برچسب: boards

Teachers, school boards threaten to sue over Gov. Newsom’s fix for revenue shortfall

Gov. Gavin Newsom

Credit: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File

The article was updated on May 20 to include a quote from Rob Manwaring and a graphic showing differences in Prop. 98 funding between the governor’s May budget revision and CTA’s estimate of full funding.

Two powerful education groups’ opposition could derail Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to fix a massive state budget shortfall for TK-12 schools and community colleges and lead to litigation this summer with an unpredictable outcome.

The dispute is over Proposition 98, the 35-year-old, complex formula that determines how much money schools and community colleges must receive annually from the state’s general fund. Newsom says he’s complying with the law while largely sparing schools and community colleges the larger budget cuts facing UC, CSU and non-educational parts of state government.

To which the California School Boards Association and the California Teachers Association say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

In separate announcements, the school boards association on Wednesday and CTA on Friday threatened to sue over what they characterize as an end run around the Proposition 98 formula that would deny schools and community colleges billions of dollars. They argue that Newsom’s tactic would set a bad and expensive precedent that governors in other tight times would imitate if allowed.

David Goldberg, CTA President

CTA President David Goldberg called the budget maneuver “an outright assault on public school funding” that would “wreak havoc for years to come.”

Patrick O’Donnell, a former high-ranking Assembly member who is now chief of government affairs for the school boards association, said the organization is willing to sit down with the governor but will not permit a violation of the state constitution on Proposition 98, “our lifeline to education.”

Like other areas of state government, schools and community colleges are facing a massive revenue shortage — a drop of $17.7 billion in Proposition 98 funding over a three-year period, including $3.7 billion just since January alone.

The biggest piece of the drop reflected a big miscalculation. Because of winter storms in early 2023 across much of the nation, the federal government and California pushed back the filing date for taxes from April 15 to Nov. 15. As a result, Newsom and legislators lacked accurate revenue estimates when they set the 2023-24 budget in June; it turns out they appropriated $8.8 billion more than the minimum required under Proposition 98.

Since TK-12 and community colleges had already budgeted and spent the money, Newsom promised to hold them harmless. The contention is over his Department of Finance advisers’ plan to treat the “overpayment” as an off-the-books accounting maneuver.

The Department of Finance would pay for the $8.8 billion in cash — the state apparently has lots of it these days — and then accrue the expenditure from the general fund over five years, starting in 2025-26.

The proposed budget “is not only legal and constitutional in our view, but is designed to provide predictable and stable support” in response to unprecedented disruption in revenue projections,” said H.D. Palmer, the deputy director for external affairs for the Department of Finance. But the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has questioned whether the governor’s plan is prudent, without commenting on its legality. And key legislators, including the chairs of the budget subcommittees on education financing — Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, and Assemblymember David Alvarez, D-San Diego — appeared skeptical in hearings this week.

CTA and the school boards association have a different beef: the “manipulation” of the Proposition 98 obligation. Voters passed the proposition as a constitutional amendment to protect education spending from tax cutters and, as has happened more often lately, tax volatility. The formula sets a funding floor but not a ceiling, and the Proposition 98 appropriation in any given year generally becomes the base for calculating the next year’s minimum. There are several “tests,” tied to economic conditions and growth in student attendance, that determine how much Proposition 98 funding changes annually.

The teachers union and the school boards association argue that the extra $8.8 billion becomes the floor for calculating the 2023-24 obligation, and that it is not a mistake or overpayment.

By CTA’s calculations, adding in the $8.8 billion and applying other Proposition 98 factors would raise funding for 2023-24 by $6.8 billion beyond what Newsom calls for in his May revision and $5.1 billion more in 2024-25.

“The Proposition 98 maneuver proposed in the May Revise threatens public school funding,” Goldberg said in a statement. “Eroding this guarantee would harm schools for years to come and create the conditions for larger class sizes, fewer counselors, school nurses and mental health professionals, cuts to essential school programs and potential layoffs.”

Kenneth Kapphahn, senior fiscal and policy analyst for the Legislative Analyst’s Office, said that the agency hasn’t seen CTA’s calculations but that the union’s numbers are “close to what we are tracking.”

“The Administration is trying to illegally exclude the $8.8 billion that already was spent on schools in 2022-23 when calculating the minimum guarantee for 2023-24,” said Rob Manwaring, senior policy and fiscal adviser for the advocacy nonprofit Children Now. “In passing Proposition 98 as a constitutional amendment, voters were clear they wanted to avoid manipulations to suppress spending on schools and community colleges.”

Suspension of Proposition 98 likely

Newsom’s May revision to the budget calls for using $8.8 billion from the general fund to plug the shortfall for 2022-23, draining what remains of the nearly $8.5 billion Proposition 98 reserve to balance 2023-24 and 2024-25, and making a couple of billion dollars’ worth of cuts, including facilities spending for preschools and transitional kindergarten, middle-class college scholarships, tuition grants for teacher candidates and a delay in funding preschool slots.

