As California emerges from a divisive national election, it is crucial to remain clear-eyed about the risks ahead while pursuing bold strategies to address them. There are many domains in which state and local leaders can still work to improve the lives of Californians, and education offers one of the clearest examples. Historically, education policy has been shaped at the state and local levels, and California has the tools to lead the nation by championing sensible, evidence-based policies that create better outcomes for children and families.
That work has never been more important. California’s education system faces four pressing challenges in the wake of COVID-19. Student achievement continues to lag behind other states, with performance gaps remaining unacceptably wide. Chronic absenteeism is also hindering recovery efforts, as many children and families remain disengaged from schools. Additionally, schools are falling short in equipping students with the skills needed for career readiness, real-world success, and active participation in a complex democracy. Meanwhile, brutal culture wars are consuming vital attention and resources from addressing these critical issues. Tackling these challenges head-on and developing targeted solutions is essential for driving meaningful progress.
Any improvement strategy must start with every teacher having high quality, comprehensive instructional materials and the training to use them effectively. One clear model for this kind of reform is the “science of reading” movement, which has been adopted by many states but not yet embraced by California.
One need not agree with every element of the science of reading to recognize that Mississippi’s suite of reforms pushed the state from nearly last in national rankings to above the national average. Their approach offers a model of a state that had a clear instructional point of view, supported that vision with a well-crafted policy, and saw impressive outcomes as a result. California would do well to embrace the idea that state policy can meaningfully shape teaching and learning when implemented with purpose and precision.
However, students cannot learn if they are not at school in the first place. Chronic absenteeism in California more than doubled after the pandemic, rising from 10% to 24% in the 2022-23 school year, affecting over 1.4 million students. It’s a pervasive issue that cuts across all types of schools and students. While the causes of this crisis are not fully understood, several ideas merit policy responses.
Access to school-based mental health services remains inadequate and disproportionately limited for students of color and those from low-income families. Districts must collaborate across systems to expand these services and ensure they reach those most in need. Additionally, the school violence and bullying epidemic causes parents to question whether sending a child to school is safe. Therefore, efforts should be made to eradicate violence and bullying on school campuses.
The goal is not to simply get students to school, but to ensure that their determination to stay translates to strong job opportunities and overall well-being — whether they enroll in college or go directly into the workforce. For districts, paving the way begins well before high school.
Encouraging progress is being made in the region to expand student access to high-wage, high-interest careers. Public-private partnerships can help districts better equip students with well-paying jobs by developing career pathways in fields like technology and healthcare, progressing from foundational skills to advanced competencies. District administrators can join forces with local colleges to build cross-sector strategies to better prepare students for college success. These efforts should include paid internships in high-demand professions, such as health care, allied health professions, high technology, or green technology. Notably, several organizations (UniteLA,Growing Inland Achievement) and others are already driving this important work in Southern California, providing a model for other regions to follow.
To gain traction on these meaningful issues, advocates, parents, and policymakers must lower the temperature around divisive “culture war” issues that are currently sucking up too much of the air in the room. Where there are areas of sharp moral disagreement, we must demand civil discussion and respect differing viewpoints. California’s public schools must remain spaces where all parents feel comfortable sending their children. While debates about the goals of education are inevitable — and even vital to a healthy democratic process — allowing school boards and education leaders to be overtaken by partisan, nationalized politics only hinders progress. By focusing efforts on the pressing challenges, we all recognize we can move forward and create solutions to improve our children’s lives.
We don’t yet know what the national election portends for California’s schools, and some federal actions could escalate with serious potential consequences for the state’s students and families. In times of uncertainty, it is prudent to focus on local education improvements rooted in strong evidence. By prioritizing proven strategies that advance long-term goals, California can continue to strengthen student learning across the region’s schools and colleges, regardless of broader political shifts.
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Patricia Burch is a professor of education at USC Rossier School of Education and faculty co-director of the USC Education Policy Hub.
Morgan Polikoff is a professor of education at USC Rossier School of Education and faculty co-director of the USC EdPolicy Hub.
Jon Fullerton is a research professor and executive director of the USC EdPolicy Hub.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Deborah Vanessa Lopez, left, is a program manager that works with students formerly in the foster system at Rio Hondo College. She has worked with Faylen Bush, right, who is set to transfer out of Rio Hondo College this year.
