The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is the most distinguished scholarly organization in the nation. It is dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences. It is decidedly nonpartisan. I was elected to membership many years ago. AAAS rarely issues a statement. Its board did so in April because of unprecedented attacks on higher education, scholarly independence, and the rule of law.
A statement from the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Approved April 2025.
Since its founding in 1780, the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences has sought “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuouspeople.” We do this by celebrating excellence in every field of human endeavor and by supporting the unfettered pursuit of knowledge and its application to the common good.
The Academy fosters nonpartisan, deliberative discourse on pressing issues facing our communities in the United States and the world.Our founders were also the founders of our nation. From them, we inherit a deep commitment to the practice of democratic self-governance. Our constitutional democracy has been imperfect, but almost 250 years since its inception, it remains an inspiration to peoplenear and far. Ours is a great nation because ofour system of checks and balances, separation of powers, individual rights, and an independent judiciary — as the Academy’s founder JohnAdams put it, “a government of laws, not of men.” And we are a great nation because we haveinvested in the arts and sciences while protecting the freedom that enables them to flourish.
These values are under serious threat today.Every president of the United States has the prerogative to set new priorities and agendas; nopublic or private institution is above criticism or calls for reform; and no reasoned arguments, from the left or the right, should be silenced. But current developments, in their pace, scale, and hostility toward institutions dedicated to knowledge and the pursuit of truth, have little precedent in our modern history.
We oppose reckless funding cuts and restrictions that imperil the research enterprise of our universities, hospitals, and laboratories, which contribute enormously to our prosperity, health, and national security. We condemn efforts to censor our scholarly and cultural institutions, to curtail freedom of the press, and to purge inquiry or ideas that challenge prevailing policies. We vigorously support the independence of the judiciary and the legal profession, and opposeactions and threats intended to erode thatindependence and, in turn, the rule of law.
In this time of challenge, we cherish theseprinciples and stand resilient against efforts to undermine them. The Academy will continue to urge public support for the arts and sciences, and also work to safeguard the conditions of freedom necessary for novel discoveries, creative expression, and truth-seeking in all its forms. We join a rising chorus of organizations and individuals determined to invigorate the democratic ideals of our republic and its constitutional values, and prevent our nation from sliding toward autocracy.
In the coming months and years, the Academy will rededicate itself to studying, building, and amplifying the practices of constitutional democracy in their local and national forms, with particular focus on its pillars of freedom of expression and the rule of law. We call on all citizens to help fortify a civic culture unwavering in its commitment to our founding principles.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced Friday that the state has released $470 million to 302 school districts, charters and county offices of education to fund the Golden State Pathways program.
The program allows students to “advance seamlessly from high school to college and career and provides the workforce needed for economic growth.”
“It’s an incredibly historic investment for the state,” said Anne Stanton, president of the Linked Learning Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates giving youth opportunities to learn about careers.
Both the state and federal governments previously made big investments in preparing students for college or career at the K-12 level, but the Golden State Pathways program is different in that it challenges school districts, colleges, employers and other community groups to create “pathways” — or a focused series of courses — that prepare K-12 students for college and career at the same time. These pathways aim to prepare students for well-paying careers in fields such as health care, education and technology, while also ensuring that they take 12 college credits through dual enrollment courses and the A-G classes needed to apply to public four-year universities.
“By establishing career technical pathways that are also college preparatory, the Golden State Pathways Program provides a game-changing opportunity for California’s young people,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Thurmond said in a statement.
The Golden State Pathways are an important part of the new master plan for education — Newsom’s vision to transform career education in California — which is expected by the year’s end.
The state is distributing the vast majority of the funding — $422 million — to enable schools to implement their plans in partnership with higher education and other community partners. The remaining $48 million will assist those who still need grants for planning.
All sorts of schools throughout the state — rural and urban, large and small — benefited from the funding.
Schools in the rural Northern California counties of Tehama and Humboldt — whose K-12 enrollment is under 30,000 students — jointly received about $30 million to implement and plan pathways to help students stay on track for college and careers with livable wages.
“That’s a big deal to have that kind of influx going to that many small schools,” said Jim Southwick, assistant superintendent of the Tehama County Office of Education, which plans to expand career pathways in education, health care, construction, manufacturing and agriculture.
Schools in Tehama had previously begun to implement career pathways at the high school level in concert with local employers and Shasta College. However, many students struggled to complete the pathways because they were ill-prepared in middle school, Southwick said.
But one middle school pilot program did successfully introduce students to career education, he added, leading to an influx of funding through the Golden State Pathways that will expand the program to other middle schools.
Long Beach Unified, the fourth-largest district in the state, received about $12 million through the Golden State Pathways program. District spokesperson Elvia Cano said the funding will provide counseling and extra support for students navigating dual enrollment, Advanced Placement courses, college aid, externships and other work-based learning opportunities.
The district also plans to increase access to dual enrollment through partner Long Beach Community College and to create a new pathway in arts, media and entertainment at select high schools.
Advocates are celebrating the governor’s commitment to the program despite the uncertainty surrounding the budget this year.
Linda Collins, founder and executive director of Career Ladders Project, which supports redesigning community colleges to support students, said, “It’s an impressive commitment at a time that it’s desperately needed.”
Newsom said in a statement that this funding will help students even if they don’t go to college , saying it “will be a game-changer for thousands of students as the state invests in pathways to good-paying, high-need careers — including those that don’t require college degrees.”
Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, stops a student while they are walking to class and asks how their day is going.
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Across the Oakland Unified School District, the mantra for school staff is to call city police only as a last resort. If a disturbance occurs, they should rely first on in-house staff who don’t carry guns and can’t arrest anyone.
Since voting in June 2020 to disband its police department, Oakland has pursued one goal — to defuse conflict and avoid bringing in police and exposing students to the possibility of arrest. Oakland’s preference is for restorative justice, which emphasizes circle-of-trust interactions to improve how students treat one another.
“Most of the time, it’s just having conversations with them (students),” said Eddie Franklin, a former security guard who is now part of the district’s new police-free staffing. “Let them authentically be themselves, and the goal becomes to chip away at the rough edges they might have.”