A win for the CTA and the school boards association, whether through negotiations or in court, wouldn’t immediately send additional revenue, which the state doesn’t have, to districts’ doorsteps or resolve the challenge of a $17.7 billion shortfall.

O’Donnell, representing the school boards, acknowledged that adding billions to the Proposition 98 minimum could compound the “short-term pain” of balancing the budget.

This immediate result could be additional cuts, an emergency suspension of Proposition 98 this year or the creation of billions of dollars in IOUs called deferrals.‘ The legislative analyst’s Kapphahn said that the state is heading into the next fiscal year with less state revenue and without a rainy day fund to help out.

Suspending Proposition 98 when the state cannot fund its minimum obligations has been done twice, in 2004-05 and 2010-11. Suspension requires a two-thirds vote of the Legislature and creates a debt, called the “maintenance factor,” that, Kapphahn said, “can take many years to be restored.”

Deferrals, which were used in the years after the Great Recession, involve late payments, anywhere from days to months, into the next fiscal year, which are rolled over yearly until there’s enough new money to end them.

“There’s a whole series of options, and they are all difficult. Every single one seems to require us to pay money that is not budgeted with the possible exception of the governor’s proposed maneuver,” said the Senate’s Laird. “We are going to have intense discussions over the next few weeks about these options.”

CTA acknowledged that a Proposition 98 suspension might be inevitable but also essential. “At least a suspension brings a constitutionally required restoration of the guarantee level” through repayments of the maintenance factor, it said in a statement Friday, “thereby avoiding a permanent reduction in school funding and the whims of future Administrations.”

The union intends to put pressure on legislators. “We will be calling our elected leaders in the coming weeks to demand protection of school funding,” Goldberg said, adding that CTA will launch a media campaign to ensure that our communities understand what’s at stake.”

Source link

29/05/2025
What effective school boards get right

Kindergarten students in San Jose Unified School District. (EdSource File photo.)

Credit: Liv Ames / EdSource

Over the next several months, high-profile political races will command the public’s attention. But one set of races at the local level might be just as consequential: local school board elections.

Too many of us are flying blind when making school board ballot decisions. Few of us can say we regularly attend our local school board meetings (and those that do rarely represent the larger community). There is little research about school boards and limited public understanding of what the role of a school board entails. Although it seems like there are more news stories about school boards than ever before, those accounts unfortunately focus on disruption and dissension. Tales about recent recall votes, a fight about which books to teach, or a board meeting turning violent reveal that many school boards have become battlegrounds for political issues beyond K-12 education.

Now is an opportune time to build greater awareness of what school boards do and the positive impact of effective governance. Fortunately, there are strong examples from which we can learn. The California Collaborative on District Reform released a case study of two California school districts — Napa Valley and San José Unified School Districts — with strong reputations among peer superintendents as having highly functional superintendent–school board relations. The case study illuminates the kinds of practices governing teams in other districts can adopt and the general public can reward in their voting.

Commit to shared priorities. The pressures facing school districts — including from the pandemic, educator shortages, a daunting fiscal outlook, and others — are more intense than at any time in recent memory. These pressures often lead districts to fragment their work or, in an attempt to address every concern, do none of them well. In San José Unified and Napa Valley Unified, the governing teams orient their work around a shared mission, vision and values that help create focus and coherence in what could otherwise be an overwhelming environment. Both districts illustrate that school boards and their communities can work toward a shared vision more effectively with clearly defined priorities.

Establish and embrace norms for behavior. Just as important as what a governing team does is how it does its work. Napa Valley Unified and San José Unified both commit to shared norms for working together that keep them accountable for acting in the best interests of their communities. These norms include treating each other with respect, clearly defining what their role does and does not entail, and embracing a commitment to sharing information transparently. The norms help them maintain focus, navigate disagreement in healthy ways, and model behavior that districts seek to develop in their students.

Invest in early and recurring onboarding experiences. November elections will shift the composition of the governing teams in many districts, which can potentially undermine the commitment to both priorities and norms. To avoid this, newly elected trustees in San José Unified and Napa Valley Unified undergo district-specific onboarding processes that include one-on-one meetings with the superintendent and members of the central office and a California School Boards Association (CSBA)-facilitated Good Beginnings workshop to form relationships with one another and co-develop norms for how they will work together. A strong onboarding experience fosters role clarity, establishes a foundation for the governing team to work collaboratively, and communicates to constituents what the school board role involves and how it can best serve the community.

Lean on internal commitments to navigate challenges. The two districts’ strong sense of role clarity and their commitment to priorities and norms allow them to better navigate periods of struggle. Representatives from Napa Valley Unified described the painful decision to close schools in 2019 and 2021; San José Unified governing team members recalled an intense series of votes about police presence on school campuses. These difficult experiences tested the governing teams’ norms and values, but board members reported they would have been much harder without the practices, processes and commitments they had made prior.

