PBS ran an important segment on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s decision to cancel $500 million in grants to study mNRA vaccine grants. These are the vaccines that broke the COVID pandemic.
PBS interviewed scientists about this surprise decision. If you would like to see the interviews, open the link.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to cancel nearly half a billion dollars in federal funding for mRNA vaccine development has left many public health experts and scientists stunned.
mRNA technology was central in the battle against COVID and can be developed more quickly than traditional vaccines. But anti-vaccine communities and skeptics don’t trust its safety.
Geoff Bennett spoke with Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, about the latest in mRNA vaccine research and the implications of Kennedy’s move.
“I can say unequivocally that this was the most dangerous public health decision I have ever seen made by a government body,” Osterholm said.
U.S. children’s health in decline
As the Trump administration works to reimagine public health through its “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, a new study paints a stark picture of the challenges facing the nation’s kids.
The health of American children has significantly worsened across several key indicators since 2007, according to a recent study published in JAMA.
A UC Berkeley labor economist this week offered a California answer to the persistent question of whether more money matters for K-12 education.
Rucker Johnson, who researched the state’s decade-old school finance overhaul known as the Local Control Funding Formula, concluded it does matter, especially for the highest needs students targeted for help by the equity-based funding.
“The findings provide compelling evidence that school spending matters and providing additional resources to support high-need students pays dividends,” wrote Johnson, a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.
The improvements were consistent across grades, subjects, and performance metrics, the research found. Johnson calculated that a $1,000 increase in per-student funding, sustained for three consecutive years in the highest-poverty districts, produced roughly a full grade-level increase in math and reading achievement for students in grades three through eight and 11, relative to what the average student achieved in the years preceding the formula’s passage in 2013.
It’s a big deal for students who started third grade a year behind in math to be at grade level by the end of fifth grade, he said.
Graphic note: Third graders’ test scores in math improved as they progressed through fifth grade while receiving increased funding from the Local Control Funding Formula. The vertical scale measures growth in math beyond a standard year of achievement (1.0 is a full extra year of additional growth, whether catching up to grade level or accelerating beyond it). The horizontal scale measures the percentage of high-needs students in a district, which determines how much bonus funding a district receives. The dotted line in the middle marks 55% of high-needs students, the point at which districts gradually begin receiving an extra dose of concentration funding. The blue line shows average academic growth for districts with 55% or fewer high-needs students. The red line shows the impact of districts’ concentration funding on academic growth. The dots signify groups of districts above and below average.
Johnson’s research focused from 2013-14, when the funding formula was introduced, through 2018-19, when the full funding targets were achieved. What mattered, he said, was not just the amount of the increase but the number of years in a row students benefited.
The Covid pandemic of 2020, with more than a year in remote learning for many districts, has wiped out most of the academic gains during this period, particularly among low-income Black and Hispanic students — despite record federal and state funding.
Did equity-based funding cause the improvement?
The Legislature included a number of major policy and accountability initiatives, along with providing more money, in the funding formula law. It required that districts and charter schools spell out how they planned to spend on high-needs students in a Local Control and Accountability Plan or LCAP and then measure the impact. The law defined high-needs students as English learners, homeless and foster youths, and low-income students — those qualifying for free or reduced school meals and other income-based government benefits.
The locally controlled funding formula introduced the color-coded California School Dashboard, which ranks districts’ performance on multiple measures in an effort to pressure districts to reduce suspensions and chronic absences and raise high-school graduation rates. In 2015, the State Board of Education ended the high school exit exam and switched to the Smarter Balanced tests to measure the newly adopted Common Core standards.
Johnson, however, wrote that new money, not new policies, caused the widespread gains in student performance “based on compelling evidence.” Another prominent researcher, however, said that the claim is overstated.
Johnson said he was able to isolate the impact of additional funding in two ways. The new funding formula’s distinct design, with concentrated funding for highest-needs districts, showed disproportionate gains in achievement. He could find no similar pattern of achievement in the decade preceding the new formula. Julien Lafortune, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, who also has studied the funding formula, agreed that is a fair conclusion.
Johnson also compared the achievement of districts funded by the Local Control Funding Formula with basic aid districts – the 100-some districts that received no funding under the Local Control Funding Formula because their funding from property taxes exceeded what they would have received from the state. Because there were no similar effects in student achievement among the basic aid districts that he found with Local Control Funding Formula districts during its rollout, Johnson concluded more funding must be the cause.
That comparison is problematic because the majority of basic aid districts are small, wealthy residential communities with few low-income families. They include Palo Alto, Saratoga, Santa Clara and San Mateo Union High School District in the Bay Area, and Santa Barbara, Newport Mesa, and San Dieguito Union High School District in Southern California. Graduation rates and test scores generally were already above average in those districts, and suspension rates were already lower than in high-poverty districts.
“The correlation of LCFF funding with poverty is at the extreme with the basic aid districts,” said Eric Hanushek, an economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who has written extensively on education financing. Johnson “makes an admirable attempt to parse the impact of LCFF funding, but this is an exceedingly difficult task. He cannot convincingly separate pure spending changes from the host of other changes in California schools at that time.”
The study did not cite the number of districts that received $1,000 per student in additional funding, sustained over three years, and, therefore, how many students should have gained approximately a year in academic growth. A graph showing yearly Local Control Funding Formula funding increases during this period indicated that many districts benefited by at least that amount. Some districts with the largest numbers of high-needs students received more than $2,000 more per student over the three years.
Funding for the Local Control Funding Formula increased annually after its adoption in 2013. Districts with more than 55% high-needs students received increased amounts of funding, called concentration grants.
But Johnson said the exact number of students whose math and reading scores grew the equivalent of a grade was not calculated because of the methodology and parameters he used. The research was more precise than looking at the unfiltered year-over-year results of all students. It eliminated students who transferred schools during the period and took into account parental socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity. Its specific parameters compared:
Students from the same school across cohorts evaluated at the same grade.
Students from the same school and same kindergarten cohort across successive grades.
Student achievement growth among students from the same cohort and same grade across districts.