It’s a strategy credited by the district with drastically reducing the 911 calls to city police from 2,128 during the 2019-20 school year, the last year the Oakland district had its own police department, to 200 in 2022-23.
But an EdSource analysis of data from the police shows a higher number of calls from just eight of the district’s 18 middle and highschools in half a year. The period from January to June 2023 shows those schools made 225 calls, with 105 considered “serious” for reasons including assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.
The Oakland data was part of a statewide investigation of school policing across California. EdSource gathered nearly 46,000 police logs of calls from and about 852 schools. The data collection was designed as a representative sample of California schools.
Police track all calls from and about eight of the district’s 18 middle and high schools, while the district’s data captures calls made to police from all 106 schools.
Misha Karigaca, Oakland Unified’s director of student support and safety, could not fully reconcile the differences between the police call logs and the district’s record of internal calls to police for the same time period.
“If a 911 call comes from a cell phone and the call doesn’t get reported to my department, we will not have information about the call which can also account for significant discrepancies,” he said.
Karigaca and Board President Sam Davis acknowledged that while staff are trained when not to call 911 and to report any calls that they make, it doesn’t always happen.“We don’t capture every call in our data as (school) sites are required to notify us if law enforcement comes on campus; but we know of times when this hasn’t always happened,” Karigaca said.
Davis said it’s also possible other staff are calling 911 for nonemergent reasons because “a lot of people reach the end of their rope for all sorts of reasons.”
The Oakland schools included in EdSource’s data are McClymonds, Castlemont, Fremont, Oakland, Skyline high schools and Montera, West Oakland and Westlake middle schools.
“We’re not in a place where we can have completely police-free schools. That is our goal and what we’re working towards, but unfortunately, there are times when we do need police support,” Karigaca said. “It was our conditioning, whatever we needed they (police) would respond. It’s almost similar to our communities and our society — there’s not many other options. Anything that revolves around safety, we’re conditioned to call police.”
In place for two school years, the new police-free plan is being evaluated locally and nationally on whether it is achieving what it set out to do.
The Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, in describing its study, put Oakland on the “leading edge of an emerging violence-reduction practice” happening in schools across the country, according to Jesse Jannetta, a senior policy fellow at the institute. Study results are expected in August.
Not everyone supports the decision to disband the district’s police department.
Board member Clifford Thompson said it was wrong for Oakland to disband its police department. “There’s little benefit to not having police at schools,” he said. “Totally eliminating the force without having a backup for those who need that type of force, it might not have been the best thing to do.”
Getting to police-free
The Black Organizing Project, a Bay Area community organization focused on racial, social and economic justice, has been advocating for the end of the police department since 2011. It finally happened in June 2020 with a unanimous vote of the school board.
Oakland has had a fraught and violent history of racism and police abuse of Black people for nearly 80 years, which factored greatly into the final push to disband the department following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.
The city’s Black population increased dramatically during World War II when slave descendants migrated west from Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Police officers from those states were quickly recruited and stationed in Black neighborhoods. In 1950, a civil rights leader told the state Assembly that Black people lived “in daily and nightly terror” of Oakland police, according to a 1950 State Assembly report. The police department in Oakland Unified was born in 1957.
After more than 60 years of having an embedded police department in Oakland schools, educators, city officials and community partners are working to untangle the decades of policing culture and running its own police department.
There’s no contract or memorandum of understanding with the Oakland Police Department, but the district shares what staff are taught about when to call 911 and how to interact with police.
Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention recently reported to a joint council-district committee on the plan’s progress. The city of Oakland invested $2.4 million in the 2022-23 school year to address violence in schools by creating a School Violence Intervention and Prevention Program and hiring life coaches, violence interrupters and gender-based violence specialists to four comprehensive high schools and three continuation high schools.
Gender-based violence specialists are unique to Oakland, Jannetta said. The specialists have workshops about dating violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual assault and commercial sexual exploitation.
Through surveys, officials found these extra staffers have more relatability to students, can focus on individual needs, and alleviate some of this work from teachers.
It’s too early to evaluate whether it is working, but the district is going in a positive direction, said Jessica Black, director of administration for the Black Organizing Project.
Getting to a police-free school environment also faces challenges. City and school officials say violence especially among 14 to 18-year-olds in the city bleeds into the school district.
During the 2022-23 school year, there were more than 600 high school suspensions and two shootings at OUSD high schools, according to the report. One of last year’s shootings was at Skyline High School, and just last month, another shooting occurred during the high school’s graduation that injured three people.
The city’s analysis of school violence puts some of the blame on the heightened crime in the city. According to the report, there’s been an increase in violence on campuses “that is related to community conflicts as well as an increase in instances of non-students showing up at school campuses with weapons to fight students.”
Despite the challenges, the school board has not considered reinstating the district’s police department, Davis confirmed. Oakland Unified Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell declined to comment through a district spokesperson.
When to call police
One of the Black Organizing Project’s goals was to “uproot the security structure,” said Jasmine Williams, development director. With community support, the project pushed to restructure campus police, including getting rid of badges or anything that emulates the police and installing new titles, training, and redesigning the shirts they wear.
“The district is not coming up with this stuff on their own,” the project’s Jessica Black said. “We’re literally pushing the district to think differently.”
Oakland administrators can call for “nonviolent de-escalation support” from staff known as culture and climate ambassadors when there are fights, a student is causing harm to themselves or others, or unwelcome visitors are on campuses, according to the School Administrator Guidance to Police Free Response. There’s a nonemergency line administrators can call to dispose of firearms or illegal drugs, when there’s suspicion of a crime, or during lockdowns. For mental health crises, administrators also have different people to reach out to depending on the situation.
Students can still be disciplined, including suspended, but that’s rarely the first option, Karigaca said. Most of the time, interventions take place.
“It’s offering a conduit of other opportunities, such as a restorative session, once both parties are in a place to have a restorative session,” Karigaca said. “Sometimes it’s going to take a walk or going to a different office; sometimes it’s calling parents or connecting with a community resource.”
District police-free guidelines give a variety of reasons when calling 911 is appropriate: active shooters, fire, medical emergencies, a person with a gun or explosive, bomb threats, serious injuries, hostage situations, abduction or kidnapping, violent crimes, death at a school site, emergency evacuations, or any situation posing danger to health or safety.
