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  • Lack of reliable education data hamstrings California lawmakers and the public

    Lack of reliable education data hamstrings California lawmakers and the public


    Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

    This story was updated to more accurately describe the data availability issues. Details.

    Public data posted by the California Department of Education has been incomplete, often outdated and occasionally inaccurate, forcing legislators to pass laws based on old data, researchers to delay inquiries and journalists to grapple with inaccurate information.

    Californians, living in a state known globally as a center of innovation and technology, have had to cope with a state education agency that has admittedly lacked the staffing and the policies to provide much-needed data, EdSource reporting has found. 

    As a result, there are gaps in the knowledge needed by lawmakers, researchers, journalists and others to evaluate state programs and policies, from teacher demographics, to how many English learners become fluent in English each year, to how districts have spent a $50 million court settlement to improve early literacy.

    Obtaining data from the California Department of Education (CDE) has been difficult, said Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust-West, one of the state’s most prominent social justice and advocacy organizations. There have been delays in the public release of data and a lack of consistency when it comes to the annual publication of key data sets, he said.

    “In an ideal world, we would have a legislature in a state that is making data-informed decisions about legislation, and then making data-informed decisions about assessing the efficacy or impact of investments, or the interventions, and this is difficult in the state of California right now,” Nellum said.

    The CDE collects data about student achievement and demographics, enrollment, course information, discipline, graduation rates, staff assignments and other data, much of it mandated by legislation. 

    Some data have not been updated by the department for as long as five years. The most recent available data for teacher demographics, pupil-teacher ratios, course enrollment, and class size is from 2018-19.

    “In an ideal world, we would have a legislature in a state that is making data-informed decisions about legislation, and then making data-informed decisions about assessing the efficacy or impact of investments, or the interventions, and this is difficult in the state of California right now.”

    Christopher Nellum

    The dashboard that tracks the annual progress of K-12 students on standardized tests, chronic absenteeism, suspensions and graduation was also suspended or only partially updated due to the pandemic-related school closures until Dec. 2023. The Legislature suspended the reporting of state and local indicators on the 2020 and 2021 dashboards and, because the state didn’t have prior-year data to measure growth in 2022, that year’s dashboard was published without the full-color display.

    Cindy Kazanis, the director of the Analysis, Measurement and Accountability Reporting Division at CDE, said many of the delays in reporting data have resulted from “not having enough boots on the ground.”  The department is in the process of recruiting and hiring 17 new staffers.

    New state mandates and changes in the way data is collected also have impacted data collection, Kazanis said. The five-year delay in updating some data is because the department has a backlog of reports and data that must be reconfigured because the state changed course codes in 2018-19, she said.

    Legislation based on old data

    An EdSource examination of recent state education bills shows that legislative staff have sometimes had to rely on outdated CDE data to complete analysis meant to help legislators make decisions about whether to pass laws.

    One example is an analysis of Assembly Bill 2097, which used department data from 2018-19, the most recent year it was available, to show computer science offerings in California high schools, and the number and gender of students enrolled in them. The bill, if passed, will require school districts to offer computer science courses to high school students, who will be required to complete a one-year course before graduating.

    An analysis of Assembly Bill 2429 also relied on data from five years ago. The legislation mandates health education courses, required by some districts to graduate, including instruction on the dangers of fentanyl use. The legislation passed on June 13.

    “The committee may wish to consider that course-taking data, which is important for policy analysis and evaluation, has not been updated by the CDE since the 2018-19 school year,” stated the analysis. “The CDE reports that this data will be updated in 2024.”

    Since 2018, legislators also have required that several new datasets be added to the CDE website, including absenteeism by reason, a stability rate, restraint and seclusion, special education, college-going rates, teacher assignment monitoring outcomes, five-year graduation rates and homeless students by dwelling type, according to the CDE.

    Assembly Bill 1340, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October, mandates that the department post test scores, suspensions, rates of absenteeism, and graduate and college-going rates for students with disabilities, disaggregated by federal disability category, on its website. 

    The analysis of the bill for the Assembly Education Committee was terse. “When this committee is asked to evaluate the effect of a policy on a subset of students with disabilities — for example, students who are visually impaired — it requires data about this subgroup of students’ progress on academic and other measures. Under current CDE practice, a single number for all students with disabilities is shown, obscuring important information about students’ progress, which is needed for evidence-based policymaking and to provide transparent information for the public,” it read. Legislators could not be reached to comment.

    Unreliable public information

    EdSource journalists working on news stories have struggled in several cases to obtain accurate, up-to-date data from the California Department of Education. This year, EdSource had to twice remove data after publication because the analysis was based on incorrect data that the department had published on its website. In both cases, school district officials notified CDE that they had inadvertently submitted incorrect data to the department, but the agency did not correct the information online.

    The timing of data releases has also been an issue. When CDE refused to publicly release state test scores after districts began releasing the information to parents, EdSource enlisted legal help to require CDE to comply with the California Public Records Act. 

    In September 2022, just months before the election that re-elected Tony Thurmond as state superintendent of public instruction, the CDE refused an EdSource request for Smarter Balanced test scores, saying they would not be released until sometime later in the year. EdSource wrote about the delay and enlisted an attorney to write a letter outlining why the data was public information. Within a week, the department announced the scores would be released in October, before the election. The Legislature subsequently required the department to release test scores annually by Oct. 15. 

    Nonprofits, schools share data

    Because of the difficulty obtaining education data from the state, many nonprofits and collaboratives have started collecting their own data or creating online tools, so the public can more easily access CDE data.

    The Education Trust-West, which has campaigned for clear and accessible data through its Data for the People initiative for over a decade, developed a data visualization tool that uses public data on California K-12 and higher education systems. Because much of the data comes from the CDE, information is limited to what the department has made available. 

    CORE Districts, a collaborative of nine California school districts serving more than a million students, collects data directly from districts for its Insights Dashboard. CORE collects data from its member districts, as well as 124 other school districts and charter schools, so that comparisons can be made. But the effort doesn’t come near reporting on all nearly 1,000 districts.

    “We regularly get requests from researchers to look at our data,” said Rick Miller, CORE Districts’ chief executive officer. “Going through the CDE process is so cumbersome.”

    Lack of data stymies researchers

    Education data that is not being collected or made publicly available recently became the central topic of a gathering of California researchers discussing educator diversity, said Kai Mathews, project director for the California Educator Diversity Project at UCLA.

    “What we realized is that some people had some information that’s not publicly available, and it largely depended on past relationships,” Mathews said. “So some data is actually probably collected, it’s just not publicly shared with all of us.” 

    Mathews and Nellum agree that a lack of updated teacher demographic data is particularly perplexing, given the teacher shortage and the number of workforce issues facing teachers. The Education Trust-West has had to delay some of its work because it hasn’t been able to obtain teacher data, Nellum said.

