Students in a combined second- and third-grade at UCLA community school talk in pairs.
Credit: Allison Shelley for EDUimages
“It takes a village.” When it comes to raising a child, we hear this phrase often. It takes extended families, neighbors and close friends to raise a child. It not only takes the support of society as a whole, but also the systems we’ve built. It’s an effort that starts at home but extends to the doctor or clinic’s office, to extracurricular activities and to school.
Anyone who regularly interacts with youth has the unique opportunity to help them feel seen, heard and supported. Our early care providers, educators and others who work in these environments, like coaches, librarians or receptionists, have many of these opportunities and are often the first line of support for today’s youth — especially those who have experienced trauma or adversity.
Research suggests that adverse childhood experiences — or ACEs — like homelessness, loss of parents or loved ones, abuse, neglect, violence or illness—can affect a student’s ability to learn as well as their behavior in the classroom. This can show up in a variety of ways, but research shows children with three or more ACEs are five times more likely to have attendance issues, six times more likely to have behavior problems, and three times more likely to experience academic failure.
But even one caring adult can make all the difference for a child who’s struggling.
That’s why it’s so important to continue to give our early care providers, educators and other school personnel tools and resources to help our young people manage stress and achieve the healthiest version of themselves. Safe Spaces: Foundations of Trauma-Informed Practice for Educational and Care Settings is a free, self-paced training designed to help educators, school personnel and child care providers understand and respond to trauma and stress in our youth. This resource, launched by the Office of the California Surgeon General, helps to reshape these critical interactions with youth who may be overwhelmed or need additional support by using effective strategies that can lead to healthier lives.
Safe Spaces is grounded in research and was developed in collaboration with experts in education and youth mental health. Through case examples, strategies, videos and practices, individuals gain the education and tools they need to be that pillar of support in a child’s life. Those who complete the training will also receive a certificate of completion from the Office of the California Surgeon General.
This training was made possible with funding from the California Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative. Safe Spaces is just one piece of a larger effort to reimagine the systems that support California’s children and youth.
In August 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced California’s master plan for kids’ mental health, a multiyear effort to more holistically serve the state’s diverse children, youth and families. The California behavioral health initiative is at the very core of that plan. Additional investments include $4.1 billion to develop a community schools strategy that connects kids and families to essential health, mental health and social services alongside high-quality, supportive instruction with a strong focus on community, family and student engagement. To date, the State Board of Education has awarded grants to fund 1,028 schools to become community schools or expand their existing programs.
These investments in mental health and wraparound services for young people are designed to meet Californians where they are and make a tangible difference in their lives.
We continue to be inspired by the drive and passion of so many educators, early care providers and school personnel who are nurturing our youth. This training is just one example of how we can support them along the way.
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Diana Ramos is California’s surgeon general and a public health leader dedicated to improving health care quality and equity.
Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun professor of education emeritus at Stanford University, president of the California State Board of Education and an adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
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.
Marcus Epps, a resident in the Black Educator Teacher Residency, teaches a math lesson to a third grade class at Castle Elementary School in Bakersfield.
Credit: Emma Gallegos / EdSource
California needs to do much better for Black students, and the efforts to do so as of late are few, far between and watered down.
For years, our state has been looked to as a leader on education equity and pointed to as a model for other states on equitable funding and other programs. Yet from its inception, the Local Control Funding Formula has left out Black students, the student group denied the most support and resources from schools. And despite years of “equity” being an increasingly heard buzzword in Sacramento, we are still seeing alarmingly low progress on academic outcomes.
Now, in the wake of increasing hostility around acknowledging the legacy of slavery and its continued impact on Black people in America, the recent rollback of affirmative action, and an all-out assault against teaching the truth in classrooms around the country, California leaders need to be as bold with their actions as they are with their rhetoric.
Take, for instance, the current state of California’s ethnic studies course requirement. Ethnic studies help broaden awareness of the experiences of Black people, ensuring Black students see themselves reflected in the curriculum, and improve Black students’ academic achievement. In 2021, state leaders approved the course as a requirement that all graduating high school seniors must complete by 2030.
While the California Department of Education has taken some initial steps to support implementing this new requirement, there is much more to do to make universal ethnic studies a reality — as Gov. Gavin Newsom recently pointed out in a letter to districts. Implementing ethnic studies now requires a concerted effort from state and district leaders. First, district leaders must prioritize developing locally adapted curriculum, adopting high-quality instructional materials, and ensuring teachers have high-quality professional development opportunities.
Districts should also consider innovative ways to fully incorporate and align ethnic studies with other offerings, like dual enrollment, so that students can take college-level ethnic studies courses and simultaneously fulfill the high school graduation requirement while earning college credits. Districts should also be communicating with students and their families to ensure they are aware of the new requirement and upcoming opportunities to take the course.
Lastly, these and other implementation needs come with costs that the state has not yet fully addressed. Legislators should provide targeted financial resources in the state’s next budget cycle to guarantee ethnic studies implementation is fully funded and on track.
Effectively implementing ethnic studies is not a panacea that will eradicate racism from California schools. But it is a tangible step, one that is all the more important in the wake of an increasingly aggressive backlash against addressing the hundreds of years of oppression experienced by Black people in America. In fact, numerous California district leaders are welcoming this backlash through their own discriminatory actions, with multiple school boards around the state restricting teachers from discussing race in their classrooms. To be frank, this is not just a Florida problem.
