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  • Conflict over race, LGBTQ issues cost schools more than $3 billion last school year

    Conflict over race, LGBTQ issues cost schools more than $3 billion last school year


    Conservative groups and LGBTQ+ rights supporters protest outside the Glendale Unified School District offices in Glendale on June 6, 2023. Several hundred people gathered at district headquarters, split between those who support or oppose teaching that exposes youngsters to LGBTQ+ issues in schools.

    Credit: Keith Birmingham/The Orange County Register via AP

    Conflicts between parents, teachers and school leaders over parental rights policies focusing on LGBTQ+ students, limitations on teaching about race and racism, and book bans have come with a cost — both socially and financially.

    The conflicts are disrupting school districts, negatively impacting schools and classrooms, and costing districts money that could be used to better serve students, according to “The Costs of Conflict, The Fiscal Impact of Culturally Divisive Conflicts on Public Schools in the United States,” released last month.

    Researchers from UCLA, the University of Texas at Austin, American University and UC Riverside conducted a national survey of K-12 public school superintendents from 46 states — 467 in all — and found that these conflicts are prevalent.   

    Since the 2020-21 school year, uncivil discourse and hostile political rhetoric at school board meetings and on school campuses has been an ongoing problem. Two-thirds of the school superintendents surveyed for the study said they have experienced moderate to high levels of culturally divisive conflict in their districts, including misinformation campaigns, violent rhetoric and threats.

    Cultural conflicts cost U.S. school districts about $3.2 billion last school year, according to the study. Researchers estimate that districts with high levels of conflict spent about $80 per student. Districts with moderate levels of conflict spent $50 per student, and districts with low conflict spent $25 per student.

    “This is costing us general fund dollars,” said a superintendent from a midsize school district in a Western state. “In the 2023-24 school year, the district spent an additional $100,000 on security, hiring armed plainclothes off-duty officers … because people coming to the board meetings are unpredictable and sometimes violent.” 

    Researchers allowed superintendents to remain anonymous in the report.

    The superintendent also said the district spent more than $500,000 in legal fees on lawsuits associated with a board member and a campaign against the LGBTQ+ community, and lost $250,000 in outside funding from social services organizations because of the dispute. It also spent $80,000 on recruiting and training new staff to replace teachers, counselors and administrators who left because they did not want to work in such a divisive setting. 

    “Culturally divisive conflicts have substantial costs to the public and to our capacity as a state to mount quality learning experiences for all students,” said John Rogers, director of the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education and Access and lead researcher on the report. “It has a fiscal cost that we’ve tried to lay out with some specificity, and it has broader social costs as well — there’s an undermining of social trust, there’s a deepening sense of stress and all of this is hugely consequential for how educators experience public schools and how young people are experiencing public schools.”

    Costs of conflict can’t always be counted in dollars

    Average-sized school districts of about 10,000 students spent about $811,000 each last school year to cope with cultural division, according to the study. The money was spent on legal fees, added security, additional staff time and on community, school board and government relations. Districts also incurred indirect costs because of staff turnover related to the conflict and because staff had to take time away from their other duties to deal with discord.

    According to the survey, the largest expense for districts with cultural conflict came from staff turnover, with districts of about 10,000 students spending between $148,000 and $461,000, depending on the level of conflict. 

    One superintendent said that cultural conflict has caused “incredible stress on leaders and teachers as they navigate imaginary slights and online drama in the community.” A Pennsylvania superintendent called the emotional stress and anxiety “nearly crippling.”

    “This research makes clear that culturally divisive conflicts in the nation’s schools are generating fear, stress and anxiety that is disrupting school districts and taking a personal toll on the educators and staff members who work in them,” Rogers said. 

    The stress has also led to increased staff absenteeism at schools, even in districts with lower levels of conflict, according to the report.

    Half of the superintendents surveyed said they had been personally harassed at least once during the school year. Ten percent reported being threatened with violence, and 11% had their property vandalized.

    As a result, superintendent turnover has also increased — from 14.2% to 17.1% — over the past four years. More than 40% of the superintendents who left their jobs in the last year said their decision was related to conflict, stress and politics, according to the report.

    “The relentless demands of leading a district can easily overshadow their own well-being, which, if neglected, not only affects their personal health but also the health and stability of students, educators, and families they serve,” said Rachel S. White of the University of Texas at Austin in a statement. “Reducing the extent to which superintendents experience unwarranted divisiveness is an important step to change the trajectory of increasing superintendent churn.”  

