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  • A conversation with Martin Blank, national community schools leader, about California’s big bet

    A conversation with Martin Blank, national community schools leader, about California’s big bet


    Students at UCLA Community School pass by one of several outdoor campus murals on their way to class.

    Credit: Allison Shelley/EDUimages

    EdSource asked Martin Blank for his perspective on California’s massive investment in community schools in the context of the community schools movement that he was instrumental in creating.

    For 20 years after he co-founded it in 1997, Blank directed the Coalition for Community Schools, a national organization that advocates for policies that support the implementation of quality community schools. He also served as president of the Institute for Educational Leadership, the coalition’s home.

    Marty Blank

    After serving as a VISTA volunteer in the Missouri Bootheel region, Blank, an attorney, was a senior staff member at A.L. Nellum and Associates, the nation’s first African American-owned consulting firm.

    He is a co-author of “The Community Schools’ Revolution: Building Partnerships, Transforming Lives, Advancing Democracy,” which was published this year, and other books on community schools.

    In our interview, which was edited for length, Blank discussed the key elements for a successful school and his hopes for California’s initiative, the California Community Schools Partnership Program.

    Through two-year planning and five-year implementation grants, more than 2,000 schools could become community schools to broaden services to meet children’s multiple needs and schools’ connections with the community. More than a place, the book says, a community school “is a set of partnerships built on a foundation of mutually beneficial relationships between schools and communities.”

    With growing gaps in wealth and an increase in poverty, is it important that schools take a larger role than traditionally people have thought schools should take?

    Yes, the school should have a larger role, but that role should be as an ally with an array of partners with expertise and people who want to help kids thrive.

    The idea that schools could take on a larger role and do everything is mistaken. You open up the school to the community, you open up the potential for greater family engagement, and you get people to think about kids in different ways. Health people, youth people, school people, organizers all have a slightly different view of the world and how it should change. When you put them together, you can really create a synergy that leads to a better strategy and better results. It’s the wisdom of the group, rather than a single entity being in charge of everything.

    The title of your book is “The Community Schools’ Revolution: Building Partnerships, Transforming Lives, Advancing Democracy.” What’s revolutionary, and how would parents and teachers know that they’re in the middle of a revolution?

    That partnerships are essential in today’s public school and policy environment is a revolutionary concept. The power of partnership between schools and community is the essence of our work. We’ve begun to demonstrate how powerful that is.


    Listen: How parents, teachers, and the community can tell if the community schools “revolution” is in their midst

    We also have leaders in community schools who are thinking and acting differently. Principals are not only focused on their school, on their academic responsibilities, but they also recognize their ability to build a community of parents, teachers and now partners that support their students.

    The community schools revolution is also demonstrated by their growth. There are thousands of schools across the country. We have evidence of success, and we have a growing investment. California’s is significant and we’ve got substantial federal money. Maryland has embedded community schools across all school districts, by including them in the school funding formula, and a growing number of states are funding community schools development.

    California’s is the biggest bet yet on community schools. In part, it was driven by money. California had a huge surplus, and so the Legislature and the Newsom administration, at the encouragement of State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond, put down $4.4 billion over seven years. It made this commitment without really anything in place as a state system. Does it concern you that it might fall short of its potential?

    If I could control the way policy functions, one might do very careful planning, then implement, then evaluate. But in the United States, we don’t do policy that way. It’s all a bit chaotic, and that makes it really hard for school people.

    We were worried when New York expanded from 40 community schools to 150, because we thought that was going to be challenging. And it was. But in time, because the school system and the city government and the community-based organizations and the school leaders stayed together, there are now 420 plus community schools in New York, and they’re working toward a set of common goals. Are there challenges? Do we worry that money is going to be taken away? Of course, but sustainable partnerships emerging.

    Listen: Whether California’s approach to community schools, through planning grants, followed by implementation grants on a mass scale, makes sense

    We saw measurable progress in New York. A report by Rand demonstrated there was some improvement in math achievement, that students were more connected to adults and to the school, that there were improvements in attendance. We saw progress in California, where there are community schools that people could draw on — in San Francisco, West Contra Costa, Oakland, Los Angeles and other places.

    We’re hoping that school and community organization leaders will realize that if they go beyond vendor and contract relationships, to really become partners, there will be a foundation on which to continue. Grants may come, but if the relationship between the school and their partners remains, then the essence of the community school will remain.

    California is investing many billions of dollars in other services, too, such as mental health, transitional kindergarten, and an extended day and year, particularly for low-income schools. What difference will this make in a community school?

    California represents a real opportunity. If it works the way we hope, the person in charge of new mental health money, the person running the after-school program, and other partners will be talking to each other and educators about what they want to accomplish. I remember a principal telling me he was responsible for all partners. They would ask for space and for equipment. He held a meeting and said, “Who are you and why the hell are you here?” What we want is for those potential allies to sit and talk regularly, to listen to students and their families and figure out how to make progress together.

    Oakland and UCLA are prominent in your book. Any school would be fortunate to be associated with a university like UCLA. And Oakland has more nonprofits than coffee shops. But there are lots of communities that don’t have those opportunities. If you are in rural San Bernardino County or Humboldt County, what do you do?

    The first thing is to go out in the community and talk to the business community, to the religious community. In every community, there are some nonprofit organizations. Every community has resources. We’ve had community schools where the emphasis was on bringing in elders from Appalachian communities to teach about the local history. We’ve had community schools where the kids have learned about the fishing industry. 4H is a significant player in many rural communities.

    It’s a mindset issue. People have assets and expertise. If you assume there’s nothing, it puts the school and the teachers in a very negative mindset about what they’re trying to accomplish.

    A crucial person will be the community schools coordinator, which all community schools in California must hire to receive state funding. Whom should districts be looking for, and why is that person important?

    A community school coordinator is a bridge builder. We’ve had innumerable principals say, “I don’t know how I managed before I had a community school coordinator.” A community school coordinator is vital to connecting the work of partners and school staff. They should be collaborative and like to work with other people; they should be someone who knows how to listen to families and young people, who can bring ideas from partners to the principal and teachers and be part of the school leadership team.

    The  California Teachers Association has taken a position and some local unions in negotiations that the community schools coordinator should be a certificated teacher. A number of districts have said that first and foremost, the person should come from the community and know the community. What’s your view?

    Sometimes you’ll find a social worker with community organizing training. Or a teacher who was a Peace Corps volunteer, a parent or community resident with strong relational skills. We need someone who can build bridges to the community whether they work for a school system, a nonprofit organization or a higher education institution. We should not limit ourselves when we think about where we look for people.

    What might be early wins that might set the right tone and culture for community schools?

    Attendance is a big issue and really a critical place to start. People are worried about it all across the country. When you have partnerships, whether it’s around health and mental health or just outreach with the ability to talk to parents and meet in their homes or workplaces, you can encourage improvement in attendance. In Baltimore, grassroots groups of Black men, some of whom are formerly incarcerated, have become involved with schools to try to make connections.

    I can imagine some principals and teachers might say, “We welcome the partnerships, we welcome the additional resources, but leave instruction and learning to us.” How can what goes on in the school day be integrated into the community school?

    We’ve seen teachers do walk-arounds in neighborhoods, so they understand their students’ lives and communities and use that knowledge in the classroom.  At the UCLA Community School, the kids have worked on immigration and housing issues. We’ve seen young people get involved in dealing with hunger and nutrition issues in their neighborhoods. Partners can help facilitate that.

