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  • Collegiate recovery programs are essential for students battling addiction

    Collegiate recovery programs are essential for students battling addiction


    UC Berkeley students on campus on Sather road in Berkeley.

    Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

    Patrick Acuña entered the University of California, Irvine as an undergraduate. In recovery from methamphetamine and heroin usage, he entered the UC system with the hope of being supported while he was starting a new academic and social journey. Acuña said maintaining his recovery is vital to him because he knows for sure he “doesn’t want to go back to what once was” — staying up for days on end when he was in active addiction. 

    The normalization of drinking, substance use and other potentially harmful behaviors campuses is a scary reality for folks in recovery. This disconnect from healthier peers can be isolating and damaging, especially because community can serve as an essential support system. For students entering college, this, in addition to academic stress, new financial responsibilities and more, can increase the risk of relapse. 

    But on-campus collegiate recovery programs can help students navigate these pressures as part of the continuum of care that is essential to maintaining and solidifying recovery.

    Unfortunately, UC Irvine lacked a collegiate recovery program that could have supported Acuña in these challenges. Currently, only six out of the 10 UC campuses have a developing or established collegiate recovery program. The programs that do exist vary widely in their staffing capacity and the range of services they provide.

    This discrepancy must be addressed; collegiate recovery programs systemwide should be staffed with at least one full-time staff member, a dedicated and safe physical space and institutional funding.

    Trey Murray, an undergraduate student at UC Santa Barbara, said, “I remember coming to UCSB, a quarter behind all the other freshmen because I spent the summer in a treatment center. I was terrified of college as a whole and especially scared of navigating school while staying sober. (The collegiate recovery program) provided me with a safe and recovery-supportive environment that was crucial to my success in school and sobriety. (It) gave me a place to fit in on campus and sparked joy and passion in my student life.”

    Collegiate recovery programs provide resources such as substance-free social events, harm reduction supplies such as fentanyl test strips and the overdose medication naloxone, campuswide educational programming, recovery housing, referrals to higher levels of care, and support groups led by peers who are familiar with the social isolation and distinct difficulties of maintaining sobriety or reducing their usage in collegiate settings where substance use is a standard part of social experiences.

    These programs are a vital support for students in recovery from substance abuse, other behavioral addictions, eating disorders and similar conditions. According to a report from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 1 in 7 people aged 18 to 25 meets the diagnostic criteria for a substance-use disorder. Among college students specifically, that number is closer to 1 in 4. Furthermore, data from the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment shows that students at every UC campus are using substances and seeking recovery-supportive communities.

    For Acuña, integration of recovery into his everyday life was a much bigger challenge due to the lack of a collegiate recovery program on his campus. “I always have to be vigilant with my recovery; I wouldn’t ever say I have arrived at recovery,” he notes. He didn’t get the needed assistance a collegiate recovery program would have provided regarding hosting on-campus support groups, connecting him to clinicians, allowing him to find a supportive community of peers on campus, and providing an accessible, safe place to go when faced with stressors, activators or urges. Instead, he had to find ways to travel off campus and relied largely on other forms of peer support through student organizations and identity-based clubs such as Underground Scholars to have community and connection with his peers. These organizations, however, are not specifically geared for recovery.

    An undergraduate student shared why they had chosen to attend UC Santa Cruz, which has a staffed and funded collegiate recovery program: “My biggest fear in coming to college was relapsing. Having (a collegiate recovery program) during my college experience with its substance-free events and programming, as well as support groups to meet people with shared experiences, has been tremendously helpful in my recovery.”

    Recovery as a process is more taxing than a full-time job, as it requires constantly challenging the unhelpful coping mechanisms one has been using for so long, and collegiate recovery programs can support students especially well through their on-campus presence and support.

    Preliminary research shows that collegiate recovery programs contribute to better academic outcomes. Data from Texas Tech University, which is home to one of the country’s oldest collegiate recovery programs, suggests that its members have higher graduation rates and higher GPAs than the general student body. Data collected from such programs nationwide show that participating students have almost a 90% graduation rate compared with a 61% institutionwide graduation rate.

    As Esse Pink, a master’s student at UCLA, said, “Without the UCLA collegiate recovery program, my life trajectory would be far worse. I would not have stayed sober, I would not have graduated with my bachelor’s, I may not even be alive.”

    •••

    Aditi Hariharan is a third year student at UC Davis, majoring in both political science and nutrition science (public health emphasis). She served as the ACQUIRE vice chair on behalf of the UC Student Association in 2023-24.