    Superintendents who were surveyed expressed concern that the time they spent managing cultural conflict, including responding to Freedom of Information Act requests, and unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation, is keeping them from focusing on improving instruction.

    California not immune to divisive conflict

    Rogers said that while cultural conflict wasn’t as common in California as in other parts of the country in 2021-22, it has grown over the last few years.

    Donald Trump’s election is likely to bring more cultural division to school campuses, Rogers said.

    “I think that a Trump victory will lead some on the right to take a message that these sorts of cultural attacks, that have been playing out across the United States and across California in the last couple of years, are an effective strategy for mobilizing the base and for energizing the electorate,” said Rogers, in an interview the day before the election.

     “A Trump victory will mean that Donald Trump will have more of a presence in our public life in the months to come. And so, that too will mean that he will be using language and framing that will further activate attacks on public schools around these culturally divisive issues.”





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  • Judge rejects lawsuit over ‘liberated’ ethnic studies classes in LAUSD

    Judge rejects lawsuit over ‘liberated’ ethnic studies classes in LAUSD


    Theresa Montaño, a professor in Chicano/a Studies at CSU Northridge and a member of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee, is a defendant in the lawsuit.

    Credit: Luis Garcia / California State University, Northridge

    A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit against the United Teachers Los Angeles and the organization that created a controversial ethnic studies curriculum adopted by at least two dozen school districts in California. 

    U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin’s scathing ruling on Nov. 30 criticized what he concluded was a lack of evidence and unpersuasive arguments made on behalf of the two Jewish teachers and parents in Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles, the group that brought the litigation.

    The plaintiffs’ complaint “is difficult to understand and contains a morass of largely irrelevant — and sometimes contradictory — allegations, few of which state with any degree of clarity precisely what plaintiffs believe defendants have done or, more importantly, how plaintiffs have been harmed,” wrote Olguin of the Central District of federal court in California. His 49-page pretrial ruling dismissing the lawsuit “with prejudice” precludes the plaintiffs from refiling another similar lawsuit in federal court.  The lawsuit was filed in 2022.

    The lawsuit alleged that the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, the teachers union, its president Cecily Myart-Cruz, and two members of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee encouraged the adoption of instructional materials used in several LAUSD classrooms, that they also “covertly” trained teachers in the “liberated” ethnic studies curriculum, which condemns capitalism, white privilege, and Zionism, and characterizes Israel’s existence as “based on ethnic cleansing and land theft, apartheid and genocide,”  according to Olguin’s summary of the lawsuit.

    The lawsuit also alleged that teachers who identified as Jewish or Zionist were not welcome in classrooms where ethnic studies was taught and “personally experienced the official hostility” of UTLA to Israel and to the concept of Zionism.”

    Denying they are antisemitic, educators affiliated with the consortium — mainly instructors and professors in ethnic studies departments at California State University and University of California — have made anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel a focus of their curriculum. They characterize Israel as a settler, colonialist nation, similar to European nations’ oppressive occupations of Africa and Asia in the 19th and 2oth centuries.

    The “liberated” approach to ethnic studies has drawn scrutiny since its leaders formed the consortium in protest after the State Board of Education rejected as ideological and one-sided a draft curriculum that some of them had authored. In passing Assembly Bill 101, creating a mandate requiring high school students to take ethnic studies to graduate, the Legislature, at the encouragement of the Legislative Jewish Caucus, specified that school districts should not use unadopted portions of earlier drafts of the model curriculum. 

    Advocates of liberated ethnic studies charged the clause and other “guardrails” in the law were intended to squelch their free speech. The largely unfunded graduation mandate is set to take effect in 2029-30.

    In an online celebration Monday, Theresa Montaño, a defendant in the lawsuit who is also a member of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee and secretary of the consortium, said, “The end of this two-and-a-half year lawsuit means vindication, affirmation, and victory.”

    “This is a win for liberatory critical ethnic studies and academic freedom. It’s a testament to the power of solidarity and liberation, whether that be in South Los Angeles or in Gaza,” said Montaño, a professor of Chicano/a Studies at CSU Northridge. “And so it’s a signal to us that we will not stop, that we will persist until authentic ethnic studies is guaranteed to every student in this state.”

    The attorney representing the defendants, Mark Kleiman, told teachers on the press call, “The moral of this story for people in the other school districts is, you don’t have to be afraid of these kinds of attacks. Given half a chance in a fair courtroom, you will be vindicated.” 