Local Control Funding Formula reconsidered
Gov. Jerry Brown, who championed the funding overhaul, made it clear he wanted the funding formula to roll out without interference from the Legislature and would veto any modifications to the law as long as he was in office. Gov. Gavin Newsom has proven more receptive to changes out of recognition that the law has flaws and its implementation has been uneven. Districts receiving the same funding per student have shown wide variations in student performance. That’s because, Lafortune noted, the Legislature sets the rules on funding, but districts decide how to spend it.
Last year, Pivot Learning, a national nonprofit that works with school districts on improving classroom instruction, created aDistrict Readiness Index that measures conditions like family and community engagement, principal retention, and work environment, which can determine districts’ success with programs and investments. In 2019, the Learning Policy Institute, the Palo Alto-based research and education policy nonprofit that published Johnson’s research, producedCalifornia’s Positive Outliers: Districts Beating the Odds. It identified districts that excelled and why.
Advocacy nonprofits like Public Advocates argued for a decade that the Local Control Accountability Plan rules and Local Control Funding Formula law did not require districts to be transparent enough on how they spent money for high-needs students, who make up about 60% of California students. Newsom includedone important transparency change in the 2021 state budget, prohibiting districts from transferring unspent funding for high-needs students to the general fund.
Recognizing that Covid intensified the disparities facing high-poverty areas, Newsom increased funding for districts with the greatest concentrations of high-needs students from 50% of base funding to 66%. Acknowledging the Local Control Funding Formula’s district-centric approach has not narrowed the achievement gap, Newsom created an“equity multiplier” in this year’s budget. It includes an additional $300 million in ongoing money for the high-poverty schools and requires that districts create mini-Local Control Accountability Plans with goals and actions to improve the lowest-performing schools. Until now, the formula allocated funding only by districts.
Lafortune said that Johnson’s research is an important contribution to the effort to evaluate the formula.
“I don’t think school finance formula should exist in stone because the conditions that are affecting schools are changing,” he said. “But now that we have evidence that funding targeted in high-concentration districts on average seems to be making a difference, the question becomes how to equitably deploy the funding everywhere.”
How the funding formula works
Gov. Jerry Brown and Michael Kirst, his longtime education adviser and state board president, said the Local Control Funding Formula made equitable funding a priority. On top of base funding per student, the formula gives districts and charter schools an additional 20% for each high-needs student.
The Legislature then gave an added boost to those districts with high proportions of those students, called concentration grants, based on research that high-poverty neighborhoods compounded challenges that children experience.
The concentration funding kicked in gradually once high-needs students made up 55% of a district’s enrollment. The differential could be significant. While districts with 40% high-needs students received an additional 8% funding, those with 85% high-needs students, like Los Angeles Unified, received 32% funding above the base.
In the decade preceding the new formula, California consistently ranked in the bottom of the states in per-student funding, adjusted for regional costs, according to the report. In 2011, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, it ranked last. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed California’s socioeconomic achievement gaps were among the largest in the nation, the report said.
Faced with Brown’s threat to cut education funding severely without additional revenue, voters in 2012 passed a temporary sales tax and income tax on the top 1% of wage earners. Base funding per student rose from under $6,000 in 2013-14 to more than $8,000 in 2018-19, adjusted by grade span. Districts like Paramount Unified in Los Angeles County, with 95% high-needs students, received nearly $12,000 per student in local control funding.
Johnson found sizable improvement in other performance measures besides higher math and reading scores in high-concentration districts.
LCFF concentration funding increased the likelihood that students would graduate from high school by 8.2 percentage points for students exposed to a $1,000 increase in the average per-pupil spending experienced from grades nine to 12.
By a 9.8 percentage-point increase in math and 14.7 percentage-point increase in reading, students were more likely to meet college readiness standards, as measured by the 11th-grade Smarter Balanced tests.
By a 5 to 6 percentage-point reduction for boys and 3 percentage-point reduction for girls, Local Control Funding Formula-induced increases in school spending led to significant reductions in annual suspensions and expulsions across third to 10th grades. Suspensions for Black students in 10th grade were cut by 8 percentage points in schools benefiting from $1,000 in Local Control Funding Formula increases for three consecutive years.
Lafortune said Johnson’s research was consistent with his own findings comparing the academic growth of districts receiving the most local control funding — those with more than 80% high-needs students — with districts with fewer than 30% high-needs students. Another report will be published next month.
“I’m happy to see there’s actually some good research out using student-level data with evidence in answer to the top-level question, Is (the formula) moving the needle? Yes, for those high-concentration districts,” he said.
An EdSource examination of growth in Smarter Balanced scores for the years of Johnson’s study shows slow but steady progress for both low-income and non-low-income students. Both groups of students grew by an average of slightly more than 1 percentage point annually in math and slightly less than 2 percentage points in English language arts. After five years, the achievement gap remained nearly identical, about 30 percentage points apart.
“Yes, we do care about the gaps, but our idea of equity is not to bring the children that are performing really well to the levels that are not excellent,” said Johnson. The overall gains are evidence that more money matters for all students, he said, adding that the aggregate averages don’t reflect his research of districts receiving the biggest dose of funding.
Lafortune said that the overall averages also reflect that low-income students are spread throughout the state. A fifth — about 800,000 students — attend wealthy districts that get no concentration funding. More than 40% of non-low-income students attend districts that receive concentration funding, he said.
Students work together during an after-school tutoring club.
Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education
In an agreement ending a 3-year-old lawsuit brought by families of 15 Oakland and Los Angeles students, the state will target billions of dollars of remaining learning-loss money to low-income students and others with the widest learning disparities.
State officials have also agreed to pursue statutory changes that would commit districts and schools to measure and report on student progress using proven strategies, like frequent in-school tutoring, in ways that the state hadn’t required in other post-Covid funding. If the state reneges or the Legislature fails to follow through, the plaintiffs can revoke the deal and return to court for trial.
The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Mark Rosenbaum, director of the Opportunity Under Law project for the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel, said he was optimistic that won’t be necessary.
“The state stepped up in focusing on those kids who have been hardest hit,” Rosenbaum said. “The urgent vision of this historic settlement is to use strategies that not only recoup academic losses but also erase the opportunity gaps exacerbated by the pandemic.”