    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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  • Preliminary LAUSD test scores show recovery from pandemic learning loss

    Preliminary LAUSD test scores show recovery from pandemic learning loss


    Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho, right, with students at Miles Avenue Elementary School in Huntington Park.

    Credit: Twitter / LAUSDSup

    The Los Angeles Unified School District is showing signs of recovery from the learning losses it incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced Tuesday at a press conference, following his Opening of Schools Address at The Music Center’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.

    The preliminary scores for the California Smarter Balanced Assessments show that English proficiency increased from roughly 41% to 43% among LAUSD students. Meanwhile, district students’ math scores went up by more than 2 percentage points — reaching a 32.8% proficiency rate across the district, a spokesperson for LAUSD confirmed. The scores were first reported Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times.

    Carvalho said the increase in math scores was particularly impressive given the subject had always been LAUSD’s “achilles heel.”

    “For every grade level tester — those are Grades 3 to 11 — both in English Language Arts as well as mathematics, our students beat the odds,” he said Tuesday. “They rose to the expectation we had with them.”

    Since 2015, when the state began its current testing system, there has only been one other year when scores have gone up at every grade level. 

    According to a district announcement on X Tuesday evening, students “are achieving success” in both English Language Arts and math, irrespective of their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or gender. 

    Specifically, students who are English learners — and make up a significant portion of LAUSD’s student population — made the most significant progress of any sub-group, Carvalho also said Tuesday. He added that foster youth was the only sub-group that did not make the same strides. 

    The district has not yet released its science scores; last year, it was LAUSD’s weakest link, with only 22% of students meeting or exceeding state standards. 

    At this point, the California Department of Education has not released scores for the state as a whole, so it is impossible to know how Los Angeles Unified performed in comparison to other districts. 

    In fall 2022, Carvalho vowed to curb the district’s pandemic learning losses. Last year, halfway to that benchmark, math scores went up by small margins, while scores in English Language Arts declined slightly. 

    Experts at the time called the district’s goal of returning to 2018-19 levels in another year ambitious but possible if they specifically target students who are struggling. 

    “I just want to appreciate and celebrate the amazing work of our schools in achieving the progress that has been discussed today,” said LAUSD school board member Kelly Gonez at Tuesday’s press conference. “When you think about the struggles that our families are facing, they are significant.”

    She applauded the principals, teachers and classified staff members who support Los Angeles Unified students on a daily basis — especially as students continue to struggle with mental health challenges in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

    “Everyday we’re showing up for our students, and it’s showing results,” Gonez said. “I believe that we’re at the tipping point of really achieving the ambitious goals that we have for our students in our school district. And I’m excited for the best school year yet.”





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  • Districts still have learning recovery money: why not spend it on tutoring?

    Districts still have learning recovery money: why not spend it on tutoring?


    Third graders at Alpha Cornerstone Academy join their individual Ignite Reading tutors for their 15-minute daily session on phonics and other fundamental skills in reading,

    John Fensterwald / EdSource

    Top Takeaways
    • Up to 40 districts and charter schools can sign up to design their own high-impact tutoring.
    • Unless they’ve spent billions already, districts should have funding available.
    • Both online and in-person high-impact tutoring will work can show impressive results – if done right,

    A recent visit to Alpha Cornerstone Academy, a TK-8 charter school in San Jose, offered a glimpse of high-impact tutoring. It was during the intervention period in third grade, a time when teacher specialists work in small groups. 

    In one corner, five students in their maroon Alpha school shirts sat around a horseshoe table, listening intently through earphones to their own tutor from Ignite Reading, a growing Oakland-based public benefit corporation operating in 20 states. Ignite specializes in tutoring foundational skills – phonics and phonemic awareness. Each lesson was different; some students were repeating words with similar letter sounds. One girl, Sophia, was reading paragraphs to her tutor. 

    At the start of the year, 103 students were reading from kindergarten and first grade levels, said Fallon Housman, the school’s principal; some were newcomers to the school; others were English learners, fluent in their home language but needing extra time, and others have been identified as having a learning disability. 

    Now, with the school year coming to a close, all but 20 are reading at third-grade level, Housman said. Sophia is now among them. “I feel like it’s earlier to read,” Sophia said quietly. 

    “We see a lot of our third graders actually do really well towards the end of third grade because of all of the interventions and supports. We’re excited to have Ignite because it’s an extra push, focusing on foundational skills,” Housman said. 

    What’s happening at Alpha Cornerstone Academy classroom could be in many California districts. Unlike districts in other states that are scrambling for money to continue tutoring funded with now-expired federal Covid aid, California districts potentially still have multi-billion-dollar state funding for accelerating learning over the next several years. 