    Listen to kids. You can build a standards-based curriculum that involves kids dealing with science and math, and everything else around problems that matter to them and to their neighborhood.

    Listen: How principals must open up schools and themselves for community schools to succeed

    The community can be a resource for learning apprenticeships and internships. The University of Pennsylvania has students going into labs and doing summer work. All of that is part of what can happen in a community school.

    For this $4 billion public investment, what metrics should the public use to gauge whether community schools are making a difference in the lives of students including, academic achievement?

    They would see better attendance. They might see reductions in disciplinary incidents because they’ve applied restorative justice practices. They might see indications of improvement in mental health, not only because young people have had access to mental health professionals, but also because they’ve just had more opportunities to be on a team, whether it’s a robotics team or a football team, They should be looking for parents to stand up and say, “This school works for our kids” and for kids to be saying the same kinds of things.

    I was told by a high school principal who was a community schools manager that building trust can be difficult and that the initial efforts can be frustrating. Parents are busy, and perhaps their own experiences may have turned them off to school.

    It’s a never-ending process. Each of us, in our personal lives, in our professional lives, has had situations where we built some trust, we lost the trust, we had to rebuild it. Parents are busy, but if you knock on doors and listen to them, you can capture the essence of what they want. Educators and partners build trust when they look at data together to solve problems.

    You mentioned timing may be both right and difficult now, with so much scrutiny on schools for various reasons and tensions brought into schools from the outside. Your book ends with this quote: “Now more than ever, with a deeply divided electorate and an often toxic political environment, community schools may represent a strategy that can bring people together, build community, and even bridge ideological divides.” Why are you confident that a community school can achieve such ambitions?

    If you’re not a dreamer or ambitious, then you’re not going to be able to overcome the historic inequities that have existed in our public school system and society. I’ve been at this work for 60 years, and it’s been urgent for all 60 years. When we first opened the migrant education program in a formerly segregated school in southeast Missouri, it was urgent. Now, with our politics so divided, the fact that there can be community schools in Florida and Idaho, in New York and California, in Wisconsin and Texas, indicates there’s a power in the idea of public school being the vehicle around which we build community.

    School leaders have to realize that they gain power by being more open. And that’s a challenge, given the politics of the moment. But our schools are a place that everyone knows, where we can all come together and act democratically. It’s not the only solution, but it offers the possibility of creating the kind of trust, the kind of relationships and the kind of places where people can come and see that we all care about each other’s kids.

    Community schools show how people and organizations can come together to solve problems.





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  • Districts groan as state board sets in motion Newsom’s big changes to funding formula

    Districts groan as state board sets in motion Newsom’s big changes to funding formula


    Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

     In pursuit of narrowing cavernous gaps in student achievement, Gov. Gavin Newsom this year made changes to the Local Control Funding Formula, the state’s school funding law, that are among the most far-reaching since the law’s adoption a decade ago. School districts are bracing for the extra paperwork and demands. 

    Newsom’s directive requires that starting in 2024-25, districts and charter schools spell out how they will address poor performance and target funding for improvements in every school where one or more of the state’s 13 student groups rank red — the lowest of five performance bands on the California School Dashboard. Until now, state law required only improvement efforts for districts as a whole. 

    The revision was made in the language of the governor’s proposed state budget in January. It was discussed in legislative budget subcommittees as one of many items in the education budget but didn’t receive a separate and detailed review.

    Last week, the State Board of Education implemented the changes with regulations on what school districts must do to raise the achievement of the schools’ lowest-performing students. They include setting specific goals, committing to actions and spending to achieve them, and a new requirement — determining how to measure if those strategies are effective by the end of three years and what to do if they aren’t. 

    Before they voted, board members heard repeated warnings from dozens of superintendents and school district administrators that piling on more extensive documentation would make districts’ three-year strategic plans, called the Local Control and Accountability Plans, unbearably long and unreadable. 

    “In smaller school districts, where time and resources are already significantly limited, the current requirements of the LCAP add an undue burden,” Helio Brasil, superintendent of Keys Union School District, a two-school district in Stanislaus County, wrote to the board. 

    “In my experience, every addition of a new table or box or check box or prompt to the LCAP makes it less and less useful as the tool to promote equity-focused, locally informed strategic resource allocation,” Joshua Schultz, deputy superintendent of the Napa County Office of Education, testified. “Already, practitioners in the field will tell you that the LCAP document is not useful for informing and engaging educational partners because of its length and complexity.”

    Equity multiplier schools

    Included in the revisions is a new category of “equity multiplier” schools serving many of the state’s most vulnerable students. Among the factors for their selection are the proportions of students from low-income families and parents lacking a high school diploma, and school stability — the rate of student transience.  Many will likely be small alternative high schools serving students who have been expelled, bullied and struggled at standard high schools or are at risk of dropping out.

    The idea was initially proposed by Black educators through a bill authored by Assemblymember Akilah Weber, D-San Diego, to dedicate $300 million to improve the achievement of Black students as the lowest-scoring student group on the dashboard. Newsom agreed to the new level of funding, but, concerned about violating Proposition 209, the 1996 voter initiative that bans affirmative action in public schools, he broadened the idea. The money will require districts to address and fund the specific needs of any lowest-performing student group on any dashboard indicator — whether math scores or absenteeism and graduation rates — and create overall goals for a school. Weber and the California Association of African American School Administrators endorsed the final plan.

    The schools have yet to be designated, but the California Department of Education is projecting there could be 1,000 schools. Many will likely have student groups performing in the red and will have to address them like other schools. But equity multiplier schools additionally will be eligible for technical help from designated county offices of education and their share of the extra $300 million, based on student enrollment. 

    Intense focus on school spending

    While not providing explicit funding for each student group, districts are held accountable for their performance. Student groups are determined by race and ethnicity, family income, students learning English, students with disabilities, and foster and homeless youth. Next month, the California Department of Education will release the 2023 dashboard, with color ratings for the first time since Covid interrupted testing in March 2020.

    The statutory revisions will mark a major shift in attention and accountability for the billions of dollars in extra “supplemental” and “concentration” money that the funding formula provides to districts annually based on the enrollment numbers of English learners and low-income, homeless and foster students. 

    The state already reports in the dashboard every school’s test scores and other indicators of student performance. Some districts funnel supplemental and concentration dollars directly to high-needs schools, as Los Angeles Unified does through its Student Needs and Equity Index. But the state steers funding formula dollars only to districts, which in turn determine how the funds are spent: which schools get tutors, extra counselors, teacher training or additional aides. Districts determine whether supplemental and concentration dollars are given to schools or through the central office. Districts are not required to track supplemental and concentration funding by school.  

    Stepped up accountability

    The revisions indicate Newsom agrees that either not enough funding reached the schools where high-needs students attended or funds were spent ineffectively.

    “The experience of the past decade is that we haven’t seen districts consistently identify schools with specific needs and take actions tailored to those needs,” said Brooks Allen, an adviser to Newsom and executive director of the State Board of Education.

    There has been overall progress in raising graduation rates and cutting suspension rates statewide. But the vast differences in proficiency rates on state test scores between Black (17% in math in 2023), white (48.2% in math) and Asian students (70% in math) have not narrowed, and absenteeism rates remain disproportionately high among Black and Hispanic students.

