Speaking more than one language is a superpower and a growing necessity in our global economy. If we want more California students to experience the economic, academic, social and emotional benefits of multilingualism, bilingual or dual language classrooms should be the gold standard for all schools. English learners, who often fall behind in school, especially stand to benefit from bilingual/dual language programs.
Families across the state — regardless of political affiliation, or whether they speak English at home — can recognize the academic, cognitive and economic advantagesof bilingualism. They want multilingual education for their children when they see the data and experience these benefits for themselves. While California has made major strides toward making bilingual classrooms the norm, there is a long road ahead, particularly in communities with large numbers of English learners. This is a grave injustice for the 40% of California children who speak a language other than English at home, because these children would excel in bilingual classrooms academically while still developing literacy in their home language and English. We need long-term investment from the state for our students to realize their full potential.
A recent report from the UCLA Civil Rights Project underscores this urgent need. Proposition 227, which passed in 1998, mandated English-only education for English learner students in public schools and dismantled bilingual teacher preparation programs. Then, in 2016, California voters passed Proposition 58 with 73% of the vote, overturning Proposition 227 and making it easier, in theory, to implement bilingual classrooms.
However, more than two decades of “English-only” education has left us without enough qualified bilingual teachers, even though there is now more demand for them. According to the UCLA report, out of 1.1 million English learners in California, only 188,381 students, or 16% of that population, were enrolled in these programs as of the 2019/2020 school year.
California is still a nationwide leader in supporting bilingual education, despite these numbers. The state’s English Learner Roadmap and Global California 2030 show that our education leaders really do want to improve our students’ critical thinking skills, family and community relationships, and earning potential through bilingual education. And one-time programs like the Bilingual Teacher Professional Development Program, English Learner Roadmap Power in Collaboration Across California, and the English Learner Roadmap Implementation for Systemic Excellence are doing important work to fulfill these goals.
But visionary policies and initiatives, along with one-time grants alone, are not enough. Schools and districts require sustained resources and incentives to train bilingual teachers, set up classrooms, purchase materials, recruit families and ensure their programs can launch and thrive. Right now, we simply do not have that in California. It’s a symptom of our state’s fundamental lack of investment in education overall — California is the world’s fifth largest economy, but we rank 18th in education funding out of the 50 states.
To illustrate this, the UCLA report compares California to Texas, another state with similar English learner populations. Even though California has a large number of English learner students and high interest in bilingual education, it’s still difficult to expand these models in California classrooms. Meanwhile, in Texas, enrollment in bilingual education programs is twice as high as in California. This is because Texas mandates bilingual education for districts enrolling significant numbers of English learners and provides extra state funding per student enrolled in these programs. This ensures strong demand for bilingual teachers and secure funding for their training.
Districts and schools need ongoing funding sources like this embedded in their funding formula. Policymakers must support both one-time initiatives like those mentioned above and long-term sustainable funding sources that help increase our bilingual teacher pipeline and incentivize schools to build high quality bilingual/dual language programs.
These long-term solutions could be modeled after initiatives like First Five, which has received $492 million in state investments since 2000. We need a comprehensive approach to the bilingual teacher pipeline, such as giving colleges and universities “Jump Start” funds to hire faculty and build out their bilingual teacher prep and authorization programs. California should also create initiatives to recruit and give incentives to students who graduate from high school with a State Seal of Biliteracy to enter bilingual teacher preparation programs.
Language is the vehicle of learning. When educators understand how to integrate and leverage language development across everything, all students thrive. We must invest in bilingual education long-term if we are ever going to create a sustainable future for our state’s most valuable resource: our children.
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Anya Hurwitz is president and executive director of SEAL (Sobrato Early Academic Language), a nonprofit initiative of the Sobrato Foundation and vice president of the board of directors for Californians Together. She holds a doctorate in education from University of California Berkeley.
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.
California has had a racial imbalance between its teacher workforce and its student population for years, with a majority Hispanic student population being taught by teachers who are mostly white. That could be changing, as more people of Hispanic heritage enroll in college teacher preparation programs in the state.
Overall enrollment in teacher preparation programs in California has decreased in recent years, but the biggest declines have been among white teacher candidates. The result has been a higher percentage of people of color entering teacher preparation programs, according to the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
In the 2022-23 school year — the most recent year state data is available — more than half of the new teacher candidates identified themselves as a race other than white. Nearly 40% of the 17,337 newly enrolled teacher candidates that year were Hispanic, and just over 33% were white, according to CTC data.
That was a stark contrast to the racial makeup of the state’s teacher workforce that same year, when 55% of the state’s 312,124 teachers were white, and Hispanic teachers made up 25% of the workforce from transitional kindergarten (TK) through high school.
“Over half of our TK-12 student population identifies, and the majority of our English language learners also are Latino,” said José Magaña, executive director of Bay Area Latinos for Education. “The research is pretty clear that not just Latino students and English language learners, but all students, benefit from having a more diverse educator.”
Latinos for Education offers fellowships to support Latinos in the education system. The Bay Area branch of the organization also has a Latinx Teacher Fellowship program to support beginning teachers and paraprofessionals.
Research shows that when students are taught by educators who reflect their cultural backgrounds and understand their lived experiences, it results in stronger academic outcomes, greater social-emotional growth, and a profound sense of belonging, said Kai Mathews, executive director of the Urban Ed Academy in San Francisco, which recruits and supports Black male teachers.
“Increasing the number of Latinx educators is about more than representation — it’s about creating classrooms where every student feels seen, valued and is liberated to be their authentic self,” Mathews said.
Changing California demographics
The change in the racial makeup of teacher candidates coincides with the evolving population of the state, where 56% of the K-12 student population was Hispanic last school year, according to the California Department of Education. The number increases to over 60% for children younger than age 5, said Shireen Pavri, assistant vice chancellor of California State University’s educator and leadership programs.
In the years between 2018 and 2023, the percentage of Hispanic teacher candidates has slowly increased from 31.4% to 39.7%, while the number of white teacher candidates dropped by 10 percentage points, according to CTC data. The number of Hispanic teacher candidates also has been increasing, although it dropped from 7,154 in 2021-22 to 6,934 in 2022-23, when the overall number of teacher candidates declined for a second consecutive year.
California State University, which prepares the majority of the state’s teachers, had the largest percentage of Hispanic students in its teacher preparation programs in 2022-23 — nearly 50%, according to the CTC’s “Annual Report Card on California teacher preparation programs.” The number is currently 55%, Pavri said.
During that same time, the percentage of white candidates in CSU teacher preparation programs decreased, and the percentage of teacher candidates of other races remained flat.
CSU is leading the way
“Anecdotally, a lot of our Latinx population, who come into our teacher preparation programs, come in because they want to make a difference,” Pavri said. “They didn’t necessarily see people who looked like them when they were going through school. Many of them came in as English learners. They want to make an impact now on their communities and give back.”
Some of the recent success at diversifying the pool of teacher candidates at California State University can be attributed to the Center for Transformational Educator Preparation Programs, which has helped to recruit, prepare and retain teachers of color, according to the university.
Its Transformation Lab, a four-year program that recently ended, increased the retention rate of teacher candidates at some campuses and improved teacher placement numbers at others, Pavri said. At CSU Bakersfield and CSU Northridge, for example, the completion rates for Black candidates increased by 17% and 31% respectively between 2020 and 2023, and Stanislaus State doubled its student teaching placements for historically underserved teacher candidates at Modesto City Schools over a two-year period.
The center’s leadership is seeking additional funding to support similar programs in the future.