Credit: Faylen Bush and Deborah Vanessa Lopez
When Faylen Bush returned to college in 2023 after being laid off from work, he planned to pursue construction management to build on the skill set he had acquired over several years in that field as a concrete carpenter and protect himself from future layoffs.
He was married and had three young children, and he had little time to spare as he pursued a more stable future for his family. He knew that to succeed in college, he needed to remain more focused on his career goals than he was when he had been in college about a decade earlier, when he was first entering adulthood after leaving the foster system amid a cycle of housing instability and juvenile detention.
Faylen Bush
And so, when a program at his school, Rio Hondo College in Los Angeles County, reached out to Bush with resources for students with experience in the foster system, he paid little attention. He was unsure that the resources would apply to him at all because he was in his early thirties.
But the program, Guardian Scholars, was persistent. They tried to reach him multiple times until he finally decided to go to their office and learn more. He learned that Guardian Scholars is a chapter-based organization across California’s college campuses that supports students who have foster care experience. It is an organization that, since its inception in 1998 at Cal State Fullerton, has sought to increase college enrollment, retention, and graduation rates among former foster youth as a pathway toward overall stability in their lives.
“I can honestly say that stepping into the office, sitting with Deborah, and having that conversation opened up a whole world of opportunities for me,” said Bush of his first meeting with Guardian Scholars staff.
“Deborah” is Deborah Lopez, a Guardian Scholars program manager. She and her team connect students with access to counselors who are trained to support former foster youth, grants to purchase textbooks, meal vouchers, on-campus jobs, access to conferences to further students’ professional networks, and more.
“Our students experience a tremendous amount of trauma even if it was one day or 15 years of their life” in foster care, Lopez said. This thinking serves as the foundation for their program: They extend support to every single Rio Hondo College student with experience in the foster system, no matter when or how long their experience was.
Bush said he is aware of the statistics he is up against given his upbringing. According to a national 2020 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, far fewer students with experience in foster care have a bachelor’s degree — nearly 5% for men and about 9% for women, than students without foster experience, about 31% for men and close to 36% for women.
Deborah Lopez
These rates persist despite several studies showing that the majority of current and former foster youth report an interest in attending and graduating from college.
But Lopez knows the statistics of the students who have received support targeted to their foster care background. For example, across the California community colleges, students are more likely to enroll in credit-bearing courses and to remain enrolled in school if they are enrolled in foster-specific support programs, according to a 2021 report from John Burton Advocates for Youth, an influential nonprofit that advocates for California’s homeless and foster youth.
“One of the things that has worked for us as a program is consistency,” said Lopez, who has worked with the program for nearly a decade.
While many of their students have graduated and transferred from Rio Hondo, some have needed to cut back on classes or drop out altogether. “But eventually, they come back, and we’re here,” said Lopez.
With the support he has received, Bush has not only remained on track to transfer to a four-year university later this year — he has applied to several Cal State and University of California schools, though he is particularly interested in UCLA. His career goal has also changed in the year-and-a-half since he returned to school. He is now pursuing psychology and a career in counseling, and, while the career change might seem abrupt, it’s a return to the goals he had about a decade ago.
Foster youth also need a blueprint
As Bush tells it, the consistent instability throughout his childhood played a critical role in how his life unfolded as he entered adulthood.
“The system is trying to help … and it’s providing homes, but I still feel like a necessary component is to provide that blueprint for success after you age out,” said Bush of the foster system.
He went on to describe the blueprint that a teenager without foster experience might have: If their parents went to college, they might also attend college; if their parents were part of the workforce, they might decide to pursue a similar path after high school.
“Someone who has experienced the foster system, they don’t have that blueprint and, sadly, the statistics show there’s a small percentage of success stories,” he added.
He was around 10 years old when both of his parents died, leaving him and his sister in the foster system. Their maternal grandmother was near them in Lancaster, a city in northern Los Angeles County, but she was caring for her own young children plus some of her grandchildren and couldn’t take them in.
They remained in foster placement for two years until an aunt in Louisiana reached out and requested they be placed with her.
Thus began Bush’s experience with kinship in which a child in foster care is placed with a family member. He was living with family once again, but his life was no more stable than before.
