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  • Florida Judge Strikes Down Part of Book Banning Law

    Florida Judge Strikes Down Part of Book Banning Law


    Since Governor Ron DeSantis got his “Don’t Say Gay” law in 2023, Florida has led the nation in book banning. That nefarious activity is currently on hold because a federal judge struck down DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.

    Anytime a book banning law gets knocked down, we should celebrate a victory for the freedom to read. Another court, higher-up, may overturn the decision, but for now it’s good news.

    Stephany Matt of the Palm Beach Post reported:

    A federal judge has struck a blow against Florida’s book bans, ruling that part of a DeSantis-backed law used to sweep classics and modern novels off school shelves is so vague that it’s unconstitutional.

    U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza of the Middle District of Florida focused on the portion of the law that prevents books that “describes sexual conduct” in his Aug. 13 order, saying it’s “unclear what the statute actually prohibits” and to what detail of sexual conduct is prohibited.

    The statute (HB 1069) was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023, and it’s been used to remove thousands of books from Florida’s school library shelves.

    Mendoza drew concern with classical literature and more modern works such as “The Handmaid’s Tale,” among 23 books removed from Orange County and Volusia County schools.

    To defend book removals, DeSantis and state officials have pointed to “government speech,” a legal doctrine that the government has the right to promote its own views without being required to provide equal time or a platform for opposing views.

    Mendoza disagreed.

    “A blanket content-based prohibition on materials, rather than one based on individualized curation, hardly expresses any intentional government message at all,” he said. “Slapping the label of government speech on book removals only serves to stifle the disfavored viewpoints.”

    The judge’s order is a win for Penguin Random House and five other publishers, the Authors Guild, two parents and authors Julia Alvarez, John Green, Angie Thomas, Laurie Halse Anderson and Jodi Picoult. Green is famous for his books “Looking for Alaska” and “Paper Towns,” both of which were mentioned in the order.

    Penguin Random House is “elated” that the federal judge upheld First Amendment protections for students, educators, authors and publishers, and that books may only be removed if they lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” when considered, said Dan Novack, vice president and associate general counsel of Penguin Random House.

    “This is a sweeping victory for the right to read, and for every student’s freedom to think, learn, and explore ideas,” Novack said in a statement…

    The judge’s order does not cast down all of the law, which restricts teachers from using preferred pronouns in schools outside their assigned sex at birth and expedites a process for people to object to reading materials and books in schools..



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  • Heather Cox Richardson: Everything You Need to Know About Immigration Law

    Heather Cox Richardson: Everything You Need to Know About Immigration Law


    Before he was elected President, John F. Kennedy published a book titled “A Nation of Immigrants.” He celebrated the fact that his family was descended from Irish immigrants, and almost every one else (excluding native Americans) was descended from immigrants. At the time, our immigrant heritage was widely acknowledged. Most celebrated their heritage, others embraced America because it rescued them from tyrannies.

    Today, thanks to Donald Trump, we live in an era where immigrants are treated as invaders and enemies. He wants to deport millions of them and has even hinted that he has the power to expel American citizens, even to strip them of their citizenship.

    Heather Cox Richardson points out that the American people do not share his visceral hatred for immigrants.

    Trump appointees insist they have a “mandate” to drive undocumented immigrants out of the U.S. and prevent new immigrants from coming in, and are launching a massive increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and detention facilities to do so. But a poll released Friday shows that only 35% of American adults approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 62% disapprove.

    The poll shows a record 79% of adults saying immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad. Only 30% of American adults say immigration should be reduced.

    The poll shows that 85% of American adults want laws to allow “immigrants, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.” Seventy-eight percent of American adults want the law to allow “immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.” Only 38% want the government to deport “all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country.”

    The poll shows Americans eager to fix a problem that stems from a bipartisan 1965 law that reworked America’s immigration laws.

    In 1924, during a period of opposition to immigration that fueled the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Congress had passed the nation’s first comprehensive immigration law. That law, known as the Johnson-Reed Act, limited immigration according to quotas assigned to each country. Those quotas were heavily weighted toward western Europe, virtually prohibiting immigration from Asia and Africa and dramatically curtailing it from southern Europe.

    The Johnson-Reed Act simply taxed workers coming to the U.S. from Mexico, because from the time the current border was set in 1848 until the 1930s, people moved back and forth across it. Laborers in particular came from Mexico to work for the huge American agribusinesses that dominate the agricultural sector, especially after 1907 when the Japanese workers who had been taking over those jobs were unofficially kept out of the country by the so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” Later, during World War I, the government encouraged immigration to help increase production.

    The Depression, when the bottom fell out of the economy, coupled with the Dust Bowl, when the bottom fell out of the western plains, made destitute white Americans turn on Mexican migrants (as well as on their poor white neighbors, as John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath). The government rounded up Mexicans and shipped them back over the border.

    World War II created another shortage of laborers, and to regularize the system of migrant labor, the U.S. government in 1942 started a guest worker policy called the Bracero Program that ultimately brought more than 4 million Mexican workers to the U.S. The program was supposed to guarantee that migrant workers were well treated and adequately paid and housed. But it didn’t work out that way. Employers hired illegal as well as legal workers and treated them poorly. American workers complained about competition.

    President Dwight D. Eisenhower returned about a million illegal workers in 1954 under “Operation Wetback,” only to have officials readmit most of them as braceros. Under pressure both from labor and from reformers who recognized that the system was exploitative at the same time that mechanization began replacing workers, President John F. Kennedy initiated the process that ended the Bracero Program in 1964. In 1965 the government tried to replace migrant labor with American high school students, but the “A-TEAM” project—“Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower”—failed.

    The end of the Bracero program coincided with congressional reworking of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. In the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, Congress wanted to end the racial quota system of immigration and replace it with one that did not so obviously discriminate against Asia and Africa. In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, or the Hart-Celler Act. It opened immigration to all nations, setting a general cap on total immigration levels.

    But southern congressmen, appalled at the idea of Black immigration, introduced a provision that privileged family migration, arguing that “family unification” should be the nation’s top priority. They expected that old-stock immigrants from western Europe would use the provision to bring over their relatives, which would keep the effect of the 1924 law without the statute. But their provision had the opposite effect. It was new immigrants who wanted to bring their families, not old ones. So immigration began to skew heavily toward Asia and Latin America.

    At the same time, Hart-Celler put a cap on immigrants from Mexico just as the guest worker program ended. The cap was low: 20,000, although 50,000 workers were coming annually at that point, and American agribusiness depended on migrant labor. Workers continued to come as they always had, and to be employed, as always. But now their presence was illegal.