    And having watched tutoring elsewhere from the sidelines for the past four years, the state can avoid other states’ missteps and build programs based on their successes – if  California makes tutoring a priority.

    “Tutoring isn’t just a tool for learning recovery,” said Jessica Sliwerski, co-founder and CEO of Ignite Reading. ”It’s serving as an essential classroom support that students need to build strong literacy skills.”

    A second or “Western” wave of tutoring

    “Lots of other states have helped push tutoring along more than California has. I’m really optimistic that in some ways, it [California] can be a leader, because we’ve learned so much that they could really do it more effectively immediately than we could right at the beginning,” said Susanna Loeb, a professor at the Graduate School of Education as well as the founder and executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator. 

    Loeb sees an opportunity for California to jumpstart the state’s laggard performance on state and national achievement assessments, especially in early literacy, by creating a second or “Western” wave of tutoring.

    In four years, the National Student Support Accelerator has become the foremost source of information on and coordinator of research into online and in-person “intensive, relationship-based, individualized instruction” called by various names, high-dosage, high-impact, or high-intensity tutoring.

    This week, three state agencies – the California Department of Education, the State Board, and the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence – will make the first joint effort in promoting it. They will join the nonprofit Results for America, and Loeb’s organization in sponsoring a webinar explaining high-impact tutoring.  

    The May 13 event serves as an invitation for up to 40 school districts to design their own high-impact tutoring programs that could serve as a model for other district cohorts.  

    It isn’t clear what happens after the event, but tutoring providers are hoping the state will get more involved.

    “This is the first time that the state has recognized high-impact tutoring as desirable. We know what the research has found; we know the formula for making tutoring work,” said  Chris Norwood, founder of Bay Area Tutoring Association, which works with school districts on creating effective programs. “Now we have to get the word out through channels of information that districts  use, like county offices of education.”

    An exciting prospect, hard to do 

    Many parents, teachers, policy makers and student equity advocates looked at tutoring as a recovery strategy coming out of Covid. 

    “What was not so clear was whether they could actually pull it off at any kind of scale,” said Loeb who acknowledges it’s easier for smaller states with a less complex system of governance to say, “Here’s the guidance on how to do high-impact tutoring; here are some funds to do it, and here are professional support.” 

    The federal Institute of Education Services identified “high-quality” tutoring as one of several effective strategies for schools. An analysis of 96 rigorous studies comparing results of students who had high-impact tutoring with those who hadn’t found significant improvement in 87% of the programs, equivalent to a half-year growth in many cases. The strongest gains were in early grades in literacy and when it was given during, rather than after, school.

    Based on research, the National Student Support Accelerator says that effective, high-impact tutoring programs have these elements in common: 

    • A high-dosage delivery of three or more sessions per week of required tutoring, each 15 to 30 minutes.
    • An explicit focus on cultivating tutor-student relationships, with tutors assigned with the same students throughout. Consistency is critical to building a solid relationship, and the tutor should be  “someone who is engaging and motivating,” Loeb said.
    • Alignment with the school curriculum.
    • Formalized tutor training and support.
    • The use of formative assessments to monitor student learning. 

    There are different models for districts: training paraprofessionals as full-time tutors, hiring outside tutoring organizations for in-person tutoring, or turning to online nonprofits; the latter lack the face-to-face connection but can better scale up to serve more students, she said.

    But many California districts found that creating a system with all of the elements was hard to pull off, and outside of urban areas and university towns, many had difficulty finding organizations and trained tutors for in-person instruction. Districts lacked experience evaluating tutoring outfits’ promises and measuring results. Communication over student results could be erratic; arranging schedules could be a challenge.

    Given other, more familiar options, many overstretched California districts and schools made tutoring a low priority; they invested instead in hiring teacher aides and counselors.

    An examination by Edunomics Lab, a Georgetown University-based education research nonprofit, found that 70% of California’s public school districts, charter schools and county offices of education didn’t report spending any money on tutoring from the last and biggest outlay of federal learning loss funding for California – ESSER III. Of the 30% of districts that did, spending on tutoring totaled 1.5% – $190 million out of $13.5 billion. (Go here for an interactive graphic on California districts’ tutoring spending.)

    Meanwhile, other states became directly involved in high-impact tutoring. According to the National Student Support Accelerator’s 2024-25 summary of states’ activities, two dozen states allocated specific funds for high-impact tutoring, while others provided technical help to set up programs. One state, Tennessee, is funding tutoring through its annual school funding formula. 

