In recent decades, many universities have sought to increase racial and ethnic diversity in their student body and faculty. In addition to grades and test scores, they looked at many other factors, such as talents, life experiences, meeting challenges. This process meant that more students of color were admitted, while some students with higher test scores were rejected.
The Trump administration adamantly opposes this process, known as affirmative action. Its view is that scores on the SAT and ACT and grades should be the most important, if not the only criteria for admission. Those scores, to Trump officials, are synonymous with merit. Any deviation from their view will be grounds for investigating violations of civil rights laws.
As part of the settlements struck with two Ivy League universities in recent weeks, the Trump administration will gain access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, including information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter competitive college admissions.
That aspect of the agreements with Columbia andBrown, which goes well beyond the information typically provided to the government, was largely overlooked amid splashier news that the universities had promised to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle claims of violations of federal anti-discrimination laws, including accusations that they had tolerated antisemitism.
The release of such data has been on the wish list of conservatives who are searching for evidence that universities are dodging a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions, and will probably be sought in the future from many more of them.
But college officials and experts who support using factors beyond test scores worry that the government — or private groups or individuals — will use the data to file new discrimination charges against universities and threaten their federal funding.
The Trump administration is using every lever it can to push elite college admissions offices toward what it regards as “merit-based” processes that more heavily weigh grades and test scores, arguing that softer measures, such as asking applicants about their life challenges or considering where they live, may be illegal proxies for considering race.
The additional scrutiny is likely to resonate in admissions offices nationwide. It could cause some universities to reconsider techniques like recruitment efforts focused on high schools whose students are predominantly people of color, or accepting students who have outstanding qualifications in some areas but subpar test scores, even if they believe such actions are legal.
“The Trump administration’s ambition here is to send a chill through admissions offices all over the country,” said Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor who just wrote a book about the Supreme Court and affirmative action and who said he believed that the administration’s understanding of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decisionwas wrong. “They are trying to get universities to depress Black and brown enrollment.”
Guillermo Tejeda and the Neighborhood Orchestra performing at the Venice Beach Jazz Festival.
Guillermo Tejeda
The first thing Guillermo Tejeda does when he visits a new school is hunt for the piano. At most schools, the teacher finds a dusty old instrument, out of tune, stashed away in a dark closet.
The cobwebs tell him all he needs to know about how little arts education those students have been getting. His go-to technique to get them more jazzed about learning is to tickle the ivories, make that piano come back to life.
“I’ll bring it out, dust it off. I’ll bring students into the auditorium and I’ll do lessons there,” said Tejeda, a fourth grade teacher at Wadsworth Elementary in hardscrabble South Central Los Angeles. “I’m telling you, when I bring in song, when I bring music and performance into the classroom, the students light up in a way that really creates a meaningful experience for them.”
A schoolteacher who is also a jazz musician and a member of the Neighborhood Orchestra Collective, Tejeda uses music in general and the narrative of the LA jazz scene in particular, to teach about history, race and culture, as well as to spark joy in the classroom. A father of three currently on parental leave with his 11-month-old daughter Maya, Tejeda started playing the guitar at the age of 6. His grandfather, a migrant farm worker with a love of mariachi and a hand gnarled from picking in the fields, taught him how to play.
“I’m from East LA and I became a teacher because I wanted to be the teacher that I never had,” he said. “We come from a marginalized community where it’s hard to be a teacher. A lot of the adults are stressed out. People are not feeling joy. How do we bring more joy? How do we bring more meaning into our lives? I think music is that vehicle.”
Tejeda takes an expansive view of education that integrates the arts into all the disciplines to bring learning to life for children. His teaching feeds his music, he says, and his music feeds his teaching.
“I wish I had a teacher like Guillermo when I was in fourth grade,” said Elmo Lovano, the founder of Jammcard: The Music Professionals Network, who developed School Gig, an app that connects artists to schools. “He’s a passionate guy. He’s incredibly talented. It’s important for artists to know you can still be doing your art, but being a teacher could be an amazing opportunity for you to make a living, stay at home, support your family, give back to the kids, the next generation, and also still do you.”