    In 1986, Congress tried to fix the problem of border security between the U.S. and Mexico by offering amnesty to 2.3 million Mexicans who were living in the United States and by cracking down on employers who hired undocumented workers. But rather than ending the problem of undocumented workers, the new law exacerbated it by beginning the process of guarding and militarizing the border. Until then, migrants into the United States had been offset by an equal number leaving at the end of the season. Once the border became heavily guarded, Mexican migrants refused to take the chance of leaving.

    Since 1986, U.S. politicians have refused to deal with this disconnect, which grew in the 1990s when the North American Free Trade Agreement flooded Mexico with U.S. corn and drove Mexican farmers to find work, largely in the American Southeast. But by 2007, as Mexico’s economy stabilized and after U.S. border enforcement tightened significantly under President Bill Clinton, more Mexican immigrants were leaving the U.S. than coming.

    Between 2007 and 2017, the U.S. saw a net loss of about 2 million Mexican immigrants. In 2017 about 5 million undocumented Mexicans lived in the United States; most of them—83%—were long-term residents, here more than ten years. Only 8% had lived in the U.S. for less than five years. Increasingly, undocumented immigrants were people from around the world who overstayed legal visas, making up more than 40% of the country’s undocumented population by 2024.

    In 2013 the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform measure by a bipartisan vote of 68 to 32. The measure provided a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and increased border security. It also proposed to increase visas for immigrant workers. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the measure would reduce the federal deficit by $197 billion over 10 years and $700 billion over 20 years.

    The measure had passed the Senate by a wide margin and was popular with the public. It was expected to pass the House. But then–House speaker John Boehner (R-OH) refused to bring the measure up before the chamber, saying it did not have the support of a majority of Republicans.

    About that time, undocumented migration across the southern border was changing. By 2014, people were arriving at the U.S. border from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, where violence that approached warfare—much of it caused by gangs whose members had been socialized into gang culture in the U.S.—and economic stress from that violence created refugees. These migrants were not coming over the border for economic opportunity; they were refugees applying for asylum—a legal process in the United States.

    Before the 2014 midterm elections, Republicans highlighted the new migrants at the southern border, although immigration numbers remained relatively stable. They also highlighted the death from the Ebola virus of a Liberian visitor to the U.S. and the infection of two of his nurses. They attacked the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama for downplaying the danger of the disease to the U.S. public and suggested foreigners should be kept out of the U.S. (In fact, the only Americans who contracted the virus in the U.S. were the two nurses who treated the Liberian visitor.)

    Despite his own history of using undocumented workers at his properties, Trump followed this practice of using immigration against the Democratic administration for political points, launching his presidential campaign in 2015 by claiming Mexico was sending “people that have lots of problems…. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He promised mass deportation and to build a wall across the southern border and make Mexico pay for it.

    In fact, Trump’s administration deported significantly fewer undocumented immigrants than Obama’s had, at least in part because Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Obama focused on deporting those who had been convicted of crimes, a much easier deportation process than that for immigrants without convictions. But it was still legal to apply for asylum in the U.S., a fact MAGA Republicans opposed as they embraced the “Great Replacement” theory: the idea that immigration destroys a nation’s culture and identity.

    The covid pandemic enabled the Trump administration in March 2020 to close the border and turn back asylum seekers under an emergency health authority known as Title 42, which can be invoked to keep out illness. Title 42 overrode the right to request asylum. But it also took away the legal consequences for trying to cross the border illegally, meaning migrants tried repeatedly, driving up the numbers of border encounters between U.S. agents and migrants and increasing the number of successful attempts from about 10,000–15,000 per month to a peak of more than 85,000.

    Title 42 was still in effect in January 2021, when President Joe Biden took office. Immediately, Biden sent an immigration bill to Congress to modernize and fund immigration processes, including border enforcement and immigration courts—which had backlogs of more than 1.6 million people whose cases took an average of five years to get decided—and provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

    His request got nowhere as MAGA Republicans demanded the continuation of Title 42 as a

    general immigration measure to keep out migrants and accused Biden of wanting “open borders.” But Title 42 is an emergency public health authority, and when the administration declared the covid emergency over in May 2023, the rule no longer applied.

    In the meantime, migrants had surged to the border, driven from their home countries or countries to which they had previously moved by the slow economic recoveries of those countries after the worst of the pandemic. The booming U.S. economy pulled them north. To move desperately needed migrants into the U.S. workforce, Biden extended temporary protected status to about 472,000 Venezuelans who were in the U.S. before July 31, 2023. The Biden administration also expanded temporary humanitarian admissions for people from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua.

    Then, in October 2023, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) injected the idea of an immigration bill back into the political discussion when he tried to stop the passage of a national security measure that would provide aid to Ukraine. He said the House would not consider the Senate’s measure unless it contained a border security package. Eager to pass a measure to aid Ukraine, the Senate took him at his word, and a bipartisan group of senators spent the next several months hammering out an immigration bill that was similar to Title 42.

    The Senate passed the measure with a bipartisan vote, but under pressure from Trump, who wanted to preserve the issue of immigration for his 2024 campaign, Johnson declared it “dead on arrival” when it reached the House in February 2024. “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill,” Trump posted about the measure.

    And then Trump hammered hard on the demonization of immigrants. He lied that Aurora, Colorado, was a “war zone” that had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs—Aurora’s Republican mayor and police chief said this wasn’t true—and that Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” A Gallup poll released Friday shows the MAGA attacks on immigration worked: in 2024, 55% of American adults wanted fewer immigrants in the country.

    Trump was reelected in part because of his promise to strengthen border security, but now his administration is using attacks on immigrants to impose a police state. As Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng reported Saturday in Rolling Stone, the administration is fighting to impose its will on wrongly-deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it rendered to a terrorist prison in El Salvador, because if they are forced to back down, “it could set a precedent that opens the floodgates to other legal challenges” to Trump’s other executive power grabs.

    “The last thing you want to do here is contribute to a domino effect of decisions where suddenly you’re admitting you’re wrong about everything,” a close Trump advisor told the reporters. “That is why you gotta stand your ground on everything against the left, including on the [Abrego Garcia] situation.”

    But it appears the American people simply want to fix a sixty-year-old mistake in the nation’s immigration laws.



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  • Teachers of recently arrived immigrant students to get help under new law

    Teachers of recently arrived immigrant students to get help under new law


    Oakland International High math teacher David Hansen teaches newcomer immigrant students fractions using the game of checkers.

    Theresa Harrington/EdSource

    As soon as Jenna Hewitt King asked students in her senior English class for newcomers to introduce themselves, she knew she was in over her head.

    “I saw this look of fear in their faces, like, ‘What? I have to talk out loud?’ There was a lot of whispering in their home language,” said King, who also wrote a commentary about the experience for EdSource. “We were both looking at each other like deer in headlights and you could sense this was not something that any of us were prepared for.”