    Nine states have ongoing partnerships between higher education institutions and tutoring organizations. 

    Norwood is partnering with San Jose State to hire students on an education track to serve as tutors in the schools while earning federal work-study money. If all teacher preparation programs credited time tutoring toward fulfilling time required in the classroom, California could add thousands of tutors to the ranks.

    Money to spend

    California had the advantage of surging state revenues from a post-pandemic economic boom to set aside more than $10 billion in one-time and ongoing money for schools in 2021-22 and 2022-23.

    The state lists tutoring as one of the evidence-based options that districts can choose for their unspent share of the $6 billion Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant; they have through 2027-28 to use it. It’s not clear how much remains; districts filed the first spending report in late 2024.

    There’s also the $4 billion Expanded Learning Opportunities Program, although that money can only be used before or after school and during summers (Rural districts argue there needs to be more flexibility for tutoring).

    The advent of universal transitional kindergarten next fall and rollout of a new math framework are touchpoints for high-impact tutoring, Loeb said.

    “If I had to think about where California could embed tutoring just as part of normal operations, it would be in early literacy,” she said. “It is a shame and a detriment to the state that so many students are not learning how to read before third grade. There’s lots of evidence that high-impact tutoring can help get us there.”

    The selection of new materials aligned with the math framework will lead districts to rethink how math is taught.  

    “That’s a really good time to say, ‘OK, within this structure, how do we get students who aren’t making progress at the rate of the class or rate the state expects to get that individual attention so that they can accelerate their learning and excel in school?’ We’re not really doing that, so students are kind of falling off as we move quickly through the curriculum.”





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  • Pandemic recovery in schools will be a ‘long slog,’ says sobering national report

    Pandemic recovery in schools will be a ‘long slog,’ says sobering national report


    Student mental health was declining even before the pandemic, research has shown.

    Alison Yin for EdSource

    Nearly five years after Covid-19 began, a national report released Tuesday shows that recovery from the pandemic for students will be a “long slog.”    

    “The State of the American Student,” a report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) states that the findings are “sobering, daunting, and discouraging,” and that the slow pace of recovery from the pandemic has left an indelible mark on education, with long-term implications for students’ income, racial inequity and social mobility in the United States. 

    “If policymakers and educators do not get serious about ensuring these students have access to proven interventions, then we will continue to see the educational impact of the pandemic reverberate for many years, both in our schools and in our economy,” the report stated.

    For the last three years, CRPE — a research organization out of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University — has released annual reports examining the academic, social, emotional and mental health effects of the pandemic on students. CRPE Executive Director Robin Lake said the reports were an attempt to ensure that schools wouldn’t go back to business as usual before students were “made whole.”

    Fears that the pandemic would widen pre-existing opportunity gaps have come to fruition, according to the report’s summary of a wide span of research. The report focuses extra attention on certain groups: young children, disabled students, English learners and homeless students, and students who still lag far behind from where they would have been if not for the pandemic. Lake added these groups were largely not well served by schools before the pandemic began.

    The report takes a sweeping look at the issues that have been harming students’ recovery since 2020, including chronic absenteeism, staffing shortages, poor teacher morale and student disengagement. These are all signs pointing to a pandemic recovery effort that will require a “long haul.”

    Struggling students need more attention

    Currently, schools are facing “gale-force” headwinds trying to address these challenges, the report states. Pandemic-era funding is drying up, declining school enrollment is stretching district finances, and many educators are facing burnout. But the worst part is that the problem is underappreciated, Lake said.

    “Perhaps the most concerning thing to us is how little discussion there is about these problems,” Lake said. 

    Politicians are not talking about pandemic recovery, especially when it comes to the groups that have been struggling the most, she said. For instance, CRPE pointed out how some states, including California, do a poor job communicating data about how students have fared since the pandemic.

    Additionally, parents do not seem to know just how far behind their children are — thanks in part to grade inflation and some schools’ poor communication, Lake said.

    USC’s Center for Economic and Social Research conducted interviews with the parents of disabled students.

    One parent did not learn from the school that their child was failing two courses, making him ineligible to graduate from high school: “I didn’t know until we were in the process of graduation,” the parent told interviewers.

    The number of students who are served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has skyrocketed in recent years. It dipped during the peak of the pandemic when school campuses were closed, but surged again as students returned to the classrooms. It’s not clear why, but different theories have emerged.

    While it states that kindergartners who have not attended preschool are more likely to have academic and social struggles, including a rising number of behavioral issues and speech delays, the report notes that students who start school behind their peers may be being over-identified as having a disability or that the high numbers could be because students who might have simply been treading water in a previous era are now being correctly identified as having a disability.