The university also operates CalStateTEACH, an online multiple-subject teaching credential program that focuses on recruiting male teachers of color from throughout California.
In University of California teacher preparation programs, 35% of the teacher candidates are Hispanic, 29% are white, 20% are Asian and 2.8% are Black. There are still slightly more white teacher candidates than Hispanic, 38% and 32.6% respectively, in teacher preparation programs at private universities and colleges.
State programs bearing fruit
The increase in the number of Hispanic teacher candidates in teacher preparation programs could be attributed, in part, to efforts by state lawmakers to ease the teacher shortage and diversify the teacher workforce by making earning a credential easier and more affordable. The state has offered degree and coursework alternatives to several tests, established residency and apprenticeship programs and paid for school staff to become teachers.
District grow-your-own programs and the state’s Classified School Employee Credentialing program and apprenticeship programs are meant to diversify the educator workforce because school staff recruited from the community more closely match the demographics of the student body than traditionally trained and recruited teachers, according to research.
“All of those state investments, particularly around affordability, have helped incredibly with bringing more Black and brown students into our teaching field,” Pavri said.
CSU teacher residency programs outpace even the traditional teacher preparation programs in terms of the number of teachers of color enrolled, she said.
Numbers for other ethnic groups flat
Despite the efforts, California State University continues to struggle to attract Black teacher candidates, hovering around 3% for years, despite several initiatives to improve their numbers, Pavri said.
“While we celebrate this progress, we must confront the persistent underrepresentation of Black, Asian and Pacific Islander educators,” Mathews said. “Our classrooms deserve to reflect the fullness of California’s diversity. Ensuring this kind of equity in the teaching workforce isn’t just good for students—it’s essential to building the inclusive, transformative and liberating system our communities deserve.”
Statewide, Black teacher candidates made up 4%, and Asian teacher candidates about 9.5% of total enrollment in California teacher preparation programs between 2018 and 2023, according to CTC data.
There are fewer Black teachers because of obstacles they encounter on the way to completing their education, including an unwelcoming school environment, disproportionate discipline and overrepresentation in special education, Pavri said.
Pursuing a teaching credential, where traditionally student teaching is unpaid, is not affordable for some. Teacher salaries, which are generally lower than the pay for other jobs with the same qualifications, and working conditions also are a deterrent for students from families with limited generational wealth, Pavri said.
More needs to be done to keep teachers
The increase in the percentage of Hispanic teacher candidates is positive, but not significant enough, Magaña said. In order to reflect student demographics, the state will need to make significant investments to recruit and retain educators.
“The numbers are staggering around the number of educators that are leaving the profession, especially our Latino educators,” he said.
Magaña, who was a classroom teacher for 15 years, said Latino educators often have to take on extra work on campus, whether it is supporting translations or family engagement.
“It can be a lonely role,” he said. “Sometimes there may be just one Latino educator on campus, and without mentorship and community, and network building, it makes it easier for folks to not feel supported.”
Fremont High School students in Oakland Unified use restorative justice circles to welcome newcomers, get to know each other and build bridges between different cliques and ethnic groups.
Credit: Tatiana Chaterji / Oakland Unified
Top Takeaways
Trump executive order challenges the concept that race-neutral policies can be discriminatory.
Administration said focus on equity in discipline has harmed student safety, while advocates say it’s an excuse to roll back civil rights protections.
Experts say executive order threatening to withhold funding from schools doesn’t have much bearing on California schools — for now.
The Trump administration has taken aim at a key assumption of federal civil rights enforcers and California’s school discipline strategy: that large racial disparities are a red flag for discrimination.
Trump’s executive order, released Wednesday, attacks the concept of disparate impact — the idea that a policy that may seem neutral actually harms a racial or ethnic group. The order calls this approach to discipline, championed by both the Biden and Obama administrations, a “risk to children’s safety and well-being in the classroom.”
“Their policies placed racial equity quotas over student safety — encouraging schools to turn a blind eye to poor or violent behavior in the name of inclusion,” U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.
The previous Trump administration rescinded Obama-era guidance from the Department of Education, which warned it would initiate investigations based on reports of racial disparities in discipline.
The executive order takes this a step further by threatening state agencies and districts that fail to comply with the Trump administration’s “colorblind” interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which protects against racial discrimination.
The introduction of the California School Dashboard, the state’s school accountability website, raised public awareness of suspension rates and other indicators of school performance. The dashboard designates the performance of every district and every school as well as their student groups — including racial groups — in one of five colors. No statewide student group’s suspension rate was red, designating the worst performance, but 674 schools — 7% of 9,671 schools — had that designation. They may have been designated for state assistance to determine the cause of high suspension rates. They would also have to commit to lowering suspensions as part of their district’s annual accountability plan.
Suspensions in California have dropped dramatically over the last decade, but disparities remain: 8.6% of Black students were suspended in 2023-24, compared with 2.7% of white students.
California has also taken action and banned schools from suspending students solely for “defiance.” Many advocates claimed it was a “catch-all” justification to punish students, particularly students of color, for smaller infractions, like refusing to take their hat off. The state banned the practice for K-3 students in 2013, expanded it to K-8 in 2019 and, this school year, expanded it to high school students.
Los Angeles Unified School District pioneered this policy to reduce suspensions. In 2013, its school board passed the School Climate Bill of Rights. A district spokesperson said in a statement to EdSource that the district follows state law and district policy regarding student discipline.
“Race is not a consideration in the application of student discipline policies at the district,” the statement said.
Carolyn Gorman, an analyst with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, says California is at risk of losing funding for schools with its policies on willful defiance that reference disparate impact.
But other experts disagree.
Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said the executive order is no surprise. “I expected them to write about it, but it’s so vague, it’s important to wait for the guidance to see, really, what they are trying to say.”
“It’s one of those threats that I would advise districts to ignore,” said John Affeldt, managing attorney at Public Advocates.
Affeldt points to recent court rulings that blocked Trump from enforcing an executive order he signed in January that promised to withhold funds from schools that have diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.
It is not illegal to simply have a racial disparity in discipline statistics, Affeldt notes. Instead, disparities serve as a red flag that triggers an investigation to examine whether certain policies or practices are discriminatory and violate civil rights.
Daniel Losen, a civil rights attorney, education researcher and former director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, called the executive order “fear-mongering — making up unproven harms to discourage folks from considering the possibility that maybe their school policies are inequitable.”
“They are hoping that people think that looking at racial differences is unlawful, even though the law requires that we address disparate impacts” of education policies, he said. “And those regulations, which have been in effect since the ’60s, have not been rescinded.”
Those sharp disparities, he wrote, “also raise the question of how we can close the achievement gap if we do not close the discipline gap.”
Sixth grade teacher Thomas Courtney said he is concerned about the message that an order from the country’s highest office sends to teachers about addressing racism. He worries that it may reinforce a perception among a largely white workforce of teachers that students of color are to blame for the rise of misbehavior in classrooms.
“The scapegoat is brown and Black children and the fact that they’ve been getting away with murder in your classroom — that’s how this is going to be interpreted,” said Courtney, who teaches humanities and English at Millennial Tech Middle School in San Diego.
He worries some teachers will read the order and say, “I can finally write suspensions on all those Black kids causing all these problems in my class.”
Looking at discipline through the lens of disparate impact tends to highlight one glaring fact: Black students — boys in particular — are far more likely to be disciplined.
“It’s historically egregious that it is Black males in particular who get referred much more often, suspended much more often, expelled much more often,” Affeldt said.