Students can be arrested for some of these incidents, Karigaca said, but usually students aren’t arrested as a result of staff calling 911. There are about four to five arrests every school year, and it’s typically because police are arresting students for something they did outside of school, he said.
The district partners with organizations for alternative support, but sometimes they can’t immediately respond, Karigaca said.
“When we call CPS (Child Protective Services) or any other mental health crisis response folks, a lot of times their staff is also under-resourced and they aren’t able to respond,” Karigaca said. “Even they will tell us, ‘Call law enforcement.’”
New titles for security guards
As Eddie Franklin walked down the hallway of Bret Harte Middle School, it was as if every student knew who he was. Most would fist pump him or shake his hand and he knew every student’s name.
Eddie Franklin, the culture and climate ambassador for Oakland Unified, shakes a student’s hand while walking down the hallway. Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Franklin has been at OUSD for seven years and used to be a security guard who worked with police and used handcuffs for detaining students. He became a culture keeper four years ago. Now he’s what’s called a culture and climate ambassador.
Franklin said he brings “an unbiased approach” to every situation even if the student is acting negatively. “Your goal is to actually make them (students) see and critically think about what’s in the best interest of both sides.”
Security guards were replaced with culture keepers and culture and climate ambassador who have leadership roles and assist culture keepers when needed, Karigaca said. The main priorities for all roles are to de-escalate violence and create positive relationships with students and staff.
The 63 culture keepers are spread around the district: up to three in middle schools; up to six in most high schools. Five elementary schools also have culture keepers.
When Franklin was a culture keeper, he said his day-to-day work evolved into understanding the different personalities on campus to get a better understanding of student behavior.
“So you don’t overreact when they do some of the things they do,” Franklin said. “But also try to give them an idea of what they can do differently.”
As a culture and climate ambassador, Franklin is deployed to different schools when extra support is needed, Karigaca said. Most of the time, they roam around different schools building relationships.
Franklin said he oversees 13 middle schools and does check-ins with staff to talk about what kind of support they need. A big part is building trust, he said.
When Franklin goes to a school, he said, his goal is “to act like a parent, a positive parent, let them know I actually care about you and support you in whatever you do, and I’m not going to be over the top if I react to something that you did negative.”
To other districts looking at Oakland as an example, Williams, of the Black Organizing Project, said she doesn’t want the message to be “all you have to do is implement a policy.”
“It took us 10 years of fighting to get here, and we are still fighting within the district,” Williams said. “It takes community to have even this much progress.”
EdSource reporters Thomas Peele; Daniel J. Willis and Andrew Reed contributed to this report.
This story was updated to more accurately describe the data availability issues. Details.
Public data posted by the California Department of Education has been incomplete, often outdated and occasionally inaccurate, forcing legislators to pass laws based on old data, researchers to delay inquiries and journalists to grapple with inaccurate information.
Californians, living in a state known globally as a center of innovation and technology, have had to cope with a state education agency that has admittedly lacked the staffing and the policies to provide much-needed data, EdSource reporting has found.
As a result, there are gaps in the knowledge needed by lawmakers, researchers, journalists and others to evaluate state programs and policies, from teacher demographics, to how many English learners become fluent in English each year, to how districts have spent a $50 million court settlement to improve early literacy.
Obtaining data from the California Department of Education (CDE) has been difficult, said Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust-West, one of the state’s most prominent social justice and advocacy organizations. There have been delays in the public release of data and a lack of consistency when it comes to the annual publication of key data sets, he said.
“In an ideal world, we would have a legislature in a state that is making data-informed decisions about legislation, and then making data-informed decisions about assessing the efficacy or impact of investments, or the interventions, and this is difficult in the state of California right now,” Nellum said.
The CDE collects data about student achievement and demographics, enrollment, course information, discipline, graduation rates, staff assignments and other data, much of it mandated by legislation.
Some data have not been updated by the department for as long as five years. The most recent available data for teacher demographics, pupil-teacher ratios, course enrollment, and class size is from 2018-19.
“In an ideal world, we would have a legislature in a state that is making data-informed decisions about legislation, and then making data-informed decisions about assessing the efficacy or impact of investments, or the interventions, and this is difficult in the state of California right now.”
Christopher Nellum
The dashboard that tracks the annual progress of K-12 students on standardized tests, chronic absenteeism, suspensions and graduation was also suspended or only partially updated due to the pandemic-related school closures until Dec. 2023. The Legislature suspended the reporting of state and local indicators on the 2020 and 2021 dashboards and, because the state didn’t have prior-year data to measure growth in 2022, that year’s dashboard was published without the full-color display.
Cindy Kazanis, the director of the Analysis, Measurement and Accountability Reporting Division at CDE, said many of the delays in reporting data have resulted from “not having enough boots on the ground.” The department is in the process of recruiting and hiring 17 new staffers.
New state mandates and changes in the way data is collected also have impacted data collection, Kazanis said. The five-year delay in updating some data is because the department has a backlog of reports and data that must be reconfigured because the state changed course codes in 2018-19, she said.
Legislation based on old data
An EdSource examination of recent state education bills shows that legislative staff have sometimes had to rely on outdated CDE data to complete analysis meant to help legislators make decisions about whether to pass laws.
One example is an analysis of Assembly Bill 2097, which used department data from 2018-19, the most recent year it was available, to show computer science offerings in California high schools, and the number and gender of students enrolled in them. The bill, if passed, will require school districts to offer computer science courses to high school students, who will be required to complete a one-year course before graduating.
An analysis of Assembly Bill 2429 also relied on data from five years ago. The legislation mandates health education courses, required by some districts to graduate, including instruction on the dangers of fentanyl use. The legislation passed on June 13.
“The committee may wish to consider that course-taking data, which is important for policy analysis and evaluation, has not been updated by the CDE since the 2018-19 school year,” stated the analysis. “The CDE reports that this data will be updated in 2024.”
Since 2018, legislators also have required that several new datasets be added to the CDE website, including absenteeism by reason, a stability rate, restraint and seclusion, special education, college-going rates, teacher assignment monitoring outcomes, five-year graduation rates and homeless students by dwelling type, according to the CDE.