    A bill signed over the weekend by Gov. Gavin Newsom, Assembly Bill 714, will begin to provide much-needed guidance and data for teachers like King, who often don’t have training or experience in how to teach newcomer students — defined as students between 3 and 21 years old who were born in other countries and have attended school in the U.S. for fewer than three years.

    King had expected to be able to teach the class in a way similar to how she teaches other senior English classes at San Leandro High School in Alameda County. Those students read three novels over the course of the year and write multiple essays.

    But the students in her newcomer class had recently arrived from other countries and did not know much English. Most of them spoke Spanish, and a few spoke Mandarin or Cantonese.

    King speaks only English and had no experience or training in teaching English language development to students learning English as a second language, let alone students new to the country.

    “I was just ridiculously ill-prepared. Teaching English in high school, we don’t teach phonics, we don’t teach language in the immense detail that elementary or English learner teachers do,” King said. “Most of last school year was me running around like a crazy person asking ELD teachers on campus, ‘What am I doing? What can you share with me?’”

    King’s experience is not an isolated one. Researchers and educators who work with teachers throughout California say it is common for teachers of newcomer students to feel unprepared.

    “What happens is that they’re basically thrown into the classroom and it’s either sink or swim,” said Efraín Tovar, who teaches seventh and eighth grade newcomer students at Abraham Lincoln Middle School in Selma Unified School District in the Central Valley and is also founder and director of the California Newcomer Network.

    Tovar said most school districts, charter schools and county offices of education do not have experts in teaching newcomers.

    Assembly Bill 714 will require the California Department of Education to put together a list of resources on best practices and requirements for teaching newcomer students. In addition, the law requires the state to consider including content on newcomers in the next revision of the English Language Arts and English Language Development curriculum framework and to include resources on newcomer students in any new instructional materials for grades one to eight.

    “As a teacher, I’m excited. It’s historic. It’s a light. It’s hope,” Tovar said. “Finally, newcomers are being brought to the forefront.”

    The bill also requires the state’s Department of Education to report the number of newcomer students enrolled and their countries of origin. There were about 152,000 newcomer students enrolled in California schools in 2020-21, according to data obtained from the state by Californians Together, but this data is not readily available to the public.

    Separating data on newcomers from other English learners is important, said Jeannie Myung, director of policy research at Policy Analysis for California Education, or PACE, an independent research center at Stanford University that focuses on education.

    “We know that what we don’t measure, we don’t really understand, and what we don’t understand, we can’t really improve,” Myung said.

    The bill originally would have also required the department to report newcomers’ scores on standardized tests, to be able to compare them to other groups of English learners. But that requirement was removed from the final version of the legislation.

    In 2021 and 2022, PACE brought together leaders from California’s departments of Education and Social Services, the Legislature, school districts and universities to discuss how to improve newcomer education, resulting in six reports on newcomers in the state.

    Myung said there is expertise and knowledge about how to best teach newcomers, and how it is different from teaching other English learners, but that information is not reaching most teachers.

    “California’s a local control state, and local control is often good in decision-making. But local control shouldn’t mean that every teacher in every classroom is repeating the wheel when it comes to how to educate newcomer students,” Myung said.

    Myung said an example of best practices is materials created for older newcomer students. Most texts available for English learners are created for younger students, but many newcomers are often teenagers, who would find a picture book about playing with a toy too juvenile. They need access to materials that are at their level of English but also deal with content at their age level, she said.

    In addition, teachers need to know how to help students who speak different home languages talk to each other in English.

    In King’s class at San Leandro High, she relied on Google Translate to communicate with her students. After realizing her students would not be able to read the novels she had planned for other seniors, she scrambled to find other materials. She found one novel written in short poetry with pictures, and she had her students watch a movie version of another novel and then read short excerpts of it rather than the whole text. This year, she is using some books in students’ home languages, but she is still struggling to figure out how to facilitate discussion between them.

    “If you can imagine having a group of newcomers where you have three, four, five, maybe up to eight languages represented in your classroom, that requires a special skill set,” Tovar said.

    Newcomer students also need support understanding their new communities in the U.S. and how they fit into them, said Magaly Lavadenz, executive director of the Center for Equity for English Learners at Loyola Marymount University.

    “It’s not just about teaching them to learn English better, but how to better integrate into society and be a fully participatory citizen,” Lavadenz said.

    Lavadenz said it is crucial for schools to help newcomer students and families access social services they may need, like food, housing and mental health therapy.

    As a teacher in Glendale Unified in the early 1990s, Lavadenz said she saw many students who had fled war in Central America draw pictures of the violence they had witnessed. She saw that again while conducting a case study of San Juan Unified’s newcomer program, published by PACE. She said children were asked to draw the flags of their countries and one boy from Afghanistan described his drawing by saying, “Red is the color of blood spilling on the streets.”

    “These are things that children should not see, that we should not see as adults. They’re seeing this and they’re experiencing this, and those images stay with them,” Lavadenz said. “That experience opened my eyes about what the effects of trauma are on young children and how schools could be more ready.”

    King said AB 714 is a small but good step forward.

    “I still haven’t received any additional training,” she said. “Each time I ask, I’m told, ‘Yeah, find a training.’ I don’t know where to go or what to do.”





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  • Community college students can take classes in their native language under a new law

    Community college students can take classes in their native language under a new law


    Tina Chen, who is taking computer science courses taught in Mandarin at East Los Angeles College, speaks at a recent press conference for Assembly Bill 1096.

    Courtesy of Ludwig Rodriguez

    Hoping to entice more non-English speakers to enroll in community college, California is making it easier for those students to take courses in their native language.

    Currently, students in California can take community college classes taught in languages other than English only if they simultaneously enroll in English as a Second Language courses. 

    That’s about to change, thanks to Assembly Bill 1096, which was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and is set to take effect Jan. 1. The law will allow community colleges to offer courses in languages other than English without requiring students to enroll in ESL. 

    Community college officials think the bill could be a game-changer for potential students who might otherwise have been discouraged from enrolling or staying in college because of the ESL requirement. Some students have called that requirement a burden because of the extra time commitment.

    “We hope that this will create a pipeline for individuals to engage in community college,” said Gabriel Buelna, a member of the Los Angeles Community College District’s board of trustees and supporter of the bill. 

    “In a world of lower enrollment, do you want more Californians at your community college? Or do you not want more Californians at your community college?” he said, referring to enrollment declines that community colleges suffered during the pandemic. 