Order is an ‘opening salvo’
This executive order may have little immediate legal effect, but experts expect to see much more from the administration on the topic of discipline.
“If they say, do not treat kids differently based on race, that should be fine. But they could go further to say that the Office of Civil Rights can investigate only individual circumstances, and cannot assume a disparate impact based on suspension data,” said Petrilli, of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
“They could go looking for principals who would say they did not discipline students because of mandates to reduce the number of suspensions,” he said.
Or they could find teachers who say that restorative justice in lieu of suspensions, without staff training and administrative support, doesn’t work. As Brian Foster, a retired California teacher, wrote in a comment to EdSource, “When there are no real consequences to bad behavior, it spreads. Behavior is excused and pushed right back into the classroom unresolved, degrading the real learning of all other students.”
Courtney, who wrote a commentary for EdSource on the topic, worries that this executive order could represent an “opening salvo” in an effort to turn the practice of restorative justice into a politically toxic concept, as critical race theory was. Restorative justice focuses less on punishment and more on strengthening a school’s culture through righting wrongs, solving disputes and building relationships.
Affeldt also expects to see more from the administration on the topic of disparate impact — both inside and outside of schools. He says conservatives have been pushing for a case that would outlaw disparate impact theory. He calls it a “moonshot” for the movement to get a case that would invalidate California’s take on racial discrimination.
“That’s a real stretch,” Affeldt said, “but that’s their game plan, and they’re trying to tee it up.”
EdSource reporter Mallika Seshadri contributed to this story.
Construction site at Murray Elementary in Dublin Unified in 2022.
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
The record 205 school districts that passed construction bonds in November will spend 2025 vying for matching money from a $10 billion state bond that will meet only a small portion of the demand for financial help.
Novices at navigating state agencies, especially small districts, may find the process of claiming a share of state funding will be lengthy, complex and potentially overwhelming, said Julie Boesch, administrator for small school district support for the Kern County Superintendent of Schools. Boesch singlehandedly shepherded a renovation project through the funding process as superintendent and principal of Maple Elementary, a one-school district in Kern County.
“Putting out requests for qualifications and for proposals to hire consultants, architects, construction management and then to determine what kind of funding you can get — there are just so many things that have to happen,” she said. “There were times when I, as superintendent, was spending 90% of my time just on facilities.”
The success of Proposition 2, the construction bond for schools and community colleges, with 59% of support, was a vote of renewed confidence in public schools and a rebound from March 2020, when voters defeated a $15 billion bond amid anxiety over the Covid pandemic.
“They understood the need for this,” said Rebekah Kalleen, a legislative advocate with the Coalition for Adequate School Housing (CASH), an organization of school districts and construction and architectural firms that led the effort to pass the proposition. “The funding opportunities will go a long way to ensure that projects are robust and that we’re able to make the repairs and the upgrades that we need.”
New money, old projects
Proposition 2’s passage will inject a welcome $10 billion on top of the $45 billion in bonds approved for school and community college districts. However, $3.7 billion — less than half of the $8.5 billion allotted to TK-12 districts under Proposition 2 — may be available for local projects approved in November.
That’s because as much as $4.8 billion in unfunded projects with preliminary approval from the last state bond will get priority. This extensive backlog dates back to Proposition 51, which voters passed in 2016. Funding from that bond ran dry several years ago, but under state law, districts could apply through Oct. 31, a week before the vote on Proppsition 2. They could reasonably assume that state funding would eventually become available from the next bond.
“Because there is so much more demand than there is funding, it’s safe to say that there’s always a long pipeline of projects awaiting allocations,” said Sara Hinkley, California program manager for the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley, which researches school facilities.
Districts submitted plans with preliminary approval for more than 1,000 unfunded projects. These include projects valued at $1.46 billion for new construction and $3.42 billion for modernization. The latter category includes renovations, system upgrades, repairs, and replacement of portable classrooms more than 20 years old and permanent buildings over 25 years old.
One line ends, another forms
After Proposition 2 money runs out, the remaining projects will form a new line of unfunded projects awaiting state money whenever voters pass the next state bond.
“It is a fair question whether voters understood the degree of the funding backlog and the fact that so much of the Proposition 2 funding would already be spoken for by the time they were voting on their own local bonds in November,” Hinkley said. “What this all really emphasizes is that we are constantly playing catch-up with facilities funding, not coming anywhere close to meeting the actual needs of districts.”
It’s unlikely that all the pending projects will successfully run the gauntlet of state agencies for final approval, although it’s not possible to know how many now.
What follows is a primer on steps districts must take to be eligible for matching money under Proposition 2.
How will Proposition 2 money be divided?
Under the ballot language that the Legislature passed, Proposition 2 will be apportioned into several categories. It’s too soon to know how funding the previous bond’s unfunded projects will affect Proposition 2 categories.
$1.5 billion for community colleges. The Legislature and the governor will select specific projects based on recommendations of the community colleges.
$8.5 billion for TK-12 districts, allocated as follows:
$4 billion for repairs, replacement of portables at least 20 years old, and other modernization work
$3.3 billion for new construction
$600 million for career and technical education facilities
$600 million for facilities for charter schools
$115 million to remove lead from school drinking water
When can districts apply?
Over the next eight months, the Office of Public School Construction will revise rules to differentiate Proposition 2 from previous state construction bonds. Changes include requiring districts to submit a five-year master plan with an inventory of classrooms, square footage and auxiliary facilities at each school.
Proposition 2 also will set aside 10% of modernization and new construction money for districts with fewer than 2,500 students. But that provision notwithstanding, what hasn’t changed is a first-come, first-served distribution system that can favor property-wealthy districts and large districts, such as Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) which can afford to employ permanent facilities staff to push their projects to the front of the line.
Kalleen of CASH and others familiar with state facilities grants urge districts to start submitting applications for priority projects now and not wait for more state guidance, in order to avoid getting left behind and ending up on the next waiting list.
“Districts are already planning and looking at their projects and submitting without yet knowing what the regulations will look like because there’s so much pent-up demand for state support for facilities funding,” Kalleen said. “Projects are funded based on the date that they’re received by the Office of Public School Construction. So as long as you meet those eligibility criteria, they’re funded in the order that they’re received.”
Districts won’t have to finish their master plans to initially apply for state funding, although they will have to complete them before receiving state money. They’ll have an opportunity to amend their proposals after the state revises regulations this summer.
Districts that have already completed a master plan with a needs assessment and established priorities “will be ahead of the game,” said Karla DeLeon, senior director-education for Dahlin Architecture, with three offices in California.
A small shift toward needs-based funding
Instead of submitting one application for all of their construction work, districts must apply for each project. The state’s share — at least 50% of the cost for new construction and 60% for a modernization project — will be funded uniformly on a per-student basis.
For an elementary school, for example, the per-student funding for 2024 was $15,770, meaning that building a classroom for 25 students would be $394,250 of base funding. (The per-student amount differs depending on whether a student is in elementary, middle or high school.) The per-student dollar amount is the minimum districts will qualify for, as there could be additional funding through supplemental grants if the project includes certain features.
But for the first time, the state will slightly increase funding for high-poverty, low-property-wealth districts. Huge differences in districts’ taxable property values create disparities in how much they can charge property owners for repairing and building school facilities. To narrow the gap, the state will provide up to 5 percentage points more matching money for qualifying projects based on the proportion of students who are low-income, foster youth, and English learners and, to a lesser extent, on a district’s property wealth per student.
A district could receive a 65% state match for renovations, reducing its contribution to 35%; the maximum contributions for new construction would be 55% state and 45% district.