Districts are receiving the state block grant based on the proportion of low-income students, foster children, and English learners enrolled, although they can currently use the funding for all students. The program lists various possible uses to “support academic learning recovery and staff and pupil social and emotional well-being,” including more instructional time, learning recovery materials, and counseling. The money can be spent through 2027-28.
The settlement covers what’s remaining of the $7.5 billion Learning Recovery Block Grant, which Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature reduced to $6.3 billion in the current state budget. The largest Covid pot of relief money for districts — $12 billion from the federal government under the last phase of the American Rescue Act — expires on Sept. 30.
The settlement would limit funding to the lowest performing student groups and chronically absent students, including Black and Hispanic students, and would narrow the list of permitted uses while requiring strategies backed by evidence that they are effective. Districts would create a plan for the money, which is not currently required, and track the outcome of at least one strategy over the following three years.
Newsom kept the remainder of the block grant intact in his proposed 2024-25 budget, although he based the budget on optimistic revenue forecasts. To guard the block grant from future cuts, the settlement would guarantee a minimum of $2 billion will be protected.
“One of the reasons that animated our settlement was, we didn’t want to go to trial and then, at the end of the trial, get a decision and then find that the cupboard was bare,” Rosenbaum said.
In a statement on behalf of the Newsom administration, State Board of Education spokesperson Alex Traverso called the agreement’s use of one-time dollars “appropriate at this stage coming out of the pandemic.”
“We look forward to engaging with the Legislature and stakeholders to advance this proposal and focus learning recovery dollars on serving the students with the greatest needs,” he wrote.
The rollout of distance learning and equipment was uneven among districts. The quality and extent of remote learning also varied widely among districts initially and when schools restarted in the fall.
The lawsuit charged that “the delivery of education left many already-underserved students functionally unable to attend school.”
“In addition,” it said, “students are being harmed by schools that fail to meet minimum instructional times, which the state has done nothing to enforce.”
The lawsuit pointed to then 8-year-old twins Cayla J. and her sister Kai J., from a low-income family and attending third grade in Oakland Unified. They had remote classes only twice between March and the end of school in 2020. Because some of the students in the class lacked the equipment for remote learning, the teacher told their mother that classes were canceled for the other students, according to the lawsuit.
Oakland and Los Angeles Unified had among the fewest minutes of live daily instruction during distance learning and were among the last districts to return to in-person learning in spring 2021. Los Angeles Unified students missed 205 in-person days, and Oakland students missed 204 days.
In subsequent court filings, as the case dragged on, the California Department of Education pointed to the massive state and federal Covid aid for districts, the minimum daily minutes of instruction that the Legislature set, and the many webcasts and guidance that the department gave on strategies for remote instruction and learning recovery. It cited districts’ authority to make decisions under local control and the transparency requirements for reporting spending through their Local Control and Accountability Plans.
Rosenbaum told EdSource when the lawsuit was filed that the state was shirking its constitutional obligation to prevent education inequality. “The state cannot just write big checks and then say, ‘We’re not paying attention to what happens here,’” he said. “The buck stops with the state. The state’s duty is to ensure that kids get basic educational equality and that the gaps among the haves and the have-nots do not widen.”
Providing expert testimony for the plaintiffs, Lucrecia Santibañez, professor at UCLA’s School of Education & Information Studies, wrote, “Our decentralized school system in California, and the minimal guidance that was received from the state appears to have left many (districts) to their own devices.”
“Data collection was minimal to non-existent, and monitoring of the learning and continuity plans was superficial at best,” she wrote.
Dispute over test scores
Meanwhile, chronic absences soared to set new records in 2022-23, and test scores fell sharply. In 2022-23, 34.6% of students met or exceeded standards on the Smarter Balanced math test, which is 5.2 percentage points below pre-pandemic 2018-19. Only 16.9% of Black students, 22.7% of Latino students, and 9.9% of English learners were at grade level.
There was a similar drop in English language arts results by 2022-23: 46.7% of students overall met or exceeded standards. Only 29.9% of Black students and 36.1% of Latino students were at grade level, compared with 60.7% of white students and 74% of Asian students.
The key issue in the case was whether the pandemic effects were disproportionate and whether the digital divide contributed to it. State officials acknowledged the impact of the pandemic but asserted that the declines were similar, within one or two percentage points, for all groups. In rebuttal, Harvard University education professor Andrew Ho, a nationally known psychometrician, charged that the state intentionally used “a biased calculation of achievement gaps” that led to the finding it sought.
The state used the method displayed on the California School Dashboard that compares the percentages of student groups that met a single pre- and post-pandemic target — scoring at or above meeting standards from one year to the next. Ho wrote that it should have compared individual students’ losses and gains in scale points, a more refined measure that other states use.
Using that methodology, Ho wrote, “California test scores show that racial inequality increased in almost all subjects and grades. Economic inequality also increased.” An independent analysis of state test data by EdSource corroborated that finding.
Advocates for a more precise system of measuring students’ growth on test scores have also called for the use of scale scores. In a move that could accelerate that adoption in California, the settlement calls for using scale scores to determine which student groups will be eligible for the block grant funding.
Last August, in a decision that prompted negotiations to settle the case, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman denied the state’s motion to dismiss the case and ordered the parties to go to trial. He concluded that the state had not established that it made adequate and reasonable efforts to respond to the pandemic’s impact and that Ho’s finding on increased learning disparities was credible. Under the settlement, the state would pay $2.5 million in attorneys’ fees.
Credit to local nonprofits
During the summer of 2020, Cayla J. and her sister turned to a nonprofit for help the district didn’t provide. Calling The Oakland REACH “a lifeline” for the two girls, the lawsuit said it “provided a safe space for learning and community advocacy” while offering enrichment online summer courses. Its family liaisons helped keep Cayla J. and Kai J. from falling further behind, it said.
Oakland REACH’s counterpart in Los Angeles, the Community Coalition, provided similar services. Both signed on as plaintiffs.
