After years of preparation inside and outside the state Capitol (shown), California has launched a website that gathers all sorts of education and career data in a single, searchable place.
Credit: Kirby Lee / AP
Higher revenues than Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators predicted will likely produce a modest increase in funding in 2025-26 for TK-12 schools and community colleges, the Legislative Analyst’s Office projected on Wednesday.
The growth in revenues will also pay down a big portion of the state’s debt to education, with enough to sock away money into a rainy day fund for education that was depleted by the Legislature last year. But at the same time, a rarely invoked constitutional provision would deny schools and community colleges billions in funding that they would otherwise get, the LAO said.
The LAO’s annual state budget forecast is the first hint of how much funding schools and community colleges can expect when Newsom releases his budget in early January. How to spend the new funding amid pressure from competing interest groups — always a challenge — will be up to Newsom and the Legislature.
The LAO is projecting only a $1.5 billion increase (1.3%) for 2025-26 above the $115.3 billion approved in June for 2024-25 for Proposition 98, the quarter-century-old voter-approved formula that determines the minimum amount that must go to schools and community colleges. It comprises 40% of the state’s annual general fund.
But combined with an additional $3.7 billion freed up from expiring one-time costs and Proposition 98 adjustments, schools and community colleges can anticipate a 2.46% cost-of-living-adjustment for programs like the Local Control Funding Formula, the primary source of spending for TK-12. That will leave $2.8 billion in new, uncommitted spending. (The LAO suggests using a piece of that to wipe off $400 million in “deferrals,” late payments to schools that will be carried over from year to year unless paid off.)
Even though California’s economy has been slowing and the unemployment rate is higher, the 2024-25 Proposition 98 level is projected to be $118.3 billion, $3 billion more than the Legislature set in June; however, none of the increase will go to the pockets of school districts and community colleges. All of it, by statute, will be deposited into the Proposition 98 reserve account unless the Legislature overrides the law.
“I think that’s the element of our forecast that will surprise school groups the most,” said Ken Kapphahn, principal fiscal and policy analyst for the LAO. “I think many people do understand revenue is up in 2024-25. What isn’t as well understood is that the increase is going into the reserve and not available for them.”
“Building reserves is a good use of one-time funding,” he said. “We just saw how valuable those reserves can be when we went through $9.5 billion from the reserve. That was a big reason why the state didn’t have to cut ongoing school programs last year. In some ways, making a deposit makes sense right now; it’s an opportunity to rebuild that reserve.”
A big increase in tax receipts from capital gains income, which governs when and how much is deposited into the rainy-day fund, is the source of the money, the LAO said. Much of it is from stock options and reflects the wealth gap between well-compensated high-tech employees and other workers.
There’s also expected to be enough money by the end of 2024-25 to pay off nearly two-thirds of the $8 billion debt to schools and community colleges in 2022-23, caused by a revenue shortfall resulting from a short Covid-19 recession.
The Proposition 98 debt to schools is called a “maintenance factor.” Repaying it becomes the top state priority once more revenue becomes available — to the extent of capturing 95 cents of every new dollar in the general fund. The LAO projects that the maintenance factor will be lowered $4.8 billion this year, leaving $3.3 billion unpaid.
Proposition 98 is a stunningly complex formula, and the higher 2024-25 funding level will add a new twist. Usually, the Proposition 98 level from one year becomes the base funding level for the next year. But the increase in 2024-25 is expected to be big enough to trigger a rarely used “spike” protection, limiting the increase in 2025-26; without that restriction, Proposition 98 would be $4.1 billion higher than LAO’s forecast.
The rationale behind its adoption is to create stability in the non-Proposition 98 side of the general fund. Education advocates view it differently, as a way to fund schools at the minimum constitutionally required level — and no more.
“The maintenance factor payment increases Prop. 98 on an ongoing basis. On the other hand, the state is making the spike protection adjustment to slow the growth in Prop. 98,” said Kapphahn. “Both of those different formulas are part of the constitution, and they happen to be working in opposite ways.”
The “spike” clause has been triggered several times before during years of unusual growth in Proposition 98. What would be different this time is that 2025-26 funding of $116.8 billion would be $1.5 billion less than LAO’s projection for 2024-25.