    “Newsom is saying we should move faster and stronger to close gaps in outcomes,” said John Affeldt, managing attorney for Public Advocates, a public interest law firm, one of the advocacy groups that called for the changes that Newsom adopted.

    The latest iteration of the LCAP template is at least the sixth in the past nine years. The state board designed the LCAP both as a strategic plan for district improvement and as an accountability tool to verify that districts are directing the $13 billion in supplemental and concentration funding to students for whom it was intended.

    Over time, the goals of accessibility and transparency have worked at cross-purposes. A previous iteration, for example, eliminated a potentially huge spending loophole, which the California State Auditor and Public Advocates identified, allowing districts to dump unspent supplemental and concentration dollars into their next year’s general fund to spend for any purpose on all students. Fixing it required adding yet another section to the LCAP accounting for the unspent money from year to year.

    A challenge to follow the money

    The Legislature hasn’t dedicated funding for research or evaluations to determine whether the funding formula was working. Consistent with his view that legislators should not meddle with local control, former Gov. Jerry Brown, the funding formula’s architect, made it difficult to compare districts’ spending from the funding formula and fought proposals to standardize spending through accounting codes.

    Despite the obstacles of limited data, researchers have persisted and found evidence for optimism and skepticism. In separate research studies, both UC Berkeley labor economist Rucker Johnson and Public Policy of Institute of California research fellow Julien Lafortune concluded that the funding formula succeeded in creating a much more equitable finance system and worked as designed for those districts getting the most extra money — those in which low-income students and English learners account for at least 95% of enrollment. Johnson calculated that a $1,000 increase in per-student funding, sustained for three consecutive years in the highest-poverty districts, produced significant increases in math and reading scores.

    But Lafortune, in an analysis he co-authored this year, also found that 60% of districts do not report spending on high-need students at or above the level of supplemental and concentration funding they receive. His 2021 research found that statewide only about 55% of supplemental and concentration dollars reached school sites whose students generated the funding, although some of the remaining money could have funded districtwide activities benefiting those schools. 

    Thus, there have been increasing calls from advocates for low-income students for more fine-grained reporting on spending.

    “We don’t report in a standardized way how much we spent at a school site. Getting that would go a long way to build trust that districts are doing what the policy intended,” said Rob Manwaring, senior policy and fiscal adviser for Children Now.

    Despite efforts by California Department of Education staff to eliminate redundancies, combine goals for multiple equity multiplier schools, and convert spending listings into data tables, the latest version will undoubtedly lengthen LCAPs that already are often several hundred pages for medium and large school districts, and will take extra labor to complete.

    The LCAP instructions will increase from 45 to 57 pages. Districts will have to engage parents, students, and teachers in every equity multiplier school and document how the engagement shaped goals and actions. Districts will add dozens to hundreds of entries for schools with student groups in the red.

    “No one wants to fill out paperwork for the sake of it,” said Allen. “But if the result leads districts to conduct further needs and data analyses, and not a compliance exercise, the result could lead to positive change and better support for kids who need it most.”

    Representatives of advocacy groups who had been calling for more transparency in the LCAP expressed support for the revised template. “The governor’s proposal,  combined with other improvements, would get California closer to ensuring equitable educational opportunities and outcomes,” wrote Guillermo Mayer, president and CEO of Public Advocates, and Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust-West, a nonprofit organization, in an EdSource commentary earlier this year.

    In letters and comments to the state board, no superintendent or lobbyist for school groups commended Newsom’s decision to strengthen the funding formula law and add a new category of highest-need schools. Instead, celebrating seemingly small victories, many praised Department of Education administrators for holding the line by making only those changes to the template that were required by law. They also called for additional efforts to slim down the LCAP.

    Advocates and school administrators are hoping that software engineers from Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence will somehow resolve their differences. They’re assuming an interactive, electronic template can reduce confusion and duplication with links to both AI-generated LCAP summaries for curious parents and detailed financial data for accountability hawks. 

    “I’m sure there’s technology out there that can help to take that large document that’s now being streamlined and put it into an even more user-friendly format for those who desire (it),” said state board Vice President Cynthia Glover Woods, who, she said, had read more than her share of LCAPs as chief academic officer of the Riverside County Office of Education.

    The idea of an electronic fix has been mentioned for several years — so far to no avail. 





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  • California faces big challenges to implement new math guidelines

    California faces big challenges to implement new math guidelines


    Credit: Allison Shelley / EDUimages

    After a contentious road to approve a new set of statewide guidelines on teaching students math, California officials must still figure out how to support school districts with implementation.

    The 2023 Math Framework, which the State Board of Education passed in July, is a 1,000-page document that details what many state and education officials accept as the best practices to teach mathematics. Although not everyone agreed and controversies arose during the four years of work it took to reach approval, math experts and organizations across the state are beginning to have conversations about what a statewide rollout could look like.

    The state hasn’t provided funding for implementation, which is typical, said Mike Torres, director of curriculum frameworks and instructional resources for the Department of Education. Historically, any framework rollout isn’t funded and is implemented with outside collaborators who are experts in the topic. For the most part, district officials must find ways to fund professional development on their own.

    “This situation with the mathematics framework is not different,” Torres said. “There isn’t any specific funding where we can pay experts to help us participate in webinars … or put on events.”

    It’s unclear why California historically hasn’t set aside money to help districts with implementation once new guidelines are passed. But that could change. 

    During a press conference last month, State Superintendent Tony Thurmond said he intends to introduce legislation for funding for professional development for those teaching math and reading. The funds could be up to $500 million, he said. 

    Torres said the California Department of Education would need to find other ways to offset costs if events will be held. It’s too early to know what kind of rollout could or will happen. Torres and his team have had three meetings with groups they work with to talk about a framework rollout, he said. 

    There are many organizations collaborating with the California Department of Education on implementing the math framework, including the California Mathematics Project, California County Superintendents Curricular and Improvement Support Community (CISC), California Math Council, California Teachers Association, and County Offices of Education. 

    During other framework rollouts, districts have sent teams of teachers and administrators to training and then had them relay information to the rest of the staff, said Kyndall Brown, one of the framework authors and executive director of the California Mathematics Project – one of the state’s partners. It’s something that could be replicated during a math framework rollout. 

    Even if there are conferences teachers can attend, one professor says she isn’t a huge fan. 

    “One day of hearing these ideas doesn’t necessarily translate into having a balanced curriculum – at all,” said Karajean Hyde, co-director of the UC Irvine Math Project. “It doesn’t necessarily create change in the classroom.”

    To create changes that will increase students’ proficiency in math, teachers need trainers who will work with them in and outside of classrooms on a consistent basis, Hyde said, which is work she does with her colleguues. 

    School districts do have pots of funding that could be used toward professional development, Brown said, such as special education funds or funds from the Local Control Funding Formula.

    However, a $50 million math, science, and computer science professional learning grant the governor allocated in the 2022 budget could help to fund professional development. Some allocations have been given to the County Offices of Education, Torres said, and the offices handle how the money is used.

    The timing of the grant worked out perfectly with the beginning of a math framework rollout, said Ellen Barger, an associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction at the Santa Barbara County Office of Education. Other grant funds are being used to support rural school districts in particular and the most recent grant will help to continue building coherence across all counties and to fill gaps. 

    “The framework is one of the tools that’s helping us achieve a vision of high-quality 

    mathematics for every California student, and we are building structures to bring people together to build knowledge and skills to operationalize that vision in every county, district, and community,” Barger said.

