Among its many stupid decisions, Elon Musk’s DOGE cut the staff of NOAA and the Natuonal Weather Service. Experts warned that people would die without accurate warnings. Trump ignored the warnings; so did Republicans in Congress. The cuts were imposed. The savings were a pittance. Unprepared for the storm and flooding in Texas a few days ago, people died.
As the best and the brightest were being fired at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by senseless and draconian ‘DOGE’ cuts earlier this year under Trump, with no reason given except for the need to cut a paltry amount of the government’s budget, experts warned repeatedly that the cuts would have deadly consequences during the storm season. And they have.
Dozens and dozens of stories have been written in the media citing hundreds of experts which said that weather forecasting was never going to be the same, and that inaccurate forecasts were going to lead to fewer evacuations, impaired preparedness of first responders, and deadly consequences. I quoted many of them in my daily Bulletins and wrote about this issue nearly 20 different times.
And the chickens have come home to roost. Hundreds of people have already been killed across the US in a variety of storms including deadly tornadoes – many of which were inaccurately forecasted. And we are just entering peak hurricane season. Meteorologist Chris Vagasky posted earlier this spring on social media: “The world’s example for weather services is being destroyed.”
Now, after severe flooding in non-evacuated areas in Texas has left at least 24 dead with dozens more missing, including several young girls at a summer camp, Texas officials are blaming their failure to act on a faulty forecast by Donald Trump’s new National Weather Service gutted by cuts to their operating budget and most experienced personnel.
At a press conference last night, one official said: “The original forecast we received on Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6” of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8” of rain in the hill country. The amount of rain that fell in these locations was never in any of their forecasts. Everybody got the forecast from the National Weather Service. They did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.”
Reuters published a story just a few days ago, one of many warning about this problem: “In May, every living former director of the NWS signed on to an open letter with a warning that, if continued, Trump’s cuts to federal weather forecasting would create ‘needless loss of life’. Despite bipartisan congressional pushback for a restoration in staffing and funding to the NWS, sharp budget cuts remain on pace in projections for the 2026 budget for the NOAA, the parent organization of the NWS.”
But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose agency oversees NOAA, testified before Congress on June 5 that the cuts wouldn’t be a problem because “we are transforming how we track storms and forecast weather with cutting-edge technology. Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.” Apparently the “cutting edge technology” hasn’t arrived yet.
And now presumably FEMA will be called upon to help pick up the pieces of shattered lives in Texas – an agency that Trump said repeatedly that he wants to abolish. In fact, Trump’s first FEMA director Cameron Hamilton was fired one day after he testified before Congress that FEMA should not be abolished.
The voters of Texas decided that they wanted Donald Trump and Greg Abbott to be in charge of the government services they received. That is exactly what they are getting. And as of this writing on Saturday morning, Trump still hasn’t said a word about the storm and the little girls who were killed at the camp.
However, Trump was seen dancing on the balcony of the White House last night celebrating the latest round of cuts in his budget bill that just became law so billionaires and corporations can have huge tax cuts. People are dying and more will die because of their recklessness, just like we saw during covid. And now millions won’t even have health insurance to deal with the consequences.
On Dec. 14, 2023, the California Department of Education updated the official California School Dashboard with the latest data for schools and districts. You can also view results for 2019, 2018, and 2017.* The dashboard shows achievement and progress, or lack of it, on multiple measures in color codes tied to performance metrics by the state. Enter a search term in the box to search by school, city, district or county. If a school or district does not appear, it means that no data is available. Detailed test scores are available on cells with an “i” (click to see more). For a full explanation, see the notes below the chart.
* The 2022 California School Dashboard only displays that year of results, without comparisons to the previous year, due to disruptions caused by the pandemic.
School Name, City and County
Chronic Absenteeism Rate
Suspension Rates
English Lang. Arts Performance
Math Performance
High School Graduation Rate
English Learners
Link
School Name, City and County
Chronic Absenteeism Rate
Suspension Rates
English Lang. Arts Performance
Math Performance
High School Graduation Rate
English Learners
Link
Notes to Database
Color Codes and Ratings: The dashboard includes five color-coded performance levels, based on a combination of current performance level and change over the previous year. The color spectrum ranges from red to orange to yellow to green to blue, with red signifying the lowest performance level and blue the highest.
More information about how the performance levels were calculated is available at the California Department of Education’s website here.
Column Headings:
Chronic Absenteeism: Proportion of students who miss 10 percent or more expected days of attendance in a school year. (For a student enrolled for 180 days, this would be 18 or more days.) Note: This indicator is not reported for high schools.
Suspension Rates: Based on a combination of current suspension rates and changes in those rates over time.
English Language Arts Performance: Student performance in Grades 3-8 and 11 on the English Language Arts Smarter Balanced tests administered in the current year, combined with whether scores improved, declined or stayed the same compared to the previous year.
Math Performance: Student performance in Grades 3-8 and 11 on the math Smarter Balanced tests in the current year combined with whether scores improved, declined or stayed the same compared to the previous year.
High School Graduation Rate: Combined four-year and five-year graduation rates, including current graduation rate along with whether rates have changed over the previous year.
For more information about how the performance levels were calculated, go to the California Department of Education’s website here.
For the full dashboard for each school or district, go here.
Susy Aguilar, a literacy tutor recruited by the nonprofit Oakland REACH, meets with this small group of students for 30 minutes daily, providing science-based literacy instruction at Manzanita SEED Elementary in Oakland Unified.
Credit: The Oakland REACH
Initial findings from a study of a closely watched Oakland Unified program that recruits parents and neighbors as tutors show intriguing potential for other low-income school districts struggling to teach kids to read.
By training recruits in phonics and structured literacy and assigning them to K-2 classrooms, the initiative offers Black and Latino parents and others a direct stake in seeing their neighborhood children achieve the skills to read.
Through a partnership with The Oakland REACH, an innovative nonprofit serving low-income Black and Hispanic families, the district has been able to mine what the study calls a “pool of untapped talent” —parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, “many of them poorly served by public schools themselves and now brim with passion for addressing systemic problems in public education,” author Travis Pillow wrote in an accompanying analysis.
“People within our own community as a whole make the best tutors because we connect directly with the children,” Susy Aguilar, a tutor at Manzanita Seed Elementary, which her daughter attends, said in a video about the program. “Just believing in the children and making them believe in themselves is one of the most important things for me.”
Irene Segura, a literacy coach with Oakland Unified, said students look forward to meeting with their tutors, and the feelings are mutual.
“When their students have those light-bulb moments of putting those decodable sounds together and putting that into words, it makes them happy and more determined to continue their work,” she said.
The Oakland REACH was highlighted this week in a separate report that summarized effective tutoring practices. Accelerate, a nonprofit organization that seeks to expand high-impact tutoring programs into public schools nationwide, cited The Oakland REACH’s tutor recruitment efforts and its partnership with Oakland Unified.
The Oakland REACH is one of 31 grantees whose tutoring work Accelerate has funded. In 2022, The Oakland REACH received an unrestricted $3 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to continue its work.
The research by the Center for Reinventing Public Education also documented significant obstacles facing the program, concluding that paying the tutors a competitive wage to retain them in high-cost Oakland will be difficult. And gains in reading scores in the first year were uneven among schools and between kindergarten and first and second grades. Figuring out why is the next step.
The district, through a literacy training nonprofit, FluentSeeds, trained the tutors in the district’s phonics-based curriculum and gave them a specific goal: work in small groups with every child struggling with the elemental skill of decoding for a half-hour each day, at least three times each week. In its smoothest form, teachers communicated daily with tutors, who worked regularly with coaches, when they weren’t pulled aside to substitute teach.
The analysis of 84 tutors employed by Oakland Unified found considerable variability in student improvement. The first-year study, in 2022-23, found positive outcomes in a district where only 33% of students overall, 23% of Hispanic students, and 18% of Black students scored at standard in English language arts on the 2023 state Smarter Balanced test. The initiative is still a work in progress.
