Credit: Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education
For folks in the literacy world, the bitter fight over California’s math framework sounded eerily familiar. On one side, proponents of the framework argued that students need to learn to love math, see themselves as math people and grapple with math concepts. On the other, traditionalists argued that the framework spends too much time on unproven, poorly researched ideas that fail to equip students with the foundational knowledge they need to learn more complex math.
For good measure, there’s even a popular Stanford professor, Jo Boaler, who’s been tagged as the Lucy Calkins of math and whose research has become a lightning rod for criticism from math researchers and educators nationally. Sounds just like the reading wars and the fight between balanced literacy and phonics, doesn’t it?
For those talking about the new “math wars” and calling for a “science of math,” that’s where the similarities end. Yes, there are serious differences between the two sides of the California framework debate on how to teach math in the elementary grades, when students should take algebra and the importance of calculus. But unlike reading, these pedagogical differences are far from being resolved.
That’s because the “science of reading” didn’t happen overnight. It was a multidecade movement engaging every sector of our education system including research, media, advocacy, state and local policy and business to tackle an issue — early literacy — that was broadly understood by the public.
One could argue that the math crisis is far more severe with overall results far behind English and enormous achievement gaps. It is also just as consequential for students, given the connection between early math proficiency and access to higher-level math coursework, post-secondary education and technical careers. To get the attention that math deserves, advocates should learn from the multiyear, multifaceted strategy that’s driven the science of reading movement.
The first step is articulating how poor math instruction affects a child’s life and harms the most vulnerable students, especially students with dyscalculia, a condition that makes it hard to do math. For years, reading advocates have hammered away at the connection between third grade reading results and the school-to-prison pipeline. Meanwhile, dyslexia advocates showed how poor reading instruction harmed children with reading difficulties. Their efforts expanded public consciousness and led to massive philanthropic and government investments in reading research.
For years, ways to teach reading with names like “explicit direct instruction,” “whole language and “balanced literacy” fought it out, creating dissension and confusion down to the classroom level. Over the last decade, stunning advances in neuroscience have resolved most of these conflicts. We now know that learning to read is a complex neurological process marked by explicit sequential stages of learning and interlocking skill development. Approaches like early phonics instruction work for the bulk of students, especially kids with reading difficulties like dyslexia while other popular methods like whole language don’t.
Unfortunately, when it comes to research, math is where reading was 20 years ago, with a similarly animating set of conflicts like the recent California Framework fight pitting “problem-based learning” against procedural knowledge such as memorizing multiplication tables. As we did with reading, we should heavily invest in the neuroscience research that can definitively answer what works in the classroom and what doesn’t.
Simultaneously, we should build the understanding and the will of state and local policymakers and community leaders about the math crisis, its implications for students and the importance of investing in high-quality math instruction from the earliest grades. This means that school districts shouldn’t wait two years for the state to publish a list of approved materials. Most math curricula in California classrooms are low quality and almost 10 years old. Districts should use the flexibility provided by state law to purchase a new highly rated math curriculum and provide ongoing professional learning and coaching for teachers, especially elementary teachers who are often math averse.
As we improve our knowledge of the neuroscience of math, state and local leaders shouldn’t sit on their hands. They should build capacity in state and local agencies by creating math departments that rival the size and influence of their literacy departments, hiring senior math administrators and building a cadre of math coaches so that best practices are quickly disseminated to districts and schools. Using current research, they should regularly revisit their math standards to establish a balance between procedural knowledge and problem-based learning. They should adopt the most vigorous quality metrics for math curriculum and intervention materials and require they are up to date, eliminating lags longer than three years between online updates and district adoptions.
It may be a few years before we have a “science of math” as impactful as the “science of reading.” But with the right focus, research, investments and infrastructure, California can get there with just as many lifelong benefits for our students.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
The U.S. Department of Education is attempting to solve issues associated with this year’s rocky rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and ensure colleges and universities release financial aid packages in a timely manner through a new plan announced Monday — but some California campuses remain pessimistic about receiving support.
“We’re not only talking about a better form or a better system. We’re talking about a better shot at accessing higher education for more than 600,000 American students. We’re talking about a better chance to go to college for students who would qualify for Pell Grants,” said Miguel Cardona, the U.S. secretary of education, at a news conference announcing the department’s plan Monday.
“We’re talking about making the American dream more achievable for so many more people who could realize the incredible potential they have through higher education but have been deterred by the cost and complexity of our current system.”
As part of the plan unveiled Monday, the department will send about 50 federal student aid officials to colleges and universities throughout the nation to help “prepare and process” students’ financial aid forms.
Senior Education Department officials did not provide a number or list of campuses that will receive support, but they emphasized that lower-resourced campuses will be prioritized, including historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges.
The plan also includes $50 million in federal funding for nonprofit organizations that focus on financial aid support. The department will also release test records for campuses to model.
“Ensuring our nation’s colleges and universities are prepared to assist in the massive overhaul of the FAFSA is critical for a smooth implementation, and we are excited to be partners in this work,” said Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, in a statement.
“These are some of the biggest changes facing the financial aid profession — not to mention students and families — in decades, and it will take cooperation, clear communication, and mutual trust among all stakeholders to get us over the finish line. We are eager to begin this work and look forward to sharing more details soon.”
However, Cal Poly Pomona officials doubt the plan to support campuses outlined by the U.S. Department of Education will do much to help CSU, UC or community colleges in California. Charles Conn, the campus’s associate director of financial aid, also said the announced measures should have been taken months ago.
So far, the UC system has not decided whether to push back the May 1 deadline, but Rachel Zaentz, a spokesperson for the UC Office of the President, told Inside Higher Ed that the delays might have “significant implications” for students’ decisions.
