of success stories,” he added.

He was around 10 years old when both of his parents died, leaving him and his sister in the foster system. Their maternal grandmother was near them in Lancaster, a city in northern Los Angeles County, but she was caring for her own young children plus some of her grandchildren and couldn’t take them in.

They remained in foster placement for two years until an aunt in Louisiana reached out and requested they be placed with her.

Thus began Bush’s experience with kinship in which a child in foster care is placed with a family member. He was living with family once again, but his life was no more stable than before.

“I can honestly say she tried her best, but she didn’t really have the resources to fully cater to our needs. To her it was more like, OK, you guys live with me now,’ and that’s it,” Bush said. “But there was trauma that needed to be addressed. There was, for both of us, abandonment issues that needed to be addressed.”

By the time he was 14, Bush was regularly suspended from school, eventually missing enough days to become truant and land in juvenile detention.

“That set a course for me, going in and out of juvenile corrections,” he said. He continued getting into trouble, eventually spending over a year inside.

Once released at 16, he returned to his aunt’s home, but he had developed resentment toward her because she had not visited him during his time inside. He learned that she continued receiving payment as he was still officially under her care, and so began a cycle of housing instability as he began to stay at friends’ homes and hotel rooms rather than sleep at his aunt’s home.

To route the payment to himself and pay for housing, Bush figured out how to emancipate himself at 17. It’s a process that Lopez noted few of their students go through given its difficulty.

Bush knew he had a path forward: football. After his time in juvenile detention, his football coach continued to invest in him, sending him to university training camps. But his behavior landed him in trouble again, and he was in a fight so bad during the summer going into his senior year of high school that the coach ended the relationship.

“I would always wind up in situations where I’m in trouble. I always used to ask myself when I was in front of the principal, when I was in front of the judge, ‘Why am I here?’ said Bush, reflecting on his youth. “And then I learned over time, it’s the decisions that I’m making.”

“Before, there were a lot of things that were happening that were out of my control,” he continued. He slowly learned there were things he had control over, such as his path toward emancipation, but without the proper, stable guidance of an adult through his upbringing, he was often unclear on how to properly use that newfound power.

Unable to play football after the fight, he reached out to a former foster parent in California who agreed to take him in so he could start fresh in his home state.

With his high school requirements complete, he attended Southwest College in Los Angeles, playing football for the team and eventually landing a scholarship to continue playing the sport in Oklahoma.

He had dreams of continuing his studies in psychology, eventually earning a doctorate in the field and becoming a school counselor.

But the pressure of supporting his family took center stage once he and his now-wife had their first child, so he declined his university scholarship. “It was such a big transition at that time, and I felt the need to support my family,” said Bush.

From then through the fall of 2023, Bush worked odd jobs and eventually secured stable work in the construction industry as he and his wife had two more children. His return to school was prompted by his layoff, but he was also keenly aware of the harsh reality of working in such a physically demanding field.

“The longevity for a Black carpenter isn’t that long. I have to figure out how I’m going to maneuver within this industry so that I can make it for at least 15 years,” he said of his thinking at the time.

It wasn’t long after landing in the Guardian Scholars office that he began thinking more deeply about his goals. What began as a return to school to secure job stability in a field he’d entered solely to provide for his family has since become a path back to the goals Bush had long before he had the level of support he has found with Lopez and her team at Guardian Scholars.

“My daughters and my son,” he said. “I feel they are the best thing out of my whole life. I’m trying to put myself in a position where I can be the best example and the best provider for them. I know now, at 33, with all my life experiences, this is what seems clearest to me.”

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23/04/2025
UC faculty to consider its own high school ethnic studies mandate
Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource
KEY TAKEAWAYS

The UC course criteria would promote the Liberated Ethnic Studies perspective.

It would likely become the default ethnic studies course in K-12 districts.

It would contradict the state’s own voluntary, open-ended model curriculum.
School districts are looking to the May revision of the state budget to learn if Gov. Gavin Newsom will press ahead with a mandate to offer a high school ethnic studies course whose implementation is contingent on state funding. That will be unlikely.

Brooks Allen, executive director of the State Board of Education and a Newsom adviser, confirmed Tuesday that, given current revenue forecasts, Newsom will not be funding the mandate. He conveyed that message to a representative of the UC Academic Senate, he said.

On Wednesday, however, representatives of the University of California faculty will decide whether to recommend that U.C. regents not wait for state funding and instead independently mandate a course. They’ll vote on a proposal (see pages 39 to 57) to require an ethnic studies course, incorporating criteria and content that Newsom and the State Board of Education have already rejected as politically extreme, for admissions to UC campuses.

Opponents said that adopting the proposal, which had been nearly five years in the making, would be unwise and probably illegal.

“Requiring such a course would entangle the university in the sorts of political and ideological disputes over ethnic studies course content that are currently roiling school districts across the state and the nation,” wrote Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, and Matt Malkan, an astronomy professor at UCLA, in a letter to the UC Faculty Assembly of the Senate, the body that will take up the issue on Wednesday. An earlier version was signed by 440 members of the UC faculty.