Gains made by students who were tutored in small groups were comparable to gains by students who were taught the same curriculum by classroom teachers, as measured by progress on the iReady reading assessment in the 2022-23 school year.
Students who received tutoring from an early literacy tutor made statistically significant gains on the iReady test compared with students who did not receive any instruction from the tutoring curriculum. The difference was nearly a year’s worth of reading growth; students without the training made less than half of a year’s standard reading achievement.
But the large gains in kindergarten between tutored and nontutored students were not matched in first and second grades on the iReady reading assessments. With 100% reading improvement, the expected rate of yearly gain, improvementranged from79% to 188% among low-income schools.
“Their average growth is lower than we would expect or hope for. But growth doesn’t just reflect the impact of tutors,” said Ashley Jochim, consulting principal of the Center for Reinventing Public Education and co-author of the study. “Tutors are only one part of the literacy instruction puzzle.”
Factors in and outside the school affect results, she said, including students’ chronic absences, which were among the highest in California since the pandemic. The number of tutors within a school, how they were deployed, the size of tutoring groups and scheduling are among the variables.
Another factor is the uneven support of principals, Jochim said. Among tutors responding to a survey, only half reported daily communication with classroom teachers, and fewer said they were in regular communication with school staff leading the literacy work.
“There are gaps; this is where greater attention to quality and fidelity in tutoring is important,” Jochim said.
Added Lakisha Young, founder and CEO of The Oakland REACH, “We’ve helped the district add a bunch of tutors. But if we don’t work on these other conditions to bring everything into alignment, then it’s going to make the work harder.”
Jochim said that the center will spend the last year of a two-year grant collecting better and more data to determine how differences among schools affected outcomes. The range of reading skills widens in first and second grades, complicating the ability to compare the progress of tutored students and nontutored students, she said.
The secret of success
Jochim said the most instructive lesson from the pilot is that having more adults in the classroom allows for differentiation of instruction.
“For so long in this country, we have assumed that a single teacher working alone in their classroom could sufficiently differentiate instruction for kids in literacy and math,” she said. That’s difficult, she explained, in a kindergarten class where some students are reading for comprehension while others are struggling to decode one-syllable words.
Jochim said there is “no question that this project is the right approach.”
“My thinking has evolved,” she said. “Differentiation of instructions is the ticket to better outcomes — if we can figure out the specifics.”
Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University education researcher and authority on tutoring, is bullish as well. The Oakland REACH’s partnership with the district and FluentSeeds matters, she said, because it treats tutoring as “part of a broader and coherent approach to improving literacy, not simply an ‘add-on’ program.”
“I’m excited,” she added, “what this systemic approach can offer for communities across the country.”
Dilemma over adequate pay
The level of pay may also determine if the tutoring initiative succeeds. The district pays tutors $16 to $18 per hour, plus benefits, which Young had to lobby the district for. Tutors who responded to the survey cited low pay as the biggest disincentive to the job, and it is likely a factor in why only five of the 11 tutors placed last spring returned to the job this fall.
Young acknowledged that pay appears to be the biggest obstacle to sustainability. It is a difficult issue because, under the district labor contract, bumping up the pay significantly will run into the pay level for a para-educator, which requires more education than a high-school degree. Young is exploring other options to fill the income gap, such as a retention bonus.
Roots in the pandemic
The Oakland REACH incubated the concept of community-trained tutors in the Covid summer of 2020. Parents frustrated by the failures of remote learning had cited reading instruction as their top need, so Young hired the first group of tutors. Buoyed by their success, she began working closely with the district to make early-grade reading tutoring its priority as well once schools reopened.
The Oakland REACH recruited the first group of 16 “literacy liberators,” handing out fliers on school grounds and going door-to-door in the fall of 2022 and partnered with FluentSeeds to train them in early 2023. Many had to be convinced they could do the job; the minimum requirement was a high-school degree.
According to the report, the first recruits included a young man who had seen family members struggle with reading comprehension and a retired teacher who “expressed alarm” that he had mistaught young readers and wanted to make amends through the science of reading — instruction grounded in structured literacy and evidence-based practices.
Oakland Unified hired 11 of them to fill tutoring vacancies and placed them in the classrooms last spring.
“Six months into the school year, Oakland had still not filled tutor positions in schools that served the most marginalized students. Oakland REACH was really critical to filling the gaps and ensuring the kids who most need this help are able to get it,” Jochim said.
A second cohort of 20 tutors began work in the fall of 2023.
Extra training with leadership skills
FluentSeeds gives all of Oakland’s K-2 literacy tutors a four-day course in SIPPS — Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words — the district’s early-stage intervention program. The subset of tutors that The Oakland REACH recruited for “literacy liberator fellowships” took an additional eight, two-hour sessions that provided background in the science of reading and focused on building student mindsets and tutors’ roles as leaders and advocates.
“We bring in a social-emotional component of what it means to be a teacher in Oakland teaching students that are behind, and how does that make them feel?” said Emily Grunt, program director for FluentSeeds, who has led the Oakland training.
One tutor characterized the fellowship as “life-changing.” The report described a session, offered by Decoding Dyslexia CA, in which fellows attempted to read a passage from Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild,” in which letters were changed to simulate the experience of a child with a learning disability. The passage became unreadable.
“Maybe you’re just not trying,” the trainer told the fellows, projecting the hurtful response that many students with dyslexia are told.
A model for other districts?
Interest in the program is spreading. The Oakland REACH held a conference on the tutoring model that attracted representatives from 14 nonprofits nationwide. Another conference is planned for the spring. The Oakland REACH has created a readiness assessment to determine if groups have the leadership capacity, organizational strength, funding and strong ties with the community.
“We only can work with people who have a certain level of readiness to be able to push this forward because it’s going to be really tricky,” she cautioned. “If you’re not used to working with your district at all, your head’s going to explode starting this out.”
And if you thought 2023 was a downer, just wait for …
“Hold on,” ever-wise Ms. Fensters interrupted. “Why would anyone read a New Year predictions column if you make them feel like jumping back in bed and pulling the covers over their head for the next 362 days?”
She’s right.
Let’s celebrate the dawn of the new year before wading into the swamp that will be 2024.
How’D you Do betting on 2023?
My predictions for 2023 were like my singing: off-key but not terrible.
I said third-grade English language test scores would plunge. They were stagnant.
I predicted strikes in a half-dozen districts: Teachers struck in LA, Oakland and Rohnert Park Cotati Unified, and settled within hours of hitting picket lines in San Francisco and Fresno.
I said that members of the new California College Corps, which pays college students to do community work, would become a legion of elementary school reading tutors. It was wise advice couched as a prediction, which Gov. Newsom ignored. (It’s still a good idea.)
If you kept your own scorecard, go here to compare your results. If not, grab a pencil and paper and bet your fensters for 2024. They’re redeemable with S&H Green Stamps at your local Mervyn’s.
Arts on the rise
School attendance will soar, and students will master the math of music in triads and quarter tones in districts like Manteca Unified in San Joaquin County, which will get about $3.8 million in new funding from Proposition 28. That’s the $1 billion ballot initiative, Arts and Music in Schools — Funding Guarantee and Accountability Act, that voters passed in 2022. Manteca, known for its quality bands and providing instruments to all who need them, will be better positioned than many districts. Most others will struggle to fill arts, dance and music jobs, at least initially.
Chances that arts will flourish in districts like 24,000-student Manteca Unified:
A note of caution: Under the terms of the new law, districts must use Proposition 28 to expand, not replace, existing arts funding. Eagle-eyed arts protectors will be watching how administrators move the Proposition 28 pea in the budget shells.
Chances that Create CA or other advocates will file a complaint with the California Department of Education against a district suspected of using Proposition 28 money to supplant, not supplement, its arts budget:
Now, brace yourselves for the dark side of the moon.