This fall, voters will determine who represents them in crafting local school policy.

Now is the time for district leaders, trustees and voters to ask themselves some critical questions: Do members of my community understand what the work of the school board entails? Do they understand what a commitment to problem-solving enables the district to do? And will their voting reflect those kinds of behaviors and commitments?

By building awareness, fostering understanding, and equipping voters to make informed decisions on behalf of their communities, we can help cultivate governing bodies that will prioritize problem-solving over dysfunction, compromise over grandstanding, and student needs above all.

•••

Joel Knudson is a principal researcher at American Institutes for Research and the chair of the California Collaborative on District Reform, a learning community of researchers, practitioners, policymakers and funders dedicated to improving instruction and student learning for California’s school systems.

Marina Castro is a research analyst at American Institutes for Research, a nonpartisan and not-for-profit social science research organization, and a staff member of the California Collaborative on District Reform.

The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.

Source link

17/05/2025
School boards association lawsuit claims provision in California budget deal is unconstitutional

Credit: Flickr

This article was rewritten and reposted on Sept. 27 to clarify that the lawsuit’s aim is to prevent underfunding of Proposition 98 in future years. The earlier version misstated that the lawsuit asserted the current state budget as enacted also violated the funding law.

Although the 2024-25 state budget shields school districts and community colleges from funding cuts, the California School Boards Association is suing the Newsom administration over a provision that the school boards association claims is unconstitutional.

The change to the Education Code would deny schools money they would be entitled to under some conditions in future years, setting a dangerous precedent, CSBA argued in a lawsuit filed this week.

The school boards association is asking the Superior Court in Sacramento County to invalidate that section in the education budget bill. CSBA argues it violates the letter and spirit of Proposition 98, the formula that determines how much of the General Fund must be allocated to schools and community colleges.

The Department of Finance inserted the little-known statutory wording into the budget trailer bill in the final days of the legislative session in June, with no discussion or notice. It was not mentioned in the budget analysis that legislators reviewed before passing the budget.

“CSBA’s defense of voter‐approved Proposition 98 is nonnegotiable, as is the obligation of the state to follow the Constitution that governs it,” CSBA President Albert Gonzalez, a Santa Clara Unified school board member, said in a statement.

On behalf of Newsom, the California Department of Finance refuted CSBA assertions in a series of exchanges with legislative leaders in July. All of its actions were legal, Joe Stephenshaw, director of the Department of Finance, wrote.

The lawsuit would not affect this year’s budget, which took effect July 1. However, the tense negotiations and controversial revenue maneuvers preceding the budget’s passage were very much on the minds of Newsom’s financial advisors when they wrote the statutory change that the school boards association opposes.

It pertains to the unusual challenge that Newsom and the Legislature found themselves in trying to write the 2023-24 budget. Because of the devasting impacts of winter storms and floods, the federal government and the state pushed back the tax collection deadline from April to November 2023. Without having tax receipts in hand, Newsom and the Legislature made a best-guess estimate of what Prop. 98 minimum guarantee would be for 2022-23. As it turned out, the minimum guarantee was $8.8 billion less than what they appropriated.

Rather than cut funding for school districts and community colleges after the 2022-23 fiscal year had ended and money had been spent, Newsom left what he called “an overappropriation” alone. Two of the main formulas to determine the Prop 98 minimum guarantee incorporate what the state spent on schools in the prior year. So, the over-appropriation in 2022-23 would increase the amount that the state owed schools in 2023-24, 2024-25 and beyond. his initial 2024-25 budget in January, Newsom proposed allowing schools to keep the $8.8 billion for 2022-23 but to exclude the money when calculating the Prop. 98 minimum guarantee for 2023-24 and 2024-25.

CSBA and other education groups opposed that move. They said that dropping Prop. 98 below what the Legislature had approved violated the initiative that voters passed in 1988.

In most years, the Legislature’s Prop. 98 appropriation becomes the base amount for the following year, then is adjusted for enrollment growth or decline, inflation, or increases in economic growth per student. That assures that Prop. 98 minimum funding guarantee will grow over time, CSBA said.

Faced with strong opposition from a coalition of school groups, Newsom eventually gave up on lowering the minimum guarantee. But still short of funding to pay for it, Newsom turned to a series of multiyear maneuvers: suspending the minimum guarantee in 2023-24, deferring funding from one year to the next, draining the rainy day fund, and creating a multi-billion dollar debt that the General Fund, not future Prop. 98 revenues, would pay back over several years. All of these tactics were legal.

Newsom tries again

But Newsom and Finance officials hadn’t given up on the idea of revising the Prop. 98 minimum guarantee downward when tax revenues come up short. They quietly inserted language into the trailer bill to limit the state’s funding vulnerability in the event of another tax filing delay in the future.