    Equity in implementation

    As of this school year, there will be 939 school districts in the state that will have to find resources to support educators in teaching under the new guidelines, which align with the California Common Core State Standards for Mathematics that were passed a decade ago. 

    How to make that equitable will be a difficult task. 

    Each school district has different needs, unique populations, and different levels of resources. For example, a district with more than 50,000 students will typically have more resources and staff to support professional development. A district with less than 50 kids might just have one staffer who is taking on multiple roles.

    There are some school districts that haven’t yet finished implementing the common core standards, Brown said. The common core standards detail what students in each grade level need to master.

    “There was no rollout of the 2013 framework (common core standards),” Brown said. “You had county offices and math project sites doing what we could, but we’re running into teachers who still don’t know about the elements of the common core standards.”

    There are also always new teachers coming into schools who will need to be trained, Brown said. “We have years and years worth of content.”

    But at least some colleges of education at California universities have had many aspects of the math framework already embedded in their curricula for the last decade. Professors at UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UC Riverside all spoke about how ideas in the framework have been used in their classrooms and the long history of controversy over how to teach math.

    Karajean Hyde, co-director of the UC Irvine Math Project, works with districts to train teachers on how to teach math and students in the credential program. For years, she said, the focus has been on student engagement, understanding motivation, including student identities in lessons, and building healthy classrooms – all included in the math framework. 

    Most teachers teach the way they were taught, Hyde said, and learned shortcuts to solving math problems. It results in current and future teachers not understanding the mathematics behind what they’re teaching. 

    During professional development training, Hyde and other Irvine professors make sure educators begin to understand the concepts behind what they are teaching, she said. They spend time co-planning lessons, observing lessons being taught, and relating what they are teaching back to the common core standards.

    “We need to make sure teachers understand the math and how to teach the math first and then it’s easier to help them consider – ‘How do I make this more engaging? How do I connect this back to the kid’s prior experience?’” Hyde said. 

    If teachers don’t understand the content “I fear they will just have a series of super fun, engaging lessons that kids feel super good about but they’re not actually mastering mathematics,” Hyde said. “I feel in turn is going to really increase the achievement gaps that we already have that are horrible in California.”

    The professional development work UC Irvine is doing has helped the two dozen districts they work with, but there are still many districts that don’t have this kind of support in place. 

    It will take years until every student in California is exposed to a way of learning math that follows the guidelines in the framework and Brown says, “Something needs to change.”

    Only about 35% of California students met or exceeded math standards this year, only about 1% higher than the previous year. Smarter Balanced Assessment results were lower for Black and brown students. 

    About 17% of African-American students and nearly 23% of Hispanic students in the state

    met or exceeded math standards in 2023, which was only about a 1% increase from the prior year. Brown called the results “horrendous.” 

    “It’s more than obvious the current system is failing too many people,” Brown said. “It’s long overdue – time to make some changes so we can see some different outcomes.”

    A Long Way to Go

    The final version of the framework was posted last month on the California Department of Education website. Officials are still working on a professionally edited version of the framework, which can take about a year, Torres said.

    Although school districts have access to the final version of the framework, it will still take up to two more years to have math materials that are vetted and approved by the state board that align with the framework, Torres said. Some publishers have likely started to write new materials. 

    The earliest the State Board of Education will kick off an adoption of math instructional materials is January – when the board approves a schedule of hearings. Districts aren’t required to use the materials approved by the state board, Torres said, but it’s helpful for implementation. 

    School districts also don’t have deadlines for when the framework needs to be implemented, Brown said. Every district is on its own timeline.

    Barger said a rollout isn’t an event, but an ongoing process of continuous improvement that could take the next six or seven years.





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  • The Senate Passes Trump’s Big Ugly Budget Deal, and Vouchers Are in It

    The Senate Passes Trump’s Big Ugly Budget Deal, and Vouchers Are in It


    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.

    In The Washington Post:

    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 Voucher Program 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



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  • The missing element in Cal State’s big investment in AI

    The missing element in Cal State’s big investment in AI


    Credit: Matheus Bertelli / Pexels

    A recent New York Times investigation revealed OpenAI’s ambition to make artificial intelligence the “core infrastructure” of higher education. In California, that vision is already a reality: The California State University system has committed $16.9 million to provide ChatGPT Edu to 460,000 students across its 23 campuses. But this massive investment misses a crucial opportunity to develop the strategic thinking capabilities that make students genuinely valuable in an AI-augmented workplace.

    The irony is striking. OpenAI helped to create the problem of students outsourcing critical thinking to chatbots, and now presents itself as the solution by making that outsourcing even more seamless. Recent research in Psychology Today found a negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical thinking abilities, particularly among younger users. When students delegate decision-making and problem-solving to AI, they bypass the very mental processes that build strategic capabilities.

    California State University’s investment in ChatGPT Edu is significant and potentially transformative. But spending almost $17 million on AI tools without a strategic framework is like buying students calculators without teaching them mathematics. The investment is sound; what’s missing is teaching students how to direct these powerful capabilities strategically rather than becoming dependent on them.

    Students in the CSU system already possess remarkable strategic thinking skills that traditional academic metrics don’t capture. Here are a few examples. Working multiple jobs while attending school requires sophisticated resource optimization. Supporting families demands stakeholder management and priority balancing. Navigating complex bureaucracies develops systems thinking. Translating between different cultural communities builds pattern recognition across domains.

    These aren’t just life experiences — they’re strategic capabilities that, when developed and articulated, become powerful career advantages in an AI-augmented workplace. The goal should be to help students recognize and leverage these skills, not replace them with chatbot dependency.

    European business schools are already proving that the strategy-focused approach works. At Essec Business School, outside of Paris, executive education programs focus on developing “strategically fluent leaders” who use AI as a strategic tool rather than a replacement for thinking. Students learn to maintain strategic direction while leveraging AI capabilities — exactly what CSU students need. When executives can apply strategic frameworks to AI integration, they don’t merely use the technology better; they direct it toward genuine business value.

    A recent University of Chicago Law School study found that even AI systems trained on specific course materials made “significant legal errors” that could be “harmful for learning.” This isn’t about AI’s current limitations; it’s about the fundamental difference between tactical execution and strategic judgment. AI excels at processing information within defined parameters, but strategic thinking requires the uniquely human ability to see patterns across domains, understand complex motivations, and envision new possibilities.

    The democratization of AI tools actually creates unprecedented opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds to translate their strategic insights into career success. But only if we teach strategic frameworks, not just tool usage.

    In my courses at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School — spanning advertising, social media, public relations and political communications — I’m developing approaches that emphasize strategic thinking alongside AI capabilities. Rather than just teaching AI literacy, I focus on helping students develop strategic frameworks for directing these tools effectively. The goal isn’t AI literacy — it’s strategic literacy enhanced by AI capabilities.

    Rather than criticizing CSU’s AI investment, we should help the system maximize its value. Imagine courses that help students identify their strategic thinking patterns from real-world experience, develop frameworks for human-AI collaboration, and practice directing AI capabilities toward strategic goals. Students would graduate not as AI users, but as strategic directors of AI — exactly what employers need, and exactly what justifies CSU’s significant investment.

    This isn’t about rejecting AI in education. It’s about ensuring that as AI handles tactical execution, we develop the strategic thinking capabilities that become more valuable, not less. CSU students bring strategic insights from lived experience that no chatbot can replicate. The question is whether we’ll help them recognize and develop these capabilities, or teach them to depend on tools instead.