    The problems faced by disabled students exemplify many of the biggest struggles of pandemic recovery efforts in schools. Disabled students’ academic performance has long lagged behind other students, but that gap has widened in the wake of the pandemic. The teacher shortage is particularly acute among special education teachers, now that they are needed most. Meanwhile, some effective efforts, such as tutoring, are not reaching disabled students. Low expectations for students with disabilities is a crisis that has failed to garner proper attention and resources, Lake said.

    One parent interviewed for the report said that getting help for their disabled students required constant fighting. “Multiple times, they promised in-person, in-school tutoring — which they just were understaffed and were never able to find anyone,” the parent said.

    Another parent said that without speech therapy, their son with epilepsy fell behind in school during the pandemic.

    “He fell further behind because my husband and I tried our best, but we can only do so much if you’re not a teacher, which is very frustrating,” the parent said in an interview.

    Recovery solutions are straightforward

    The strategies that helped schools recover have “not been rocket science,” Lake said. 

    Many schools have been successful with programs such as tutoring, high-quality curricula, extending learning time and improving communication with parents. Some schools are making these strategies a permanent part of the school experience, which is good news: Tutoring and small-group instruction are some of the most powerful tools schools have at their disposal, the report states.

    But scaling can be tricky, and many of the students who need help the most are not getting it, CRPE notes. Fewer than half of students who most needed that help enrolled in summer school, according to a Rand study, and just 1% of eligible students in Louisiana enrolled in a tutoring program for struggling readers.

    The report recommends focusing on the specific needs of struggling students, such as students with a disability or English learners, rather than so-called average students. Addressing the issues that these students are struggling with will pay dividends for the broader student population, Lake said.

    Some schools are demonstrating that recovery is possible, even if it’s not the dominant story right now. Students and educators alike are struggling, but there is a renewed understanding of the crucial role that school plays in a community. That has led to some schools rebuilding and strengthening that institution.

    “During the pandemic, you remember, there was so much talk about more joyful education, more engaging, more flexible,” Lake said. “We think that that has actually taken hold.”





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  • LAUSD celebrates academic recovery, but a rough road lies ahead without Covid relief money 

    LAUSD celebrates academic recovery, but a rough road lies ahead without Covid relief money 


    LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho applauds the district’s improvement in state test scores.

    Credit: Mallika Seshadri

    This story has been updated to include more community voices.

    The Los Angeles Unified School District celebrated its students’ academic achievement in the 2024 California Smarter Balanced test scores during a press conference Friday. The district’s scores reflect a near realization of Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s 2022 promise to overcome pandemic learning losses within two school years. 

    Across each grade level, most demographics and LAUSD’s Priority Schools, the district showed growth in both English Language Arts (ELA) and math. 

    Between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years, scores in English Language Arts increased from roughly 41% of students meeting or exceeding standards to just over 43%. 

    Math scores also rose. In the 2022-23 academic year, 30.5% of LAUSD students met or exceeded state standards. This past year, that number grew to 32.83%. 

    “I made a prediction about two years ago that within two years, we would begin to see recovery at a level impacting some subgroups that would hit or exceed pre-pandemic levels,” Carvalho said.

    “I am heartened by the fact that the students who historically performed at the lowest levels are actually the ones that have already exceeded pre-pandemic achievement levels.”

    Carvalho added that LAUSD’s Black and Latino students outperformed their counterparts throughout the state. Meanwhile, both students with disabilities and English learners performed better than they did before the pandemic. 

    While district officials say they are prepared to maintain students’ level of performance, they are dealing with the end of the one-time Covid relief money that expired last month and pressing federal and state legislators for more support moving forward. 

    “I believe that to the bottom of my gut and my heart, that we have to provide the conditions where every child can learn. And that means smaller class sizes. It means more mental health support. It means a nurse at every school. It means [psychiatric social workers] at every school. It means things that right now we can no longer afford because the Covid money is gone,” said LAUSD’s school board president Jackie Goldberg during the event. 

    “This is remarkable, but if we’re to keep it forward, the state has got to find a way….to do something.”

    How did the district’s highest needs students perform?

    Students with disabilities showed a roughly 1% increase in scores compared to the previous year. Still, just over 13% of LAUSD students with disabilities met or exceeded California ELA standards, with nearly 11% meeting or exceeding math standards. 