We seem to shy away from a more honest conversation in our own state, at times almost dismissing racist occurrences as outliers and pointing fingers at other states from a supposed mantle of progressivism and anti-racism. But for the Black students in Anaheim who were threatened with images of guns and racial slurs from fellow students, for the Black students in Dixon who were posted about online, labeled as monkeys by a fellow student, these occurrences are not outliers, they are part of what living in California means to them. Our commitment to valuing diversity must include not just denouncing these incidents, but taking tangible, proactive actions to prevent them while uplifting Black students.
California can truly be at the forefront of the national movement to definitively reject the white nationalism that is increasingly creeping into the mainstream — but only if we prioritize tangible action as much as compelling rhetoric. We should be the state that leads the way in not just passing legislation, but in developing and implementing policies and practices that center serving Black students and other marginalized students, knowing that ultimately all students will do better if we prioritize the students currently at the margins.
From funding decisions and ethnic studies implementation to the policy changes suggested by the California Reparations Task Force, the state has a myriad of tangible strategies to pull from that are completely legal even in the face of the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action — and now is the time to double down on such strategies. After all, as goes California, so goes the nation.
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Natalie Wheatfall-Lum is director of TK-12 education policy at The Education Trust–West, a statewide research, policy and advocacy organization focusing on educational justice and closing achievement and opportunity gaps for underserved students, especially students from lower-income communities.
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.
As the controversy over Trump’s relationship to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein turned into a media frenzy, members of Trump’s team threw distractions into the mix. One of them came from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. She released a report calling for prosecution of high-level Obama-era officials for what she called “treasonous conspiracy” about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. She ignored a three-year investigation by a Republican-led Senate Committee, which concluded that Russia did try to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.
Politico posted:
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called for several Obama administration officials to face criminal prosecution for participating in a “treasonous conspiracy” surrounding the 2016 election on Friday afternoon, the latest example of the Trump administration targeting critics of the president.
In a newly declassified report, Gabbard on Friday alleged the officials “manipulated and withheld” key intelligence from the public related to the possibility of Russian interference in the election.
In a Friday afternoon statement, Gabbard said she would provide all related documents to the Justice Department “to deliver the accountability that President [Donald] Trump, his family, and the American people deserve.”
“No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again,” Gabbard said in the statement.
The DOJ declined to comment on Gabbard’s comments.
The ODNI’s memo names former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, among others allegedly involved in the White House’s review of possible Russian meddling in the election.
The administration has routinely targeted critics of the president and has sought to relitigate the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The president has repeatedly criticized former intelligence officials for their efforts to probe the Kremlin’s possible attempts to interfere in American politics, with Trump accusing Comey of leading a “corrupt and vicious witch hunt” against him.
Jeff Kim, a teacher at Cambridge Virtual Academy in Anaheim Union, is teaching the first-ever Korean American ethnic studies course for high school students.
Credit: Courtesy of Jeff Kim
Jeff Kim, a world history teacher in Anaheim Union High School District, had long dreamed about how a Korean American studies course could help his students connect with their heritage. But it was the surge of hatred against Asian Americans during the pandemic that made him realize just how urgently the class was needed.
Shortly before the pandemic reached the U.S., a seventh grade student came up to him before class and expressed concern that she or her family might face anti-Asian violence because of this new virus in China. Although Kim had experienced discrimination in his own life, he wanted to reassure her and so told her that in California, a relatively liberal state, and Orange County — where 23% of students are Asian — she and her family would not face those problems.
“I just said, ‘We live here in California, I don’t see that type of violence happening to Asian Americans here,’” Kim said. “I gave her the wrong information.”
That Kim was wrong became apparent in the early days of the pandemic, during which time a surge of xenophobic rhetoric scapegoated Asian Americans as the cause of the pandemic. It was both a local and national issue. Anti-Asian hate crimes doubled in California in 2020, compared with the prior year. In Orange County, the number of hate incidents against Asian Americans jumped 1,800% in 2020, according to the annual Orange County Hate Crime Report. News of Asian American spa workers in Georgia who were killed in a shooting rampage was a turning point for Kim.
He asked himself, “What is a way I can respond with love and wisdom?”
Fast-forward to this year – the Anaheim Union High School District has launched a first-of-its-kind high school ethnic studies course focused on the experiences of Korean Americans.
For the past three years, Kim worked with district leaders in Anaheim Union High and scholars of Korean American history — many of whom are based in Southern California — to pioneer the first high school course dedicated to Korean American history. It’s a historic moment in the development of Korean American studies, which has been maturing as an academic field in recent decades.
“It’s huge,” said professor Edward Chang, the founding director of the Young Oak Kim Center for Korean American Studies at University of California Riverside. “It’s a starting point, and I’m hoping it will spread to other school districts.”
Chang is the co-author of “Korean Americans: A Concise History,” a book that covers leading figures and highlights in Korean American history in a little over 100 pages, a book he said he conceived with future K-12 students in mind, and which now serves as a textbook for Anaheim Union High’s new course.
The course debuted earlier this month as a virtual course through Anaheim Union High’s Cambridge Virtual Academy and is open to all high school students in the district.
Building the curriculum
The Korean Consulate General in Los Angeles sponsored the development of the curriculum; Kim worked with Grace Cho, a professor in Cal State Fullerton’s department of secondary education, to come up with the components of the proposed course, which consists of seven lessons adapted to California state standards, and available online.
The lessons begin with the earliest wave of 19th-century Korean immigrants and end with K-pop’s global dominance. There are lessons on the struggles and triumphs of key figures, such as war hero and humanitarian Col. Young Oak Kim and Dosan Ahn Chang Ho, the founder of the first American Koreatown.