    “That is bad for students. It’s bad for schools. And, of course, it’s bad for any sort of hope we have of advancing equity,” Nellum said.

    EdSource requested updated teacher demographic information from CDE earlier this year for a series of stories on recruiting and retaining Black teachers, an issue Superintendent of Public Instruction Thurmond had called a priority. The data was last updated in 2018-19, despite being submitted to the department annually by school districts. After sending five email requests over a month, the reporter never received the data from the CDE. Instead, the reporter used data from 2020-21, the most recent year available, from the National Center for Education Statistics. 

    Alix Gallagher, the director of strategic partnerships at Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), says the lack of data on universal transitional kindergarten makes it unclear whether the state is optimizing the annual investment it is making in the grade. California will spend an estimated $3 billion a year by 2025-26, when universal transitional kindergarten (TK) will be offered to all 4-year-olds, Gallagher wrote in a commentary on the PACE website.

    The state should collect data on the features of transitional kindergarten programs and on student outcomes from transitional kindergarten through second grade, to better understand the effectiveness of transitional kindergarten, she wrote.

    “Right now there isn’t publicly available data for roughly the first third of a kid’s career in the public schools,” Gallagher told EdSource. “We now have universal access to TK, kindergarten, first, second and third grades. And, at the end of third grade, kids take the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment). And that’s the first time, as a system, we know anything about kids’ learning.”

    In fact, this year’s test scores show 57% of third-graders reading below grade level and 55% doing mathematics below grade level. 

    CDE data division staffing up

    An annual $3 million investment from the state will allow CDE to add 17 new employees to improve data reporting to the public, Kazanis said. Twelve of the new employees have been hired. The Analysis, Measurement and Accountability Reporting Division currently has 66 employees.

    Some of those resources are headed to CDE as part of the state’s launch of the first phase of its Cradle-to-Career Data System sometime this year. The longitudinal data system will provide tools to help students achieve their goals and deliver information on education and workforce outcomes, according to the website. It may also give researchers the data they are seeking.

    “I’m hopeful though, because the Cradle-to-Career data system is working on a teacher dashboard, which I know will have a lot of the data that we have been waiting for,” said Nellum, who also is a member of the Cradle-to-Career (C2C) Advisory Board. Nellum spoke to EdSource for this story as a representative of The Education-Trust West and not as a member of the C2C board. 

    Eight of the employees will make up the new Data Visualization and Insights Office. It will collect data at the request of state policymakers and the California State Board of Education and work to make publicly available data more user-friendly, Kazanis said.

    The state funding includes $300,000 to move the release date of the California School Dashboard data up incrementally each year until the annual release date is Oct. 15. This is expected to happen in 2026. Last year, data which includes test scores, graduation rates and student demographics was released on Dec. 15. Two data teams work on the dashboard full-time all year, Kazanis said. 

    The influx of new staff is expected to allow the department to revamp DataQuest to make it more user-friendly, Kazanis said. The new teacher reports, for example, will allow the user to make comparisons among districts, she said.

    Seven new positions will focus entirely on generating teacher data, Kazanis said. 

    “We’ve wanted to get out from under this backlog, but part of it was recognizing that we did need more resources, and we need dedicated resources to be focused on teacher data.”

    Friday: California launches the Cradle-to-Career data system, a long-awaited project to track student progress

    California prepares to launch first phase of new education data system | EdSource

    This story has been changed to correct the spelling for Tony Thurmond, California superintendent of public instruction and to reflect that some data sets have not been updated for the past five years, not seven years as originally stated. The paragraph about the California School Dashboard has been updated to make clear that the dashboard was suspended by the Legislature during the Covid pandemic.





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  • California’s public universities come through – at least for one family

    California’s public universities come through – at least for one family


    UC Santa Barbara bids farewell to the class of 2024 across eight ceremonies on June 15.

    Credit: Rebecca Caraway / Noozhawk.com

    Last weekend I had the moving experience of attending one of the last of dozens of commencement ceremonies held on various campuses of California’s massive system of public higher education this academic year.

    The one I went to took place at a scenic site at the University of California, Santa Barbara next to the landmark UCSB Lagoon and the glittering Pacific Ocean beyond.

    Over 6,000 undergraduates received their bachelor’s degrees over the weekend — requiring the commencement to be staged in multiple ceremonies over two days to accommodate all of them. 

    The sight of thousands of students walking — or ambling or skipping — across the stage offered a graphic representation of what California has been able to accomplish on a scale not seen anywhere else in the United States, or perhaps the world.

    I was moved not only by the sheer numbers, but also when I reflected that almost all of them had missed out on their high school graduation because of the pandemic, and then had to start their college education by studying remotely from home.  And then this year, until just a few days earlier, even the location of the event had been in doubt against the backdrop of possible protests triggered by the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

    I was also moved because my daughter was among the graduates. 

    She was just one of the over 60,000 undergraduates who received their degrees from the 10-campus University of California system over the last few weeks — and the more than 100,000 who received similar honors at the 23-campus California State University system.

    As the graduates filed by, with names reflecting a dazzling kaleidoscope of different ethnicities and backgrounds, I thought about the great effort it took to get each one of them to the finish line — effort on the part of the students themselves, of their families and of the institutions they attended. 

    I confess that when my daughter enrolled as a freshman four years ago, I worried about the quality of the education she would receive — simply because of the huge numbers of students most UC and CSU campuses have had to take on. I had the same concerns when my son enrolled at UC Irvine a few years earlier. 

    I need not have worried.

    At a celebratory dinner a few hours after her graduation ceremony, I asked my daughter to name the worst class she had taken — and the best.  She easily remembered the worst one, but then, with equal facility, named four courses — psychopharmacology, psychopathology, population health, and the history of architecture in the U.S. — she said were outstanding ones. She enthusiastically described each of them, including the professors who taught them. It was exhilarating to see a young person, and my daughter no less, so excited about learning and scholarship.

    My son had a similar experience at UC Irvine, where he majored in data science, and then, partially as a result of the pandemic, stayed for an extra year to get his master’s degree in statistics. He now has a job at Google.

    Both of them say they got a high-quality education on their campuses. This was achieved despite the huge increases in enrollment in recent decades.

    UC Santa Barbara this year, for example, awarded about 50% more undergraduate degrees than two decades ago. 

    I could easily see the impact these increases had on my daughter and her friends. Before moving to an off-campus apartment, she lived in a three-bedroom campus apartment with six other students, with two students in each of two tiny bedrooms, and three in the small room my daughter was in.  It was tough to get into all the classes she wanted to take.

    But she made it through, pandemic and all.

    Unbeknownst to them, what she and my son benefited from were the fruits of California’s ambitious Master Plan for Higher Education, drawn up in 1960, which aimed to provide postsecondary opportunities to “anyone who could benefit.”