“The total funding for the project would, in the eyes of the state, remain the same; it’s just more would be on the state’s dime, less on the school district’s dime,” Kalleen said.
Advocates for changing the system say the bonus funding won’t make enough difference to help many districts fully repair or replace subpar and antiquated buildings. The new system “does not meaningfully address the serious equity concerns that we and others have raised about the distribution of state funds,” wrote the Center for Cities + Schools, an institute at UC Berkeley, in an analysis.
How soon will local bond and Proposition 2 money be available?
When the state and local money becomes available depends. Bonds are loans that are usually paid back over 25 to 30 years. Working with their financial teams, districts will time their borrowing to align with their construction schedule and minimize property tax increases.
The increases cannot exceed a statewide bonding limit of charging property owners more than $40 per $100,000 of assessed property value for school facilities. For many small, low-wealth districts, this is a major obstacle to funding school improvements. For property-wealthy districts, it’s not an issue.
State funding to districts will be disbursed in batches over the next several years. The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects that paying for Proposition 2’s interest and principal will cost the state’s general fund about $500 million per year over 35 years.
What else is new under Proposition 2?
Proposition 2 includes other new features affecting TK-12 districts:
Along with reserving 10% of new construction and modernization funding for districts with fewer than 2,500 students, small districts can receive 5% of a project’s funding to hire architects, engineers and project managers. This should help them speed up the application process.
The state has a financial hardship provision funding the full cost of a project for a district that lacks the property tax base to pay for it. Proposition 2 triples the maximum tax base qualifying from $5 million to $15 million in assessed value.
Proposition 2 does not set aside funding for classrooms specifically equipped for transitional kindergarten (TK), as advocates had hoped, but it does permit districts to seek supplemental funding for TK in a school project. Districts can also seek supplemental money to pay for updating or constructing “essential facilities,” including kitchens, cafeterias, and undersized gyms, and installing energy conservation and efficiency measures like solar panels, outdoor shade areas and more efficient heating and air conditioning units.
What will the application process be like?
Districts face a multiagency and multiyear process with hoops to jump through and deadlines to meet before they can receive state funding. All must submit project plans to at least two state agencies before their plans can go to the Office of Public School Construction for a review for funding.
The Division of the State Architect, a group of architects and engineers, will ensure compliance with building codes, structural requirements and safety standards.
The Department of Education ensures “educational adequacy” — whether the facility complies with the state’s education code, meets classroom space requirements by subject and grade as well as how its design handles the needs of special education students, English learners, intervention services and accommodates community events, parking and outdoor activities. Depending on the site location, approval may be needed from the state Department of Toxic Substances Control or review under the California Environmental Quality Act.
DeLeon of Dahlin Architecture recommends turning to experts to guide the process. “You will want a solid team of support to manage all of the balls in the air within the time limits.”
Boesch said her most important advice to districts is to seek pre-approval meetings with state agencies. “Most districts avoid these, because they assume ‘they’ll just tell us to do something different, and it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,’” she said. “Truly, it’s not. It’s easier to ask permission and move forward instead of having to go back and undo something that may have been done incorrectly.”
Kalleen said districts can expect the process to take six months to a year for approval from the Office of Public School Construction, depending on the size of the project, and an additional two years or longer to receive funding from the State Allocations Board.
Boesch agreed. “At an absolute minimum, in a perfect world, it really would be two years,” she said, to receive funding, but more likely three or four.
“The backlog is so large that state funds often get to districts after projects have already been completed,” Hinkley said. “Districts that do not have sufficient local funds to cover a project’s costs while waiting for the state backlog are at an enormous disadvantage.”
California state officials and leaders of county offices of education and school districts quickly rebuked the Trump administration’s new guidance allowing immigration enforcement near or in schools.
“Schools must be safe spaces, not sites of fear,” said Alex Traverso, director of communications of the State Board of Education. “Every child deserves to learn without intimidation, and California will do all we can to protect our students.”
The directive issued Tuesday by Department of Homeland Security acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman reverses guidance that dates back to 2011, restricting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agencies from detaining immigrants near locations like schools, child care centers, playgrounds, hospitals and churches.
“This action empowers the brave men and women in CBP and ICE to enforce our immigration laws and catch criminal aliens — including murderers and rapists — who have illegally come into our country. Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Tuesday.
Under California law, school officials are not required to allow immigration agents to enter schools without a judicial warrant, according to recent guidance issued by California Attorney General Rob Bonta.
“It is disappointing, but unfortunately unsurprising that President Trump, in his first days in office, is focusing his time and energy on making his inhumane and irresponsible mass deportation agenda a reality. My team is actively reviewing his executive orders, and we stand ready to defend the rights of Californians if we find that the President has in any way violated the law — starting with our lawsuit, filed today, challenging the President’s unconstitutional executive order on birthright citizenship,” Bonta said.
The Association of California School Administrators issued a statement saying they are “troubled and deeply disappointed” in the Trump administration’s order allowing immigration enforcement near schools.
“This is an abuse of power and goes against the constitutional right of every child to have a public education,” the statement reads. “Schools are meant to be safe spaces where children can learn and grow without fear. … We know from past experience that this decision will result in some students not attending school, families disengaging, academics being disrupted, and severe impacts on social-emotional well-being.”
In response to requests for support from school districts and county offices of education, the California Department of Education sent a letter Tuesday to all county and school district superintendents and charter school administrators with resources for immigrant students and families and reminders about their rights.
“Our schools must be a safe place for children to learn and educators to teach. In line with federal and state law, California’s schools can take actions to ensure that all students have access to school campuses and educational opportunities without fear of deportation,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said.
“In light of the new administration’s action today to overturn the sensitive locations policy, I want to reassure our education community that the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) remains steadfastly committed to ensuring that every student, regardless of their immigration status, has access to a safe, secure and nurturing learning environment,” said Debra Duardo, superintendent of schools for Los Angeles County, in a statement.
“The change to the policy does not overrule the student’s constitutional right to an education. It also does not overrule state constitutional protections,” Duardo continued. “It is important to reinforce that all students possess the right to a public education, independent of their immigration status. Our schools are mandated to ensure that no student is denied enrollment or faced with barriers to their educational opportunities based on their or their family’s immigration status.”
Many school districts, including Los Angeles Unified, Long Beach Unified, San Diego Unified and San Francisco Unified have reaffirmed “sanctuary resolutions” or sent letters to families in recent weeks, explaining their rights and sharing legal resources. Seventeen Santa Clara County superintendents and school board members signed a letter earlier this month, saying schools will continue to support immigrant students and families and reminding the public of a 1982 Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe, which found that all children present in the United States have a right to a public education, regardless of their immigration status or their parents’ immigration status.
A spokesperson for Los Angeles Unified School District said the district has begun training all staff in how to respond if federal immigration officers show up at schools and will be distributing cards to students explaining their rights if approached by immigration agents.
“Los Angeles Unified School District is compelled by legal, professional, and moral obligations to protect rights of its students and employees, including privacy rights under FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), and state and federal constitutional rights, which include rights of all students to a free and public education,” a district spokesperson wrote in an email. “School officials do not collect or share information about the immigration status of students and their families. Since 2017, LAUSD has had a policy to not voluntarily cooperate with immigration enforcement actions by federal agencies.”
Fresno Unified School District is holding a series of workshops for families about immigrant rights. District spokesperson Diana Diaz wrote, “We want to urge our families who are concerned about possible detainment or deportation to please make a family preparedness plan NOW. This includes updating your child’s emergency card with their school so they can be released to another trusted adult if parents are unable.”