“I can honestly say she tried her best, but she didn’t really have the resources to fully cater to our needs. To her it was more like, OK, you guys live with me now,’ and that’s it,” Bush said. “But there was trauma that needed to be addressed. There was, for both of us, abandonment issues that needed to be addressed.”
By the time he was 14, Bush was regularly suspended from school, eventually missing enough days to become truant and land in juvenile detention.
“That set a course for me, going in and out of juvenile corrections,” he said. He continued getting into trouble, eventually spending over a year inside.
Once released at 16, he returned to his aunt’s home, but he had developed resentment toward her because she had not visited him during his time inside. He learned that she continued receiving payment as he was still officially under her care, and so began a cycle of housing instability as he began to stay at friends’ homes and hotel rooms rather than sleep at his aunt’s home.
To route the payment to himself and pay for housing, Bush figured out how to emancipate himself at 17. It’s a process that Lopez noted few of their students go through given its difficulty.
Bush knew he had a path forward: football. After his time in juvenile detention, his football coach continued to invest in him, sending him to university training camps. But his behavior landed him in trouble again, and he was in a fight so bad during the summer going into his senior year of high school that the coach ended the relationship.
“I would always wind up in situations where I’m in trouble. I always used to ask myself when I was in front of the principal, when I was in front of the judge, ‘Why am I here?’ said Bush, reflecting on his youth. “And then I learned over time, it’s the decisions that I’m making.”
“Before, there were a lot of things that were happening that were out of my control,” he continued. He slowly learned there were things he had control over, such as his path toward emancipation, but without the proper, stable guidance of an adult through his upbringing, he was often unclear on how to properly use that newfound power.
Unable to play football after the fight, he reached out to a former foster parent in California who agreed to take him in so he could start fresh in his home state.
With his high school requirements complete, he attended Southwest College in Los Angeles, playing football for the team and eventually landing a scholarship to continue playing the sport in Oklahoma.
He had dreams of continuing his studies in psychology, eventually earning a doctorate in the field and becoming a school counselor.
But the pressure of supporting his family took center stage once he and his now-wife had their first child, so he declined his university scholarship. “It was such a big transition at that time, and I felt the need to support my family,” said Bush.
From then through the fall of 2023, Bush worked odd jobs and eventually secured stable work in the construction industry as he and his wife had two more children. His return to school was prompted by his layoff, but he was also keenly aware of the harsh reality of working in such a physically demanding field.
“The longevity for a Black carpenter isn’t that long. I have to figure out how I’m going to maneuver within this industry so that I can make it for at least 15 years,” he said of his thinking at the time.
It wasn’t long after landing in the Guardian Scholars office that he began thinking more deeply about his goals. What began as a return to school to secure job stability in a field he’d entered solely to provide for his family has since become a path back to the goals Bush had long before he had the level of support he has found with Lopez and her team at Guardian Scholars.
“My daughters and my son,” he said. “I feel they are the best thing out of my whole life. I’m trying to put myself in a position where I can be the best example and the best provider for them. I know now, at 33, with all my life experiences, this is what seems clearest to me.”
The Covid-19 pandemic amplified long-standing inequalities; there are no quick fixes to high chronic absentee rates and other challenges.
A return to “normal” won’t address post-Covid students feeling disengaged – nor should it.
Unlike other states, California districts have a $6 billion Covid block grant to replace federal relief that expired.
In March 2020, the Covid pandemic shut down schools, creating havoc, particularly among California’s most vulnerable children. Five years later, despite unprecedented funding from the state and federal governments, most districts continue to struggle to recover the ground they lost amid multiple challenges: more disgruntled parents and emotionally fragile students, a decline in enrollment, and uncertain finances.
According to calculations by researchers at Stanford and Harvard universities, most California school districts remain below pre-pandemic levels in standardized test scores — 31% of a grade equivalent below in math and 40% of a grade equivalent in reading. These averages understate the widening gaps in living conditions as well as test scores between the lowest-income and least-impoverished districts and schools.
The drop in the average scores in California and the nation on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2024 “masks a pernicious inequality,” said Sean Reardon, faculty director of the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford.