It says that when the filing deadline for personal and corporate income taxpayers is pushed back at least two weeks, then the state will revert to the previous year’s minimum guarantee. After the new taxes are collected, the state will recalculate the new Prop. 98 minimum and determine the difference between the original and revised Prop. 98 minimum. The “excess” appropriation won’t be able to raise the Prop. 98 minimum that year and for subsequent years, the statute says.

CSBA criticized this “unlawful provision” for “artificially lowering the baseline upon which future years’ school funding is established.” The lawsuit argues that voters passed it to assure a “stable and predictable source of funding that is not subject to political influence or manipulation.”

“When the Newsom administration proposed a budget maneuver in January to exclude some school funding from the Prop 98 formulas, education groups opposed it because it was unconstitutional. The budget language passed this summer to allow a similar manipulation of the guarantee in the future would be similarly unconstitutional,” said Rob Manwaring, senior policy and fiscal advisor for the nonprofit Children Now and an advisor on the lawsuit.

Delays in the tax deadline as occurred in 2022 and laid out in the provision will presumably be rare, but CSBA said the integrity of Prop. 98 must be preserved.

The Legislature has no authority to amend the wording of Prop. 98 – only voters can do that, CSBA argued.

Source link

10/05/2025
Teachers, conservatives battle for sway on school boards

Elk Grove Unified director of elementary school education Jodi Boyle gets tips on how to use a canvassing app before she heads out in support of Measure N, a school facilities bond.

Diana Lambert/EdSource

California school board races, largely ignored by voters until the 2022 election, are again taking center stage. The California Teachers Association(CTA), the California Republican Party and other organizations have significantly ramped up efforts to help their favored candidates win local school board seats on Nov. 5.

On Saturday, teachers and other school employees dropped into the offices of the Elk Grove Education Association to receive last-minute instructions and pick up yard signs and union T-shirts before fanning out across the Sacramento County district to encourage residents to vote for a local school bond and union-supported school board candidates.

It is part of a larger effort by CTA to get its local unions more engaged in school board elections. For the last few months, California teachers have been attending rallies and canvassing neighborhoods to drop off door hangers and knock on doors. County Republican central committees, other conservative organizations, and in some parts of the state, charter school organizations are doing the same.

CTA President David Goldberg said the union is “absolutely” taking this year’s school board elections more seriously than it has in the past, and is counting on the engagement and popularity of its teachers to win local races. It is also trying to change the culture of local unions not being active in elections.

“We know that our popularity as educators and union educators is at an all-time high,” Goldberg said. “And just the words: … ‘I’m an educator in your community, and I’m asking you to vote for this person,’ just that alone, changes elections. I mean that’s the gift we have. So we just have to lean into it and use it much more than we have in the past.”

Before the 2022 election, the Republican Party, and some conservative organizations and churches, spent more than a year recruiting, training and endorsing candidates in an attempt to create a “red wave” to win what are supposed to be nonpartisan seats.

Their goal was to gain seats on California school boards to promote conservative ideas, including fighting educational policies on gender identity and racial equity. Although the effort made some headway, it failed to flip many seats in more liberal areas of the state.

This year, county Republican central committees and conservative groups, like the Leadership Institute, again recruited and trained school board candidates throughout the state with a focus on winning seats in more liberal areas of the state.

Shawn Steel

Conservatives are campaigning even more aggressively than they did two years ago, said Shawn Steel, the Republican National Committee member from California. “There’s been a lot less noise but a lot more action,” he said.

Both sides say power is the issue

Goldberg said that some of the conservative candidates running for school board are self-proclaimed “white Christian nationalists” who are part of a broader movement to dramatically change public education to suit their ideology.

“It’s not an attack on Christianity, what we’re saying,” Goldberg said. “Because this has very little to do with Christianity at all. It’s about power, and it’s about using power to really re-imagine public education in a way that does not include the majority of our students in that vision, but really is a fundamentalist attack on democracy.”

Steel says the teachers unions have too much power and that union members are trying to get candidates elected that they can control.

“You got the union reps that are literally knocking on doors and financing their candidate,” Steel said. “And why are they doing that? It’s not because they want education better, they want better salaries and more power. It should be illegal, in my view.”

How the union supports campaigns

As a rule, the CTA focuses its efforts on statewide races and propositions, while local unions support local races. But local unions can apply for financial support for school board races from the CTA Political Action Committee. The CTA and local teachers unions sometimes share the cost of joint mailers advertising statewide races on one side and local races on the other, Goldberg said.

“We’re never going to have enough money to fund these races,” Goldberg said. “We live in the fifth-largest economy in the world. We have billionaires who frankly could write a bigger check in a single day than 300,000 members could raise in years. So, our real power is our member strength. And our members and educators are trusted more than any other people.”

Over the next several years, the CTA is spending about $60 million so that every union president can be released from the classroom to engage with their members, including encouraging their members to participate in local campaigns, Goldberg said.

