The disastrous floods that swept through Hill Country and caused the deaths of 80 or more people were made worse by human error.
The New York Timesfound that the local branches of the National Weather Service were short on staff; critical positions were empty. The computer specialists who worked for Elon Musk in an operation called DOGE decided that too many people worked for the National Weather Service. Some meteorologists took buyouts, others resigned.
Furthermore the affected area did not have an early warning ststem. Local taxpayers didn’t want to pay for it.
The quasi-libertarian belief that we don’t need government services and we shouldn’t pay for them took a toll on innocent people.
The combination of Musk’s ruthless cost-cutting and local hostility to taxes set the stage for a disastrous tragedy.
The Times reported:
Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.
Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation.
The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said — the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.
The shortages are among the factors likely to be scrutinized as the death toll climbs from the floods. Separate questions have emerged about the preparedness of local communities, including Kerr County’s apparent lack of a local flood warning system. The county, roughly 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, is where many of the deaths occurred.
In an interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending.
“Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Mr. Kelly said. Asked if people might reconsider in light of the catastrophe, he said, “I don’t know.”
The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.
The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.
That office’s warning coordination meteorologist left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure.
Sign up for Your Places: Extreme Weather. Get notified about extreme weather before it happens with custom alerts for places in the U.S. you choose. Get it sent to your inbox.
Some of the openings may predate the current Trump administration. But at both offices, the vacancy rate is roughly double what it was when Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January, according to Mr. Fahy.
Declining enrollments are painful for districts, yet may yield revenue options for the state.
With $15 million, districts would brainstorm new concepts for high schools of the future.
There’s a catch-22 for English learners who are too young to be tested.
Inside every governor’s voluminous state budget are items that, while not headline-grabbing, are newsworthy and illuminating.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s May budget revision for 2025-26 is no exception, as four examples illustrate. One invites districts to redesign high schools; another adds a billion dollars to spur growth in learning. A third is a quick fix for a legal obstacle to help young English learners; a fourth reveals an important long-term funding trend. Here are the details.
Reimagining high school
Asked to describe how they felt about high school, 3 out of 4 students chose “tired,” “stressed” or “bored” in a 2020 nationwide survey by Yale University. Closer to home, about 4 out of 10 students in the 2024-25 California Healthy Kids Survey reported they lacked a relationship with a caring adult in high school.
State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond has read those numbers and similar data. She has also seen schools, like MetWest High School in Oakland Unified, and districts like Anaheim Union High School District, that have explored project-based learning, work internships, team teaching, and individual learning plans with alternative measures of achievement. One of the challenges has been scaling models within a learning system that measures learning in terms of periods, course credits, and minutes of seat time.
That’s why Darling-Hammond encouraged Newsom to include $15 million in the May budget revision for a pilot program to redesign middle and high schools “to better serve the needs of all students and increase student outcomes.”
“If public schools are to survive, they will have to be transformed to be more responsive,” Darling-Hammond said. “Students should not have to leave public schools for microschools and school pods to get a personalized environment.”
Newsom is proposing that a yet-to-be-chosen county office of education guide a network of between 15 and 30 districts in a multi-year program to examine innovations, propose alternatives, and learn from each other.
State law allows districts to seek waivers from state requirements, and existing independent study regulations permit some flexibility for experimentation. But an independent study was designed to accommodate individual schedules, not a systemic response that reorients the school day to a changing vision for a high school graduate, Darling-Hammond said.
“The state board can’t spend time doing workarounds for 2,000 districts,” she said.
Ron Carruth, the retired superintendent of the El Dorado Union High School District, said he is encouraged by the proposal. This month, he helped establish the California High School Coalition, which will hold its first conference in Sacramento on Oct. 26-28.
Anaheim Union High School District Superintendent Michael Matsuda said that “in the age of AI, we need to be more innovative than ever, considering tectonic shifts in jobs and employment. If we’re not preparing students for that world, shame on us.”
The state-funded network will be “an opportunity to innovate,” he said, while noting that changing systems and culture are a lot harder than people think. “School leaders need to think more like entrepreneurs.”