Several Cal State campuses, however, have opted to adjust their timelines — as that is something officials say they can control.
Cal Poly Pomona, for example, has updated its commitment deadline for incoming first-year students to June 1 as a result of the delays, according to Jessica Wagoner, the campus’s senior associate vice president for enrollment management and services.
“It’s heartbreaking … to see this happening and know the impact that it has on the students, especially first-generation students from a lower income, or even the lower middle-class students,” Conn said.
“They’re relying on this information, and the Department of Education has really failed the graduating class as well as students who maybe are looking to transition from a community college over to a four-year college.”
Typically, Cal Poly Pomona would determine aid offers by the end of February. This year, as a result of issues with student information systems and the Department of Education’s delays, they probably won’t be able to extend offers until the middle of April.
Conn added that delays will likely challenge students who need to update their records and that there are still some families unable to complete the FAFSA — including families where at least one parent doesn’t have a social security number.
“That’s a big population,” Conn said. “It’s not like two or three students. It’s in the hundreds if not thousands of our students that fall into that scenario across the system.”
Most continuing students, however, will not be impacted, Conn said.
Delays with the FAFSA have also affected Cal Poly Pomona’s other operations and the ability to predict the nature of the incoming class, ranging from the number of students attending to the distribution of different majors, according to Traci Lew, the interim associate director of admissions.
It also tightens the turnaround time for organizing campus events such as orientation — which takes place 10 days after the June 1 deadline.
Despite the challenges posed by the later deadline, Lew emphasized that “we can’t allow families to make shotgun decisions.”
“We want to help our students, and right now we can’t. We are blind to the information,” Wagoner said. “So if they call us, there’s nothing we can say to assist and support our students. We should be on the phone helping them, guiding them, and we can’t do that.”
This is a very important chart to raise awarement across schools, districts, and the state; however, I think it needs to be corrected that these are students who don’t pass these college-prep courses with a C or higher. It sends the wrong message to say that these “students don’t take courses needed to apply to CSU or UC” as I know that most students in many schools/districts do take these courses — they just … Read More
This is a very important chart to raise awarement across schools, districts, and the state; however, I think it needs to be corrected that these are students who don’t pass these college-prep courses with a C or higher. It sends the wrong message to say that these “students don’t take courses needed to apply to CSU or UC” as I know that most students in many schools/districts do take these courses — they just don’t get a passing grade, which is another systemic issue that needs to be tackled.
First graders at Frank Sparkes Elementary in Merced County write about how they would spend their money.
Credit: Zaidee Stavely / EdSource
Two years ago, California launched an innovative program to help children from low-income families save for their future education. Enrollment in the program, known as CalKIDS, began for all newborn babies and eligible low-income public-school students in 2022.
CalKIDS is a children’s savings account (CSA) program, a long-term wealth-building vehicle that can be used to help finance higher education. These accounts have specifically designed features (incentives and explicit structures) that encourage asset building among disadvantaged families, but they are meant to universally serve all families with children.
They provide a financial structure to collect contributions from a variety of entities such as governments, employers, philanthropic foundations, communities, private donors and others. But while CalKIDS provides each newborn with their own account, they should be thought of only as community accounts opened for individual children. CalKIDS challenges the norm that paying for college and building wealth for low-income children is solely or even mostly the responsibility of families or even the government alone.
While enrollment, account opening and initial deposits for CalKIDS are automatic, so far only 8.3% of eligible students (about 300,000) have taken the additional step of registering for the program, which is necessary for them to ultimately be able to access the funds.
But this is not a reason to despair. Registration rates alone are not the best metric for understanding or measuring the potential of this program because:
CalKIDS is likely to have a high return on investment for Californians over the long term. For example, a return-on-investment (ROI) analysis estimates that for every dollar invested by the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, in its CollegeBound program, the city will receive $9 in benefits associated with increased income, improved health, additional tax revenues and savings to the judicial and education system.
The program opens the door to multiple sources of support. The ability of CalKIDS to build wealth for children by facilitating the flow of multiple asset streams into a child’s account makes it unlike any other wealth-building tool within the state’s policy tool kit. An example of how other programs are doing this can be found in a case study on the Early Award Scholarship Program, a children’s savings account program in Indiana. They are converting traditional scholarships awarded at age 18 into early award scholarships that go into accounts long before age 18. New York City’s Kids RISE is using community scholarships, allowing groups like churches to come together and provide every child in their community with an early award scholarship. With a little foresight, CalKIDS can also be adapted to act as a financial structure for combining other efforts to support children and tackle wealth inequality, such as the “baby bonds” proposals in California.
CalKIDS can provide many other social, psychological and educational benefits. Building wealth is only one part of its potential impact on Californians. Evidence shows that children’s savings accounts reduce maternal depression, improve social-emotional development, parental educational expectations, and lead to more positive parental practices. Increasingly, evidence also shows that these programs are an effective strategy for improving children’s postsecondary outcomes. These effects can occur even when families have not contributed to their account. Moreover, the effects are often strongest among disadvantaged families.
However, it will take time to realize all the potential benefits of CalKIDS. Here are some reasons why:
Existing norms: A seldom-discussed reason why some families may wait to register or begin to save in CalKIDS is because of the cultural norm that families don’t need to start planning for college until their children are in high school. Having become entrenched over generations, it will take time to reverse these assumptions. As more families register in CalKIDS, however, we can expect the norm of waiting to change.
Economic conditions: According to financial needs theory, when families’ incomes increase and they have enough resources to meet basic needs, they are more likely to plan and save for college. Covid and the high inflationary period that followed have strained the ability of families to meet basic needs. This might be another reason why it might take time to see the full benefits of CalKIDS.