California Teachers Association President David Goldberg and local school board presidents at State Council. The union is paying to release all the presidents from their teaching duties so they can engage with their members and promote participation in elections.
California Teachers Association

This is the first year Elk Grove Education Association members have canvassed neighborhoods for candidates. Teachers who were campaigning on Saturday credited the leadership of local union President James Sutter for getting Elk Grove teachers excited about supporting union-endorsed candidates and a local school facilities bond in the upcoming election.

Troy Morgan, science teacher at Monterey Trail High School, has been knocking on doors promoting union-endorsed candidates every Saturday since early September. He sometimes goes out after school on weekdays as well.

“I think we just realized how important it is, having a cohesive school board that supports students, and just knows how things should work, or what’s going to work best for students and all staff, not just teachers,” Morgan said Saturday before heading out for more canvassing. “There have been times in the past where it hasn’t been a cohesive kind of board, and we want to make sure that we have the kind of board that is going to be supporting all students.”

Elk Grove Unified teachers, wearing “Yes on N” T-shirts, have collectively knocked on about 7,000 doors since they started hitting the streets each Saturday since September, Sutter said.

Temecula teachers fight back

Goldberg recently walked for union-endorsed candidates running for the Temecula Valley Unified school board. The district in Riverside County has been in the media spotlight for more than a year for everything from rejecting textbooks with materials that included references to gay rights activist Harvey Milk, banning critical race theory and passing a policy requiring teachers and school staff to notify parents if a child appears to be transgender.

“That’s been turning our district a little upside down,” said union President Edgar Diaz. “Most of the board meetings have turned to focusing on these issues, instead of how do we address supporting students who are falling behind on the dashboard, who have IEPs (individualized education programs), who are English language learners? How do we develop systems that help them be successful in the classroom? So, in this election, it’s turned a lot into supporting candidates who believe in good governance.”

Tension over the policies of the conservative majority board led to the recall of board President Joseph Komrosky in June. Komrosky is running for one of the four available seats on the board in the upcoming election.

Two years ago, teachers at Temecula Valley Unified paid little attention to board races and campaigning, Diaz said. That all changed after a conservative majority was elected to the board in 2022. This year, members of the Temecula Valley Educators Association are sending out mailers, making phone calls and texting potential voters.

“Once they were elected and the policies and kind of chaos they brought into school board meetings, that is what got people motivated to do the work,” Diaz said.

The union’s political action committee recruited and interviewed candidates for endorsements and has spent about $60,000 total – $20,000 on each of three endorsed candidates. In 2022, the union spent $18,000 in total helping three candidates get elected.

Local teacher unions fund their PACs with donations primarily from their members. Temecula also received contributions from other union locals as well as money the union got from CTA, Diaz said.

Parental notification still on the ballot

School board policies directing school staff to notify parents if a student asks to use a different pronoun or name than given at birth — often called parental rights policies — continue to be a hot-button issue in some districts this election season, despite a new state law that will make these policies illegal starting in January.

The new state law requires a student’s consent before information about their sexual orientation or gender identity can be given to parents. The law also protects school staff from retaliation if they refuse to notify parents of a child’s gender preference.

In Yuba County, north of Sacramento, members of the Republican Central Committee attended school board meetings to evaluate whether school board trustees supported parent notification policies and, if not, whether they should be replaced in the upcoming election, said Florentina Di Gennaro, the treasurer of the committee.

“We kind of let them know if you’re not going to stand up for these things that we need to start happening in our schools or defending parents’ rights for our children, we are going to find someone to replace you,” Di Gennaro said.

The California Republican Party leaves funding and campaigning for down-ballot races to its county central committees, said Jonathan Zachreson, a candidate for the Roseville City School District board.

The Yuba County committee recruited and endorsed “Mama Bears” and “Papa Bears” to run for school board seats. Committee members wanted people who would push back against the new state law and other policies, Di Gennaro said.

The central committee is also attempting to replace Marysville Joint Unified Superintendent Fal Asrani because she won’t disregard the law. Asrani went on medical leave earlier this month. Di Gennaro said that a committee that will include a member of the GOP Central Committee will soon begin looking for a new superintendent.

Steel doesn’t agree with everything conservative board members have done since the last election. Some of the people elected to school boards in 2022 were wrongly focused on social issues instead of economic issues or fighting against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, he said. Steel said that DEI policies are racist and punish students for their color, but he doesn’t agree with policies focused on LGBTQ+ communities, he said.

“That’s a mistake,” he said. “I think most folks don’t think that the gay community should be targeted and scorned. So, that’s something I think most of the folks have learned this time around, because it’s not something that most folks believe. It’s not a community that should be attacked.”

San Jose union protecting board seat

The San Jose Teachers Association has been recruiting candidates and helping them win elections for years, but this year the 1,500-member union is putting more energy and money into campaigning after seeing conservative organizations recruiting candidates for local school board seats, said Renata Sanchez, union president.