Sander and Malkan also said that the proposal “would effectively force hundreds of schools to invest large sums in creating the mandated curriculum and finding or hiring teachers to teach it” – a step that “would probably ultimately be found to be illegal” if UC acted unilaterally.

If the Assembly passes the proposal, it would be forwarded to UC President Michael Drake and then to the UC Regents this summer for final approval.

Ethnic studies faculty at UC campuses pushed for including ethnic studies among the 15 courses required for admissions, known as “A-G.” It would be satisfied through an English, history or an elective course taught through an ethnic studies lens, as UC defines it. Ethnic studies would become “H”, a new area of concentration.

When adopting legislation in 2016 authorizing the creation of a voluntary, model ethnic studies curriculum, the Legislature was vague about what it intended for an ethnic studies course. It said the objective was to prepare pupils to be “global citizens with an appreciation for the contributions of multiple cultures”; school districts could “adapt courses to reflect the pupil demographics in their communities.”

UC’s proposed criteria for high schools would take a more directive and controversial approach, reflecting the content of many college-level courses.

“Ethnic studies is aimed at producing critical knowledge about power, inequality, and inequity as well as the efforts of marginalized and oppressed racialized peoples to challenge systemic violence and the institutional structures that perpetuate racial injustice,” wrote the co-lead writers, UC Riverside teaching professor Wallace Cleaves and UC Santa Cruz critical race and ethnic studies and literature professor Christine Hong, in a preface explaining the intent of the criteria.

Hong and Cleaves say it is appropriate to set rigorous course criteria for students entering UC because ethnic studies faculty created the foundational theories and instructional strategies for the academic discipline, and the State Board and local district teachers lack their expertise.

But the effect of adopting their course for entry into UC would be an end-run around the state board’s open-ended guidance. It would also deviate from many legislators’ vision of ethnic studies as the study of the cultures and achievements of minority groups, as well as their past and ongoing struggles with racism and discrimination.

The UC criteria would become the standard version that high schools would offer. In turn, UC and CSU ethnic studies faculty would become the go-to private consultants for creating districts’ curricula and training teachers.

Emergence of Liberated Ethnic Studies

UC and CSU ethnic studies faculty were primary writers of the first draft of the state’s model curriculum in 2019, but President Linda Darling-Hammond and other members of the State Board rejected it as biased, and the board hired new writers. The California Legislative Jewish Caucus objected to its characterization of Israel as an oppressive white colonial state and the call for a boycott of companies doing business with Israel.

“A model curriculum should be accurate, free of bias, appropriate for all learners in our diverse state and align with Governor Newsom’s vision of a California for all,” Darling-Hammond’s statement said.

The writers of the initial draft disavowed the final, revised model curriculum that the State Board passed in 2021. They then formed the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium and have encouraged school districts to adopt the original draft as the true alternative. More than two dozen districts have. Both Hong and Cleaves are affiliated with the consortium.

Having gone through five revisions, the final proposal before the Assembly (pages 10 to 18) is a toned-down version, but its purpose and guidelines for developing skills are clear. For example, toward the goal of “Applying critical analysis,” it reads, “Study histories of imperialism, dehumanization, and genocide to expose their continuity to present-day laws, ideologies, knowledge systems, dominant cultures, institutions, and structures that perpetuate racial violence, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression.”

Sander said, “It’s still very clearly a liberated course by which I mean it’s very ideological. It has a particular point of view on various controversial issues.”

Under Assembly Bill 1010, the 2021 state law, high schools would have to offer a one-semester ethnic studies course starting in fall 2025 and students would have to take it for a high school diploma starting in 2029-30. Legislators explicitly referenced the rejected first draft in the law. “It is the intent of the Legislature that (districts) not use the portions of the draft model curriculum that were not adopted … due to concerns related to bias, bigotry, and discrimination,” it reads.

Since then, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Newsom administration have reminded school districts to follow the law’s requirements for “inclusivity, sensitivity, and accuracy.”

“We have been advised, however, that some vendors are offering materials that may not meet the requirements of AB 101,” Brooks Allen, executive director of the State Board of Education and an education adviser to Newsom, wrote in a memo to districts in 2023.

The “liberated” version has prompted several lawsuits (see here, here and here) by Jewish families and supportive law firms charging that its one-sided perspective fosters discrimination.

A “target” for President Trump?

The vote Wednesday coincides with fraught relations with the Trump administration. The president has threatened to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from school districts and California universities that fail to curb antisemitism and teach undefined “woke” ideology on race, including critical race theory.

“Passing the course criteria now would be like putting a target on our back,” Sander said in an interview, and undermine the university’s best defense against Trump’s effort to dictate who to hire and what ideas can be taught.

“It is fundamentally wrong, and inconsistent with the very spirit of a university, to mandate courses that are framed by an ideology – whether that ideology comes from the left or from the right,” he said.
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23/04/2025
More Than 100 Universities Sign Statement Rejecting Trump’s Interference in and Control of Their Campuses

More than 100 universities joined forces to oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to control their curriculum, their hiring policies, and their admissions policies. The initial statement was released this morning and almost another 100 universities signed on.