It’s a class for everyone, said Kim. Other ethnic groups can connect with Korean stories of resilience, such as how gold medal-winning Olympic diver Sammy Lee was barred from practicing in public pools because of his race or how most Koreans were barred from immigrating to the United States before 1965.
“This class is not just about Korean Americans. It’s U.S. history, but through the eyes of Korean Americans,” said Cho. “By learning other ethnic groups’ history, you get to expand your perspectives and views.”
The course will enable students to fulfill the ethnic studies requirement that will go into effect for all California high school students in two years. But many of the first 34 students who signed up for the course simply wanted to learn more about their own cultural background.
Celine Park, a freshman at Oxford Academy, said this class is a unique opportunity for second-generation Korean Americans like her who haven’t had a way to synthesize Korean and American history in their lives.
“I wanted to meld these two together, to make these connections between the two histories and bond my own identity, while helping other second-generation Korean Americans like me,” Park said.
It has also inspired pride in students’ families. Yuri Yamachika, a first-year student at Oxford Academy, said that her mom, a first-generation Korean American, didn’t have many opportunities to learn about her culture beyond what her own parents shared with her.
“She was excited and proud that we have a course to learn about our own heritage,” said Yamachika. “She’s glad I took it.”
Parents are a crucial firsthand source of information in the course. Understanding that every student has an ethnic heritage is a key part of the ethnic studies discipline. Kim encouraged his students, no matter their background, to learn and reflect on their families’ stories.
“Sometimes parents haven’t had a chance to tell these stories, because there’s a language barrier or a cultural barrier,” Kim said. “But if I make it a class assignment, they’re much more inclined to ask — and parents are much more inclined to tell their story.”
That makes the course a draw to students — including those who aren’t Korean American.
When Karina Soliman interviewed her father for a class assignment, she learned about the discrimination he faced as an Egyptian in the post-9/11 era, when Arab Americans were widely stereotyped as terrorists. The senior at Savanna High School connected this to the stereotypes that other ethnic groups in the U.S. have faced. She hopes the course will help her model the importance of respecting others’ stories.
“I’ve grown more cognizant of other cultures and other people, and realizing how important that is,” Soliman said.
Students in Kim’s class will also participate in a civic project of students’ own choosing. This is a facet that has earned the notice of the California Asian American & Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus. In a letter of support, Assemblymember Evan Low and state Sen. Dave Min praised the course for “allowing students to foster collaborations and partnership with Asian American organizations.”
This new course also represents a high-water mark for scholars who have promoted Korean American studies. It was only recently that there was a critical mass of scholars interested in Korean American history, Chang said. There’s a growing interest in the field in higher education, but promoting it at the K-12 level has been a major goal of scholars.
Korean American history didn’t make it into the early drafts of the state’s ethnic studies model curriculum, but scholars pushed back, said Cho. The state’s model curriculum now includes a lesson on the L.A. civil uprising of 1992, known as Saigu or 4/29 among Korean Americans, which marked a turning point in the community’s identity.
Chang said that he looks forward to students like Kim arriving at college. He has seen students’ eyes widen as they learn about their own history. He believes college is too late for that experience.
Kim said in the early days of deciding to push forward with the curriculum, he felt like he was taking a big risk. He worried about how the course might be misunderstood, but he feels like it has paid off. Now he reminds his students of their own role in blazing a trail for the next generation of students. His students are already eager to see that continue.
Soliman has advice for teachers or administrators considering a course like this: “Don’t be afraid to put it out there, or to start a conversation for that kind of course to be created because it can greatly impact and inform a lot of students on topics that they’re not traditionally going to learn about until college.”
Achieving a college degree in prison is rare, but now a select 33 incarcerated people in California can earn their master’s degrees.
California State University, Dominguez Hills, and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced a partnership Thursday to launch the state’s first master’s degree program for incarcerated people. Corrections Secretary Jeff Macomber said the partnership furthers the state’s prison system’s goal to expand “grade school to grad school” opportunities.
“These efforts are vital, as education serves as a powerful rehabilitative tool,” Macomber said.
Research shows that prison programs reduce recidivism rates and help formerly incarcerated people find jobs and improve their families’ lives once they are released.Those studies show that incarcerated people are 48% less likely to return to prison within three years than those who didn’t attend a college program in prison.
All 33 of the state’s adult prisons offer the ability for the system’s 95,600 incarcerated people to earn community college degrees; about 13.5% are enrolled in a college course. The state has been expanding its offerings of college in prisons. Eight partnerships with state universitieshave begun since 2016 to offer bachelor’s degrees to incarcerated people. About 230 are enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program for the current semester.
The new Dominguez Hills program will allow all people in all 33 prisons who have already earned a bachelor’s degree and have at least a 2.5 GPA, to earn a Master of Arts in humanities. The students will participate in two years of courses, including urban development, religion, morality and spirituality. The classes will take place over Zoom or through written correspondence.
Tuition for the program is about $10,500 and students or their families will be responsible for covering the costs. However, the corrections department said that it may provide some assistance. The university is also accepting donations to go toward incarcerated students’ tuition. Because these are post-bachelor’s degree courses, the incarcerated students do not qualify for the state’s Cal Grant or federal Pell Grant programs.
“Our mission is firmly anchored in social justice,” said Thomas Parham, president of Cal State Dominguez Hills. “This historic partnership between California State University and CDCR benefits students — and ultimately their families and communities — by distinguishing between what people did and who they are at the core of their being, and recognizing their potential, cultivating their talents and preparing them to thrive in their paths moving forward.”
Parham said it was important for the university to provide advanced learning opportunities in prisons because the campus is focused on “transforming lives.”