Teachers’ unions also rejected the Trump administration’s change.
“As educators and union members, we are committed to protecting our students — every single student, regardless of their immigration status,” said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, which represents 310,000 teachers, nurses, counselors, psychologists, librarians and other education staff across the state. “We have a professional and moral responsibility to keep our students safe if ICE comes to our communities. We will always come together in our union to ensure every public school is a safe space and to uphold the constitutionally protected right of all students to access a public education.”
Jeff Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers, the state’s second-largest teachers union, said in a statement, “Trump’s first day in office showed us that he is exactly who he told us he would be. His first actions as president direct hate and aim to stoke fear in the hearts of immigrant families and our LGBTQIA+ community. We can’t expect students to learn when they fear being separated from their parents, being bullied for being LGBTQIA+, or being treated differently based on the language they speak or the color of their skin.
“While we still hope to see Congress and our courts block these blatantly unconstitutional actions,” Freitas continued, “we won’t wait for them to act. Educators and school staff stand ready to fight back against every single action that stands to harm our members, our students, and our communities.”
EdSource reporter Diana Lambert contributed to this article.
Paradise Elementary in Butte County was one of nearly 19,000 structures destroyed in the November 2018 Camp fire.
Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Diann Kitamura was superintendent of Santa Rosa City Schools in 2017 when the Tubbs fire became the most destructive fire in state history, burning through nearly 37,000 acres and destroying two school structures, plus the homes of about 800 students and 100 staff.
That record was broken the following year, when the Camp fire tore through Butte County, including the town of Paradise, where eight of nine school structures were damaged or destroyed; more than 50,000 people were displaced, and 85 people were killed. Meagan Meloy heads the homeless and foster youth services department at the Butte County Office of Education, which stepped in to support the thousands of students who were suddenly homeless from one day to the next.
Now, more than seven years for Kitamura and six years for Meloy after leading their Northern California school districts through the fire recovery efforts, they discuss lessons they learned and offer tips to the districts dealing with the aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles County on how they could ease the suffering of their communities.
At the time of the Tubbs fire, there had been no recent fires impacting schools on that scale, and Kitamura had no model to guide her and her team. She now extends support to other districts going through their own recovery process.
Both Kitamura and Meloy say they believe their experiences can help school leaders across Los Angeles County as they deal with the widespread devastation of the Palisades and Eaton fires.
Former State Superintendent Tom Torlakson, center, and former Santa Rosa City Schools Superintendent Diann Kitamura, right, at the Hidden Valley Satellite school, Santa Rosa, after the school was destroyed in the Tubbs fire in 2017.Credit: Diann Kitamura
Kitamura said it’s important to understand that the impact of fires goes beyond the people whose homes burned down: “Even if their school didn’t burn, their home might have burned; even if their home might not have burned, their school had burned.”
She added that despite the complex tasks involved, leaders should stay focused on what most matters. “It was really my own common sense and my deep, deep, deep care and love for my students, my staff and my families that guided the decisions every step of the way of how I was going to operate,” Kitamura said.
To ensure the physical and emotional well-being of their school communities, Kitamura said, leaders must think of a wide range of tasks, including making sure the business department is creating budget codes specific to disaster-related expenses, determining what instructional materials were destroyed and need replacing, identifying what resources the Federal Emergency Management Agency can offer, beefing up air quality monitoring across the areas that burned, figuring out if the insurance policies are adequate, and more.
“It’s going to be a long process, and it’ll come in waves,” said Meloy of fire recovery efforts in Butte County.
‘Create some kind of normality for students as soon as possible’
Meloy said the immediate need after a fire is to ensure the safety of all students and staff, and she highlighted the importance of finding a place and time for the greater school community to gather, given the impact of such a crisis.
“It maybe can’t happen immediately, but as soon as possible, when it’s safe and feasible, provide opportunities for the school community to just come together, support one another socially, emotionally,” she said. “Create some kind of normality for students as soon as possible.”
Meagan Meloy working at the Local Assistance Center after the Park fire in Butte County during the summer of 2024.Credit: Meagan Meloy
Use systems that are already in place to help as many families as possible. For instance, students whose families lose their homes to fires are likely to qualify for resources available to students experiencing homelessness. That’s because homelessness among children and youth is defined broadly under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which mandates that every school district, county office of education and charter school hire a local liaison to ensure that homeless youth are identified and education services are coordinated to increase these students’ chances of succeeding academically.
This federal law defines homeless students, in part, as “children and youths who are sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason; are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations; are living in emergency or transitional shelters; or are abandoned in hospitals.”
Districts typically already have systems in place for this student group to ensure students have stability across three basic needs: shelter, food, and gas — the same needs that Kitamura noted are most urgent for students displaced by fires.
But Meloy, who has worked with the county education office for 21 years, offers a warning about the language used when communicating with families about their children’s education rights while they search for stable, permanent housing.
“A lot of the families that lost their homes in the Camp fire had never experienced homelessness before and weren’t comfortable with self-identifying. (Consider) using terms like ‘displaced,’ ‘temporary,’ ‘not stable’ rather than that label of homeless or homelessness that can be kind of off-putting to people. They may not want to even think of themselves as fitting under that category,” Meloy said.
While students displaced by fires may be eligible for student homelessness resources, schools and districts are often limited in the amount of funding available for this student group and in how funding can be used.
For example, homeless liaisons cannot typically purchase gas gift cards to hand out to families who need help transporting their children to school.
To meet some of the needs that education funding typically cannot be applied to, Meloy and her team relied on funding from a local foundation, North Valley Community Foundation, which received donations from a wide range of sources.
“Without that, I don’t know how we would have met the need for transportation,” she said.
Schools in Los Angeles County can also tap into the network of partners that liaisons and other school staff often work with. Both Meloy and Kitamura noted that their schools faced difficulties managing an influx of physical donations after fires.
Meloy said while some donations such as school supplies were helpful for her team of liaisons, they were not “really best equipped to” sort through donations like food and clothing.
It’s best for liaisons to work with “partner agencies who already have storage and systems for disbursing other items” so that they and other school staff can “stay focused on the school stuff,” she said.
It can also be helpful to communicate to the public that cash donations are most helpful in recovery efforts.
“I know that sounds maybe not appropriate … but in Santa Rosa City Schools, I had to haul out nine truck and trailer loads of stuff, and people who are displaced, they have no place to hold stuff,” said Kitamura, who is now the deputy superintendent of equitable education services with the Sonoma County Office of Education. “What they need is food, shelter and gasoline in most cases right now.”
Meloy also underscored what she called “secondary homelessness.”
For example, a family with sufficient home insurance might be able to purchase another home that had previously been a rental, which might then cause a group of renters to go on the search for housing.
“It’s families who maybe were not directly impacted in the sense that they lost their home in the fire, but it ripples out into the housing market and pushes people out,” Meloy said.
Addressing both physical and emotional needs
With the majority of Paradise Unified schools destroyed, enrolling students at neighboring schools became a primary task for Meloy and her staff.
To streamline the process, Meloy’s department asked every school district to identify an enrollment point of contact for families displaced by the Camp fire. Families were asked to text or call 211, the state’s local community services number, to be connected with a district point of contact, who worked with each family to help them decide where to enroll their children.
As student enrollment was handled in Butte County, Meloy noticed that the trauma that students had experienced became clearer and that the wide range of support, from mental health counseling to transportation to tutoring, might become difficult to track over time.
Meloy’s recommendation to L.A. County education staff is to create a filter in the district’s student information system that can be applied to students who were affected by fires. With this filter, school staff can have “some kind of a system where those students can then be flagged for extra support” over several years.