The Trump administration’s threat to academic freedom by suspending federal funding and threatening the universities’ tax-exempt status alarmed the universities and spurred them to resist the administration’s unprecedented effort to stifle academic freedom.

CBS News reported:

Washington — More than 100 U.S. universities and colleges, including Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Brown, MIT, Cornell and Tufts issued a joint letter Tuesday condemning President Trump’s “political interference” in the nation’s education system.

The move comes a day after Harvard University sued the Trump administration, which announced an initial funding freeze of $2.2 billion and later signaled its intention to suspend an additional $1 billion in grants. The moves came after weeks of escalation between the administration and Harvard, which had rejected the administration’s demands to change many of the school’s policies and leadership, including auditing the student body and faculty for “viewpoint diversity.”

“We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” Tuesday’s letter read.

“We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight. However, we must oppose undue government intrusion,” it said, adding: “We must reject the coercive use of public research funding.”

Mr. Trump has sought to bring several prestigious universities to heel over claims they tolerated campus antisemitism, threatening their budgets and tax-exempt status and the enrollment of foreign students.

The letter said the universities and colleges were committed to serving as centers where “faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.”

“Most fundamentally,” the letter reads, “America’s colleges and universities prepare an educated citizenry to sustain our democracy.

“The price of abridging the defining freedoms of American higher education will be paid by our students and our society. On behalf of our current and future students, and all who work at and benefit from our institutions, we call for constructive engagement that improves our institutions and serves our republic.”

Reuters reported that other higher education institutions added their names to the statement, which now has nearly 200 signatories.

The New York Times reported today that some of Harvard’s major donors were urging it to settle with the administration. Eventually, the government’s threats to take control of the university made a settlement impossible.

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23/04/2025
California leaders must keep their promise by funding ethnic studies

Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

Decades of institutionalized racism and inadequate funding have left California with a racial achievement gap in its schools. All of our students deserve the chance to learn and succeed, but all too often, students of color have been failed by an education system that still bears the marks of a long history of racism and inequality.

To address this persistent structural problem, Gov. Gavin Newsom has allocated funding that will be directed toward the poorest schools, to be used specifically to help all student groups improve academic achievement in this year’s proposed budget.

The governor did not, however, explicitly allocate funding to support Assembly Bill 101, the mandate that all public high schools offer an ethnic studies course in the 2025-26 school year and require all students to complete a one-semester ethnic studies course for graduation, beginning with the school year 2029-30. The lack of explicit funding has emboldened opponents of ethnic studies education, who now argue that the ethnic studies requirement must be delayed or withdrawn.

Delaying or abandoning the state’s commitment to ethnic studies would not only break the promise that the governor and the Legislature made to the people of California at a time when this kind of education is more important than ever, but also threaten efforts to close the racial achievement gap. Although ethnic studies isn’t designed with the specific goal of reducing or closing racial achievement gaps, it has a track record of doing exactly that.

For example, Stanford researchers Thomas S. Dee, Emily K. Penner and Sade Bonilla found San Francisco’s ninth-grade ethnic studies course to improve students’ GPA, school attendance, and graduation rate. University of Arizona researchers Nolan L. Cabrera, Jeffrey F. Milam, Ozan Jaquette and Ronald W. Marx found that participation in Tucson’s Mexican American studies program raised students’ achievement on the state’s reading, writing and math achievement tests and virtually closed racial achievement gaps.

San Francisco State University researchers found that students who major in ethnic studies graduate within six years at a much higher rate (92%) than students in other majors and students in other majors who take at least one ethnic studies course boost their graduation rates compared with students who do not. At the University of Louisville, researcher Tomarra A. Adams found that Black students who major in Pan-African studies have a higher graduation rate than Black students who major in something else.

Ethnic studies has consistently positive impacts on the academic achievement of students from racially marginalized backgrounds. By offering a relevant curriculum that speaks to issues of concern to their lives and communities, ethnic studies taps into and engages the knowledge students bring to the classroom, allowing them to draw from and recognize their own expertise.

Ethnic studies classes offer an environment where important and relevant issues related to race and ethnicity can be addressed openly rather than be belittled or ignored. Further, as students come to see education as relevant to addressing problems and needs in their communities, and themselves as academically capable, they gain confidence to thrive in school more generally.

Ethnic studies benefits all California students while helping to close the racial achievement gap and preparing the workforce of tomorrow for the multicultural reality of our state. It was in recognition of these benefits that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 101, declaring as part of the signing statement that “these courses boost student achievement over the long run — especially among students of color.”

Recently, Assembly Bill 1468 was introduced to authorize the development of content standards for high school ethnic studies. This bill is unnecessary and potentially harmful. Ethnic studies is a highly contextual approach to curriculum and teaching because it connects with the local cultures and issues of specific communities in which it is being taught.

For that reason, there can be no standardized ethnic studies curriculum. Within the current Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, we already have a set of six guiding values and principles that are broad enough to allow for diverse contextualized approaches to ethnic studies, while they are also sufficiently direct as standards.

