State lawmakers Wednesday demanded that the University of California system make more space for California residents — particularly at its most competitive campuses — even if it means charging higher tuition to those who come from out of state.
The number of non-resident students has declined at most UC campuses, ticking down from 17.7% to 16.3% systemwide over the past two years. Increasing pressure from the Legislature led the state to create a plan in the Budget Act of 2021 to increase the enrollment of Californians in the UC system over five years. The system has enrolled more in-state residents — but not enough to meet targets set by the state.
Assemblymember David Alvarez, D-San Diego, noted that most UC campuses reject more than half of their applicants, including many highly qualified California residents.
“This is frustrating for a lot of Californians,” Alvarez said during an Assembly budget hearing addressing college enrollment in the state.
Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, shared a story from a constituent who said she graduated with a 4.67 GPA, took 12 AP courses and was a varsity captain. She told him she applied as a political science major at four competitive UC campuses and was rejected from all, only to enroll at an out-of-state school.
“What would you tell this student about why she can’t attend the UC campus of her dreams?” Muratsuchi said.
A report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) called it “frustrating” that during a time of “tremendous demand,” the UC system fell nearly 1,400 full-time equivalent students short of its target to enroll more in-state students this year, as set by the 2023-24 Budget Act.
Assembly members said they also have concerns about nonresidents increasingly edging out California residents at a few CSU campuses. Nonresidents made up 17% of enrollment at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and 14.6% at San Diego State in 2022-23.
The LAO report notes that community college enrollment has begun to rebound after a precipitous decline during the pandemic. But its decline has created a domino effect by reducing the number of students transferring to CSU. Enrollment at the University of California has been growing, but it has not kept pace with student interest, as indicated by the rapidly rising number of applications. Unique applications to the UC system increased by 30% from 2013 to 2022.
Looking to the future, the systems — especially the community colleges and CSU — face continuing challenges attracting enough students. The report also noted that the numbers of traditional college age students are expected to decline in the coming years, just as they have in California’s K-12 school system.
Muratsuchi asked whether it might be time to rethink the way funds are allocated, not just between campuses but also between UC and CSU campuses. He pointed to the increased demand at UC campuses and declining interest at many CSU campuses.
The UC system does plan to address demand from California residents in the long term by adding between 23,000 and 33,000 full-time equivalent students by 2030. UC Merced and UC Riverside would account for 30% to 35% of that growth, while UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Diego would account for half or more of that growth. The UC system contends that this plan would rely on state funding to pay for an increase in California residents.
Seija Virtanen, associate director of state budget relations for the University of California Office of the President, said the UC system became more reliant on nonresident students to backfill massive budget cuts during the Great Recession of 2008. Each nonresident student pays nearly three times the tuition paid by resident students.
For 2024-25, Californians will pay $14,436 for undergraduate tuition, while nonresidents will pay $48,636.
“If we were to remove those funds, it would be catastrophic for our campuses,” Virtanen said.
Currently, the state is providing the UC system with an additional $31 million each year to support more California residents attending UC campuses, supplanting the funds that nonresidents bring in. Over the last two years, UC has enrolled over 2,600 fewer nonresidents. It has also enrolled nearly 5,900 additional in-state residents, but that is nearly 1,400 students short of the state target.
Alvarez proposed raising tuition for nonresidents to cover this $31 million in annual funds from the state. Using back-of-the-napkin math, Alvarez noted that passing along $31 million in tuition to 20,000 nonresident students would increase their tuition by about $1,500 each year. There are an estimated 36,630 nonresident students in the UC system. Alvarez suggested a follow-up hearing to discuss raising nonresident tuition.
During public comment, UC alumni-regent Keith Ellis agreed that it would be “worthy” to give the plan to raise nonresident tuition serious consideration.
CSU, where most campuses have seen enrollment drop, has room in its budget to add 24,000 full-time students, according to the LAO report. Only four of the 23 campuses — Fullerton, Long Beach, San Diego and San Luis Obispo — have increased their enrollment since fall 2019.
Seven campuses are enrolling at least 20% fewer students than four years ago, including campuses in Sonoma, the Channel Islands, the East Bay, Chico, Humboldt, Bakersfield and San Francisco.
Nathan Evans, deputy vice chancellor for academic and student affairs at CSU, said there is a plan to reallocate resources from campuses that have seen a sustained drop in enrollment to those where there is more demand. He said this reallocation needs to be done over several years.
“We’re not going to pull the rug out from any institution,” he said.
Evans noted that demographic changes in rural areas in Northern California and the Bay Area mean enrollment is not likely to rebound. The number of families with college-age students has been declining in these areas.
Evans said the CSU system is also working on increasing enrollment through partnerships with K-12 districts, marketing and attempting to reengage students who may have stopped out.
Gov. Gavin Newsom joins Chief Service Officer Josh Fryday and higher education leaders at a College Corps swearing-in celebration.
Credit: Office of the Governor
In 2022, the state launched the #CaliforniansForAll College Corps program. Spread across 45 campuses throughout the state, the program is designed to help college students pay for their schooling in exchange for performing community service: It offers $10,000 for 450 hours of service, paid through 10 monthly installments of $700 and an additional $3,000 for completing the program.
This new program is well-intentioned, but there is room for improvement.
I joined College Corps during its inauguration, under the regional chapter — Sacramento Valley College Corps, formed by California State University, Sacramento; UC Davis; Sacramento City College and Woodland Community College. After completing the application to be a fellow beginning in the summer, I was paired with a host site almost immediately. My placement was with First Star Sacramento State Academy, a college-preparation program aimed at helping high school students within the foster care system graduate and go to college. This help was provided through the tutoring and resources offered by youth mentors, which was my position at First Star.
Prior to my admission into College Corps, I was already an employee of First Star; the director of the program worked with College Corps to ensure I got placed there. But I took on a new role: College Corps fellow.