The 33 students in the new master’s program reside in 11 different state prisons across the state including Avenal, Chuckawalla Valley and San Quentin state prisons and Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signs an executive order that charges the state’s educational and legislative leaders with creating a master plan for career education.
Credit: Office of the Governor
In recent years, the state has poured billions of dollars into a dizzying array of programs under the banner of career education. The only problem, said Gov. Gavin Newsom, is that there is no cohesion between these programs.
“Tens of billions of dollars invested in the last few years, 12 different agencies, but not a cohesive, connective tissue, not a compelling narrative that drives a vision and drives a focus forward,” Newsom said Thursday, during a news conference at River City High in West Sacramento.
Newsom took aim at that disconnection by signing an executive order calling for the state to create a master plan for career education in the next 13 months.
The governor’s executive order promises to knock down the barriers that students in California face on their journey from the K-12 system to college and ultimately a fulfilling, well-paying career.
“California will be the model of the nation in making sure that we educate all Californians to be career-ready, back in their neighborhoods where they lift their neighborhoods,” said CSU Chancellor Mildred Garcia.
Newsom signed the order while flanked by a heavy-hitting lineup of state education leaders who pledged to knock down the “silos” between the institutions.
That includes the leaders of all the educational systems: Garcia, UC Chancellor Michael Drake, Community College Chancellor Sonya Christian and State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Thurmond. It also includes Assembly Education Committee Chair Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, and Senate Education Committee Chair Josh Newman, D-Fullerton. It also included the secretary of the California Labor & Workforce Development Agency, Stewart Knox.
“This is a team effort; it is a collective effort, and it is long overdue,” Newsom said.
Input for the master plan, due Oct. 1, 2024, will come, not just from education leaders, but from labor leaders, business leaders, community groups, students, parents and families, the governor said.
The order lays out the importance of building connections not just between different education agencies but also between education institutions and employers.
It lays out some specific strategic goals, such as building an online portal for any job-seeking Californian and rethinking the concept of a student transcript.
Newsom introduced the concept of a “career passport” that would look beyond grades. That means a student’s transcript would include marketable work skills and experience developed through classes as well as apprenticeships, internships or other experiences outside the classroom.
Newsom said it’s important to look at a student “broadly,” adding “I say that as someone who didn’t get very good grades.”
The plan will require public progress reports to the Legislature. The first deadline is Dec. 1 — shortly before the next legislative session — when agencies are requested to provide preliminary recommendations to the governor’s office.
The master plan describes the state’s three goals for career education. One is ensuring that ninth grade students are encouraged to explore well-paying careers and that they are guided on a pathway to that career. The second is that students have opportunities to learn real-life career skills in their education, preferably for pay. Lastly, the executive order states that students shouldn’t have to take on substantial debt or navigate complicated bureaucracies as they prepare for their careers.
The state has already made substantial investments in this arena, particularly during recent years when the state budget was flush.
“California, like most states in the nation, has workforce shortages in just about every single sector,” said State Superintendent Thurmond. “This presents the opportunity for us to use our pathway programs to propel our students into the workforce.”
The state is focused on knitting together the disparate parts of its career education strategy, but the governor noted that some of this work is already funded and happening at the regional level through its K-16 collaboratives and its California Economic Resilience Fund.
The governor’s executive order also takes aim at the way the state hires its own workers. It charged the Department of Human Resources with reviewing any position where a bachelor’s degree is a requirement and determining whether there is data to back up that job requirement. Newsom said the state has already reclassified 169 positions that previously required a degree, but this executive order charges the state with updating its existing policies to make this process official.
A UC Berkeley labor economist this week offered a California answer to the persistent question of whether more money matters for K-12 education.
Rucker Johnson, who researched the state’s decade-old school finance overhaul known as the Local Control Funding Formula, concluded it does matter, especially for the highest needs students targeted for help by the equity-based funding.
“The findings provide compelling evidence that school spending matters and providing additional resources to support high-need students pays dividends,” wrote Johnson, a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.
The improvements were consistent across grades, subjects, and performance metrics, the research found. Johnson calculated that a $1,000 increase in per-student funding, sustained for three consecutive years in the highest-poverty districts, produced roughly a full grade-level increase in math and reading achievement for students in grades three through eight and 11, relative to what the average student achieved in the years preceding the formula’s passage in 2013.
It’s a big deal for students who started third grade a year behind in math to be at grade level by the end of fifth grade, he said.
Graphic note: Third graders’ test scores in math improved as they progressed through fifth grade while receiving increased funding from the Local Control Funding Formula. The vertical scale measures growth in math beyond a standard year of achievement (1.0 is a full extra year of additional growth, whether catching up to grade level or accelerating beyond it). The horizontal scale measures the percentage of high-needs students in a district, which determines how much bonus funding a district receives. The dotted line in the middle marks 55% of high-needs students, the point at which districts gradually begin receiving an extra dose of concentration funding. The blue line shows average academic growth for districts with 55% or fewer high-needs students. The red line shows the impact of districts’ concentration funding on academic growth. The dots signify groups of districts above and below average.
Johnson’s research focused from 2013-14, when the funding formula was introduced, through 2018-19, when the full funding targets were achieved. What mattered, he said, was not just the amount of the increase but the number of years in a row students benefited.
The Covid pandemic of 2020, with more than a year in remote learning for many districts, has wiped out most of the academic gains during this period, particularly among low-income Black and Hispanic students — despite record federal and state funding.
Did equity-based funding cause the improvement?