Long-term investment: These are investment accounts designed to build wealth over a long period. Furthermore, the real outcomes CalKIDS is concerned with are also long-term, such as increased college enrollment rates. Given this, impacts should be examined over a longer period.
The SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK) experiment started in 2007. It provides an example of how investments in children’s savings accounts are better understood over time, and not in a single snapshot. After the Great Recession (2008-09), the initial $1,000 investment in the accounts declined to just below $700. However, they grew to about $1,900 by the end of 2019. This is similar to what has been seen in other long term investment accounts such as 401k’s. After an economic disturbance, over time they often recover.
Similarly, after Covid, which was at its peak in 2020, by 2021 when children in SEED OK were about age 14, the average treatment child had about $4,373 in their account. And families that were able to save had average balances of about $14,000. So, even if families are not able to save, significant assets accumulate in these types of accounts.
Even though it might seem like the CalKIDS program is off to a slow start, it is important to not lose sight of the fact that it is a long-term investment in kids living in California. And that it has the potential for creating a variety of important social, psychological, educational and economic impacts. These impacts can produce a substantial return on investment for the state and its citizens if given time to be fully realized.
Jamelle Bouie writes an opinion column for The New York Times, and he is my favorite on that site. His insights are clear and sharp. In this column, he reminds us that Republicans have a long history of promises about tax cuts for the middle class that have ended up enriching the wealthiest and increasing inequality.
He writes:
It’s 1981. A Republican president and his allies in Congress are promising large, broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.
It’s 2001. A Republican president is promising broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.
It’s 2003. That same president is promising another round of broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.
It’s 2017. Yet another Republican president is promising broad tax cuts that will benefit the middle class and strengthen the economy.
With each new Republican administration, it is the same promise. With each round of tax cuts, it is the same result: vast benefits for the wealthiest Americans and a pittance for everyone else. There is little growth but widening inequality and an even starker gap between the haves and have-nots.
President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, which inaugurated the pattern, slashed the top tax rate on investment income to 50 percent from 70 percent and the capital gains rate to 20 percent from 28 percent. “New tax benefits for business were so generous,” Michael J. Graetz writes in “The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America,” “that corporate tax receipts declined from about 15 percent to less than 9 percent of federal revenues.” The law, he continues, “substantially cut taxes on income generated from wealth, increased opportunities for tax-free savings by upper-income Americans and greatly expanded tax-shelter opportunities for high-income individuals and corporations.” It also “reduced taxes on transfers of wealth from the richest Americans to their descendants by exempting all but a small fraction of the wealthiest 1 percent” from the estate tax.
Over the next decade, Reagan and his successor George H.W. Bush were forced to raise taxes as a result of this profligacy. Reagan signed deficit-reducing tax increases in 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1987. Bush signed a significant tax increase in 1990, breaking his “Read my lips” election-year promise not to raise taxes.
George W. Bush rejected his father’s fiscal heterodoxy in favor of the unrepentant supply-side orthodoxy of Reagan’s first year. Sold as middle-class tax relief, the $1.7 trillion George W. Bush tax cuts — passed in 2001 and 2003 — were by and large a handout to the wealthiest Americans. As Graetz notes, they “reduced federal revenues from 20 percent of G.D.P. in 2000 to 15.6 percent in 2004,” and when all the changes were phased in, “they raised the after-tax incomes of people in the top 1 percent by nearly 6.5 percent — $54,000 on average — compared to about 1 percent, or an average of $207, for the bottom 40 percent.” In a 2017 analysis of the legacy of the George W. Bush tax cuts, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the top 1 percent of households received an average tax cut of over $570,000 from 2004 to 2012. Not surprisingly, it also found that these cuts “did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.”
We can basically copy and paste this dynamic from Reagan and George W. Bush to Donald Trump, who sold his 2017 tax cuts as — you guessed it — middle-class relief. “Our focus is on helping the folks who work in the mailrooms and the machine shops of America,” he told supporters in the fall of 2017. “The plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe fitters, the people that like me best.”
Except — surprise! — a vast majority of the benefits of the $1.9 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went to the highest earners — millionaire chief executives and billionaire owners of large companies. Americans in the middle received an average tax cut of $910. Americans in the top 1 percent received an average cut of $61,090. The 2017 law also cut estate taxes and gave new advantages to real estate investors, direct benefits for Trump and his family.
We are now looking at another round of Republican tax cuts. Yet again the claim is that this will benefit most Americans. “The next phase of our plan to deliver the greatest economy in history is for this Congress to pass tax cuts for everybody,” Trump said in his March 4 address to Congress. But as Paul Krugman points out in his Substack newsletter, this latest package is both a shameless giveaway to the rich and a ruinous cut to safety net programs for lower-income and working Americans.
The tax and benefit cuts are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. To pay for the more than $1.1 trillion in tax cuts for people with incomes above $500,000, the House Republican framework would cut $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — snatching food assistance away from millions of low-income families — and $800 billion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, leaving an estimated 10 million or more Americans without health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The top 0.1 percent of earners would see their income grow; the bottom 20 percent would see it plummet.
It remains to be seen whether Republicans can pass their bill in the form they want. They have had some trouble moving it out of the House of Representatives and into the Senate. But if they can, it’s hard to imagine that there will be much appetite to kill the president’s “big, beautiful bill.”
Which is all to say that it’s 2025, and a Republican president has promised a broad tax cut that will help the middle class and strengthen the economy. I think we know what is going to come next.
