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  • California faces big challenges to implement new math guidelines

    California faces big challenges to implement new math guidelines


    Credit: Allison Shelley / EDUimages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Equity in implementation

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

    How to make that equitable will be a difficult task. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A Long Way to Go

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

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

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

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

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





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  • Study of Oakland Unified’s parent tutors finds exciting possibilities and challenges

    Study of Oakland Unified’s parent tutors finds exciting possibilities and challenges


    Susy Aguilar, a literacy tutor recruited by the nonprofit Oakland REACH, meets with this small group of students for 30 minutes daily, providing science-based literacy instruction at Manzanita SEED Elementary in Oakland Unified.

    Credit: The Oakland REACH

    Initial findings from a study of a closely watched Oakland Unified program that recruits parents and neighbors as tutors show intriguing potential for other low-income school districts struggling to teach kids to read.

    By training recruits in phonics and structured literacy and assigning them to K-2 classrooms, the initiative offers Black and Latino parents and others a direct stake in seeing their neighborhood children achieve the skills to read. 

    “Oakland provides a key example of how tutors can complement and make more manageable broader efforts to dramatically improve literacy outcomes,” concluded a research report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education based at Arizona State University. 

    Through a partnership with The Oakland REACH, an innovative nonprofit serving low-income Black and Hispanic families, the district has been able to mine what the study calls a “pool of untapped talent” —parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, “many of them poorly served by public schools themselves and now brim with passion for addressing systemic problems in public education,” author Travis  Pillow wrote in an accompanying analysis. 

    “People within our own community as a whole make the best tutors because we connect directly with the children,” Susy Aguilar, a tutor at Manzanita Seed Elementary, which her daughter attends, said in a video about the program. “Just believing in the children and making them believe in themselves is one of the most important things for me.”

    Irene Segura, a literacy coach with Oakland Unified, said students look forward to meeting with their tutors, and the feelings are mutual.

    “When their students have those light-bulb moments of putting those decodable sounds together and putting that into words, it makes them happy and more determined to continue their work,” she said.

    The Oakland REACH was highlighted this week in a separate report that summarized effective tutoring practices. Accelerate, a nonprofit organization that seeks to expand high-impact tutoring programs into public schools nationwide, cited The Oakland REACH’s tutor recruitment efforts and its partnership with Oakland Unified. 

    The Oakland REACH is one of 31 grantees whose tutoring work Accelerate has funded. In 2022, The Oakland REACH received an unrestricted $3 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to continue its work. 

    The research by the Center for Reinventing Public Education also documented significant obstacles facing the program, concluding that paying the tutors a competitive wage to retain them in high-cost Oakland will be difficult. And gains in reading scores in the first year were uneven among schools and between kindergarten and first and second grades. Figuring out why is the next step.

    The district, through a literacy training nonprofit, FluentSeeds, trained the tutors in the district’s phonics-based curriculum and gave them a specific goal: work in small groups with every child struggling with the elemental skill of decoding for a half-hour each day, at least three times each week. In its smoothest form, teachers communicated daily with tutors, who worked regularly with coaches, when they weren’t pulled aside to substitute teach.  

    The analysis of 84 tutors employed by Oakland Unified found considerable variability in student improvement. The first-year study, in 2022-23, found positive outcomes in a district where only 33% of students overall, 23% of Hispanic students, and 18% of Black students scored at standard in English language arts on the 2023 state Smarter Balanced test. The initiative is still a work in progress.

    Gains made by students who were tutored in small groups were comparable to gains by students who were taught the same curriculum by classroom teachers, as measured by progress on the iReady reading assessment in the 2022-23 school year.

    Students who received tutoring from an early literacy tutor made statistically significant gains on the iReady test compared with students who did not receive any instruction from the tutoring curriculum. The difference was nearly a year’s worth of reading growth; students without the training made less than half of a year’s standard reading achievement.

    But the large gains in kindergarten between tutored and nontutored students were not matched in first and second grades on the iReady reading assessments. With 100% reading improvement, the expected rate of yearly gain, improvement ranged from 79% to 188% among low-income schools. 

    “Their average growth is lower than we would expect or hope for. But growth doesn’t just reflect the impact of tutors,” said Ashley Jochim, consulting principal of the Center for Reinventing Public Education and co-author of the study. “Tutors are only one part of the literacy instruction puzzle.”