The Legislature included a number of major policy and accountability initiatives, along with providing more money, in the funding formula law. It required that districts and charter schools spell out how they planned to spend on high-needs students in a Local Control and Accountability Plan or LCAP and then measure the impact. The law defined high-needs students as English learners, homeless and foster youths, and low-income students — those qualifying for free or reduced school meals and other income-based government benefits.
The locally controlled funding formula introduced the color-coded California School Dashboard, which ranks districts’ performance on multiple measures in an effort to pressure districts to reduce suspensions and chronic absences and raise high-school graduation rates. In 2015, the State Board of Education ended the high school exit exam and switched to the Smarter Balanced tests to measure the newly adopted Common Core standards.
Johnson, however, wrote that new money, not new policies, caused the widespread gains in student performance “based on compelling evidence.” Another prominent researcher, however, said that the claim is overstated.
Johnson said he was able to isolate the impact of additional funding in two ways. The new funding formula’s distinct design, with concentrated funding for highest-needs districts, showed disproportionate gains in achievement. He could find no similar pattern of achievement in the decade preceding the new formula. Julien Lafortune, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, who also has studied the funding formula, agreed that is a fair conclusion.
Johnson also compared the achievement of districts funded by the Local Control Funding Formula with basic aid districts – the 100-some districts that received no funding under the Local Control Funding Formula because their funding from property taxes exceeded what they would have received from the state. Because there were no similar effects in student achievement among the basic aid districts that he found with Local Control Funding Formula districts during its rollout, Johnson concluded more funding must be the cause.
That comparison is problematic because the majority of basic aid districts are small, wealthy residential communities with few low-income families. They include Palo Alto, Saratoga, Santa Clara and San Mateo Union High School District in the Bay Area, and Santa Barbara, Newport Mesa, and San Dieguito Union High School District in Southern California. Graduation rates and test scores generally were already above average in those districts, and suspension rates were already lower than in high-poverty districts.
“The correlation of LCFF funding with poverty is at the extreme with the basic aid districts,” said Eric Hanushek, an economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who has written extensively on education financing. Johnson “makes an admirable attempt to parse the impact of LCFF funding, but this is an exceedingly difficult task. He cannot convincingly separate pure spending changes from the host of other changes in California schools at that time.”
The study did not cite the number of districts that received $1,000 per student in additional funding, sustained over three years, and, therefore, how many students should have gained approximately a year in academic growth. A graph showing yearly Local Control Funding Formula funding increases during this period indicated that many districts benefited by at least that amount. Some districts with the largest numbers of high-needs students received more than $2,000 more per student over the three years.
Funding for the Local Control Funding Formula increased annually after its adoption in 2013. Districts with more than 55% high-needs students received increased amounts of funding, called concentration grants.
But Johnson said the exact number of students whose math and reading scores grew the equivalent of a grade was not calculated because of the methodology and parameters he used. The research was more precise than looking at the unfiltered year-over-year results of all students. It eliminated students who transferred schools during the period and took into account parental socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity. Its specific parameters compared:
Students from the same school across cohorts evaluated at the same grade.
Students from the same school and same kindergarten cohort across successive grades.
Student achievement growth among students from the same cohort and same grade across districts.
Local Control Funding Formula reconsidered
Gov. Jerry Brown, who championed the funding overhaul, made it clear he wanted the funding formula to roll out without interference from the Legislature and would veto any modifications to the law as long as he was in office. Gov. Gavin Newsom has proven more receptive to changes out of recognition that the law has flaws and its implementation has been uneven. Districts receiving the same funding per student have shown wide variations in student performance. That’s because, Lafortune noted, the Legislature sets the rules on funding, but districts decide how to spend it.
Last year, Pivot Learning, a national nonprofit that works with school districts on improving classroom instruction, created aDistrict Readiness Index that measures conditions like family and community engagement, principal retention, and work environment, which can determine districts’ success with programs and investments. In 2019, the Learning Policy Institute, the Palo Alto-based research and education policy nonprofit that published Johnson’s research, producedCalifornia’s Positive Outliers: Districts Beating the Odds. It identified districts that excelled and why.
Advocacy nonprofits like Public Advocates argued for a decade that the Local Control Accountability Plan rules and Local Control Funding Formula law did not require districts to be transparent enough on how they spent money for high-needs students, who make up about 60% of California students. Newsom includedone important transparency change in the 2021 state budget, prohibiting districts from transferring unspent funding for high-needs students to the general fund.
Recognizing that Covid intensified the disparities facing high-poverty areas, Newsom increased funding for districts with the greatest concentrations of high-needs students from 50% of base funding to 66%. Acknowledging the Local Control Funding Formula’s district-centric approach has not narrowed the achievement gap, Newsom created an“equity multiplier” in this year’s budget. It includes an additional $300 million in ongoing money for the high-poverty schools and requires that districts create mini-Local Control Accountability Plans with goals and actions to improve the lowest-performing schools. Until now, the formula allocated funding only by districts.
Lafortune said that Johnson’s research is an important contribution to the effort to evaluate the formula.
“I don’t think school finance formula should exist in stone because the conditions that are affecting schools are changing,” he said. “But now that we have evidence that funding targeted in high-concentration districts on average seems to be making a difference, the question becomes how to equitably deploy the funding everywhere.”
How the funding formula works
Gov. Jerry Brown and Michael Kirst, his longtime education adviser and state board president, said the Local Control Funding Formula made equitable funding a priority. On top of base funding per student, the formula gives districts and charter schools an additional 20% for each high-needs student.
The Legislature then gave an added boost to those districts with high proportions of those students, called concentration grants, based on research that high-poverty neighborhoods compounded challenges that children experience.