Oliver Darcy is a media expert who reports on the media at his blog called Status. He here writes about the unwarranted jubilation of rightwing pundits who believe that their relentless attacks on Biden’s cognition were correct after all. This turns out to be a useful topic for them right now as Trump is hoovering up all the cash he can handle from his profitable dealings in real estate, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and other lucrative deals.
When you compare the two, it’s clear that Biden’s presidency was unblemished by corruption or scandal. The unemployment rate was low, inflation was dropping, and relationships with our allies in Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Asia were strong. The Economist said that the American economy was “the envy of the world.”
Now we are locked, as Rahm Emanuel wrote in The Washington Post, in a state of chaos, corruption, and cruelty. Every government agency has been ripped apart by Elon Musk’s DOGS, and our democracy is turning into an imperial presidency. Trump has assembled a Cabinet of billionaires and FOX News personalities. From day to day, we wonder which government responsibility will be cast aside.
I don’t know what Biden’s mental state was. But I liked his government far more than Trump’s cruel autocracy.
Darcy writes:
For years, right-wing media pushed a warped narrative of Joe Biden as a brain-dead puppet controlled by sinister, shadowy forces. Now they’re demanding vindication—but they do not deserve it.
Over the last week, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin,” has landed with a flurry of attention-grabbing headlines—not just for the reporting, but for what Tapper has said during the press tour. In an interview with Megyn Kelly on Tuesday, Tapper declared that “conservative media was right and conservative media was correct” about Joe Biden’s mental state.
But that’s not quite true. Or rather, it simplifies a much more nuanced media and political reality. While it’s fair to argue that the press should have covered Biden’s age with greater urgency—and to acknowledge that Biden clearly lost a step during his presidency—that’s a far cry from validating the deeply irresponsible narrative right-wing media spun for years: that the president of theUnited Stateswas a mentally incapacitated puppet with dementia, unaware of his own surroundings, and propped up by a “shadow government” running the country in his name.
That was never journalism. It was propaganda. Full stop.
Since the early days of the 2020 campaign, MAGA Media figures—particularly on Fox News—lobbed increasingly absurd claims about Biden’s mental faculties. They painted him as a senile old man who didn’t know what day it was, who couldn’t walk unaided, and who spent his presidency dozing off while Barack Obama or Ron Klain or some other shadowy liberal elite force secretly ran the country behind closed doors.
This wasn’t grounded in evidence. It wasn’t the result of deep reporting or careful observation. It was pure narrative warfare—an attempt to delegitimize Biden not just as a candidate but as a commander-in-chief. And the coverage became so cartoonish at times that no amount of fact-based reporting about Biden could pierce the right-wing media bubble.
None of this is to deny that Biden was aging. He was. By the end of his term, it was obvious to those around him—and to many voters—that he lacked the energy he once had. Even Democratic operatives privately acknowledged that he didn’t have his fastball anymore. But there’s a world of a difference between an 80-something president, who has always been prone to gaffes, showing his age and a man secretly suffering from debilitating dementia or worse. And conflating the two, as Fox News and its allies routinely did, wasn’t just misleading—it was malicious.
Yes, Biden’s debate performance on CNN was troubling. Yes, the press should have been more aggressive in scrutinizing his capacity to serve a second term. But reporters who refrained from joining the right-wing media hysteria were not negligent or part of a cover-up—they were simply cautious. They understood the weight of diagnosing a president with a serious neurodegenerative disorder without hard evidence. And they understood the cost of being wrong, particularly asDonald Trump ran on an authoritarian-like platform that he is now implementing in office.
MAGA Media’s goal was never honest diagnosis. It was political demolition. They weaponized Biden’s verbal gaffes, his slower gait, and his lower-energy demeanor to manufacture the idea that he was mentally vacant. Never mind that Biden managed the job without the chaos and confusion that has markedTrump’s second term. No matter what Biden did—whether it was biking, traveling, or delivering speeches—the same echo chamber smeared him with the same predictable attacks.
That wasn’t journalism. It was performance. And it came from people like Kelly and Sean Hannity, who weren’t doing reporting at all. They weren’t gathering facts. They were throwing mud, hoping some of it would stick. And in many corners of the country, it did.
That’s what makes the current revisionism so maddening. Now, with Tapper and Thompson’s book pointing to Biden’s visible decline, MAGA Media figures are claiming vindication. They’re demanding apologies from journalists who didn’t amplify their dementia narrative—insisting, once again, that they were “right all along.”
It’s reminiscent of how right-wing media rewrote history around Robert Mueller’s Russia probe or the COVID-19 pandemic: flattening complexity, cherry-picking facts, and pretending their worst-faith speculation was truth from the start.
But they weren’t right. They were irresponsible. They didn’t try to understand what was happening behind the scenes—they invented a version of it that was politically convenient. And just because Biden aged, and struggled in the final days of his presidency, doesn’t make their years of bad-faith character assassination suddenly noble. Notably, while they maligned Biden, they let Trump—a man prone to deranged rants and wild conspiracy theories—off the hook entirely.
Biden didn’t have a perfect presidency, and his age became an unavoidable liability. But he was not an empty shell of a man, either. He governed. He made decisions. He passed legislation. And he did it while under constant attack from a media machine that acted not as a watchdog—but as an attack dog.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent encampment executive order mandating the clearing of homeless encampments on state property, coupled with the start of the school year and a new Supreme Court decision, shines light on an often-overlooked crisis — the devastating impact that both homelessness and the criminal justice system can have on our youth.
I know firsthand how housing insecurities, combined with a broken criminal justice system, can destabilize the lives of young people, pushing them further into systems that fail to support their complex journeys.