Scores are a shorthand measurement of learning, and they do not address the deeper, latent impact of the pandemic.
“We tend to overlook the longer-term effects of the delay in socialization and self-discipline — things that schools nurtured in young people,” said Vito Chiala, principal of William C. Overfelt High, whose 1,400 primarily low-income Hispanic and Vietnamese American students live in East San Jose. “Young people becoming adults at the high school level seem to be maybe two or three years behind where it used to be.”
In the first year of returning from remote learning, the focus was on school-related behaviors and self-management, Chiala said. “Students who had spent over a year saying whatever they wanted on social media had to face people in person, and that was super-uncomfortable sometimes. Now it’s much more about endurance, being willing and able to do hard academic work for longer periods of time.”
Overfelt High is far from unique. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2021-22, 87% of public schools said the pandemic harmed student socioemotional development, and 56% reported increased incidents of classroom disruptions from student misconduct.
Educators, in turn, have taken a more holistic approach to building students’ mindsets and meeting families’ basic needs, said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California Berkeley, who is studying nine California districts’ post-Covid responses.
Recognizing that Covid amplified the harsh conditions of living in poverty, Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators put $4 billion into creating community schools in low-income neighborhoods to strengthen ties to parents and open health clinics at schools. The state began to fund free universal school breakfasts and lunches.
With state grants, Rocketship Public Schools hired care coordinators in all of its charter schools, most in East San Jose, to cope with the aftermath of Covid.
Fabiola Zamora, a mother of four children from ages 2 to 10, described the support from the care corps coordinator for her school when she became homeless. “We received blankets, diapers, warm clothes. Mrs. Martinez guided me to a shelter and helped get my daughter to school,” she said. “It was hard. I was scared; it made me feel I wasn’t alone.”
Mental health responses
The proportion of students experiencing mental health issues had been rising before Covid. It accelerated during remote learning and coincided with an explosion of social media and cell phone use. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the incidence and prevalence of depression among 1.7 million 5- to 22-year-olds served by Kaiser Permanente in Southern California rose by about 60%, and the incidence of anxiety increased 31% from 2017 to 2021.
School districts in turn hired more counselors and psychologists using mental health funding and $13.4 billion the state received from the federal American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the last and biggest installment of the $23.4 billion in Covid aid from Congress. Savvy districts have tapped Medi-Cal, the California version of Medicaid, to reimburse school mental health services, although Republican plans for massive cuts to Medicaid could jeopardize the funding.
Addressing the whole child makes sense. Disengaged and depressed students can’t focus; chronically absent students fall behind, complicating efforts to catch them up while moving others ahead.
But have these added responsibilities overburdened and preoccupied districts? In a fifth-year Covid reassessment, Robin Lake, director of the Center for Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, and Paul Hill, the center’s founder, raised that issue. “By easing up on graduation requirements” (which the California Legislature did), “making it easier for students to earn good grades, excusing frequent absences, and prioritizing social-emotional learning curricula over core academics,” they wrote, “the pendulum has swung too far away from the core business of schooling.”
Stubbornly high chronic absenteeism
The persistently high rates of chronic absences in California since Covid underscore complex challenges. In the first full year back from remote learning, chronic absenteeism nearly tripled statewide from 12% in 2018-19 to 30%, mirroring that of other states.
Just as with test scores, the averages masked yawning differences between ethnic and racial groups and levels of poverty: 35% for Hispanics, 42.5% for Black students, and 46% for homeless and foster youths, compared with 11% for Asian and 23% for white students. Students are chronically absent when they miss 10% or more days of school.
By 2023-24, the statewide rate declined, first to 25% in 2022-23 and then to 20% — still two-thirds higher than pre-Covid. An analysis by researchers Heather Hough of Policy Analysis for California Education and Hedy Chang of Attendance Works helps explain why learning recovery has been slow in impoverished schools. Only 2% of schools with the fewest low-income students had high or extreme levels of chronic absences, compared with 72% of schools in which three-quarters or more of students were low-income. The disparity isn’t new; the dimensions of the divide are.
“If you want to reduce chronic absence, you need to solve the root causes that result in kids not showing up to school in the first place,” said Attendance Works founder Chang. “The barriers — poor transportation, homelessness and food insecurity — are huge, and these issues are hard to solve.”