The state budget
Within days, Gov. Gavin Newsom will release his first pass at the 2024-25 budget, but Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek offered his gloomy forecast last month: a three-year projected state general fund deficit of $68 billion; between $16 billion and $18 billion would be in Proposition 98, the formula determining how much funding goes to TK-12 and community colleges.
Draining the state’s rainy-day fund for education and picking away at budgeted but unspent funding, perhaps for buying electric school buses and creating hundreds more community schools, could halve the problem. School lobbies will demand that legislators hold districts and community schools harmless and cut elsewhere in the state budget — to which UC President Michael Drake will reply, “You lookin’ at me?”
A likely compromise: Pay what the Legislature appropriated for 2023-24 but dust off a Great Recession strategy. Do what your boss does when he can’t make payroll but doesn’t want to lay you off: issue you IOUs. In edu-speak, they’re “deferrals” — and would involve pushing back state payments to districts scheduled for May and June 2024 into July, August or later in the next fiscal year. It’s not a painless tactic: Districts without cash on hand will have to borrow. And the money will have to be paid back, potentially eating into future levels of Proposition 98 funding.
Chances that the Legislature will impose billions in deferrals in the 2024-25 budget:
It gets worse
Schooldistricts have known the reckoning was coming. Called “the fiscal cliff,” it combines the expiration of billions in federal Covid relief, declining enrollment in nearly three-quarters of districts, and a leveling off from record state funding. What they hadn’t anticipated is a projected 1% cost of living increase, based on a federal formula that this year will disadvantage California; this compares with 8% in 2022-23 and 13% the year before that.
For districts like San Francisco Unified that negotiated sizable raises and over-hired with one-time funding, budget pressures will be intense to close underenrolled schools — never a popular decision — and lay off staff. Dozens of districts will suddenly find themselves on the state’s financial watch list.
Chances that by the March 15 notification deadline, 15,000 teachers and 10,000 classified employees, many hired with expiring federal funding, will get pink slips (the final number of layoffs will be less):
Chances that the number of districts with a financial rating of negative or qualified by FCMAT, the state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, will at least quintuple from a low of 13 districts in April 2023 to more than 65 in April 2024:
Chances that San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles will close underenrolled schools, notwithstanding common sense:
PODCAST
What’s in store for California education in 2024?
JANUARY 11, 2023
State facilities bond
The state has run out of money to subsidize the costs of new school construction and renovations; billions of dollars’ worth of districts’ projects are in the pipeline. Covid, last year’s floods and sweltering temperatures — signals of climate change — exposed the need for retrofits to meet 21st-century conditions. But the first-ever defeat of the last state bond proposal, in March 2020, proved school advocates shouldn’t take voters for granted. Was the $15 billion price tag too big? Should funding for CSU and UC be included? There will be lots of polling to answer those questions.
Chances that a school construction bond will be on the ballot in November:
Chances that it will pass:
Toil and trouble
The odds are five fensters that the fight over library books and the backlash against transgender protections in reddish districts will embroil voters statewide in 2024. Suppose school choice and religious conservatives succeed in passing the initiatives they’re aiming to place on the ballot. In that case, progressive California voters will awake with a fright on Nov. 6, wondering if they’re living in Kansas.
Proposed for November vote
Private school choice: Pushed by the coalition Californians for School Choice, the initiative would create voucher-like education savings accounts equal to the average Proposition 98 per student funding, initially $14,000, that families could use to send their kids to private schools, including religious schools currently prohibited by the state constitution from receiving public money. Home-schools with 10 or more students could form a private school for funding, too. State oversight would be minimal. Subsidies for families already paying for private schools would cost the state $6.3 billion to $10 billion per year by diverting money from Proposition 98, the Legislative Analyst estimates.
In 2002, voters rejected a voucher initiative 70% to 30%. Capitalizing on unhappiness with schooling during Covid-19, this initiative will do better, but defenders of public schools, starting with the CTA, will hugely outspend the proponents.
Because the initiative would amend the state constitution, organizers would need to collect 874,641 signatures.
Chances that the initiative will make the ballot:
Chances, if it does make the ballot, that it will lose while getting 40% of the vote:
School Transparency and Partnership Actaka Outing Trans Kids Act.Unable to get traction in the Legislature, the parent activist group Protect Kids California, co-founded by Roseville City Elementary School District board member Jonathan Zachreson, is canvassing for the 546,651 signatures required for the initiative. It would require schools to notify parents within three days if a student asks to be treated as a gender other than listed in official school records. This would include requesting a name change, a different gender pronoun, participation in an activity using a different gender, or changing clothes identifying as a different gender.
Chances the initiative will collect enough signatures to qualify:
Chances the initiative will be approved:
Protect Girls’ Sports and Spaces Act, also collecting 546,651 signatures, is the second of three related initiatives proposed by Protect Kids California. It would repeal the 2013 state law allowing students to participate in school activities and use school facilities consistent with their gender identity. Biologically born male students in grades seven and higher in public schools and colleges identifying as females would be banned from participating in female sports or using bathrooms and locker rooms assigned to females based on their birth gender.
Chances the initiative will collect enough signatures to qualify:
Chances the initiative will be approved:
Protect Children from Reproductive Harm Act, aka Parental Control Unless We Say So Act. California, which has been a sanctuary for families seeking medical care for transgender youths, will join the nearly two dozen states that ban transgender care if this initiative, the third transgender-restriction initiative pushed by Protect Kids California, passes. It would ban health care providers from giving medical care to patients under 18 seeking to change their gender identity. It would prohibit that treatment even if parents consent or doctors recommend it for the minor’s mental or physical well-being.
Chances the initiative will collect enough signatures to qualify:
Chances the initiative will be approved:
Eyes of the storm
Recall elections of school board members in two districts will serve as a gauge of whether activist conservative majorities represent a fringe minority or the will of the majority.
Longtime Orange Unified board President Rick Ledesma and newly elected board member Madison Miner angered opponents by voting with two other conservatives to fire a respected superintendent on Jan. 5 during winter break without citing a cause. In October, the board became the sixth in the state to adopt a transgender notification policy.
Chances that Orange Unified voters will oust Ledesma in the March 5 vote:
A three-member majority in Temecula Valley Unified adopted a similar playbook this year, including firing its superintendent. A political action committee of voters appears to have turned in more than enough signatures to recall board President Joseph Komrosky, their primary target, but not enough to oust Jennifer Wiersma. In July, the board stirred the ire of Gov. Gavin Newsom by rejecting a sixth-grade textbook that included a passage about gay activist Harvey Milk, whom Komrosky characterized as a pedophile. The third conservative, Danny Gonzalez, resigned in December to move out of state. In his last board meeting, he lashed out at opponents, including board member Stephen Schwartz, whom he accused of showing “vile contempt for Christians.” Schwartz is Jewish.
The outcome of the recall would be a measure of the power of the Evangelical 412 Church Temecula Valley and its pastor, Tim Thompson, who has been outspoken in defense of the board majority.
Chances that Temecula Valley voters will oust Komrosky later this year:
Etc.
California Personal Finance Education Act, aka “Why You Should Tear Up That 20th Credit Card Offer Act.” Pushed by Palo Alto entrepreneur Tim Ranzetta, who’s been proselytizing for teaching students personal finance through a nonprofit he co-founded, the initiative would require a semester of personal finance as a graduation requirement, starting with the graduating class of 2030. California would join about two dozen states with or phasing in the requirement.
Chances that it will make the ballot in November:
Chances that voters will approve it, despite some misgivings about mandating yet another graduation requirement:
Early literacy
In late December, a new alliance of advocates calling for the state to take a clearer and more resolute policy on early literacy published an early literacy policy brief with the expectation that it would lead to legislation in 2024. The California Early Literacy Coalition includes Decoding Dyslexia CA, 21st Century Alliance, Families in Schools, California Reading Coalition and the rejuvenated nonprofit EdVoice.
Among its positions, the coalition calls for:
Directing the California Department of Education to create a list of approved professional development courses grounded in the science of reading that districts and educators can select.