Ideas for accelerating learning?
Parents and community members with ideas for moving districts beyond their post-pandemic learning lag will have a chance to share them under the May budget revision, with an extra $1.1 billion for districts to spend on them.
Newsom is proposing to add $378 million in each of the next three fiscal years to the Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant program — a massive, five-year state grant program approved in 2022-23. The grant program, targeted for the most struggling students, provides what districts in other states lack: state money to replace federal Covid funding that expired in September 2024.
It’s unclear how much of the original $6.8 billion remains. As of a year ago, $4.8 billion hadn’t been spent, according to an analysis of the most recent state data by School Services of California. The proposed $1.1 billion would add to what’s left.
Under the terms of the program, districts must solicit community views on spending the money on “evidence-based practices,” like tutoring or investing in teacher residences to retain new teachers. Districts will then have to spell out uses for the funding as a new entry in their annual Local Control and Accountability Plans.
The timing is good. For example, the Legislature is likely to move districts toward adopting effective early literacy textbooks and effective ways to teach them. This new block grant money could amplify the more than $700 million that Newsom is also proposing for districts to improve early math and reading instruction.
More districts are also indicating interest in high-impact tutoring, with additional research showing its effectiveness. Along with providing districts with a free, step-by-step guide and counseling for setting up a program, Stanford University-based National Student Support Accelerator is cosponsoring an effort for 40 California districts to design their own tutoring programs over the next year (go here for information on signing up).
TK English learner funding workaround
A decision by the Legislature that 4-year-olds in transitional kindergarten (TK) are too young to be tested for English proficiency could delay funding for services the children need before kindergarten.
Recognizing the problem, Newsom proposes a temporary fix in the May budget revision by providing $7.5 million in one-time money for 2025-26 and 2026-27.
All students who speak a language other than English at home are required to take the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC) when they enroll in school to determine if they are English learners. But the law that legislators passed last year exempts students in transitional kindergarten from taking the test because of concerns that it was not age-appropriate. Without identifying English learners and providing funding for them under the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, schools are not required to provide unidentified students with language services or report their academic progress on the state dashboard.
“It’s critical that we have funding to support our children, that we have the requirement to support our children, and that we’re doing so in the age and developmentally appropriate way that really keeps their assets in mind,” said Carolyne Crolotte, director of policy for Early Edge California, an organization that advocated for the exemption of TK students from ELPAC testing.
Crolotte said Early Edge California has been researching what other states do to identify young English learners and is working with the State Board of Education and the National Institute for Early Education Research to identify alternative assessments.
Newsom is also proposing $10 million for selecting and making available a new screener for schools to use with TK students to identify their language needs. However, there is a catch. The language the governor is suggesting for the budget bill states that the screener should not be used to identify students as English learners. Unless the Local Control Funding Formula is changed, schools would still not receive funds specifically for these students or be required by law to provide them with help to learn English.
Declining enrollment’s ‘dividend’
There’s a silver lining to the continued decline in TK-12 student enrollment in California. Per-student funding could grow statewide during much of the next decade if, according to state projections, student enrollment statewide drops by nearly 10%, to 5.25 million by 2033-34.
That’s because the state will be apportioning money through what’s called Test 1 under Proposition 98, the formula that determines the minimum portion of the state’s General Fund that must be spent on TK-12 schools and community colleges. Under Test 1, that’s about 40% of the total. If state revenues grow at the same time as the number of kids shrinks, the result will be more money per student.
The increase won’t be enough to prevent spending cuts or school closures in those districts with big drops in enrollment. But it should help ease the pain, and for districts with flat or growing enrollment, provide a modest increase in their share of the Local Control Funding Formula, which provides the bulk of their state funding; it is tied to average daily attendance.
Funding through Test 1 is a relatively recent development. In 1988, when they wrote Prop. 98, its authors didn’t foresee a period of declining enrollment. For the first 25 years, as student enrollment grew by more than 1 million, growth in student attendance, along with increases in personal income (Test 2) or increases in General Fund revenue plus 0.5% (Test 3), determined funding levels above or below the previous year.
