Kindergarten students in San Jose Unified School District. (EdSource File photo.)
Credit: Liv Ames / EdSource
Over the next several months, high-profile political races will command the public’s attention. But one set of races at the local level might be just as consequential: local school board elections.
Too many of us are flying blind when making school board ballot decisions. Few of us can say we regularly attend our local school board meetings (and those that do rarely represent the larger community). There is little research about school boards and limited public understanding of what the role of a school board entails. Although it seems like there are more news stories about school boards than ever before, those accounts unfortunately focus on disruption and dissension. Tales about recent recallvotes, a fight about which books to teach, or a board meeting turning violent reveal that many school boards have become battlegrounds for political issues beyond K-12 education.
Now is an opportune time to build greater awareness of what school boards do and the positive impact of effective governance. Fortunately, there are strong examples from which we can learn. The California Collaborative on District Reform released a case study of two California school districts — Napa Valley and San José Unified School Districts — with strong reputations among peer superintendents as having highly functional superintendent–school board relations. The case study illuminates the kinds of practices governing teams in other districts can adopt and the general public can reward in their voting.
Commit to shared priorities. The pressures facing school districts — including fromthepandemic, educatorshortages, a daunting fiscal outlook, and others — are more intense than at any time in recent memory. These pressures often lead districts to fragment their work or, in an attempt to address every concern, do none of them well. In San José Unified and Napa Valley Unified, the governing teams orient their work around a shared mission, vision and values that help create focus and coherence in what could otherwise be an overwhelming environment. Both districts illustrate that school boards and their communities can work toward a shared vision more effectively with clearly defined priorities.
Establish and embrace norms for behavior. Just as important as what a governing team does is how it does its work. Napa Valley Unified and San José Unified both commit to shared norms for working together that keep them accountable for acting in the best interests of their communities. These norms include treating each other with respect, clearly defining what their role does and does not entail, and embracing a commitment to sharing information transparently. The norms help them maintain focus, navigate disagreement in healthy ways, and model behavior that districts seek to develop in their students.
Invest in early and recurring onboarding experiences. November elections will shift the composition of the governing teams in many districts, which can potentially undermine the commitment to both priorities and norms. To avoid this,newly elected trustees in San José Unified and Napa Valley Unified undergo district-specific onboarding processes that include one-on-one meetings with the superintendent and members of the central office and a California School Boards Association (CSBA)-facilitated Good Beginnings workshop to form relationships with one another and co-develop norms for how they will work together. A strong onboarding experience fosters role clarity, establishes a foundation for the governing team to work collaboratively, and communicates to constituents what the school board role involves and how it can best serve the community.
Lean on internal commitments to navigate challenges. The two districts’ strong sense of role clarity and their commitment to priorities and norms allow them to better navigate periods of struggle. Representatives from Napa Valley Unified described the painful decision to close schools in 2019 and 2021; San José Unified governing team members recalled an intense series of votes about police presence on school campuses. These difficult experiences tested the governing teams’ norms and values, but board members reported they would have been much harder without the practices, processes and commitments they had made prior.
This fall, voters will determine who represents them in crafting local school policy.
Now is the time for district leaders, trustees and voters to ask themselves some critical questions: Do members of my community understand what the work of the school board entails? Do they understand what a commitment to problem-solving enables the district to do? And will their voting reflect those kinds of behaviors and commitments?
By building awareness, fostering understanding, and equipping voters to make informed decisions on behalf of their communities, we can help cultivate governing bodies that will prioritize problem-solving over dysfunction, compromise over grandstanding, and student needs above all.
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Joel Knudson is a principal researcher at American Institutes for Research and the chair of the California Collaborative on District Reform, a learning community of researchers, practitioners, policymakers and funders dedicated to improving instruction and student learning for California’s school systems.
Marina Castro is a research analyst at American Institutes for Research, a nonpartisan and not-for-profit social science research organization, and a staff member of the California Collaborative on District Reform.
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.
This is the fourth in a series of stories on the challenges impacting California’s efforts to offer high-quality instruction to all 4-year-olds by 2025.
Transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds has been touted as a way to boost declining enrollment and offer universal preschool. One major roadblock: Some districts just don’t have the space.
Some districts do not have room to accommodate additional transitional kindergarten, or TK, classes at all schools. Others, especially those in less affluent areas, lack the resources to add toilets and playground equipment made for 4-year-olds. A lack of state funding makes the problem worse.