    Factors in and outside the school affect results, she said, including students’ chronic absences, which were among the highest in California since the pandemic. The number of tutors within a school, how they were deployed, the size of tutoring groups and scheduling are among the variables. 

    Another factor is the uneven support of principals, Jochim said. Among tutors responding to a survey, only half reported daily communication with classroom teachers, and fewer said they were in regular communication with school staff leading the literacy work. 

    “There are gaps; this is where greater attention to quality and fidelity in tutoring is important,”  Jochim said. 

    Added Lakisha Young, founder and CEO of The Oakland REACH, “We’ve helped the district add a bunch of tutors. But if we don’t work on these other conditions to bring everything into alignment, then it’s going to make the work harder.”

    Jochim said that the center will spend the last year of a two-year grant collecting better and more data to determine how differences among schools affected outcomes. The range of reading skills widens in first and second grades, complicating the ability to compare the progress of tutored students and nontutored students, she said. 

    The secret of success

    Jochim said the most instructive lesson from the pilot is that having more adults in the classroom allows for differentiation of instruction.  

    “For so long in this country, we have assumed that a single teacher working alone in their classroom could sufficiently differentiate instruction for kids in literacy and math,” she said. That’s difficult, she explained,  in a kindergarten class where some students are reading for comprehension while others are struggling to decode one-syllable words.

    Jochim said there is “no question that this project is the right approach.”

    “My thinking has evolved,” she said. “Differentiation of instructions is the ticket to better outcomes — if we can figure out the specifics.”  

    Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University education researcher and authority on tutoring, is bullish as well.  The Oakland REACH’s partnership with the district and FluentSeeds matters, she said, because it treats tutoring as “part of a broader and coherent approach to improving literacy, not simply an ‘add-on’ program.” 

    “I’m excited,” she added, “what this systemic approach can offer for communities across the country.”

    Dilemma over adequate pay

    The level of pay may also determine if the tutoring initiative succeeds. The district pays tutors $16 to $18 per hour, plus benefits, which Young had to lobby the district for. Tutors who responded to the survey cited low pay as the biggest disincentive to the job, and it is likely a factor in why only five of the 11 tutors placed last spring returned to the job this fall.

    Young acknowledged that pay appears to be the biggest obstacle to sustainability. It is a difficult issue because, under the district labor contract, bumping up the pay significantly will run into the pay level for a para-educator, which requires more education than a high-school degree. Young is exploring other options to fill the income gap, such as a retention bonus.

    Roots in the pandemic

    The Oakland REACH incubated the concept of community-trained tutors in the Covid summer of 2020. Parents frustrated by the failures of remote learning had cited reading instruction as their top need, so Young hired the first group of tutors. Buoyed by their success, she began working closely with the district to make early-grade reading tutoring its priority as well once schools reopened.

    The Oakland REACH recruited the first group of 16 “literacy liberators,” handing out fliers on school grounds and going door-to-door in the fall of 2022 and partnered with FluentSeeds to train them in early 2023. Many had to be convinced they could do the job; the minimum requirement was a high-school degree. 

    According to the report, the first recruits included a young man who had seen family members struggle with reading comprehension and a retired teacher who “expressed alarm” that he had mistaught young readers and wanted to make amends through the science of reading — instruction grounded in structured literacy and evidence-based practices.

    Oakland Unified hired 11 of them to fill tutoring vacancies and placed them in the classrooms last spring.

    “Six months into the school year, Oakland had still not filled tutor positions in schools that served the most marginalized students. Oakland REACH was really critical to filling the gaps and ensuring the kids who most need this help are able to get it,” Jochim  said.

    A second cohort of 20 tutors began work in the fall of 2023.

    Extra training with leadership skills

    FluentSeeds gives all of Oakland’s K-2 literacy tutors a four-day course in SIPPS — Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words — the district’s early-stage intervention program. The subset of tutors that The Oakland REACH recruited for “literacy liberator fellowships” took an additional eight, two-hour sessions that provided background in the science of reading and focused on building student mindsets and tutors’ roles as leaders and advocates.

    “We bring in a social-emotional component of what it means to be a teacher in Oakland teaching students that are behind, and how does that make them feel?” said Emily Grunt, program director for FluentSeeds, who has led the Oakland training.