This meant I was no longer a student assistant working only 10 hours a week. Now I was expected to work almost double that as a fellow, and my responsibilities grew.
My experience with First Star as a youth mentor was wonderful. I already knew the program and the students in it. I had an established relationship with the supervisor, program coordinator and director. It was working under College Corps where challenges arose.
After completing one year with College Corps at First Star, I re-enrolled in the program as part of its second cohort. My new host site was Girl Scouts Heart of Central California. Since it was located only seven minutes from my campus, I thought this was going to be a great match.
Unfortunately, the job required going from city to city, and I do not own a car, so I had to withdraw from the program only one month in. In addition, my supervisor expected us fellows to complete some of our hours in the Modesto office, nearly a 1.5-hour commute. (I learned that right after I left, the remaining fellows were given rental cars to complete their hours.)
Another problem was that many Girl Scout events took place in the evening, since they were after-school activities for the girls. As a full-time student taking mostly evening classes, I struggled to fulfill my hours as the opportunities to do so were either far away, or at a time I was in class, or both.
Since I was part of the very first cohort of the College Corps, it is understandable that my experience was not entirely smooth.
For starters, there seemed to be a disconnect with College Corpsand the external host sites. Fellows at some placements struggled to complete the required hours because host sites simply didn’t have enough service opportunities. This was a real problem because failure to complete the required hours put College Corps fellows at risk of losing the $3,000 education award promised to them upon completion.
Another challenge was the payment method. We were paid via a prepaid debit card that was quite cumbersome to use. I also had problems receiving my $3,000 education award.
Thankfully, College Corps ditched the prepaid cards in the second year and now pays fellows via simple checks, although direct deposit is still not available for the second cohort.
Yesenia Toribio, a Sacramento State student and former College Corps fellow, acknowledged the positives of the program. “I felt very supported by my supervisor at my host site and the staff in charge of leading the cohort for College Corps at Sacramento State. Everyone was so patient and understanding, it made me feel like I was a part of something bigger.
“I truly believe the downsides were because we were the first cohort and they were still trying to figure out the program,” Toribio said.
However, she added, “It was difficult trying to manage completing 450 hours of community service while being a full-time student and working part time.”
But, despite the growing pains, I can still see the promise and potential of the College Corps. Being part of it provided us with many benefits — not just monetary. The program allowed fellows to get involved with different events such as feeding the homeless, runs, river cleanups and more. The program also allowed fellows to make connections, and I still consider the fellow youth mentors at First Star as my close friends.
●●●
Aya Mikbel is a fourth-year student studying political science and journalism at California State University, Sacramento and a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.
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.
Hundreds of San Diego State students protest in support of Palestinians on April 30, 2024.
Credit: Jazlyn Dieguez / EdSource
The University of California disclosed Tuesday that it has $32 billion invested in assets that pro-Palestinian protesters demand the university divest, including weapons manufacturers that sell to Israel.
The university, however, has no plans to sell off those assets, despite the recent protests and encampments across the UC system, a spokesperson reiterated Tuesday.
The system’s chief investment officer, Jagdeep Singh Bachher, outlined the investments during a meeting Tuesday of the investments committee for UC’s board of regents. Bachher’s list responded to specific demands from the protesters and included broader investments in U.S. Treasuries, which he added in response to the request that UC divest from assets that support Israel. “The answer to that question is the U.S. government,” he said, referring to the aid and weapons that the government sends to Israel.
The full list of investments include:
$3.3 billion in weapons manufacturers
$12 billion in U.S. Treasuries
$163 million in BlackRock, an asset manager that owns shares of companies that support Israel
$2.1 billion in investments managed for UC by BlackRock
$8.6 billion in the investment firm Blackstone, also targeted by protesters
$3.2 billion in 24 other companies targeted by protesters, including Coca-Cola and Disney
“So if I interpret the questions and the responses mathematically with numbers, the letter sent to us would suggest that we should sell $32 billion of assets out of the $175 billion,” Bachher said, referring to the system’s entire investment portfolio.
The investments committee took no action toward divestment Tuesday, nor did it suggest they were considering doing so.
When reached Tuesday, a spokesperson for the system also said UC stands behind its April 26 statement opposing the idea of divestment.
“The University of California has consistently opposed calls for boycott against and divestment from Israel,” UC said at the time. “While the University affirms the right of our community members to express diverse viewpoints, a boycott of this sort impinges on the academic freedom of our students and faculty and the unfettered exchange of ideas on our campuses.”
Demands for UC and other universities to divest from Israel have heightened in recent weeks as pro-Palestinian encampments and protests have swept the country since last month, including at UCLA and other UC campuses.
Driving the encampments are calls for divestment from companies doing significant business with Israel. The protesters see universities as complicit in Israel’s war in Gaza. More than 35,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including many women and children, according to health authorities. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza followed the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people.
Tuesday’s financial disclosures followed a lengthy public comment period in which many commenters called on UC to divest.
“I wanted to emphasize my support for the Palestinian encampment students and faculty and to strongly support their call for divestment from all investments in the military industrial complex,” said Darlene Lee, a faculty member in UCLA’s teacher education program and a UCLA alum. “Educational funds should go towards education and community and not war.”
Calls for UC to divest are likely to continue Wednesday, when the regents will convene for the second of their three-day meeting at UC Merced. Ahead of the regents meeting, protesters at UC Merced set up a pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus, making Merced the latest of UC’s 10 campuses to establish such an encampment.
In a statement posted on Instagram, organizers of the encampment wrote that they are demanding UC to divest, call for a ceasefire in Gaza and end ties with Israel, including study-abroad programs.
“The UC regents are meeting on our campus. … They will hear us!,” the organizers wrote.
Hundreds of San Diego State students protest in support of Palestinians on April 30, 2024.
Credit: Jazlyn Dieguez / EdSource
The University of California disclosed Tuesday that it has $32 billion invested in assets that pro-Palestinian protesters demand the university divest, including weapons manufacturers that sell to Israel.