    Homeless students’ performance remained roughly the same as the previous year — with marginal increases, less than 1% in both subject areas. Foster youth, meanwhile, experienced a slight decline in ELA scores — with just over 20% meeting or exceeding standards — and a slight increase to 13.08% in math. 

    Migrant students performed better on the 2023-24 tests, and English learners saw a significant jump in improvement. 

    Between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years, the number of English learners who met or exceeded state ELA standards doubled from 4.44% to 8.88%. Meanwhile, the percentage of English learners who met or exceeded math standards rose from 6.80% to 10.65%. 

    “Los Angeles is not like the rest of the state of California. The challenges in our community are far greater. The level of poverty is higher. The percentage of students who are English language learners is significantly higher. The percentage of students with disabilities is higher. The percentage of students who are newly arrived international newcomers is significantly higher. The percentage of students experiencing homelessness is unparalleled,” Carvalho said Friday. 

    “That is why anytime that the unnatural, the almost impossible becomes the inevitable, we ought to come together and celebrate.” 

    Not everyone agrees. Evelyn Aleman, the organizer of the Facebook group Our Voice/Nuestra Voz, maintained that the district’s scores are still not adequate and that more investments need to be made to support student achievement. 

    “We cannot be satisfied with substandard scores,” she said, “…especially for vulnerable, high-need, student populations. There are no gains when most of our children aren’t meeting state standards in basic subjects.” 

    How much variation was there between non-charter and charter schools? 

    In both English Language Arts and mathematics, LAUSD’s charter schools outperformed non-charters. 

    Roughly 49% of students in district charters met or exceeded standards in English Language Arts and just above 35% met or exceeded standards in math compared to non-charters where just over 40% met or exceeded English Language Arts standards, and just over 30% met or exceeded standards in math. 

    How did students perform in science? 

    While LAUSD’s scores in science rose, they are still lagging behind other subject areas. 

    In the 2023-24 academic year, nearly 24% of LAUSD students met or exceeded state standards in science in comparison to 22.17% the previous year. 

    What strategies helped at the local level?

    While district officials emphasized that a lot of work is required to sustain and improve this year’s numbers, they also said their growth reflects the hard work of LAUSD’s teachers and employees at every level. 

    “We’ve [improved our scores] by intention,” said Elesia Watkins, the principal of 54th Street Elementary, “intentionally ignoring the stigma that Black and Brown children cannot achieve greatness.” 

    Principals from other LAUSD schools with increased scores chimed in, emphasizing the importance of tracking data and making sure students are also aware of where they stand and what they need to work on. 

    Others stressed the importance of students participating in both lab enrichment classes along with elective courses every day — and even after school hours, if possible.

    Student board member Anely Cortez Lopez also applauded the hard work and resilience of the student body. 

    “I believe it will be wrong with me not to highlight the immense resilience and dedication our students have shown,” she said. “We have seen an unprecedented event occur, many falls….not only academically, but emotionally, physically and spiritually for many of our students. ”

    “But [we] were dedicated to bounce back better.” 





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  • After the fire: Former foster youth attributes recovery to unconditional support

    After the fire: Former foster youth attributes recovery to unconditional support


    Wildfire smoke fills the air over the 110 freeway in Los Angeles.

    Credit: AP Photo / Etienne Laurent

    Before the Eaton fire this January, Alexander Ballantyne lived in Altadena, just a few minutes away from his Pasadena City College campus.

    That all changed on Jan. 7 when the fire reached the home he’d lived in the past three years with his aunt and uncle, forcing them to quickly evacuate. He left with only the clothes he was wearing and the school backpack he had left in his car.

    The home burned down later that day, and he was suddenly homeless, a situation he’d been in just a few years prior.

    Among the people who lost their homes, livelihoods, and lives in the fires that ravaged Los Angeles early this year is a subset of young people who are in the foster care system and already knew the trauma of losing a home.

    Ballantyne’s recovery from the devastation of the fire has not been easy, but it has been remarkably quick, a feat that highlights how imperative it is to pair stable housing with consistent, individualized support.

    “I had stable housing with my legal guardians (in high school) and I had stable housing with my aunt. If it was just the stability, theoretically, I should have gotten through all of high school amazingly, flying colors,” he said. “I think it’s more so the type of support you get — you know it’s unconditional.”

    Ballantyne, 25, was in the final stretch of transfer applications as the Eaton fire started. He was preparing the supplemental application for UC Berkeley’s business school, a highly competitive program. Less than 24 hours after it became available, however, he was fleeing from his family’s home, pushing finishing the application down his list of priorities.

    Alex Ballantyne is a student at Pasadena City College, where he’s finishing his last semester before transferring to a four-year university.