    One tutor characterized the fellowship as “life-changing.” The report described a session, offered by Decoding Dyslexia CA, in which fellows attempted to read a passage from Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild,” in which letters were changed to simulate the experience of a child with a learning disability. The passage became unreadable.

    “Maybe you’re just not trying,” the trainer told the fellows, projecting the hurtful response that many students with dyslexia are told.

    A model for other districts?

    Interest in the program is spreading. The Oakland REACH held a conference on the tutoring model that attracted representatives from 14 nonprofits nationwide. Another conference is planned for the spring. The Oakland REACH has created a readiness assessment to determine if groups have the leadership capacity, organizational strength, funding and strong ties with the community.

    “We only can work with people who have a certain level of readiness to be able to push this forward because it’s going to be really tricky,” she cautioned. “If you’re not used to working with your district at all, your head’s going to explode starting this out.”





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  • Advocacy group leader talks about the challenges of transitional kindergarten

    Advocacy group leader talks about the challenges of transitional kindergarten


    Credit: Randall Benton / EdSource

    Michael Olenick has spent his life pondering the preschool years. His mother, a childhood development professor, was one of the first Head Start teachers back in the 1960s, so he started preschool at age 3.

    credit: CCRC

    In some ways, he has never left that space. Olenick, a lifelong advocate for children and families and president of the Child Care Resource Center, a California-based advocacy organization, has long been a champion of early childhood education, having seen its power to uplift lives firsthand. But he worries that the educational system often pits the needs of one age group of children against another. 

    For instance, he worries that the rollout of transitional kindergarten, or TK, not only has undermined the preschool sector by stealing away some of its 4-year-olds. He also notes that TK is poised to run into a number of speed bumps ahead, including a lack of facilities and the need for more child developmental training, as it reaches full implementation in the fall. 

    Olenick, who received his Ph.D. from UCLA in educational psychology and has shaped the field with influential research on the importance of quality child care, recently made time to chat about his passion for early education and what he sees as the key challenges facing TK.

    What fascinates you most about early ed?

    My mother said that I always liked kids because I always had to be there in her classrooms. To me, it’s the most hopeful period of time, the opportunity to change kids’ trajectories the most. It’s the most hopeful time in life.

    What are the biggest challenges in the expansion of TK? Do you worry about too much academic rigor, potty training incidents, the need for nap time?

    All of those issues. In the ’80s I evaluated hundreds of preschool programs and kept running into large numbers that were drilling children on colors, numbers and letters for inordinate amounts of time. Boys had a harder time with this than girls. In looking at teacher qualifications, I saw lots of certificated teachers who were doing the drilling. I realize that’s a long time ago, but I keep hearing from colleagues seeing the same thing now. That’s why we pushed for early childhood education units for TK teachers. The other issue that comes up is many schools are designed for children to go to the bathroom unescorted. Four-year-olds can get lost there.

    What do you think is the root source of the problem? A lack of understanding of child development, like the realities of potty training?

    I don’t think most current teachers understand early development. Over time, this may right itself if they get the education they need. But principals have to have the expectation that TK is not first grade. Also, teachers do not generally handle toileting issues, and schools are not designed for 4-year-olds.

    Is the academic pressure too high today? 

    I recently got an email from my first adviser at UCLA saying she went to half a dozen TK classrooms, and it looked like first grade. I wrote her back and I said, I told you so. We don’t have enough people yet that understand that kids learn differently. People learn at different rates, and we try to put them all into the same box and have them all learn stuff at the same time. Some of them are just not ready yet. You have to individualize instruction. 

    Why do you think the TK take-up rate has been more sluggish than expected?

    Some of the biggest challenges are in rural districts, where they can’t get a very large number to attend, and the lack of child-sized facilities, especially easily accessible bathrooms. Also, I don’t buy the part about this helping all lower-income children because their parents need a full-day, full-year solution, not just three hours. For families who have a predictable schedule, a 9-to-5 job, TK with aftercare probably works pretty well, but some families need more flexibility.

    Why are small ratios so important?

    There has always been the rationale for safety. But more recent literature focuses on individual interactions between adults and children, and the fewer children per adult increases interactions, learning and attachment.