    There’s already some evidence that the new landscape will make a difference. The Los Angeles college district launched a pilot program this year offering courses in non-English languages and gave students the ability to opt out of enrolling in ESL. The program offered 60 classes this spring in four languages — Spanish, Mandarin, Russian and Korean. More than 1,000 students enrolled, almost half of them first-time community college students.

    This fall, the district is expanding the program to 86 classes, including child development, business and computer literacy.

    Before the pilot launched, the district surveyed students and found that 25% cited English proficiency as a barrier to their educational goals.  

    “We’ve uncovered that there’s this hidden group of individuals that have missed out on higher education opportunities,” said Nicole Albo-Lopez, the district’s vice chancellor for educational programs and institutional effectiveness.

    It’s unclear how many colleges across the state will begin offering more classes in non-English languages when the law goes into effect next year. But several community college districts endorsed the bill, including Foothill-De Anza, Long Beach and San Diego. And in a state where 44% of households speak a primary language other than English, officials expect there will be interest among prospective students across California.

    In the Los Angeles pilot, almost all the courses offered were in noncredit classes focused on job training, including in automotive repair, child care and health care services. The new law, however, will apply to both noncredit and credit courses.

    For Tina Chen, taking computer science classes at East Los Angeles College in her native language of Mandarin has made a challenging subject more accessible.

    Chen’s goal is to eventually transfer to UCLA and enter into a career in artificial intelligence, but computers are new for her, and the course material can be challenging. Being able to learn in her native language, though, has provided a solid foundation.

    “It makes it easier. I can understand my teacher who speaks to me and my classmates,” she said.

    Carmen Ramirez has also taken advantage of the classes offered at East LA College and enrolled in basic skills courses this year that are taught in Spanish. 

    Ramirez is from Guadalajara, Mexico, where she previously took college courses while pursuing a degree in psychology. She didn’t finish that degree because of economic reasons, she said, and later moved to Los Angeles.

    Taking classes in Spanish “is a great way to be able to come back and renew my studies,” she said through a translator. “It’s more comfortable and lets me learn better.” Ramirez added that native language courses may also be more welcoming to undocumented students and make it more likely that they enroll.

    After she’s completed her basic skills courses, Ramirez wants to start taking classes toward a credential or certification. She’s not sure yet what career she wants to pursue, but knows she wants to enter a field that allows her to help other people. 

    Even though the law won’t require it, Ramirez still plans to eventually take ESL courses because she sees learning English as an important skill that will benefit her career. Research backs up that premise: A 2022 report by the Public Policy Institute noted a link between English proficiency and access to high-wage jobs. 

    Buelna, the Los Angeles trustee, said he expects many students to follow a path similar to Ramirez’s and enroll in ESL even though they won’t be forced to do so. 

    “I think this law will actually increase English acquisition,” he said. “Once you get folks in an institution, and you get that curiosity going, they’re going to say, ‘Well, I do need to learn English.’”

    Buelna added that the most important factor is that more students get an education and develop new skills — regardless of whether they’re learning English.

    “Why does it matter so much that someone learn about caring for the elderly or phlebotomy in a specific language?” he said. “Do you want them to have the skill or not? What’s more important?”





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  • Trump’s law reshapes federal loans and Pell Grants, impacting California students

    Trump’s law reshapes federal loans and Pell Grants, impacting California students


    UC Berkeley students stroll around campus near the landmark Sather Gate on April 19, 2017.

    Photos by Alison Yin for EdSource

    Top Takeaways
    • The law blocks graduate students from taking out new Grad PLUS loans and caps Parent PLUS loans starting in 2026.
    • To maintain access to federal student loans, academic programs must soon show alumni earn more than peers without the same degree. 
    • The law expands Pell Grants to short-term workforce training and nixes an earlier proposal that likely would have reduced aid to many Pell recipients.

    The domestic policy law signed by President Donald Trump will have major implications on how students in California and across the country pay for college, with analysts describing it as the most consequential federal higher education legislation in decades.

    The most significant changes will impact access to federal loans and borrower repayment plans. The law also amends Pell Grant eligibility standards, expands qualified expenses for 529 college savings accounts, and is expected to raise the endowment tax on a few private universities, including Stanford. 

    Republican lawmakers say their suite of higher education policies aims to make college more affordable and reel in student debt while broadening access to career and technical education. Critics warn the package’s financial aid measures will do just the opposite, making higher education more expensive for low- and moderate-income students.

    “This is the biggest set of changes to higher education policy in America since at least 1992,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, noting that the Higher Education Act hasn’t been reauthorized since 2008. “In this reconciliation bill, there are effectively pieces of legislation that congressional Republicans have been working on for years.”

    The Grad PLUS program will stop accepting new borrowers

    The federal Grad PLUS program, loans which make it possible for graduate students to borrow up to the cost of attendance minus other financial aid, will stop accepting borrowers this time next year. Current borrowers, however, will be grandfathered in and allowed to continue accessing those loans.

    Graduate students will still have access to direct unsubsidized federal loans, but the bill caps those at $50,000 per year for students in professional programs, such as those studying to become lawyers or doctors, and most other graduate degrees at $20,500 per year. 

    The changes will reduce access to graduate school, particularly for low-income students who don’t have other funding options, said Melanie Storey, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, a nonprofit membership organization representing financial aid professionals at colleges across the country. “Very capable students who come from more modest backgrounds may be unwilling to pursue graduate or professional education.”

    Some of those students may borrow from private lenders, but those loans “won’t come with the same kinds of terms and conditions and protections that a federal loan has,” she added.

    The University of Southern California may be hit particularly hard by the loss of those PLUS loans. “They have so many graduate programs, and they have a lot of students who do not get financial aid,” Kelchen said.

    The Grad PLUS program disbursed about $2 billion to students at California colleges and universities in the 2023-24 school year, federal data shows.

    Lower caps on Parent PLUS loans will limit borrowing

    Under the federal Parent PLUS loan program, parents used to have the ability to borrow up to the total cost of a student’s college education. A new cap starting July 2026 will limit borrowers to $20,000 per year and a lifetime maximum of $65,000 per student. Supporters argue that borrowing limits will slow rising tuition. 

    Parent PLUS loans have been “the loans of last resort” for students whose parents don’t qualify for private loans because of their credit, Kelchen said, so reducing the borrowing limit may hit students with substantial financial need the hardest. A brief by the Education Trust characterized them as “a double-edged sword for Black borrowers” in particular, who tend to have fewer resources to pay for college due to long-standing inequities in wealth and income.

    Capping the Parent PLUS program will likely either “discourage students from attending college or limit their choices,” Storey said. 

    Institutions will need to get creative to ensure low-income and first-generation students can continue enrolling, said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education. 

    “It’s hard to say that institutions will just find a way to make up the difference and will offer more institutional aid for low-income students to help them be able to cover the cost,” he said.