TK-12 revenue is tied to student attendance, which has been declining in most districts. Attendance statewide fell by nearly 550,000 (9.3%) from 2019-20 to 2021-22 during the height of the Covid pandemic, and has recovered gradually. The LAO expects overall attendance to increase slightly by 12,000 students (0.2%) in 2024-25 and 26,000 (0.5%) in 2025-26 due to the expansion of transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds. The LAO projects attendance will drop each of the three years after that by about 60,000 students primarily because of a smaller school-age population due to lower births.
In an investigative report, The New York Times demonstrated that Elon Musk failed to deliver on his claim that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. Not only did he fall short, but his efforts were so reckless that they might cost money instead of saving it.
Having launched his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (which is not a department at all and was never authorized by Congress), Musk and his then-partner Vivek Ramaswamy promised to cut $2 trillion. Their goal dropped to $1 trillion, and Vivek left the team to run for Governor in Ohio.
Some of DOGE’s claims turned out be be inflated (one alleged saving of $8 billion turned out to be a saving of only $8 million.
Musk eventually reduced his saving claim to only $150 billion.
Since DOGE began, thousands of federal employees have been fired. Some have been rehired after courts decided their firing was illegal. Some have been fired, rehired, and fired again. Some career employees have taken buyout offers. Tens of thousands of federal employees have been laid off, without regard to their experience. There was no time for DOGE workers to evaluate each person they ousted, nor did DOGE have the competence to judge its victims.
The New York Times concluded that DOGE’s activities may actually save nothing at all. Firing workers is expensive when you do it the wrong way, the DOGE way.
President Trump and Elon Musk promised taxpayers big savings, maybe even a “DOGE dividend” check in their mailboxes, when the Department of Government Efficiency was let loose on the federal government. Now, as he prepares to step back from his presidential assignment to cut bureaucratic fat, Mr. Musk has said without providing details that DOGE is likely to save taxpayers only $150 billion.
That is about 15 percent of the $1 trillion he pledged to save, less than 8 percent of the $2 trillion in savings he had originally promised and a fraction of the nearly $7 trillion the federal government spent in the 2024 fiscal year.
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000.
Neither of these estimates includes the cost to taxpayers of defending DOGE’s moves in court. Of about 200 lawsuits and appeals related to Mr. Trump’s agenda, at least 30 implicate the department.
“Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”
Mr. Stier and other experts on the federal work force said it did not have to be this way. Federal law and previous government shutdowns offered Mr. Musk a legal playbook for reducing the federal work force, a goal that most Americans support. But Mr. Musk chose similar lightning-speed, blunt-force methods he used to drastically cut Twitter’s work force after he acquired the company in 2022.
“The law is clear,” said Jeri Buchholz, who over three decades in public service handled hiring and firing at seven federal agencies, including NASA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. “They can do all the things they are currently doing, but they can’t do them the way they’re doing them. They can either start over and do it right, or they can be in court for forever.”
California needs to mandate bilingual education in districts with significant numbers of English learners and invest much more to support districts to offer it, according to a new report released Thursday.
The authors said California is far behind other states in enrolling students in bilingual programs, despite having published documents like the English Learner Roadmap and Global California 2030, that lay out a vision for significantly expanding bilingual education in the state.
“It’s particularly significant because of the loud promises the state has made on behalf of bilingual education,” said Conor P. Williams, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and one of the authors of the report. “When it comes down to actual resources devoted, they’ve come so far short.”
The authors of the report recommend three main actions for California state leaders to take: Expand bilingual education programs with more funding and requirements for districts to offer them; prioritize enrollment of English learners in bilingual programs; and invest more in bilingual teacher preparation programs.
In order to expand bilingual education programs, the authors said California should follow the lead of Texas and pass legislation that requires districts to offer bilingual education if they have at least 20 students in any grade level that speak the same home language. In addition, they recommend the state provide districts more funding for every student enrolled in a bilingual program.
The authors said this “carrot and stick” approach in Texas has helped the state enroll a much higher percentage (36.7%) of English learners in bilingual programs. In contrast, California has enrolled only 16.4 % of English learners in bilingual programs.
The report cites research that shows bilingual education improves academic achievement, progress in learning English, retention of home language, high school graduation and college attendance, in addition to other benefits.
“Bilingual education should not be a partisan issue, because of the vast and wide-reaching benefits of it,” said Ilana Umansky, associate professor of education at the University of Oregon and one of the authors of the report. “It’s very telling that a state like Texas mandates bilingual education in a lot of circumstances and incentivizes bilingual education and has twice the enrollment of English learners in bilingual education as California.”