I worry that further specification of what should be in an ethnic studies curriculum will authorize one version of ethnic studies to the exclusion of others. This has been my experience with content standards for decades. In addition, ethnic studies is interdisciplinary, which means that the standards for that subject (such as history or English) should be used along with the seven ethnic studies guiding principles. AB 1468 unnecessarily adds layers to the standards we already have.

Ethnic studies needs to be a part of the curriculum offered to California’s students, and it is incumbent on the governor and the Legislature to make good on that promise by resolving any ambiguities about the funding of AB 101.

•••

Christine Sleeter is professor emerita in the College of Education at California State University Monterey Bay, known for pioneering research into multicultural education and anti-racism.

The opinions in this commentary are 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.

A version of this commentary originally appeared in the Sacramento Bee.

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23/04/2025
Months after fire, Pali High moves into Santa Monica Sears building

Students return to Pali South in Santa Monica on April 22.

Credit: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource

It was like the first day of school on Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica.

Campus security directed parents as they mapped out drop-off routes. Staff greeted students, who lugged backpacks, musical instruments and sports gear. High schoolers embraced and marveled at their new campus.

But unlike most first days of school, even seniors on the verge of graduating wandered around, asking where to go. Teachers wondered where to lock their bikes.

“[I’m] definitely nervous,” said Aurora Robles, a freshman. “I don’t think I would know where any of my classes are or where any of my friends are.”

It’s April 22 — more than three months since the Palisades Fire ravaged over 23,000 acres in Los Angeles and destroyed roughly 30% of the historic Palisades Charter High School, which is known for its appearances in films such as “Carrie” and “Freaky Friday.”

Unlike other schools in both Los Angeles Unified and Pasadena Unified that returned to in-person learning weeks after the fires, Pali High’s roughly 2,500 students had been learning online.

And as of Tuesday, its students, teachers, administrators and staff can call an old Sears building — now called Pali South — their new, temporary home. It took roughly eight weeks to transform the industrial building into a learning space complete with the school’s lettering, Lauren Howland, a spokesperson for the City of Santa Monica, told KTLA.

“I’m happy to welcome the administrators, educators and students of Palisades Charter High School back to in-person learning,” said Governor Gavin Newsom in a statement released Tuesday.

“While this home is only temporary until we can get them back to their regular site, the partnership and collaboration between state and local officials to get this new site up and running shows the spirit of our recovery. This is an important step forward for the Palisades community as we rebuild and rise together.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District is chipping in with about $300 million to help Pali High rebuild over the next few years. And debris from the original campus has already been cleared by the Army Corps — with the hope that the campus community can return to its true home with portable classrooms at some point in the next year, according to LAUSD School Board Member Nick Melvoin, who spoke at a town hall for the Pali High community earlier this month.

“I definitely didn’t expect it would happen,” said senior Lucas Nehoray. “I told a lot of people that I just didn’t think it would have time to come to fruition at a different site. But here it is… I’m really happy.”

Despite being used to online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic, several students expressed their excitement at being back. Some of them, including senior Samantha Murillo, hadn’t seen their peers since December, before winter break.

“I get to see my friends after five, six months,” Murillo said. “But I’m also kind of thrown off a little bit because it’s a whole different location…It’s weird, but in a good way.”

Others said they were looking forward to learning more in person — especially with AP exams around the corner in May.

The “last few months have been easier academically,” Nehoray said. “I’m glad I’m in person and I can actually learn.”

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23/04/2025
Will Ron DeSantis Outrun This Scandal?
Jason Garcia is an investigative reporter in Florida who has had plenty to investigate during the regime of Ron DeSantis. His blog is called “Seeking Rents.” This is a post you should not miss.

The governor acts like a dictator, and the Republican-dominated legislature doesn’t stop him. Remember the takeover of New College? It was the only innovative, free-thinking public institution of higher education in the state. It was tiny, only 700 students. But DeSantis took control of the college’s board, hired a new president (a crony) and set about destroying everything that made it unique. He issued one executive order after another for the entire state to crush DEI and assure the only permissible thought mirrored his own. He attacked drag queens and threatened to punish bars and hotels that allowed them to perform. He created a private army, subject only to his control. He selected politicians to run major universities. He imposed thought control on the state. Fascism thrives in Florida.

Thus far, he has gotten away with his gambits. But Garcia doesn’t think he will get away with this one.

He writes:

A simmering scandal erupted Friday afternoon when the Tampa Bay Times, Miami Herald and Politico Florida revealed that the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis orchestrated a $10 million payment last fall to a charity founded by the governor’s wife — which then turned around and gave the money to groups that helped finance the governor’s campaign against a proposed constitutional amendment to legalize marijuana in Florida.

In a nutshell: The DeSantis administration pressured a major state contractor to make a $10 million donation to the Hope Florida Foundation, the controversial charity spearheaded by First Lady Casey DeSantis. It was part of a settlement negotiated with Centene Corp., after the state’s largest Medicaid contractor overbilled the state by at least $67 million.

Days later, Hope Florida transferred that $10 million to a pair of dark-money nonprofits. The state-backed charity gave $5 million each to “Save Our Society From Drugs,” an anti-marijuana group founded by a late Republican megadonor, and “Secure Florida’s Future,” a political vehicle controlled by executives at the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the Big Business lobbying group.