    At the time, only 11% of adults of prime working age had bachelor’s degrees. As researchers from the Public Policy Institute of California point out in a just-issued paper, by 2021, that number had risen to 37%.  The state has now set a goal of 40%, which according to the authors, should be much higher.

    So enrollments are likely to increase, and there obviously is still work to be done to make sure all students are able to take full advantage of what our public universities have to offer. That includes making sure they graduate not only within a reasonable amount of time, but graduate at all.

    The overall four-year graduation rate for UC is 73%, a respectable number, but California can do better — especially among low-income students and those from underrepresented groups who graduate in significantly lower numbers. At the California State University system, which serves an older student body, many of whom are working, graduation rates are even lower.

    But California is at least on the right track. Rather than simply creating degree-granting factories, the state appears to be able to offer a high-quality academic experience to its students — one that they, and California, will benefit from for many decades.

    Louis Freedberg is Interim CEO of EdSource.

    •••

    The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • Michael Hiltzik: RFK Jr. is a Danger to Public Health

    Michael Hiltzik: RFK Jr. is a Danger to Public Health


    Michael Hiltzik, columnist for The Los Angeles Times, explains why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is himself a danger to public health. Why did Trump pick him? RFK Jr. is neither a medical nor a scientific researcher. He has made his mark in public as a conspiracy theorist and a publicist for the idea that vaccines cause autism and other illnesses.

    Hiltzik writes:

    Americans have become woefully familiar with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the purveyor of flagrant misinformation about medical treatments. And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the minimizer of health crises such as the spreading measles outbreak. And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the antivaccine crusader.

    Now let’s meet Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the promoter of a costly, time-consuming and distinctly unethical order for testing vaccines. “All new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure — a radical departure from past practices,” HHS announced in a May 1 statement. What it didn’t say was that the “departure” is “radical” because it’s shunned by medical authorities as a bad thing.

    Just this week, Kennedy’s agency doubled down on this order with the appointment of Vinay Prasad, an oncologist at UC San Francisco, as head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the division at the Food and Drug Administration that oversees vaccine testing.

    Prasad was a strident critic of the Biden administration’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the COVID vaccines. In a blog post in late April, he called for clinical testing of COVID boosters, along the lines of Kennedy’s order. Prasad succeeds Peter Marks, a widely respected expert who resigned from the FDA in March after clashing with Kennedy.

    “I was willing to work to address [Kennedy’s] concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter. “However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

    The HHS announcement about Kennedy’s demand for placebo-controlled trials was unclear about how it defined “new vaccines.” But his previous claims about vaccine safety have made clear that he’s referring not only to first-generation vaccines for diseases, but also boosters and expanded formulations. That’s an important point, as I’ll cover in a moment.

    The antivaccine camp, of which Kennedy has long been a leader, has pushed the claim that most childhood vaccines haven’t been adequately tested for safety because they haven’t been subjected to placebo-controlled trials — and therefore may be unsafe.

    “Except for the COVID vaccine, none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products,” Kennedy’s spokesman at HHS, Andrew Nixon, asserted in connection with the order.

    Both components of that claim are misrepresentations.

    Let’s take a closer look, starting with some rudimentary points.

    The testing that Kennedy and Prasad advocate are randomized control trials. They’re correct in asserting that so-called RCTs are the gold standard in clinical testing of drugs and vaccines.

    RCTs typically involve at least two groups of subjects: One receives the medicine in question and another — a control group — receives something else, such as a placebo, a concoction that’s designed to resemble the medicine but is essentially inert, with no evident effect on the disease. The placebo may be an injectable saline solution, or water, or a sugar pill.

    Kennedy, like other antivaxxers, is deceptive in saying that the safety of vaccines should be questioned if it hasn’t been tested against an “inert placebo.”

    That brings us to the ethics of clinical testing, and why Kennedy’s policy is so dangerous.

    Testing a vaccine against a true placebo is ethical and proper when it’s the first treatment for a disease for which no other safe and effective treatment exists. That’s not the case, however, when a known treatment does exist — say after a vaccine has been shown to be safe and effective and has become the standard of care.

    As vaccine specialist Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has explained, subjecting new versions of those vaccines to placebo-controlled testing — giving some subjects the new vaccine and the control subjects no treatment, would be unethical, because it would require depriving the placebo group access to a known treatment. That was the conclusion of an expert panel assembled by the World Health Organization in 2014.

    Offit, in a 2023 rejoinder to Kennedy’s appearance on a Joe Rogan podcast, in which he claimed that drug companies “never do placebo-controlled trials,” pointed to what may be the most famous vaccine trial to illustrate this point.
    That was the nationwide trial of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. In 1954, 420,000 first- and second-graders were given the Salk shot, and 200,000 got a shot of salt water. Salk objected to the trial’s design. Smaller trials had established the safety and efficacy of his vaccine, so the plan meant depriving 200,000 children of immunity to a disease that was paralyzing 50,000 children a year and killing 1,500.


    As Offit noted, in the full trial 16 children died from polio; all were in the placebo group. So were 34 of the 36 children paralyzed in the course of the trial. “These are the gentle heroes we leave behind,” Offit wrote.


    Now let’s examine Kennedy’s order as it applies to modern vaccines. As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski has pointed out, contrary to the assertion by Kennedy’s spokesman, almost none of the vaccines on the current childhood vaccination list is a first-generation vaccine warranting placebo testing. (An exception is Gardasil, which safeguards against human papilloma virus.)

    They’re upgraded preparations of vaccines that themselves underwent placebo-controlled trials, or formulations aimed at new variants of the targeted disease, or shots that inoculate against several diseases all at once.

    To demand that every new formulation be tested against an inert placebo would mean turning back the clock to reproduce trials that may have taken place decades ago, but resulted in the licensing of the original vaccine after safety and efficacy were established.

    That means it would have been unethical to test the new version against a saline control, because the control group would be deprived of any effective treatment. “The bottom line,” Gorski writes, “is that, if you trace back the history of the vaccines developed for a disease like, say, measles, you will eventually find the RCT testing the first effective vaccine against it and that vaccine will have had a placebo control.”
    He’s right. In a tweet thread, vaccinologist Peter Hotez traced back the history of several vaccines to their initial RCTs.

    What makes Kennedy’s order especially cynical is that designing and implementing a clinical trial is an extraordinarily complex, costly and time-consuming process. As a team of Canadian researchers observed in a 2018 Nature article, a full-scale Phase 3 clinical trial — the level at which drugs and vaccines are studied for safety, efficacy and dosing — requires as many as 3,000 participants and can take as long as four years.

    In an online posting last month, Prasad ridiculed “the mainstream media” for being upset about the idea that COVID boosters should in effect receive full randomized clinical trials before approval. He took particular issue with an article by Helen Braswell of STAT asserting that such a requirement might well delay approval of a vaccine targeting a new COVID variant until it was too late to protect users from that variant. Prasad called the argument false because “the virus spreads year round.”