“We shared it (the information) with our smaller locals as well,” Sanchez said. “And we’re like, let’s get ready now because they’re coming for us next year. And now they’re here.”

One candidate running for San Jose Unified is being endorsed by the Santa Clara County branch of Moms for Liberty, a national group that has supported efforts to bar schools from teaching about race, gender and sexuality. Members of the organization and the Silicon Valley Association of Conservative Republicans also are endorsing the candidate, Sanchez said.

“So, we’re making sure that we protect our school board and protect our academic freedom, by making sure that she doesn’t get on,” Sanchez said.

The union is sending out mailers, buying digital advertising and recently launched a mass text-messaging campaign. It also has encouraged teachers to go on “block walks” in the neighborhoods around their campuses after the school day ends to talk to potential voters about union-backed candidates and a facilities bond that includes some funding for workforce housing. Groups of teachers also canvas neighborhoods every Saturday.

“The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been,” Sanchez said.

LA teachers take on charter proponents

Not all hotly contested elections are cultural. In Los Angeles Unified, the teachers union and charter school organizations are also battling over school board seats.

The union is running campaigns in two of the three school board races, endorsing and supporting a UTLA member — who will stop teaching if elected to the paid school board seat — and an incumbent it has endorsed in prior elections, said Julie Van Winkle, vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles. The incumbent is running against another UTLA member who has been an advocate for charter schools and is outspending the union candidate 3-to-1, she said.

“We are always outspent by the charter school candidates, and we anticipate that in our school board election in the Valley, we’re going to be outspent 7-to-1,” Van Winkle said.

The union political action committee that finances campaigns is funded by about $2 million in member contributions and additional funding from the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, she said.

Because funding is limited, Van Winkle said it is more advantageous for UTLA to mobilize its 39,000 members to knock on doors and to talk to residents about the union’s endorsed candidates.

“People value teachers and respect teachers, and so we feel like our best strategy is just getting teachers to donate their time to go out and tell people about why it’s important to vote for our candidates,” Van Winkle said.

Source link

06/05/2025
Anatomy of a divided California school board’s vote on ethnic studies
Ariane Tuomy, a social studies teacher at Palo Alto Unified’s Gunn High School, responds to school board members’ questions at a special board meeting on Jan. 23.

Credit: Palo Alto Unified / YouTube

In hour two of a meeting that stretched to nearly five, Josh Salcman, barely two months on the Palo Alto Unified School Board, said aloud what other school board members no doubt realize at some point in their first term: “I’m acutely aware that no matter how I vote, I’m going to deeply disappoint a large part of our community, including people whose friendship is important to me and whose opinions I hold in the highest regard.”

He was undoubtedly right. Whether to require ninth graders to take an ethnic studies course starting next fall was and likely will remain contentious this year, not only in Palo Alto but throughout California.

Palo Alto had become the latest skirmish in California’s ethnic studies war. Salcman, who founded two education-related tech startups, was in the middle, ultimately facing the awkward decision of choosing between the views of enthusiastic students and teachers and apprehensive parents.

Two decisions in 2021 all but guaranteed that. First, a battle-weary State Board of Education, after multiple rewrites, approved an ambiguously worded curriculum framework that challenged districts to determine what should be included in an ethnic studies course. Then, the Legislature mandated that schools offer an ethnic studies course in high school starting in 2025-26.

Or maybe not. This month, Gov. Gavin Newsom decided not to fund the implementation of ethnic studies in next year’s state budget without explaining why. This not only calls the mandate into question, at least for next year, but also gives an out to districts that are dreading arguing over the course.

But not Palo Alto. Last week, board President Shana Segal, a Palo Alto native and former high school teacher, called for a special board meeting to approve the course that Palo Alto high school teachers had developed. The district would offer it in the fall and mandate it for graduation, starting in 2028-29. Regardless of state funding, that would be one year ahead of the state mandate. She set the hearing for later in the week, Jan. 23.

To pause or not to pause?

For two years, at the board’s direction, a half-dozen veteran Palo Alto teachers persevered to create a first-year ethnic studies course. Last fall, they offered a pilot version to 20 students in each of the district’s two high schools in Palo Alto. The students’ survey results, all positive, were in.

But at the same time, members of the Palo Alto Parent Alliance have been watching conflicts and lawsuits over ethnic studies and complaints of antisemitism since the slaughter of Israelis by Hamas in October 2023 followed by Israel’s mass destruction in Gaza.

At the center of the conflict is Liberated Ethnic Studies, a strain of ethnic studies that made the liberation of Palestine a prominent element of instruction. Critics characterize it as a left-wing ideology focused on the ongoing domination and oppression of white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism.