In addition to expanding the number of bilingual programs, the authors also called on state and district leaders to make sure there are spaces set aside in bilingual programs for English learners, that they are located in neighborhoods where English learners live or that they can easily reach by transportation.
“It’s critical to prioritize English learners, because it’s English-learner-classified students that most need and benefit from bilingual programs,” Umansky said.
Umansky said many dual-language immersion programs are often located in neighborhoods where most families speak English, because English-speaking parents are often the loudest advocates pushing for them. And she said some districts outright bar recent immigrant students from enrolling in bilingual programs, incorrectly assuming they are not beneficial for them.
Finally, the report’s authors are recommending the state also invest more in bilingual teacher preparation programs and in making such programs more affordable for students. They pointed out that after voters passed Proposition 227 in 1998, limiting bilingual education in California, many bilingual teacher preparation programs were closed.
“Prop 227 had such a devastating effect on traditional bilingual teacher programs, we have got to invest in them. They have to be bigger, they have to be stronger, and we have to have support for the programs and support for the students,” Umansky said.
Proposition 227 was overturned in 2016, when voters passed a separate measure, Proposition 58.
“California has put its foot down about saying, ‘We believe in multilingualism, we’re going to get students to be multilingual,’” Umansky said. “Now is the moment to really start putting money and efforts behind those intentions.”
Isabel Dueñas teaches her transitional kindergarten students how to read at San Miguel Catholic School in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Credit: Archdiocese of Los Angeles
The article was updated to include a statement that LAUSD Supt. Alberto Carvalho issued on Dec.23.
Los Angeles Unified has settled a 3-year-old lawsuit with the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles over how much federal Title I funding low-income students within the archdiocese are entitled to receive. The district agreed to pay the $3 million it improperly withheld from archdiocese schools and to comply with federal regulations requiring transparency and consultation with the archdiocese it had repeatedly violated.
The agreement covered 2018-19 and 2019-20, when Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) first changed the method of determining student eligibility for Title I and cut funding by more than 90%, from $9.5 million for the eligible 13,000 students in the archdiocese to $757,000.
The LAUSD school trustees signed off on the agreement in a closed session Dec. 11 and did not publicly disclose details after announcing the vote. A district spokespersondeclined comment before publication of the article.
But Paul Escala, superintendent of the Los Angeles Archdiocese schools, said the agreement sends a clear message. It “ensures that non-public school students who are eligible for these services will get them. While that may seem basic, when we’ve operated in an environment where that was not clear and was not being upheld, that is a win for kids,” he said.
“This recognizes that kids who attend Catholic schools in urban Los Angeles, not only are they eligible for Title I services, but in fact suffer with poverty and needs just like their public school district peers,” he said.
Since its passage in 1968, Congress extended Title I funding to poor students in private schools, including religious schools, to boost their chances for success. However, to avoid directly funding religious schools, Congress decided that districts in which private and religious schools are located should determine student eligibility and consult with the schools on which services, such as counseling, the students should receive.
Districts have a menu of methods for determining Title I eligibility. The simplest and generally most advantageous for private schools is to use census data to determine the level of poverty in a neighborhood and calculate eligibility as the proportion of low-income students that attend a private school. It’s the method most large urban districts have used, Escala said, including LAUSD and Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where Alberto Carvalho was superintendent before becoming LAUSD superintendent in 2022. That approach also meets the spirit of Title I, he said.
An incentive to deny Title I to privateschool kids
Under Superintendent Austin Beutner’s incoming administration, the district changed the eligibility process for 2018-19 without prior notice to require schools to document family incomes through surveys or the number of income-eligible students registered for the federal subsidized meals programs. Along with requiring more time, paperwork and verification by the schools, the district changed the reporting rules several times in a short period and failed to engage the archdiocese about its decisions meaningfully, the California Department of Education wrote in 2021 in response to a formal complaint by the archdiocese. In addition to slashing funding, the district cut the schools served to fewer than two dozen out of 116 schools in the archdiocese. According to the California Department of Education, the district cut its total share allocated to private schools from 2% and 2.6% of $291 million to 0.5%.
Districts have a financial incentive to minimize private schools’ Title I eligibility, since the federal government awards Title I funding to districts. After subtracting the amount going to private schools, a district gets to keep unallocated dollars for its own Title I students.
“There’s a moral and ethical question on the table,” Escala said at the time.