    We don’t need AI-native universities. We need strategic-thinking native students who can direct AI capabilities toward human purposes. That’s the transformation worth investing in.

    •••

    Steve Caplan teaches strategic communications at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and is the author of “Strategy First: Thriving in the Face of Technological Disruption.”

    The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • Randi Weingarten: Trump’s Big Bad Bill Is Good for His Billionaire Buddies

    Randi Weingarten: Trump’s Big Bad Bill Is Good for His Billionaire Buddies


    The American Federation of Teachers released a statement by its President Randi Weingarten:

    Contact:
    Andrew Crook
    607-280-6603
    acrook@aft.org

    AFT’s Weingarten on Senate’s Big, Ugly Betrayal of America’s Working Families

    As we prepare to celebrate our independence, the promise of the American dream, of freedom and prosperity for all, is now further out of reach.’

    WASHINGTON—AFT President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement after the Senate passed President Trump’s billionaire tax scam:

    “This is a big, ugly, obscene betrayal of American working families that was rammed through the Senate in the dead of night to satisfy a president determined to hand tax cuts to his billionaire friends.

    “These are tax cuts paid for by ravaging the future: kicking millions off healthcare, closing rural hospitals, taking food from children, stunting job growth, hurting the climate, defunding schools and ballooning the debt. It will siphon money away from public schools through vouchers—which harm student achievement and go mostly to well-off families with kids already in private schools. It’s the biggest redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich in decades—far worse, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, than the version passed by the House.

    “But if you only listened to those who voted yes, you wouldn’t have heard anything like that. You would’ve heard bad faith attempts to rewrite basic laws of accounting so they could assert that the bill won’t grow the deficit. You would’ve heard false claims about what it will do to healthcare and public schools and public services, which are the backbone of our nation.

    “The reality is that the American people have rejected, in poll after poll, this bill’s brazen deception. As it travels back to the House and presumably to the president’s desk, we will continue to sound the alarm and let those who voted for it know they have wounded the very people who voted them into office. But it is also incumbent on us to fight forward for an alternative: for working-class tax cuts and for full funding of K-12 and higher education as engines of opportunity and democracy.

    “Sadly, as we prepare to celebrate our independence, the promise of the American dream, of freedom and prosperity for all, is now further out of reach.”

     ###

    The AFT represents 1.8 million pre-K through 12th-grade teachers; paraprofessionals and other school-related personnel; higher education faculty and professional staff; federal, state and local government employees; nurses and healthcare workers; and early childhood educators.



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  • David Dayen: What Else Is Included in the Big Ugly Budget Bill?

    David Dayen: What Else Is Included in the Big Ugly Budget Bill?


    Since this is a mostly education blog, I have covered the budget debate by focusing on what the GOP is doing to maim public schools and enrich private (especially religious schools). In the past, Republicans were strong supporters of public schools. But the billionaires came along and brought their checkbooks with them.

    The rest of the Ugly bill is devastating to people who struggle to get by. Deep cuts to Medicaid, which will force the closure of many rural hospitals. Cuts to anything that protects the environment or helps phase out our reliance on fossil fuels. Well, at least Senator Schumer managed to change the name of the bill, new name not yet determined.

    One Republican vote could have sunk the bill. But Senator Murkowski got a mess of pottage.

    David Dayen writes in The American Prospect:

    Welcome to “Trump’s Beautiful Disaster,” a pop-up newsletter about the Republican tax and spending bill, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in a generation. Sign up for the newsletter to get it in your in-box.

    By the thinnest of margins, the U.S. Senate completed work on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Tuesday morning, after Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) decided that she could live with a bill that takes food and medicine from vulnerable people to fund tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy, as long as it didn’t take quite as much food away from Alaskans.

    The new text, now 887 pages, was released at 11:20 a.m. ET. The finishing touches of it, which included handwritten additions to the text, played out live on C-SPAN, with scenes of the parliamentarian and a host of staff members from both parties huddled together.

    At the very end, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer knocked out the name “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” with a parliamentary maneuver, on the grounds that it was ridiculous (which is hard to argue). It’s unclear what this bill is even called now, but that hardly matters. The final bill passed 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie.

    Murkowski was able to secure a waiver from cost-sharing provisions that would for the first time force states to pay for part of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In order to get that past the Senate parliamentarian, ten states with the highest payment error rates had to be eligible for the five-year waiver, including big states like New York and Florida, and several blue states as well. 

    The expanded SNAP waivers mean that in the short-term only certain states with average or even below-average payment error rates will have to pay into their SNAP program; already, the language provided that states with the lowest error rates wouldn’t have to pay. “The Republicans have rewarded states that have the highest error rates in the country… just to help Alaska, which has the highest error rate,” thundered Sen. Amy Klobuchar (R-MN), offering an amendment to “strike this fiscal insanity” from the bill. The amendment failed along party lines.

    The new provision weakens the government savings for the bill at a time when the House Freedom Caucus is calling the Senate version a betrayal of a promise to link spending cuts to tax cuts. But those House hardliners will ultimately have to decide whether to defy Donald Trump and reject the hard-fought Senate package, which only managed 50 votes, or to cave to their president.

    In addition, Murkowski got a tax break for Alaskan fishing villages and whaling captains inserted into the bill. Medicaid provisions that would have boosted the federal share of the program for Alaska didn’t get through the parliamentarian; even a handwritten attempt to help out Alaska on Medicaid was thrown out at the last minute. But Murkowski still made off with a decent haul, which was obviously enough for her to vote yes.

    All Republicans except for Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Susan Collins (R-ME) voted for the bill. Tillis and Collins are in the two most threatened seats among Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections; Tillis decided to retire rather than face voters while passing this bill. Paul, a libertarian, rejected the price tag and the increase in the nation’s debt limit that is folded into the bill.

    Other deficit hawks in the Senate caved without even getting a vote to deepen the Medicaid cuts. That could be the trajectory in the House with Freedom Caucus holdouts. But the House also has problems with their handful of moderates concerned about the spending slashes in the bill.

    The bill was clinched with a “wraparound” amendment that made several changes, including the elimination of a proposed tax on solar and wind energy production that would have made it impossible to build new renewable energy projects. The new changes now also grandfather in tax credits to solar and wind projects that start construction less than a year after enactment of the bill. Even those projects would have to be placed in service by 2027. The “foreign entities of concern” provision was also tweaked to make it easier for projects that use a modicum of components from China to qualify for tax credits.

    The bill still phases out solar and wind tax credits rather quickly, and will damage energy production that is needed to keep up with soaring demand. But it’s dialed down from apocalyptic to, well, nearly apocalyptic. And this is going to be another source of anger to the Freedom Caucus, which wanted a much quicker phase-out of the energy tax credits.

    The wraparound amendment also doubled the size of the rural hospital fund to $50 billion. The Senate leadership’s initial offer on this fund was $15 billion. Overnight the Senate rejected an amendment from Collins that would have raised the rural hospital fund to $50 billion. Even at that size—which will be parceled out for $10 billion a year for five years—it hardly makes up for nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts, which are permanent. The hospital system is expected to buckle as a result of this legislation, if it passes.

    Some taxes, including a tax on third-party “litigation finance,” were removed in the final bill. But an expanded tax break for real estate investment trusts, which was in the House version, snuck into the Senate bill at the last minute.