    Is that so? At the height of the pandemic, new COVID variants sometimes appeared within months of one another. The virulent Delta variant, for example, appeared in the spring of 2021 and was overtaken by the Omicron variant, which also caused severe disease, that November.

    Delays in rolling out vaccines to combat newly emergent disease strains and variants could cost millions of lives. Under existing vaccine approval protocols, the COVID vaccines prevented as many as 20 million deaths globally within a year after they were introduced early in 2021.

    Prasad’s new job will put him in charge of developing vaccine testing policies and overseeing the design and approval of clinical trials. I asked him via email what policies he would pursue, whether he was in alignment with Kennedy’s approach, and how he expected vaccine developers to reconcile the costs and time constraints of undertaking clinical trials on the scale he advocates with the imperatives of public health. I didn’t receive a reply.

    So far, the Kennedy regime at HHS has lived down to the worst expectations of his critics. His devotion to unnecessary testing of vaccines that have already shown their safety and efficacy is only one aspect of a comprehensive assault on public confidence in science-based medicine.

    In a recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Kennedy dismissed the severity of the current measles outbreak and denigrated the effectiveness of the measles vaccine. The current outbreak of 935 cases is by far the worst in the U.S. since 2019, when 1,274 cases were recorded; at the current rate, we are on the path to nearly 3,000 this year.

    Kennedy has promoted almost useless nostrums against measles, such as vitamin A, while describing vaccination as a personal choice. That’s devastatingly wrongheaded. Kennedy confuses “medicine” and “public health.” The former concerns itself with the individual; the latter with the community. Vaccine policy belongs in the latter category because vaccines are most effective when the effort is communitywide.

    Measles is among the most contagious diseases known to humankind, which means that communal vaccination is crucial. Professionals have concluded that a 95% vaccination rate is the minimum required to protect the most vulnerable, such as infants, from infection; as of 2024, the U.S. vaccination rate among kindergartners had fallen from 95.2% in 2019-20 to 92.7%.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which falls within Kennedy’s jurisdiction, says the decline in measles vaccinations leaves 280,000 kindergartners at risk. Two children in the U.S. already have died from a disease that was thought to have been eradicated in the U.S. in 2020; Kennedy doesn’t seem concerned that the toll on his watch is poised to get much worse.



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  • Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance tickets offer radically different visions of public education

    Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance tickets offer radically different visions of public education


    Kamala Harris introduces Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as running mate in Philadelphia on Aug. 6, 2024. Credit: Phil McAuliffe/Polaris

    Rarely if ever have visions of education offered by the two major party tickets in a presidential campaign been so radically different. 

    Vice President Kamala Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate this week affirmed her total support of public education — along with her acknowledgment of the crucial contributions of teachers, not only to her personal success but to the well-being of the nation as a whole. In his first appearance with Harris in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Walz spoke favorably of her view of education as a “ticket to the middle class.”

    By contrast, Trump and Vance take a conspiratorial view of education in which public schools are viewed as vehicles to indoctrinate children into left-wing ideologies. Rather than strengthening public education, a major goal of the Trump campaign, as in his previous ones, would be to provide parents with alternatives to what he, and many others on the right, disparagingly refer to as “government schools.”

    “Our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs,” Trump declared in a video outlining his position earlier this year. To undercut the far-left influence he is alleging, he is promising to “cut funding for any school program that promotes critical race theory, gender ideologies, or any other racial, sexual or political content.”

    Harris has yet to issue a campaign platform on education (or any other issue for that matter). But when she ran for president in 2019, support for public education was a key element, including backing universal preschool and debt-free college. Not surprisingly, the American Federation of Teachers was the first major union to endorse her presidential bid this year, soon followed by the National Education Association. And as vice president, she has been a prominent advocate on behalf of President Joe Biden’s many education initiatives, including his big push to provide student loan relief.

    In Philadelphia, Walz acknowledged he is almost certainly the first vice presidential nominee whose principal occupation before entering politics was as a public school teacher. 

    For a decade, Walz taught social studies and coached football at Mankato West High School in a politically mixed community 80 miles from Minneapolis. Before moving to there, he and wife Gwen were teachers in Nebraska for nearly 10 years.

    As governor, one of his catchphrases has been to “fully fund” public schools. To that end, last year, he pushed for a $7 billion increase in school funding — and was eventually able to convince the Legislature, in the face of Republican opposition, to approve a $2.2 billion increase, still a significant amount in his state. He also signed a bill allowing schools to offer free meals for all students regardless of income.   

    Vance, by contrast, has echoed much of Trump’s rhetoric on education. On the website for his 2022 U.S. Senate campaign, for example, he lashed out at “the continued CRT indoctrination in our kids’ schools.” He also took aim at what he called the “radical left’s culture war waged during Covid-19” in closing public schools during the pandemic.  

    In Congress, Vance has focused most of his attention on higher education, and what he has called “left-wing domination” of colleges and universities. In the Senate, for example, he has sponsored legislation making it more difficult for colleges to accept donations from “foreign entities” – which he said would prevent the Chinese Communist Party from “exerting influence over American educational institutions.” 

    By contrast, Walz, as governor, has made greater access to public universities in his state a major priority. That includes backing the North Star Scholarship Program which underwrites tuition to any public college in Minnesota, along with big increases in funding to higher education in general. 

    Nowhere are the differences between the two tickets in their visions for education starker than in their views on teachers. 

    Harris has repeatedly paid tribute to Frances Wilson, her first-grade teacher at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley. In recognition of the challenges teachers face, a major pledge in her 2019 campaign for president was a hugely ambitious initiative to raise the average salaries of teachers by $13,500 through a massive 10-year, $315 billion federal program.  

    In Philadelphia, Walz shared that not only was his father a teacher, but that he and his three siblings “followed in his footsteps.” He, like two of his three siblings, married a teacher. His wife, Gwen, has been a “public educator” for 29 years. “Don’t ever underestimate teachers,” Walz told the crowd amid cheers. 

    Trump, by contrast, continues to berate teachers for supposedly indoctrinating children with anti-American ideologies. In his campaign video, he railed against “Marxism being taught in schools” that “is aggressively hostile to Judeo-Christian teaching.” 

    “As the saying goes, personnel is policy, and at the end of the day, if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids, we have a major problem,” Trump said. 

    He is also promising to create a “new credentialing body” to certify teachers “who embrace patriotic values and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children, but to educate them.” He also wants to abolish teacher tenure, and to give preference in federal funding to states and school districts that support his efforts to do so. 

    Walz has been unafraid to take on some of the more difficult issues around gender identity in schools. While at Mankato West High, he agreed to be the first faculty sponsor of the gay-straight alliance on the campus. “It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married” in the position, he explained. 