The university, however, has no plans to sell off those assets, despite the recent protests and encampments across the UC system, a spokesperson reiterated Tuesday.
The system’s chief investment officer, Jagdeep Singh Bachher, outlined the investments during a meeting Tuesday of the investments committee for UC’s board of regents. Bachher’s list responded to specific demands from the protesters and included broader investments in U.S. Treasuries, which he added in response to the request that UC divest from assets that support Israel. “The answer to that question is the U.S. government,” he said, referring to the aid and weapons that the government sends to Israel.
The full list of investments include:
$3.3 billion in weapons manufacturers
$12 billion in U.S. Treasuries
$163 million in BlackRock, an asset manager that owns shares of companies that support Israel
$2.1 billion in investments managed for UC by BlackRock
$8.6 billion in the investment firm Blackstone, also targeted by protesters
$3.2 billion in 24 other companies targeted by protesters, including Coca-Cola and Disney
“So if I interpret the questions and the responses mathematically with numbers, the letter sent to us would suggest that we should sell $32 billion of assets out of the $175 billion,” Bachher said, referring to the system’s entire investment portfolio.
The investments committee took no action toward divestment Tuesday, nor did it suggest they were considering doing so.
When reached Tuesday, a spokesperson for the system also said UC stands behind its April 26 statement opposing the idea of divestment.
“The University of California has consistently opposed calls for boycott against and divestment from Israel,” UC said at the time. “While the University affirms the right of our community members to express diverse viewpoints, a boycott of this sort impinges on the academic freedom of our students and faculty and the unfettered exchange of ideas on our campuses.”
Demands for UC and other universities to divest from Israel have heightened in recent weeks as pro-Palestinian encampments and protests have swept the country since last month, including at UCLA and other UC campuses.
Driving the encampments are calls for divestment from companies doing significant business with Israel. The protesters see universities as complicit in Israel’s war in Gaza. More than 35,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including many women and children, according to health authorities. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza followed the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people.
Tuesday’s financial disclosures followed a lengthy public comment period in which many commenters called on UC to divest.
“I wanted to emphasize my support for the Palestinian encampment students and faculty and to strongly support their call for divestment from all investments in the military industrial complex,” said Darlene Lee, a faculty member in UCLA’s teacher education program and a UCLA alum. “Educational funds should go towards education and community and not war.”
Calls for UC to divest are likely to continue Wednesday, when the regents will convene for the second of their three-day meeting at UC Merced. Ahead of the regents meeting, protesters at UC Merced set up a pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus, making Merced the latest of UC’s 10 campuses to establish such an encampment.
In a statement posted on Instagram, organizers of the encampment wrote that they are demanding UC to divest, call for a ceasefire in Gaza and end ties with Israel, including study-abroad programs.
“The UC regents are meeting on our campus. … They will hear us!,” the organizers wrote.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on Monday during an event with NCAA college athletes. This is her first public appearance since President Joe Biden endorsed her to be the next presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.
Credit: AP Photo / Susan Walsh
The likelihood that Vice President Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee for president is inviting scrutiny of her positions on every public policy issue, including education.
By her own accounting, those views have been profoundly shaped by her experiences as a beneficiary of public education, as a student at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley and later at the Hastings College of Law (now called UC Law San Francisco).
Just three months ago, in remarks about college student debt in Philadelphia, she paid tribute to her late first grade teacher Frances Wilson, who also attended her graduation from law school. “I wouldn’t be here except for the strength of our teachers, and of course, the family in which I was raised,” she said.
The most memorable moment in Harris’ unsuccessful 2019 campaign for president was in the first candidates’ debate when she sharply criticized then-Vice President Joe Biden for opposing school busing programs in the 1970s and 1980s.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me,” Harris said in the debate.
She was referring to Berkeley’s voluntary busing program set up in 1968, the first such voluntary program in a sizable city. Biden was apparently able to put the exchange aside when he selected her to be his running mate several months later.
At age 12, her family moved to Montreal where she attended a public high school, and then went to Howard University, the Historically Black College and University in Washington D.C. for her undergraduate education.
It is impossible to anticipate what if any of the positions Harris took earlier in her career, or as a presidential candidate five years ago, will be revived should she win the Democratic nomination, or even become president.
But they certainly offer clues as to positions she might take in either role.
When she kicked off her campaign for president at a boisterous rally in downtown Oakland in January 2019, she made access to education a major issue. “I am running to declare education is a fundamental right, and we will guarantee that right with universal pre-K and debt-free college,” she said, referring to pre-kindergarten.
By saying education is a fundamental right, Harris addressed directly an issue that has been a major obstacle for advocates trying to create a more equitable education system.
While education is a core function of government — even “perhaps the most important function,” as Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling — it is not a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. That has meant relying much more on state constitutions.
During her term as vice-president, she has played a prominent role in promoting a range of President Biden’s education programs, from cutting child care costs to student loan relief.
Last year she flew to Florida especially to take on Gov. Ron DeSantis over his attacks on what he dismissed as “woke indoctrination” in schools. In particular, she was incensed by the state’s middle school standards that argued that enslaved people “developed skills that could, in some instances, be applied for their personal benefit.”
DeSantis challenged her to debate him on the issue — an offer she scathingly rejected. “There is no roundtable, lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeemable qualities to slavery,” she declared at a convention of Black missionary women in Orlando.
Earlier in her career, she was best known on the education front for her interest in combating school truancy — an interest that could be extremely relevant as schools in California and nationally grapple with a huge post-pandemic surge in chronic absenteeism.
Students are classified as chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of school days in the school year.
Nearly two decades ago, while district attorney in San Francisco, she launched a student attendance initiative focused on elementary school children. Each year, she sent letters to all parents advising them that truancy was against the law. Prosecutors from her office would meet with parents with chronically absent children. If they did not rectify the situation, they could be prosecuted in a special truancy court — and face a fine of up to $2,500 or a year in county jail.