    The state AI regulation ban was left out of the final text after a 99-1 rejection of it in an amendment overnight.

    The action now shifts to the House, where in addition to Freedom Caucus members concerned about cost, several moderates, including Reps. David Valadao (R-CA) and Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), have balked at the deep spending cuts to Medicaid and other programs.



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  • Community college math policy: Balancing big picture gains and classroom struggles

    Community college math policy: Balancing big picture gains and classroom struggles


    Is this a picture of something bad, or something good?

    Cognitive scientists call this the global-local processing dilemma: Do we perceive the overall image, or focus on the details? Education policy often faces the same question: Can a policy be considered “good” if the overall data look promising, but the day-to-day experiences feel “bad?”

    This tension is at the heart of California’s college math reforms.

    Like the image, the story of these policies may look “good” from a distance, but “bad” up close.

    Before recent reforms, community college students who needed extra math support were typically placed in remedial courses like elementary algebra. These classes didn’t count toward transfer requirements, and most students stuck in them never made it to a math course needed to transfer to a four-year university, such as college algebra or introductory statistics. This created an academic dead end for many.

    A 2017 law, Assembly Bill 705, changed that. It used high school grades for placement and gave more students direct access to transfer-level courses, with corequisite support (a support course taken concurrently with a transfer-level course) when needed. Instead of multi-semester remediation, students could move into transfer-level math courses faster.

    While challenges remain, the approach led to significant improvements. In 2016-17, before AB 705 was announced, only 27% of students passed a transfer-level math course within one year. But in 2019-20, the first full year of AB 705’s implementation, that number had nearly doubled to 51%. And by 2023-24, it reached 62%. About 30,000 more students were fulfilling their math requirements each year. The story is similar in English courses, and so it’s undeniable that AB 705 has helped California’s community college students get one step closer to transfer. 

    Despite these gains, many faculty don’t see AB 705 as a success. As one instructor put it, “There are a lot more people failing than before … largely students of color. … By making this change (i.e., AB 705) around equity, we’ve created an inequitable system.” And the data do show that pass rates have declined. 

    But here’s the catch: Far more students are now taking those courses. The graph below helps illustrate this shift using data from one community college district. Before AB 705, only a small fraction of students reached transfer-level math, but with high pass rates, as shown by the darker blue shading within the dashed box. After AB 705, access expanded, but pass rates declined from 80% to 70%. Critically, that’s 70% of a much larger group.

    With such an improvement, why do some faculty feel like the policy is a failure? 

    Because of this paradox: AB 705 absolutely led to more students passing. But it also led to more students failing. 

    People respond more strongly to stories than to statistics, and losses loom larger than gains. The students we see struggling — their faces, their frustration, their stories — linger longer than a bar graph showing statewide gains. As faculty members, we know this all too well. We remember the students who didn’t make it. We think about what we could’ve done differently. We agonize over them.

    And often, faculty haven’t been given the full picture. Our research has found that many instructors hadn’t even seen outcome data on AB 705’s impact. So, without that context, and given the classroom experience, it’s reasonable to assume the policy failed.

    This disconnect is a classic challenge in public policy: a policy can be effective overall but still feel painful on the ground. And this tension is always a part of the hard work of building systemic justice. AB 705 succeeded in dismantling long-standing barriers and expanding access to transfer-level math. But that progress has introduced new classroom dynamics that feel personal, urgent and overwhelming to faculty. Good policy must account for both the big-picture gains and the human cost of change. Reforms don’t succeed on data alone. They require understanding, empathy and support for those doing the work.

    And just as faculty were beginning to adjust to AB 705, we face Assembly Bill 1705, a sharper and even more controversial new policy. It asks colleges to stretch even more, limiting their ability to offer even prerequisite math courses. Understandably, many educators are still reeling. They’re trying to adapt to new expectations while managing unintended consequences in their classrooms. Recent guidance has softened the rollout, but confusion remains. The stakes are high, and many faculty feel mistrustful and angry.

    If AB 705 taught us anything, it’s that mistrust grows when there’s a gap between what the data show and what people experience. This is why the next phase of work cannot be just about compliance or policy enforcement. It must be about storytelling, listening and solutions. Faculty need to see the big picture. Policymakers need to understand life on the ground. The policy “worked” in aggregate, but not without professional and emotional cost. If we ignore that, we risk undermining the very equity goals these reforms were meant to achieve.

    Like the image above, the truth lies in seeing both levels clearly. We must acknowledge the trade-offs, the tension, and the very real pain of transition. Let’s take concerns seriously without retreating from hard-won progress. Let’s keep asking the harder, more honest questions: How do we support both students and faculty through ambitious change? How do we ensure that every student, not just the most prepared, has a real shot at success? 

    If we can do that, maybe we’ll find a way forward that is both honest and hopeful, one that sees the whole picture.

    •••

    Ji Y. Son, Ph.D., is a cognitive scientist and professor at California State University, Los Angeles and co-founder of CourseKata.org, a statistics and data science curriculum used by colleges and high schools.
    Federick Ngo, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research examines higher education policy, with a focus on college access and community college students.

    The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • Through comedy, students can take ‘big swings’ for mental health

    Through comedy, students can take ‘big swings’ for mental health


    Two teaching artists lead a group of students through improv exercises during a Laughing Together workshop at San Joaquin County Office of Education's Peer-to-Peer Summit in September 2024.

    Teaching artists lead students through improv exercises during a Laughing Together workshop at San Joaquin County Office of Education’s Peer-to-Peer Summit in September 2024.

    Top Takeaways
    • Many school districts are using comedy and improv workshops to teach students social-emotional skills, encourage self-expression and foster social connection. 
    • Through the comedy program Laughing Together, professional comedians and mental health clinicians develop workshops based on exercises that can improve student mental health. 
    • Game-based learning and interactive play can engage students who might have fallen behind academically or socially during the pandemic.

    “If you were an object, what object would you be?” 

    Chris Gethard, a veteran comedian and improv teacher, posed this question to a group of high school students in Northern California at a Laughing Together workshop he was leading. He remembered one who identified as a fruit. 

    “When I was a kid, I convinced myself that I hated avocados,” Gethard remembered the student saying. “And then I tried one, and I actually love ’em. And that’s been my experience the past few years as I’m learning to love and embrace myself.”

    It quickly became obvious to Gethard that the improv wasn’t about avocado or any fruit for that matter. It was a big moment, and the student was taking a big risk to figure out something about themselves — their gender identity in real time.

    “Young people right now are living in a world where those experiences are often held up in the spotlight and politicized,” Gethard said. “So to see a kid being able to take a comedy exercise, which feels light and accessible and not too heavy, they can let their guard down and take a big swing like that.”

    Many school districts are turning to comedy as a way of supporting student mental health. In 2023, Gethard co-founded Laughing Together, a program based on research that comedy can be an effective tool for students’ social-emotional learning and social connection with their peers. 

    Nearly 6,500 students and educators across 26 different schools, districts, or youth organizations, have taken part in their workshops since Gethard co-founded the program with Marlon Morgan, CEO of parent nonprofit Wellness Together. 

    “One of the reasons that we [partnered with Gethard] is that he had already shared about his own mental health through his comedy special on HBO,” said Morgan, who is also a former school counselor. “He can make dark and scary things funny, which really helps students gain insight into their own emotions and become better at connecting with each other.” 