And days after that, Save Our Society From Drugs and Secure Florida’s Future gave a combined $8.5 million to “Keep Florida Clean,” a political committee — chaired by Ron DeSantis’ then-chief of staff — created to oppose Amendment 3, the amendment on last year’s ballot that would have allowed Floridians to use marijuana recreationally rather than solely for medicinal reasons.

It’s a daisy chain that may have transformed $10 million of public money — money meant to pay for health insurance for poor, elderly and disabled Floridians — into funding for anti-marijuana campaign ads.

DeSantis, of course, has repeatedly insisted that he did nothing wrong while also lashing out in increasingly vitriolic ways at everyone from the Republican speaker of the state House to the newspaper reporters digging into the story.

But at least one prominent GOP lawmaker — Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican who has been presiding over hearings into Hope Florida — told the Times and Herald that the transaction chain “looks like criminal fraud by some of those involved.”

Clearly, this looks very bad. But it is also by no means an isolated incident.

In fact, this is part of a larger pattern of potential abuses that Ron DeSantis committed last fall when he chose to turn the power of state government against two citizen-led constitutional amendments that appeared on the November ballot: Amendment 3 and Amendment 4, which would have ended Florida’s statewide abortion ban.

Consider what we already know about how DeSantis financed his campaigns against the two amendments using public money taken from taxpayers — and private money taken from donors who got public favors from the governor.
- Five state agencies directly funded television commercials meant to weaken support for the marijuana and abortion-rights ballot measures. We still don’t know the full extent of their spending, although Seeking Rents has estimated the total taxpayer tab at nearly $20 million. We also know that the DeSantis administration commandeered money for anti-marijuana advertising from Florida’s share of a nationwide legal settlement with the opioid industry — money that was supposed to be spent combatting the opioid addiction crisis.
- At the same time, another nonprofit funded by Florida taxpayers poured at least $5 million into television ads attempting to soften Florida’s image on women’s healthcare at a time when Florida’s near-total abortion was under intense attack. It was the Florida Pregnancy Care Networks’ first-ever TV ad campaign. And its commercials, which were overseen by DeSantis administration staffers, complemented the state agency ads against the abortion-rights amendment — right down to using the same slogan.
- Last June, after DeSantis vetoed legislation that would have strictly regulated the state’s hemp industry, CBS News Miami revealedthat industry executives and lobbyists promised to raise $5 million in exchange for the veto for the governor to spend on his campaign against Amendment 3. “Our lobby team made promises to rally some serious funding to stand with him on this,” a hemp industry representative wrote in one message that included a bank routing number for the Republican Party of Florida. “We have to pay $5 million to keep our end of the veto,” a hemp executive wrote in another message.
- In the closing weeks of the campaign, records show that the Big Tobacco giant Philip Morris International gave $500,000 to DeSantis’ personal political committee — which was also chaired by the governor’s then-chief of staff and which DeSantis was using to campaign against both Amendment 3 and Amendment 4. Shortly after the election, the DeSantis administration handed Philip Morris a lucrative tax break, ruling that the company could sell a new line of electronically heated tobacco sticks free of state tobacco taxes.
There were other abuses of power, too. DeSantis and his team threatened to criminally prosecute television stations that aired ads supporting Amendment 4. They sent state police to the homes of Florida voters who signed Amendment 4 petitions. And they hijacked the ballot-writing process for Amendment 4.

There’s a reason why the DeSantis administration made sure to extract a promise of legal immunityfrom the organization that sponsored Amendment 4 as part of a legal settlement negotiated after the election.

DeSantis’ tactics worked. Though Amendments 3 and 4 each won majority support from Florida voters — 55.9 percent for recreational marijuana, 57.2 percent for abortion rights — both fell short of the 60 percent support needed to amend the state constitution.

But, suddenly, it looks like this may not be over — at least not for Ron DeSantis.

House Republicans are seeking troves of records from the DeSantis administration, including text messages and emails related to Hope Florida. The chamber has also scheduled another hearing on the Casey DeSantis charity next week.

What’s more, the House also unveiled a sweeping ethics reform package last week that would, among other things, explicitly expose senior government officials to criminal penalties if they interfere with elections.

That particular legislation would also prohibit state employees from soliciting money for political campaigns — an idea that emerged after DeSantis aides got caught squeezing lobbyistsfor more donations to their boss’ political committee ahead of a possible Casey DeSantis campaign for governor….

Ron DeSantis bet his political future on beating the marijuana and abortion-rights amendments. And he won both of those battles.

But it may turn out that he ultimately lost the war.

Wishful thinking? I hope not.