    Former students’ earnings will determine loan access

    The reconciliation bill puts postsecondary programs to a new test: In order to access federal student loans, alumni must earn more than peers who didn’t study for the same degree. 

    Congressional Republicans say the idea is to hold colleges and universities accountable for what alumni ultimately earn when they join the workforce. Loosely, for a given field of study, an undergraduate degree program can continue accessing federal loans if the median earnings of former students exceed the median earnings of high school graduates in the same state. Graduate programs maintain access to federal loans by comparing former students to similarly situated bachelor’s degree holders.

    “It’s a really significant step towards the kind of focus on educational outcomes that we have seen both Republicans and Democrats talk about in recent years,” said Clare McCann, policy director at the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research Center. But McCann said it’s problematic that the measure doesn’t apply a similar standard to undergraduate certificate programs. 

    An analysis by Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, found that many associate degree programs could lose access to student loans, although associate degree students may be less likely to finance their educations in the first place. 

    “The promise of a lot of these programs is that you shouldn’t have to borrow,” Cooper said. “I kind of think that if these programs do have earnings outcomes that are so low, we probably shouldn’t be giving students loans for those programs, because it’s very unlikely that they’ll be able to repay their loans in full.”

    SAVE, other repayment plans will close to new borrowers

    The repayment terms will also change, reducing the number of plan choices to just two: a standard repayment plan and the Repayment Assistance Plan, which ties payment size to the borrower’s income. Supporters argue that doing so simplifies the options available to borrowers while putting them on a path to repay loan balances in full. 

    Most existing income-driven plans will later close to new borrowers, including the popular Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, a Biden administration initiative aimed at lowering monthly payments. In California, about 600,000 borrowers are enrolled in the SAVE plan, according to the Student Borrower Protection Center.

    “For most borrowers, their payments will be drastically more expensive on a monthly and annual basis,” said Aissa Canchola Bañez, policy director of the Student Borrower Protection Center. 

    Loan deferments for economic hardship will be eliminated, and new limits will be placed on forbearance.

    Lawmakers nixed a Pell proposal that worried colleges

    The version of the reconciliation bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives would have increased academic credit requirements per semester to be considered a part-time or full-time student under the Pell Grant program. That proposal sparked concern among officials at California State University and the University of California that tens of thousands of their students would receive less money from Pell — or would lose eligibility altogether because they don’t take enough classes each term. 

    The universities may now breathe a sigh of relief: The final law makes more incremental adjustments to Pell, such as making students who receive full scholarships from other sources ineligible for Pell.

    Students can use Pell for short-term workforce training

    Starting in July 2026, Pell Grant recipients will be able to spend their awards on educational programs that last more than eight but less than 15 weeks at accredited institutions. Supporters of extending Pell to shorter programs say doing so will make educational programs more accessible to adult students who are already in the workforce.

    Kelchen said workforce Pell Grants have gained traction among a broad spectrum of policymakers due to frustration regarding the value of a college degree. “The goal is, by trying to encourage short-term credentials, you get people in through [an educational program] fast and back out into the economy,” he said. 

    But some are skeptical about the return on investment of weeks-long credential programs. Wesley Whistle, a project director who monitors higher education policy at the left-leaning think tank New America, said student earnings after completing short-term certificate programs “aren’t good on average” and that even when they do boost earnings, the positive effect “tends to fade after a year or two.” Researchers with the Institute of Education Sciences reported similar findings.

    Families with 529 plans will have more spending options

    The law also makes several changes to 529 plans, investment accounts typically used to save money for college, in which earnings are tax-deferred and withdrawals for qualified educational expenses are tax-exempt. The new law, starting in 2026, adds items including tutoring, standardized testing fees and some educational therapies to the list of qualified expenses while students are in K-12. After high school, the law also allows funds to be used for some professional credentials, not just college. 

    Researchers at the Brookings Institution have found that 529 plans mainly benefit wealthy families while costing the federal government billions in tax revenue. “Low-income people don’t have enough money to be able to save in this way,” McCann said.

    In California, the state’s 529 plan — ScholarShare 529 — managed more than $15.6 billion in more than 439,000 accounts as of June 2024. 

    A few selective universities will see an endowment tax hike 

    Critics, including the American Council on Education, have also warned that another provision of the law — increasing the endowment tax at a relatively small number of private universities from 1.4% to as much as 8% — could indirectly reduce the institutional financial aid available to their students. However, proponents argue that elite colleges hoard wealth while charging students exorbitant tuition. Based on their current endowment-to-student ratios, Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology would likely be among the universities to see a tax increase, while the University of Southern California, with its much larger student body, would probably be exempt.





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  • What Trump’s budget and tax law means for California students

    What Trump’s budget and tax law means for California students


    Students at Wilson Elementary School in Selma participate in mental health awareness activities on May 24, 2023. Students are seen trying toys that can be used as coping mechanisms.

    Credit: Kristy Rangel

    Top Takeaways
    • Cuts to social safety net programs for the United States’ poorest will partly offset the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts weighted toward the wealthy.
    • $170 billion to immigration enforcement likely to harm student mental health, research shows.
    • Up to 151,000 children could lose health care in California, though advocates say the number is likely higher, as cuts may impact school-based health services.

    Hundreds of thousands of California’s low-income children and their families will likely see federally funded food support and health care shrink or vanish in the coming years under the mammoth budget and tax law that President Donald Trump rammed through a divided Congress and signed last week.

    Education cuts to come

    The $12 billion in cuts to K-12 schools and colleges that Trump proposed in May and the related $6.2 billion in federal funding that he ordered withheld from schools last week are not connected to the tax and budget bill that Congress just passed. They are the next target of Trump’s plan to hollow out funding for public education.

    The $12 billion cut — about 15% of what the U.S. Department of Education last appropriated for schools and universities — would take effect on Oct. 1, the start of the 2026 federal fiscal year. Trump’s plan would kill funding for educating migrant children and English learners, and end grants to attract candidates to become teachers, while maintaining current funding levels for Title I aid for poor children and students with disabilities.

    Because the forthcoming budget bill will require 60 votes in the Senate to pass, unlike the simple majority that Trump squeezed by last week with the budget and tax bill, opponents are optimistic they’ll be able to blunt some of the proposed cuts. They also believe they’ll get courts to reinstate the $6.2 billion that Trump withheld as of July 1. Congress already appropriated that money for states last February, in effect, to tide them over, since their fiscal year starts earlier, on July 1.

    “The bill will put young people and families at significant risk,” said Dave Gordon, Sacramento County superintendent of schools. “There’s nothing good about any of that. It’s cruel and it’s mean-spirited.”