Efforts by The Oakland REACH evolved into a novel early literacy and early math tutoring partnership with Oakland Unified, employing trained community members and parents. In a nod to both nonprofits’ good work, the settlement calls for amending the education code to encourage districts to contract or partner with community-based organizations “with a track record of success” for services covered by the block grant.
Michael Jacobs, a partner with Morrison Foerster working pro bono on the case, called the provision an important and landmark element of the agreement.
“We saw during the pandemic that community-based organizations filled critical needs,” he said. Pointing to The Oakland REACH, he said, “Now the evidence is in that the services made a significant difference in educational achievement.”
Lakisha Young, CEO and founder of The Oakland REACH said she has been speaking with community partners in other districts about their work “building solutions for our kids to be reading proficiently.” She called the agreement a “historic win” and praised the families involved in the lawsuit for “the courage to step forward, not knowing their voices would make a difference.”
This is a very important chart to raise awarement across schools, districts, and the state; however, I think it needs to be corrected that these are students who don’t pass these college-prep courses with a C or higher. It sends the wrong message to say that these “students don’t take courses needed to apply to CSU or UC” as I know that most students in many schools/districts do take these courses — they just … Read More
This is a very important chart to raise awarement across schools, districts, and the state; however, I think it needs to be corrected that these are students who don’t pass these college-prep courses with a C or higher. It sends the wrong message to say that these “students don’t take courses needed to apply to CSU or UC” as I know that most students in many schools/districts do take these courses — they just don’t get a passing grade, which is another systemic issue that needs to be tackled.
Christian Robinson always planned to go to college, but when she graduated from Adelanto High School in California’s High Desert, she felt aimless. Without a plan or preparation for higher education, she decided to go to work instead.
She regrets that now.
“I wish I would have gone straight into college because I would have had everything done, finished and over with,” said Robinson, who at 20 is now enrolling at Victor Valley College.
Currently, Robinson juggles two jobs, working for a security company and serving fast food. She wishes she had received more guidance about attending college from her school.
Robinson’s story was typical for Black students at Adelanto High School, where over 8 out of 10 Black students graduated in 2020 without the college prep courses — known as A-G — required for admission to California’s public universities.
The path has been different for her younger brother MarQuan Thornton, currently a high school senior at Adelanto. Months away from graduation, Thornton is one of a small group of students deciding not whether he will go to college, but which one.
MarQuan Thornton is a senior at Adelanto High in California’s High Desert. He credits the Heritage Program at his school, aimed at Black students, for helping to keep him on track for attending college.Emma Gallegos/EdSource
Thornton has worked hard but recognizes that the key difference between his trajectory and his sister’s is the support he’s getting from school that did not exist during his sister’s time there.
Three years after his sister graduated, his high school began the Heritage Program, which is aimed at ensuring that Black students, like him, are on track to complete their A-G requirements.
Thornton knows he’s on track to meet the requirements that will make him eligible to attend a state university.
“If she (Christian Robinson) had this type of chance when she was in high school, she probably would have been where I am at,” Thornton said. “I can see the difference.”
While the vast majority of students in California — 86% of seniors in 2023 — graduate from high school, most — 56% in 2023 — do not complete their A-G requirements, according to an EdSource analysis of data from the California Department of Education. EdSource’s analysis found that Black and Latino students are the hardest hit.
In 2023, 68% of Black students and 64% of Latino students did not meet A-G requirements, compared with 26% of Asian students and 48% of white students, according to EdSource’s analysis.
The highest non-completion group is foster students at 88%, followed by disabled students at 85% and English learners at 82%.
“These kinds of numbers should be treated as a five-alarm fire,” said Melissa Valenzuela-Stookey, director of P-16 research for Ed Trust-West, a nonprofit that advocates for justice in education.
Valenzuela-Stookey said high school graduates are being shut out of affordable four-year public college options, because they are not getting the support they need to complete the A-G coursework.
“Our education systems urgently need to invest more in our students of color,” Valenzuela-Stookey said.
As Robinson neared graduation in the early days of the pandemic, she said everyone, even teachers, seemed to lose track of how to prepare students for college and life after high school.
But long before the pandemic, the district was struggling to prepare Black students to meet their A-G requirements and be ready for higher education, according to Ratmony Yee, assistant superintendent of educational services for Victor Valley Union High.
Robinson’s mother, Crystal Francisco, says that she is proud of how hard her daughter works to earn her own money. But she concurs that if Heritage had been around, Robinson might have gone straight to college.
“She probably would have gone a different way,” said Francisco.
Snapshot of California
Of 1,766 high schools in California, about half graduated more than 56% of students lacking the required college preparatory courses.
Fewer than 2 out of 10 students met A-G rates in 2023 in many northern counties, such as Lake, Del Norte, Plumas, Lassen, Nevada, Tehama, Trinity. Just 3 out of 10 students in Kern, Merced, Tulare and Kings counties met the requirements. That compares to the Bay Area in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Marin counties where more than 5 out of 10 students met A-G requirements.
Improving low A-G completion rates has been a longtime goal of both educators and state policymakers, but it’s a problem that resists easy answers or quick fixes, said Sherrie Reed, executive director of the California Education Lab at UC Davis and a researcher with Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), an independent research nonprofit affiliated with several California universities.
The idea of simply aligning the state’s minimum high school requirements with A-G requirements hasn’t gained steam because of the concern that it would result in fewer students graduating, said Mayra Lara, the director of Southern California partnerships and engagement with Ed Trust-West.
What are A-G requirements?
The details of A-G requirements can be arcane, especially for students and parents who are not familiar with the college admissions process. The state requires students to complete a minimum of 13 courses to receive a high school diploma.
But to attend a UC or CSU requires that a student takes 15 courses in seven areas: history, English, math, science, foreign language, arts and an elective. Each category has its own letter, A-G, which is where the requirements get their name.
These courses overlap with high school requirements, but they are also more rigorous. For instance, three years of English are required to graduate from high school, while A-G eligibility requires four years. Only one of those years can include English as a Second Language or English Language Development — courses that English learners are often enrolled in.
Low grades are a common way students fall off the A-G track. A “D” is considered a passing grade for a high school diploma, but A-G classes require at least a “C” to count as eligible.