Ethnic studies faculty at California State University and University of California and activists created Liberated Ethnic Studies after the state board rejected the first draft of the curriculum that they had primarily authored in 2019. They have made spreading Liberated Ethnic Studies a lucrative side hustle and have contracted with at least several dozen districts to train teachers and guide instruction.

In a May 2024 FAQ it published, the Palo Alto parent group cited language tying Liberated Ethnic Studies to the proposed course.

Superintendent Don Austin has reiterated that Palo Alto’s course is not Liberated Ethnic Studies and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict won’t be part of a course on California racial and ethnic groups.

But in October, Linor Levav, an attorney and co-founder of the parent group, filed a Public Records Act request for curriculum materials that the district had largely ignored. Eventually, the district provided a PDF that contained links that couldn’t be opened.

The rejection has fueled suspicions. “And so the question is, why are they teaching materials that they’re not willing to even tell us about?” she told EdSource.

The parent group called for a “pause” from proceeding with a mandated course.

While running campaigns for their first term on the five-member board, Salcman, Rowena Chiu and Alison Kamhi supported a delay. Now, the new majority’s campaign position would be put to a test.

The audience in the boardroom was not particularly friendly to the three dissenters. The room seated about 80, with some standing room. By board rules, students get to speak first, and they filled most of the room. The adults lined up outside to address the board for one minute via Zoom or enter to do so individually. Forty-five were set aside for one-minute comments. Students, all supporting ethnic studies now, clapped enthusiastically at comments they liked.

During the hearing, the three board skeptics said they shared some of the public’s concerns about the course’s content. They questioned its timing and sharply criticized the district for not being forthright about what would be taught in the course.

“I believe we have to be very transparent about what we are teaching, provide an opportunity for meaningful feedback, and not push through classes that make people and communities, including communities of color, feel unsafe, targeted, or disrespected,” said Kamhi, who is the legal program director for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HwyKHvVA9E
Watch Palo Alto Unified board member Josh Salcman discuss his concerns regarding ethnic studies.

Two hours into the hearing, when he was still advocating a delay, Salcman explained his dilemma, mixing high praise for the teachers’ work with well articulated reservations about some of the content.

He congratulated the teachers who developed the pilot course and the initial students who took it. Their presentation “underscored what I’ve heard from many community members who have emphatically urged me to vote yes.”

“I find myself agreeing with most of what they say,” he said. “About how one-sided our current history classes are, about how little our students are currently learning about the experiences of historically underrepresented communities. How our students from those communities can feel so marginalized as they question why their family histories are nowhere to be found in our classrooms.”

And “how they wish we could have more challenging conversations about topics like power and privilege and structural inequity.”

Then he switched and laid out his concerns and those he had heard in the community:
- “insufficient communication, which I share”
- “ideologies that could increase a sense of division among students, which could lead to fixed mindsets or scapegoating”
- “a lack of guardrails”
- “widespread confusion about why, if there’s nothing to worry about, almost no details were shared about the course until yesterday.”
One thing he knows for certain, he said, is: “We do not have a shared understanding of what the phrase ‘ethnic studies course’ means.”

“Is an ethnic studies course primarily about the histories, cultures, and contributions” of the main ethnic and racial groups in California?” he asked, or “Is it primarily about concepts like ethnicity, identity, intersectionality, power, privilege, oppression and resistance? Is it a mix of both?”

Striking a balance

At least on paper and in student testimonies, Palo Alto’s course would appear to strike a balance. The teachers’ eight-page course description — the form that board members have used to approve all previous courses — states that the course “examines social systems, social movements, and civic participation and responsibility through a local lens. … By fostering empathy and belonging, the course prepares students to engage meaningfully in our communities.”

The four units in the course would be Identity; Power, Privilege and Systems of Oppression; Resilience and Resistance; and Action and Civic Engagement, in which students would create their own projects aligned to the course.

Each of the four units in the course would contain sample essential questions, learning objectives, and examples of assignments and assessments. Students would keep a journal of reflection throughout. Each unit calls for reading, analyzing and evaluating multiple and diverse sources.

Palo Alto High history teacher Ben Bolanos acknowledged that privilege and systems of oppression “are triggering for certain people” but said it “is important to look at the shadow side of the human experience in order to understand what needs to be changed and how to look at and change the world for a better place.”

The word “oppression” appeared more than 100 times in the state framework, observed Ander Lucia, a Teacher on Special Assignment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtRsvAM-vFc
Watch student testimonies regarding ethnic studies at Palo Alto Unified.

All the student evaluations of the course — 27 of the 40 who completed one — were positive. A half-dozen ninth graders elaborated at the hearing.

“I’ll admit I had some reservations going into this course,” said Gunn High student Quinn Boughton. “I wasn’t sure how much it would apply to me as a white student or whether the topics might make people feel divided or uncomfortable, but those fears turned out to be completely unfounded. This course didn’t just teach history; it built empathy.”