Assembly Bill 1340, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October, mandates that the department post test scores, suspensions, rates of absenteeism, and graduate and college-going rates for students with disabilities, disaggregated by federal disability category, on its website.
The analysis of the bill for the Assembly Education Committee was terse. “When this committee is asked to evaluate the effect of a policy on a subset of students with disabilities — for example, students who are visually impaired — it requires data about this subgroup of students’ progress on academic and other measures. Under current CDE practice, a single number for all students with disabilities is shown, obscuring important information about students’ progress, which is needed for evidence-based policymaking and to provide transparent information for the public,” it read. Legislators could not be reached to comment.
Unreliable public information
EdSource journalists working on news stories have struggled in several cases to obtain accurate, up-to-date data from the California Department of Education. This year, EdSource had to twice remove data after publication because the analysis was based on incorrect data that the department had published on its website. In both cases, school district officials notified CDE that they had inadvertently submitted incorrect data to the department, but the agency did not correct the information online.
The timing of data releases has also been an issue. When CDE refused to publicly release state test scores after districts began releasing the information to parents, EdSource enlisted legal help to require CDE to comply with the California Public Records Act.
In September 2022, just months before the election that re-elected Tony Thurmond as state superintendent of public instruction, the CDE refused an EdSource request for Smarter Balanced test scores, saying they would not be released until sometime later in the year. EdSource wrote about the delay and enlisted an attorney to write a letter outlining why the data was public information. Within a week, the department announced the scores would be released in October, before the election. The Legislature subsequently required the department to release test scores annually by Oct. 15.
Nonprofits, schools share data
Because of the difficulty obtaining education data from the state, many nonprofits and collaboratives have started collecting their own data or creating online tools, so the public can more easily access CDE data.
The Education Trust-West, which has campaigned for clear and accessible data through its Data for the People initiative for over a decade, developed a data visualization tool that uses public data on California K-12 and higher education systems. Because much of the data comes from the CDE, information is limited to what the department has made available.
CORE Districts, a collaborative of nine California school districts serving more than a million students, collects data directly from districts for its Insights Dashboard. CORE collects data from its member districts, as well as 124 other school districts and charter schools, so that comparisons can be made. But the effort doesn’t come near reporting on all nearly 1,000 districts.
“We regularly get requests from researchers to look at our data,” said Rick Miller, CORE Districts’ chief executive officer. “Going through the CDE process is so cumbersome.”
Lack of data stymies researchers
Education data that is not being collected or made publicly available recently became the central topic of a gathering of California researchers discussing educator diversity, said Kai Mathews, project director for the California Educator Diversity Project at UCLA.
“What we realized is that some people had some information that’s not publicly available, and it largely depended on past relationships,” Mathews said. “So some data is actually probably collected, it’s just not publicly shared with all of us.”
Mathews and Nellum agree that a lack of updated teacher demographic data is particularly perplexing, given the teacher shortage and the number of workforce issues facing teachers. The Education Trust-West has had to delay some of its work because it hasn’t been able to obtain teacherdata, Nellum said.
“That is bad for students. It’s bad for schools. And, of course, it’s bad for any sort of hope we have of advancing equity,” Nellum said.
EdSource requested updated teacher demographic information from CDE earlier this year for a series of stories on recruiting and retaining Black teachers, an issue Superintendent of Public Instruction Thurmond had called a priority. The data was last updated in 2018-19, despite being submitted to the department annually by school districts. After sending five email requests over a month, the reporter never received the data from the CDE. Instead, the reporter used data from 2020-21, the most recent year available, from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Alix Gallagher, the director of strategic partnerships at Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), says the lack of data on universal transitional kindergarten makes it unclear whether the state is optimizing the annual investment it is making in the grade. California will spend an estimated $3 billion a year by 2025-26, when universal transitional kindergarten (TK) will be offered to all 4-year-olds, Gallagher wrote in a commentary on the PACE website.
The state should collect data on the features of transitional kindergarten programs and on student outcomes from transitional kindergarten through second grade, to better understand the effectiveness of transitional kindergarten, she wrote.
“Right now there isn’t publicly available data for roughly the first third of a kid’s career in the public schools,” Gallagher told EdSource. “We now have universal access to TK, kindergarten, first, second and third grades. And, at the end of third grade, kids take the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment). And that’s the first time, as a system, we know anything about kids’ learning.”
In fact, this year’s test scores show 57% of third-graders reading below grade level and 55% doing mathematics below grade level.
CDE data division staffing up
An annual $3 million investment from the state will allow CDE to add 17 new employees to improve data reporting to the public, Kazanis said. Twelve of the new employees have been hired. The Analysis, Measurement and Accountability Reporting Division currently has 66 employees.
Some of those resources are headed to CDE as part of the state’s launchof the first phase of its Cradle-to-Career Data System sometime this year. The longitudinal data system will provide tools to help students achieve their goals and deliver information on education and workforce outcomes, according to the website. It may also give researchers the data they are seeking.
“I’m hopeful though, because the Cradle-to-Career data system is working on a teacher dashboard, which I know will have a lot of the data that we have been waiting for,” said Nellum, who also is a member of the Cradle-to-Career (C2C) Advisory Board. Nellum spoke to EdSource for this story as a representative of The Education-Trust West and not as a member of the C2C board.
Eight of the employees will make up the new Data Visualization and Insights Office. It will collect data at the request of state policymakers and the California State Board of Education and work to make publicly available data more user-friendly, Kazanis said.
The state funding includes $300,000 to move the release date of the California School Dashboard data up incrementally each year until the annual release date is Oct. 15. This is expected to happen in 2026. Last year, data which includes test scores, graduation rates and student demographics was released on Dec. 15. Two data teams work on the dashboard full-time all year, Kazanis said.
The influx of new staff is expected to allow the department to revamp DataQuest to make it more user-friendly, Kazanis said. The new teacher reports, for example, will allow the user to make comparisons among districts, she said.
Seven new positions will focus entirely on generating teacher data, Kazanis said.
“We’ve wanted to get out from under this backlog, but part of it was recognizing that we did need more resources, and we need dedicated resources to be focused on teacher data.”