    Meanwhile, the legal director for the Deborah Project — the law firm that filed the lawsuit — said, “We absolutely will be appealing the decision and are confident that the decision will be reversed on appeal.” The appeal must be filed by Dec. 30.

    The ruling, said Lori Lowenthal Marcus, “is deeply flawed, as it ignores crucial allegations in plaintiffs’ complaint, fails to address arguments plaintiffs made in their briefs, and even ignores binding precedent from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.”  

    “We are in the midst of soaring antisemitism in education throughout the U.S., and this is no time for anyone — much less a federal court — to allow publicly funded public schools to be used to indoctrinate children to hate the Jewish commitment to Israel,” she said. “Contrary to the ruling, that’s not ‘education’ about a ‘controversial’ issue. It’s prejudice, pure and simple.”

    Uncertain implications

    It’s unclear what impact, if any, the ruling might have on other litigation in California involving ethnic studies and allegations of antisemitism and indoctrination which include a potentially stronger lawsuit that the Deborah Project filed last month against the Sequoia Union High School District in Menlo Park, its superintendent, and administrators at two high schools. The plaintiffs in this case are the parents of Jewish students who claim that the district ignored parents’ repeated complaints of antisemitic taunts and bullying by students and biased lessons on the Israeli-Gaza conflict, taught by two history teachers.

    On Friday, an Orange County Superior Court judge will consider a motion to invalidate four ethnic studies courses in Santa Ana Unified. In their lawsuit, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law claims that district staff wrote the courses, with the participation of school board members, in violation of the California open meetings law. They did so in order to hide the content from Jewish community members who had repeatedly offered to participate in the process and offer their perspectives. Documents reveal that staff members referred to the Jewish Federation of Orange County as “racist Zionists” and made other bigoted remarks about Jews. 

    The lawsuit against UTLA and the consortium did not include LAUSD as a direct defendant, which may have weakened the case because the district has not adopted the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum, and there is no indication if and when it would. That made the plaintiffs’ concerns speculative and, therefore, their proposed remedies invalid, Olguin wrote, noting that the participation of Montaño and Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, an LAUSD teacher and a member of the consortium’s leadership team, in an advisory committee is not evidence of the district’s endorsement of the curriculum.

    Olguin further ruled that the plaintiffs could not substantiate that teachers and other plaintiffs had yet faced any actual harm, nor did they demonstrate that the eventual adoption of the curriculum would violate civil rights. The judge continued that although plaintiffs claimed the curriculum was “infected from top to bottom with racism,” they didn’t show any evidence to support their assertion.

    “It is far from clear that learning about Israel and Palestine or encountering teaching materials with which one disagrees constitutes an injury,” Olguin wrote.

    The plaintiffs had asked Olguin to issue injunctions prohibiting LAUSD from including language critical of Israel or Zionism in teaching materials; preventing the district from paying teachers who used the liberated curriculum; and prohibiting the district from using materials from liberated curriculum in classrooms and teacher training paid for by public funds.

    Olguin ruled that the plaintiffs had not substantiated claims that their First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom and their right to equal protection under the U.S. and California constitutions were impeded. However, their request for an injunction would have raised an unconstitutional prior restraint on the defendants’ First Amendment speech rights, he concluded.

    While a district can “reasonably” curtail teachers’ speech rights in a classroom, “those limitations are fundamentally different from speech restrictions imposed by a court at the behest of a group of private citizens,” he wrote.

    In language certain to alarm Jewish organizations worried that antisemitic and anti-Israel bias is gaining a foothold in California schools, Olguin wrote, “It would be of great concern for the educational project and for academic freedom if every offended party could sue every time they did not like a curriculum or the way it was taught.”





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  • LAUSD settles lawsuit over federal money it unlawfully denied to Archdiocese schools

    LAUSD settles lawsuit over federal money it unlawfully denied to Archdiocese schools


    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 spokesperson declined 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 private school 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 turning point in the case came on July 16, 2024, when L.A. County Superior Court Judge Curtis Kim ordered the district to turn over all relevant documents, emails and records by Aug. 20 and to pay $82,141 to the diocese in attorneys’ fees.

    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.”





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  • Over $45 billion in local bonds coming to schools, community colleges

    Over $45 billion in local bonds coming to schools, community colleges


    A San Jose Unified teacher attends a rally Oct. 9 to promote candidates and a school bond measure that includes funding for staff housing.