To give you an idea of how far/right the legislature is, Garcia lists some of the bills that are currently moving through the legislative process:
- House Bill 549: Requires all new public school textbooks to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Passed the Senate by a 28-9 vote. (See votes) Previously passed the House of Representatives by a 78-29 vote. (See votes) Goes to the governor.
- House Bill 575: Replaces Gulf of Mexico with “Gulf of America” in state law. Passed the Senate by a 28-9 vote. (See votes) Previously passed the House of Representatives by a 78-27 vote. (See votes) Goes to the governor….
- House Bill 1517: Allows someone to file a wrongful death lawsuit seeking lost wages on behalf of an embryo or fetus. Passed the House of Representatives by a 79-32 vote. (See votes)…
- House Bill 7031: Cuts the state sales tax rate from 6 percent to 5.25 percent. Passed the House of Representatives by a 112-0 vote. (See votes)
- House Bill 123: Allows a traditional public school to be converted into a charter school without the consent of the teachers who work at the school. Passed the House Education & Employment Committee by an 11-4 vote. (See votes)
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22/04/2025
Ethnic studies standards can’t save California’s deeply flawed mandate

Alison Yin / EdSource

Members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus recently introduced a new bill (AB 1468) to address concerns that the state’s new ethnic studies mandate has been and will continue to be used as a vehicle for sneaking dangerous antisemitism and anti-Israel content into our classrooms. Unfortunately, AB 1468 will only serve to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these concerns.

In 2021, California became the first state to require an ethnic studies course for high school graduation with the passage of AB 101. Despite good intentions, this mandate has been plagued by fundamental and unresolved problems. Chief among them is that it allows school districts to choose their own curriculum, leading many to adopt materials and training from consulting groups such as the Liberated Ethnic Studies Consortium, which promote a highly politicized approach to ethnic studies, exacerbating concerns about classroom bias and antisemitism.

Recognizing this looming threat and knowing that content standards are required for all other California courses required for high school graduation, the Jewish legislators have introduced a bill to establish state-approved standards to prevent antisemitic content and ensure ethnic studies is taught in a way that respects all communities.

The lack of content standards, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. Far more troubling is the absence of any consensus on what kind of subject ethnic studies even is. Some proponents view it as an inclusive, objective examination of the history, culture and contributions of various ethnic groups in the state. This understanding appears to have guided California legislators in passing the ethnic studies mandate with AB 101, whose author stated, “California is one of the most diverse states in the country, and we should celebrate that diversity by teaching a curriculum that is inclusive of all of our cultures and backgrounds.”

Others, however, hold a radically different view. They believe high school ethnic studies should replicate the university-level discipline, which focuses primarily on four racial groups and is rooted in ideologically driven frameworks that emphasize systemic oppression and promote political activism, often incorporating antisemitic content. This approach, championed by state university ethnic studies faculty, teachers unions and Liberated consulting groups, has infiltrated many school districts.

The lack of consensus about the very nature of ethnic studies has led to fierce battles over curricula, which have played out in contentious school board meetings and costly legal challenges, underscoring the folly of implementing a mandatory ethnic studies course without any common understanding of the subject.

The folly becomes even graver when considering that the primary justification for an ethnic studies mandate — its supposed improvement of student outcomes — is wholly unfounded. The single empirical study claiming to demonstrate the academic benefits of ethnic studies was thoroughly debunked by scholars at the University of California and the University of Pennsylvania, who warned that “no conclusion” could be drawn from its data. Worse, an ethnic studies mandate forces students to take a controversial course with no demonstrable academic benefits in place of one with clear value, such as world history.

The mandate’s serious flaws were well-known before the passage of AB 101, which raises the question: How could state legislators establish a law requiring all students to take a course with no agreed-upon subject matter, content standards or proven academic benefits and, under the Liberated approach to ethnic studies, that was likely to sow divisiveness and incite antisemitism?

Unfortunately, the Jewish Caucus’ idea of adding standards to a deeply flawed mandate, though well-intentioned, will not fix the problem. Given the entrenched influence of teachers unions, university ethnic studies faculty and Liberated consultants over who teaches high school ethnic studies and how it’s taught, any attempt to add standards will inevitably be co-opted by these groups, further entrenching an ideological version of ethnic studies that is divisive, controversial and harmful to Jewish students. Moreover, AB 1468 risks giving a false sense of security to concerned parents and community members while failing to address deeper issues.

Now is the time to reconsider — not reinforce — the ethnic studies mandate.

Thankfully, a critical provision in AB 101 has been largely overlooked: The mandate is only operative when the Legislature provides funding for it, which has not yet occurred. And given California’s current financial crisis and the fact that the mandate is estimated to cost the state a whopping $275 million annually, it’s unlikely to become operational anytime soon. This presents an opportunity for legislators to do what is best for all California students: Instead of trying to salvage a foolhardy mandate that is beyond repair, legislators must work to repeal it.

Without a state-funded graduation requirement, school districts could still offer ethnic studies as an elective or even a local graduation requirement, allowing communities to decide whether the course serves their students’ needs. However, given the cost, controversy and administrative burden involved with implementing an ethnic studies requirement without state support, it is doubtful many districts will proceed with it on their own. As a result, the ethnic studies industry — especially consulting groups like Liberated and university-based teacher training programs —will lose their primary source of demand and begin to wither, removing a major driver of politicized and antisemitic content in California classrooms.

Legislators now face a clear choice: double down on a mandate that divides communities, burdens schools, and fails students, or take this opportunity to end it before it does further harm. Repealing AB 101 isn’t just prudent policy — it’s a necessary course correction.