    “I almost felt like I was in my element, in the sense that it really wasn’t the first time I had nothing,” Ballantyne said in a recent interview. “And even though I say it feels pretty similar to how it was when I was homeless at 18, just having the support of my family … I feel like I landed on my feet.”

    As soon as his friends and network found out that he had lost his home, they stepped in to help him rebuild. A friend started a GoFundMe donation page for him, and it quickly reached its goal. One Simple Wish — an organization that directly funds any need or want a foster youth might have — crowdfunded additional money to replace the school and office supplies he’d lost.

    This quick support came from networks that Ballantyne had built over the years. He’s been part of organizations like First Star, a college readiness program for foster youth, where he met people like the founder of Jenni’s Flower, an LA-based organization that organizes events to empower foster youth. He is part of the foster youth programs at Pasadena City College, and he’s on the board of two nonprofits.

    What mattered to Ballantyne, more than anything else, was that the support he received came with no strings attached and from people he knew truly cared for him.

    “It’s really not the money that will get a foster kid through school or training or whatever they want to do,” Ballantyne said. “It’s the support, it’s the human connection, and it’s the feeling like they have somebody to lean on. That’s the most important part.”

    In the months since the fires, One Simple Wish has provided thousands in funding to 12 foster youth in Los Angeles alone, including Ballantyne.

    “Especially for minor children moving through the system, there’s not a lot of choice. You don’t often get to choose the neighborhood or the church you go to, the school you go to, the friendships that you can or can’t maintain, whether or not you get to stay with siblings; there’s just so much choice already being removed,” said Danielle Gletow, founder of One Simple Wish.

    Her organization’s mission is to fill the gaps that other groups might leave: Instead of asking someone if they need a backpack, her team leaves the question open-ended, asking, “What would you like to put your belongings in?”

    “Our goal is to just make sure that … what an individual needs in a time of crisis or challenging times, we put that power back in their hands,” said Gletow, who said the majority of funds come in as donations from supporters across the country.

    Ballantyne knows that lack of choice firsthand. He entered the foster system during middle school after an unstable childhood, andmoved through four placements during his freshman year of high school, before being placed with a family who became his legal guardians until the age of 18. He said that despite having housing stability through most of high school, he earned a 2.9 GPA.

    Today, weeks after his home burned down along with all of his belongings, coupled with the stress of waiting to hear back from colleges he applied to as he finishes his spring semester, he has maintained a 3.6 GPA.

    It’s all in the support

    At 18, shortly after graduating from high school, Ballantyne said he was kicked out of his foster home of three years and was homeless, couch surfing and working four jobs to get by, until he landed in transitional housing.

    He enrolled in community college shortly after, but left before the semester was over, right as the Covid-19 pandemic was starting. He fell into a deep, long-lasting depression, and for the next three years, he spent most days playing video games, drinking, smoking weed and taking pills, he said.

    His “wake-up call,” as he calls it, came in March 2021, when he received a text notifying him his grandmother was dying in the hospital. “I just remember feeling so helpless. I didn’t have the money to get an Uber to go see her,” he said. “I didn’t drive. I was doing nothing with myself.”

    Ballantyne’s grandmother had been like his mother, he said, and she’d just died in the same hospital he’d been born in about two decades earlier. She was his champion, always reminding him how much she loved him.

    While in the foster system, he had been estranged from his family for years, but as he helped his aunt prepare his grandmother’s home for sale, he told her about his living condition.

    It was around this time that Ballantyne’s life started turning around. His decision to get a job at a Best Buy “changed everything.” He initially wanted the job just for the discounts on video games, but he came away with companionship, which he needed after having been isolated in his depression for years.

    His aunt soon invited him to move in with her rent-free as long as he worked or attended school full-time and helped out around the house. He grabbed the opportunity and enrolled at Pasadena City College, where he is now just months from transferring to a four-year college.

    He learned what it was like to receive unconditional support when he moved in with his biological family as an adult.

    “I don’t think I was ever dumb,” he said, referring to the many years in which he didn’t excel academically. “I just don’t think I ever was in a situation where I truly, 100% felt comfortable and secure with where I was at.”

    Ballantyne is currently living in Burbank, renting a room in a classmate’s apartment, while his uncle and aunt are staying with family farther north in Los Angeles County.

    He’ll be there through the end of the summer, at which point he’ll be moving to whichever university he chooses among the four that accepted him so far. His rent is paid through August, thanks to the funding he received after the fires.