The concentration funding kicked in gradually once high-needs students made up 55% of a district’s enrollment. The differential could be significant. While districts with 40% high-needs students received an additional 8% funding, those with 85% high-needs students, like Los Angeles Unified, received 32% funding above the base.
In the decade preceding the new formula, California consistently ranked in the bottom of the states in per-student funding, adjusted for regional costs, according to the report. In 2011, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, it ranked last. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed California’s socioeconomic achievement gaps were among the largest in the nation, the report said.
Faced with Brown’s threat to cut education funding severely without additional revenue, voters in 2012 passed a temporary sales tax and income tax on the top 1% of wage earners. Base funding per student rose from under $6,000 in 2013-14 to more than $8,000 in 2018-19, adjusted by grade span. Districts like Paramount Unified in Los Angeles County, with 95% high-needs students, received nearly $12,000 per student in local control funding.
Johnson found sizable improvement in other performance measures besides higher math and reading scores in high-concentration districts.
LCFF concentration funding increased the likelihood that students would graduate from high school by 8.2 percentage points for students exposed to a $1,000 increase in the average per-pupil spending experienced from grades nine to 12.
By a 9.8 percentage-point increase in math and 14.7 percentage-point increase in reading, students were more likely to meet college readiness standards, as measured by the 11th-grade Smarter Balanced tests.
By a 5 to 6 percentage-point reduction for boys and 3 percentage-point reduction for girls, Local Control Funding Formula-induced increases in school spending led to significant reductions in annual suspensions and expulsions across third to 10th grades. Suspensions for Black students in 10th grade were cut by 8 percentage points in schools benefiting from $1,000 in Local Control Funding Formula increases for three consecutive years.
Lafortune said Johnson’s research was consistent with his own findings comparing the academic growth of districts receiving the most local control funding — those with more than 80% high-needs students — with districts with fewer than 30% high-needs students. Another report will be published next month.
“I’m happy to see there’s actually some good research out using student-level data with evidence in answer to the top-level question, Is (the formula) moving the needle? Yes, for those high-concentration districts,” he said.
An EdSource examination of growth in Smarter Balanced scores for the years of Johnson’s study shows slow but steady progress for both low-income and non-low-income students. Both groups of students grew by an average of slightly more than 1 percentage point annually in math and slightly less than 2 percentage points in English language arts. After five years, the achievement gap remained nearly identical, about 30 percentage points apart.
“Yes, we do care about the gaps, but our idea of equity is not to bring the children that are performing really well to the levels that are not excellent,” said Johnson. The overall gains are evidence that more money matters for all students, he said, adding that the aggregate averages don’t reflect his research of districts receiving the biggest dose of funding.
Lafortune said that the overall averages also reflect that low-income students are spread throughout the state. A fifth — about 800,000 students — attend wealthy districts that get no concentration funding. More than 40% of non-low-income students attend districts that receive concentration funding, he said.
This map only includes schools that had 10% or more kindergartners not fully vaccinated.
Note: Unvaccinated includes students with overdue vaccinations and those in the process of getting vaccines. Numbers do not include special education students and those with medical exemptions.
NA: Accurate information was not immediately available from CDE.
More than 500 California public schools are being audited by the state because they reported that more than 10% of their kindergarten or seventh-grade students were not fully vaccinated last school year. Schools that allow students to attend school without all their vaccinations are in jeopardy of losing funding.
The audit list, released by the California Department of Public Health, includes 450 schools serving kindergarten students and 176 schools serving seventh graders with low vaccination rates. Fifty-six of the schools serve both grade levels. Another 39 schools failed to file a vaccination report with the state.
“Schools found to have improperly admitted students who have (not) met immunization requirements may be subject to loss of average daily attendance payments for those children,” the California Department of Public Health said in an email.
Students who are overdue for their vaccinations or who have been admitted to schools conditionally while they catch up on vaccines are not fully vaccinated, according to the state. Students who are in special education or have a medical exemption are not required to be vaccinated.
California law requires school staff to report vaccination rates to the state each fall and to check up on those catching up on vaccinations while attending school at least every 30 days. If the student who is catching up on their vaccines does not have a second dose of a vaccine within four months of the first dose, they must be excluded from school, according to a state audit guide.
“After the personal belief exemption was gone, we found a significant number of schools were behind on their reporting and were allowing a lot of conditional admissions and weren’t following up,” said Catherine Flores Martin, director of the California Immunization Coalition.
More than 30 Oakland Unified schools make audit list
More than half of Oakland Unified’s 48 elementary schools and eight of its schools serving seventh graders are on the audit list for 2022-23. This includes Markham Elementary where 65% of the 66 kindergarten students were not fully vaccinated last school year. The school had the highest percentage of kindergartners in California’s traditional public schools — with over 20 students — who were not fully vaccinated.
Of the 27 Oakland Unified elementary schools on the list, more than 20% of kindergarten students in a dozen schools did not have all the required vaccinations last school year.
Oakland Unified district spokesperson John Sasaki did not comment on the audit list for last school year by publication time. Previously he told EdSource that lower vaccination rates at some schools in 2021-22 were due, in part, to the difficulty families had getting medical appointments during the pandemic, and a district backlog logging vaccinations.
The Bay Area district isn’t the only large school district struggling to get students fully vaccinated, according to state data. Los Angeles Unified has 75 of its non-charter schools on the audit list, while Pomona Unified has 13, San Francisco Unified 14 and San Juan Unified in Sacramento County eight.
Pandemic still affecting school vaccination rates
The state’s vaccination rate, which had grown steadily since the state eliminated personal belief exemptions in 2015, plunged in the months after the Covid-19 pandemic closed schools. Thousands of California students were unable to start the school year in 2022 because they did not have their immunizations.