In its 58-page report, the California Department of Education called the funding cuts “totally unreasonable.” Its report concluded that LAUSD “engaged in a pattern of arbitrary unilateral decisions,” including giving archdiocese schools 12 days during a summer break to produce income surveys for families and then removing all the schools that were unable to meet the deadline. It characterized the district’s approach as a “hide-the-ball approach (that) breached both the spirit and the letter” of the law.
LAUSD appealed the ruling to the U.S. Department of Education, which largely affirmed the California department’s findings in a November 2023 ruling. It gave the district 60 days to consult with the district, as the Title I law required, and fix the inaccurate count of ineligible students. It gave the district 90 days to provide the services that it had denied.
The archdiocese returned to Los Angeles Superior Court in the spring of 2024 because, Escala said, the district dragged its feet and declined to hand over documents the archdiocese was entitled to.
The documents confirmed what the archdiocese had assumed, said the archdiocese’s chief academic officer, Robert Tagorda. “For years they had insisted that they were following the law. We had suspicions that if you’re cutting us this much, it can’t be lawful. We had the documents to show we had far more low-income students than they had originally counted.”
With revelations of public records, the archdiocese reached out to LAUSD to resume settlement talks. Within several weeks in November, there was a deal. The terms correspond to what the U.S. Department of Education had recommended, Tagorda said. LAUSD would recalculate how much was owed in 2018-19 and apply the corrections to 2019-20. It would disclose how the Title I obligation was calculated and confer with the archdiocese on the services to be provided. The archdiocese also will be able to pool Title I money so that it can direct it to the most intensive-needs schools — a practice that LAUSD had prohibited.
The combined $3 million owed for the two years was far below what had been received the year before the district changed the eligibility method. But staff turnover in the district and the archdiocese, and incomplete records in some schools, undermined the claims, Tagorda acknowledged. The eligibility process in years since 2019-20, unaffected by the lawsuit, changed little. In 2023-24, the archdiocese received $2 million in Title I funding.
Title I rules allow districts to annually change the process of determining eligibility. Escala said the archdiocese will continue to request that LAUSD return to the proportionality method that produced more funding; LAUSD, by law, must give the rationale each year for denying it.
Escala acknowledged that the archdiocese could have chosen to litigate the case — and likely won. But the outcome would have potentially taken years and legal expenses that archdiocese schools don’t have. “We recognized that we could not afford another day, another year, another generation of students not having the ability to fairly access legally entitled services,” he said.
Tagorda said the additional money from the settlement would be used for tutoring, after-school and summer programs, and academic counseling that schools have been requesting.
In an interview with EdSource in March 2022, soon after becoming LAUSD superintendent, Carvalho said he had familiarized himself with the archdiocese lawsuit. “I’m going to resolve this issue sooner rather than later,” he said. “What I can tell you is that we need more objective, transparent tools by which we assess and fund this guaranteed federal entitlement that’s driven by poverty,” regardless of whether for a public or private school.
It took nearly three years since then, after exhausting appeals and losing one ruling in Superior Court, for the district to resolve the case. Escala said he is optimistic it will be enforced.
“When we came back to the table, it was clear that Carvalho took a personal interest to make sure we have the conditions on his side to get a settlement done. We have seen a change in approach by district staff. He is committed to abide by Title I regulations and consultation that is fair, I take him at this word,” said Escala.
“In the course of these negotiations, trust and faith had to be rebuilt. I think that we’re in a far better place than we were six months ago.”
On Dec. 23, a day after the article was published, Carvalho issued the following statement: “I am grateful for our partnership with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. I look forward to the ways we can work together in the future and serve the students of Los Angeles. Thanks to Superintendent Paul Escala for his steadfast leadership over the Department of Catholic Schools.”
Construction site at Murray Elementary in Dublin Unified in 2022.
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
The record 205 school districts that passed construction bonds in November will spend 2025 vying for matching money from a $10 billion state bond that will meet only a small portion of the demand for financial help.
Novices at navigating state agencies, especially small districts, may find the process of claiming a share of state funding will be lengthy, complex and potentially overwhelming, said Julie Boesch, administrator for small school district support for the Kern County Superintendent of Schools. Boesch singlehandedly shepherded a renovation project through the funding process as superintendent and principal of Maple Elementary, a one-school district in Kern County.
“Putting out requests for qualifications and for proposals to hire consultants, architects, construction management and then to determine what kind of funding you can get — there are just so many things that have to happen,” she said. “There were times when I, as superintendent, was spending 90% of my time just on facilities.”