Schools also had a messaging problem. “During the pandemic, we said, ‘You should stay home for any reason for illness, any symptom.’ I don’t think we had counter-messaging when we wanted kids to come back.”
“The imperception was maybe missing school doesn’t matter so much if I think my kid might be sick,” Chang said.
Some high school students reached the same conclusion, added Overfelt principal Chiala. “We always said school is mandatory, school is important. And then we said for a year and a half (during remote learning) it wasn’t,” he said. “I think psychologically, a lot of young people are like, ‘”If it was really important, you would’ve made me keep coming.’”
Computers for all students
There is an unmistakable positive legacy of Covid: the equitable spread of technology after initial chaos.
Covid caught the state flat-footed, without a plan or the capacity to switch on a dime to remote learning; in many districts, this did not go well, as kids with home computers but spotty internet drove to fast-food parking lots to download the week’s homework assignments and to upload their answers.
In June 2020, the California Department of Education estimated that 700,000 students lacked a home computer — which soon rose to 1 million, or about 17% of students — and that there were 322,000 hot spots for internet service.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond created the Bridge the Divide Fund. With $18.4 million in donations, it distributed 45,000 Chromebooks, plus 100,725 hot spots.
The difference-maker arrived in 2021 with $7 billion as California’s share of the Biden administration’s Emergency Connectivity Fund. Federal funds have enabled more than 75% of schools nationwide to provide a computer for every student, and more than 80% of schools have high-speed broadband service, said Evan Marwell, the founder of the San Francisco-based nonprofit EducationSuperhighway.
Soon, it will be time to recycle personal computers. The good news, Marwell said, is a Chromebook can now be bought for $200.
Low return on federal investment?
On the 2021-22 Smarter Balanced tests, low-income students fell back after years of slow improvement. The overall 35% proficiency in English language arts was 4 percentage points lower than in pre-pandemic 2018-19. The 21% proficiency in math was a drop of 6 percentage points. Two years later, low-income students had regained half of what they had lost on both tests.
During these three years, per-student spending in California mushroomed by about 50% per student because of federal Covid relief and one-time state funding due to record-setting revenues, according to data assembled by Edunomics Lab, an education finance organization. The combination of high spending and lower test scores earned California one of the nation’s worst “returns on investments.”
However, a newly released deeper analysis of district-by-district Smarter Balanced results by researchers at UC San Diego, American Institutes of Research, UC Berkeley and Public Policy Institute of California showed that two years of federal Covid spending had a statistically significant effect in 2021-22. It was equivalent to a gain in math and English language arts of about 10 days of learning, said economics professor Julian Betts of UC San Diego.
Schools that reopened a year earlier from remote learning than most schools in California showed a bigger gain: about 20 days of learning.
However, those positive factors were not big enough to offset the effects of poverty — a loss of a quarter year of learning for schools with a high percentage of low-income students.
Researchers also looked at the results of the California Healthy Kids Survey that students fill out annually to see if there was a correlation between widespread bullying and student harassment with test scores. The effect was large: the equivalent of a half-year of lost learning in math and a third of a year in English language arts in 2021-22. The data document what socio-emotional learning advocates have preached for years: School climate matters in recovering academically from Covid declines.
One last source of funding
Starting with the 2021-22 state budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature invested more than $10 billion in TK-12 in the post-Covid years. The bulk of it went to transitional kindergarten (TK) and extended learning programs. What Newsom didn’t direct funding to were comprehensive, statewide, early reading and numeracy programs and high-intensive tutoring — two strategies that other states like Louisiana funded to respond Covid-era declines in test scores. Newsom had proposed $2.6 billion for “high-dosage” in-school tutoring; it vanished in the final budget.
What did survive was a $6 billion Learning Loss Emergency Block Grant program. Apparently unique among states in providing substantial money beyond the expiration of the $23.4 billion federal Covid funding, it directs most money to heavily low-income districts through 2026-27. In settling the Cayla J. lawsuit filed by Oakland and Los Angeles families over the state’s failure to meet their children’s education needs during remote learning, the state agreed to require that districts use the block grant for evidence-based strategies, like high-dosage tutoring. Districts must also conduct a needs assessment study, create a plan for the money, and present it to the public.