    Within minutes of Harris announcing her vice presidential pick, commentators on Fox News were going after Walz for supporting legislation requiring tampons in boys’ bathrooms (actually all bathrooms), along with the more customary GOP critique that both of them will be controlled by teachers’ unions.

    It is impossible to predict just how large a role issues like these will play in the remaining 90 days of this accelerated campaign. But what is clear is that any battles around education will be waged on ideological grounds, rather than on the best policies to improve public education, and, most importantly, what is needed to ensure that all students succeed. 





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  • The rise of microschools: A wake-up call for public education

    The rise of microschools: A wake-up call for public education


    Superintendent Michael Matsuda speaks with students in a technology classroom in Anaheim Union High School District.

    Courtesy: Anaheim Union High School District

    The demise of great corporations like Kodak, Sears and others serves as a stark reminder of the perils of failing to innovate and evolve with consumer demands. Kodak famously ignored the rise of digital cameras despite inventing the technology itself. Similarly, Sears, once a retail giant, failed to adapt to the changing landscape of e-commerce. These cases highlight a common theme: success breeds complacency, whereby nimble competitors can quickly exploit new technologies and consumer trends. 

    Will public education, ensconced in outdated brick-and-mortar buildings and traditions, be next? 

    The pandemic forced schools to close but did not necessarily stifle learning. New models of teaching, such as neighborhood learning pods run informally by local parents, called “microschools,” were created. These microschools, many now monetized for profit, have grown exponentially, serving over 1.5 million K-12 students, mostly unregulated and taught by noncertified, noncertificated “teachers.”  The jury is still out on this new model, but, in the meantime, microschools are gaining momentum with parents who want more choices for their children.

    Arguably, the rise of microschools poses a significant threat to the traditional public school system, challenging its long-standing dominance in the American educational landscape. While California doesn’t specifically track homeschools or microschools, the number of private schools with fewer than five students has more than doubled to nearly 30,000 from prepandemic 2018-19 to 2023-24.

    Microschools, with their aggressive marketing to adapt quickly to the evolving needs of students and families, offer a “fresh” approach to education that starkly contrasts with the bureaucratic, often stagnant nature of public schools. As microschools grow in popularity, they expose the deep-rooted issues within the public education system, particularly its resistance to change and reliance on traditions tethered to a “teach to the test” culture making schools mostly unengaging and irrelevant to students’ lives. 

    According to a recent article in Politico, startup companies backed by investors like Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, act as the support system for teachers running microschools by handling issues like leasing classrooms, getting state approval and recruiting students. One such startup, Primer, recruits the “top 1 percent” of teachers and pays them 25% more than they would make on a school district salary. The company also offers teachers a revenue share for bringing in more students, treating them as “entrepreneurs.” It doesn’t currently operate in California, but is planning on expanding to more states. 

    Microschools, which typically serve small groups of students in personalized learning environments, have gained traction as families seek more flexible and tailored educational options. This flexibility is particularly appealing in an era when traditional education models are increasingly seen as one-size-fits-all, leaving many students either unchallenged or overwhelmed.

    One strength of microschools is their ability to innovate rapidly. Unlike public schools, which are often bogged down by layers of bureaucracy, microschools can implement new teaching methods, curricula and integrate technologies quickly. This agility allows them to meet the needs of students who may not thrive in a traditional classroom setting, such as those with learning disabilities, gifted students or children who simply learn better outside the confines of a traditional school day.

    However, without regulation or oversight, uninformed parents and students may be shortchanged in that classes are often not taught by well-prepared certificated teachers (who are more likely to be steeped in the science of learning and development) and schools may exclude students who do not “fit” into the model, thereby leading to more segregation and “otherness” — not a good outcome for society. Unfortunately, because of a lack of accountability, it is unknown whether microschools are meeting their student learning outcomes or preparing students for college and career readiness.

    In stark contrast to the nimble nature of microschools, public schools are often viewed as educational behemoths — large, slow-moving institutions that struggle to adapt to the changing needs of students and society. This inflexibility is rooted in the very structure of the public education system, which is designed to serve large numbers of students in a standardized manner, which is seen as outdated in a world that demands more personalized and flexible approaches to education.

    Furthermore, the bureaucratic and compliance-driven nature of public schools often stifles innovation. This makes it difficult for schools to implement new ideas or respond quickly to the needs of their students. In contrast, microschools, which are often run by small teams of educators or even parents, can make decisions quickly and adapt to new challenges as they arise.

    The growing popularity of microschools represents a significant threat to the traditional public school system. As more families opt for microschools, public schools may find themselves facing declining enrollment, which could lead to reduced funding and resources. This, in turn, could exacerbate the challenges that public schools already face, such as overcrowded classrooms, insufficient funding, and a lack of access to modern educational tools and technologies.

    Moreover, the growth of microschools highlights the shortcomings of public schools and puts pressure on them to reform. As parents and policymakers become increasingly aware of microschools, they may demand more flexibility, choice, and innovation from the public education system. 

    The threat posed by microschools is not just a challenge to the public education system, but also an opportunity for redesign and reform. If public schools are to remain relevant in the face of growing competition from microschools, they must find ways to become more flexible, innovative and responsive to the needs of their students. This may involve rethinking traditional methods of instruction, reducing bureaucratic obstacles, and placing a greater emphasis on personalized learning augmented by technology. 

    There are a number of obstacles to innovation. One is the difficulty in shifting from a traditional “seat based” instruction, tethered to the old Carnegie unit of attendance, to more “work-based” instruction to support internships, mastery grading and flexible scheduling. Another requires a mind shift beyond a top-down standardized test culture to teaching to the “whole child” with a focus on relevance and engagement. 

    As microschools continue to grow in popularity, public schools must either find ways to innovate and meet the demands of today’s students or risk becoming increasingly irrelevant in the rapidly evolving educational landscape.

    •••

    Michael Matsuda is superintendent of Anaheim Union High School District.

    The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • NEA: Trump Slashes Education Budget, Encourages Privatization of Public Schools

    NEA: Trump Slashes Education Budget, Encourages Privatization of Public Schools


    The National Education Association analyzed Trump ‘s proposed budget and finds that it contains deep cuts and massive support for privatization by promoting vouchers and charter schools. The proposal mirrors Project 2025 by turning Titl 1 for low-income students and IDEA funding into block grants that can be converted to vouchers. The overall goal is to undermine public schools and cut funding.

    FY2026 Budget Request Slashes Education Funding, Shortchanges Students

    …………………………………………………………………….……….

    President Trump’s FY2026 “skinny” budget request to Congress, released on May 2, cuts non-defense domestic spending by 22.6%.  The Department of Education sustains a $12 billion reduction, a cut of approximately 15.3%. 