By 2009, she said she had prosecuted about 20 parents. “Our groundbreaking strategy worked,” she wrote in an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, citing a 20% increase in attendance at the elementary level.
When she ran for California attorney general in 2010, she backed a bill that enacted a similar program into state law. The law also subjected parents to fines and imprisonment for up to a year, but only after they had been offered “support services” to address the pupil’s truancy.
As attorney-general, she used the clout of her office to go after for-profit colleges she accused of false and predatory advertising, and intentionally misrepresenting to students the benefits they could provide. She was able to get a $1 billion judgment against the California-based Corinthians Colleges Inc. which eventually declared bankruptcy. ““For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people – now they have to pay,” she said at the time.
During her presidential campaign five years ago, she made a major issue of what she labeled “the teacher pay crisis.” She said as president she would increase the average teacher’s salary by $13,500 — representing an average 23% increase in base pay. Almost certainly the most ambitious proposal of its kind made by any presidential candidate, the cost to the federal government would be enormous: $315 billion over 10 years.
To pay for it, she proposed increasing the estate tax on the top 1% of taxpayers and eliminating loopholes that “let the very wealthiest, with estates worth multiple millions or billions of dollars, avoid paying their fair share,” she wrote in The Washington Post.
Also on the campaign trail, she proposed a massive increase in funding to historically Black colleges and universities — one of which (Howard University in Washington, D.C.) she graduated from. In fact, she proposed investing $2 trillion in these colleges, especially to train Black teachers. She contended that if a child has had two Black teachers before the end of third grade, they’re one-third more likely to go to college.
Biden was able to push through a big increase in support for such institutions totaling $19 billion — far short of her goal of $2 trillion.
Many of her positions on education — including a push for universal pre-school, and making college debt-free — were aligned with those proposed by Biden, or ultimately implemented by him as president.
For that reason, there is likely to be continuity in her candidacy with much of the education agenda proposed by Biden.
But mainly as a result of lack of action in Congress and Republican-initiated lawsuits blocking his proposals, many of the administrations’s aspirations, like making community colleges free, doubling the size of Pell Grants, and student debt refiled, remain unfulfilled.
It will now be up to Harris — and the American voter — whether she will have the opportunity to advance that unfinished education agenda.
This story has been updated to include details about Harris’ education after her parents moved from Berkeley to Canada when she was 12.
Stockton Unified Superintendent Michelle Rodriguez talks about how she arrived at her goals and plans for improving student achievement.
Credit: Lasherica Thornton/ EdSource
Stockton Unified, a mostly poverty-stricken community in San Joaquin County, has become known for its legal troubles, financial issues and superintendent turnover, which have, for years, distracted the low-performing school district from addressing student achievement. Most of the district’s nearly 40,000 students have failed to meet state standards in English and math.
Becoming superintendent in July 2023, Michelle Rodriguez knew those facts to be true. Rodriguez, the 14th superintendent to lead the district in less than two decades, said she was determined to change SUSD’s troubled reputation by focusing on students, creating stability, restoring public trust and engaging the community “one interaction, one decision, one day at a time.”
But without “actually digging in to find out what is happening,” Rodriguez refused at the start to make assumptions about what the district faced, especially its barriers to student achievement.
“Until I get in the classroom, I probably won’t be able to answer the question about lack of student achievement here,” Rodriguez told EdSource last year.
“What I knew was that because I was the 14th superintendent in 19 years, and because of just the headlines that we had seen, we knew that we needed to make sure that we solidified the system,” she said in a recent sit-down. “Instead of making the assumption that I knew specifically what was happening, I identified four key areas that effective systems have”: quality assurance, high expectations, continuous improvement and community trust.
A little over a year since her start — aligned with those areas and guided by an initial 100-day plan, over 40 school visits and dozens of listening sessions and town halls — Rodriguez is implementing a public accountability system, 44 priority recommendations, and a district culture in which data and feedback drive change.
“Something that I’m trying to do is create new traditions and new systems to hear feedback, make changes and, kind of, move the work forward,” Rodriguez said.
A system of accountability
At the start of her superintendency, Rodriguez hosted meet-and-greets and community listening sessions in English and Spanish to identify concerns that the district needed to address; based on the sessions, there were in-person and virtual town halls to create priority recommendations with “fingerprints” of community feedback.
“We want to reach the hardest-to-reach parent. We want to reach the hardest-to-reach student,” Rodriguez said a year ago about listening and collaborating with the community to develop a plan. “And within those priority recommendations, you will see your fingerprints.”
As a result, all 44 priority recommendations, including a goal to create student success plans for certain student groups, came from those engagements.
Setting those goals was merely one part of Rodriguez’ approach.
Visit Stockton Unified’s Pubic Accountability Dashboard, here
Read the 2023 State of District, here, which detailed last school year’s priorities
The dashboard includes each goal, its complexity, which of the four areas it falls under, the department(s) responsible, actions, whether it’s completed or not, outcomes and the impact of those outcomes.
Simply put, the dashboard shows the district’s progress and holds the superintendent and the other officials accountable to the goals.
Rodriguez said she didn’t want the Stockton Unified community to feel as though “we did all this work, we did all these 21 listening sessions, and now nothing happened.”
44 goals is a lot. What’s been accomplished?
Within weeks of setting the goals, Rodriguez and the district completed “easy wins.”
An easy win, for example, was providing radios for special education classrooms to address student safety. Since the pandemic, dozens of teachers and staff had reported high numbers of “elopers,” mostly special education students but also young learners, running from the classroom — a recurring problem that “no one necessarily was able to solve, or chose to solve, until now,” she said.
For each radio purchased, a staff member felt better equipped to support students, Rodriguez said.