    The network of friends and resources that stepped up to support Ballantyne is there for all other foster youth, both he and Gletow emphasized.

    “We really do stress the importance of making connections wherever you can because it will matter as you get older. And as you become an adult, you have less and less of a network or safety net,” said Gletow, whose organization also has an educational wish fund where school staff can submit requests for flexible funding to use as needed.

    Ballantyne did eventually submit his supplemental application to UC Berkeley’s business school on time when he was sheltering at a family member’s home. The application had a video component requiring applicants to record themselves answering prompt questions, but the desk in the room he was staying in was inside a closet — not an ideal setting for such an important video.

    But Ballantyne knew he had everything he needed, including a newly replaced laptop, thanks to his friends and network, so he hit the record button and got to work making his goals a reality.





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  • Covid recovery funds are gone; what now for California students?

    Covid recovery funds are gone; what now for California students?


    Credit: Pexels / Mikhail Nilov

    California’s most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores revealed troubling trends in student achievement. Despite significant financial investments, student performance continues to struggle to reach full academic recovery. Worse, achievement gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students widened even further.

    The timing of these results couldn’t be worse. With California districts spending the last of their $23 billion in federal relief funds last year, schools are now facing a critical juncture. With declining enrollment reducing their budgets and only modest new state investments coming this year, it will be tough for districts to dramatically scale up promising initiatives like high-dosage tutoring or extensive summer programming.

    So, what levers do state and local policymakers have at their disposal? By looking at the data and learning from other successful low-cost interventions, the state has an opportunity to reverse its slide and drive student gains.

    First, kids have to be in school to learn. In California, chronic absenteeism rates have come down significantly from their pandemic levels, but they’re still nearly twice as high as they were five years ago. Black students, English learners, students with disabilities, and other marginalized groups are missing too much school. 

    Fortunately, there are low-cost, high-impact strategies that schools can adopt to ensure students are present and engaged. For example, a research study looking at a large California district found that missing a part of the school day — for referrals for in-school discipline or participation in extracurricular activities — predicted short- and long-run outcomes for students. Many school districts are already tracking these measures; the next step is using them to inform and implement interventions such as parent notifications or individualized support.

    Second, once kids are back in school, the next step is ensuring that classroom time is used well. This is especially critical in California, given that it ranks in the bottom 10 states in terms of total instructional hours per school year. Last year’s law to ban or limit the use of cell phones during school hours should help reduce digital distractions, but the research on attention is clear that humans are not good at multitasking and can take a long time to refocus when our thinking is interrupted.

    For schools, that means that every little interruption counts. Students being pulled out of class for special interventions or testing, outdoor noise and intercom announcements are all important in their own way, but they also add up. One study found that a typical classroom might be interrupted 2,000 times per year and that these disruptions can result in the loss of 10 to 20 days of instructional time. School district leaders could conduct attention audits to maximize and better understand how schools are using time and all of their technological tools.

    Last but not least is the question of what students are (and are not) learning. California’s test results suggest that reading is a particular problem area. Since 2019, California’s reading scores on NAEP are down 4 points in fourth grade and 5 points in eighth grade. But those are averages. Last year, just 7% of California’s Black students met the “Proficient” benchmark and 72% fell below “Basic” in fourth grade reading.

    When students lack foundational reading skills, the impact compounds across subjects. All students need and deserve evidence-based literacy instruction, with sustained focus on the relationships between sound and print, exposure to rich text, thought-provoking content, and both general and domain-specific vocabulary that builds knowledge of the world.

    Improving reading scores is hard work, and other states are dealing with similar challenges. But California — unlike many other states — has not yet passed a comprehensive reading bill.

    This is where California could stand to learn from some of the higher-performing states on NAEP, sometimes called “the nation’s report card.” Specifically, it might surprise some readers to learn that Mississippi made the largest reading gains over the last 10 years. Last year, Mississippi ranked seventh overall but third for Black students and first for low-income students. California, in contrast, came in 37th, 33rd and 28th, respectively.

    How did Mississippi make this turnaround? It took a long-term, systematic approach to its literacy efforts. It invested in teacher development and coaching, identified and supported struggling readers as early as possible and equipped teachers with high-quality instructional materials.

    This combination of high-quality instructional materials with diagnostic data and student supports has the potential to improve outcomes for California’s most vulnerable students, and to create a more equitable education system for all. By leveraging data it already tracks and focusing on the delivery of core instruction, California can build a stronger foundation for student success.

    •••

    Lindsay Dworkin is senior vice president of policy and government affairs at NWEA, a K-12 assessment and research organization.

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





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