Friday: California launches the Cradle-to-Career data system, a long-awaited project to track student progress
This story has been changed to correct the spelling for Tony Thurmond, California superintendent of public instruction and to reflect that some data sets have not been updated for the past five years, not seven years as originally stated. The paragraph about the California School Dashboard has been updated to make clear that the dashboard was suspended by the Legislature during the Covid pandemic.
Gov. Gavin Newsom answers a reporter’s question about his revised 2024-25 state budget during a news conference in Sacramento on May 10, 2024.
Credit: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
True to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s promise, the 2024-25 budget compromise that the Legislature announced Saturday and will pass this week will spare TK-12 and community colleges from cuts that other state operations will bear.
TK-12 funding will be flat and will continue Newsom’s major commitments to multiyear, multibillion-dollar programs, including community schools and before- and after-school expansion.
Update: State Budget Signed
On June 26, Gov. Newsom signed Assembly Bill 107, the main budget bill, and Senate Bill 154, the Proposition 98 suspension bill. On June 28, Newsom signed SB 153, the education trailer bill.
The budget will even throw in a couple of billion in new revenue that Newsom didn’t call for in January or in his May budget revisions. Newsom and legislators, meanwhile, struggled to squeeze an additional $28 billion out of a $211 billion general fund spending.
But protection for schools and community colleges will carry risk. To balance the budget, Newsom and legislative leaders rely on budget maneuvers that would give a button-down accountant acid reflux.
They include creating a $6 billion debt that won’t be fully repaid to the state treasury for a dozen years, and draining the $8.4 billion education rainy day fund.
The deal also requires delaying payments to schools and community colleges and suspending — for only the third time in its 36-year history — Proposition 98 obligations for the current school year, on the assumption the money will be repaid quickly. Proposition 98, a constitutional amendment voters passed in 1988, established a formula for determining the minimum level of general fund spending on transitional kindergarten through grade 12 and community colleges — generally about 40%.
Rather than punish schools for money already spent, the budget bill creates a $6.2 billion debt that the general fund, not schools and community colleges, will repay the state treasury over a decade, starting in 2026-27. The remaining $2.6 billion will be a Proposition 98 obligation pushed ahead to 2023-24; that unfunded amount is called a deferral.
The California State University and the University of California won’t fare as well in the budget deal, although better than Newsom had proposed in January, even with a drop in state revenues since then. Both will get a 5% budget increase in 2024-25 that Newsom had proposed delaying, equal to $227.8 million for UC and $240.2 million for CSU, to support enrollment growth of California residents this fall.
Another promised 5% budget increase for both systems in 2025-26, however, will be put off a year. UC and CSU also face one-time cuts in 2024-25 of $125 million and $75 million, respectively, which will be restored in 2025-26.
Both CSU and UC will also face a 7.95% cut in their administrative expenses in 2025-26.
There will be no reforming the Cal Grant program in 2024-25, but, at the Legislature’s insistence, the $637 million ongoing funding for middle-class scholarships will continue, with a $289 million one-time increase.
Late spending changes
The final budget will also restore some TK-12 and child-care cuts that Newsom had proposed in his May budget revision while maintaining others. They include:
Restoring $60 million for the Golden State Teachers Program, which provides $20,000 in scholarships to teacher candidates, although a new means test may pare back $10 million in eligibility.
Restoring $100 million in funding to help preschools prepare classrooms and train teachers in order to enroll more children with disabilities, while withdrawing larger plans to expand the program.
Continuing the existing agreement to serve 200,000 more children in the state-subsidized child care system but pushing back the timetable for full compliance to 2028.
Rescinding $895 million in one-time spending on electric-powered school buses that Newsom had made a priority. Instead, the money will be used to reduce some of the late payments in state funding for schools.
School districts receive the bulk of their funding through the Local Control Funding Formula, which is based on daily student attendance and a yearly cost-of-living adjustment. So, even though overall state funding won’t be cut, many districts with declining enrollments and high absenteeism rates will face financial challenges.
The cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), which is based on a federal formula tied to the cost of goods and services but does not factor in regional costs, including housing, will be only 1.07% for 2024-25, forcing further belt-tightening. One option for school districts, giving layoff notices to staff, will be off the table. State law allows an additional round of layoffs in August in years when the COLA is less than 2%, but, at the urging of public employee unions, Newsom and legislative leaders included a clause prohibiting late summer layoffs. They have done the same statutory override before.
The initial reaction from two veteran TK-12 budget watchers was mixed. “This budget remarkably insulates K-14 funding from cuts, abides by constitutional requirements to restore funding in the future, and even provides a modest cost-of-living increase, all amid a record budget shortfall. Pretty amazing,” wrote Kevin Gordon, president of Capitol Advisors Group, a school consultancy firm.
Rob Manwaring, senior policy and fiscal adviser with the nonprofit advocacy organization Children Now, was cautious. “While the final budget is perhaps the best schools could anticipate given the budget challenges, we worry about the size of the suspension for schools, $8.3 billion,” he wrote. “Schools will eventually get paid back those funds in future years on top of the minimum guarantee, but these payments will result in increased school funding volatility and uncertainty until they are paid back.”
And if revenues falter next year, schools and community colleges will no longer have a rainy day fund to turn to; it will be depleted by the end of 2023-24, with the possibility of replenishing it by $1.1 billion in 2024-25.
Proposition 98 juggling act
The proposed 2024-25 budget for schools and community colleges will be balanced, if revenue projections hold true, by juggling three years of Proposition 98 shortfalls, with one year’s solution creating the next year’s dilemma.
The big drop was in 2022-23 when the Legislature “over-appropriated” the minimum Proposition 98 guarantee by $8.8 billion, while state revenue from the post-Covid stock market and the tech sector plummeted. Legislators didn’t see the warning signals because winter storms had pushed back the tax filing deadline from April to November.
Under the mechanics of Proposition 98, the funding level for 2022-23 becomes the base level for 2023-24, even though the state still lacks the revenue to pick up the tab. So all but $1 billion of the $8.4 billion in the education rainy day fund will be drained to cover some of the 2023-24 deficit and the $2.6 billion deferral from the year before.