The state, instead, has offered carrots for districts working on improving poor A-G rates, especially those that have a large marginalized student population, such as those who are low-income, English learners, homeless or have a disability. In 2021-22, the state set aside over $547 million for the A-G Completion Improvement Grant Program. The state has also pushed dual enrollment and career technical education to the high school curriculum, both of which can help students meet their A-G requirements.
Progress has been slow. The number of students who have met A-G requirements statewide has ticked up just shy of four points over the last six years.
Understanding why any given student may or may not meet A-G requirements requires examining what is happening in a particular region or district, as well as disparities within schools.
“The answer is that it is all of that,” said Reed. “No one factor accounts for it.”
Some students said that graduating without meeting A-G requirements sent them the message that they were not college material.
Brock Wooster-Mills, 20, said he felt “doomed to fail” as a student with a disability attending Liberty High School in Bakersfield, where 49% of students do not meet A-G requirements.
Partial hearing loss had affected Wooster-Mills’ ability to speak and follow lessons in elementary school. But even when his hearing improved, his counselors in the Kern High School District wouldn’t allow him to transfer into required A-G courses such as French and geometry.
He remembers one special education teacher telling his class that they likely wouldn’t even attend a community college, but Wooster-Mills said he always knew he was capable of more. He enrolled in Bakersfield College in 2021, the fall after he graduated.
He’s now in his sixth semester, but his lack of academic confidence and inadequate preparation continue to dog him. In high school, he had never been taught how to write an essay. He had never studied a foreign language, which made Spanish daunting. He failed the first time he took it.
“I feel like I’m still behind,” he said. “I wasn’t taught what I was supposed to be taught.”
Most high schools in the state — 91.4% of traditional district schools, according to PACE — do offer a full slate of A-G coursework that put them on track for college. But the degree of access students get to those courses or support, once they have enrolled, varies greatly, resulting in wide disparities between groups of students.
Interactive Map
View the map to see the percentage of students in each high school who graduate without A-G required courses.
PACE released a series of briefs and reports on the A-G completion rates in summer 2023, noting that access to rigorous coursework — whether dual enrollment, Advanced Placement or other college preparatory courses — can profoundly change the trajectory of a student’s life. These courses not only set students up for admission to college, but make it more likely that a student will pursue college in the first place.
Researchers found that some high schools do not offer the full range of A-G courses. In 2018-19, 2.5% of schools offered no A-G courses, and another 6% only offered some A-G courses. The list also includes small and rural schools that struggle to hire teachers who are qualified to teach A-G required classes in fields such as math, science or foreign language.
But 84% of schools that do not offer a full range of A-G courses are charter schools focused primarily on credit recovery for students at risk of not graduating from high school. Charter schools tend to be outliers in both directions; schools with the highest and lowest A-G rates — where fewer than 40% or greater than 80% of students meet A-G requirement — tend to be charters.
Changes in high school can help
Adelanto High is a part of Victor Valley Union High School District, which serves communities in the High Desert, including Victorville. Cheap, abundant land attracts residents priced out of the Southern California housing market, but there is little economic opportunity. Unemployment is high, and so is the poverty rate.
“The kids get stuck here, because there’s a cycle of poverty,” said Aleka Jackson-Jarrell, the coordinator of the Heritage program at Adelanto High.
Educators in Victor Valley Union High say that beyond ensuring that students have all of their options open to them upon graduation, it is not their role to choose a path for students. Military or trade school are options celebrated at the school, but educators tell students that a bachelor’s degree will be key for most students who aim to earn better wages and escape the cycle of poverty.
“Money talks,” said Yee, assistant superintendent of instructional services for Victor Valley Union High.
District leaders say ensuring that students meet their A-G requirements opens up two key options for students: being eligible to apply for a CSU or UC school, and also having the preparation to succeed at a community college.
Like much of inland California, the rate of students completing their A-G is low in Victor Valley Union High. In 2016-17, 13% of students in the district completed their A-G coursework, but it has been improving: that number rose to 29% last year.
Victor Valley Union High has been making districtwide changes that administrators say are key to putting more students on track for A-G completion.
Scheduling is important, Yee said. Creating a master schedule that prioritizes disabled students or English learners ensures these students aren’t missing A-G coursework because of a scheduling conflict. Some schools also build tutoring into daily schedules for struggling students.
The district studied students’ transcripts to figure out how to improve their chances of meeting A-G requirements. For instance, they found that students who took foreign language classes as freshmen or sophomores were more likely to fulfill this requirement, because they had time to retake classes to make up for any poor grades. Students are now required to begin their foreign language courses by sophomore year.
Victor Valley Union High also rolled out two programs aimed specifically at groups of students that were struggling the most: Black students and long-term English learners.
Homing in on groups who need the most help
The Heritage program, aimed at Black students like MarQuan Thornton, was piloted in 2022-23 at Adelanto High. Beginning sophomore year, every Black student in this High Desert school is automatically enrolled in this program that ensures students are prepared for graduation as well as college and a career.
Thornton said the program has helped him, even ensuring that he made up classes he struggled with his sophomore year. He now boasts a 3.7 GPA.
A-G completion rates for Black students at his high school improved. In 2021-22, 6% of Black students met their A-G. The following year, when Heritage began, that number jumped to 26%.
Because of its early success, the program is not only being rolled out at other campuses in the district, but is being used as a model for Legacy, a program aimed at long-term English learners.
Students in both Heritage and Legacy are sorted in four groups. Level 1 students are on track to graduate from high school with A-G requirements, while Level 4 students may be in danger of not graduating from high school at all. The coordinators hold monthly sessions with each group on topics ranging from how to fill out the FAFSA form or make up failed classes to basic life skills that students approaching adulthood need. Students also visit college campuses.
Parents are invited for workshops to school so that they can understand the importance of A-G classes and learn how to support — and perhaps badger — their children into staying on track.
Heritage coordinator Jackson-Jarrell said that having a background similar to her students’ helps her connect with them. She dropped out of high school when she was younger. She tells students that earning degrees — starting with an associate degree and ultimately obtaining a doctorate — helped her go from making $4.25 an hour to making six figures.