That filter can become particularly helpful when students’ trauma around fires is triggered by conditions similar to those that can spark fires. For example, Kitamura’s students dealt with power shut-offs during strong winds, poor air quality, and smoke traveling from other regional fires for years following the Tubbs fire. “The trauma from the fires is exacerbated” each time, said Kitamura.
Meloy said staff should be “prepared to see behaviors that would be consistent with someone who has experienced trauma.” In her case, she saw some students begin acting out in class by fighting or throwing things, while some other students became more shut down, dissociating while in class, and being extra quiet.
“Understand that it’s a trauma response,” said Meloy. “If it’s a windy day, it’s probably going to be, years from now, a tough day at school.”
To support Los Angeles County schools with mental health counseling, Kitamura is currently recruiting a group of counselors from across several Northern California schools who are prepared to offer counseling for students.
“I only learned after experience with the fire to do these kinds of things for other districts,” said Kitamura, who is in contact with the LA County Office of Education regarding this effort.
Meloy offered a reminder to not underestimate the trauma that staff membrs have also experienced: “In a classroom with students who have experienced this trauma, when you’ve experienced it yourself, it can be really overwhelming, so don’t forget about the staff and the support they need.”
Kitamura also recommended that the LA education office “beef up” on air quality monitoring; “make sure they are ready to go; make sure they are accurate, and make sure that the places you’re measuring are close to the places where the most burn happens.”
Lessons in preparation
Kitamura and Meloy also noted that once the emergency was over, they moved to planning for future fires.
Kitamura’s district, for example, established a redundant server in a separate location so officials could still communicate with their school community in the event that their primary servers went down or were burned.
Meloy noted the lack of dedicated, ongoing funding for the work that homeless liaisons do — and how it undermines all planning. Both Kitamura and Meloy called on legislators to provide funding support for students displaced by fires, given that the issue now surges regularly across the state.
“It is no longer, sadly, an isolated, once-in-a-decade event. It is continuing to happen. I had been thinking about, from the homeless liaison perspective, wildfires being a rural issue,” Meloy said. “But it’s really everywhere. I would love to see some dedicated funding for that.”
As Kitamura put it: “There will be more wildfires. There will be more crises. So … we better plan accordingly.”
Jorge Espinoza Jr., left, and Luke Wilson are the first two student board members in West Contra Costa to be compensated for the job.
Courtesy of Jorge Espinoza Jr. and Luke Wilson
West Contra Costa Unified School District students Jorge Espinoza Jr. and Luke Wilson have a seat and voice at a table that most students don’t have regular access to.
For the last five months, they’ve been sitting next to school board trustees at the dais, asking top administrators accountability questions and making recommendations on what could improve student experiences in the classroom.
On top of that, they are the first two students in the district to be paid for this work.
“It definitely has been an experience,” Espinoza said. “It’s been a journey – one that I would never want to change.”
“I believe I’ve learned so much, not only just being a board member, especially as a student, but also getting to engage with my community, engaging with the cabinet and what they do and seeing and learning all these things that go on within the board.”
Although many districts in California have student board member positions, it’s rare for them to be paid, said Troy Flint, spokesperson for the California School Boards Association. This school year, West Contra Costa Unified became one of the few in the state that pays its student board members.
School districts, including West Contra Costa, moved to pay board members after the 2023 passage of Assembly Bill 275, a state law that allows districts to pay or offer course credits to student board members. The West Contra Costa school board passed the resolution last July and updated and reapproved it last month to comply with the law.
Flint said that “the concept of involving student board members more fully, including compensating them in some very rare cases, is gaining momentum … (and) breaks from traditional practices where student board members were not supported to the same degree we’ve seen become more common with this recent generation.”
Historically, it’s been difficult to recruit students to be student board members, said West Contra Costa board member Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy. Various West Contra Costa Unified school board members had said publicly that they believed including compensation and course credits would motivate a more diverse population of students to apply. They pointed to the time commitment the students must make. Typically, board meetings start at 6:30 p.m. and last between three and five hours — time that students could use to work for pay, study or participate in an internship.
“It’s a commitment, and many students in our high schools have to not just take care of their own family, but they have to work,” Gonzalez-Hoy said. “Having to do a volunteer position for our students is a big ask.”
In West Contra Costa, at least one of the two student board members must be from a school with 60% of students receiving free or reduced lunch, which was an effort to ensure representation from schools in less affluent areas of the district, Gonzalez-Hoy said. Students are paid $150 for every board meeting they attend and $100 for each agenda review meeting and board study session. Students also receive elective course credits.
There are typically two board meetings and an agenda review meeting per month, Gonzalez-Hoy said. The number of study sessions varies based on the business of the district.
“They won’t have to choose between a paycheck and being in this (student board member) position, but also they won’t have to choose between their studies and working,” Gonzalez-Hoy said.
Espinoza and Wilson just wrapped up their one-semester term, and the new student board members will be announced and sworn in at the Feb. 12 board meeting.
Wilson, who attends El Cerrito High School, is also a student board member of the Contra Costa County Office of Education, a term that lasts the whole school year. He suggested West Contra Costa should do the same.
“I believe that having two student board members elected for one whole year would actually be a better benefit for all students because of that momentum not being lost,” Wilson said. “One semester really doesn’t make sense in terms of that momentum and actually picking up a grasp on how the meetings run. But then you’re out when you get that grasp.”
Gonzalez-Hoy said the board is considering all student feedback to make the student board member experience as beneficial as possible.
Last year, San Diego and Palm Springs school districts passed resolutions similar to West Contra Costa’s. San Diego students receive elective course credit and are paid $1,736 per month, the amount paid to other board members in the district. Student board members in Palm Springs are paid about $296 monthly, according to the Palm Springs Desert Sun.
Board members historically receive low wages
Paying student trustees is not very popular, especially now with many school districts dealing with declines in enrollment, school closures and budget cuts, resulting in a lack of available funds. Most board members serving on school boards around the state are paid low wages.
The amount of money board members receive in California depends on the average daily attendance in the district. Average daily attendance — which is different from overall student enrollment — is calculated by taking the total number of student attendance days and dividing by the number of school days in the year.
In a district like West Contra Costa, where average daily attendance was about 23,400 in the 2023-24 school year, regular board members make up to $400 a month.
Board members in districts with 25,000 to 60,000 students receive up to $750 monthly. In districts with 1,000 to 10,000 students, board members receive up to $240 monthly. In the smaller districts with 1,000 or fewer students but more than 150, trustees receive up to $120 a month. Those in districts with less than 150 students only make up to $60 a month.
There’s a stark difference in pay for board members in larger districts with more than 250,000 students. According to the state education code, compensation in those districts is set by municipalities.
For example, board members in the Los Angeles Unified School District, serving more than 500,000 students, receive $125,000 annually if they don’t have another job and $50,000 if they do.
Some states, like Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, do not allow compensation for board members, and the elected board members are volunteers.
Empowering students
Espinoza and Wilson’s top priority this year is to create a student bill of rights that will eventually be posted in every classroom.
“The reason for this is to empower students to not only know their rights but to also have respect and accountability, not just within students but all of our staff as well,” said Espinoza, who attends Middle College High School.
Incoming student board members will take over the process of finalizing the bill of rights through outreach and surveys.
Another change Espinoza and Wilson spearheaded was to include the All Student Congress — a group of middle and high students, nominated by their schools — in discussions about the Local Control Accountability Plan, a document that outlines how the district should be spending money. Student feedback will then go to an advisory committee made up of parents and community members.