Music is the prism through which his students become immersed in the history of their city, its politics and culture. He wants his students to be in tune with their heritage.
“I teach on 41st and Central, which is a historic jazz corridor,” he said. “And when I got to that school site, it surprised me that so few teachers talked about that. The first thing I did was write a lesson plan about it.”
Tejeda, whose students call him ‘Mister’ as a nickname, makes sure his class learns about the rich legacy of jazz in Los Angeles. For example, the historic Central Avenue jazz corridor was, for decades a cultural mecca, the heart of the African-American community in the city. At a time when most of the country was rigidly segregated, it was also something of an oasis, a place where people of all races and classes came together over music. There, a pantheon of jazz luminaries, including Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Jelly Roll Morton, played to full houses.
“The giants of Central Avenue may have gone, but their footprints still remain on all of American culture,” as basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once put it. “The jazz musicians and record promoters also gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm and blues, hip-hop and rap.”
Guillermo Tejeda and members of the band Steam Down at the Venice Jazz Festival.credit: Luis Hernandez
Steeping in the often overlooked history of their neighborhood, Tejeda says, can help children sharpen their sense of identity, belonging and pride.
“These kids have no idea how special and beautiful their neighborhoods are because all they see on the news is how messed up it is,” said Tejeda, long a champion of culturally relevant pedagogy. “I want them to know this is the place, right here in your hood, this is where a lot of jazz music was born.”
Music often resonates with children on a deeper level than other forms of instruction. Tejeda is moved to tears remembering one little boy who had trouble engaging at school because of trauma at home. He only opened up when they began to play the piano together at recess. The piano became his sanctuary.
“I’m shook when I come home because a lot of these kids are dealing with very hard stuff and they’re so resilient,” said Tejeda, his voice thick with emotion.
“Yes, math and science is important but the whole child is important, that’s what drives me.”
Music also enhances both math and reading performance, experts say, perhaps partly because it enhances the neuroplasticity of the brain. Music amplifies learning across subject areas, experts say.
“Music and movement in addition to the more common modalities of written and verbal instruction is critical for including all kinds of learners in a well-rounded education,” said Jessica Mele, interim executive director of Create CA, an advocacy group. “It’s particularly beneficial for students whose first language is not English. Using art as a window into culture, race and history can engage students in complex conversations that they might not otherwise engage in.”
Music can also be healing, research suggests. As a boy, Tejeda suffered from a stutter that only subsided when he sang.
“I keep it real with the kids because I see myself in them,” he said. “It’s crazy how impactful music has been for me.”
It’s also a uniquely social experience that invites children to collaborate with their peers on projects that both require and reward focus and discipline, qualities that fuel academic success, experts say. Children practiced in the arts become accustomed to working collectively toward ambitious long-term goals.
Perhaps most importantly for Tejeda, children often find their voice through music and the arts. They can gain a sense of confidence, social-emotional well-being and a passion for lifelong learning.
“The end goals of music and education aren’t to memorize curriculums or key terms,” said Tejeda. “It’s really to find out who you are. It’s about self-determination and growing the full human being. I’m so excited to see this synergy of music and education because they are inextricable.”
Tejeda’s ambition is to make school so stimulating that children want to go there every day because they are deeply engaged in their studies. At a time of chronic absenteeism and plummeting test scores, he has a transformative vision of arts education as reinvigorating the classroom.
“I feel a deep calling to help effect change across California classrooms,” he said. “I am never going to stop teaching, because teaching and education is so essential to my soul. It is at the core of who I am,” but this “is a critical time for me to put my work into the next gear and figure out how I’m going to apply my passion and expertise to affect tangible change, more urgently, on a wider scale.”
Going forward, he hopes to pursue arts education advocacy on a broader level. He is also developing a new arts-driven curriculum, to “unleash the symphony of learning,” as Proposition 28, the state’s groundbreaking 2022 arts initiative, ramps up.