The state did not relax vaccination requirements during school closures, but not all school officials cooperated with the requirements, Martin said. She isn’t sure that has changed.
“Some schools may be out of practice and, in some areas, their leadership has changed and it isn’t a priority,” she said.
The state’s kindergarten vaccination rate was 92.8% in 2020, down from 95% in 2018. But districts sent information about vaccinations home and held vaccination clinics and made up some ground. In 2021 the vaccination rate rose to 94%.
A vaccination audit has been part of the state’s annual financial and compliance audit of public schools since the 2021-22 school year, according to the California Department of Public Health. That year the vaccination audit found that 45 school districts did not meet state vaccination requirements. Seventeen were further reviewed for potentially allowing students to attend school unvaccinated, said Scott Roark, spokesperson for the California Department of Education.
Schools in violation of the state law must submit corrected attendance reports that reflect the reduction in average daily attendance cited in the audit finding, which will likely reduce their funding, Roark said.
Parents opposed to vaccines are often drawn to charter schools
Parents against vaccinations found few options for their children as California laws became increasingly more restrictive. Some decided to home-school their children or sought independent study or virtual learning options, mostly provided by charter schools. Students who learn from home without any in-person instruction or school-related activities are not required to be vaccinated.
About 90% of the state’s 1,300 charter schools offer in-person instruction to students, according to the California Charter School Association; 67 of those are on the 2022-23 audit list.
Of all California schools, Agnes J. Johnson Charter School in Humboldt County had the highest percentage of kindergartners who were not fully vaccinated last school year. Ninety percent of the 11 kindergartners still needed at least one vaccine. Mountain Home Charter in Oakhurst had the second-highest percentage of kindergartners — 83% — who were not fully vaccinated, followed by Gorman Learning Center – 76% – serving 140 kindergarten students in the San Bernardino and Santa Clarita areas.
Gateway Community Charters has been trying to improve vaccination rates at Community Outreach Academy by working with a nearby health care provider to offer immunization clinics for the students, and to ensure there is a nurse on-site daily. Despite that, almost a third of the 219 kindergartners who attended Community Outreach were reported as being behind on their vaccinations last fall.
Vaccination rates at the school, which have been low for years, began improving before the pandemic but decreased after schools closed and have remained low, said Jason Sample, superintendent of Gateway Community Charters, which operates the school.
Community Outreach Academy offers in-person instruction in buildings on a former Air Force base in Sacramento County. The school primarily serves the Slavic community, whose members are often suspicious of the government and vaccines, Sample said. Its enrollment ballooned to 1,200 students in recent years as refugees from Ukraine, Russia and Afghanistan moved to the Sacramento area.
Community Outreach Academy isn’t the only school in the Gateway Community Charter system on the audit list. Community Collaborative School, which offers both in-person and online instruction, had 39% of its kindergartners and 14% of its 42 seventh-grade students not fully vaccinated last fall. Two other schools run by the charter system — Empowering Possibilities International Charter School and Gateway International School — each had more than 28% of their students without all their vaccinations last school year, according to the audit report.
Empowering Possibilities International Charter lost average daily attendance funding for two students for three months of last school year after its audit was completed, Sample said.
Students who do not have all the required vaccinations are given information about the state vaccination guidelines to take home, Sample said. A health services team then reaches out to the family to connect them with vaccination resources. Students who still don’t provide proof of vaccination are excluded from school, he said. The charter system has a non-classroom-based virtual academy as an alternative until students are up-to-date on their vaccinations.
Vaccine hesitancy has hurt vaccination rates
Vaccine hesitancy has helped to reduce vaccination rates across the country and sparked outbreaks of infectious diseases, including measles outbreaks in Disneyland in 2015 and another Ohio in 2018. Last year, 121 cases of measles were reported, up from 49 cases in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A UNICEF report released in April shows that 67 million of the world’s children missed out on one or more vaccinations between 2019 and 2021 because of strained health systems, scarce resources, conflict and decreased confidence in immunizations. The report says that while overall support for vaccines remains strong, vaccine hesitancy seems to be growing.
Vaccine hesitancy stems from growing access to misleading information, declining trust in expertise, uncertainty about the response to the Covid-19 pandemic and political polarization, according to the report.
Bernardo Lafuente said he isn’t worried his son, Gavril, will be infected by measles or other childhood diseases. He doesn’t trust reports about outbreaks.
“I don’t believe what they are saying. I don’t believe it,” he said. “We don’t see an epidemic. I haven’t seen anyone with measles or smallpox; they are virtually nonexistent in America.”
Lafuente and his family left California in 2018, in part, because of its vaccination requirements and moved to Nevada where vaccines are not required to attend school.
“The government in Nevada pushes vaccination of not just kids, but everybody, but in Nevada we have a choice,” Lafuente said.
Gavril, now in fifth-grade, had some vaccinations when he was younger. His father set up a schedule he devised, instead of the vaccine schedule endorsed by the CDC. But he doesn’t intend for his son to get any more.
“He’s vaccinated except for boosters,” Lafuente said. “I’m not against vaccines if someone else wants to get them. I’m personally against vaccines. I don’t think everybody should have to get a vaccine, unless there is an outbreak, but even then, it should be a choice.”
Pockets of unvaccinated students dot most districts
Even districts with high overall vaccination rates often have schools that have vaccination rates low enough to land on the audit list. In 2021, the last year overall student vaccination rates were available, 95% of Sacramento City Unified students were fully vaccinated. Yet last school year, it had eight schools on the audit list.