Students need to be part of the All Student Congress to qualify for the student board member position. The student congress also elects both student board members.
Espinoza Jr. and Wilson also helped draft “Educational Response to the Climate Emergency,” a resolution to help implement climate literacy in West Contra Costa schools and to help students graduate with a deeper understanding of the impacts of climate change and possible solutions. The resolution could include a climate literacy curriculum and professional development for educators.
Other goals Espinoza and Wilson have that will be passed on to the incoming student trustees are to implement a Student Advisory Panel, have more student trustee engagement, and have career technical education programs for students in grades K-8.
Wilson’s advice to would-be student board members is to “go into it with an open mind in terms of when you’re listening to the adults and frequently … you’ll hear debates, you’ll hear people not agreeing with each other. And before you just immediately pick a side, try and hear both sides.”
Espinoza said future student board members shouldn’t be shy or let the complex jargon and policies hinder them from applying.
“You’re there for a reason,” Espinoza said. “These adults, they’re here to serve us, and as students, we’re here to represent the students’ voices directly as well.”
Wendell Norris Marquez teaches pre-AP Spanish to seventh graders at Lively Middle School in Austin, Texas.
Credit: Zaidee Stavely/EdSource
On a recent Monday morning in Wendell Norris Marquez’s classroom in Austin, Texas, students were getting ready to read a story in Spanish by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But first, they discussed the differences between a story and a novel, and between a story and a legend.
“Los cuentos son ficción (Stories are fiction),” said one student. “But are legends real?” asked Norris Marquez.
No, the students decided. They may have started based on something real, but then they changed over time as they were told and retold.
This is a sophisticated literature class. But these students aren’t in high school. They’re in seventh grade. And they’ll be taking the AP Spanish exam before they graduate from middle school.
“When I describe this class, I tell people it’s not really what you think in the back of your head as a language course, because in elementary, the kids already learned Spanish, so by the time they get to us, they’re already fully bilingual,” Norris Marquez said. “So it is about taking them to the next level. We learn literary genres, we talk about metaphors, we analyze poems, and we write essays.”
This kind of advanced Spanish class is only possible at the middle school level because most of Norris Marquez’s students have been attending dual-language programs with instruction in both Spanish and English since preschool or kindergarten.
It turns out that bilingual education is much more common in Texas than in California.
“Anybody who studies bilingual education, English learners, dual-language students, eventually stumbles across this reality that Texas has this long and linguistically rich, multilingual, multicultural K-12 history, and California doesn’t,” said Conor P. Williams, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and author of a report called “Making California Public Schools Better for English Learners: Lessons from Texas.”
According to the report, Texas enrolls 38% of English learners in bilingual education programs — more than double the 18% California enrolls.
Williams also found that Texas’ English learners have consistently done better than California’s on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in both reading and math.
“On every single administration of the test, Texas is better, over and over and over,” he said.
It’s not clear whether Texas’ English learners are doing better because of bilingual education. Multiple other factors could influence scores. Still, Williams points out that the findings are consistent with research that shows that bilingual education helps students achieve fluency in English and do better on academic tests over time.
“The research suggests that English learners in bilingual schools will score a little lower in English acquisition and in academics for a couple of years, but by roughly fourth grade, they should be outperforming English learners in English-only,” Williams said. “So you would expect to see that by about fourth grade, Texas, with its large number of bilingual programs, would start to really outperform California. You would expect that to be especially true by eighth grade. And that’s sort of what we see.”
Money and a mandate
Texas requires school districts to offer bilingual education if at least 20 children in the same grade speak the same language other than English at home, a mandate that dates back to 1973.
By contrast, California voters passed a law in 1998, Proposition 227, that required English learners to be taught in English-only classrooms unless their parents signed a waiver. That law remained in place for 18 years, until voters overturned it in 2016. The almost two decades of English-only instruction set the state back, officials say.
“The passage of Proposition 227 deeply impacted bilingual teacher education programs, resulting in fewer teachers earning bilingual certification over the past two and a half decades. Bilingual teacher education programs are still recovering,” wrote Alesha Moreno-Ramirez, director of multilingual support at the California Department of Education, in an email.
After Proposition 227 was overturned, California published two documents that set out a vision and goals for expanding bilingual education, the English Learner Roadmap and Global California 2030. But Williams says these documents have no teeth.
“There hasn’t been commensurate investment, accountability and oversight to make sure that these goals and vision documents matter,” Williams said. “Neither can make any school district do anything. It’s all voluntary.”
Texas passed a law in 2019 that sends additional funds to schools for all students enrolled in dual language immersion, and even more for English learners enrolled. By one calculation, Texas schools receive $924 more per year for every English learner in dual-language immersion. The state also has a long history of bipartisan support for bilingual education, and the top education official reportedly sends his own children to a bilingual school.
In Austin alone, there are 57 elementary schools offering dual-language programs, in Spanish, Mandarin and Vietnamese. More than half of the district’s English learners, referred to as “emergent bilingual” students, attend these programs.
At Perez Elementary, Spanish and English can be heard in classrooms, hallways, and out on the playground. One corner of the school library is dedicated entirely to books the students wrote themselves in both languages. Alongside a book that one child wrote about Roblox, a game creation platform, is a poignant story about a family’s journey to the U.S. from Honduras.
Yadi Landaverde teaches fourth grade at Perez Elementary School in Austin.Credit: Zaidee Stavely/EdSource
In a fourth grade classroom, as students prepared for a math lesson in English, teacher Yadi Landaverde walked them through how to say some terms in English and Spanish — right angle, obtuse angle and protractor, for example.
Landaverde, who has been teaching for 10 years, said that explicitly teaching the differences and similarities between languages is especially important for students who recently immigrated to the U.S. and are not as familiar with English. This year, she said, she has eight recent immigrants in her class. Landaverde was born in Mexico and grew up in South Texas. Growing up, she only had English instruction in school. But she’s seen the benefits of dual-language immersion with her students.
“As long as the first language is strong, students do tend to score higher on state tests,” Landaverde said. “I’ve seen that.”
Her students were eager to share why they love bilingual education.
“Being in a dual-language program is just the best thing you could do in school because you are learning two languages, and that feels like a superpower for everybody,” said Emil, 10. Austin Independent School District officials asked EdSource not to publish students’ last names to protect their privacy.
His classmate Luis, also 10, emigrated from Venezuela two years ago, but first attended an English-only school in New York, where he didn’t feel like he could communicate with anyone.
A fourth grade dual-language classroom at Perez Elementary in Austin, Texas.Credit: Zaidee Stavely/EdSource
“I couldn’t understand nobody and I couldn’t talk to nobody. One time I got home, and I was crying because nobody talked to me,” he said. When he moved to Texas and began attending Perez, he said, he was immediately welcomed.
“Now in class, I can speak Spanish normally without nobody saying that they don’t understand me,” he said. “And when I don’t know … something in English, I can just ask my friend that speaks more English than me and say, ‘What does this word mean?’”
Mathilda, who has been in the dual-language program at Perez since pre-kindergarten and speaks Spanish at home, said it has helped her keep both languages strong.
“My cousins in California cannot speak Spanish, so I need to teach them to learn Spanish ’cause they don’t go to a program for bilingual,” she said.
Middle and high school classes
In Austin, 13 middle schools and five high schools have bilingual programs in which students take at least two classes a semester in Spanish. One is a language or literature course, and the other is a content class, like science or math. Many schools also have electives available in Spanish, like film history or web design.