“Things like that seem insignificant, but to the system, they had a lot of impact because now those teachers feel more at ease that if they do have a student leave the classroom, there’s a way to get help to retrieve them,” she said.
Rodriguez, also in her first few weeks, formed a student advisory group of 90 students from the district’s high schools.
The formation of the Superintendent’s Student Advisory, the first of its kind in Stockton Unified, allowed her to listen to students, such as Emily Gomez Valle, a Chavez High School junior, who said the advisory was a way for her to advocate for her peers.
Then, the district tackled short-term goals, accomplishing them in three months. The district, for instance, started conducting thorough exit interviews to understand why staff were leaving the district.
The easy wins and short-term goals were intentional, so that “people knew the superintendent was getting things done,” Rodriguez said.
In the 2023-24 school year, under Rodriguez’ leadership, Stockton Unified’s graduation rate increased to 83.9% — the highest in the district’s history.
Long-term goals completed in the 2023-24 school year included increased access and participation in Educators Thriving, a program that provides social-emotional support and training for teachers and other school staff. Stockton Unified is set to have two program cohorts with up to 100 educators participating this school year, according to its accountability dashboard.
Based on the need to “focus on our most vulnerable students and have an action plan that is linked to them,” Stockton Unified created specific student success plans for Black students, English learners, homeless youth and students with special needs.
Other long-term goals have addressed the district’s legal and financial woes. The San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office, with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI, launched a criminal investigation into Stockton Unified in April 2023, after a state audit by the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) found evidence that fraud, misappropriation of funds or other illegal fiscal practices may have occurred between July 2019 and April 2022.
Millions of dollars in federal one-time Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding, which school districts received to address the impacts of the pandemic, was the subject of the investigation. Under Rodriguez’ leadership, the school district didn’t have to repay the federal government the $6.6 million in ESSER funding that was improperly awarded for a contract.
Rodriguez’ challenge was spending the ESSER funds by their timeline.
As of March 2023, just months before she started, Stockton Unified had spent only 1.84% (over $5 million) of the more than $156 million it received in ESSER III, which must be returned to the federal government if not budgeted this month and spent by January 2025. According to Rodriguez, the district has now used all the funding, completing over 40 projects.
But the allegations about the misuse of ESSER funding triggered a 2021-22 grand jury investigation into the district’s overall spending as well. Stockton Unified, Rodriguez said in 2023, relied on and spent a lot of money on consultants, which the grand jury attributed to district staff lacking the “necessary training and guidance to execute complex district business needs.”
Stockton Unified has since identified and evaluated the consultants and increased staff expertise to take over the work, leading to a reduction in consultant costs from $886,561 last school year to an estimated $275,000 this year.
And as of June, the district has finalized 32 of 44 priority recommendations, including the easy wins, short-term goals and long-term priorities.
Still there are larger systemic and structural projects and objectives that are taking more than a year to accomplish, up until this school year or longer.
What’s left to do
Three weeks after school started in the 2023-24 school year, Rodriguez said she met a homeless student who hadn’t attended school at all. She told the student about district supports, such as transportation to school and other available resources once on campus.
“And what she said to me is, ‘How do you expect me to come to school when I haven’t bathed in a week?’” the superintendent recalled.
Such encounters highlighted the need to expand family and community partnerships, increase expectations and develop equitable action plans, all of which are among the remaining priorities meant to support students and improve their experience in Stockton Unified, Rodriguez said.
More than 82% of Stockton Unified students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, according to EdData, with many facing challenges such as the student Rodriguez encountered. Even so, there must be increased expectations for students to perform at high levels with strong support.
Using her saying, “You change experiences to change beliefs to change expectations,” Rodriguez said, “I actually have to reframe your experiences so that it changes your beliefs about students, and, then, that changes your expectations for students.”
The district will also conduct an equity audit to develop a three-year action plan. The equity audit is meant to evaluate district and school policies, practices and procedures that are inequitable and create barriers “that are getting in the way of our students,” Rodriguez said. The goal requires the district to form teams of employees from each school, which will develop a multiyear action plan.
In fact, Stockton Unified’s 2024-2027 LCAP goals are to increase student academic achievement; center the whole child; provide systemic and innovative programs aligned to students’ passions, interests and talents; create meaningful partnerships; provide access and opportunities to ensure success for students with disabilities; and provide positive learning conditions and experiences for Black students to thrive.
Some of the other district priorities include:
Investing in facilities by putting $50 million of ESSER funding into schools so that students have access to amenities such as classrooms with science labs.
Equitably offering arts programs at the district’s 55 schools and for all students, specifically those who are Black, English learners, homeless, have special needs and/or are foster youth who benefit from “differentiated instruction,” Rodriguez said.
Launching school and district administrator classroom visits, allowing classroom staff to get feedback and administrators to gain a better knowledge of the adopted curriculum.
Resolving the remaining findings and corrective actions reported by the California Department of Education and the San Joaquin County Office of Education as well as the findings of grand jury, FCMAT and audit reports.
Knowing if and when to change course
In some areas, such as chronic absenteeism, Stockton Unified identified a systemic goal and improved that metric in a year’s time, but still must find solutions to continue addressing the problem. In this case, the goal was to identify solutions to chronic absenteeism, in which students miss 10% or more days in a school year. Stockton Unified data shows that chronic absenteeism, though still higher than prepandemic numbers, decreased by 3.1 percentage points from the 2022-23 to the 2023-24 school year.
“How can we celebrate that?” Rodriguez asked, “but at the same time say, ‘OK, well, what we’re doing is working. Is it working fast enough? Are there any shifts that we could continue to do?’”
Chronic absenteeism, performance indicators and other data measured over time create the challenge of knowing if, when and how to pivot a district response.
For example, even though there isn’t a specific district goal about it, Stockton Unified has been adding an intervention teacher to each K-8 school based on district data. Seventeen of 41 such teachers have been hired so far.