First invoked in 2011-12, Test I has been used in seven of the past eight years and will be in effect in 2025-26, and likely in the coming years.
The extra money systemwide will also give the Legislature and future governors new options. They could decide which new programs with soon-to-expire one-time funding, such as community schools, should receive permanent support. Or they could choose to phase in much-talked-about changes to the Local Control Funding Formula. These could include raising the base funding for all districts or building in a regional cost adjustment. Those are among the ideas in Assembly Bill 1204, which will get serious attention next year.
The declining enrollment “dividend,” as it’s been called, “is kind of a boon for the education system,” said Julien Lafortune, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.
Children line up to drink water from a fountain inside Cuyama Elementary School in Santa Barbara County.
Credit: Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP Photo
It’s that time again when I line up my predictions for the year only to see events conspire to knock them down like bowling pins.
As you recall, I lay down my wager in fensters. You can, too, on a scale of 1 fenster — no way it’ll happen — to 5 – it’s bird-brain obvious (at least to you). Fensters are a cryptocurrency redeemable only in Russian rubles; currently trading at about 110 per U.S. dollar. Predict right, and you’ll be rich in no time!
2025 will be rife with conflict; you know that. It will start Jan. 20, when President Donald Trump will announce that POTUS 47 v. California will be the main attraction on his UFC fight card. Trump’s tag team of both a Republican Congress, though barely a majority, and a conservative Supreme Court will be formidable.
Since it’s often difficult to know from day to day whether Trump’s acts are grounded in personal vendettas or conservative principles, that will complicate predictions. Insiders also say his decisions change based on the last person he speaks with. Safe to say it won’t be me.
With that caution, grab your spreadsheet.
Trump’s agenda
Mass deportations could turn hundreds of thousands of kids’ lives upside down, and massive shifts in education policies could jeopardize billions of dollars in federal funding for low-income kids.
Public reaction will determine whether Trump deports tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants with criminal records or indiscriminately sends back millions of people, as he implied. Most Americans found Trump’s policy early in his first term of separating children from parent border crossers abhorrent. Scenes on social media of ICE agents’ midnight raids, leaving kids without a working parent and potentially homeless, could have the same effect. And Central Valley farmers dependent on immigrants to harvest crops will warn Trump of financial disaster; other factories dependent on immigrants to do jobs other Americans don’t want will, too.
Trump will rely on shock and awe instead: swift raids of meat-packing plants and of visible sites targeting immigrant neighborhoods in California’s sanctuary cities — to send a message: You’re not welcome here.
And it will work, as measured by fear among children, violations of habeas corpus (laws pertaining to detention and imprisonment), and, in the end, declines in illegal crossings at the border, a trend that already started, under widespread pressure, in the final year of the Biden presidency.
The likelihood that Trump’s deportations will number closer to 100,000 than a million
The likelihood that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will open immigrant detention centers, one each in Northern California and Southern California
The likelihood that chronic absence rates in California school districts with large undocumented immigrant populations will soar to higher than 40%
The likelihood that the number of California high school seniors in those same districts who will not fill out the federal application for college financial aid known as FAFSA because of worry about outing an undocumented parent will increase significantly
The likelihood that the Trump administration will challenge the 1981 Supreme Court decision that children present in the United States have a right to attend public school, regardless of their immigration status and that of their parents
Eliminating the U.S. Department of Education
One of the late President Jimmy Carter’s accomplishments was the creation of the Department of Education. Forty-five years later, Trump wants to dissolve it and divide responsibilities among other federal bureaucracies: Title I funding for children in poverty to the Department of Health and Human Services; federal student loans and Pell grants to the Department of Treasury. That would take congressional approval, and past efforts over the years to eliminate it — a popular Republican idea — never came close to passing.
The likelihood that Trump could get majorities in Congress to eliminate the department
With or without a department, Trump could make radical changes that could impact billions of federal education dollars for California. He could turn Title I’s $18.8 billion funding for low-income children into a block grant and let states decide how to spend it. California, which had spats with the Obama administration over how to mesh state and federal funding, might welcome that. But poor kids in other states will be at the whim of governors and legislators who won’t be held accountable.