“It’s like out of my dreams and into reality,” he said. “We’re going to create a new world for students. This is a revolutionary time.”
Andrew Egger of The Bulwark describes the chaotic atmosphere in which Trump’s precious Big Bad Beastly Budget Bill is being rushed to completion. Most Senators have no idea what’s in the bill. They know only that Trump wants it done by July 4. Why? Because he does. The Bulwark is the home of many Republican Never Trumpers.
Egger writes:
A 9 a.m. newsletter is, apparently, a poor fit for the ungodly timetables of today’s Congress. As of this writing, we don’t know whether Senate Republicans will manage to squeeze through their Frankenstein’s monster of a big beautiful bill. What we do know is that this has been one of the most ridiculous and embarrassing spectacles of “legislating” we’ve ever had the displeasure of witnessing.
There have been three driving forces behind this bill. The first has been the “pass something or everyone’s taxes go up” pressure created by the soon-to-expire 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The second has been President Donald Trump, who took a shine to the simplicity of slamming together a bunch of things he wanted done into a single package and who has imposed an artificial deadline of July 4.¹ And the third is the Senate’s utterly dysfunctional procedures surrounding the filibuster, which make it basically impossible for majorities to pass new laws unless they get significant minority buy-in or glue them together into a “budget reconciliation” package that doesn’t need 60 votes.
What we’re left with is a bill that’s bigger than big and anything but beautiful. Although maybe it overstates it to even say we have a bill. As the Senate barrels to a vote (we think) they’re still crafting the actual text of the legislation. There will be no hearings, no comprehensive analysis, and certainly not enough time to read the thing. Whether it will pass now depends on whether Senate leaders can find a sweetener good enough to woo one of the four remaining Republican holdouts. Would any other institution operate in this way?
Yes, it’s common, in our sclerotic era of idiotic megabills, for such packages’ opponents to complain about “the process.” But the BBB has taken that situation to new heights.
It’s Trump’s bill, but even he doesn’t seem to be staying up to speed on what’s in it. He keeps posting that the bill will deliver “NO TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY FOR OUR SENIORS,” a provision that hasn’t been in the legislation for weeks.²
Massive policy amendments keep getting papier-mâchéd onto the package or peeled off by the Senate parliamentarian. One particularly egregious example is a new tax on wind and solar projects that threatens to bankrupt the entire fledgling renewables sector, which suddenly appeared in the bill during this week’s marathon cram session. Not only were a number of senators taken aback by the provision, many didn’t even know how it made it into the bill.
“I don’t know where it came from,” Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told NBC News yesterday evening.
“It wasn’t part of any consideration,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), one of the holdouts whose consent the bill will likely need to pass. “It’s like, surprise! It’s Saturday night.”
Surprise! We’re just gonna cripple an industry and not tell you who did it!
Whether that provision will remain in the bill remains to be seen, as several amendments have been proposed to blunt it. My personal favorite is from Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah), who would leave the new tax in place but give the treasury secretary broad discretion to suspend it. Just what we need, more policy levers for the White House to pull to inflict or relieve pain on private companies at its discretion! What could go wrong?
Other tentpoles of the bill have remained more or less the same. It still contains a staggering increase in federal immigration enforcement, with only a pittance of new funding for immigration courts—a congressional blessing of the White House’s agenda of arresting every migrant we can now, and figuring out how to get around the courts to deport them later. It still blows a massive new hole in federal deficits: $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years, according to a weekend Congressional Budget Office report. And it will still slash Medicaid funding by nearly $1 trillion, knocking nearly 12 million people off their insurance despite Trump’s own continual promises not to cut the program. (But hey, no tax on tips!)
This last provision has been one of the most interesting to watch play out among Republicans online. As many have noted, the bill’s changes to Medicaid will hit many of Trump’s own supporters, who tend to be poorer and more rural, the hardest. But there’s been no grassroots groundswell against the package. Instead, many Trump supporters seem to be operating on the assumption—this is becoming a theme—that it’s other people whom the cuts will hit. Point out online that Trump’s own base stands to hurt from the provision and you’ll be swamped by a wave of MAGA derision: We see through these media lies! We know they’re only taking Medicaid away from fraudsters and illegals!