    ! Since the President’s budget does not list specific funding requests for every federal program, the 46-page document is a “skinny” budget. Congress ultimately has the power of the purse, but the proposal is a clear signal of the White House’s priorities: a massive 24 percent cut to U.S. domestic spending, and, privitazing our nation’s public education system.  

     

     The narrative says the budget “maintains full funding for Title I,” but the numbers tell a different story. Title I and 18 unidentified programs are combined to create a single block grant, dubbed the “K-12 Simplified Funding Program,” then that block fund is cut by $4.535 billion cut.

     

     All seven Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) programs are combined to create a single block grant called the “Special Education Simplified Funding Program.” The approach perpetuates the current shortfall—the federal government now covers 13% of special education costs, far short of the 40% Congress promised when the law was passed. 

     

     Programs slated for elimination include English Language Acquisition (Title III) and the Teacher Quality Partnership, which addresses the teacher shortage through deep clinical practice. 

     

     The budget shifts costs to states and institutions of higher education to reduce the federal investment in today’s students—our nation’s future leaders and workforce—as much as possible.  

     

     Regrouping specific, separate programs into block grants, in theory gives states more flexibility on how the money is spent. In reality, block grants usually lead to less funding and less accountability for our most vulnerable students. As the strings attached to the funding are cut, many states could maneuver block grant funds over to private school voucher programs. 

     

     Amidst these cuts, the proposal calls for investing $500 million, an increase of $60 million, to expand the number of charter schools across the country. Charter schools, along with private school vouchers, drain scarce resources for traditional public schools. 

     

    May 2025



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  • Treat chronic absenteeism in California like a public health emergency

    Treat chronic absenteeism in California like a public health emergency


    Credit: Alison Yin/EdSource

    A silent crisis is unfolding in our schools and impacting millions of California students: chronic absenteeism. The consequences of unchecked absenteeism are severe and far-reaching.

    It starts innocuously with a few missed days, but can quickly spiral, decimating a child’s future prospects. When dropout rates increase and college readiness declines, the ripple effects harm entire communities.

    Traditionally, students and their families are penalized for missing school, but this hasn’t resolved the issue and instead, targets marginalized student groups. As an educator with years of experience in the classroom and administration, I propose a radical shift in our approach — treating chronic absenteeism as a public health emergency. 

    The rise in social isolation, health concerns and economic hardships have dramatically increased the number of students consistently missing school nationwide. In California, we are seeing consistent, distressing high chronic absence rates, particularly among high school studeents and historically marginalized populations.

    We can’t simply discipline our way out of this crisis. Instead, we need a comprehensive strategy that addresses the complex roots of absenteeism, from persistent health issues to limited transportation access, from heightened stress to trauma.

    Imagine if schools treated chronic absenteeism with the same urgency and collaboration used during the Covid-19 pandemic. We mobilized resources to fight a global crisis, and we can apply that same level of commitment to ensuring every child attends school regularly. 

    By framing chronic absenteeism as a public health crisis, we open the door to more effective interventions. One crucial strategy for dealing with public health emergencies is risk communication, which helps convey urgency, provide accurate information, and mobilize stakeholders to take collaborative action. The impact of proactive attendance management has shown to improve attendance rates threefold for chronically absent students.

    Here are strategies schools can implement, drawing from public health approaches:

    1. Convey urgency: Research shows attendance is the most crucial predictor of school success. Schools must create a “relentless drumbeat” about the importance of attendance through daily text messages, visual aids, public recognition and personalized follow-ups with absent students.
    2. Provide accurate information: Transparency is key. Schools should share clear data on absenteeism and its effects. Implementing user-friendly attendance management systems can automate positive intervention letters and free up staff for more personalized outreach. Training teachers to analyze attendance data enables early, tailored interventions.
    3. Mobilize stakeholders: Thirty-seven percent of K-12 families want actionable steps to improve their children’s attendance. Schools must provide specific, consistent messaging about attendance importance to all stakeholders — students, families, educators, board members and policymakers. Offer concrete ways for everyone to contribute to the solution.
    4. Advocate for prevention: Positive messaging encourages attendance; punitive actions deter it. A multilevel approach works best:
    • District level: Superintendents should regularly communicate about the importance of attendance.
    • Building level: Principals should celebrate good attendance and offer incentives.
    • Classroom level: Teachers should reach out personally to families, highlighting successes and addressing issues promptly.
    1. Foster two-Way, equitable communication: A Harvard study found that students with the best outcomes for remote learning during the pandemic were in communities with high levels of trust. Schools must establish open dialogues with families in their preferred languages and communication channels. This approach helps identify root causes of absenteeism and builds the trust essential for consistent attendance.

    The responsibility for addressing chronic absenteeism extends beyond individual schools or districts — it requires a unified national effort. However, we needn’t wait for a grand solution. By prioritizing consistent, positive communication in our classrooms, schools and communities, we can make significant strides in reducing absenteeism.

    Treating chronic absenteeism as a public health emergency isn’t just a metaphor — it’s a call to action. It demands we recognize the severity of the issue and respond with the urgency, coordination and comprehensive strategies that have proven effective in addressing other public health crises.

    By reframing our approach, we can foster healthier educational environments and brighter futures for our students, one attendance record at a time.

    •••

    Kara Stern, Ph.D., is the director of education and engagement at SchoolStatus, a provider of K-12 data-driven communication, attendance and professional development solutions.

    The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. We welcome guest commentaries with diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • Q&A: Big drop in enrollment of low-income undocumented students at California’s public universities

    Q&A: Big drop in enrollment of low-income undocumented students at California’s public universities


    People rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 as oral arguments are heard in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to end the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The University of California brought the case to the court.

    Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

    The number of low-income undocumented students newly enrolled in the University of California and California State University plummeted 50% between 2016-17 and 2022-23, according to a study released this month.

    The study by William C. Kidder of the UCLA Civil Rights Project and Kevin R. Johnson of the UC Davis School of Law comes at a moment of heightened debate about policy proposals aimed at defraying the cost of college for undocumented students, who are not eligible for federal Pell Grants and often lack legal work permits. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday vetoed Assembly Bill 2586, which would have cleared the way for undocumented students to take on-campus jobs at the state’s public colleges and universities.

    “Given the gravity of the potential consequences of this bill, which include potential criminal and civil liability for state employees, it is critical that the courts address the legality of such a policy and the novel legal theory behind this legislation before proceeding,” Newsom wrote in his veto statement. “Seeking declaratory relief in court — an option available to the University of California — would provide such clarity.”

    Johnson wrote in an email that Newsom’s veto of AB 2586, also called the Opportunity for All Act, “will make it more difficult for undocumented students to attend public universities in California.” 

    “I hope that the University of California and California State University systems will consider ways to help financially support undocumented students,” he wrote. “Scholarships, fee remissions, and the like must be considered if lawful employment, as would have been permitted by the Opportunity for All Act, is not possible.”