    Why is play so key in TK?

    Play is so important. I’ve heard from several TK program directors who said it took their administrators five years to recognize that play was learning. It’s not just the teachers that need to be trained on what’s developmentally appropriate; it’s important for principals, too. You know, a principal comes into a classroom and expects to see that teacher up in front of that class teaching. So if you go in and you see all these kids are playing, you may not realize they are being taught. It’s all about how you structure things in the classroom because you can get the same results in a play environment. You don’t have to drill kids. 

    Do you think we focus on setting a solid preschool foundation too much when financial stability may be more important for families?

    It’s at least as important. We do a lot of work with families that are below the federal poverty line, the poorest of the poor. There are classrooms where there are kids who seem to be defiant. There was one kid who, it turns out, was deaf, and it took a long time to get him checked. He wasn’t being defiant; he just couldn’t read our lips. We have to work to give families what they need. 





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  • Dual admission programs a tool for addressing state’s transfer challenges, panel says

    Dual admission programs a tool for addressing state’s transfer challenges, panel says


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a7FKovXyWQ

    A group of education leaders and experts representing both community colleges and four-year universities agreed during EdSource’s Wednesday roundtable discussion that dual admission might be one of the most promising solutions to California’s broken transfer systems.

    About 2 million students are enrolled in the state’s 116 community colleges, yet just 10% of them transfer to a four-year university within two years, according to research from the Public Policy Institute of California, or PPIC.

    “At the end of the day, it’s really important for us to ensure that transfer is as seamless as possible, that students have the information they need upfront, that it’s actionable, that they’re able to take the courses they need and get through to transfer,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the PPIC Higher Education Center.

    Panelists at the roundtable — “Is dual admission a solution to California’s broken transfer system?” — agreed that dual admission should be available statewide for all interested students in order to ensure more seamless transfers.

    The roundtable included discussion of a state law passed in 2021 that sought to improve transfer rates in California. The postsecondary education trailer bill, or Assembly Bill 132, asked the University of California and required the California State University systems to create such programs for students who didn’t “meet freshman admissions eligibility criteria due to limitations in the high school curriculum offered or personal or financial hardship.”

    going deeper

    Visit the virtual event page for EdSource’s dual admission roundtable for more information about the speakers and a list of resources.

    Dual admission programs offer students guaranteed admission into certain four-year universities after completing a specific list of lower division courses at a community college. This is different from dual enrollment, a process in which students earn college credit while in high school.

    This law could potentially transform the state’s higher education pathways, given that California ranks 41st when it comes to high school graduates who enroll in a four-year university but third in its share who enroll in community college, according to Johnson.

    “What that means is that transfer students are critical to ensuring that California really provides a meaningful ladder of educational and economic mobility for our population,” Johnson said.

    While the state law calls for a pilot program, CSU’s dual admission program is permanent. It’s called the Transfer Success Pathway Program and launched in fall 2023 with an initial cohort of 2,000 students, said April Grommo, CSU’s assistant vice chancellor of enrollment management.

    “We purposely are creating a statewide system,” Grommo said. “We also know that students transfer or take courses at multiple community colleges, and we wanted all of that credit to be reflected in the system and for students to be able to accurately track how many units they’ve completed, what their transferable GPA is, and how they fulfill general education and major prerequisites so that they truly understand the courses that they need to transfer.”

    CSU’s program includes all campuses, though some of the most impacted majors are excluded, while UC’s program is limited to six of the nine campuses. CSU also goes beyond what’s required by law by offering dual admission to just about any student who was rejected or simply chose not to attend CSU.

    “Just for scale, there’s 162 community college students in the dual admission program for UC, and there’s 2,008 students in the dual admission program for CSU currently in the community colleges,” said panelist John Stanskas, vice chancellor for educational services and support at the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office.

    Roundtable panelists also discussed existing programs that could be used as a model for more statewide access to dual admission.

    One such example is in the state of Virginia, where Northern Virginia Community College has a dual admission partnership with George Mason University, which sits just 5 miles away. One of the roundtable panelists, Jaden Todd, is a current student at the community college and shared his experience.

    A significant benefit of his dual admission program, called ADVANCE, has been the clarity of knowing exactly which classes he’d need to take at his current campus and at George Mason University after transferring. A clear understanding of the courses he’d be required to take was important, he said, as he decided whether to pursue computer science versus computer engineering.