As a high school student growing up in Los Angeles, I remember coming home after a full day of classes to find something unexpected on our door — an eviction notice. My mom, an educated single mother who worked tirelessly to afford our Culver City condominium, looked at me with sorrow in her eyes.
She handed me trash bags and told me we had a day to leave the home we had spent a decade making our own. Uncertain of the future, I packed all my belongings in those bags, making sure to grab my grandfather’s wooden cane, which I needed for my leading role in the school’s upcoming Black History Month assembly.
As my mother and I slept in an acquaintance’s living room, I convinced myself to keep going to school, clinging to the fact that I had a play to complete. On the day of the play, I woke up early, grabbed the cane, and walked to Culver City High from our new neighborhood. On the way, the police stopped me and questioned why I was carrying what they considered a weapon.
Confused, I explained that the cane was for my role in the school play. They handcuffed me, searched my belongings, and asked where I lived — a question I couldn’t answer. They interrogated me about gang affiliations and potential tattoos while noting my information, likely for future stops.
Although they eventually let me go, I realized then that my reality had shifted — I was now a young Black man navigating systems not designed for my success.
Unfortunately, my story is far from unique. Black and Latino people are overrepresented in both the criminal justice system and the unhoused community. Although Black youth make up about 6% of California’s population, they account for roughly 29% of the homeless youth population.
A 2021 report from the Coalition for Juvenile Justice indicated that homeless youth are more likely to be criminalized for “survival behaviors” such as loitering, panhandling or sleeping in public places. These interactions can lead to arrests, fines or incarceration, further entrenching them in the justice system.
The Supreme Court’s misguided Grants Pass v. Johnson decision this spring allows cities and counties to criminally charge people who sleep in public. This will disproportionately affect youth and families of color — those who have historically been displaced from their housing due to redlining, rising costs, gentrification and lack of access to resources. Communities of color find themselves pushed into a criminal justice system designed to marginalize and penalize rather than support and serve them.
Intertwining the brutal inequities of homelessness with those of the criminal justice system has devastating long-term impacts, particularly for youth. The lack of stable housing often leads to repeated interactions with the criminal justice system, as these youth may be detained for minor offenses or for violating terms of probation that require them to maintain a stable address.
Criminalizing our unhoused youth further exacerbates homelessness, creating a vicious cycle of jail, debt and inevitable future homelessness. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, people who have been to prison even just once experience homelessness at a rate nearly seven times higher than the general public. A criminal record can also reduce the likelihood of a callback or job offer by almost 50%.
We must address the root causes of youth homelessness, including economic instability, lack of affordable housing, and inadequate support systems for those aging out of foster care. Let’s not place undue burdens on the youth most impacted by our systemic failures — those who have the least power to do anything about it.
While there is much work to be done, we’ve seen progress from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles in moving people inside humanely with tangible results. The recent Los Angeles Housing Services Authority Homeless Count showed declines in the number of people living outside across LA, including a nearly 20% decrease in homelessness on the Westside of LA, where I experienced housing insecurity growing up. This decline is the product of homeless service providers and community-based organizations working with policymakers to provide quality case management, interim and permanent supportive housing, mental health supports, and workforce development opportunities for our unhoused neighbors.
Gov. Newsom and other leaders should seize this moment to end the youth homelessness-to-prison pipeline once and for all. LA County’s Office of Diversion and Reentry Housing program has successfully housed thousands of people, including youth, through diversion and development programs tailored to both young people and adults.
Also, organizations like Safe Place for Youth and Covenant House California provide a comprehensive range of services, including housing support, education, employment resources, and mental health care for homeless and at-risk youth. The SJC Santa Monica Youth Resource Team, a collaborative network that connects youth with essential services like shelter, counseling and job training, is doing everything possible to end youth homelessness in this generation.
It’s not just about what we do, but how we do it. Los Angeles and all of California must continue to lead with compassion, confronting the roots of this crisis with the care and dignity that all our neighbors deserve.
Even though I nearly gave up on high school, I had a counselor who was, committed to helping me apply to colleges and then assistant principal Leslie Lockhart, who paid for my application to UCLA. Because of their efforts, I completed my undergraduate and graduate studies at UCLA.
We overcame our challenges because of support systems that focused on my family’s needs with healing and dignity. Now is the time to double down on resources and evidence-based practices for the communities we serve.
We must prioritize care, not cages.
•••
Ryan J. Smith, who holds a doctorate in education, is the president and CEO of the St. Joseph Center, a homelessness services and poverty alleviation agency, and an affordable housing commissioner for the city of Los Angeles.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Arkansas is deep-red, so of course the Legislature banned abortion. Supporters of abortion rights gathered enough signatures to put the issue to the voters, but the politicians knocked their referendum off the ballot. But the issue has not gone away.
I thought readers might like to read about the persistence of abortion right supporters.
The Arkansas Times is a dissident website that keeps readers informed about events like this one. If you want to know what Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is doing, this is a great source.
For proof of the sorry state of reproductive rights in Arkansas, consider that for the second year in a row, no protesters even bothered to show at the annual Planned Parenthood Garden Party.
It’s been a brutal run here since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of 2022 whipped away the national right to abortion access, pulling the trigger on an Arkansas law primed to ban virtually all abortions in the state as soon as our blood-red state government officials could get away with it.
Since then, the annual Planned Parenthood fundraiser still goes on. But the protesters who used to hoist their placards of bloody, dismembered fetus parts in view of the wine sippers and bidders at the silent auction tables aren’t a problem anymore. Transgender people and immigrants have displaced abortion care providers as the right’s new bogeyman, leaving reproductive rights advocates to regroup in peace.
Planned Parenthood Great Plains Executive Director Emily Wales was in town for a party nonetheless. And while she didn’t sugarcoat the status report, it wasn’t quite as bitter as you might expect.