The learning recovery block grant provides an opportunity to ask questions raised by the Center for Reinventing Public Education in its five-year reassessment:
What worked and didn’t work over the last five years?
How are the students most in need going to get extra time and attention?
What skills and new work habits are required of teachers?
Authors Robin Lake and Paul Hill concluded that the needed systemic changes would be “a heavy lift.” The necessary changes “probably can’t be done unless state officials seriously consider major waivers of regulation and teacher unions allow experimentation with new teacher roles and school staffing rules.”
Vito Chiala
Bruce Fuller, the UC Berkeley professor who is analyzing the learning recovery plans of 700 California districts, agrees. “It’s hard to sustain anything that’s seriously innovative,” he said.
Vito Chiala at Overfelt High in San Jose, however, said Overfelt is becoming a different place. “When we came back (from remote learning), we really spent a lot of time radically dreaming about how will we treat our kids? How will we grade work? How, what will we be teaching them? How will we embrace our students’ humanity?”
The result: “We don’t grade the same way we used to. Classes aren’t rushing through curriculum like they used to. Teachers aren’t feeling they have to move on, even though half the class hasn’t learned. We’re really trying to motivate students to feel the intrinsic need to learn and get better.”
“We’re still finding our footing in sort of this post-pandemic world,” he said.
Left to right: Carly Bresee, Erika Cedeno, Todd Shadbourne, Sesar Carreño and Keith Carames.
The last five years have not been easy for students or their teachers.
During Covid school closures, teachers, accustomed to using overhead projectors and pencil and paper in classrooms, had to learn to use new technology so their students could learn from home.
When students returned to campuses a year later, some had learning and socialization gaps. There were more behavior problems and chronic absenteeism.
Thousands of California teachers, discouraged by classroom discipline problems, quit the profession. But many took on the challenge, offering students social-emotional support and individualized instruction.
Keith Carames: Pandemic didn’t stop James Lick thespians
Drama teacher Keith Carames takes the adage “the show must go on” quite literally.
Keith Carames
A pandemic didn’t stop Carames and his students at James Lick Middle School in San Francisco from producing a show, even if it meant doing it virtually.
During school closures in the first year of the pandemic, Carames hired a director through the American Conservatory Theater to use digital storytelling and voiceovers to help students bring the Amanda Gorman poem “The Hill We Climb” to life in a five-minute video.
Once school reopened, Carames was reluctant to have actors masked in live productions, something other schools were doing.
“This is horrible,” Carames recalled. “Like it’s so disingenuous. We’re not using their full instrument. You don’t see their faces. It just made me sick.”
So, Carames hired two playwrights to work with students to write eight original plays based on their experiences during Covid. He then collaborated with the San Francisco Opera Guild to turn two of the plays into musicals.
“Everybody’s in the classroom with masks on,” Caramas said. “We rehearsed with masks on. I was like, OK, we’re going to do a show this year, but it’s not going to be like normal.”
Carames’s answer was to rent a theater space where Covid-tested students could act and be filmed on stage without a mask for 10 minutes at a time. A production company filmed the eight plays.
“We had fans blowing, and we had air filtration, and we had all the protocols in place,” Carames said.
Much has changed since then. Last month, students in Carames’ after-school drama program performed the musical “SpongeBob” in front of a live audience. No one wore masks. Last week, the student actors gathered after school to watch a recording of the video and to eat Mediterranean food provided by their teacher.
“Isn’t that cool?” Carames said.
Sesar Carreño: Central Valley school gets technology boost
Earlimart Middle School classrooms in Tulare County have had a technology boost since Covid closed schools.
Sesar CarreñoCredit: Lifetouch Photography
Students who once shared computers now each have one provided by Earlimart School District. Students and their families also have district-provided internet access in their homes, said SesarCarreño, an eighth-grade teacher at the school.
Now teachers use giant smart TVs to share their computer screens during lessons, instead of using overhead projectors and pull-down screens.
Carreño says the increased technology in the classroom has been a plus, but the increased access to everything the internet has to offer means more effort by teachers to keep students’ attention.