    “The fact that I’m able to see not only what classes I need to take here at NOVA (Northern Virginia Community College) but also what it transfers to and what it transfers as, I think that’s one of the biggest benefits of the program,” said Todd, who is on track to transfer to George Mason University in one year.

    “I don’t have to worry I’m wasting my money, I don’t have to worry I’m wasting my time. … I don’t have to be a junior taking freshman classes because I didn’t know that this history class was a prereq for this other class.”

    Todd said he’s also benefited from having access to a second campus.

    “That’s something that I wouldn’t have if this ADVANCE program doesn’t exist because I have access to everything a GMU student has access to because I’m considered a GMU student, even though I’m at NOVA,” Todd said, referring to George Mason University.

    Some GMU resources available to Todd are their libraries, a lab with 3D printers, and access to their student clubs.

    One of the longstanding challenges that California community college students face when transferring to a CSU or UC is the need to align the courses on their transcripts with the courses they must take after transferring. It’s a challenge that NOVA and GMU avoided by clearly outlining required courses for students enrolled in ADVANCE, but one that students in Long Beach City College’s initial dual admission program often came up against.

    In its initial iteration of the program in 2008, Long Beach City College partnered with Long Beach Unified and CSU Long Beach to create the Long Beach College Promise. Understanding which courses students were required to take at each level of their higher education journey, however, “was almost like a maze that they were trying to demystify,” said panelist Nohel C. Corral, executive vice president of student services at Long Beach City College.

    In 2019, the college relaunched a revised version called Long Beach College Promise 2.0, Corral said.

    “We mapped the courses students would need to take in their first two years here at Long Beach City College and what it would look like in their last two years at California State University Long Beach,” Corral said. “And that required a lot of coordination between the instructional faculty at both Long Beach City College and at Long Beach State, in addition to counselors and advisers in both institutions.”

    The relaunched program included 38 students enrolled at Long Beach City College who were also given CSU Long Beach student identification cards with access to the CSU library, sporting events and career services, among other resources. The following year, the cohort included 162 students, which grew to 774 by the fall of 2021.

    “We’re still tracking them and collecting data to assess the transfer rates for those cohorts, but for that fall 2019 cohort, we saw significant transfer rates compared to other populations,” he said.

    The panelists agreed that geography may become a potential challenge in the development of dual admission programs statewide, given California’s size. They also agreed, however, that regional partnerships become crucial in those areas.

    Just last week, for example, Chico State announced a dual admission partnership with seven community colleges. Fresno State and Fresno City College also have a partnership; likewise, CSU Bakersfield has one with Bakersfield College.

    Corral suggested “starting off with the data and seeing where the students are transferring to, if you don’t have a local CSU in your direct vicinity, so that you can start those dialogues and start those engagements with those CSUs that your students are going to.”

    Stanskas, of the community colleges’ chancellor’s office, said that dual admission can be “especially important for our place-bound students who can’t go a hundred miles or 500 miles to a program. They have family; they have commitments; they have lives that they are unable to move that way.”

    Grommo said, “We would love to see every student that’s transitioning from high school and decides that the community college pathway is their pathway that they need to take, really enroll in the Transfer Success Pathway program so we can support them early in their process and help them through this transfer journey.”

    This story was updated to accurately reflect Jaden Todd’s name.





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  • How can We Find a “Sweet Spot” that Challenges Our Learners?

    How can We Find a “Sweet Spot” that Challenges Our Learners?


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxf5iOQP0J0

    Introduction

    Rigor is often discussed among educators, but can be misunderstood. While rigor involves high standards for every student, it is essential to pair these standards with the right support. Creating an environment that encourages both challenges and understanding can lead to students’ success. It is all about fostering productive struggle, where students are pushed to think critically, but are also supported just enough to make progress.

    What is the Productive Struggle?

    In their article, How Do We Find the Right Level of Challenge for Our Learners?, authors John Almarode, Douglass Fisher, and Nancy Frey explain that productive struggle happens when a task is hard enough to make learners think hard. It is important that learners receive the right help to stay motivated and not feel overwhelmed. Research, such as the Visible Learning MetaX, shows that productive struggle can lead to an average growth of 0.74 standard deviations. This significant improvement shows how effective it is to challenge students in their learning zones. Barbara Blackburn describes productive struggle as the perfect balance between giving help and letting learners work on their own.