If this monstrosity of a bill ever becomes law, it will be interesting to see the unstoppable force of this delusion meet the immovable object of people actually losing their coverage en masse. For the sake of the country, we hope we never get to see it. That would be a mess far bigger than the process of putting this bill together.
The Temecula Unified School District can no longer implement its ban on Critical Race Theory as litigation moves forward, a California Court of Appeals ruled Monday — marking the first time in California that a court has overturned a district’s effort to censor student learning about racial and LGBTQ+ equity, according to Amanda Mangaser Savage of the Strategic Litigation Counsel at Public Counsel.
“This ruling binds all of California,” said Amelia Piazza, an attorney with Public Counsel’s Opportunity Under Law project, “and, I think is an important signal to school districts all over the state that this type of censorship, the courts aren’t going to tolerate it — and that students shouldn’t be deprived of a fact based education now for any reason, and certainly not because it conflicts with the ideological positions of school board members.”
The decision is the latest chapter in the lawsuit Mae M. v. Komrosky, filed in August 2024, on behalf of the district’s teachers union, teachers, parents and students — alleging that the December 2022 ban on Critical Race Theory has led to a hostile environment at schools, censored teachers and infringes on students’ right to equal protection and to receive information.
Monday’s opinion also called the district’s policy “unconstitutionally vague” and said it has led to anxiety among teachers who remain confused about the policy and fearful of consequences — even if there are accidental violations.
But supporters of the district’s policies maintain that they do not discriminate against students of color or transgender students.
“Critical race theory and its offshoots have no place in public institutions that are meant to serve all individuals equally. These ideas promote division, resentment, and a distorted view of history that punishes students and staff based on skin color rather than character,” said Nicole Velasco, a spokesperson for Advocates For Faith & Freedom, a law firm representing the district for free, in an email to EdSource. “We remain committed to defending lawful policies that reject this kind of racialized thinking and instead promote unity and equal treatment under the law.”
Velasco added that while disappointed in the ruling, they “remain confident in the legality of Temecula Valley Unified School District’s actions and the strength of the case as it proceeds.”
In a statement released Tuesday, David Goldberg, the president of the California Teachers Association, said that “as educators and union workers, we work so hard to provide every student with a quality education and for schools to be safe places for all students, regardless of their race, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”
He added that teachers should be able to focus on teaching, without being caught between state law and district policies.
Temecula Valley Unified has not announced whether it will appeal the court’s decision, according to Velasco. But Piazza said they will continue to litigate until a final decision that will “permanently enjoin” Temecula’s resolutions is reached.
“Especially, as the federal government sort of escalates its attack on public schools and the right to a fact based education, I think it’s a really meaningful decision to come down in the California courts,” Piazza said.
Conservative groups and LGBTQ+ rights supporters protest outside the Glendale Unified School District offices in Glendale on June 6, 2023. Several hundred people gathered at district headquarters, split between those who support or oppose teaching that exposes youngsters to LGBTQ+ issues in schools.
Credit: Keith Birmingham/The Orange County Register via AP
Conflicts between parents, teachers and school leaders over parental rights policies focusing on LGBTQ+ students, limitations on teaching about race and racism, and book bans have come with a cost — both socially and financially.
The conflicts are disrupting school districts, negatively impacting schools and classrooms, and costing districts money that could be used to better serve students, according to “The Costs of Conflict, The Fiscal Impact of Culturally Divisive Conflicts on Public Schools in the United States,” released last month.
Researchers from UCLA, the University of Texas at Austin, American University and UC Riverside conducted a national survey of K-12 public school superintendents from 46 states — 467 in all — and found that these conflicts are prevalent.
Since the 2020-21 school year, uncivil discourse and hostile political rhetoric at school board meetings and on school campuses has been an ongoing problem. Two-thirds of the school superintendents surveyed for the study said they have experienced moderate to high levels of culturally divisive conflict in their districts, including misinformation campaigns, violent rhetoric and threats.