“When we’re looking at our KPI (key performance indicator) data, what we know is that our students aren’t making the growth that we need them to make,” Rodriguez said. The district is now using iReady data, which allows teachers to deliver adaptive lessons and includes data on student progress.
Based on fall 2023 iReady data, 35% of fourth graders were one grade level behind in English, 13% were two grade levels behind and 39% were three or more grades behind, meaning that just 12.6% were on grade level. In math, 35% of fourth graders were one grade level behind, 25% were two grade levels behind and 32% were at least three years behind, meaning only 8.4% of students were on grade level.
“What is our data actually telling us? Every quarter we’re looking at the data because we want to be able to pivot and shift quicker than just yearly,” she said.
And the district was able to do that by the end of the 2023-24 school year. In the spring 2024 semester, 24.3% of fourth graders were on grade level in English – an 11.7 percentage point increase from the previous semester. In math, fourth graders on grade level grew from 8.4% to 29% — an improvement of 20.6 percentage points.
Maintaining focus
The priorities that Stockton Unified has identified are what the district has and will continue to focus on moving forward, Rodriguez said. While the equity audit will identify needed changes over the next three years, and while the district will respond to data, the district won’t shift much from the priorities it has identified.
“If you aren’t actually focused on what you need to do, then you can be too scattered and not really have the impact that you want,” she said, adding that, “Some of these changes will not change in one single year.”
Rodriguez maintains her pledge to make those changes by dedicating the last eight years of her career to Stockton Unified — a plan that became more attainable when the school board extended her contract until 2028, or year five.
“Why aren’t kids being successful?” she said. “That cannot happen until people even believe that I’m going to stay put. I won some people over at the six-month mark. I (won) some people over at the year mark. Some people will take the two-, three- year mark.”
Family Resource Center in Greenfield, CA, where families go for assistance with basic needs. The school district is located in southern Monterey County.
Credit: Betty Márquez Rosales / EdSource
Less than two months into this school year, three families seeking shelter in Monterey County asked for motel vouchers from their children’s schools and were turned away. The vouchers, along with several other services for students experiencing homelessness, are no more.
The families sought help from the schools because, in the past, that was where the county’s homeless liaison had provided them with vouchers for short stays at local motels, temporarily sheltering their homeless families with the ultimate goal of getting them into permanent housing.
But the funds that paid for those vouchers had come from a federal program, the American Rescue Plan-Homeless Children and Youth, known as ARP-HCY. The historic allocation of $800 million for schools nationwide, of which California received $98.76 million, was one-time pandemic-era funding that must be committed by the end of this month and used by the end of January 2025. There is a possibility for schools to receive an extension on the timeline to spend the funds, though they won’t receive additional amounts.
There is no plan either at the federal or state level to replace those funds at anywhere near the same level.
“There is a fair amount of heartache because the needs are high, and higher than they were even before the pandemic, and homelessness is always a crisis,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of youth homelessness nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection. “The prospect of the additional funds to meet those heightened needs going away is demoralizing. It’s true everywhere, but I think particularly true in California, where homelessness is unabated, to say the least.”
Rising rates of child homelessness as the funding to address it decreases
Homeless liaisons have long rung the alarm of rising child homelessness, and their concerns are not without merit. The rate of student homelessness in California rose by 9% during the 2022-23 school year from the year prior. Child poverty in the state also increased in 2023 for the third year in a row and, at 19.2%, is now higher than its pre-pandemic rate of 18.6%, according to a recent analysis published by the California Budget and Policy Center.
There was a significant dip in student homelessness rates at the peak of the pandemic, which was followed by a sharp increase, once schools reopened. Experts attribute this dramatic shift to the identification efforts by liaisons. While some of the increase can be attributed to rising homelessness amid skyrocketing rent prices and inflation, it is also in part due to the staff hired with ARP-HCY funds whose jobs were to figure out which students were homeless and to connect them with resources.
Liaisons have also resoundingly cited a critical issue: There is no dedicated, ongoing funding for their work, which they say impedes their ability to implement long-term programming, hire staff and build out preventive measures to help families avoid homelessness.
“The money that we received is the money that we should be receiving on a regular basis to do the work that we need to do,” said Jennifer Kottke, the homeless liaison for the Los Angeles County Office of Education.
There are other streams of funding for students experiencing homelessness, but most are one-time funds, too limited to be distributed across all schools, or they are not set aside specifically for this population of students.
For example, California’s funding formula for education requires that funds be set aside for high-needs students, which includes homeless students. But those dollars need to be distributed across all high-needs students, not only those experiencing homelessness. As such, the percentage of funds has long been disproportionate to the number of homeless children enrolled in schools statewide. And crucially, this funding requires first identifying students who are homeless — the very effort school staff say needs to first be funded.
There is also the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act’s Education for Homeless Children And Youth grant, but at $129 million nationwide, it is a fraction of the windfall the ARP-HCY provided.
Earlier this year, there was a statewide push to include $13 million in the state budget as dedicated funding for students experiencing homelessness. The amount was a match for the federal McKinney-Vento dollars California received in the pre-pandemic years, but the state Legislature failed to pass it.
What did liaisons do with ARP-HCY funding?
Liaisons are pointing to ARP-HCY dollars as an example of the possibilities for supporting students experiencing homelessness when they are given the opportunity to hire staff and expand their services for children.
“The thing is that the work is intense, but the funding doesn’t match, so then you end up undercounting because you don’t have the time to do the proper identification process,” said L.A. County’s Kottke.
With the influx of funds, Kottke hired someone to run a countywide free tutoring program for a year and a half that served about 600 students experiencing homelessness, a data analyst to navigate the complicated nature of homelessness data, and a community outreach specialist to distribute informational modules to other liaisons and share social media posts on homeless education resources. In the last school year alone, her office served at least 63,000 students and families experiencing homelessness, though they are still finalizing their numbers and expect that number to be higher.