•••

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is the director of AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. She was a faculty member at the University of California for 20 years.

The opinions in this commentary are 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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22/04/2025
California launches first phase of long-anticipated Cradle-to-Career data system
After years of preparation inside and outside the state Capitol (shown), California has launched a website that gathers all sorts of education and career data in a single, searchable place.

Credit: Kirby Lee / AP
Top Takeaways

The Cradle-to-Career data system links education, workforce and social service data.

The Student Pathways dashboard, released Tuesday, will help students decide on a college and career path.

California is one of the few states that make educational data easily accessible to the public.
California introduced the first phase of its ambitious Cradle-to-Career data system Tuesday, making it one of the few states with education data accessible to everyone.

Now, parents, students and others can go to the Cradle-to-Career (C2C) website to learn how many graduates from each school district earned a bachelor’s degree each year, how long it took to achieve that goal and how much, on average, they earned after graduation.

Cradle-to-Career links data sets from school districts, institutions of higher education, workforce organizations and social services to help students plan their education and careers.

The first phase, the Student Pathways dashboard, explores pathways to and through college, college enrollment, awards and diplomas, time to graduation or certificate, and earnings during and after college.

“With the C2C Student Pathways Dashboard now live, Californians can visualize their futures by seeing disconnected data from across sectors and previously unavailable insights, all in one place,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom in a statement released Tuesday. “The Golden State is once again leading the way in innovation, connecting our education system to the workforce to ensure everyone has the freedom to succeed.”

How it works

The website uses charts, guiding questions and pull-down menus to make the information accessible and easy to use. The pull-down menus allow users to compare their child’s school to other schools, the state average or legislative districts. They can also compare the pathway progress of different student populations, said Ryan Estrellado, director of data programs for C2C.

Each chart in the dashboard has links with instructions to help users interpret it, and includes links to underlying data that can be downloaded and used by the public to create their own charts and reports.

“What’s so exciting about what California has done is they’re putting the information out to everybody,” said Paige Kowalski, vice president of the Data Quality Campaign, a national nonprofit advocacy organization. “It’s out there for the community folks, for schools, for parents, for kids looking at colleges. And, this is their first step, right? It’s not everything. It’s not all of it, but it is the first step, and it’s a really good one.”

Future C2C dashboards will focus on early education, primary school, college and career readiness, transfer outcomes, financial aid, employment outcomes, and teacher training and retention.

This year, the data team will work on launching additional dashboards and completing a secure data enclave to allow researchers to use underlying data, said Mary Ann Bates, executive director of C2C.

Access to centralized data about education and workforce outcomes is necessary to understand whether efforts to improve student success are working, according to a media release from C2C. The dashboards will not include information about individual students.

A community effort

The website follows years of community meetings, open meetings of the 21-member C2C board and feedback from residents, advocates, policymakers and researchers. The most requested feature from the public, Bates said, allows users to break down the data by both geography and student populations.

“We hope that when the public uses this, they will see that the questions and the feedback that they had are represented here,” Estrellado said Monday. “The most exciting part for me is that we invite them to continue that conversation with us as we improve this tool. I can’t wait to get it to the public.”

C2C data will eventually be available in three ways — through accessible data stories and charts, through aggregated data files that use query builders, and through a data request process for approved research projects.

Launch delayed

The initial launch was originally expected to happen late last year.

“We prioritize securing the data system, ensuring privacy protection and ensuring linked information is accurate and reliable before working to make our tools publicly available,” said Bates when asked about the delay.

The data for the website is submitted each March by partners that have signed data-sharing agreements with C2C, including the California Department of Education, California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, University of California, California State University, California Community Colleges, Department of Social Services, Employment Development Department, Department of Industrial Relations, Department of Developmental Services and private universities.

The data from all partners was linked by the end of the year, Bates said.

“We’re really proud of being able to have moved from the linkage of the underlying data system to releasing a public tool just a few months later,” Bates said. “Few (states) have prioritized creating dashboards like this for the public. And many of those have done so after more than a decade of working on building their data systems.”

Six years in the making

In 2019, the Legislature passed the Cradle-to-Career Data System Act, which called for creating a data system to support teachers, parents and students; enable agencies to optimize educational, workplace and health and human services programs; streamline financial aid administration, and advance research.

The state legislation included public engagement in the planning process and mandated that the data system also require an annual survey of students and their families to ensure their voices and experiences guide the work, according to C2C. By the end of 2023, the program had received its first batch of data.

The price tag for the project, which includes direct costs like contracts, as well as relevant staff time, is $24.2 million, Bates said, and current spending is still below that.

There is also an ongoing line item in the state budget to fund the operation of the office and to pay the salaries of its staff, including $15 million this fiscal year.

Federal cuts to education data collection are not expected to impact the Cradle-to-Career IT project, which is entirely funded by California. It is not clear if data collection from any of the state’s data partners will be negatively impacted by federal cuts.

“Regardless of what happens in the federal context, we remain committed to ensuring that we’re building a data system that answers the needs of Californians and remains true to California’s values,” Bates said.

Kowalski is hopeful that the work California has done can be replicated in other states.