    ‘Taking chances in the spotlight’

    Research shows that students who practice social-emotional skills in safe environments with well-defined goals have improved social behavior, emotional regulation and academic performance. 

    “We have clinical psychologists who go through all the improv exercises,” Gethard said. “They get to say — ‘these ones are about making people funny, and they also prioritize nonverbal communication, strengthening eye contact, being comfortable with failure and taking some chances in the spotlight.’”

    Christina Patterson, a senior and peer counselor at Lincoln High School in Stockton, said pandemic shutdowns forced her to spend nearly entire days scrolling through social media, hoping for something new to interact with (“But, there never is anything new,” she added). 

    For the first time since her school implemented a cellphone ban, Patterson said taking part in the Laughing Together workshop, even for an hour, met the level of engagement she had always been looking for on her phone. Like Patterson, students in recent years report better cognitive, social and academic outcomes through game-based learning and interactive play, compared to lecture-based instruction. 

    “I feel engaged with people who are interactive — they’re not trying to teach at you, but they’re trying to teach with you together,” Patterson said. 

    Laughing Together workshops are led by one of the program’s teaching artists, including professional comedians, actors and performers, alongside children’s psychologists, drawing on art, play and game therapy research, to develop social-emotional learning and communication skill-building into each exercise. For Gethard, a workshop is successful if he can teach students something without them realizing it. 

    “We want kids to leave feeling more connected and comfortable with each other, not like they just watched a slide show or that they were just spoon-fed these lessons,” he said. “We want them to feel that they’re allowed to at least throw an idea out there, and no one’s going to judge them, pick them apart, or criticize them.” 

    Sofia Stewart-Lopez, a senior and peer counselor at Lincoln High School, helped set up a peer-to-peer summit, where she and other student mentors took part in a Laughing Together workshop. She remembered starting the day anxious about a big presentation about mental health resources she had later in the day, but after a few skits and improv games, she felt more confident, relaxed and connected to the people around her. 

    “I learned that a big part of balancing heavy topics of mental health, like anxiety, depression or substance abuse, is learning how to combat them with things that can help you with those feelings,” Stewart-Lopez said.

    Markus Alcantar, a senior and a peer counselor at Lincoln High School, said his favorite part of the workshop was one in which he got to become an apple. He had to think on his feet about why he felt like one, and then he improvised a skit with someone who had decided they were a tree. In another exercise, he said a volunteer started with juggling a ball, after which students added another ball, followed by another, and then another — until they couldn’t keep up anymore. 

    “It was a fun representation of how you can have a lot of things going on in your head mentally, and that you can learn to unravel those thoughts and organize them for yourself and other people,” Alcantar said. 

    About 1 in 5 teenagers, and most of Stewart-Lopez’s friends at school, she said, have experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression. So the workshop, she said, was particularly helpful in understanding how laughter exactly works in the brain — like how endorphins and serotonin receptors can alleviate some feelings of sadness or anxiety — to be able to have fun and build healthy coping skills with friends at school. 

    “The [improv exercises] also taught us that thinking on our feet better prepares us to be able to respond in different types of situations,” Stewart-Lopez said. “We learned that different people need different types of support, which betters us as mentors.”

    Middle school students attend a Laughing Together workshop at San Joaquin County Office of Education’s Peer-to-Peer Summit in September 2024.

    Most recently, Gethard completed nine workshops at a high school where over half of the student body are on Individualized Education Plans (IEP), or accommodations for students with learning, developmental, or behavioral disabilities. During the first workshop, he noticed most students reaching for their phones in the middle of an exercise or while on stage. To ease students into the experience, he’d tell them to simply take a breath and try to be present. 

    “After the first few workshops, a teacher came up to me and said, ‘their ability to lock in and focus on that is leaps and bounds compared to week one,” Gethard said. “She said, ‘they just never got their ability to focus back after Covid, but if we can keep going with this, it’s going to change the game for these kids in the room.’” 

    Rates of anxiety and depression — which shot up by 70% among California children between 2017 and 2022 — are the top health-related drivers of absenteeism since the onset of the pandemic. Research indicates that reduced social interaction, coupled with overreliance on screen time, also worsened students’ social cognition skills, such as cooperation and communication, and executive functions, such as attention and memory.

    Alcantar was in seventh grade when schools shut down, and when he returned to in-person instruction as a high school freshman, he said he found it difficult for him to initiate conversations with people around him. Stewart-Lopez said that after schools lifted mask mandates, she kept hers on for a while because she was worried about meeting social expectations about what she should look like. 

    “The pandemic had added to my sense of anxiety about, ‘What if I don’t fit in? What if I’m different from everybody else?” she said. 

    For Stewart-Lopez, laughter feels like home. It’s how she and her sisters got through their parents’ separation and also how she plans to take new risks with new people at college this year. 

    “We’re creating that safe place for students to get real-time responses to the risks they’re taking — and everyone’s taking risks — which makes it okay,” said Morgan, the CEO of nonprofit Wellness Together.





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  • Q&A: Big drop in enrollment of low-income undocumented students at California’s public universities

    Q&A: Big drop in enrollment of low-income undocumented students at California’s public universities


    People rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 as oral arguments are heard in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to end the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The University of California brought the case to the court.

    Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

    The number of low-income undocumented students newly enrolled in the University of California and California State University plummeted 50% between 2016-17 and 2022-23, according to a study released this month.

    The study by William C. Kidder of the UCLA Civil Rights Project and Kevin R. Johnson of the UC Davis School of Law comes at a moment of heightened debate about policy proposals aimed at defraying the cost of college for undocumented students, who are not eligible for federal Pell Grants and often lack legal work permits. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday vetoed Assembly Bill 2586, which would have cleared the way for undocumented students to take on-campus jobs at the state’s public colleges and universities.

    “Given the gravity of the potential consequences of this bill, which include potential criminal and civil liability for state employees, it is critical that the courts address the legality of such a policy and the novel legal theory behind this legislation before proceeding,” Newsom wrote in his veto statement. “Seeking declaratory relief in court — an option available to the University of California — would provide such clarity.”

    Johnson wrote in an email that Newsom’s veto of AB 2586, also called the Opportunity for All Act, “will make it more difficult for undocumented students to attend public universities in California.” 

    “I hope that the University of California and California State University systems will consider ways to help financially support undocumented students,” he wrote. “Scholarships, fee remissions, and the like must be considered if lawful employment, as would have been permitted by the Opportunity for All Act, is not possible.”

    Since 2012, the federal program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, has allowed certain undocumented immigrants to temporarily work legally in the U.S. and live without fear of immediate deportation, but the program has ceased processing new applicants due to legal challenges.

    “When we think that we’re seeing a decrease in enrollment in California, CSU and UC, with all the support provided by the university and by the legislature in terms of allowing undocumented students to pay resident fees, you have to imagine that in other states it’s much worse in terms of drop off in enrollment of undocumented students,” Johnson wrote.

    Johnson and Kidder’s study seeks to fill an important gap in California policymakers’ understanding of how undocumented student enrollment has changed over time. 

    The state’s colleges and universities historically have avoided collecting official data on undocumented students, mindful of those students’ vulnerable legal status. To solve that problem, Kidder and Johnson examined the number of students awarded a Cal Grant under the California Dream Act, a state financial aid program for which low-income undocumented students are eligible. The numbers likely represent a subset of all undocumented college students at Cal State and UC campuses, since they do not include students who applied for a Dream Act award but were not eligible or who were offered an award but didn’t accept it.