Her county office received just over $3 million in the first round of ARP-HCY distributions and about $253,000 in the second round — but these amounts include the funds for 78 districts and charters that Kottke contracted with as the head of her local consortium, which she and other county offices statewide had to create in order to distribute funds to any districts and charters that received less than $500,000.
The motel vouchers in Monterey County were paired with case management to guide families through the county’s housing assistance programs. The part-time staffer in charge of that was hired with ARP-HCY funds, which means that Donna Smith, the county’s homeless liaison, has had to eliminate the position.
The American Rescue Plan “was designed as a safety net to be able to help students still participate in school, still have access to the curriculum,” said Smith, whose county has some of the highest concentrations of student homelessness. “It was really designed to keep them from failing in school, because we know that school is very important no matter what you do.”
To highlight the importance of education, Smith also hired two people to run after-school programs for children at homeless shelters in the region. Every day, for two and a half years, children at the shelters were taught music and art, played sports, and went on field trips on the weekends. But with the money drying up, the programs were shut down on June 30.
Smith’s county office received about $423,000 in the first round of allocations and just under $29,000 in the second round. As with Kottke, she was also the head of her local consortium and distributed portions of that funding to other districts and charters.
In total, Smith had to lay off seven part-time employees, and Kottke is laying off two this month.
Farther north, Meagan Meloy, Butte County’s liaison, began offering what she calls “the next tier of support for students.”
In her two decades doing this work, Meloy has focused on ensuring that students experiencing homelessness were enrolled and could get a ride to school. “That always felt like a Band-Aid approach versus the more comprehensive case management,” she said.
But with over $295,000 total in ARP-HCY funds, she was also able to support families with getting into housing, maintaining their housing, addressing their social-emotional needs, offering academic support, and distributing basic aid needs like food and clothing.
“It just puts more restrictions on prioritizing which students and families we’re going to serve first,” said Meloy, referring to the end of ARP-HCY funds.
One of the uses of the federal funds was the increase in identification efforts. A significant dip in student homelessness followed school closures at the height of the pandemic, which experts agree occurred because the identification of students experiencing homelessness relies on school staff being able to see and interact with children. That became much more difficult, at times impossible, via video.
If liaisons do not notice signs of potential homelessness, it is then up to the student and their families to self-identify. But, according to interviews with liaisons statewide, few children and families self-identify as homeless; they might feel ashamed, be fearful of their children being taken away from them, or might not consider themselves as being homeless.
Such challenges make identification of homelessness among students a key part of every homeless liaison’s job. Some schools, such as Santa Rita Union Elementary in Monterey County, used their ARP-HCY money to hire staff who focused primarily on calling and visiting families they believed might be homeless. It’s a job that liaisons say requires significant investment in time, money and effort, as trust needs to be built with families.
“I think we’ll see even a bigger bump (in homelessness rates) for ’23-24, because that’s when ARP was fully out, but if it goes down next year, it’s not going to be because ‘Oh, we’re solving homelessness,’” said Duffield. “It’s because there are fewer people knocking on doors and following up and asking questions.”
This is an amazing story about the new Pope. Not only is he the first American-born pope, not only is he the first Peruvian pope, but he is descended on his mother’s side from Afro-Caribbeans.
Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago-born cardinal selected on Thursday as the new pope, is descended from Creole people of color from New Orleans.
The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records, lived in the city’s Seventh Ward, an area that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.
The grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, eventually moved to Chicago in the early 20th century and had a daughter: Mildred Martinez, the pope’s mother.
The discovery means that Leo XIV, as the pope will be known, is not only breaking ground as the first U.S.-born pontiff. He also comes from a family that reflects the many threads that make up the complicated and rich fabric of the American story.
The link is a gift article so feel free to open it and read about the genealogical research.
After Trump introduced Elon Musk and his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” several Republican-controlled states created their own DOGE operations. Like the one Musk launched, these were non-governmental, unelected, unaccountable cost-cutters, set loose to apply a chainsaw to state government.
John Thompson reports on what happened in Oklahoma.
CBS’s Sixty Minutes recently reported on the danger of H5N1 bird flu spinning out of control. It cited Dr. Kamran Khan who explained why “We are really at risk of this virus evolving into one that has pandemic potential.” Another expert agreed that “this flu could make Covid look like a walk in the park.”
And this is only one reason for looking into the DOGE–OK process.
Anyone paying attention to Elon Musk’s leadership of the Trump administration’s DOGE campaign to cut federal programs has reason the fear the DOGE campaigns launched in 26 states. After all, as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) explains, when Governor Kevin Stitt opened Oklahoma’s DOGE-OK, he called for a reduction in our personal income and corporate tax rates, thus making the state’s tax code even more regressive.
The EPI further explained that Stitt selected Marc Nuttle, “who was the ‘chief strategist’ behind Oklahoma’s 2001 so-called right-to-work referendum—a policy designed to disempower workers and lower wages (and contrary to proponents’ claims, it did not bolster job growth in the state).” The executive order empowered Nuttle to lead efforts of a newly formed agency to study the state budget.
Moreover, the EPI explains:
DOGE-OK is itself duplicative since the Office of the State Auditor and Inspector is constitutionally mandated to “examine the state and all county treasurers’ books, accounts, and cash on hand, stipulating that [the office] shall perform other duties as may be prescribed by law.” Similar to DOGE-OK, the auditor reviews staffing levels, assesses state spending, and issues public reports to promote transparency.
Once DOGE-OK ideas are received, they are analyzed and vetted with the appropriate group. If validated, ideas are added to the DOGE-OK website.
But, when I studied the report, I found no sign of hard evidence to back its claims. For instance, they didn’t explain their methodology, and offered no cost/benefit analyses. DOGE didn’t explain what “groups” it considered to be “appropriate,” and what data was used to analyze and vet, and validate their ideas.