    Credit: Photo courtesy of California Teachers Union

    This past November, hundreds of California school districts pursued local bond dollars to fix or update campuses across their communities. 

    Voters passed 205 of 267 proposed local construction bonds on the Nov. 5 ballot, including 14 of 15 for community colleges. Along with the largest number of bonds, the 77% passage rate was just shy of the historic approval rate of 79% since 2000, said Michael Coleman, founder of CaliforniaCityFinance.com, who compiled the voting results.

    That was the year voters lowered the threshold for passing school bonds from a two-thirds majority to 55%.

    Voters in major urban areas were the most receptive to bond proposals, including Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), whose $9 billion bond was by far the biggest on the ballot; $1.15 billion in San Jose Unified, which included money to underwrite staff housing; and $790 million in San Francisco Unified. San Diego Community College District’s $3.5 billion bond proposal was the largest community college measure.

    The bond in Earlimart Elementary in Tulare County passed with the state’s highest approval of 81.6%. But in the if-only-we-had-knocked-on-more-doors category, bonds in Kingsburg Union High School District, spanning three Central Valley counties, and Elverta Joint Elementary District in Sacramento County, lost by only three votes, and in Weed Union School District, in Siskiyou County, by four votes. 

    Across the Central San Joaquin Valley, stretching from San Joaquin and Calaveras counties to Kern County, more than 40 measures were approved. 

    Enrollment is growing in some parts of the region, so voters decided on multimillion dollar measures to meet the demand, such as Clovis Unified’s $400 million bond and Sanger Unified’s $175 million measure. In both districts, 57.6% of voters said yes to meet the needs of their growing communities. 

    “We have emphasized that this bond measure is critical to keeping our schools in the great shape they are in today and to finishing the much-needed Clovis South High School,” Clovis Unified Superintendent Corrine Folmer said when voting results showed that the district’s bond measure had secured a win.

    Clovis and Sanger Unified listed finishing construction at their high schools as priorities. Estimating its student population doubling in the next 10 to 20 years, Sanger Unified is also looking to build a new elementary school to alleviate overcrowding. 

    Other school communities in the Central Valley and up and down the state approved bond money to address the deteriorating condition of aging facilities. For instance, in Fresno Unified, 64.5% of voters said yes to a $500 million bond — the largest in district history.

    In the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, all districts but one, Vacaville Unified, passed bond measures. In Los Angeles County, only Saugus Union School District’s bond failed. In Orange County, all transitional kindergarten to grade 12 school district bond measures passed, but voters nixed Rancho Santiago Community College District’s bond.

    However, voters in many predominantly rural and low-property-wealth districts, from Humboldt County in the north to Imperial County in the south, voted down bonds that would have raised taxes. This included eight small districts in San Diego County and Del Norte Unified in Del Norte County. In October, EdSource highlighted Del Norte’s struggle with mold-infested, leaky portables and hazardous playgrounds in a roundtable on Proposition 2, a statewide school construction bond that voters passed.

    “Our one-district county is strained by a lack of economy, and the community is struggling with high tax rates. This wasn’t a lack of desire for our youth, but one based on meeting basic needs for household necessities,” said Brie Fraley, a parent of four boys and active bond supporter. “The structure of bonds in California doesn’t help the neediest communities.” 

    Nearly all parcel taxes pass

    Along with construction bonds, 26 school districts placed annual parcel taxes on the ballot, and 24 passed. Parcel taxes are also property taxes, but they must be a uniform amount per property in a district — whether it’s assessed for a run-down home or a five-star hotel. Although it requires a two-thirds majority vote for approval, 92% of the parcel taxes passed in November; 17 of those renewed existing taxes. 

    Particularly popular in the Bay Area and coastal Los Angeles County, they ranged from $647 per parcel in Lakeside Union School District, a small rural district lying in both Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, and $369 per parcel in Woodside Elementary, near Palo Alto, to $59 per parcel in both Sunnyvale School District and Ventura Unified. 





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  • Academic gaps ‘allowed to linger’ among California’s Black students over past decade, report says

    Academic gaps ‘allowed to linger’ among California’s Black students over past decade, report says


    Aleka Jackson-Jarrell, coordinator of the Heritage Program at Adelanto High in California’s High Desert, regularly meets with Black students to make sure they stay on track to graduate and meet A-G requirements that enable them to apply to a public university.