On top of that, the budget deal calls for suspending $8.3 billion of the Proposition 98 funding for 2023-24. That has the effect of lowering the minimum guaranteed funding by that amount, while freeing up money to avoid deeper cuts in other state operations. That’s how the Legislature can restore cuts in 2024-25 for child care and preschool that Newsom had planned.
The architects of Proposition 98 wanted to discourage the Legislature from suspending the law. So it requires the Legislature to declare a fiscal emergency and to make the suspended funding a priority for repayment as soon as there is new revenue. The 2024-25 budget assumes the state will have enough new revenue to pay back at least $4 billion of the suspended $8 billion, maybe more. But if revenues falter, districts won’t get what they’re entitled to, with no set date for repayment.
That’s why the deal is also a gamble for schools and community colleges.
There’s one more wrinkle. To raise revenue quickly, the Legislature has accelerated the temporary, three-year suspension of two tax benefits for large and medium-sized businesses: net operating loss deductions and tax credits. The period will start in 2024-25, one year ahead of schedule. It will yield a projected $5 billion, with $2 billion going to Proposition 98 — funding that will be used to pay down deferrals.
Between this new money and the $4 billion payback for suspended funding, the Proposition 98 minimum guarantee is expected to rise to a record $115.3 billion in 2024-25.
As with all deadline negotiations, legislators will have at most three days to review hundreds of pages of budget details spread over 16 separate bills. Newsom, Senate President pro Tempore Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, are expecting that legislators will demand some changes when they return from vacation in August.
Sitting in the rear-facing “way back seat” of my family’s station wagon in 1979, we were counting trees tied with yellow ribbons to memorialize 55 Americans held hostage in Iran. As kids, we didn’t understand the conflict, but one thing was clear: Securing the hostages’ freedom was a collective national obsession. Much has changed about the way we express our democratic values in the U.S. and how we think about innocent hostages held today in Gaza.
My nostalgia makes me wonder how young people make sense of our current political divisions, including at UCLA. As an educator and researcher at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies, my colleagues and I have been discussing our role to prepare K-12 teachers to advance social justice as global citizens. Teaching and learning to think criticallyand consider a multiplicity of perspectives has never been so crucial, nor has it been so controversial.
When I mention my friends’ 23-year-old son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was severely wounded when abducted by Hamas terrorists from Israel’s Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, I have been met with skepticism and distrust among colleagues who share my social justice values. It shouldn’t feel so alienating to speak out for the release of the hostages, who include eight Americans among the 120 multinationals held in Gaza for more than 260 days.
Recently, when a colleague asked about the numbered piece of masking tape I was wearing, I explained it is in solidarity with Hersh’s mom, Rachel, marking the days of her heartbreak and his captivity. “Well, now you know how the other side feels,” he replied, as if supporting the hostages equates to indifference to Palestinian suffering. I tried to counter his assumption by explaining that advocating for the release of innocent hostages does not diminish my concern for innocent lives lost in Gaza. Our hearts can hold compassion for both.
This false binary is detrimental to finding common ground in the pursuit of peace. The deep anguish many of us feel for Jews, Palestinians — and their supporters — has made it difficult to know what to say. Rather than choosing a side, our common humanity should unite us.
I learned these lessons years ago as a student at Pitzer College in a seminar that opened my eyes to different perspectives on the Mideast conflict. We debated texts from Palestinian and Israeli authors, appreciating the similarities and differences between the world’s major religions. We learned how our own cultural lens and experiences informed our identities, and we felt inspired to ask more questions, rather than be expected to have the right answer. I’m grateful for this complex picture of the geopolitical, historical and religious perspectives essential to developing a nuanced understanding of current events.
My classmates and I shared a collective journey of discovery, challenging previously held truths without demonizing others for them. The greatest gift I received from my college education is the ability to know what I don’t know, inspiring me to seek new knowledge and perspectives on making the world more just.
I wish more students had this opportunity and more educators had the confidence to teach this way. Good-faith efforts to bridge divides aren’t always easy, and they aren’t fail-proof, but they can deepen ongoing dialogue while building a community with mutual trust and respect.
I’m afraid these essential foundations of education are being avoided in too many college and high school classrooms, since many educators feel ill-equipped to address them. I understand the reluctance to speak out for fear of saying the wrong thing, not knowing enough about the conflict or the anxiety of becoming a meme on social media, and consequently getting “canceled.” The result of this polarized climate is an unfortunate chilling effect, where not having a discussion is safer than a well-intended one.
Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts can help navigate barriers to cross-cultural dialogue, but when these principles are unevenly applied, they lose their power. For example, campus statements of solidarity that center one people’s history, while insidiously erasing any mention of the other, serve to further entrench beliefs. Acknowledging the value of others’ “lived experiences” would increase awareness of multiple indigenous claims to land in Israel-Palestine dating back to biblical times.
Without a rigorous understanding of the roots of the conflict and different historical narratives, we are mis-educating a generation of young people who lack the skills to excavate the depth of complicated problems, and have little agency to generate solutions to them. These omissions lead to oversimplified “either-or” “oppressor vs. oppressed” or “black-white” narratives that have become familiar in the U.S. College is supposed to be the place to cultivate curiosity, critical thinking, and challenge an ethnocentric Western lens that may or may not always apply.
The deeply divided campus protests have unveiled the harm of a false dichotomy. Rather than picking a side on a protest encampment, we should be creating a space for students to advance a peaceful coexistence, recognizing each party’s rightful presence.
Thankfully, I recently had the opportunity to participate in a UCLA effort to seek peaceful solutions through its Dialogue Across Difference Initiative. Through this cross-campus collaboration, faculty and staff engaged in dialogue, instilling empathy, while building active listening skills to think critically and compassionately about recent protests and how we can carry these lessons into our respective roles on campus. Education initiatives like this can play a vital role in building a democratic citizenry.
Beyond simplified slogans, opportunities to dialogue across our differences can help bridge our individual and collective aspirations, including those who support Israelis, Palestinians, and their allies. These critical conversations can help connect our shared values and unite in seeking justice at home and abroad.