“Arkansas has paved the way for some pretty awful policies, not just for abortion access, but also excluding us from the Medicaid program and then continuing to pass anti-abortion billswhen there is really no abortion that is accessible for people,” Wales said. “That is not about health care, it’s about messaging and fear.”
Arkansas’s consolation prize for winning this race to the bottom is that we’re down here pioneering tips and tricks to share with other states who find themselves shut off from access to necessary medical care. A decade ago, then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson blocked Planned Parenthood clinics in Arkansas from collecting Medicaid reimbursements for non-abortion services. (Federal reimbursements for abortions generally were banned even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.) Now, Planned Parenthood affiliates in other states are facing similar threats, and the Trump administration maintains a chokehold on the Title X federal funding that once helped cover the cost of family planning consultations, prescriptions and procedures.
“I don’t want to lean into our trauma or say that we’re resilient, because we’ve always been under attack,” Wales said. “But we have learned lessons about how to adapt and change and meet the moment. And right now, we have sister affiliates in Planned Parenthood who are trying to figure out what happens if they lose Medicaid, or if their Title X funding that was recently cut for many Planned Parenthoods doesn’t come back, what do they do? And for places like Arkansas, we are now in the position of advising other Planned Parenthoods on how you keep your doors open.”
Doesn’t seem like much to brag about until you consider that Arkansas’s two Planned Parenthood clinics – one in Little Rock and one in Rogers – are seeing increasing numbers of patients each year, even with the state’s abortion ban in place. The number of patients served by Planned Parenthood in Arkansas rose nearly 45% from July 2023 to July 2024. Turns out they really do provide lots of other medical services after all!
Iffy weather necessitated a change of venue for this year’s garden party, from the grounds of a historic home in the Quawpaw Quarter to the decidedly less garden-themed Next Level Events in the Union Station basement. The regulars showed up anyway, their numbers weighted toward people old enough to have a glimmer of memory of the pre-Roe days, but a three-dozen-strong corps of young volunteers organized the nametag table and passed out hors d’oeuvres.
Speakers skipped those apologetic qualifiers that used to precede seemingly every statement about abortion. None of that tired and defensive, “Nobody likes abortion, but …” anymore.
Instead, speakers leaned into the freedom that comes with having little to lose. The din of a chatty, tipsy crowd packed into a subterranean space helped, too. “I feel like I could say anything and you wouldn’t know,” Wales said. “I could be wildly offensive about, perhaps, the current administration, and no one would ever know.”
Other speakers laughed about the time Lori Williams, longtime clinical director at Little Rock Family Planning Services and the night’s winner of the Brownie Ledbetter Award, helped torpedo a 2013 bill to require ultrasounds for abortion access at six weeks by pulling out an alarmingly phallic vaginal ultrasound probe during a legislative committee hearing.
Sarah Thompson, a leader with Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights and winner of this year’s Christina Mullinax Persistent Spirit Award, lamented progress made and lost.
“When I needed abortion care in Arkansas, I had to leave the state, and it was a long time ago. And now young women still have to leave the state to obtain abortion care,” Thompson said. “I’ll never stop doing this work. It’s part of who I am for the rest of my life.” (It should be noted that many Arkansas women still do access abortion services without leaving the state thanks to the prevalence of mail-order medication for early term abortions — though many Republicans want to put a stop to that as well.)
Arkansas is part of Planned Parenthood of Great Plains, a consortium that includes Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. Abortion is legal in Kansas, and last year, Missouri voters reinstated abortion rights, although state lawmakers there are angling to repeal them again. That kind of heartache is familiar to the 100,000+ Arkansans who signed a petition to give the state a chance to vote on reinstating abortion rights in 2024, only to see that opportunity smothered by dubious legal shenanigans.
“Care in Arkansas does not look the way we want it to, and eventually it will return to what it needs to be, but we’re going to keep working on that,” Wales said. “Until then, we will be creative and thoughtful, and we are not about to be intimidated by what’s happening at the federal level, because we are really, really good at undermining authority.”
Recently, Instagram unveiled new policies designed to address what we all see: teenagers suffering the adverse effects of addictive social media apps. The new policies include making teen accounts private by default, stopping notifications at night, and including more adult supervision tools for parents.
While this is a first step, as school leaders and parents, we know the addiction is bigger than just Instagram. This is a larger reflective moment for us as educators, parents and caretakers of tomorrow’s leaders. We must go beyond platform-by-platform fixes.
I’ve been an educator for more than 20 years. Now, as a school leader of seven high schools in Southern California, reaching nearly 3,000 students from historically underserved communities in Los Angeles and Orange counties, I see the impact that technology has had on our teenagers, and how captivating social media and gaming apps have become. It has taken a long time to teach myself the self-regulation skills to manage social media and more, and I am in my 40s. Now imagine trying to learn it at 13, unaware of all the tools working to hook us.
It is overwhelming for parents, teachers or anyone who cares about the future leaders of our communities.
Just a few weeks ago, it seemed like every week another school district or state was announcing a sweeping cellphone ban, but no one was asking a critical question: Are America’s youth hooked on phones, or are they addicted to the social media and gaming apps that have become central to their social lives and to staying informed? How do we break the spell that these companies have cast over teenage minds?
Cellphones themselves aren’t the problem. Notice that we don’t need to ban the Calculator, Camera app, Google search, or many other tools, because those tools don’t have the intentional captivating pull of direct messaging, new posts or endless scrolling.
It seems to me that social media apps and games that are optimized for long-term addiction should be banned or significantly altered before banning cellphones, which are ultimately a great learning and communication tool. Cellphones can promote the development of a student’s necessary sense of independence.