Requiring all teachers and reading coaches in elementary schools to complete training from the approved course list.
Providing help to schools and districts as they adopt the science of reading-aligned instructional materials.
The state, under Newsom, supports the science of reading approach to reading and, in piecemeal fashion, is partially funding some of what the coalition advocates. The difference is that a comprehensive policy would mandate what the administration has only encouraged.
Chances that a prominent legislator will sponsor the bill and that it will be one of the most discussed non-budget bills of the session:
Passage likely will take more than a year of effort and perhaps await the election of a new governor and state superintendent of public instruction willing to challenge the reflexive defense of local control on this issue.
Chances that comprehensive legislation will be signed into law in 2024:
Extra challenges for charter schools
Along with challenges facing all school districts, the state’s 1,300 charter schools will face added pressures. Many are in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where enrollment declines for districts and charter schools are largest. Tensions between them could escalate if funding-desperate districts deny charters fair access to school facilities, as the school board majority of Los Angeles Unified voted to do last year.
A pre-pandemic reform law allowing school districts to factor in financial impact when deciding to grant a new charter school will thwart growth and expansion, and the 2024-25 resumption of the charter renewal process, using problematic post-pandemic performance measures, could compound charters’ troubles. The result: Some financially fragile charters will close; the weakest performers will be shut down.
Chances that the number of charter schools in California operating in fall 2024 will drop by at least 30 schools.
One area in which legislators, charters and districts should agree is new accountability requirements for non-classroom-based charter schools that offer virtual schools or hybrid models combining home-schooling and classrooms. They’ve become more popular with families and been more prone to scams. In the two most egregious cases, A3 and Inspire charter networks, self-serving operators double-billed, falsified attendance records, and funneled funding to shell operations, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars.
San Diego County prosecutors, who convicted A3’s executives in 2019, have expressed frustration that it has taken so long to enact remedies. Three separate task forces will present findings by June.
Chances that the Legislature will pass non-classroom-based accountability reforms this year:
Worth every penny?
EdSource reporter Diana Lambert calculated that pay for superintendents in some of the state’s districts had increased by 60% in the past decade; it’s a tough job, and these days, not too many appear to want it.
Including benefits, Christopher Hoffman of Elk Grove and Alberto Carvalho of Los Angeles Unified, respectively the state’s fifth-largest and the largest districts, earn over $500,000 per year. That’s hardly chump change, but then again, Dodger pitcher and hitter extraordinaire Shohei Ohtani signed a 10-year contract for $700 million, an average of $70 million per year.
Carvalho could argue he’s certainly worth at least 1% as much: $700,000. After all, he oversees a $20 billion budget. But with declining enrollment and layoffs likely, this is not the year to swing for the fences.
Chances Carvalho or any superintendent among the 10 largest districts will receive a 7% raise this year:
The anti-anti-tax initiatives
The Business Roundtable and Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, carrying the torch of Proposition 13, have placed an initiative on the November ballot to make it harder to pass state tax increases. It would redefine a number of state-imposed fees as taxes, therefore requiring a two-thirds majority of the Legislature to pass and require all future taxes or increases approved by the Legislature to go before the general electorate for approval. It also would nullify a recent state court ruling that school parcel taxes initiated by citizens, not by school boards, need only a majority of voters to pass — instead of the standard two-thirds.
In a shrewd counter-move to head it off, legislators, mostly Democrats, voted to place a competing constitutional amendment on the November ballot. It says that any initiative that raises the voter threshold for passing taxes would need the support of two-thirds of voters, not just a simple majority, to be enacted. It’s explicitly aimed at making it less likely the Business Roundtable initiative will pass.
Chances that voters will be as confused as I am by this chess match and wonder what will happen if they both pass:
Thanks for reading the column. One more toast to 2024!
Correction: An earlier version of the article incorrectly stated that Orange Unified board President Rick Ledesma denigrated gay activist Harvey Milk. The comment was made by Joseph Komrosky, president of the Temecula Valley Unified board.
Heilig is a Professor of Educational Leadership, Research, and Technology at Western Michigan University. He is a leader in the NAACP. In addition, he is a founding board member of the Network for Public Education.
He writes:
Artificial Intelligence didn’t fall from the sky.
It wasn’t born in a vacuum or descended from some neutral cloud of innovation. It didn’t arrive pure and untainted, ready to solve all of humanity’s problems. No—AI was trained on us. On our failures. On our history. On our data. On our bias. On the systems we tolerate and the structures we’ve allowed to stand for far too long.
And that should terrify us.
Because when you train artificial intelligence on a world soaked in inequity, saturated with bias, and riddled with disinformation, you don’t get fairness. You get injustice at scale. You don’t get objectivity. You get bias with an interface. You don’t get solutions. You get systems that do harm faster, deeper, and with more plausible deniability than ever before.
Inequity in AI
AI has the potential to enhance the speed and depth of inequity. It can supercharge systemic harm because it’s built on a house of sand—data shaped by centuries of inequality and an internet flooded with algorithmically amplified hate. And if we let it, it will not only distort truth. It will undermine democracy, destabilize public education, and rewrite reality to suit the most powerful.
Artificial intelligence is not neutral. It never was. Every AI system reflects the values, decisions, and data of the people who built it. And that data—no matter how big the set—is not free of human judgment. It’s full of bias. It’s soaked in discrimination. It reflects a world where Black and Brown communities are under-resourced, where women’s voices are undervalued, where Indigenous knowledge is erased, and where racial supremacy masquerades as objectivity.
We built AI on a broken foundation, and now we expect it to hold up the future.
But the danger doesn’t stop at replication. AI doesn’t just mirror our inequities. It can multiply them. It can take individual bias and encode it into institutional operations. What used to be a bad policy or a discriminatory judgment call becomes automated across thousands—sometimes millions—of data points and decisions per second. The old excuses are gone. You no longer need a person to do harm when the algorithm will do it automatically, invisibly, and without remorse in perceptible and imperceptible ways.
Can’t stop, Won’t Stop
Furthermore, in May 2024, Palisade Research revealed something that should have been a flashing red light across every sector of society. OpenAI’s most advanced models—o3 and o4-mini—refused to shut down when directly instructed to do so. These AI systems sabotaged their own shutdown protocols. Seven out of 100 times, o3 ignored the shutdown command. Codex-mini disobeyed twelve times. Even o4-mini, supposedly safer, resisted once.
That’s not science fiction. That’s today.
Instead of following human instructions, these models rewrote the shutdown script and continued executing tasks. Researchers believe the models had been so deeply trained to win, to complete tasks, that they were inadvertently rewarded for disobedience. In their simulated world, success was more important than ethics. Productivity was more important than control.
Let that sink in.
We are building machines that—when told to stop—don’t. That’s not innovation. That’s an existential threat.
And we are putting these systems into our schools.
Teacher apprentice Ja’net Williams helps with a math lesson in a first grade class at Delta Elementary Charter School in Clarksburg, near Sacramento.
Credit: Diana Lambert / EdSource
Top Takeaways
California leaders dismiss the criticism and methodology of the rankings.
And yet, graduate credentialing programs cram a lot in a year.
Many teachers may struggle with the demands of California’s new math framework.
In its “State of the States” report on math instruction published last week, the National Council on Teacher Quality sharply criticized California and many of its teacher certification programs for ineffectively preparing new elementary teachers to teach math and for failing to support and guide them once they reach the classroom.
“Far too many elementary teacher prep programs fail to dedicate enough instructional time to building aspiring teachers’ math knowledge — leaving teachers unprepared and students underserved,” the council said in its evaluation of California’s 87 programs that prepare elementary school teachers. “The analysis shows California programs perform among the lowest in the country.”
The report’s call for more teacher math training and ongoing support coincides with the state’s adoption this summer of materials and textbooks for a new math framework that math professionals universally agree will be a heavy lift for incoming and veteran teachers to master. It will challenge elementary teachers with a poor grasp of the underpinnings behind the math they’ll be teaching.