Her counterpart at Silverado High, Jose Velasco, teaches Spanish and runs the Legacy program. Like many of his students, Velasco is a child of immigrants whose first language was Spanish. He checks in to make sure students have access to bilingual aides so that they can understand the content in their college preparatory classes, such as geometry or history.
When Heritage first began, Jackson-Jarrell experienced pushback from non-Black teachers, parents and students questioning the need for a program focused solely on one group of students and pointing to other programs such as AVID, that focused on college and career readiness.
“We were hit with questions like, ‘Why is this program just for Black students? It’s not fair,’” she said.
Jackson-Jarrell would tell them that the data was showing that overwhelmingly, Black students need the most support meeting A-G requirements and that they have unique needs and challenges that Heritage addresses. When students visit college campuses, they try to imagine themselves fitting in. Not seeing Black students on campus can reinforce the idea that they don’t belong on a college campus.
“They’re looking for themselves,” said Jackson-Jarrell. “They feel like they don’t belong.”
So, Heritage will often ensure that when they visit campuses, they can meet directly with students from the Black student resource centers. This upcoming spring, Heritage students are invited on a tour through the American South, visiting historically Black colleges and universities. Legacy makes a point of visiting with Latino student groups on campus for similar purposes.
Jackson-Jarrell said that programs like Heritage and Legacy are important for the economic development of the community and hopes to see more programs like them in other districts in the High Desert.
Superintendent Carl Coles concurs. Increasing the rigor of students’ coursework and preparing them for higher education doesn’t just set students up for success, it improves the prospects of their families and the larger community. The district’s renewed focus on A-G requirements, he said, goes right to the core of why education is so important.
Coles said, “It really is so that every kid can live a life of purpose.”
This post has been updated to clarify a source’s statement
Los Angeles City College, one of the state’s 116 community colleges.
Larry Gordon/EdSource Today
Latino students are enrolling at low rates in bachelor’s degree programs at California’s community colleges. But many of those who do enroll are graduating quickly and finding work after leaving college.
But, in many of the programs, Latino students are not applying or enrolling at high rates. Across the programs, which range from equine and ranch management at Feather River College to dental hygiene at West Los Angeles College, just 30.1% of students are Latino. That’s much lower than the 46% of students at those colleges who are Latino.
To address that gap, the study calls for greater recruitment of Latino students to the programs and for the state to invest more money in the programs.
However, for the students who do enroll, 64% of them finish their degree within two years after starting their upper-division coursework. That’s comparable to non-Latino students, 68% of whom graduate within two years after starting those classes.
Following graduation, the vast majority of Latino students in the bachelor’s degree majors — 94% of them — reported being employed. On average, they earned $22,600 more annually than they did prior to starting the program.
Those outcomes are encouraging, but the colleges could benefit from a “public awareness campaign” to make sure Latino students know about the bachelor’s degree programs available to them, said Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, one of the report’s authors.
“We have this tool now, so let’s make sure people are aware. We’re seeing very promising results once they’re there. But we want to make sure that they get there,” added Rios-Aguilar, who is a professor of education and the associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.
The bachelor’s degrees are more affordable for students than attending a University of California or California State University campus. Students can finish their degree for just $10,560 in tuition and fees, less than half of what it costs at UC or Cal State. Lower-division classes at the community college are $46 per unit, while the upper-division courses in the bachelor’s degree programs cost the same $46 enrollment fee plus a supplemental $84 fee.
Community college students with financial need can often qualify for state aid to fully cover those costs. That typically includes a California College Promise Grant to cover their lower-division fees and a Cal Grant to cover the $84-per-unit upper-division fees.
The 15 programs examined in the study are California’s original 15 community college bachelor’s degree programs. The state established those programs in 2015 as part of a pilot program.
The state then built on that pilot program with the passage of a 2021 law that allows the community college system to approve up to 30 new bachelor’s degree programs annually. Since the fall of 2022, at least 18 additional programs have been approved, according to the state chancellor’s office.
Not every college included in the study struggled to enroll Latino students in the programs. At two colleges — Antelope Valley and Bakersfield — the share of Latino students in those programs exceeded the overall share of Latino students at the college.
At Bakersfield, which offers a bachelor’s degree in industrial automation, getting those students enrolled starts in high school. Students in the Kern High School District have the option of earning an associate degree in industrial automation while they work toward their high school graduation.
“This innovative collaboration enables these students to seamlessly transfer into our baccalaureate program. Innovations that bring opportunity to students help explain Bakersfield College’s success in successfully recruiting Latinx students to our program,” Jessica Wojtysiak, the college’s associate vice president of instruction, said in an email.
In addition to that program, Bakersfield also now offers a bachelor’s degree in research laboratory technology.
At another college, MiraCosta, the share of Latino students in the college’s bachelor’s degree program in biomanufacturing was only 0.8% less than the college’s overall share of Latino students.
“In our diverse and vibrant student body, we are proud to observe that the majority of those enrolling in our programs — specifically the bachelor’s degree in biomanufacturing — represent a majority of non-White/Asian backgrounds, showcasing our institution’s appeal across various ethnicities,” Dominique Ingato, MiraCosta’s biotechnology department chair, said in an email.
To ensure that other colleges have similar success, the study released Tuesday suggests that the state should invest more money in the community college bachelor’s degree programs.
That could include spending more on outreach, marketing and recruitment to attract more Latino students. It could also mean investing in “research infrastructure” at the colleges, Rios-Aguilar said. She pointed out that community colleges don’t have the same research capacity as traditional research institutions like UCLA and other four-year colleges.
“It’s important to highlight that community colleges are severely underfunded compared to other sectors of higher education and yet they’re doing these amazing things and these promising tools are emerging,” she added. “Colleges are working really hard to make this happen.”
DOGE (or DOGS, as I prefer to call them) just won the authority to see your most important personal data, thanks to the rightwing bloc of six on the SupremeCourt.,
The six Republicans on the Court claim to be conservatives. They are not. Some of the six claim to be “originalists,” ruling in accord with the wishes of the Founding Fathers. Nonsense.