The success of Proposition 2, the construction bond for schools and community colleges, with 59% of support, was a vote of renewed confidence in public schools and a rebound from March 2020, when voters defeated a $15 billion bond amid anxiety over the Covid pandemic.
“They understood the need for this,” said Rebekah Kalleen, a legislative advocate with the Coalition for Adequate School Housing (CASH), an organization of school districts and construction and architectural firms that led the effort to pass the proposition. “The funding opportunities will go a long way to ensure that projects are robust and that we’re able to make the repairs and the upgrades that we need.”
New money, old projects
Proposition 2’s passage will inject a welcome $10 billion on top of the $45 billion in bonds approved for school and community college districts. However, $3.7 billion — less than half of the $8.5 billion allotted to TK-12 districts under Proposition 2 — may be available for local projects approved in November.
That’s because as much as $4.8 billion in unfunded projects with preliminary approval from the last state bond will get priority. This extensive backlog dates back to Proposition 51, which voters passed in 2016. Funding from that bond ran dry several years ago, but under state law, districts could apply through Oct. 31, a week before the vote on Proppsition 2. They could reasonably assume that state funding would eventually become available from the next bond.
“Because there is so much more demand than there is funding, it’s safe to say that there’s always a long pipeline of projects awaiting allocations,” said Sara Hinkley, California program manager for the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley, which researches school facilities.
Districts submitted plans with preliminary approval for more than 1,000 unfunded projects. These include projects valued at $1.46 billion for new construction and $3.42 billion for modernization. The latter category includes renovations, system upgrades, repairs, and replacement of portable classrooms more than 20 years old and permanent buildings over 25 years old.
One line ends, another forms
After Proposition 2 money runs out, the remaining projects will form a new line of unfunded projects awaiting state money whenever voters pass the next state bond.
“It is a fair question whether voters understood the degree of the funding backlog and the fact that so much of the Proposition 2 funding would already be spoken for by the time they were voting on their own local bonds in November,” Hinkley said. “What this all really emphasizes is that we are constantly playing catch-up with facilities funding, not coming anywhere close to meeting the actual needs of districts.”
It’s unlikely that all the pending projects will successfully run the gauntlet of state agencies for final approval, although it’s not possible to know how many now.
What follows is a primer on steps districts must take to be eligible for matching money under Proposition 2.
How will Proposition 2 money be divided?
Under the ballot language that the Legislature passed, Proposition 2 will be apportioned into several categories. It’s too soon to know how funding the previous bond’s unfunded projects will affect Proposition 2 categories.
$1.5 billion for community colleges. The Legislature and the governor will select specific projects based on recommendations of the community colleges.
$8.5 billion for TK-12 districts, allocated as follows:
$4 billion for repairs, replacement of portables at least 20 years old, and other modernization work
$3.3 billion for new construction
$600 million for career and technical education facilities
$600 million for facilities for charter schools
$115 million to remove lead from school drinking water
When can districts apply?
Over the next eight months, the Office of Public School Construction will revise rules to differentiate Proposition 2 from previous state construction bonds. Changes include requiring districts to submit a five-year master plan with an inventory of classrooms, square footage and auxiliary facilities at each school.
Proposition 2 also will set aside 10% of modernization and new construction money for districts with fewer than 2,500 students. But that provision notwithstanding, what hasn’t changed is a first-come, first-served distribution system that can favor property-wealthy districts and large districts, such as Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) which can afford to employ permanent facilities staff to push their projects to the front of the line.
Kalleen of CASH and others familiar with state facilities grants urge districts to start submitting applications for priority projects now and not wait for more state guidance, in order to avoid getting left behind and ending up on the next waiting list.
“Districts are already planning and looking at their projects and submitting without yet knowing what the regulations will look like because there’s so much pent-up demand for state support for facilities funding,” Kalleen said. “Projects are funded based on the date that they’re received by the Office of Public School Construction. So as long as you meet those eligibility criteria, they’re funded in the order that they’re received.”
Districts won’t have to finish their master plans to initially apply for state funding, although they will have to complete them before receiving state money. They’ll have an opportunity to amend their proposals after the state revises regulations this summer.
Districts that have already completed a master plan with a needs assessment and established priorities “will be ahead of the game,” said Karla DeLeon, senior director-education for Dahlin Architecture, with three offices in California.
A small shift toward needs-based funding
Instead of submitting one application for all of their construction work, districts must apply for each project. The state’s share — at least 50% of the cost for new construction and 60% for a modernization project — will be funded uniformly on a per-student basis.