    A productive struggle refers to different things for different students. Almarode, Fisher, and Frey stated that what is hard for one student might not be hard for another. Some students find things more difficult than others do. Therefore, the first step in finding the correct level of challenge is to understand what makes something complex or difficult.

    Complexity refers to the difficulty level of a learning task. For example, finding a figurative language is easier than comparing how different authors use it to help readers understand it. This is particularly true if the text is new to the reader. Similarly, understanding a historical document’s purpose, message, and audience is harder than simply listing the traits of a historical event, as noted by Almarode, Fisher, and Frey.

    Almarode, Fisher, and Frey stated that difficulty indicates how much effort is needed to complete a learning task, reach a goal, and meet success standards. For example, solving 25 math problems is more difficult than solving just two different math questions. This also involves the use of different strategies. Doing a complex lab experiment might be easier than performing the experiment and writing a detailed laboratory report. However, if I have already mastered the 25 math problems, they might not seem difficult for me. This shows how hard it is to find the right level of difficulty where a good challenge occurs. Ultimately, the effort is definitely worth it.

    Productive struggles encourage students to try different methods and learn from their mistakes instead of looking for quick answers. It values the learning process as much as the final result, indicating that facing challenges is important for growth.

    Once we understand what productive struggle is and how it affects students differently, it is important to know why encouraging this struggle helps students to learn deeply and believe in themselves.

    The Importance of Productive Struggle

    Lee Ann Jung, author of Thriving in the Zone of Productive Struggle, says that productive struggle is working hard on tough tasks. This is important for deep learning and confidence building. She explained this idea using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD). Knowing this helps to create challenges that help people grow.

    Jung discusses two ideas: mastery experiences and the zone of proximal development. Mastery experiences occur when we succeed in a struggle. The zone of proximal development is about giving students opportunities to push their limits, learn from mistakes, and succeed through hard work. Jung says it’s important to make learning fun and help students succeed, but we shouldn’t remove all challenges. Easy tasks might feel good but can stop students from understanding deeply and improving their skills. Jung cites “Without challenges, students might not grow up in important areas, such as thinking about their own thinking and perseverance” (Hiebert & Grouws, 2007).

    Jung says it’s important to know that even good things can have limits. When students face difficult challenges, they may feel that they cannot succeed. This struggle can make them feel overwhelmed, frustrated, or motivated. While challenges can help them grow, if they are too hard, students may start doubting themselves. This can lead to loss of confidence and avoidance of tasks. When problems seem too big, students might think they do not have the skills to succeed, affecting not just one task or subject but their overall confidence in school.

    What Struggle Qualifies as Productive?

    According to Barbara Blackburn, author of Productive Struggle is a Learner’s Sweet Spot, productive struggle occurs when students are challenged just enough to think hard but still get help to avoid frustration. It is not about giving students difficult tasks or leaving them alone. Instead, it means creating tasks that are slightly harder than what students can now do. This makes them try hard, make mistakes, and solve their problems. Students should work through challenges on their own before receiving help. This helps them to become more resilient, confident, and better at thinking critically. Teachers help only when students are stuck, often by asking questions instead of providing answers. This keeps students interested and motivated, without overwhelming them. In the end, productive struggle helps students learn more deeply, become more independent, and see challenges as opportunities to grow, not as things to avoid.

    See Productive Struggle in Action

    Barbara Blackburn suggests several specific activities to promote productive struggle in the classroom. One key activity is the use of the “Bump in the Road” metacognitive guide, where students read a less challenging text on a topic and identified two to four points where they encounter confusion or difficulty. They first attempt to resolve these struggles independently, then collaborate with a partner and only seek teacher assistance if needed. This process helps students build background knowledge and vocabulary, and prepare them for more complex texts and tasks.

    Another activity involves metacognitive guides that prompt students to write down their predictions or thoughts about a text, and then search for the author’s points and supporting evidence as they read. Some guides provided structured statements for students to agree or disagree with, encouraging them to locate information in the text and engage in group discussions by comparing their opinions with the content of the text.