Down the hall from Norris Marquez’ class at Lively Middle School, Antonia Vincent teaches AP Spanish to eighth graders.
“At the beginning, they don’t even believe that they can do an AP class, and they don’t understand, most of them, what is an AP class,” Vincent said. “But at the end, we have good results, and they are very proud of themselves.”
Antonia Vincent teaches AP Spanish to eighth graders at Lively Middle School in Austin.Credit: Zaidee Stavely/EdSource
The majority of students in the dual-language classes in middle and high school in Austin are students who have been enrolled in bilingual education since elementary school. But some are also recent immigrants.
Advanced classes in Spanish can be empowering for recent immigrant students, Vincent said.
“Some of them, in the beginning, they are very shy,” Vincent said. “And this class empowers them because they feel that we listen to them, so they are building their confidence.”
One immigrant student wrote Vincent a letter saying, “Thanks to your class, I know that I can express myself, and that is empowering me to continue and to take this opportunity in my other classes.”
The classes also have benefits for students who are not English learners. Caroline Sweet, the dual-language instructional coach at Perez Elementary School, sent both her children to dual immersion programs. Her oldest son, now in 10th grade, attended Perez and then continued in dual immersion at Lively Middle School and Travis High School.
“His advanced Spanish courses in high school are so hard that when I look at those texts, I’m like, I do not know what that medieval poem means,” Sweet said. “But I think it’s just kept him pretty astute and paying attention to language and then just kind of really flexible in his brain.”
Patchy progress in California
Dual-language immersion programs like the ones at Perez Elementary and Lively Middle School do exist in California. Los Angeles Unified, for example, has more than 230 dual-language programs that span transitional kindergarten through 12th grade. But advocates for English learners say the investment of resources by the state has been piecemeal.
“Access to bilingual programs varies wildly depending on the district, the community, and available resources,” said Martha Hernandez, executive director of Californians Together, a nonprofit organization that advocates for English learners statewide.
Advocates and state officials agree that the biggest challenge is a lack of teachers with bilingual credentials.
Moreno-Ramirez, from the California Department of Education, pointed to recent investments to show that the state is supporting school districts to expand bilingual education.
In 2021, California invested $10 million for grants to expand dual-language immersion programs. In 2022, the state put another $10 million toward grants for helping train teachers in “effective language acquisition programs” for English learners, including bilingual proficiency. Most recently, the state invested $20 million in a program to help more teachers get bilingual credentials.
These investments have been helpful, but insufficient, said Anya Hurwitz, executive director of SEAL (Sobrato Early Academic Language), a nonprofit organization that promotes bilingual education.
“If we want to see multilingual education scaled in California, it’s got to be invested in,” Hurwitz said. “Money alone is not the answer ever to almost anything in life, yet we can’t pretend that it’s not an important ingredient.”
Williams agreed.
“227 is a real thing, no question. But 227 ended almost a decade ago,” said Williams. “At some level, if you’re going to be a progressive leader on this, it’s been a decade, it’s time, you can’t blame that anymore.”
Riverside County teachers collaboratively learn with the Riverside County Office of Education math team around increasing student thinking.
Credit: Riverside County Office of Education
When I became president of the California State Board of Education in 1975 for the first of two stints in this role (1975–82), three different offices created state curriculum frameworks, instructional materials and assessments, without much coordination or integration. In the five decades since, I’ve seen the state make significant progress in aligning K–12 policies — including those that govern finance, English learners, career/technical education, teacher preparation, accountability, postsecondary preparation, and more — to form a system where the various parts do work together.
But alignment alone is not enough for successful student learning and measurable academic growth. For example, Common Core math adopted by the State Board of Education in 2013 failed at the essential last mile of implementation by not providing the capacity for teachers and principals to teach the new math framework. As I reflected on my eight-year presidency of the board ending in 2019, I concluded we ended up with some islands of deeply rooted and changed math teaching, but mostly deserts where math teaching never changed significantly.
In 2014, the board approved the English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework and in 2023 a new math framework. Now, state educators must focus on the next step. To successfully implement both academic frameworks, we will need effective, aligned, sustained professional development that can reach and strengthen the entire teacher workforce.
Scaling up means ensuring that every teacher in California has, on an ongoing basis:
Adequate time to prepare lessons
Opportunities to continually learn in math topic areas as well as best practices in teaching
Opportunities to collaborate with other teachers while on the job
Access to models of effective teaching
Access to coaching and expert support
Time for reflection, feedback and revision
This kind of professional development has been implemented on a large scale in Ontario, Canada; Singapore; South Korea; and Japan.
To better serve our students and realize the goals of our math and English language arts standards requires substantial shifts on the part of teachers and instructional leaders. The state must make a sustained investment to make this happen. The new 2023 math framework, for example, calls for students to explain and justify their reasoning, grasp concepts, and make connections between different solutions in a much deeper manner than was the case in the No Child Left Behind era. Teachers’ instruction will likely improve only if they have developed relatively sophisticated visions of high-quality mathematics teaching. Teachers need rapid feedback mechanisms and the ability to continually measure how well each student is learning.
These are no small tasks to reach 9,700 principals and 319, 000 teachers in California. The local district is the first entity one would typically look toward in coordinating efforts to build teachers’ capacity to implement standards-aligned instruction. But most districts in California are quite small. Larger districts lack the necessary staff development capacity in-house, especially since staff support must be thorough and sustained.
Each state needs to devise its own strategies for how to best build and sustain the infrastructure for a dramatic upgrade in local instructional capacity. California has set policies and oversees the preparation of new teachers primarily through the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC). The state needs to expand the scope of the CTC, Department of Education, and California Collaborative for Educational Excellence to include current teachers starting with early career teachers, and scaling up to more experienced teachers. We can also learn from successful approaches that have taken hold in other states.
The Newsom administration has invested in service scholarships and residencies to recruit and retain better-prepared teachers and, while these show considerable promise, they were funded with one-time money and have thus far not increased in scale to provide a large enough supply of new teachers. Districts and county offices also need support to train and coach in-service teachers. The state has recently directed funds to a county office and the state Mathematics Project to train coaches for districts so that they can establish ongoing embedded professional learning for their teachers. This, too, is a promising start, but unlikely to be sufficient to meet the enormous statewide demand for assistance.
Because human and organizational capacity building at the local level is expensive and difficult to carry out, technology and digital platforms must be designed to lower the costs. For example, students could be taught using individualized technology packages during a part of a school day, while teachers are released to attend a few hours of professional development that would otherwise necessitate the hiring of substitute teachers. Online video coaching for math teaching has already proved effective in districts such as Lost Hills in Kern County, which has shown double-digit gains in math proficiency levels for their students following such coaching,
Some critics call for more state control of what happens after teachers close the classroom door. But there is no obvious path or mechanism to exert enough state control in hundreds of thousands of classrooms for top-down implementation of the series of complex instructional shifts called for by the curriculum frameworks. Advocating for the state to take an expanded interest in ensuring and coordinating local teacher training is not equivalent to explicit state control over how a teacher goes about delivering that instruction. The latter would likely achieve minimal local buy-in and could undermine the flexibility teachers need to meet the needs of different students with distinctive strategies. Instead, schools and teachers must internalize the new standards as their own and not perceive them as an intrusion. History and current research clearly demonstrate that standards-based implementation is unlikely to be advanced by additional regulations, mandates and sanctions from the top down. Teacher support for complex instruction instead must be constructed from the bottom up. California can achieve new policies that drive classroom improvement by supporting internal and revamped external school accountability, encouraging collaborative teamwork and funding sustained, ongoing professional learning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