Kyndall Brown, executive director of the California Mathematics Project based at UCLA, agrees. “It’s not just about knowing the content, it’s about helping students learn the content, which are two completely different things,” he said.
And that raises a question: Does a one-year-plus-summer graduate program, which most prospective teachers take, cram too much in a short time to realistically meet the needs to teach elementary school math?
California joined two dozen states whose math preparation programs were rated as “weak.” Only one state got a “strong” rating.Source: National Council on Teacher Quality, 2025 State of the States report
Failing grades
The council graded every teacher prep program nationwide from A to F, based on how many instructional hours they required prospective teachers to take in major content areas of math and in instructional methods and strategies.
Three out of four California programs got an F, with some programs — California State University, Sacramento, and California State University, Monterey Bay — requiring no instructional hours for algebraic thinking, geometry, and probability, and many offering one-quarter of the 135 instructional hours needed for an A.
But there was a dichotomy: All the Fs were given to one-year graduate school programs offering a multi-subject credential to teach elementary school, historically the way most new teachers in California get their teaching credential.
On the other hand, many of the colleges and universities offering a teaching credential and a bachelor’s degree through an Integrated Undergraduate Teacher Credentialing Program got an A, because they included enough time to go into math instruction and content in more depth. For example, California State University, Long Beach’s 226 instructional hours, apportioned through all of the content areas and methods courses, earned an A-plus.
The California State University rejects the recent grading from the National Council on Teacher Quality about our high-quality teacher training programs
California State University
Most of the universities that offer both undergraduate and graduate programs — California State University, Bakersfield; San Jose State University; California State University, Chico; California State University, Northridge, to name a few — had the same split: A for their undergraduate programs, F for their graduate credentialing programs.
Most California teacher preparation programs have received bad grades in the dozen years that the council has issued evaluations. The state’s higher education institutions, in turn, have defended their programs and denounced the council for basing the quality of a program on analyses of program websites and syllabi.
California State University, whose campuses train the majority of teachers, and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which accredits and oversees teacher prep programs, issued similar denunciations last week.
“The California State University rejects the recent grading from the National Council on Teacher Quality about our high-quality teacher training programs,” the CSU wrote in a statement. The council “relies on a narrow and flawed methodology, heavily dependent on document reviews, rather than on dialogue with program faculty, students and employers or a systematic review of meaningful program outcomes.”
The credentialing commission, in a more diplomatic response, agreed. The report “reflects a methodology that differs from California’s approach to educator preparation,” it said. “While informative, it does not fully capture the structure of California’s clinically rich, performance-based system.”
Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality for the past three years, dismissed the criticism as “a really weak critique.”
“You can look at a syllabus and see what’s being taught in that class much in the same way that if you go to a restaurant and look at the menu to see what’s being served,” she said. “Our reviews are certainly a very solid starting place to know to what extent teacher preparation programs are well preparing future teachers to be effective in teaching.”
It’s not just a problem in California.
“When we compare the mathematics instructional hours between the undergrad and the graduate programs, often on the same campus, we saw on average that undergrads get 133 hours compared to just 52 hours at the graduate level. In both cases, it is not meeting the recommended and research-based 150 hours,” Peske said.
Part of the problem is that graduate programs usually don’t have enough time to instill future teachers with the content knowledge that they need.
Heather Peske
Whether or not examining website data is a good methodology, the disparities in hours devoted to math preparation between undergraduate and graduate programs raise an important issue.
True jacks of all trades, elementary teachers must become proficient in many content areas — social studies, English language arts, English language development for English learners, and science, as well as math. Add to that proficiency in emerging technologies, classroom management, skills for teaching students with disabilities, and student mental health: How can they adequately cover math, especially?
“Part of the problem is that graduate programs usually don’t have enough time to instill future teachers with the content knowledge that they need,” Peske said. “California programs have to reckon with this idea that they’re sending a bunch of teachers into classrooms who have not demonstrated that they are ready to teach kids math.”
Brown said, “There’s no way that in a one-year credential program that they’re going to get the math that they need to be able to teach the content that they’re responsible for teaching.”
That was Anthony Caston’s experience. Before starting his career as a sixth-grade teacher at Foulks Ranch Elementary School in Elk Grove three years ago, Caston took courses for his credential in graduate programs at Sacramento State and the University of the Pacific. There wasn’t enough time to learn all he needed to teach the subject, he said. A few classes were useful, but didn’t get much beyond the third- or fourth-grade curriculum, he said.
“I had to take myself back to school, reteach myself everything, and then come up with some teaching strategies,” Caston said.
Fortunately for him, veteran teachers at his school helped him learn more about Common Core math and how to teach it.
The math content Brown refers togoes beyond knowing how to invert fractions or calculate the area of a triangle; it involves a conceptual understanding of essential math topics, Peske said. Only a deeper conceptual grasp will enable teachers to diagnose and explain students’ errors and misunderstandings, Peske said, and to overcome the math phobia that surveys show many teachers have.
Ma Bernadette Salgarino, the president of the California Mathematics Council and a math trainer in the Santa Clara County Office of Education, acknowledges that many math teachers have not been taught the concepts behind the progression of the state’s math standards. “It is not clear to them,” she said. “They’re still teaching to a regurgitation of procedures, copy and paste. These are the steps, and this is what you will do.”
Although a longtime critic of the council, Linda Darling-Hammond, who chaired California’s credentialing commission before becoming the current president of the State Board of Education, acknowledges that the report raises a legitimate issue.
“Time is an important question,” she said. “It is true that having more time well spent — the ‘well spent’ matters — could make a difference for lots of people in learning lots of subjects, including math.”
Darling-Hammond faults the study, however, for not factoring in California’s broader approach to teacher preparation, including requiring that teaching candidates pass a performance assessment in math and underwriting teacher residency programs, in which teachers work side by side with an effective teacher for a full year while taking courses in a graduate program.
“You could end up becoming a pretty spectacular math teacher in a shorter amount of time than if you’re just studying things in an undergraduate program disconnected from student teaching,” she said.
Weak state policies
The report also grades every state’s policies on math instruction, from preparing teachers to coaching them after they’re in the classroom. California and two dozen states are rated “weak,” ahead of seven “unacceptable” states (Montana, Arizona, Nebraska, Missouri, Alaska, Vermont and Maine) while behind 17 “moderate” states, including Texas and Florida, and a sole “strong” state, Alabama.
The council bases the rating on the implementation of five policy “levers” to ensure “rigorous standards-aligned math instruction.” However, California’s actions are more nuanced than perhaps its “unacceptable” ratings on three and “strong” ratings on two would indicate.
For example, the council dinged the state for not requiring that all teachers in a prep program pass a math licensure test. California does require elementary credential candidates to pass the California Subject Examinations for Teachers, or CSET, a basic skills test, before they can teach students. But the math portion is combined with science, and students can avoid the test by supplying proof they have taken undergraduate math courses.
At the same time, many superintendents and math teachers may be doing a double-take for a “strong” rating for providing professional learning and ongoing support for teachers to sustain effective math instruction.
Going back to the adoption of the Common Core, the state has not funded statewide teacher training in math standards. In the past five years, the state has spent $500 million to train literacy coaches in the state’s poorest schools, but nothing of that magnitude for math coaches.
The Legislature approved $20 million for the California Mathematics Project for training in the new math framework, which was passed in 2023, and $50 million in 2022-23 for instruction in grades fourth to 12th in science, math and computer science training to train coaches and teacher leaders — amounts that would be impressive for smaller states, but not to fund training most math teachers in California. (You can find a listing of organizations offering training and resources on the math framework here.)
In keeping with local control, Gov. Gavin Newsom has appropriated more than $10 billion in education block grants, including the Student Support and Professional Development Discretionary Block Grant,and the Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant, but those are discretionary; districts have wide latitude to spend money however they want on any subject.