    Blackburn also emphasizes the importance of using facilitating questions instead of giving direct answers when students struggle, such as asking if there is something in a previous paragraph that could help them or reminding them of similar problems they had solved before. This approach encourages critical thinking, persistence, and independence, allowing students to make multiple attempts, seek help from peers, and use other resources before teacher intervention

    Through these activities, Blackburn demonstrates how productive struggle can be intentionally built into lessons, supporting students as they develop resilience, a deeper understanding, and the ability to learn from challenges.

    How can a productive struggle be created in a classroom?

    From the Goyen Foundation, a blog on EMBRACING PRODUCTIVE STRUGGLE: WHY IT’s ESSENTIAL FOR LITERACY LEARNING by Jami Witherell provided answers in creating a productive struggle in the classroom. They are as follows:

    1. Create Challenges That Are Just Right: The goal is to strike a balance in which the challenge is demanding yet manageable. In literacy, this could involve selecting a reading selection that is slightly above a student’s current level or encouraging them to construct more intricate sentences. It is not about making tasks insurmountable but about finding the right level of difficulty to motivate.
    2. Normalize Making Mistakes: It is essential for students to understand that making mistakes is part of learning. This is where true growth occurs. Foster a classroom environment in which errors are viewed positively rather than negatively. In literacy, this could mean applying the editing process in writing or acknowledging a student’s ability to self-correct while reading.
    3. Pose Thought-Provoking Questions: Instead of providing immediate answers, the students were encouraged to think critically by asking open-ended questions. Queries like “What might you try next?” or “Which part of the word stands out to you?” inspires them to process information, which is their ultimate goal.
    4. Demonstrate Resilience: Finally, we illustrate to the students what it means to persist. Whether you are tackling a challenging text with them or sharing your own experiences of struggling through a literacy task, modeling resilience can significantly motivate students to persevere.
    Encouraging Learners Productive Struggle Image

    The photographs shown above were obtained from the Jackie Gerstein EdD. Gerstein wrote Letting Your Learners Experience Productive Struggle and she shows how to assist learners with their Productive Struggles.

    First, Gerstein allowed students to struggle.

    Second, Gerstein says to her learners, who struggle and want her to fix it – do it for them:

    • I know you can figure this out.
    • I will not do it for you. I have faith that you can do this.
    • You got this.
    • Take as much time as you need. There is no time limit.
    • Why do you not try _ minutes? If you do not get it by then, I will help you.
    • What steps can you take to achieve success?
    • Why do you not ask your classmates how they worked on the problem?
    • You might want to try something different.

    Conclusion

    Struggling was not something that was afraid of. This is the key aspect of learning. This helps students improve their reading, writing, thinking, and problem-solving skills. So, when you hear the word “struggle,” do not avoid it. Embrace it. This is where the real learning begins.



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  • West Contra Costa makes progress toward financial health, but big challenges remain

    West Contra Costa makes progress toward financial health, but big challenges remain


    West Contra Costa Unified’s Stege Elementary School in Richmond. (File photo 2019)

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    Top Takeaways
    • West Contra Costa Unified gets out from under a cloud of possible insolvency by coming up with a budget approved by the County Office of Education, which rated it “positive.” 
    • Positive certification is conditioned on the district implementing cuts and sending layoff notices by May 15 as agreed to by the elected school board in February. 
    • The district still faces budget challenges, including negotiating a new contract with its teachers and eliminating a structural deficit in three years after it has spent all the funds in a special reserve. 

    The West Contra Costa Unified District has made substantial financial progress by balancing its budget and averting possible insolvency. 

    Last week, the Contra Costa County Office of Education notified the district that it approved a “positive certification” in the latest version of its budget for the 2024-26 school years, the second time it has done that this year.  

    Positive certification means the county office concurs with the district that it can meet its financial obligations during the current school year and the next two years, but only if it follows through on plans to cut another $13 million over the next two years. 

    “If they do everything they say they’re going to do and keep going down the path that they submitted to us, they should be OK,” said Contra Costa County Superintendent of Schools Lynn Mackey. 

    The county office’s concurrence came as a relief to district officials. Interim Superintendent Kim Moses, the district’s business manager until last year, described the positive certification as “great news.”  