    Emma Gallegos/EdSource

    In the areas of chronic absenteeism, suspension and reading proficiency, the rates for Black students in California remain largely the same as they were a decade ago. That is the focus of a new report, Black Minds Matter 2025, which provides new insight and recommendations on education for Black students in California a decade after the first iteration of the report was published by Education Trust-West.

    “This report really meets the moment that we’re in when we’re seeing so many cuts to education funding and programs that are inevitably going to impact Black students,” said Melissa Valenzuela-Stookey, director of research at the prominent nonprofit behind the report that advocates for equity in education.

    Ten years ago, Black students were nearly three times more likely than white students to be suspended, and while suspension rates among Black students have since declined from 14% to 9%, the rate is still three times higher than white students, according to data from the California Department of Education included in the report. The chronic absenteeism rates are similar: in 2016-17, Black students had the second-highest rate of chronic absenteeism of any student group, just under Native American students — a statistic that remained the same in 2023-24.

    “None of the opportunity gaps or outcome gaps explored in this report are new — all have been allowed to linger over the past decade,” concluded the report authors.

    Black students represent about 5% of California’s student population from transitional kindergarten to 12th grade. That totals about 287,400 students, with about a third of them living in Los Angeles County, per 2023-24 state data. About 150,000 Black students are enrolled at institutions of higher education, both public and private.

    “We constantly have in the front of our minds that there are students and families and communities behind every single data point,” said Valenzuela-Stookey. “For that reason, it felt really important to not mince words and just bring to bear the information that we have about what conditions students and families are facing and are up against; despite the fact that they enter those systems with really ambitious aspirations, something is pushing against them, and that something is systemic.”

    The “ambitious aspirations” Valenzuela-Stookey mentioned refers to a finding by The United Negro College Fund in which 9 in 10 Black students agreed that earning a college degree is important, plus additional studies that found Black parents “are highly engaged and invested in their children’s educations, particularly in the early years,” per the report.

    The report, published Thursday, highlights multiple key findings, including:

    • The percentage of Black students in California at grade level in math increased from 16% to 18% in the decade since 2015-16 but has remained the lowest of all student groups
    • The gap between California’s Black and white students who have met or exceeded the state’s reading proficiency exams, known as California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, has not changed significantly since 1998
    • Three in 4 Black students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, which is 13 percentage points higher than the statewide average
    • The rate of Black students completing A-G course sequences in high school, which are required to attend the University of California and California State University systems, has increased by just 4 percentage points in the last decade
    • While the number of Black children enrolled in transitional kindergarten more than doubled from 2021 to 2023-24, the rate still makes up less than half of the number of Black 4-year-olds who are eligible to enroll
    • Black elementary school students report feeling sadness more frequently than any other student group
    • The number of Black teachers remained disproportionately lower than the share of Black students statewide; just over a quarter of school districts employ Black teachers at a rate proportionate to their Black student population
    • The rate at which Black students participate in dual enrollment increased by only 6 percentage points in the last seven school years, from about 11% to nearly 17%, while other student groups increased between 8 and 14 percentage points
    • Black college students in California face the highest rates of food and housing insecurity

    “This status quo is not an accident — it is the consequence of systems designed to produce unequal outcomes operating largely unchecked for centuries,” the report’s authors wrote. “It is also the consequence of incremental changes made in place of what’s called for: much more fundamental transformation.”

    A deeper look into some of the data cited in the report reveals alarming trends. For example, dual enrollment rates increased among all student racial groups between 2015-16 and 2021-22, per an analysis of state data by Policy Analysis for California Education, but Black students recorded the lowest rate of growth — at nearly 17% in 2021-22, just under the rate of dual enrollment participation for Asian students in 2015-16.

    Also, according to data from the California Community Colleges, within their first year in community college, Black students were completing and passing transfer-level coursework at a rate lower than their peers, with a difference of 30 percentage points between Asian students at 77% and Black students at 47%.

    While the report’s authors acknowledged the pandemic exacerbated some of the academic gaps, many existed long before Covid lockdowns began, and the data included in the report reflected that longevity. “It was really important for us to make sure that people had a long view of how entrenched these systemic inequities are because the solutions to them should follow from how long they’ve been baked into our systems,” said Valenzuela-Stookey.

    In addition to sharing the stark disparities, the report’s authors highlighted a handful of programs and initiatives they believe are working to close the gaps.