It took a great deal of political will, resources and expertise to make the California data system a reality, Kowalski said.

“Data tells us what kind of job we’re doing, how we fared as a political leader, as an agency head, as a system leader,” Kowalski said.

“And when you put that data out there, whether you’re sharing it with another agency, or you’re putting it out in the public, or you’re handing it over to a researcher, you are giving them the power to look at that data and judge you.”
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22/04/2025
California should continue to invest in teacher recruitment, retention, study says

Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource

California has spent more than $1 billion since 2018 on programs to aid in the recruitment and retention of TK-12 teachers. It must continue to make those investments if it wants to end the persistent teacher shortage, according to a report, “Tackling Teacher Shortages: Investing in California’s Teacher Workforce,” released last week.

Major investments include $672 million for the Teacher Residency Grant Program, $521 million for the Golden State Teacher Grant Program and $250 million for the National Board Certified Teacher Incentive Program.

The state programs to recruit and retain teachers are gaining traction, but still need more time to show results, according to the national Learning Policy Institute (LPI), a nonprofit education research organization that released the report. But many of the programs are funded with one-time funds nearing expiration.

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The Golden State Teacher Grant Program awards up to $20,000 and the National Board Certified Teacher Incentive Program provides $25,000 to teachers who agree to work at a high-needs school.

The Teacher Residency Grant Program funds partnerships between school districts and teacher preparation programs that pay teacher candidates a stipend while they learn alongside veteran classroom teachers.

Interest in all three of these state programs continues to increase, said Desiree Carver-Thomas, a senior researcher at LPI. But, because participation is still just a fraction of the overall teacher pipeline, it may take years until researchers will be able to tell whether the programs are actually helping to boost enrollment in teacher preparation programs, she said.

“I think it’s important to mention that the teacher residency grant program and Golden State Teacher Grant program aren’t just subsidizing people who might go into the profession either way,” Carver-Thomas said. “Those individuals are being targeted by the districts where they’re needed, to the schools where they’re needed. It’s important that the kind of supply-demand alignment that the state is supporting can help to address shortages.”

Linda Darling-Hammond is LPI president as well as the president of the California State Board of Education.

Enrollment in teacher preparation programs dip

Despite the investments, enrollment in teacher preparation programs dipped in both 2021-22 and 2022-23, the last two years state data is available. In 2022-23 there were 19,833 teacher candidates enrolled in teacher preparation programs, compared with 26,179 in 2020-21, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Teacher enrollment has been increasing incrementally each year between 2018 and 2021.

The numbers are far behind enrollment in state teacher preparation 20 years ago, but there has been some progress, Carver-Thomas said. The Covid-19 pandemic could have impacted enrollment in 2021-22 and 2022-23, she said.

“We don’t know what is on the other side of that 2023 data,” Carver-Thomas said.

Teacher shortages impact poor communities the most

The teacher shortage, especially in hard-to- fill areas like math, special education, science and bilingual education, persists despite proposed teacher layoffs and buyouts driven by declining enrollment and budget shortfalls.

As a result of the teacher shortage, school districts continue to rely on under-prepared teachers on emergency-style permits. A larger number of these under-prepared teachers end up in schools in the poorest communities, according to research.

In 2022-23, the state’s highest-need schools were nearly three times as likely to fill teaching positions with interns and teachers on emergency-style permits or waivers, compared with the lowest-need schools, according to the LPI report.

Additional funding could be on the way

California’s proposed state budget includes funding for recruitment and retention of teachers, including $50 million for the Golden State Teacher Grant and $100 million to extend the timeline for the National Board Certified Teacher Incentive Program. The proposed budget also includes $150 million in financial aid to teacher candidates through the new Teacher Recruitment Incentive Grant Program.

The Golden State Teacher Grant Program, funded with $500 million in 2021, was meant to support teacher candidates over a five-year period, but the program’s funds are nearly exhausted. The new funding, if approved, would fund applicants in 2025-26.

State lawmakers will make final decisions on funding by the June 15 budget deadline.

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22/04/2025
ProPublica: Trump’s War on Data Undermines Public Policy

Trump’s war on our federal government continues unabated. Among his least noticed targets is data collection. If we don’t collect data, we don’t know where to focus our efforts and where we are succeeding or failing. Trump is not smart enough to figure this out on his own. Someone put this malevolent plan in action on his behalf. We know he is destroying our government, firing essential personnel, closing down Congressionally authorized agencies by eliminating their staff. But we don’t yet know why. He is not cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. He is literally disabling every department. Is he the Manchurian Candidate or is it Musk? The attack on data collection appears to be a direct hit on knowledge.

Alec MacGillis of Pro Publica wrote this report:

More children ages 1 to 4 die of drowning than any other cause of death. Nearly a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, an increase of 3.4 million from the prior year. The number of migrants from Mexico and northern Central American countries stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol was surpassed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other nations.

We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:

The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse-gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)

And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.

Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.

Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.

Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”

Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.

It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.

But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.

Jesse Coburn, Eli Hager, Abrahm Lustgarten, Mark Olalde, Jennifer Smith Richards and Lisa Song contributed reporting.

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22/04/2025