“They wander off, watch YouTube videos and things like that,” he said. “You say, ‘Hey, hey, don’t do that. Stay on task.’ “
Plagiarism can also be a problem when students copy and paste from the internet a little too often when doing homework. But it’s easy to catch, Carreño said.
“They don’t change the font … or it looks better than something I wrote at Cal State Northridge or UCLA,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s brilliant.’ We try to catch that, and I do ding them for that.”
Other than policing students on the internet, Carreño says he doesn’t have any more discipline problems than before the pandemic.
“We just had a fight 30 minutes ago in the yard,” he said. “We’re a middle school, so things will happen.”
Carly Bresee: Classrooms are getting back to normal
Carly Bresee was optimistic about her new career when she began her first full year of teaching in 2019. She had wanted to be a special education teacher since she was 5 years old.
Carly Bresee
But a lifetime of dreaming about teaching didn’t prepare her for teaching during Covid school closures or the increased social-emotional needs of her young students when they returned to school a year later. Bresee teaches transitional kindergarten through first-grade special education students with extensive support needs at Perkins K-8 School in San Diego Unified.
Bresee couldn’t teach her students online like most other teachers. So, she donned a face mask and gloves and made weekly home visits during Covid school closures.
“You know, kids, especially at that age, and then especially again with students with disabilities, sitting in front of a computer for school just wasn’t a possibility,” she said. “It wasn’t accessible learning.”
But returning to school was even harder, Bresee said. Students had increased social-emotional needs and unexpected behavior that left Bresee and other classroom staff exhausted.
“We would go home and not be able to do anything else,” she said. “I would go home and fall asleep at like 4:30 in the afternoon.”
Bresee considered leaving the profession then, but is now more optimistic.
“I’m feeling good this year,” she said. “Things are getting back into a routine in my classroom. … It does feel like I’m getting my feet under me again. So, it does feel like I’m headed in the right direction.”
Todd Shadbourne: Teachers became technology converts
Foulks Ranch Elementary teacher Todd Shadbourne was a self-described “pencil-paper guy” until the Covid pandemic closed schools, including his campus in Elk Grove, in the spring of 2020.
Todd Shadbourne
Suddenly, he needed to learn to use online video conferencing programs, classroom management tools and other technology to ensure his students could learn from their homes.
“I’m almost 60, and I was surrounded by younger colleagues who totally just collaborated with me,” Shadbourne said. “I worked with my colleagues and I learned how to do it, and I’m really confident at it now.”
When students returned to school, the computers, classroom management tools and online lessons came with them. The technology now allows students and their parents more access to teachers’ lesson plans and other classroom materials, Shadbourne said.
“I think it has helped me to communicate with parents more,” said Shadbourne, who teaches sixth grade. “I’ve been teaching for a long time, and I remember when they were introducing emails and I remember when we were going to workshops for voicemail. And now, there are so many ways that I can communicate with parents. It’s almost too much.”
And now, when there are technical problems in the classroom, the entire class jumps in to help solve problems, he said.
Shadbourne says his newfound confidence in his ability to use technology has made him more self-assured in other areas as well.
“I’m more willing to try new things, and I’m not afraid to mess up,” Shadbourne said.
Erika Cedeno: Building connections key to student learning
Spanish teacher Erika Cedeno believes connecting with her students is crucial to establishing good relationships with them. She thinks it is even more important since students returned to school after a year of learning in isolation.
Erika Cedeno
Cedeno says she doesn’t have any behavior problems in her classes. Mutual respect and trust are key, she said.
She builds connections, in part, by setting aside time to have conversations with students, and by inviting them to use her classroom to heat up meals or just to hang out during lunch.
“To say hello at the door is not enough,” said Cedeno, who was recently named Teacher of the Year at Golden Valley High School in Santa Clarita.
“They need to trust you, and they need to like you,” Cedeno said. “Because if they don’t like you, they’re not going to learn.”
As chair of the world languages department at the school, Cedeno has encouraged other teachers to use project-based learning and to focus more on social-emotional support in the classroom.
She recently applied for a grant to replace the desks in her classroom with tables, so that the students can collaborate in small groups.
“When you collaborate in the real world, you don’t collaborate in rows,” Cedeno said. “With tables, you collaborate, you give feedback, you talk and you say your point of view. I’m creating that environment, and my principal is loving it.”