    Immigrant families are bracing for ramped-up immigration enforcement as those efforts are now infused with an additional $170 billion. Those billions will be pulled in part from the $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid — known as Medi-Cal in California — and $186 billion cut from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides monthly payments for food to about 5 million Californians, including nearly 2 million under 18.

    State legislators did not set aside funds to account for cuts before approving the state budget, potentially leaving school districts to “absorb the shortfall,” as Visalia Unified stated it is prepared to do.

    Each district is facing a different reality. Some might have enough reserves to maintain current programming, while small and rural districts often heavily rely on federal dollars just to maintain basic educational infrastructure and services, said Fresno County’s schools Superintendent Michele Cantwell-Copher.

    Reduced spending on the poorest Americans will partly offset the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts weighted toward the wealthy, along with other features like a small increase in the $2,000 child tax credit. But the remaining $3 trillion will add to the federal deficit and be piled onto a record national debt to become a burden for the next generation of Americans. The higher interest payments on the debt they’ll pay as a portion of the federal budget will crowd out new spending options, including education and child care.

    What follows is a summary of what’s in the 2026 budget law, which will be phased in over several years, and its implications for families and children.

    Cuts to food assistance

    Around $186 billion is cut from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, also known as CalFresh in California, where over 55% of participants are families with children.

    An estimated 735,000 people are expected to lose their benefits, mainly because of new work requirements, according to the governor’s office.

    “Work requirements do not increase employment, it increases the red tape for vulnerable populations, causing more strain on hospitals with uninsured patients,” said Clarissa Doutherd, executive director of Parent Voices Oakland and a commissioner with First 5 Alameda County.

    The bill extends work requirements to a greater number of people, including those aged 55 to 64 and parents whose children are 14 or older.

    “Schools don’t exist in a vacuum. Cutbacks that impact the health and welfare of families create additional challenges for student support and academic success,” said Troy Flint, chief communications officer with the California School Boards Association.

    Since SNAP participation also determines eligibility for school lunch programs, a drop in enrollment could cut federal meal subsidies and raise state costs for meeting all students’ daily nutritional needs.

    Under the newly signed bill, states will also be required to front a greater amount of the program’s cost.

    States may need to cover between 5% and 15% of the benefits cost starting in 2028 if they have an error rate over 6% for recipients. This is a threshold that data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows only eight states met last year. California was not one of those states.

    It remains unclear what impact the cuts will have on schools, but the state has not provided any additional funding to backfill the cuts.

    Medi-Cal cuts

    Over half of all children in California are enrolled in Medi-Cal, as Medicaid is called in the state. An analysis of the House bill found that up to 151,000 children in California would lose health care coverage, largely due to changes in work requirements and eligibility.

    Mike Odeh, senior director of health policy at Children Now, said the number will likely be higher. The final bill exempts parents of children age 13 and under from meeting work requirements. Odeh said families with children over the age of 14 who do not report monthly work hours will likely lose coverage.

    Medicaid is the fourth-largest federal funding source for K-12 schools nationwide, providing roughly $7.5 billion in school-based health services every year. California is one of 25 states that bill Medi-Cal for school-based health services, including vision and hearing screenings, nursing services, school counseling services and environmental support for special education students.

    If local clinics shut down as a result of Medicaid cuts, more kids are likely to turn to school-based health services for care, Odeh said. “So there will be less resources available for school-based medical services as there’s also more demand for them,” Odeh added.

    Medi-Cal billing is also a core source of sustainable funding for nearly 300 school-based health centers statewide, offering services such as mental health counseling, primary care and speech or occupational therapy.

    School-based health centers are funded by a combination of grant funding and Medi-Cal reimbursements, with no state-funded grants to rely on, according to a spokesperson from the California School-Based Health Alliance.

    The bill also cuts the provider tax, a key source of funding for rural community hospitals, and prohibits the use of Medicaid dollars toward reproductive care at Planned Parenthood clinics, two main sites of health care used by young people in rural, high-poverty communities.

    In recent years, California has expanded efforts to include school-based mental health support in Medi-Cal reimbursement, including support for mental health clinicians, wellness coaches and peer support programs that were initially funded by the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative. Newly hired school-based mental health providers may lose a critical portion of funding when some students are no longer eligible to have those services reimbursed by Medi-Cal, according to the California School-Based Health Alliance.

    “We know that kids who are enrolled in Medicaid do better in school,” said Odeh. “They miss fewer school days, they’re more likely to graduate high school and less likely to drop out, they’re more likely to go to college and have fewer emergency room visits and hospitalizations as adults.”

    School choice for states that want it

    The budget law will establish the first big federally funded program granting tax credits to underwrite private school tuition. If it proves popular, the program would potentially divert billions of dollars in federal tax revenue that opponents argue would be better spent supporting public schools.

    All but the wealthiest parents would be eligible to receive up to $1,700 in direct tax credits to defray tuition to private schools or potentially use it for homeschooling. Other taxpayers could receive the same tax credit by donating to “Scholarship Granting Organizations,” which would award scholarships to attend private or religious schools in states that take on the program and manage the scholarships. The number and size of the scholarships would depend on the number of Americans who make tax-deductible contributions and the states that offer the program.

    That’s the catch: Congress included an opt-in provision, and California is one of 20 states that currently don’t have a private school choice program. Gov. Gavin Newsom has shown no interest in signing up, and a state Senate committee in March killed a bill that proposed a statewide education savings account. Teachers unions are unalterably opposed, charging that it will primarily subsidize parents who already send their kids to private schools.

    Lance Christensen, a longtime advocate of school choice and a former candidate for state superintendent of public construction, criticized Newsom and state leaders for locking California out of a program “providing billions of dollars in K-12 scholarships to poor and middle-class families in other states so their kids can get an education tailored for their needs.”

    California proponents of school choice, however, are hopeful that the federal tax credits could enhance passage of their own Children’s Educational Opportunity Act, establishing a state-controlled Education Savings Account. Supporters are collecting signatures to place the initiative on the 2026 statewide ballot. It would provide parents with $17,000 — the equivalent of public school funding per student — to enroll their children in a private school or cover expenses such as tutoring or special education services.

    Billions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement

    The massive infusion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, will likely increase anxiety among immigrant families, lead to more absences from schools and harm children’s mental health, according to research.

    “The children of immigrants, any time they’re away from their families, we hear examples that they’re worried at school about what might happen to their parents. That’s a huge mental toll that we’re asking every one of these kids that is an immigrant or lives in a mixed-status family to carry with them every day, 24 hours a day,” said Xilonin Cruz-Gonzalez, deputy director of Californians Together and co-chair of the National Newcomer Network.