    These include a teacher residency program called The Village Initiative and created in collaboration with the Watts of Power Foundation; Los Angeles Unified School District; and California State University, Dominguez Hills. Fifteen Black male teachers were part of the program in 2023, and the partnership estimates they will place 113 fully credentialed, Black teachers in school over the next decade.

    Farther north, at Berkeley High School, the campus’ African American Studies Department is credited for the high rate of graduating within four years among the Black student population, at nearly 95% in the latest school year, compared to the statewide average of just over 86%.

    One of the overarching recommendations proposed by the authors was the creation of a Commission on Black Education Transformation, made up in part by Black students, parents and educators. This would be a standing state commission with the authority to make actionable decisions, including the allocation of resources to ensure follow-through from state and local agencies on policies related to academic progress for Black students.

    Other recommendations include:

    • Mandating that all high schools incorporate the 15-course A-G curriculum required for eligibility to the UC and CSU systems
    • Increasing award amounts for the existing Cal Grant program to aid students with non-tuition costs
    • Prioritizing the hiring and retention of Black educators in both TK-12 and higher education
    • Expanding pandemic-era supports, such as before- and after-school programming and academic tutoring
    • Requiring that all school staff receive training to end the disproportionate impact on Black students of punitive disciplinary practices
    • Modifying the state’s Local Control Funding Formula to target funds based on an index of metrics such as levels of adult educational attainment and homeownership rates
    • Instructing school districts to report “evidence-based strategies” aimed at supporting Black students in their Local Control and Accountability Plans

    Valenzuela-Stookey noted that her team sees both the progress and persistent gaps over the last decade “as a reminder that policy change is just the first step in closing a lot of these opportunity gaps that are highlighted in the report, and implementation and on-the-ground practice work is really the necessary next step if any of that is to come to fruition.”





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  • Department of Homeland Security Demands Harvard Turn Over International Student Disciplinary Records

    Department of Homeland Security Demands Harvard Turn Over International Student Disciplinary Records


    CNN reports that Kristi Noem sent a stern letter to Harvard, demanding the disciplinary records of all international students or lose the right to enroll any international students.

    Trump is turning all his dogs loose on Harvard. He can’t believe Harvard is standing up to his threats, and he is determined to crush the nation’s most prestigious research university.

    Whatever happened to small government? Republicans used to believe that the federal government should leave the private sector alone. Trump believes in big government, big enough to interfere in every institution, even into private medical decisions. He wants to be the emperor.

    Clearly, he never read the U.S. Constitution. He knows nothing about checks and balances. Nor did he read Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle; Yertle wanted to be the master of all he could see. Read it to see what happened to him.

    CNN reports:

    Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is threatening to strip Harvard University of its ability to enroll international students if it doesn’t turn over records on international students’ “illegal and violent activities,” the agency said Wednesday.

    Noem “wrote a scathing letter demanding detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities by April 30, 2025, or face immediate loss of Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification,” DHS said in a news release.

    The certification allows universities to issue forms to admitted international students that they can then use to apply for visas to enter the United States, according to DHS.

    CNN has reached out to DHS for additional information.

    A Harvard spokesperson said in a statement that the university is aware of the letter, but they stand by their previous statement that they “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”



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  • How to describe middling and poor test scores? State Board frets over the right words

    How to describe middling and poor test scores? State Board frets over the right words


    Students in a Fresno Unified classroom.

    Credit: Fresno Unified / Flickr

    Ending several months of uncertainty, the California State Board of Education on Wednesday chose new labels to describe how students perform on the four levels of achievement on its standardized tests.

    The decision was difficult. The 90 minutes of presentations and discussions offered lessons in the subtleties of language and the inferences of words.

    Board members said they were aware of the need to send the right messages to many parents, who had criticized the California Department of Education’s previous choices for labeling low test scores as vague euphemisms for bad news. 

    “Labels matter,” said board member Francisco Escobedo, executive director of the National Center for Urban Transformation at San Diego State. “Knowledge is a continuum, and how we describe students in different levels has a powerful impact.”’

    Researchers have warned that parents are getting confusing messages, with inflated grades on courses and declining scores on standardized tests of how well their children are doing in recovering from Covid setbacks in learning. The new labels will apply to scoring levels for the state science assessments and for the Smarter Balanced English language arts and math tests.

    Board members quickly agreed on “Advanced” for Level 4 and “Proficient” for Level 3 labels, the top two levels of scores. But their selection of “Developing” for Level 2 and “Minimal” for Level 1 differed from the consensus of parents, students and teachers who had been offered various options during focus groups in December and January.