For an elementary school, for example, the per-student funding for 2024 was $15,770, meaning that building a classroom for 25 students would be $394,250 of base funding. (The per-student amount differs depending on whether a student is in elementary, middle or high school.) The per-student dollar amount is the minimum districts will qualify for, as there could be additional funding through supplemental grants if the project includes certain features.
But for the first time, the state will slightly increase funding for high-poverty, low-property-wealth districts. Huge differences in districts’ taxable property values create disparities in how much they can charge property owners for repairing and building school facilities. To narrow the gap, the state will provide up to 5 percentage points more matching money for qualifying projects based on the proportion of students who are low-income, foster youth, and English learners and, to a lesser extent, on a district’s property wealth per student.
A district could receive a 65% state match for renovations, reducing its contribution to 35%; the maximum contributions for new construction would be 55% state and 45% district.
“The total funding for the project would, in the eyes of the state, remain the same; it’s just more would be on the state’s dime, less on the school district’s dime,” Kalleen said.
Advocates for changing the system say the bonus funding won’t make enough difference to help many districts fully repair or replace subpar and antiquated buildings. The new system “does not meaningfully address the serious equity concerns that we and others have raised about the distribution of state funds,” wrote the Center for Cities + Schools, an institute at UC Berkeley, in an analysis.
How soon will local bond and Proposition 2 money be available?
When the state and local money becomes available depends. Bonds are loans that are usually paid back over 25 to 30 years. Working with their financial teams, districts will time their borrowing to align with their construction schedule and minimize property tax increases.
The increases cannot exceed a statewide bonding limit of charging property owners more than $40 per $100,000 of assessed property value for school facilities. For many small, low-wealth districts, this is a major obstacle to funding school improvements. For property-wealthy districts, it’s not an issue.
State funding to districts will be disbursed in batches over the next several years. The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects that paying for Proposition 2’s interest and principal will cost the state’s general fund about $500 million per year over 35 years.
What else is new under Proposition 2?
Proposition 2 includes other new features affecting TK-12 districts:
Along with reserving 10% of new construction and modernization funding for districts with fewer than 2,500 students, small districts can receive 5% of a project’s funding to hire architects, engineers and project managers. This should help them speed up the application process.
The state has a financial hardship provision funding the full cost of a project for a district that lacks the property tax base to pay for it. Proposition 2 triples the maximum tax base qualifying from $5 million to $15 million in assessed value.
Proposition 2 does not set aside funding for classrooms specifically equipped for transitional kindergarten (TK), as advocates had hoped, but it does permit districts to seek supplemental funding for TK in a school project. Districts can also seek supplemental money to pay for updating or constructing “essential facilities,” including kitchens, cafeterias, and undersized gyms, and installing energy conservation and efficiency measures like solar panels, outdoor shade areas and more efficient heating and air conditioning units.
What will the application process be like?
Districts face a multiagency and multiyear process with hoops to jump through and deadlines to meet before they can receive state funding. All must submit project plans to at least two state agencies before their plans can go to the Office of Public School Construction for a review for funding.
The Division of the State Architect, a group of architects and engineers, will ensure compliance with building codes, structural requirements and safety standards.
The Department of Education ensures “educational adequacy” — whether the facility complies with the state’s education code, meets classroom space requirements by subject and grade as well as how its design handles the needs of special education students, English learners, intervention services and accommodates community events, parking and outdoor activities. Depending on the site location, approval may be needed from the state Department of Toxic Substances Control or review under the California Environmental Quality Act.
DeLeon of Dahlin Architecture recommends turning to experts to guide the process. “You will want a solid team of support to manage all of the balls in the air within the time limits.”
Boesch said her most important advice to districts is to seek pre-approval meetings with state agencies. “Most districts avoid these, because they assume ‘they’ll just tell us to do something different, and it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,’” she said. “Truly, it’s not. It’s easier to ask permission and move forward instead of having to go back and undo something that may have been done incorrectly.”
Kalleen said districts can expect the process to take six months to a year for approval from the Office of Public School Construction, depending on the size of the project, and an additional two years or longer to receive funding from the State Allocations Board.
Boesch agreed. “At an absolute minimum, in a perfect world, it really would be two years,” she said, to receive funding, but more likely three or four.
“The backlog is so large that state funds often get to districts after projects have already been completed,” Hinkley said. “Districts that do not have sufficient local funds to cover a project’s costs while waiting for the state backlog are at an enormous disadvantage.”
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.