    The funding is aimed at expanding detention centers to hold adults and families with children while their immigration cases are pending, and increasing the number of ICE agents.

    Immigration raids in California increased significantly toward the end of the latest school year, causing upheaval and fear among students whose family members — and sometimes themselves — were detained or deported.

    ICE’s methods in the state have included arresting U.S. citizens, detaining toddlers and elementary school students, and arresting immigrants with active legal asylum cases at their scheduled court appointments.

    “We already see families keeping their kids home from school and keeping their kids home from summer activities because they’re fearful to leave their houses,” Cruz-Gonzalez said.





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  • NPR: Trump’s Agreements with Law Firms May Be Illegal

    NPR: Trump’s Agreements with Law Firms May Be Illegal


    Soon after he was inaugurated, Trump began to inflict punishments on his enemies. That included law firms that had represented his political opponents in the past, such as federal prosecutor Jack Smith and prominent Democrats. He threatened to cancel any contracts those firms held with federal agencies and to bar them from future cases involving the federal government. Several major law firms worried about financial losses and immediately gave in to Trump’s demands. All agreed to provide pro bono services for causes chosen by Trump.

    But a few major law firms refused to capitulate to Trump. Instead of agreeing to serve him, they went to court. To date, all the firms that challenged Trump have won in court. It’s a basic principle in American law that every defendant should have access to a lawyer and that lawyers can represent defendants no matter what they are accused of doing.

    Now leaders of the legal profession are saying out loud what they thought all along: Trump’s demands and punishments are illegal.

    NPR reported:

    Veteran lawyers have reached a curious conclusion about President Trump’s deals with big law firms this year: they do not appear to be legally valid.

    Trump since coming to office has punished certain firms for their past clients or causes, stripping them of security clearances and government contracts, while trumpeting deals with others, including titans like Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins.

    The White House said the nine firms it’s settled with agreed to provide about $1 billion in pro bono services in order to curtail investigations into their hiring practices and maintain access to federal buildings. But the details of those agreements remain murky, even after Democratic lawmakers demanded answers.

    “The problem with the law firm deals is … they’re not deals at all,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor and former dean at Yale Law School. “You know, a contract that you make with a gun to your head is not a contract.”



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  • California colleges agree on how to interpret in-state tuition law for undocumented students

    California colleges agree on how to interpret in-state tuition law for undocumented students


    California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

    Credit: Ashley Bolter / EdSource

    Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

    More than 20 years ago, California passed a law allowing some undocumented immigrant students to attend college with in-state tuition, if they meet certain requirements.

    But immigrant rights advocates say many students who should have been eligible have been wrongfully denied in-state tuition because of confusion over requirements, misinformation and different interpretations of the law at different college campuses.

    “We lose that incredible brain power and colleges are losing enrollment,” said Nancy Jodaitis, director of higher education for Immigrants Rising, a nonprofit organization that advocates for undocumented people to achieve educational and career goals.

    Immigrants Rising brought together officials from all three public college systems — California Community Colleges, California State University and University of California — to discuss and agree on answers to frequently-asked questions about the law.

    The result is a document called the Systemwide AB 540 FAQ, which all three systems have now signed. The document includes answers to 59 questions, such as:

    • What if a student graduated from a California high school (completing three years’ worth of high school credits), but did not attend three years at a California high school?
    • Does a student have to take classes full time for their attendance to count?
    • Does all their coursework have to be taken at the same school?

    Spokespeople from UC, CSU and California Community Colleges all celebrated the document.

    Paul Feist, vice chancellor of communications and marketing for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, said the document is particularly important because there are several different laws regarding the nonresident tuition exemption.

    The first bill exempting some undocumented immigrants from out-of-state tuition, Assembly Bill 540, was signed into law in 2001. Since then, three other bills have been passed to expand the law, in 2014, 2017 and 2022.

    “While the intent was to expand access to AB 540 financial assistance, they had the unintended effect of making it more difficult to navigate,” Feist said. “This FAQ is designed to provide clearer explanations and provide additional resources in advising students.”

    Under current California law, students who are undocumented or have temporary protection from deportation such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), or who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, are eligible for in-state tuition and state financial aid, if they attended at least three years of high school, adult school or community college in California and obtained a high school diploma or equivalent, an associate degree or fulfilled the minimum requirements to transfer to a UC or CSU. 

    Access to state financial aid and in-state tuition can be a critical factor for undocumented students, who are barred from receiving federal financial aid. Without the law in place, some of them would be charged tuition rates for international students, often much higher than in-state tuition.

    “This is huge,” said Maria Gutierrez, a college counselor at Chabot College in Hayward and a doctoral student at San Francisco State University. “It helps us be aligned and have something in writing.”  Before the FAQ document, Gutierrez says college staff in charge of approving exemptions from out-of-state tuition were sometimes afraid to make decisions without written proof of how to interpret the law.

    Gutierrez herself has benefited from AB 540. She came to the U.S. when she was 5 years old on a visa, which later expired. She attended elementary, middle and most of high school in California. She also graduated from high school in California. But when she applied to attend community college in California, different campuses disagreed on whether she was eligible for in-state tuition because she had spent two years of high school in Utah. At the time, a second law had recently been passed to allow colleges to consider years of attendance in elementary and middle school for AB 540 eligibility.

    “One college that I went to in So Cal, I was approved for AB 540. When I had to go back to the Bay Area, I was not approved for AB 540. So then I was confused that there was this inconsistency,” Gutierrez said.

    A few years later, when she applied to transfer to a four-year college, both UC and CSU campuses told her she was not eligible for in-state tuition, even though by then, a law had passed that clarified that attendance at community college could be counted toward the requirements. She spent a semester paying out-of-state tuition at San Jose State University, before the university finally acknowledged she was legally eligible for in-state tuition. 

    As a college counselor, Gutierrez continues to meet students who have been incorrectly told they are not eligible for in-state tuition.

    “It’s crazy because in reality it hasn’t changed much,” she said. However, she said, the financial burden is harder now, because most students graduating from high school cannot apply for work permits under DACA, because the government has not accepted new applications since 2017. 

    “I see my students now and I see the struggles they’re going through. If I didn’t have DACA, I honestly don’t think I would be where I am now,” Gutierrez said. “There’s no way that I would’ve been able to pay nonresident fees or wait for whoever it is that is determining that to learn what they need to do for me to be able to go to college.”

    Advocates say they hope the document will help colleges give correct information and avoid students having to research on their own for information.

    California also recently streamlined the process for undocumented students to apply for financial aid and exemption from in-state tuition on the same application when they fill out the California Dream Act application. In the past, students had to both fill out a California Dream Act application and an AB 540 affidavit form for each college. Now, the AB 540 form will be part of the same application.