Cultural conflicts cost U.S. school districts about $3.2 billion last school year, according to the study. Researchers estimate that districts with high levels of conflict spent about $80 per student. Districts with moderate levels of conflict spent $50 per student, and districts with low conflict spent $25 per student.
“This is costing us general fund dollars,” said a superintendent from a midsize school district in a Western state. “In the 2023-24 school year, the district spent an additional $100,000 on security, hiring armed plainclothes off-duty officers … because people coming to the board meetings are unpredictable and sometimes violent.”
Researchers allowed superintendents to remain anonymous in the report.
The superintendent also said the district spent more than $500,000 in legal fees on lawsuits associated with a board member and a campaign against the LGBTQ+ community, and lost $250,000 in outside funding from social services organizations because of the dispute. It also spent $80,000 on recruiting and training new staff to replace teachers, counselors and administrators who left because they did not want to work in such a divisive setting.
“Culturally divisive conflicts have substantial costs to the public and to our capacity as a state to mount quality learning experiences for all students,” said John Rogers, director of the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education and Access and lead researcher on the report. “It has a fiscal cost that we’ve tried to lay out with some specificity, and it has broader social costs as well — there’s an undermining of social trust, there’s a deepening sense of stress and all of this is hugely consequential for how educators experience public schools and how young people are experiencing public schools.”
Costs of conflict can’t always be counted in dollars
Average-sized school districts of about 10,000 students spent about $811,000 each last school year to cope with cultural division, according to the study. The money was spent on legal fees, added security, additional staff time and on community, school board and government relations. Districts also incurred indirect costs because of staff turnover related to the conflict and because staff had to take time away from their other duties to deal with discord.
According to the survey, the largest expense for districts with cultural conflict came from staff turnover, with districts of about 10,000 students spending between $148,000 and $461,000, depending on the level of conflict.
One superintendent said that cultural conflict has caused “incredible stress on leaders and teachers as they navigate imaginary slights and online drama in the community.” A Pennsylvania superintendent called the emotional stress and anxiety “nearly crippling.”
“This research makes clear that culturally divisive conflicts in the nation’s schools are generating fear, stress and anxiety that is disrupting school districts and taking a personal toll on the educators and staff members who work in them,” Rogers said.
The stress has also led to increased staff absenteeism at schools, even in districts with lower levels of conflict, according to the report.
Half of the superintendents surveyed said they had been personally harassed at least once during the school year. Ten percent reported being threatened with violence, and 11% had their property vandalized.
As a result, superintendent turnover has also increased — from 14.2% to 17.1% — over the past four years. More than 40% of the superintendents who left their jobs in the last year said their decision was related to conflict, stress and politics, according to the report.
“The relentless demands of leading a district can easily overshadow their own well-being, which, if neglected, not only affects their personal health but also the health and stability of students, educators, and families they serve,” said Rachel S. White of the University of Texas at Austin in a statement. “Reducing the extent to which superintendents experience unwarranted divisiveness is an important step to change the trajectory of increasing superintendent churn.”
Superintendents who were surveyed expressed concern that the time they spent managing cultural conflict, including responding to Freedom of Information Act requests, and unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation, is keeping them from focusing on improving instruction.
California not immune to divisive conflict
Rogers said that while cultural conflict wasn’t as common in California as in other parts of the country in 2021-22, it has grown over the last few years.
Donald Trump’s election is likely to bring more cultural division to school campuses, Rogers said.
“I think that a Trump victory will lead some on the right to take a message that these sorts of cultural attacks, that have been playing out across the United States and across California in the last couple of years, are an effective strategy for mobilizing the base and for energizing the electorate,” said Rogers, in an interview the day before the election.
“A Trump victory will mean that Donald Trump will have more of a presence in our public life in the months to come. And so, that too will mean that he will be using language and framing that will further activate attacks on public schools around these culturally divisive issues.”