    Kidder and Johnson find that Dream Act awardees at CSU and UC appear to have peaked around the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years.

    At CSU, they found that new and returning Dream Act awardees fell 30% between 2019-20 and 2022-23, outpacing an almost 7% decline in other Cal Grant awardees at CSU during the same period, as well as falling undergraduate enrollment within the university system.

    The story was similar at UC campuses, where Dream Act awardees dropped by roughly 31% between 2019-20 and 2022-23, a period in which other Cal Grant awardees only dipped 1%.

    Kidder and Johnson tie the decline in Dream Act awardees to the demise of the deferred action program. The Trump administration moved to rescind the program in 2017, and subsequent efforts to revive it have been stymied by court decisions that allow current DACA recipients to renew work permits but block new applicants. As a result, most current undergraduate college students are not eligible to apply for DACA and the youngest current DACA recipients are about 22 years old.

    That said, the study does not use the kind of granular data that would allow the researchers to test explicitly whether the rescission of DACA is causing the decline in Dream Act awardees. Previous research has found that the program boosted graduation rates among undocumented high school students and that harsher immigration enforcement correlated with lower academic achievement for undocumented K-12 students. Kidder and Johnson cite those studies — as well as the similar results they observed across UC and CSU — as pointing toward the likelihood that an external force is behind declining Dream Act awardees. 

    Supporters of AB 2586, the bill Newsom vetoed this weekend, argued that the UC system is not subject to a federal prohibition on hiring undocumented workers because it is part of the state of California. Johnson is among 29 scholars to sign a legal memo building that case, which was published by the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

    Neither CSU nor UC took a formal position on the bill. But in a letter to lawmakers, the UC expressed concerns that hiring undocumented students could jeopardize “billions of dollars in existing federal contracts and grants.” The university system also said the bill could expose students, their families and UC employees to criminal or civil prosecution. In July, CSU officials similarly said the bill rested on an untested legal theory that could result in litigation against the system. 

    EdSource recently spoke with Kidder and Johnson to discuss their forthcoming article in the Journal of College & University Law. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    What do we understand about the impact that DACA had on undocumented high school students, and what has happened since the Trump administration began challenging the Obama-era program?

    Johnson: The data that we were able to put together shows that, basically, the dismantling of DACA —-the refusal to accept new applications – is having an impact that one might expect. While DACA created some kind of stability, initially, in high school students and boosted college enrollments, its dismantling has had the effect of reducing undocumented enrollment and destabilizing students and, the way I’d put it, it’s making them wonder whether they have a future in this country. …

    It’s a wake-up call in all kinds of ways for colleges and universities to claim that they want to be open, be more accessible.

    What did you find when you looked at how many students at Cal State and University of California campuses received California Dream Act grants in recent years?

    Kidder: New California Dream Act awardees, both freshmen and students, had declined by half between 2017 and 2023, which is just a remarkable drop. … I was a little surprised at the scale of the decline, just given the situation in California and how it’s different from Texas or Florida or some other states where there’s greater opposition and hostility to supporting undocumented students.

    Do you see the same pattern of decline in awards among California residents who are citizens and who received Cal Grants during this period?

    Kidder: We tried to adopt what social scientists call a “difference in difference” methodology. That’s where you study the rate of change over time with one group compared to a matched comparison group. 

    So, we looked at low-income students who are not undocumented, primarily U.S. citizen residents of California — who are going to the same high schools; the same age group; similar, but not exactly the same, income levels; very similar academic profiles in terms of high school GPAs, etc. We did that to confirm that there weren’t other systemic effects on the California budget and economy that might be unaccounted for outside factors. 

    What we found is that other Cal Grant students, both within UC and within CSU, were flat at the same time that both the undocumented students at UC and CSU had this 50% decline. So it did shore up our inference that there was something uniquely challenging in the current environment for undocumented college students.

    You write that back in the 2016-17 school year, 56% of new Dream Act students attended a UC or Cal State campus, while the remainder attended a California Community College campus. By the 2022-23 school year, that dynamic had flipped: 40% of those Dream Act students attended UC and Cal State, and the rest attended community college. What do you make of that shift?

    Kidder: We did include in the data that we are capturing not just new freshmen, but also new entering transfer students. It is of concern that somehow, in recent years … it’s not translating into those (community college) students still having higher education access to a university education through the transfer pathway. There’s a blockage there, and that was clear in the data. 

    From a public policy level, that’s troubling, given that these are students, many of whom have been living in California since age 5 or age 8, and the California taxpayers and the system of California laws has invested in their future. For those students to be blocked in their pathway lowers their future life chances. 

    State university officials can’t control what happens with DACA. If educators at UC and Cal State are concerned about losing undocumented students, what could they do to encourage those students to enroll and help them to stay enrolled?

    Johnson: I think one of the assumptions in the question is that there’s limited possibilities for what the university could do. It was the University of California that brought the lawsuit that ended up in the Supreme Court stopping the rescission of DACA, and that was a controversial move in some quarters. But I do think the university– legally, politically and otherwise — is a powerful advocate for students, and can and has, at various times, pushed for reform and change. 

    I think that the university, if they’re really committed to undocumented students, can support things like the Opportunity for All Act, which has been basically briefed and set on their desk, showing that it might be legal for the University of California to allow its students, all students, to be employed by the University of California. …

    I think that the university could also think about, “How do we create more scholarships and funding for undocumented students?” If we’re really designing, or we really want to have, a university that serves all, shouldn’t we commit ourselves to enrolling all students who we admit and making it possible for them to attend? 

    Then the question is, how you raise money, how you distribute that money, how you create scholarships. The University of California often takes great pride in bringing in large chunks of money for research projects and, for example, spends years talking about and invests mounds of money in Aggie Square in Sacramento for research. … Why not work to create more funding for all students, including undocumented students? Why not think carefully about your tuition increases at various points in time, and what impacts it has on the people that you say you want to enroll in the university?

    I want to talk to you about AB 2586. The first Cal State board of trustees meeting I attended was in July, and there was some discussion about this bill. The trustees were asking staff to brief them on what they think of this bill. The gist was, ‘We see this as risky. We see this as potentially putting us on a collision course with the federal government, where we would open ourselves up to litigation. What do you think about that approach?

    Johnson: I think it’s a cowardly approach. It’d be like the university saying “We’re not going to weigh in on the civil rights movement because it’s controversial politically, and it’s risky to do so, and we’re not going to move forward because we’re afraid of getting sued.” 

    It’s funny, but (former UC President) Janet Napolitano could have taken the same position, saying “We’re not going to challenge the rescission of DACA, don’t want to alienate the federal government, which gives a large amount of money to the University of California. We’re just going to sit on our hands and let these DACA recipients be poorly treated.” …

    I’m an attorney. I was dean of the (UC Davis School of Law) for 16 years. Attorneys are always going to tell you there are risks. There are also risks driving to the grocery store, but we still go to the store. So I don’t buy that risk assessment argument, and I think that this is the time for universities that are truly committed to these issues to show their commitment to these issues.

    Why should CSU and why should the UC prioritize helping undocumented students to get a college degree?

    Kidder: Both my data analysis as well as my personal experience as a university administrator working with lots of undocumented students confirms my conviction that this is a very talented pool of young people in California. If their hopes and dreams are allowed to flourish in California, it benefits all Californians, and I mean that both in an economic sense and in a larger democratic sense.





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