This calls for collective action. We must work together and continue listening to our teachers, acknowledging the challenges and burden that cellphones present in the classroom for them. But the first step should be to tackle what is distracting students on their cellphones before banning the phone outright. Maybe our time as educators is better spent pushing for balanced policies that protect our kids rather than working tirelessly to police our kids and their phones. Instead of focusing on cellphone use or hoping for each platform to announce their individual fixes, school leaders from across the nation need to come together and demand answers from social media and addictive gaming companies. Instagram is the first company to make a move, but the rest of these companies are actively recruiting users as young as 13 years old with minimal verification, and watching these cellphone bans from a comfortable distance. Surely, educators and social media apps can partner to create an innovative solution to the real problem.
As school leaders, we should call on social media companies and gaming companies to meet with us, to come up with practical solutions to the addictive technologies they have created.
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Oliver Sicat is the CEO of Ednovate, a network of free, public charter high schools in Los Angeles and Orange County. Ednovate primarily serves first-generation college-bound students from underrepresented and underserved communities.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Policing experts say that discipline is the responsibility of school administrators, not law enforcement.
Many California school districts’ contracts for policing services do not prohibit officers from involvement in routine student disciplinary matters, despite the federal government’s guidance that administrators are responsible for handling those issues, an EdSource investigation found.
EdSource obtained 118 contracts between 89 districts across the state and the cities and counties that provide them with school resources officers from local police, sheriff’s and probation departments. More than half either allow police to enforce school rules and code of conduct violations, such as using profanity or wearing inappropriate clothing, or don’t address disciplinary issues.
The U.S. Department of Justice advises that agreements for what are generally called school resource officers “clearly indicate” that officers will not be responsible for requests to resolve routine discipline problems involving students. That guidance aims to “prevent unnecessary law enforcement involvement in noncriminal student misbehavior.” (A spokesperson for the department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services did not respond to multiple requests to elaborate on the department’s recommendations.)
Jyoti Nanda, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said that officers lack the training necessary to respond to behavioral issues that can result in student discipline.
“Well-trained educators can handle all of the disciplinary issues,” Nanda said. “When police enforce school rules as opposed to criminal law, they are overreaching their footprint” in ways that are “deeply damaging to children.”
Many policing contracts also put resource officers in vaguely defined roles.
They are to act as “informal counselors,” “mentors,” “role models” and exemplars of “good citizenship.” Some contracts are meant to “promote a positive image of law enforcement.” One agreement refers to them as “youth development officers.” Another says their duties include serving as “a visual deterrent to aberrant behavior.”
Some give police authority to enforce school rules and code-of-conduct violations, such as using profanity or public displays of affection, that could result in a student being disciplined.
Some contracts say that officers will teach classes, without specifying the courses or training requirements.
The Anderson Union High School District’s contract with the Shasta County Probation Department requires resource officers to “provide class instruction as identified by the district and approved by the county.” Superintendent Brian Parker did not respond to questions about that requirement.
The varying roles officers play can result in legal risks to students, according to University of North Carolina law professorBarbara Fedders, who has argued for removing school resource officers.
“Relationship forming and being nice and all of that is misleading. Because if you then need to question the kids, you’re going to be able to take advantage of that relationship and use it for law enforcement purposes,” Fedders said in an interview.
‘Situations that arise from student conduct’
Some contracts don’t differentiate between officers’ roles in investigating school rule violations and potential crimes.
The Fullerton Joint Union High School District, which straddles Los Angeles and Orange counties, has policing contracts totaling more than $800,000 with the cities of Fullerton, La Habra and Buena Park. Each requires resource officers to “investigate situations that arise from student conduct at school.” The agreements also authorize officers to search students if they believe, or have reasonable suspicion, that something illegal occurred, or are “directed to do so by a school administrator.”
Fullerton Union High School in Orange County.Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Legal experts were critical of those terms.
The language in the contract “sends the wrong message not only to officers but to students and parents and teachers because it’s so vague,” said retired Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell, who also served as San Jose’s independent police auditor from 2015 to 2020.
“It’s pretty much at the discretion of an administrator, or even the officer, to just decide if there’s something suspicious, or they think may be illegal,” Cordell said. “We’re not talking here about probable cause. Who’s the reasonable person? The officer? The administrator? Who knows?”
District Superintendent Steven McLaughlin, Assistant Superintendent Ruben Hernandez, school board President Vickie Calhoun, and Dr. Chester Jeng, who was board president when the contracts were ratified on a consent agenda vote, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The city managers of Fullerton, La Habra, and Buena Park also did not reply to messages seeking comment.
Khadijah Silver, a supervising civil rights attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based Lawyers For Good Government, also criticized Fullerton’s contract language.
“It’s basically saying, anytime a kid acts up, you’re free to go violate their civil rights and interrogate them off of the school’s premises and all of that,” Silver said. “It’s unconstitutionally overbroad language that fails to define or delineate any bounds of appropriate police behavior whatsoever.”
‘What any reasonable adult would do’
Some legal experts say that by allowing officers to enforce school rules, districts create situations that are confusing and intimidating to students. Nanda said that officers’ involvement in discipline is often “ambiguous.” Students, she added, may not understand why an officer stops them in the hallway: Is it for an alleged crime or a violation of school rules?
“Are they just walking the child over to the principal’s office, or are they interviewing the child and taking police notes? How does that play out?” she said. The presence of resource officers can result in harsher discipline for students, “particularly for Black students, male students and students with disabilities,” according to a 2023 study by researchers at State University of New York, Albany, “even though officers are typically not trained to, and often do not intend to, become involved in minor disciplinary matters in the school.”