“We encourage everyone to get vaccinated,” said Susan Sivils, lead nurse for the Sacramento City Unified vaccination clinic. “If they are opposed for any reason, we follow up. The vast majority of people are not opposed to getting their vaccinations.”
The district is working to increase its vaccination rates with weekly free vaccination clinics throughout the year and two weeks of clinics before the beginning of the school year. In an effort to get more students vaccinated, the district increased the number of vaccination clinics last year and called parents directly to make them aware of the vaccination requirement and clinics.
Cecilia Reyes and her older sister Chzaray, nervously waited for their turn at a vaccination clinic at the district headquarters on Aug. 22. Cecilia was preparing for her first day of kindergarten, but this would be the first time she got a vaccination. The Covid pandemic prevented the family from getting needed appointments, her mother said. Chzaray, who would be entering seventh grade, would need four shots to be up to date. The girls may need several appointments before they are fully vaccinated.
The Sacramento City Unified vaccination clinic immunized about 50 students that day in preparation for the first day of school. The number of students who visited a district vaccination clinic skyrocketed from 1,154 in 2021-22 to 1,739 visits last year, Sivils said. Students who are uninsured or are on Medi-Cal qualify for the clinic.
Damien Burkholder blinked back tears as a nurse gave him his Tdap booster last Tuesday. The shot is required for all seventh-grade students. His mother, Vanessa Martinez, had tried to get Damien an appointment for the shot with the family’s primary physician but would have had to wait a month.
“This is very convenient,” Martinez said of the clinic. “He would have had to miss a whole month of school if this weren’t here.”
Kids get a chance to stretch their legs and skills during physical exercise in Los Angeles in 2023.
Courtesy LA84 Foundation
Millions of young people across the nation have returned to school, yet students are still struggling to navigate the return to normal. Research shows us that educators and policymakers can bring back joy in schools by prioritizing sport and play to build a supportive learning environment. One where we all win.
The role of sports and play extends far beyond physical fitness. It profoundly impacts student social and emotional health and school connectedness. By instilling valuable life skills, fostering social bonds and promoting emotional well-being, sport and play contribute to a holistic educational experience that nurtures well-rounded individuals capable of transcending life’s challenges and thriving in diverse circumstances.
With parents, educators and administrators now back in school, let’s not forget the Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a new set of challenges for youth, leading to a mental health crisis as declared by the U.S. Surgeon General in late 2021.
While issues concerning the mental health of our kids had arisen long before the pandemic, nearly three years of isolation and increased screen time, death and uncertainty only magnified students’ stress, anxiety and depression. We warned this was a mounting mental health emergency in schools last year, but today it is in clearer focus. Results released in February from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey indicated startling trends. Nearly 3 in 5 teen girls (57%) said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” More than 40% of boys and girls responded they had felt so sad or hopeless within the past year they were unable to perform regular activities.
According to a 2022 State of Youth Mental Health report which surveyed 2,000 parents, 68% have seen their children face significant mental and emotional challenges. Yet, recent studies have also found 60% of youth with major depression do not receive mental health treatment, many of them youth of color.
These findings require us to not rush into school with a singular focus on closing the learning loss. Let’s instead look to accelerate opportunities through sport and play to help our kids reconnect to themselves, to their friends and to their schoolwork.
Sport and play hold a profound significance in fostering social and emotional well-being and enhancing school connectedness for students. Beyond mere physical activity, engagement in sport and play cultivates essential life skills and nurtures interpersonal relationships.
Policymakers across the country have recognized the value of sport and play in schools and are advancing this framework. California state Sen. Josh Newman authored Daily Recess for All, Senate Bill 291, which ensures students have access to a 30-minute recess for unstructured play and that it cannot be withheld as a form of punishment.
The joy and spontaneity inherent in play promote emotional release and stress reduction. Engaging in recreational activities allows students to unwind, alleviate anxiety and recharge their mental faculties. This, in turn, equips them to navigate academic pressures and personal trials more effectively. One study found that 6-to-8-year-olds who exercised frequently had fewer symptoms of major depressive disorders two years later.
This same study found 73% of parents believe that sport benefits their child’s mental health. Participating in sports teaches invaluable lessons in teamwork, communication and perseverance. Through wins and losses, individuals learn to handle success and setbacks, building resilience and boosting self-esteem. These experiences translate into the ability to cope with challenges outside the sports arena, contributing to a balanced social and emotional state.
Sports and play serve as powerful catalysts for building social bonds. Students develop a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose in collaborative activities, breaking down barriers and forming connections that transcend differences. This inclusivity enhances the feeling of belonging, which is vital for a positive school environment.
In a world increasingly driven by digital interactions, the physicality of sports and play offers a refreshing counterbalance. Face-to-face interactions during games and playtime nurture emotional intelligence and empathy, enriching interpersonal skills that are essential for healthy relationships in school — and later in life.
Although it’s never been more needed in the educational environment, many public schools have defunded sports programs and offer physical education far less than they once did. That reinforces the pay-to-play model and leaves out the kids who have the least.
Our data shows that as household income increases in LA County, so does activity levels for the children in the home. Children from homes with income under $35,000 a year play far less than kids from affluent households, and they are unable to access the resources they need to be active.
These children are our future engineers, musicians, teachers, caregivers and leaders. Talent is universal, but opportunity is not. We can mend the kids’ lives who are suffering by providing access to the transformative power of sport and play, and help change a significant number of their destinies.
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Renata Simril is president & CEO of the LA84 Foundation, the legacy of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and a national leader advocating for the role of sport and play in positive youth development.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
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