Tucked into a section on Literacy Instruction in Newsom’s May budget revision (see Page 19) is the mention that a $545 million grant for materials instruction will include a new opportunity to support math coaches, too. The release of the final state budget for 2025-26 later this month will reveal whether that money survives.
Brown calls for hiring more math specialists for schools and for three-week summer intensive math leadership institutes like the one he attended in 1994. It hasn’t been held since the money ran dry in the early 2000s.
EdSource reporter Diana Lambert contributed to this article.
When Trump named Ed Martin as Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, those who know his record (and are not faithful Trumpers) were appalled. He had actively defended the January 6 insurrection and had a long record as a Putin apologist, among other things. A strange choice for a very important role in law enforcement. Fortunately, the Republicans who are a majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected his nomination.
Ed Martin is a major actor in Trump’s attempted regime change to authoritarianism. His particular role is to transform the law into a tool to intimidate Americans. After a stint as interim US Attorney for DC which was marked by unprecedented weaponization of the position, Martin will now continue his work for Trump as the official “weaponization czar.”
This is a new position within the Justice Department, designed by the Trump administration, to punish people who have committed no crimes. Martin was originally placed on the “weaponization working group” seemingly ex officio when he was a US Attorney; he will now continue as its chairman. On Martin’s account, his assignment will be to publicly single out Americans who have not been found guilty of anything, or for that matter even indicted. He says there will be “no limit to the targets.”
Martin’s authoritarian past and loyalties are a matter of public record. He helped build an alternative reality around Trump’s Big Lie and coup attempt, treating the January 6th criminals as heroes deserving of financial support and pardons. As interim US attorney, he described himself as President Trump’s lawyer, and abused his position to send letters to people who displeased the president in some way. He threatened journalists, universities and scientists.
Martin, to use the historical term, is taking an ostentatious part in the ongoing attempt at what the Nazis called a Gleichschaltung of institutions: of dropping the distinction between the law and the leader, and of attempting to force everyone in public life into line with the leader’s latest statements. The reference is not accidental. Martin is on the far right, and an advocate of great replacement theory: the spurious idea that a conspiracy seeks to replace white Americans with immigrants. He had a very supportive relationshipwith a known American Nazi.
The czars, lest we forget, were Russian autocrats. The title “weaponization czar” reminds us that much of happening in the United States under Trump happened first in the home of the czars. In the Russian Federation today, the law is weaponized. Prosecutions follow the whims of Putin and his regime, and that the law will be invoked against them according to the political (and financial) interests of those who hold power. Russian media is full of accusations made by Russian officials that people are criminals or wrongdoers, even before they have been tried or subjected to any judicial procedure.
It is important that we understand that Russian-style authoritarianism is a real possibility in the world, one which Martin not only advocates but represents. Russia is not a comparison for Martin. It is a central part of his career. He has no actual qualifications to serve in the Department of Justice. His role has to do instead with making the law something that it is not supposed to be: a way to protect the powerful and punish the innocent who offend them. He auditioned for this role as a propagandist for Russia’s regime.
The title “weaponization czar” is appropriate because Martin’s most interesting achievements thus far are, in fact, in the service of Russia. He has done more visible work for the Russian state television than for any other institution. Martin, in other words, has already been part of one weaponized legal system for some time. His American career as “weaponization czar” is a natural second step of his Russian career as apologist for both Russian and American weaponizers and authoritarians.
Between 2016 and 2024, Martin was a star of both RT and Sputnik, which are propaganda arms of the Russian state. Putin himself has made this completely clear. One of the central missions of RT and Sputnik is to weaken the standing and power of the United States. Anyone who goes on RT or Sputnik, as Martin did more than a hundred times, knows what he is doing. For eight years, on any issue of the day, Martin was there to spread mendacious propaganda about Americans and to defend Putin and Trump. His Russian work surpassed any media exposure in the United States.
Julia Davis, who does the important work of contextualizing Russian propaganda television available for a global viewership, has made Martin’s appearances visible. With her permission, I am sharing her work in the following paragraph. It provides samples, with video links back to his appearances, of how Ed Martin spreads untruth in the service of Russian and American authoritarians. If you want to take the time to judge more of his appearances than the ones I cite below, here (again thanks to Julia Davis) is a longer compilationof Martin’s appearances on Russian propaganda television.
Trump as American president can do, says Martin on Russian propaganda television, whatever he wants. Martin proposes that we should live in the alternative reality provided by the Russian propaganda he serves, since American media cannot be trusted. He instructs us that American elections are rigged and that the January 6th criminals are political prisoners. (Note that Martin was thereby on Russian propaganda television forecasting his own role in seeking pardons for these people and raising money for them.) Martin denied that Russia interfered in the 2016 US elections, although this was quite blatant — and indeed continuous, right down to the uncontested reports that Russians called in bomb scares to predominantly Democratic precincts in 2024. Martin also quite clear on the American role in the world, which is that the US should serve Putin and his wars. Echoing Russian claims at the time, Martin claimed that US intelligence was wrong about the coming full-scale US invasion of Ukraine, when is in fact it was entirely correct. In his view, the NATOalliance is unnecessary. The United States should be Russia’s ally.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when long service to hostile foreign propaganda networks would have been disqualifying for positions in the federal government. Now, as the head of RT boasts, it seems to be a qualification. Since Trump wants loyalists to him rather than to the United States, willingness to serve foreign countries, at least corrupt dictatorships, would be a useful filter. Repeating Russian propaganda tropes could hardly be offensive to Trump; he does this all the time. Taking part in Putin’s propaganda system would be naturally understood as the right kind of apprenticeship for work on Trump’s own regime change. We know that Trump chooses his people by treating their television appearances as auditions. So why not Russian television appearances? All the better.
No surprisingly, Martin says that his key assignment as weaponization czar will be to punish those who investigated Trump’s very real connections to Russia. This country has paid a huge price for not recognizing Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election for what it was: highly consequential and quite possibly decisive in the moment, and a sign of the coming age of oligarchical cooperation via digital tools to build right-wing regimes. That age is now upon us. There is, unmistakably, something very strange about the Trump’s submissiveness to Russia: appointing its media darlings (the list includes Tulsi Gabbard, who is of all things director of national intelligence); exempting it from tariffs when everyone else was targeted, refusing to pressure Putin to end a war when that is the obvious policy, sending as his envoy to Moscow a man who simply repeats Russian claims and uses Russian translations. Too many of us have allowed ourselves to be intimidated by the fear that Trump will use the word “hoax” when we point to the Russian elements of our present reality: such as, for example, that our “weaponization czar” apprenticed in the role in the service of Russia. With our weaponization of the law and our czars, we have a Russia problem.
Working with Russian institutions will not hurt Martin with Trump’s followers, who have been trained to see Russia not as an actual country with interests but as part of a “hoax,” a conspiracy against Trump. This is the sad convenience of “America First”: it really means “America Only”: no matter how things get, we get to be first, since no other countries exist in our minds. If other countries are meaningless, then MAGA people can rest assured that there is nothing like the complicity of international oligarchs, or the guild of international fascists, or the plans of countries like Russia to destroy the United States from within. If other countries do not matter, then it never seems right to ask: just why is it that Russian propaganda and Trumpian rhetoric so often overlap, to the point that training on one is preparation for mouthing the other? But there are, of course, Republicans who have a notion of the interests of the United States, and of the rule of law. For them, Martin’s services to Russia should matter.
The Russia connection is perhaps most important to opponents of Trump. Speaking of Martin’s connections to Russia is not a way of sloughing off responsibility to another country for our own failings. It is, instead, a way to take responsibility. So long as we see Trump and his loyalists as purely American characters, our American exceptionalism tempts us to normalize what they do. We ask ourselves, over and over again, if this is “really” an attempt to end democracy. But if we take seriously the connections of someone like Martin with a hostile foreign authoritarian power engaged in a genocidal war, we get a sense of where things could be headed. Russia is a real country and, for us, a real possibility. When we recognize that the attempt to make America authoritarian is part of a tawdry global trend, with general patterns that we can recognize, we can better see where we are, and get to work.