    Diana Aguilar-Cruz said that change is significant. Aguilar-Cruz is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public health at Cal State Fullerton. When she first began her undergraduate education at Cal Poly Pomona, she was charged nonresident tuition, which was almost double the in-state tuition. She had immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico City in 2015, when she was 14 years old, and lived with her grandmother in Baldwin Park while attending high school. 

    She had completed a California Dream Act application, but no one told her she also had to complete a separate form. After researching it herself online, she found the form and completed it, at which point the university finally changed her tuition to in-state.

    “If I didn’t find it in my Google search, would I be paying in-state tuition for my four years of college?” Aguilar-Cruz said. “I always think to myself, what would have happened if I was a more fearful student or a student who did not have a strong support system at home?”

    This article was corrected to clarify how Maria Gutierrez immigrated to the U.S. and that Chabot College is in Hayward.





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  • DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! The “Beautiful” Tax Bill Guts the Rule of Law!

    DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! The “Beautiful” Tax Bill Guts the Rule of Law!


    That “One Big Beautiful Bill” is supposed to be about the budget and taxes but tucked into it are a variety of dangerous items that Trump partisans hope will go unnoticed.

    The most dangerous item of all undercuts the rule of law.

    Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger noticed it. They posted this warning on Twitter:

    Our blog contributor called Quickwrit noticed the innocuous but dangerous insertion into the bill.

    Quickwrit write here:

    DANGER!!! DANGER!!! DANGER!!!

    Buried at the bottom of Page 562 in the Republicans’ 1,116-page “Big Beautiful Bill” is a provision that will end all federal court challenges to anything that Trump orders and that will allow Trump to declare null and void all previous rulings against his orders.

    It will be the beginning of genuine dictatorial rule.

    The provision on Page 562 invokes enforcement of Federal Rules of Civil Procedures Rule 65(c) which says that a federal court can ONLY issue an injunction AFTER a plaintiff has posted a bond to cover the costs of damages that an injunction could have on the party against which the injunction was issued if subsequent appeals overturn the injunction.

    Because Trump and his federal agencies could claim billions of dollars in damages if an injunction is overturned by the pro-Trump U.S. Supreme Court, there is NO ONE WHO CAN AFFORD to seek any future injunction against Trump’s orders or those of his agencies.

    IN ADDITION: Rule 65(c) will be applied RETROACTIVELY to all the injunctions issued so far against Trump and his agencies, and all those injunctions will be removed because no bond was posted with any of them.

    THE EFFECT WILL BE that everything that has been blocked by the federal courts will be unleashed and there will be NO FUTURE INJUNCTIONS issued against ANYTHING that Trump orders to be done.

    Even if none of the many other odious things are removed from the Big Beautiful Bill, this provision to invoke Federal Court Rule 65(c) MUST BE ELIMINATED or there will be no future restraints on Trump. He will be free to dictate anything he wants with NO COURT INTERFERENCE. Rule by law will end in America.



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  • New law requires Cal State to overhaul response to Title IX complaints

    New law requires Cal State to overhaul response to Title IX complaints


    California State University, Fullerton

    Credit: CSU Fullerton/Flickr

    What began as reports detailing the failure of the California State University to deal with Title IX complaints has led to a new state law requiring that the system take action. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed the first two bills in a legislative package addressing sexual harassment and violence on college campuses.

    Of the bills Newsom signed, the first, Assembly Bill 1790, requires Cal State to implement recommendations in a July 2023 report from the California State Auditor. The audit found the system had “not adequately or consistently addressed some allegations of sexual harassment.” Universities are required to resolve sexual harassment complaints under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in schools.

    The second, AB 2608, calls for campuses to update their annual sexual violence and harassment training to include a discussion on “how to recognize if someone is at risk of alcohol- and drug-facilitated sexual assault” beginning in September 2026. The bill applies to Cal State (CSU), the California Community Colleges, the University of California (UC) and higher education institutions that receive state funding. Both CSU and UC registered their support along with the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges.

    There are 11 other Title IX-related bills in the legislative pipeline. Cal State leadership is supporting three and has not taken a position on the rest, a spokesperson said.

    “The CSU is already working to meet all of the audit requirements,” Cal State spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith wrote in an email. “AB 1790 adds a requirement of reporting to the legislature on our progress. In terms of an additional workload, this bill will require the CSU (to) share the report we have already agreed to prepare for the State Auditor with the Education Committee.”

    Assemblymember Mike Fong, D-Alhambra, was a lead author on both bills signed this week. 

    The raft of Title IX bills was released following a California Assembly Higher Education Committee report finding that students and faculty at each of California’s three public higher education segments do not trust the way campuses respond to instances of sexual harassment and discrimination.

    It was the latest in a series of investigations into how the system handles such misconduct. A 2023 state audit found the CSU system routinely failed to address allegations of sexual assault, including instances in which universities closed cases improperly. In addition, a 232-page systemwide report by the Cozen O’Connor law firm found that the system did not adequately respond to complaints because it was understaffed and lacked enough resources. It also found that CSU did not have a way to handle misconduct that was “disruptive to the learning, living, and working environment” but does not rise to the level of discrimination or harassment.

    A spokesperson for Fong wrote in an email to EdSource that each bill was “modified in consultation with stakeholders to address the fiscal implication of the bills” and that the cost of most of the bills in the package should be “minor and absorbable.”

    Assemblymember Laura Friedman, D-Burbank, authored AB 810, another bill in the package, which would require job applicants, as part of the hiring process, to disclose decisions determining that they committed sexual harassment.

    “We are hopeful the Governor will sign the bill. He has been very proactive when it comes to signing bills to address sexual assault and harassment,” a spokesperson for Friedman wrote. “We haven’t yet spoken to his office regarding 810, but we feel confident that this bill aligns with his previous support in this area.”

    In addition to AB 2608, the three Title IX-related bills that have received Cal State’s support are:

    • AB 2047, which calls for a systemwide Office of Civil Rights to oversee campus Title IX offices. The Cal State system has already implemented such an office, according to Bentley-Smith, and committed “a large fiscal and personnel impact” to back the office prior to the bill.
    • AB 2407, which requires triennial audits of how Cal State and the UC handle sexual harassment complaints. Bentley-Smith said the system does not anticipate needing to add personnel or new processes to implement the bill.
    • AB 2492, which would create confidential positions to help students, staff and faculty navigate the sexual harassment complaint process. Bentley-Smith said some of the positions already exist and that additional training will be necessary.

    A recent CSU news release said the system is restructuring its civil rights services and seeking to “increase staffing at the system and university levels, establish uniform standards and training programs, and develop more robust data collection and tracking systems.”





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