    They had preferred “Basic” for Level 2 and “Below Basic” for Level 1.  The terms are clear, simple and familiar, a summary of the discussions said. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) classifies Basic as the lowest of its three levels, and California’s old state tests, which the state abandoned a decade ago to switch to Smarter Balanced, used Basic and Below Basic for scoring criteria as well.

    But for some veteran educators on the board, familiarity has bred contempt, or at least bad memories, of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal law under the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Schools were under heavy pressure to increase their math and English language arts scores, or potentially face sanctions.

    “I had a visceral reaction to the word Basic,” said board member and veteran teacher Haydee Rodriguez. “I remember NCLB and how finite that felt for students.” The feedback should be encouraging, not a label that discourages growth, as Basic did under NCLB, she said.

    She and Kim Patillo Brownson, a parent of two teenagers who served as a policy director at the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, also pointed out that “basic” has a different connotation for students in 2025. It’s slang for a boring and uninteresting person.  

    “Calling a student Basic is an absolute insult in 2025,” said Rodriguez. “It could shut a child down.”

    Board President Linda Darling-Hammond agreed. “If Basic is being used derogatorily, one can only imagine how Below Basic will be used. It is a real consideration; the meaning is different for adults.”

    Board members turned to other words that had been presented to the focus groups. They agreed the choices should be frank, not Pollyannaish or dispiriting.

    With Level 2, the purpose should be “trying to light a fire under parents to realize there is work to do,” said Patillo Brownson.

    Stating that “Below Basic” says a student is failing, Escobedo preferred “Developing” for Level 1 and “Emerging” for Level 2. These terms are consistent with labels used for scoring the progress of English learners.

    Patillo Brownson called Emerging “vague” and supported “Basic.”

    Board Vice President Cynthia Glover Woods, who was chief academic officer of the Riverside County Office of Education before her retirement, favored “Minimum” for Level 1 because “it is important we are clear for students and parents that students scoring at the level have a minimal understanding of grade-level knowledge.”

    Sharing the perspective of her peers, the student board member on the board, Julia Clauson, a senior at Bella Vista High School in Sacramento, recommended substituting “Approaching” for “Basic,” so as not to deter students from trying challenging courses. “Older students make academic decisions (based on what signals they get), so language matters,” she said.

    The County Superintendents association also endorsed “Approaching” for Level 2 and “Developing” or “Emerging” for Level 1.

    The board initiated what turned into a multi-month decision because of growing dissatisfaction with the labels that had been used since the first Smarter Balanced testing in 2015. They were Standard Not Met for Level 1, Standard Nearly Met for Level 2, Standard Met for Level 3 and Standard Exceeded for Level 4. Focus groups by the California Department of Education found that parents were confused about what “standard” meant. They found Standard Not Met as discouraging and Standard Nearly Met as unclear.

    But a coalition of student advocacy groups, including Teach Plus, Children Now and Innovate Public Schools, along with the County Superintendents association and the Association of California School Administrators, criticized the labels for Levels 1 and 2 that the California Department of Education recommended as their replacements as soft-pedaling euphemisms for poor scorers. The department had proposed Inconsistent for Level 1 and Foundational for Level 2.

    At its December meeting, the board told the department to try again with more focus groups.

    Changing the labels to Advanced, Proficient, Developing and Minimal won’t change how scores are determined; the individual scores within each achievement band have remained the same in all the 18 member states that take all or some of the Smarter Balanced tests, which are given to students in grades three through eight and once in high school, usually in 11th grade.

    However, additional work is needed to communicate the changes to parents and students. The department and its testing contractor, ETS, will spell out the differences between performing at the various levels in each subject and grade and the level of improvement needed to raise scores.

    Tony Alpert, executive director of Smarter Balanced, pointed out that performance differences are a continuum with students showing gaps in some grade-level skills but not others. A student scoring at Level 1 may have answered some questions showing knowledge at grade level. As scores progress from Levels 2 to 4, students demonstrate increasing accuracy and complexity in their knowledge and skills.

    Students who reach Level 3 have the knowledge to succeed in future coursework. Research has determined that for California high school students, Level 3 correlates with preparation for first-year courses at California State University.

    The state board hoped that the label changes and new explanations would be ready for this spring’s testing results. Instead, they will take effect in 2026.





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