The likelihood Trump will cut 10% to 20% from Title I funding but leave funding for special education, the Individual Disabilities Education Act, traditionally an area of bipartisan agreement, intact
The likelihood Trump will call cuts in money for Title I and the Department of Education bureaucracy a down payment for a federal K-12 voucher program
Mini-fight over state budget
Later this week, Gov. Newsom will release his 2025-26 budget. If the Legislative Aalyst’s Office was right in its revenue projections, there will be a small cost-of-living adjustment for education programs and at least $3 billion for new spending — petty change compared with Newsom’s big initiatives for community schools and after-school programs when money flowed.
A piece of it could go toward improving math. It’s been ignored for too long.
California students perform abysmally in math: Only 31% were proficient on state tests in 2024, compared with 47% in English language arts — nothing to brag about either. In the last National Assessment of Educational Progress results, California fourth graders’ scores were behind 30 other states.
The State Board of Education approved new, ambitious math standards, amid much controversy, two years ago. The state has not jump-started statewide training for them since. But the board will adopt a new list of approved curriculum materials this summer, signaling it’s time to get rolling.
The likelihood that Newsom will include hundreds of millions of dollars for buying textbooks, training math coaches and encouraging collaboration time among teachers.
Ethnic studies tensions
Conflicts over ethnic studies, which have been simmering since the Legislature passed Assembly Bill 101 in 2021 requiring high schools to teach it will come to a head this year.
At the center of the controversy is the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium and affiliated groups pushing an alternative version of the ethnic studies framework that the State Board of Education approved in 2021. The state framework, a guide, not a mandated curriculum, places ethnic studies in the context of an evolving American story, with a focus on struggles, progress and cultural influences of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native Americans.
The liberated version stresses the ongoing repression of those groups through a critique of white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, plus, for good measure, instruction in anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation. UC and CSU ethnic studies faculty members have led efforts to promote it, with substantial consulting contracts with several dozen districts.
AB 101’s mandate for teaching ethnic studies, starting in the fall of 2025 and requiring it for a high school diploma in 2029-30, is contingent on state funding. And that hasn’t happened, according to the Department of Finance. Meanwhile, the Legislative Jewish Caucus will reintroduce legislation to require more public disclosure before districts adopt an ethnic studies curriculum. In his Golden State Plan to Counter Antisemitism, Newsom promised to work with the caucus to strengthen AB 101 to “ensure all ethnic studies courses are free from bias, bigotry, and discriminatory content.”
Some scenarios:
The likelihood Newsom will press for amendments to AB 101 as a requirement for funding the AB 101 mandate
The likelihood that Newsom and the Legislature fund the AB 101 mandate, at least to keep it on schedule, for now
The likelihood the Jewish Caucus-led bill to strengthen transparency and AB 101’s anti-bias protections will pass with Newsom’s support
Amending the funding formula
Revising the Local Control Funding Formula, which parcels out 80% of state funding for TK-12, may get some juice this year — if not to actually amend the 12-year-old law, then at least to formally study the idea.
At an Assembly hearing last fall, the state’s leading education researchers and education advocates agreed that the landmark finance reform remains fundamentally sound, and the heart of the formula — steering more money to low-income, foster, and homeless students, as well as English learners — should be kept. However, with performance gaps stubbornly high between low-income and non-low-income students and among racial and ethnic groups, researchers also suggested significant changes to the law. The challenge is that some ideas are in conflict, and some could be expensive.
In his budgets, Gov. Gavin Newsom has directed more money to the most impoverished, low-performing schools. However, some school groups want to focus more money on raising the formula’s base funding for all students. Others want to focus attention on districts in the middle, with 35% to 55% low-income and English learners, who get less aid per student than in districts like Oakland, with higher concentrations of eligible students.
The outcome will affect how much money your school district gets, so keep an eye on what’s happening.
The likelihood that the funding formula will be amended this year
The likelihood there will be a two-year study with intent to pass legislation next year
What about tutoring?
At his preview Monday on the 2025-26 state budget, Newsom barely mentioned education. But a one-word reference to “tutoring” woke me up.