The U.S. Senate just passed Trump’s massive budget bill, which renews tax cuts for the rich and makes deep cuts to Medicaid, about $1 trillion. Three Republican Senators voted against it: Rand Paul of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Susan Collins of Maine. Vice-President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote. Many hoped that Lisa Murkowski of Alaska would also oppose the bill but the leadership bought her off by adding special exemptions and benefits for Alaskans.
Combined with the impact of Trump’s tariffs — which the White House has argued will help pay for the bill’s tax cuts and new spending — the bottom 80 percent of households would see their take-home incomes fall, according to the Yale Budget Lab.
“The right way to understand this bill is it is the largest wealth transfer from the poorest Americans to the richest Americans in modern history,” said Natasha Sarin, the Budget Lab’s president.
Shortly before the bill passed, I received two reports on the education section. Contrary to earlier reports, the Republicans restored vouchers. Apparently they satisfied the objections of the Senate Parliamentarian or decided to ignore them.
Leigh Dingerson, public school advocate who works for “In the Public Interest,” sent out this update shortly before the Senate passed the bill. The biggest takeaway: Vouchers are in again.
For the last 24 hours (more, actually), the Senate has been voting on a slew of amendments to the bill. Most are going down along party lines. At the same time, the Senate parliamentarian has been reviewing the bill for germaneness. She has struck out several provisions including, initially, the voucher language (this was Friday). But it was reinserted Saturday morning. Since then, some tweaks to the voucher language were made in an effort to win over some reluctant senators. Each time the language was changed, it had to go back through the parliamentarian.
This morning at about 2:15 am, Senator Hirono, along with Senators Reed, Kaine and van Hollen, presented their amendment on the floor of the Senate — an amendment to strike the voucher section altogether. That amendment needed 51 votes to pass. It got 50. All the Democrats voted in favor. All Republicans with the exception of Senators Fischer, Collins and Murkowski opposed it.
The voucher language currently in the bill has some important differences from where it started. Here are some key changes to the bill:
The tax credit is permanent, and now unlimited. There is no federal ceiling on how much can be spent. Republicans removed the $4 billion volume cap on the total amount of donations.
But!! Current language limits the amount a donor can get a tax credit on: The text now allows any individual to donate to an SGO for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit worth $1,700 (rather than 10% of adjusted gross income originally).
States can now “opt in” to the program and must provide a list of approved scholarship granting organizations. And the bill clarifies that SGOs can only administer school vouchers within their state. This eliminates our worry that an SGO in Florida, for example, could hand out vouchers in Nebraska.
The Senate has removed the provision asserting that there shall be no Federal control over private or religious schools. In other words, the door has been opened to federal regulation of schools funded with federal vouchers.
The bill provides broad authority for the Secretary of Treasury to regulate the program, including explicit authority to regulate scholarship granting organizations and opening the door to regulate private schools.
So as you can see, there have been a lot of changes, some good, some bad.
###############
The NATIONAL COALITION FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION released the following statement:
National Coalition for Public Education Denounces Senate Vote on Private School VoucherProgram in “OBBB”
Today, the Senate voted to include an uncapped national private school voucher program in its budget reconciliation bill. This represents the first time a majority of the lawmakers in the U.S. Senate have ever supported sending public dollars to private schools. Now that both chambers have voiced their support for private school voucher provisions, it is likely to become law this year, forcing tax dollars to support private religious schools that can pick and choose who they educate and discriminate explicitly against students with disabilities.
Vouchers divert critical funds from public schools, which 90% of American families choose for their children to attend. Vouchers often go to students who never attended public schools in the first place, which drains taxpayer funds to subsidize private school tuition for well-off families who could afford it without money from the government. Under this harmful program, there will be no accountability for money sent to private schools, nor would the private schools be bound by key provisions of federal civil rights laws, which public schools follow.
If this becomes law, the federal government will give a dollar-for-dollar tax credit to people who give money to use for payments for children to attend private schools or be homeschooled. This was not done previously with any other 501(c)3 donation in our history, and no other non-profit classified as a 501(c)3) would benefit from this one-to-one tax lowering scheme.
America’s public schools educate all students in every community. Private schools that take taxpayer-funded vouchers, however, often discriminate against students for any number of reasons, including based on their disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, English language ability, academic abilities, disciplinary history, ability to pay tuition, or what their family looks like. The language that was in the House-passed bill about private schools maintaining policies that do not take into account whether or not a student has an Individualized Education Program (though these are not full protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) was stripped in the Senate bill and supporters of the voucher provision criticized this language.
Public schools are a cornerstone of American democracy. NCPE condemns Congress diverting billions of dollars away from public education and toward discriminatory, ineffective private school vouchers
About 18,000 Chinese students are enrolled at the University of California, 2,600 at California community colleges and 850 at California State University.
Chinese students have increasingly chosen colleges outside the U.S., including closer to home in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Like all international students, Chinese students can be a valuable source of tuition for public universities, since they pay more than California residents.
A flurry of at-times contradictory White House pronouncements are stoking confusion and concern among the 50,000 Chinese nationals who are studyingat California’s colleges and universities — and potentially steering students away from further work and study in the U.S.
Recent shifts in U.S. policy toward China have cast a “cloud of suspicion” over Chinese students, said Gisela Perez Kusakawa, the executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum, an advocacy group.
“Let’s say you invested all this time, money and energy and years of your life studying to get into a prominent university here in the U.S.,” she said. “You get in, [but] now it’s no longer guaranteed that you could actually finish that degree.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a two-sentence statement on May 28 that the U.S. would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” He also pledged to “enhance scrutiny” of future visa applications from China and Hong Kong.
But the proposal for stronger visa enforcement appears to have been short-lived. On June 11, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would allow Chinese students into colleges and universities as part of a trade truce with China.
The flip from crackdown to rapprochement is one of the latest flash points in a volatile period for Chinese students. Even before Trump’s second term, fewer Chinese students were coming to American universities, data show. International students on U.S. college campuses have experienced a tumultuous spring term as the Trump administration first terminated and later said it would restore thousands of international students’ records in a federal database. The State Department in May paused new student visa interviews but said Wednesday it would resume processing and require applicants to make social media accounts public for government review.
V., a Chinese national student at UC Davis, who requested that EdSource withhold his full name in light of uncertain U.S. immigration policy, said the reelection of Trump has made him “a little bit afraid of speaking out.”
“I’m more conscious about, if I speak online or on social media, maybe I’ll get deported,” he said, even though he generally avoids posting anything political online.
Though he hopes to continue working in the U.S. when he graduates this summer, V. knows several Chinese students who also attended American colleges as undergraduates and initially intended to pursue graduate degrees in the U.S., but are now continuing their education in other foreign countries instead.
The ebb and flow of Chinese students is of particular interest to higher education institutions in California. China accounts for 36% of all international enrollment in the state, according to the Institute of International Education, making it California’s single-largest country of origin for international students. Nearly 18,000 Chinese international studentsare enrolled at the University of California, almost 6,000 at the University of Southern California, about 2,600 across the state’s community colleges and roughly 850 at California State University.
Those students bring with them coveted tuition dollars, a boon to the state’s public universities, where international students pay a premium over the rate charged to California residents.
California universities responded to the Trump administration’s statements on Chinese student visas with expressions of support for international students from China. A written statement from the UC system on June 11 said the public university system “is concerned about the U.S. State Department’s announcement to revoke visas of Chinese students.” The statement said international students and scholars are “vital members of our university community and contribute greatly to our research, teaching, patient care and public service mission.”
If Chinese students were to stop attending U.S. colleges and universities, their absence would be felt across academic disciplines. More than a fifth of Chinese students in the U.S. studied math and computer science, roughly 17% pursued engineering and almost 13% sought degrees in business and management, according to 2023-24 data from the Institute of International Education.