    “We are able to say that we can meet our obligations over the next three years with the changes that we’ve made,” she said. “And that is something to celebrate.” 

    The latest development for the 25,000-student district in the San Francisco Bay Area, which includes the city of Richmond, offers lessons for other California districts experiencing financial difficulties.   

    No. 1 among them: School boards have to make hard decisions to cut budgets and reduce the number of employees proportionate to their revenues, said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), a state-funded agency that helps school districts get out of financial difficulties.

    For several years, the county office of education had concluded that the district was no longer “a going concern” based on its shaky finances. And as recently as last year, FCMAT rated the district as at a high risk of insolvency.

    To get to the positive rating, the district cut $19.7 million from its budget this year, and its board voted in February to cut another $13 million over the next two years.  

    Going Deeper

    Under state oversight regulations, a school district’s financial situation can fall into three categories:  

    • A positive certification means the school district has the resources to meet its financial obligations to get through the current school year,and two subsequent ones.
    • A qualified certification means that the district may not to meet its financial obligations in the current school year, or the next two years.
    • A negative certification is the most dire category: a district will be unable to meet its financial obligation in the current year or subsequent school year.

    West Contra Costa’s positive rating is especially good news because, in 1991, the district became the first in California to get an emergency loan from the state, which took two decades to pay off.  

    But the district still faces substantial challenges. In its letter to Moses last Thursday, Daniela Parasidis, the county’s deputy superintendent for business services, said its approval of the district’s positive certification “comes with significant caution.” 

     “The district must remain vigilant and continue the implementation of its solvency plan to ensure long-term financial stability,” she wrote. 

    She also pointed to potential hazards that could affect the district’s finances, which underscore the multiple pressure points school districts face. In West Contra Costa, these include the impact of declining enrollment, increased absenteeism due to fears around immigration enforcement, expiring parcel tax revenue, and possible loss of federal funding cuts by the Trump administration.

    County officials say maintaining the district’s positive certification hinges on it doing two things: sending out layoff notices as the board voted to do in February by May 15, the deadline specified by state law, as well as adopting a budget for the coming school year by June 30.   

    One unknown is that the district is in the final stages of prolonged contract negotiations with unions representing all its staff, including its teachers union, which is demanding a pay increase and other compensation-related changes, and improved health benefits. The teachers’ contract expires June 30.

    However, there is deep disagreement between the district and its unions over the severity of the district’s financial difficulties. Francisco Ortiz, the president of United Teachers of Richmond, said the district routinely “underprojects revenue and overprojects expenditures.”  As for the cuts planned for the next two years, Ortiz said, “We feel that none of these cuts are necessary.” He said the district needs to, instead, “reprioritize how they’re actually spending their funds.” 

    “We deeply value our educators and agree they work hard and deserve to be fairly compensated,” Moses wrote in an online message last week. “Our challenge is not about disagreement, but about how we responsibly meet this need while ensuring our district remains fiscally sound.” 

    Another pitfall is that, despite making significant budget cuts, the district is still operating with a structural deficit, which it is closing by drawing on one-time reserve funds. 

    Those are so-called “special reserves” called Fund 17, valued at over $37 million at the beginning of the school year.  

    West Contra Costa was able to accumulate these special reserves at least in part because when it got its state bailout loan decades ago, the state required the district to maintain reserves of 6%, double the normally required amount, Moses said. 

    To balance its books, the district is drawing down $11.5 million of its Fund 17 reserves this year, another $20.25 million next year, and $6.2 million the following year, fully depleting that reserve.  It will still have the 3% minimum reserve required by the state, which amounts to about $15 million. 

    John Gray, CEO of School Services of California, the largest school consulting firm in the state, says it is quite acceptable for a district to use its Fund 17 reserves to get through a fiscal crisis. 

    But, he says, it means that “there will be a reckoning in three years” when all those funds are spent. “If you spend it (the Fund 17 reserve) all the way down,” he said, “you’re not going to have a place to grab money, and you’re going to have to make additional cuts.”

    Interim Superintendent Moses hopes that over the next two years, the district will be able to “align expenditures with our revenue so that we will no longer have a structural deficit, and we’ll begin to build back up that reserve for economic uncertainties.” 

    She said, “Any responsible, budget-minded person is going to make sure they save something for hard times.”





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