In my 2023 predictions column, I wagered three fensters that Newsom would expand a promising effort for state-driven and funded early-grades tutoring in a big way. Last year, looking back, I wrote, “It was wise advice couched as a prediction, which Gov. Newsom ignored. (It’s still a good idea.)”
So it is. Newsom created the structure for tutoring at scale when he created California College Corps. It recruits 10,000 college students and pays them $10,000 toward their college expenses in exchange for 450 community public service hours. Newsom, in setting it up, made tutoring an option. What he didn’t do is make it a priority and ask school districts, which received $6.3 billion in learning recovery money over multiple years, to make intensive, small-group “high-dosage” tutoring their priority, too. Other states, like Tennessee, have, and Maryland this year became the latest.
The likelihood that Newsom will include high-dosage tutoring in math and reading for early grades, in partnership with tutoring nonprofits, school districts, and university teacher credentialing programs
TK for all (who choose)
Starting this fall, any child who turns 4 by Sept. 1 can attend publicly funded transitional kindergarten in California. The date will mark the successful end of a four-year transition period and a $2.4 billion state investment.
“Done,” said Newsom pointing to the word stamped on a slide during a preview of the budget on Monday.
Well, not quite.
The hope of TK, the year between preschool and kindergarten, is to prepare young children for school through play and learning, thus preventing an opportunity gap from developing in a year of peak brain growth. For school districts, adding this 14th year of school offers the only hope for a source of revenue when enrollment in all grades in many districts is declining.
But in its first and initial years of full operation, TK will likely be under-enrolled statewide. There are a number of reasons. By design, the Newsom administration and Legislature are offering multiple options for parents of 4-year-olds. There are transitional kindergarten, state-funded preschools, private preschools, and state-funded vouchers for several care options, plus federal Head Start.
The state has provided financial incentives for providers to shift to serving 2- and 3-year-olds, but it will take time. The state had assumed that transitional kindergarten would draw parents attracted to classes taught by credentialed teachers in a neighborhood elementary school. Some parents prefer their preschool with an adult-child ratio of 8-to-1, instead of 12-to-1 in transitional kindergarten (a credentialed teacher and an aide in a class of up to 24) and a preschool teacher who speaks Spanish or another native language, said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, who has been researching transitional kindergarten in California.
And many elementary schools don’t have the bigger classrooms to accommodate TK and kindergarten, or they can’t find enough credentialed teachers and aides to staff them.
In coming years, transitional kindergarten enrollment will reach closer to serving all 4-year-olds, an estimated 400,000 next year.
For now, the likelihood that transitional kindergarten will serve more than 60% of a target population
Keep on your radar
Equity in funding: Voters approved a $10 billion state construction bond, providing critical matching funding to districts that passed local bonds. But despite small fixes in Proposition 2, the first-come, first-served system favors school districts with the highest property values — whether commercial downtowns or expensive homes. The higher tax burden for low-wealth districts is why some schools are pristine and fancy, while those in neighboring districts are antiquated and decrepit. The nonprofit law firm Public Advocates threatened to file a lawsuit last fall, and hasn’t said whether it will follow through. But it would be a landmark case.
In the 1971 landmark decision in Serrano v. Priest, the California Supreme Court ruled that a school funding system tied to local property taxes violated students’ constitutional rights. Challenging the state’s reliance on districts’ disparate local property wealth to fund school facilities could be the equivalent.
Rethinking high school: Anaheim Union High School Districtis among the districts thinking about how the high school day could be more relevant to students’ personal and career aspirations. Anaheim Union is exploring how an expanded block schedule, team teaching, interdisciplinary courses, artificial intelligence, online learning, and job apprenticeships could transform learning.
The six-period day, education code rules in instructional minutes, and seat time may be obstacles to change and perpetuate mindsets. For now, discussions have been more conceptual than specific. The State Board of Education has a broad power to grant waivers from the state education code; State Board President Linda Darling-Hammond said the board is open to considering them. This may be the year a district or group of districts take up her offer.
Thanks for reading the column. One more toast to 2025!