Who are these people that Elon Musk left behind? No one knows for sure. Were they confirmed by the U.S. Senate? No. What are their credentials? No one knows for certain. What right do these shadowy people have to know our personal data? They are not a government agency. They are friends of Elon.
This decision gives open access to our records by shadowy figures whose purposes are hidden.
Are they building a data base for the next election? Will the data be used to blackmail people?
The number of homeless students statewide increased by 9.3%, according to recently released state enrollment data. Out of 761 districts, 433 — or 57% — reported an increase in their number of homeless students. This map shows the change in the homeless student population by district from 2023–24 to 2024–25. Click on a district to see the percent change and the number of homeless students enrolled.
Note: A particularly sharp increase from one year to the next may be due to improved tracking or reporting practices. Please contact the district for further details.
Data source: California Department of Education and EdSource Data Analysis
Former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin.
Credit: John Joanino/Advancement Project California
Despite the office’s imposing title, California’s superintendent of public instruction has little actual power to do much about education.
The governor has far more influence, as does the State Board of Education. And then there are the local school boards, which, by law, are responsible for the nearly 1,000 school districts in the state.
That is why it was remarkable that at least 500 people packed into the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Sacramento last week to honor Delaine Eastin, who was superintendent of public instruction over two decades ago. She was the first, and so far, only, woman to occupy the post.
The state superintendent position is largely what you make of it — and Eastin, who died in April at the age of 76, made the most of it.
Part of her success had to do with her outsize personality. She regularly girded colleagues for any number of political battles with Shakespeare’s rallying cry, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”
Part of her impact was rooted in her sustained belief in public education, of which she herself was a product. A native of California, she attended public schools and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of California.
“Children are the living messengers we are sending to a time we will never see,” she would say. To those who argued that public education costs the state too much, she would offer the rejoinder, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
And to those who wondered why they should support children in districts other than their own with their taxes, she argued, “This country runs on other people’s children.”
Some of her success had something to do with her oratory, which was honed in her high school drama classes. As an assemblymember before becoming state superintendent, she was regarded as one of the best speakers in the Legislature. She regularly got standing ovations in the multiple speeches she made around the state. Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a legendary speaker himself who attended the memorial service, would often send her to speak in his place.
Her legacy includes her single-mindedness in promoting smaller class sizes in California’s K-3 grades. She was a force in creating California’s Academic Performance Index in 1999, the first statewide system for ranking schools based mostly on test scores.
She was also a leader in promoting California’s first efforts for universal preschool — a vision that is now coming to fruition with the expansion of transitional kindergarten to all 4-year-olds.
Less well known was her backing of Alice Water’s Edible Garden Project, which began at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley in the mid 1990s. “If it had not been for Delaine, we would not have had an Edible Garden Project,” said Waters, the founder of the renowned Chez Panisse restaurant just blocks from the school. On a video, Waters shared that there are now 6,500 edible school gardens around the world.
Above all, Eastin was a huge backer of California itself. Californians, she would often say, “are people who grew up somewhere else and came to their senses.”
Throughout her life, she was single-minded in promoting women for public office.
Eastin’s last appearance on the political stage was in 2018 when she “had the audacity to run for governor,” as Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis described the run. It was a quixotic effort at best — something Eastin was well-aware of, Kounalakis said. “She ran largely to talk about the importance of public education.”
As the two of them traveled together around the state during the campaign, Eastin would say, “This is what the future could look like” if they both were elected. But Eastin only got 4% of the vote. Kounalakis was more successful, becoming California’s first woman lieutenant governor.
While she did not make it to the governorship, there was something biblical in the arc of the life of a woman who did not have her own children, despite wanting them — but was nonetheless able to improve the lives of millions of them in her home state.
Her staff in the Department of Education recalled the many times they would set out early, half awake, on yet another trip to an outlying district.
“It’s going to be a great day,” Eastin, ever the motivator, would tell them. “We get to visit schools.”
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Louis Freedberg is interim CEO of EdSource.
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David McCuan is no stranger to strong disagreements in his political science classes.
“Everything is framed as a life or death struggle and decision, in a very serious way,” said McCuan, a professor at Sonoma State University. “So what I do tell students at the beginning of the class is, ‘We’re going to work hard. We’re going to disagree. And everything is going to be OK, because politics is a game for adults.’”
McCuan should know. Over the past two decades, he’s guided easily 400 budding politicos through an election-year course that teaches them not only how to unearth the money and power structures behind state ballot measures but also asks them to register voters, educate fellow citizens on the election and, quite frequently, work with a student from the opposite end of the political spectrum.
Sonoma State political science professor David McCuanCredit: Courtesy of David McCuan
This fall’s course comes ahead of what McCuan’s syllabus calls “the most important election since 1860” — the election that preceded the Civil War.
In the 2024 election, roughly 8 million youth nationwide will age into the electorate in a divisive election year that has highlighted deep fissures on issues like immigration and the war in Gaza.
It’s also a moment of generational transition. Sonoma students returned to the Rohnert Park campus the same week as the Democratic National Convention, where Vice President Kamala Harris’ brisk rise to the top of the ticket signaled the passing of power to a younger group of Democratic Party politicians.
All of that means fall 2024 could be a volatile time to teach politics, a reason why McCuan wants students to work with peers with whom they don’t see eye to eye. Students entering his classroom even fill out a questionnaire to gauge their political views, information McCuan uses to pair students with their ideological foil on class projects.
“I try to take two opposite individuals and put them together to work on a team to understand what’s going on,” he said, “because I’ve found over the years that actually lends itself to a lot of help for each other.”
The idea behind the class dates to the late 1990s, when as a young academic, McCuan began to contemplate the disconnect between the political science literature — where whether political campaigns even matter is an ongoing subject of debate — and the world of politics as it’s practiced on the ground.
McCuan’s students work with the League of Women Voters to research state ballot measures. The league compiles arguments in favor and against each measure, while students piece together the story of who is funding the ballot issue, how much money they’re spending, which consultants they’ve hired and how those strategies could swing the campaign.