    Since 2012, the federal program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, has allowed certain undocumented immigrants to temporarily work legally in the U.S. and live without fear of immediate deportation, but the program has ceased processing new applicants due to legal challenges.

    “When we think that we’re seeing a decrease in enrollment in California, CSU and UC, with all the support provided by the university and by the legislature in terms of allowing undocumented students to pay resident fees, you have to imagine that in other states it’s much worse in terms of drop off in enrollment of undocumented students,” Johnson wrote.

    Johnson and Kidder’s study seeks to fill an important gap in California policymakers’ understanding of how undocumented student enrollment has changed over time. 

    The state’s colleges and universities historically have avoided collecting official data on undocumented students, mindful of those students’ vulnerable legal status. To solve that problem, Kidder and Johnson examined the number of students awarded a Cal Grant under the California Dream Act, a state financial aid program for which low-income undocumented students are eligible. The numbers likely represent a subset of all undocumented college students at Cal State and UC campuses, since they do not include students who applied for a Dream Act award but were not eligible or who were offered an award but didn’t accept it.

    Kidder and Johnson find that Dream Act awardees at CSU and UC appear to have peaked around the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years.

    At CSU, they found that new and returning Dream Act awardees fell 30% between 2019-20 and 2022-23, outpacing an almost 7% decline in other Cal Grant awardees at CSU during the same period, as well as falling undergraduate enrollment within the university system.

    The story was similar at UC campuses, where Dream Act awardees dropped by roughly 31% between 2019-20 and 2022-23, a period in which other Cal Grant awardees only dipped 1%.

    Kidder and Johnson tie the decline in Dream Act awardees to the demise of the deferred action program. The Trump administration moved to rescind the program in 2017, and subsequent efforts to revive it have been stymied by court decisions that allow current DACA recipients to renew work permits but block new applicants. As a result, most current undergraduate college students are not eligible to apply for DACA and the youngest current DACA recipients are about 22 years old.

    That said, the study does not use the kind of granular data that would allow the researchers to test explicitly whether the rescission of DACA is causing the decline in Dream Act awardees. Previous research has found that the program boosted graduation rates among undocumented high school students and that harsher immigration enforcement correlated with lower academic achievement for undocumented K-12 students. Kidder and Johnson cite those studies — as well as the similar results they observed across UC and CSU — as pointing toward the likelihood that an external force is behind declining Dream Act awardees. 

    Supporters of AB 2586, the bill Newsom vetoed this weekend, argued that the UC system is not subject to a federal prohibition on hiring undocumented workers because it is part of the state of California. Johnson is among 29 scholars to sign a legal memo building that case, which was published by the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

    Neither CSU nor UC took a formal position on the bill. But in a letter to lawmakers, the UC expressed concerns that hiring undocumented students could jeopardize “billions of dollars in existing federal contracts and grants.” The university system also said the bill could expose students, their families and UC employees to criminal or civil prosecution. In July, CSU officials similarly said the bill rested on an untested legal theory that could result in litigation against the system. 

    EdSource recently spoke with Kidder and Johnson to discuss their forthcoming article in the Journal of College & University Law. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    What do we understand about the impact that DACA had on undocumented high school students, and what has happened since the Trump administration began challenging the Obama-era program?

    Johnson: The data that we were able to put together shows that, basically, the dismantling of DACA —-the refusal to accept new applications – is having an impact that one might expect. While DACA created some kind of stability, initially, in high school students and boosted college enrollments, its dismantling has had the effect of reducing undocumented enrollment and destabilizing students and, the way I’d put it, it’s making them wonder whether they have a future in this country. …

    It’s a wake-up call in all kinds of ways for colleges and universities to claim that they want to be open, be more accessible.

    What did you find when you looked at how many students at Cal State and University of California campuses received California Dream Act grants in recent years?

    Kidder: New California Dream Act awardees, both freshmen and students, had declined by half between 2017 and 2023, which is just a remarkable drop. … I was a little surprised at the scale of the decline, just given the situation in California and how it’s different from Texas or Florida or some other states where there’s greater opposition and hostility to supporting undocumented students.

    Do you see the same pattern of decline in awards among California residents who are citizens and who received Cal Grants during this period?

    Kidder: We tried to adopt what social scientists call a “difference in difference” methodology. That’s where you study the rate of change over time with one group compared to a matched comparison group. 

    So, we looked at low-income students who are not undocumented, primarily U.S. citizen residents of California — who are going to the same high schools; the same age group; similar, but not exactly the same, income levels; very similar academic profiles in terms of high school GPAs, etc. We did that to confirm that there weren’t other systemic effects on the California budget and economy that might be unaccounted for outside factors. 

    What we found is that other Cal Grant students, both within UC and within CSU, were flat at the same time that both the undocumented students at UC and CSU had this 50% decline. So it did shore up our inference that there was something uniquely challenging in the current environment for undocumented college students.

    You write that back in the 2016-17 school year, 56% of new Dream Act students attended a UC or Cal State campus, while the remainder attended a California Community College campus. By the 2022-23 school year, that dynamic had flipped: 40% of those Dream Act students attended UC and Cal State, and the rest attended community college. What do you make of that shift?

    Kidder: We did include in the data that we are capturing not just new freshmen, but also new entering transfer students. It is of concern that somehow, in recent years … it’s not translating into those (community college) students still having higher education access to a university education through the transfer pathway. There’s a blockage there, and that was clear in the data. 

    From a public policy level, that’s troubling, given that these are students, many of whom have been living in California since age 5 or age 8, and the California taxpayers and the system of California laws has invested in their future. For those students to be blocked in their pathway lowers their future life chances. 

    State university officials can’t control what happens with DACA. If educators at UC and Cal State are concerned about losing undocumented students, what could they do to encourage those students to enroll and help them to stay enrolled?

    Johnson: I think one of the assumptions in the question is that there’s limited possibilities for what the university could do. It was the University of California that brought the lawsuit that ended up in the Supreme Court stopping the rescission of DACA, and that was a controversial move in some quarters. But I do think the university– legally, politically and otherwise — is a powerful advocate for students, and can and has, at various times, pushed for reform and change. 

    I think that the university, if they’re really committed to undocumented students, can support things like the Opportunity for All Act, which has been basically briefed and set on their desk, showing that it might be legal for the University of California to allow its students, all students, to be employed by the University of California. …

    I think that the university could also think about, “How do we create more scholarships and funding for undocumented students?” If we’re really designing, or we really want to have, a university that serves all, shouldn’t we commit ourselves to enrolling all students who we admit and making it possible for them to attend? 