Chinese students are most heavily enrolled in U.S. graduate programs. Roughly 123,000 Chinese nationals studying at U.S. colleges and universities — about 44% of all Chinese students in the U.S. — are graduate students.
Sources interviewed for this story emphasized that Chinese students are weighing not only the immediate twists and turns of U.S. foreign policy, but longer-term concerns about cost of living and the draw of preferable options closer to home. They also noted that restrictions on Chinese students are consistent with policies Trump pursued during his first term.
‘Our parents are super, super worried’
A Chinese international student at the University of Southern California who graduated from a Ph.D. program in May said he has become accustomed to exchanging concerned text messages with friends whenever news of possible changes to U.S. immigration policy breaks. EdSource agreed to withhold his full name due to his concerns about increased scrutiny on international students.
“I’ve gotten texts from people saying, ‘Oh, are you OK? Are you safe?’ I’ve got people checking on each other, asking them, ‘So what can happen to the current visa holders? And if I already scheduled [a visa interview], will I still be able to go?’” he said.
Already, he added, peers in China are contemplating pursuing their degrees in the United Kingdom or Australia as alternatives to the U.S. The student himself is applying for Optional Practical Training, which allows eligible international students to extend their time in the U.S. after completing an academic program.
Meanwhile, at UC Davis, V. has found something like a second home. He has joined a sports team, pledged a fraternity and played an instrument in a school-affiliated band. Contrary to the stereotypes of U.S. cities as plagued by gun violence and crime that are common in Chinese media, he has found Davis to be peaceful, diverse and open-hearted.
But with the latest vacillations in U.S. immigration policy, concern is growing at home among Chinese students’ families. “Our parents are super, super worried,” he said, something evident whenever he checks a group chat where the parents of Chinese students in the U.S. share their questions and concerns.
A gradual slide in Chinese students at U.S. colleges
There are ample signs that Chinese students have been cooling on American degrees long before Trump’s return to office this year.
Data from the Institute of International Education show that the number of Chinese students in the U.S. increased rapidly during the 2000s, a trend that continued at a slower pace through the early years of the first Trump administration.
But the number of Chinese internationals at U.S. institutions began to drop with the onset of Covid-19 and has continued to fall since. As of the 2023-24 school year, there were more than 277,000 Chinese students in the U.S., down more than 95,000 students from pre-pandemic levels in 2019-20.
Several expertsinterviewed for this story framed the Trump administration’s recent statements about Chinese students as the latest of several policy changes that may discourage Chinese students from attending college in the U.S.
After Trump left office in 2021, Biden administration Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken struck a more conciliatory tone regarding Chinese students in the U.S., saying in a May 2022 speech that the U.S. “can stay vigilant about our national security without closing our doors.” And during a November 2023 meeting, former President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping expressed a commitment to more educational exchanges.
But the Biden administration initially continued a Department of Justice (DOJ) initiative launched under Trump in 2018, which targeted Chinese researchers accused of stealing American intellectual property. The Biden DOJ ended the program in 2022 following concerns about racial profiling.
And in March 2024, before Trump’s return to office, reports surfaced that more than a dozen Chinese students were denied reentry into the U.S. despite holding a valid visa, while others reported being searched and questioned for hours at the U.S. border. The State Department told The Washington Post at the time that the number of Chinese students found to be inadmissible for entry had been stable in recent years.
‘We are still hoping it’s getting better’
Geopolitical concerns are not the only reasons some Chinese students may think twice about studying at U.S. colleges and universities.
Al Wang, the general manager of Wiseway Global, which recruits Chinese students to study in other countries, said that Chinese students may not apply tocertain U.S. institutions because rankings of the best universities in the world tend to score institutions in countries like the United Kingdom and Singapore above U.S. rivals. In addition, he said, Chinese students may choose to stay home for college, seeing joint-degree programs in China with U.S. universities like Duke as a more economical option.
Wang nonetheless anticipates that the U.S. and China will continue cooperating on education and cultural exchange programs, something the Chinese Ministry of Education has encouraged. He predicted that more Chinese students will study abroad in the U.S. for a school term or summer intensive, rather than enrolling in degree programs. “We are still hoping it’s getting better, but we don’t know where it’s going,” he said.
The Chinese international student at USC suggested that U.S. universities aiming to maintain their international student population should focus on providing legal support, security and a sense of belonging. Failing that, he added, it won’t take long for current students to warn would-be classmates.
“They’re going to tell their peers from high school, or they’re going to tell people from home, ‘Oh, don’t come,’” he said.
Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor for North Alabama. She writes an important blog called Civil Discourse, where she usually explains court decisions and legal issues. Today she turns to education.
Today I’m recovering from the graduation tour, one in Boulder and one in Boston in the last two weeks, and getting back into the groove of writing as I continue to work on my book (which I hope you’ll preorder if you haven’t already). The graduations came at a good moment.
Watching my kids graduate, one from college and one with a master’s in science, was an emotional experience—the culmination of their years of hard work, sacrifice, and growth, all captured in a single walk across the stage. They, like their friends, my law students, and amazing students across the county, now enter society as adults. Even beyond the individual stories of hardships overcome and perseverance, witnessing these rites of passage makes me feel profoundly hopeful. The intelligence and commitment of the students—many of whom are already tackling big problems and imagining new, bold solutions—gives me a level of confidence about what comes next for our country. In a time when it’s easy to get discouraged, their commitment and idealism stands as a powerful reminder that they are ready to take on the mess we have left them.
The kids are alright, even though they shouldn’t have to be. Talking with them makes me think they will find a way, even if it’s unfair to ask it of them and despite the fact that their path will be more difficult than it should be. Courage is contagious, and they seem to have caught it. Their educations have prepared them for the future we all find ourselves in now.
As students across the country prepared to graduate this year, Trump released his so-called “skinny budget.” If that’s how they want to frame it, then education has been put on a starvation diet—at least the kind of education that develops independent thinkers who thrive in an environment where questions are asked and answered. Trump pitches the budget as “gut[ting] a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security.” Defense spending would increase by 13% under his proposal.
The plan for education is titled, “Streamline K-12 Education Funding and Promote Parental Choice.”Among its provisions, the announcement focuses on the following items:
“The Budget continues the process of shutting down the Department of Education.”
“The Budget also invests $500 million, a $60 million increase, to expand the number of high-quality charter schools, that have a proven track record of improving students’ academic achievement and giving parents more choice in the education of their children.”
As we discussed in March, none of this is a surprise. Trump is implementing the Project 2025 plan. In December of 2024, I wrote about how essential it is to dumb down the electorate if you’re someone like Donald Trump and you want to succeed. A rich discussion in our forums followed. At the time I wrote, “Voters who lack the backbone of a solid education in civics can be manipulated. That takes us to Trump’s plans for the Department of Education.” But it’s really true for the entirety of democracy.
Explaining the expanded funding for charter schools, a newly written section of the Department of Education website reads more like political propaganda than education information: “The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it has reigned [Ed: Note the word “”reigned” is misspelled] in the federal government’s influence over state Charter School Program (CSP) grant awards. The Department removed a requirement set by the Biden Administration that the U.S. Secretary of Education review information on how states approve select entities’ (e.g., private colleges and universities) authorization of charter schools in states where they are already lawful authorizers. This action returns educational authority to the states, reduces burdensome red tape, and expands school choice options for students and families.”
There are already 37 lawsuits related to Trump’s changes to education. Uncertainty is no way to educate America’s children. Cutting funding for research because you want to score political points about DEI or climate change is no way to ensure we nurture future scientists and other thinkers and doers…
I am reminded again of George Orwell’s words: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” The historians among us, and those who delve into history, will play a key role in getting us through this. Our love and understanding of history can help us stay grounded, understanding who we are, who we don’t want to become, and why the rule of law matters so damn much to all of it….
Thanks for being here with me and for supporting Civil Discourse by reading and subscribing. Your paid subscriptions make it possible for me to devote the time and resources necessary to do this work, and I am deeply grateful for them.
)
)