Although the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers recommends that districts prohibit officers from “becoming involved in formal school discipline situations,” its executive director, Mo Canady, said in an interview that he thinks officers should get involved in situations that could result in discipline.
When officers see a young person misbehaving and get involved, they’re doing “what any reasonable adult would do,” Canady said. “Adults should never walk by and ignore a situation like that. I don’t care if we’re at a shopping mall, whatever it is.”
Asked whether there is a difference between an adult and an armed police officer intervening when a juvenile misbehaves, Canady said: “That’s why one of the issues that we harp on constantly is the importance of good relationships that (officers) build with students.”
California’s Department of Education does not provide guidance on the use of school resource officers, Elizabeth Sanders, an agency spokesperson, said.
The California School Boards Association provides districts with what it calls a “sample policy” on policing contracts, which recommends that the duties of resource officers should “not include the handling of student code of conduct violations or routine disciplinary matters that should be addressed by school administrators or conduct that would be better addressed by mental health professionals.”
Troy Flint, spokesperson for the association, said district leaders are free to “interpret the sample policy in a way that captures their community’s desired approach to law enforcement on campus. We recognize there’s a diversity of opinion throughout the state about the role security personnel should play on campus or whether they should be there at all.”
‘Why are we policing our students?’
The Oxnard Union High School District has contracts with two law enforcement agencies that clearly prohibit resource officers’ involvement in disciplinary matters.
The district’s $2.33 million contract with the city of Oxnard states that police are to distinguish “between disciplinary misconduct to be handled by school officials from criminal offenses.” The contract also says that officers “are responsible for criminal public order offenses” and “should not get involved in school discipline issues.” A separate contract with the city of Camarillo contains similar language. Both contracts require officers to establish “clear probable cause” before searching a student.
Oxnard Union High District Superintendent Tom McCoy chats with school resource officers Alexus Santos,left, and Sgt. Hannah Estrada on the campus of Pacifica High School in Oxnard.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
But the district’s contract with Ventura County for one resource officer does not address discipline. Superintendent Tom McCoy said in an interview that it is “well understood and discussed in meetings” that resource officers provided by the county do not enforce discipline. It’s never been an issue. They are very aware of our policies.”
The district has a policy that is not in its policing contracts and that allows students to request “a person of the same gender or gender identity or a staff member familiar to them to be present” if they are questioned by law enforcement.
McCoy added that the district requires students who “are questioned or interviewed by police on campus also must be referred for counseling and wellness services on the same day to address any specific needs identified through the interview process.”
Karen Sher, the school board member whom McCoy credited with helping create the district’s policy, said her experience teaching at a school with resource officers led her to ask herself, “‘Why are we policing our children?’”
Oxnard Union High School District board member Karen Sher.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
Sher said she believes that officers have a role to play in school safety, but she also worries about how their presence might affect disadvantaged students. About 16% of district students lack stable housing, she said.
“How on earth does anyone believe those students have not had an interaction, both positive or negative, with police?” Sher asked. “We expect them to come to school, see police cars in front of their school, and expect them to feel good about that? That’s a very entitled perspective.”
Eric Wiatt, a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy who has worked at Adolfo Camarillo High School for the past three years, said adjusting to being a resource officer took time.
“The first year was a learning experience of communicating with (students) and developing a rapport. It wasn’t natural in me. You know, all the different social media platforms that are used and the different slang they use,” Wiatt said in an interview.
He says he spends a lot of time investigating bullying and threats made on social media.
School resource officer Eric Wiatt from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department patrols the campus of Adolfo Camarillo High School in Camarillo.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
“We actually dig into them. We take every threat very seriously. We do a full investigation,” Wiatt said.
When he’s not investigating threats, Wiatt walks the campus wearing a bulletproof vest over his uniform and a pistol holstered to his hip. He often eats lunch with students.
Riley Young, a 16-year-old junior whom school officials selected to be interviewed by EdSource, described Wiatt as calm and helpful.
“I’d been getting in trouble,” she said. “He helped me realize that being good in school and in life was important.”
‘Providing clarity’
District leaders provided a range of reasons why their policing contracts don’t address whether resource officers can be involved in disciplinary matters.
The Madera Unified School District’s contract with the city of Madera for resource officers doesn’t address disciplinary issues. Superintendent Todd Lile said the idea that officers would enforce discipline “has never been present and, as a result, has never been explicitly called out in contractual language.” Police are “not thought of or expected to keep control of a campus,” he said.
The Lucia Mar Unified School District has two contracts for resource officers. Its agreement with the city of Arroyo Grande prohibits officers from enforcing discipline. But its contract with San Luis Obispo County does not address disciplinary matters.
Amy Jacobs, a district spokesperson, said Lucia Mar has a policy prohibiting law enforcement’s involvement in discipline, but Jacobs didn’t provide an answer when asked why that policy wasn’t written into the contract with the sheriff’s office.
The Galt Union High School District board in Sacramento County agreed to a three-year contract with the city of Galt for three resource officers in 2023. The agreement did not address police involvement in discipline. But shortly after Anna Trunnell became district superintendent in 2024, the contract was revised.
It now states that resource officers “will not be responsible for requests to resolve routine discipline problems involving students. They will not respond to incidents that do not pose any threat of safety or would not be considered crimes if they occurred outside of the school.”
Trunnell said the new language “assists in providing clarity when responding to student needs.”
The lack of clarity in many school policing contracts is “profoundly alarming,” said Nanda, the Southwestern law professor.
“It’s crucial,” she said, “for parents, educators and administrators to pay attention to the who, what and why of officers in our schools.”