    Then the question is, how you raise money, how you distribute that money, how you create scholarships. The University of California often takes great pride in bringing in large chunks of money for research projects and, for example, spends years talking about and invests mounds of money in Aggie Square in Sacramento for research. … Why not work to create more funding for all students, including undocumented students? Why not think carefully about your tuition increases at various points in time, and what impacts it has on the people that you say you want to enroll in the university?

    I want to talk to you about AB 2586. The first Cal State board of trustees meeting I attended was in July, and there was some discussion about this bill. The trustees were asking staff to brief them on what they think of this bill. The gist was, ‘We see this as risky. We see this as potentially putting us on a collision course with the federal government, where we would open ourselves up to litigation. What do you think about that approach?

    Johnson: I think it’s a cowardly approach. It’d be like the university saying “We’re not going to weigh in on the civil rights movement because it’s controversial politically, and it’s risky to do so, and we’re not going to move forward because we’re afraid of getting sued.” 

    It’s funny, but (former UC President) Janet Napolitano could have taken the same position, saying “We’re not going to challenge the rescission of DACA, don’t want to alienate the federal government, which gives a large amount of money to the University of California. We’re just going to sit on our hands and let these DACA recipients be poorly treated.” …

    I’m an attorney. I was dean of the (UC Davis School of Law) for 16 years. Attorneys are always going to tell you there are risks. There are also risks driving to the grocery store, but we still go to the store. So I don’t buy that risk assessment argument, and I think that this is the time for universities that are truly committed to these issues to show their commitment to these issues.

    Why should CSU and why should the UC prioritize helping undocumented students to get a college degree?

    Kidder: Both my data analysis as well as my personal experience as a university administrator working with lots of undocumented students confirms my conviction that this is a very talented pool of young people in California. If their hopes and dreams are allowed to flourish in California, it benefits all Californians, and I mean that both in an economic sense and in a larger democratic sense.





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  • New York: Orthodox Jewish Schools Hope to Evade the Law and Collect Public Money

    New York: Orthodox Jewish Schools Hope to Evade the Law and Collect Public Money


    New York State law requires private and religious schools to offer an education that is substantially equivalent to what is offered at secular public schools. Some Orthodox Jewish schools refuse to comply. Repeated inspections have found that the recalcitrant Yeshivas do not teach English and do not teach math and science in English.

    Dr. Betty Rosa, an experienced educator and New York State Commissioner of Education, has insisted that Yeshivas comply with the law. She fears that their students are graduating from high school without the language skills required for higher education and the workplace.

    The Hasidim are a tight-knit group that often votes as a bloc to enhance their political power. They vote for whoever promises to support their interests. Both parties compete for their endorsement.

    Eliza Shapiro and Benjamin Oreskes reported the story in the New York Times:

    New York lawmakers are considering a measure that would dramatically weaken their oversight over religious schools, potentially a major victory for the state’s Hasidic Jewish community.

    The proposal, which could become part of a state budget deal, has raised profound concern among education experts, including the state education commissioner, Betty Rosa, who said in an interview that such changes amount to a “travesty” for children who attend religious schools that do not offer a basic secular education.

    “We would be truly compromising the future of these young people,” by weakening the law, Ms. Rosa said. “As the architect of education in this system, how could I possibly support that decision,” she added.

    Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday announced a $254 billion budget agreement but acknowledged many of the particulars are still being hashed out.

    Behind the scenes, a major sticking point appears to be whether the governor and the Legislature will agree to the changes on private school oversight, according to several people with direct knowledge of the negotiations, which may include a delay in any potential consequences for private schools that receive enormous sums of taxpayer dollars but sometimes flout state education law by not offering basic education in English or math.

    The state is also considering lowering the standards that a school would have to meet in order to demonstrate that it is following the law.

    Though the potential changes in state education law would technically apply to all private schools, they are chiefly relevant to Hasidic schools, which largely conduct religious lessons in Yiddish and Hebrew in their all-boys schools, known as yeshivas.

    The potential deal is the result of years of lobbying by Hasidic leaders and their political representatives…

    The Hasidic community has long seen government oversight of their schools as an existential threat, and it has emerged as their top political issue in recent years.

    It has taken on fresh urgency in recent months, as the state education department, led by Ms. Rosa, has moved for the first time to enforce the law, after years of deliberation and delay….

    There is little dispute, even among Hasidic leaders, that many yeshivas across the lower Hudson Valley and parts of Brooklyn are failing to provide an adequate secular education. Some religious leaders have boasted about their refusal to comply with the law and have barred families from having English books in their homes.

    Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, which has been closely aligned with the Hasidic community, found in 2023 that 18 Brooklyn yeshivas were not complying with state law, a finding that was backed up by state education officials.

    A 2022 New York Times investigation found that scores of all-boys yeshivas collected about $1 billion in government funding over a four-year period but failed to provide a basic education, and that teachers in some of the schools used corporal punishment.

    It is clear why Hasidic leaders, who are deeply skeptical of any government oversight, would want to weaken and delay consequences for the schools they help run.

    It is less obvious why elected officials would concede to those demands during this particular budget season. There is widespread speculation in Albany that Ms. Hochul, facing what may be a tough re-election fight next year, is hoping to curry favor from Hasidic officials, who could improve her chances with an endorsement….

    Hasidic voters are increasingly conservative and tend to favor Republicans in general election contests.…

    New York’s state education law related to private schools, which is known as the substantial equivalency law, has been on the books for more than a century.

    It was an obscure, uncontroversial rule up until a few years ago, when graduates of Hasidic yeshivas who said they were denied a basic education filed a complaint with the state, claiming that their education left them unprepared to navigate the secular world and find decent jobs.

     



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  • ProPublica: Trump’s War on Data Undermines Public Policy

    ProPublica: Trump’s War on Data Undermines Public Policy


    Trump’s war on our federal government continues unabated. Among his least noticed targets is data collection. If we don’t collect data, we don’t know where to focus our efforts and where we are succeeding or failing. Trump is not smart enough to figure this out on his own. Someone put this malevolent plan in action on his behalf. We know he is destroying our government, firing essential personnel, closing down Congressionally authorized agencies by eliminating their staff. But we don’t yet know why. He is not cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. He is literally disabling every department. Is he the Manchurian Candidate or is it Musk? The attack on data collection appears to be a direct hit on knowledge.

    Alec MacGillis of Pro Publica wrote this report:

    More children ages 1 to 4 die of drowning than any other cause of death. Nearly a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, an increase of 3.4 million from the prior year. The number of migrants from Mexico and northern Central American countries stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol was surpassed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other nations.

    We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

    The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

    Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

    The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:

    The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

    The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse-gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.

    The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)

    And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.

    Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

    Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

    Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.

    Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.

    Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”

    Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”

    “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.

    It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.

    But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

    Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.

    Jesse Coburn, Eli Hager, Abrahm Lustgarten, Mark Olalde, Jennifer Smith Richards and Lisa Song contributed reporting.



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