The course also has a service learning component. Students lead a public forum in which they present their ballot measure research to the rest of the campus and receive training on how to register voters. Many interactions with the government can feel punitive, McCuan said, like serving on a jury or paying taxes, so the hope is that more positive experiences of democracy will inspire students to stay civically engaged for the rest of their lives.
“We know that voting is a habit, so if you get people civically minded and engaged to register people to vote or to analyze what’s on the ballot, it has an educative effect,” McCuan said. “The idea is to create something that’s positive about what it means to be civically minded.”
Sonoma State also does not shy away from political science programming that can provoke strong emotions, McCuan said. The university has hosted a lecture series on the Holocaust and genocide, he noted, and McCuan himself teaches a course that examines terrorism and political violence.
McCuan said high-profile events have galvanized youth interest in politics in recent years. The 2016 election of Donald Trump, the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision holding that abortion is not a constitutional right each emerged as lightning rods for youth political engagement.
Efforts to harness students’ political energy on McCuan’s campus have paid off in the past: 88.3% of registered voters at Sonoma State cast a ballot in 2020, besting the 66% average turnout rate across more than 1,000 colleges and universities in a national study of college voters that year.
It’s not just young people at Sonoma State who are eager to cast a ballot. CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, found that turnout for voters age 18 to 29 rose from 39% in 2016 to 50% in 2020.
Will younger voters turn out this year? More than half of voters 18 to 34 told pollsters they were “extremely likely to vote.”
What those numbers don’t show is the long-standing voting gap between college goers and people without a bachelor’s degree. In 2020, 75% of 18- to 29-year-olds with a college degree voted compared to just 39% with a high school education, a CIRCLE analysis of census data found.
McCuan recently discussed why he thinks universities should invest more in civics education and how he prepares students to discuss difficult issues in the classroom.
The following Q&A was edited, condensed and re-ordered for length and clarity.
What should K-12 schools be doing to teach students about civics and politics?
We’re integrating civics rather than holding it separate. We’re trying to integrate things across the curriculum because we have so many things that we want people to learn or that we demand that they know. And I think that’s losing depth of understanding in the guise of trying to provide breadth of coverage.
(In political science), we pay very close attention to the relationship between economic, social and political variables, (also known as) ESP. They (students) might be able to name off ESP components of American history and American politics. It’s the what they’re really good at. It’s the why that is always the struggle.
They might be able to note certain things on the history timeline, but how those were moments of change or inflection points — or why they matter, or how they’re consequential — that’s the part that’s often still the same as it was before. All the stuff they’re covering from K through 12 is ticking off boxes that aren’t necessarily providing greater understanding.
Is there anything that would better prepare students before they reach your classroom?
Invest in civics. I struggle, because I was a department chair for a long time and, as you know, in higher education, it’s faced a lot of pressure and a lot of financial pressure.
I have a great passion about learning. I’m a first generation college student. I’m the son of a cop. I’m not supposed to even be here. The neighborhood I grew up in is the ‘hood, man, and if I can do it, others can do it. It takes a great deal of courage to call things out, and I don’t see that with a lot of higher education leaders, so I need an investment in civics that’s greater.–
And as we’re cutting budgets and we’re cutting requirements, we’re taking things out– like how to write and how to think — because we’re trying to cram other things in there, or graduate people faster, or push things through.
Do you ever have to step in as a conciliator between students in your classroom?
I haven’t generally had to weigh in on severe disagreements. I think your question, though, is appropriate for this fall, where everyone’s made up their mind about how they’re going to vote, except for 5% of people. So I’m going to have people in this class who are on far sides of the political spectrum trying to work together. Can that be combustible? Yeah, sure, maybe.
I just feel like a professor who hadn’t been teaching this course for as long as you have would run in the opposite direction from starting now.
I want a lively, engaged classroom, man!
And also, remember, while we’re looking at the election, paying attention to candidates, we’re also concentrating a lot on non-candidate on ballot measures. Now, those are our proxy for blue and red, for left and right, sure — but we are concentrating on ballot measures, non-candidate elections, so it does remove some of that heavy partisanship.
Do you hear this sentiment among colleagues, a reluctance to talk about political views with students?
What I do hear from colleagues, especially younger colleagues or newer colleagues, is a frustration with trying to delve into issues that are hard. They often avoid those because they’re worried that they won’t have a chair or an administration that will back them up if things get heated.
Sometimes I have newer, younger colleagues who try to steer around issues if it makes students uncomfortable or will lead to aggression in the classroom. I’m not afraid of that.
What makes you not afraid of that?
I trust that we can get to a place of respect, if not understanding. I want a classroom that’s lively, engaged. I think the best thing in a student in my class is intellectual curiosity. That’s what I want. I’m not interested in the politics — and what I mean by that is, I’m not interested that they feel strongly this way or that way. I need them to be intellectually curious, because I can work with that. We can work together on that. And intellectual curiosity is something we see less and less of, so it’s harder.
You don’t strike me as somebody who’s disillusioned with political processes — or are you?
I think to be in this profession, to do this job, you have to have an optimistic view of the human condition. Because you don’t do it for the pay. You don’t do it for the benefits. You do it because you have a passion and a mission that the next generation can do it better.
When you see that ‘aha’ moment with students, it’s not because they’re mimicking your view. It’s not that at all, and I don’t do this in the classroom. It’s that they are understanding and making connections that I never saw. Or that they are finding and understanding in depth and making those connections that are analytical, not political. And that’s really helpful, because that’s a skill.
Is there some way that the students you’re teaching have changed since you started this course in 2003?
They use social media tools to get an idea of what’s going on. So in other words, as the digital space has grown in campaigns, they’re in that space.
I don’t know what the hell a “Swiftie” is. I didn’t know the BeyHive is Beyoncé, and I would have spelled it like a beehive. But they know, so they’re operating in the space where the BeyHive and the Swifties are operating.
They’re understanding that space, and therefore, they are understanding the colors that are used by Kamala and her team, that lime green color. They know what that means, right?
Their understanding of social media, their clarity about what messages are being communicated, would fly over the head of most pointy-headed academics. So I need them.