Since the first DOGE headlines focused on $157 million in supposedly “wasteful health grants” by the federal government, I focused on Medicaid and Department of Health cuts.
First, DOGE-OK claimed that $60 million per year would be saved if the state, not the federal government, performed eligibility checks on children. And, they cited two drugs that received accelerated approval without working, costing $42 million. But, they did not mention the number and the benefits of the other drugs, like the Covid vaccine, that received accelerated approval.
Also, DOGE-OK inexplicably said that easing the prescription drug cost cap would improve prices. And they recommended repeal of staffing requirements for Long-Term Care facilities in order to save $76 million annually, without mentioning harm to elderly patients due to under-staffing.
DOGE-OK also said that three Oklahoma State Department of Health programs should be cut by almost $150 million because their funding exceeded the amount necessary. As already mentioned, in the wake of Covid pandemic, and as measles and bird flu spread, these programs provide immunization services, pathogens surveillance, and emerging infectious diseases prevention, etc. So, how did DOGE reach the conclusion that the full funding of those programs is no longer necessary?
Then, DOGE-OK said that 7 programs should have cuts because of “duplication,” with partners doing the same or similar work. They said $2.2 million would be saved by getting rid of the team efforts necessary to improve health.
And Sex Education should be cut by $236,000 because of its low Return on Investment.
Again, I saw no evidence behind their recommendations for $157,606,300 in overall health care reductions. Neither did they address financial costs of implementing their ideas. And, there is no evidence that DOGE seriously considered the costs in terms of the lives that would be damaged or lost.
Given the history of the Trump/Musk DOGE, none of the DOGE–OK should be a surprise. When Gov. Stitt selected Nuttle, a true-believer in Milton Friedman, to run the project, Stitt said, “With his help, we’ll leave state government leaner than we found it.”
Is that the proper way to launch a supposedly balanced and evidence-driven investigation of such complex and crucial policy approaches?
Stitt’s news release previewed Nuttle’s methodology: “use his knowledge of the inner workings of government to comb through agency budgets, legislative appropriations, and contracts.”
So, to paraphrase the DOGE-OK report’s description of its methodology, its proposals would be “analyzed and vetted” by what they see as the “appropriate group.”
In other words, Oklahomans were never promised an open, balanced, evidence-based DOGE process for making our state better. But the same is also true for Musk’s federal DOGE chainsaw.
Two years ago, I was ready to give up everything from my old life and move 3,000 miles away to pursue journalism at San Diego State University. This meant leaving behind my friends, family and my passion for singing and performance. I was sure I would have to leave behind my musical side to focus on my academics, take on a campus job and join the student newspaper.
Or did I?
I have been singing almost my entire life, and did so anywhere I could. The first evidence comes from a 2007 video, where 3-year-old me danced around my living room singing “I’m Wishing” from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” A few years later, I took the hobby from my living room to the stage. I joined the school choir and began performing in local productions.
From then until my high school graduation in 2022, there was not a month that went by where I wasn’t in a show, choir or dance class.
Music and theater were always my favorite hobbies, but not something I saw myself pursuing as a career. I decided to study journalism in college after discovering my passion for it during my senior year of high school.
But after dedicating countless hours of my life to performance, how could I leave all that behind in pursuit of my degree?
Luckily, I didn’t have to.
Performing served me so well during my time in high school, allowing me to form lifelong friendships and escape from my other endeavors, so I decided to take the risk and blend my old life into my new college one. I soon found the a cappella group I wanted to join: SoundWave.
I had never done a cappella before, but I wanted to give it a shot. Once I had settled into my first week of freshman year, I signed up to audition and was welcomed into a wonderful community.
Unfortunately, the rest of my first semester at university did not go so smoothly. I was in a rough living situation at my dorm and had trouble making friends. Every day, I wanted nothing more than to transfer home.
But when I went to rehearsal, I left those troubles at the door and found solace in a community that valued every single one of its members. At the time, I had wished that we had rehearsal every day.
Now in my third year of college, and feeling more settled, I am grateful that my SoundWave commitment is flexible, allowing time for my academics and outside endeavors, such as work and an internship.
I believe in the importance of career-focused pursuits. As a journalism major, I report and write for my college newspaper, The Daily Aztec, and am part of the leadership for our Society of Professional Journalists chapter.
However, I also believe in the importance of joining clubs that exist outside your academic realm. Not only do such activities make you stand out to potential employers, but they are also a great way to meet people with similar interests.
Jacob Opatz, a fourth-year computer science major who currently serves as the president of SoundWave, agrees.
“People always cite the studies that say ‘music is good for your brain,’ but on a deeper level, having a community on campus and working towards a creative goal is so important for my mental health,” he said. “Also, since my major is computer science, I’m desperate to find something creative and fun to break up my otherwise boring schedule.”
Extracurricular activities in grade schools have been proven to improve optimism and lower depression and screen time, according to a 2020 study by Preventative Medicine.
As a college student, I am on my laptop for at least eight hours a day. When I’m not on my laptop, I’m usually on my phone scrolling social media.
Rehearsal gets me to put the screen down and create something with the people around me.
We rehearse two days a week. Members are also expected to practice on their own each day. However, the competition season is more hectic. In the months leading up to the quarterfinals for the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella, our two-hour rehearsals turn into three.
New member and third-year psychology major Lexy Sakrekoff has had to make some sacrifices to be in the group.
“I used to go home more on the weekends to visit my mom in Oceanside, but now I avoid that because of our Sunday rehearsals,” she said.
However, Sakrekoff says the sacrifice is worth it.
“It helps that [my friends and family] are also super supportive and excited that I’m in SoundWave. I even rehearse my songs in front of them, and that’s always fun for them to listen to,” she said. There have definitely been times when I was up late doing homework after rehearsal or had to cut down my work hours due to performances. But despite my junior year being the busiest so far, SoundWave has always felt like a vital outlet rather than an obligation.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