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Julie Flapan is a researcher, educator, and the director of the Computer Science Equity Project at UCLA Center X, School of Education and Information Studies and co-lead of the CSforCA coalition, where she is working to expand teaching and learning opportunities for girls, students of color and low-income students.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Oakland Unified recently completed construction of new academic buildings at Fremont High with funding from a previous bond measure.
Courtesy of Oakland Unified
A Senate Education Committee hearing Monday produced a unanimous vote in support of a $10 billion school construction bond initiative for the Nov. 5 statewide ballot. It also provided a preview of what likely will be the arguments over an anticipated lawsuit challenging how the state shares funding from state bonds with school districts.
The public interest law firm Public Advocates charges that the bond that Californians will vote on will perpetuate a system that will award districts with the highest property values the most state money and harm students in low-wealth districts. It opposes Assembly Bill 247, providing the language for the ballot initiative, and has threatened to sue unless there are substantial changes to the funding arrangement.
“Our property, poor district space, face an uphill battle in struggling to raise matching funds due to low property values, often the result of decades of systemic discrimination and underinvestment in communities of color,” Gary Hardie, Jr., a school board member in Lynwood Unified, located east of Los Angeles, and a representative of the California Association of Black School Educators, told the senators. “This just isn’t unfair; it’s morally unacceptable.” Public Advocates cited Lynwood’s plight in a complaint it filed with state officials in February.
The chairs of the Senate and Assembly Education Committees, both primary authors of the bill, disputed the characterizations, pointing to the bill’s changes to the allocation system, which they said make the funding system fairer.
“It just breaks my heart to hear some of the over the top rhetoric that they’re (Public Advocates) are using,” said Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, responded. “If our goal is to serve the greatest good, the greatest number of socioeconomically disadvantaged students are in those districts that they’re calling wealthy like Los Angeles Unified, Oakland Unified, Long Beach Unified that lined up in support of this measure.”
The bill would increase the state’s share of matching money by as much as 5 percentage points, to 65% for renovations and 55% for new construction. It would expand the number of “hardship” districts with property tax bases too small to issue bonds, qualifying for 100% state aid.
Nicole Ochi, deputy managing attorney of Public Advocates, dismissed the changes as insignificant. “They will do nothing to reverse the regressive distribution of state bonds, nor will the minor changes to the financial hardship program address the punitive and burdensome nature of that system,” she said. “A sliding scale of 60 to 65% is not a meaningful equity adjustment. This is equity in name and not substance.”
Public Advocates proposed a much bigger sliding scale, with no guarantee under the current system that all districts receive at least 50% matching aid for new construction and 60% for modernization. Instead, districts with the lowest assessed property values per student, including Lynwood, San Bernardino City, and Fresno, would get a 95% match from the state, with a 5% local share; property-rich districts, like Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and Santa Barbara, would get a 5% state funding for a 95% local contribution.
Ochi said Muratsuchi was conflating low-income demographics with low property values. Primarily low-income students attend Fresno, San Bernardino, Oakland, and Los Angeles. But Oakland and Los Angeles benefit from commercial and industrial wealth, with above-average assessed property per student. Their match from the state would decline slightly under Public Advocates’ proposal.
Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, chair of Senate Education, countered the assertion by Public Advocates that the widely supported school facility program, created in 1998, is unconstitutional. “The program’s framework is built on equity and fairness and, over time, it has evolved. It’s been updated to better serve California’s diverse school districts,” he said.
He said the revised program’s “balanced approach provides additional support to high-need districts while maintaining a sustainable and broadly supported funding model statewide.”
The committee voted 7-0 to back the bill, which the full Senate and Assembly are expected to pass on Wednesday. Public Advocates has yet to decide its next move, but it said nothing in the latest bond proposal has led it to change its position.
The article was clarified on July 5 to make it clear Sen. Josh. Newsom disagrees with the assertion that the school facility program’s funding formula is unconstitutional.
An important bill making its way through the Legislature could help California’s schools better recruit and retain teachers.
Senate Bill 1391 would require the state’s new Cradle to Career (C2C) Data System to provide data that answers critical questions about California’s teacher workforce, including trends in teacher training, credentialing, hiring, retention, and the effectiveness of key programs aimed at addressing the teacher shortage.
I think about this bill as I prepare to lead a summer science workshop for nearly two dozen new middle and high school science teachers from diverse backgrounds. We will be working through our core science curriculum before the next year starts.
I know these teachers’ first few years in the classroom will be challenging, and their first year is the most challenging. They are often overwhelmed by time management issues: planning their lessons, grading students’ work, attending many meetings at their school site and in the district, all while trying to build relationships with their students.
These first-year challenges show up clearly in our data. In my district last year, about 17% of our pre-K-12 teaching staff left their positions. This means that we need many new teachers, and especially teachers from diverse backgrounds, to work with our heterogeneous students.
The good news is that California is attempting to stem the loss of teachers through a variety of innovative programs and resources. There has been an effort to bring more people into the profession through the Golden State Teacher Grant, which pays teacher candidates a stipend while they get their credential, and a variety of teacher residency programs run in partnership with our school districts. The National Board Certification grants for teachers will also help keep many teachers in the profession through opportunities for additional professional learning and the possibility of additional funds once teachers become certified.
In my district, like many others, we have built teacher housing in our city and have had recent wins for pay raises. We have also been using state incentives for teachers working in difficult-to-fill subjects and schools.
All of these programs are great and are clearly part of the solution, but are they working? How can we know? Is all of this money and support actually getting to the teachers and populations that need it? Is the state doing enough to provide us with the data to help us make the right decisions? Currently, we don’t have the information to answer those questions.
The Cradle-to-Career dashboard could provide critical data on how effective our teacher grant programs and teacher training pipelines are, but it has not yet lived up to its potential. As the governor and Legislature are debating difficult choices about our state resources, including SB 1391, we cannot back off investing in the future of our workforce — first understanding clearly which programs work and which don’t, and then doing everything we can to maintain the programs that ensure every student has access to a well-supported teacher who reflects the diversity of our state.