Gunn student Gabriel Lopez’s takeaway from the course was: “When one group of people takes power from another, I think it is the responsibility of school to teach us about the injustices people face. So, in the future and in our lives, we can strive for more equality.”

For his final project, Palo Alto High student Amaan Ali organized Palo Alto students to volunteer at tutoring programs for less well-off students in East Palo Alto. “These projects go beyond academic exercises. They empower us to turn knowledge into action,” he said.

Boughton examined homelessness in the Bay Area “in a new light” to dissect the problem and “discuss the causes and impacts of the unhoused with my peers.”

The presentation impressed board President Segal, a Palo Alto native who taught high school for more than a decade. “So teachers, I just, I want to say these words,” she said. “You did it right. I just want to make sure you know it. You did it right.”

Transparency questioned

Chiu and Kamhi repeatedly stressed that they strongly support ethnic studies.

“Ethnic studies is critical to me personally, but it is also something that I very much believe we need as a society,” said new board member Chiu, a consultant to the World Bank and an ethnic studies instructor who, she said, is scheduled to lecture on “Asian American Women and Difficult Conversations” at UC Berkeley.

But they remained unpersuaded, not because of what the teachers presented, but because of what the district had not provided. The district waited until two days before the meeting to send out an agenda with information, and it didn’t contain detailed information about the curriculum and the materials that teachers had used in the pilot.

“I also have very specific questions about the curriculum that was sent to us,” said Chiu. “I’m sorry to say, while I’m sure you have an excellent course and the students all say so, I did find your materials difficult to navigate around. I couldn’t open some of the links.”

As it turned out, Austin had included an outdated, detailed curriculum outline called a “scope and sequence” that included the broken links and sites requiring permission to open. Austin blamed the Public Records Act request that required providing outdated material. But Chiu found that explanation wanting. She had spent 48 hours poring over a document under the assumption it would be taught in the pilot. That, she said, “causes more confusion and more calls for lack of transparency.”

Neither Austen nor other district officials explained why the document did not include more information than the presentation.

“I will say it’s quite possible that your course is not going to incite any of these incidents that we’ve seen in other school districts,” Chiu said. “However, it’s connected to the issue of transparency. So if the community has not had, in their view, sufficiently transparent instructional materials, that fear is only going to grow.”

Kamhi put it differently. “What I feel really uncomfortable doing is saying every single student should take a course that we know is controversial, that based on the materials we’ve seen, some of which are problematic. Maybe they’re being taught in the classroom; maybe they’re not — without more information about what the course actually is.”

Dissenters’ dilemma

The three board members found themselves in a Catch-22. Pressed to say what in the course needed to be changed, they couldn’t provide answers without more information.

After hours debating unsuccessful amendments to Segal’s motion, and amendments to those amendments, the original motion was back on the table.

To the teachers, Segal and the fifth member, Shounap Dharap, the issue came down to trust. The founding teachers had held listening sessions for the public when the course was being developed, and had made changes in response.

“I want to reiterate my thanks, gratitude and trust in our teachers. These teachers are choosing to do extra work in addition to their daily teaching, lesson planning and grading. I know from firsthand experience the amount of time and dedication it takes to create curriculum,” Segal said.

“When we are sitting here hearing that there are concerns about the course and the way the course is being presented to students, I, we can’t help but take that personally, right?” said Jeff Patrick, social science instructional leader at Gunn, “because that, that is our job and that’s the job we thought we had the trust of the board to do, right? We think we’ve done our job, and we don’t know what a pause is going to do.”

Dharap, a personal injury attorney and law professor, encouraged board members to base their decision on what they heard from teachers and students, not the unsubstantiated fears of the public. “We really need to sit down and consider whether a decision that we’re going to make now is valuing adult inputs over student outcomes.”

The final vote

Salcman sought a solution in the minutes before the vote. He pointed to San Dieguito Union High School District as a model for involving the public. It posted each ethnic studies unit on a website as it was developed with a form inviting comments.

“I’m not saying now that we need to go back and do that. We are where we are” but is there a way to move the course forward and involve people in the process? he asked.

Dharap said the board already has liaisons with schools to convey concerns and frustrations and serve as a “conduit” for community feedback. He said the board can set course goals, measurements and expectations for public input.

“How do I know that I have a commitment from folks in this room to try to address the concerns that I raised?” were Salcman’s last words before the vote.

Segal and Dharap said yes quickly. Chiu and Kamhi hesitated before voting no.

The silence surrounding Salcman was unsettling. Twice during that time, Segal said, “There’s time; we can all take a breath. We have time.”

Three and a half minutes seemed like hours passed before Salcman said his next word, “Yes.”

Segal immediately announced the motion passed 3-to-2 and ended the meeting and the webcast.

One can only speculate what went through his mind during the long pause that followed — wondering perhaps which friend or close adviser he would please or disappoint or whether he made the right vote? Salcman didn’t respond to EdSource’s repeated invitations to share his thinking.
Source link
24/04/2025