Once we know what works, we should play the long game and really focus on what our new teachers need to be well-prepared and supported. We need to be targeted in how we recruit diverse populations into the teaching profession. Our teacher education programs need to help link our newest teachers to mentoring programs and affinity groups to help them through the challenges of their first few years. We need to identify and support programs that provide mentors or provide pay for new teachers to have an extra prep period (these programs are few and far between but help keep our newest teachers from burning out quickly). Through all this, we need to remain laser focused on what helps our incredibly diverse student population to be successful. Let’s ensure that the Cradle-to-Career database informs us on how to make this future come to pass.
So, while I don’t know how many of the teachers I work with at my summer science institute will still be in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) next year, I’m hopeful that they will be. And I hope we’ll have the data to better understand why they’ve stayed, so we can know what to do better next year and into the future.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
If someone asked you which of Trump’s policies was the most catastrophic, what would you say? His personal attacks on law firms that had the nerve to represent clients he didn’t like? His unleashing of ICE to threaten and arrest people who have committed no crime? His efforts to intimidate the media? His assault on free speech, freedom of the press, and academic freedom? His blatant disregard for the Constitution?
All of these are horrible, despicable, and vile.
Yet one of his grievances burns deeper than the other. This is his contempt for science.
His first show of irrational hatred for science was his selection of the utterly unqualified Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He is a conspiracy theorist with no experience in science or medicine. RFK has been a one-man wrecking crew.
Then he used his authority to close down university research centers. These centers are working on cures for the most intractable diseases: cancer, ALS, Alzheimer’s, and more.
Why does Trump hate science? Is it another facet of his ongoing hatred for knowledge, the arts, culture?
The State Seal of Biliteracy is a gold, embossed seal that can be affixed to a student’s high school diploma or transcript. It is awarded to recognize a student for achieving a high level of proficiency in speaking, reading and writing in both English and another language. California first began awarding the State Seal of Biliteracy in 2012.
What is the benefit of obtaining a State Seal of Biliteracy?
The State Seal of Biliteracy validates students’ hard work to learn more than one language. It can be shown to colleges and potential employers, to prove that you can speak, read and write in at least one language, in addition to English. Some colleges may give academic credit to students for the seal. In addition, some organizations, such as Language Testing International, award scholarships to seal recipients.
In one study, partially funded by the U.S. Department of Education and focused on a school district in New Mexico, students who earned a Seal of Biliteracy enrolled in four-year colleges at higher rates than their peers who did not earn the seal.
What languages does the State Seal of Biliteracy recognize?
The State Seal of Biliteracy can be awarded in any language other than English. The most common language recognized with a Seal of Biliteracy in 2022-23 was Spanish, followed by French, Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese), Japanese, American Sign Language, Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog and German, in that order.
The state has also awarded the seal in many other languages, including Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Czech, Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Igbo, Indonesian, Italian, Latin, Mixteco, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Urdu and Yurok, among others.
Do all public schools in California offer the State Seal of Biliteracy?
All public schools are eligible to participate, but participation is voluntary, not obligatory. In 2022-23, the latest school year for which data is available, 1,188 schools in 356 school districts or county offices of education awarded the seals. Check here to see if a school or district participates (click on the “Data” tab).
What can you do if your school does not yet participate?
You can contact a counselor, teacher or administrator at your school and share information about the State Seal of Biliteracy with them, to encourage them to participate.
How do you apply for the Seal of Biliteracy?
Contact your school counselor, principal or other administrator.
What are the requirements to prove you are proficient in a language other than English?
You must either complete coursework or take a test to prove proficiency.
For coursework, you must successfully complete a four-year course of study in a world language at the high school or college level and attain an overall GPA of 3.0 or higher in that course of study. In addition, you must demonstrate oral proficiency in the language comparable to that required to pass an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate examination.
You also have the option to take one of four tests, instead of coursework:
Pass a world language Advanced Placement (AP) exam with a score of 3 or higher
Pass an International Baccalaureate (IB) exam with a score of 4 or higher
Pass both an ACTFL Writing Proficiency Test (WPT) and an Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) with scores of intermediate mid or higher
Pass an exam approved by the school district that meets the rigor of a four-year high school course of study in the language and assesses speaking, reading and writing in a language other than English at the proficient level or higher. These are most often used in the case of a language for which AP, IB, or ACTFL tests do not exist. A list of locally approved world language proficiency assessments is posted on the California Department of Education’s State Seal of Biliteracy web page under the “Assessments” tab.
Can courses completed in another country count toward coursework in another language?
Yes. High-school level courses in another country in a language other than English, with the equivalent of an overall grade point average of 3.0 or above, can count toward the coursework requirement. These might be courses completed as an exchange student, or courses completed in another country by a newcomer student before arriving in the U.S. They must be verified by a transcript.
What if a language doesn’t have a written or spoken component?
If a language does not have a written system, or is not spoken (for example, American Sign Language), the district can approve an assessment on the components of the language that are used.
What are the requirements to prove you are proficient in English?
You must either complete coursework or take a test to prove proficiency.
For coursework, you must complete all English language arts requirements for graduation with an overall grade point average (GPA) of 3.0 in those classes.
You also have the option to take one of four tests to prove proficiency in English, instead of coursework:
Pass the California state standardized test (California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress) for English language arts administered in grade 11 at or above the “standard met” achievement level
Pass an English Advanced Placement exam (AP English Language and Composition, AP English Literature or Composition, or AP Seminar) with a score of 3 or higher
Pass an English International Baccalaureate (IB) exam with a score of 4 or higher
Achieve a score of 480 or above on the evidence-based reading and writing section of the SAT.
What additional requirements do English learners have to complete?
In addition to the requirements mentioned above, students who are currently classified as English learners and have not yet been reclassified as proficient in English must attain an oral language composite score of level 4 on the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC).
Can you apply for a State Seal of Biliteracy in more than one language other than English?
Yes. You can earn seals in more than one language, as long as you fulfill the requirements to show a high level of proficiency in each language.
Are the requirements different for students who qualify for special education and have IEPs?
According to the California Department of Education, the requirements to obtain a State Seal of Biliteracy may be modified for a student with an individualized education program (IEP), if the student’s IEP team determines it is necessary. The CDE website says the IEP team should review the student’s assessment plan and transition plan and determine what assessment(s) to use and what score would indicate proficiency, based on the student’s IEP.
How many students typically receive the Seal of Biliteracy every year?