“We’re going to see inequitable outcomes as a result of the inequitable access to appropriate facilities for transitional kindergarten,” said Jessica Sawko, education director at Children Now, an advocacy organization. “The state needs to continue to invest in the facilities that it has asked school districts to create.”
Some districts, such as Oakland Unified, are losing potential TK students because they don’t have space at all schools. Some elementary schools in Oakland don’t have any TK classrooms, and many have only one. As a result, some children end up on waitlists for their preferred school, and families are opting to wait until kindergarten to enroll their children.
Oakland district spokesperson John Sasaki acknowledged in an email that “there is a general capacity issue as we build out TK-appropriate classroom spaces,” noting that demand also varies between schools.
“School A may have 100 applications for 24 seats and school B may have 15 applications for 24 seats. Those families for school A may not go to school B because it’s far away, etc. and so it’s less that we weren’t able to accommodate, and more about family choice and preference,” Sasaki wrote.
Emily Privot McNamara applied for her 4-year-old son to attend transitional kindergarten in Oakland as soon as the district opened enrollment in 2023.
She was hoping for her son to attend his neighborhood school, Montclair Elementary, less than a two-minute drive from their house. Her neighbors told her getting into Montclair for kindergarten was easy for their children, since the district gives priority to students who live in the neighborhood.
But getting into TK there was different. Montclair has far fewer TK classrooms than kindergarten classrooms; in 2023-24 the school enrolled 28 students in TK, compared to 90 in kindergarten. McNamara’s son didn’t get into Montclair or Thornhill Elementary, another nearby school. Instead, the district offered him a seat at Emerson Elementary, more than 3 miles from their house and a 10-minute drive each way.
The McNamaras considered sending their son to Emerson for TK and then moving him to Montclair for kindergarten, but felt that would be too many transitions.
“We’d had several years of shifts and changes. We wanted to start consistency. The idea was once we got into TK, we could stay there a number of years,” McNamara said.
So the McNamaras declined the spot at Emerson and kept their son in private preschool, paying $1,900 a month for tuition. They stayed on the waitlist for Montclair but were never admitted.
McNamara’s son is one of 143 children who applied to transitional kindergarten in Oakland Unified in 2023-24 but ultimately chose not to enroll, according to Sasaki. That number is equivalent to about 12% of the district’s total transitional kindergarten enrollment that year.
TK enrollment has been lower than expected statewide. According to the California Department of Education, 151,491 students were enrolled in TK in the 2023-24 school year, far below projections. The Learning Policy Institute had estimated that between 159,500 and 199,400 would enroll.
A lot of districts, on paper, they’re under-enrolled. However, the devil’s in the details. … Is there potential extra space where it’s actually needed? And what’s the condition and quality of those spaces?”
Jeff Vincent, Center for Cities+Schools
Oakland Unified and Alum Rock Unified in San Jose are both trying to use empty space creatively, revamping previously closed elementary school campuses and converting them into early childhood centers to serve both TK and younger students in preschool. Oakland gives priority at this center and another early childhood center to students who come from neighborhoods with schools that don’t have a single transitional kindergarten classroom. Yet the situation in Oakland, where some schools are under-enrolled, while others have waitlists, shows that expanding TK is more complicated than simply filling empty classrooms with 4-year-olds, said Jeff Vincent, who co-directs the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley and has done extensive research on school facilities.
“A lot of districts, on paper, they’re under-enrolled,” said Vincent. “However, the devil’s in the details on that, right? Is there potential extra space where it’s actually needed? And what’s the condition and quality of those spaces, and what would it take to turn them into TK-appropriate classrooms?”
A problem statewide
According to a February 2023 Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) budget brief, 25% of districts said they did not have adequate classroom space to meet projected transitional kindergarten enrollment. Similarly, a survey conducted by the California Department of Education and analyzed by the Learning Policy Institute found that 18% of school districts did not have enough classroom space for transitional kindergarten expansion, and more than a third cited facilities as the biggest challenge.
That report found that school districts will need 946 additional classrooms to enroll all projected transitional kindergarten students in 2025-26. TK has been gradually expanding since 2022 to reach all the state’s 4-year-olds by the 2025-26 school year.
One of the challenges for districts is the requirement for transitional kindergarten classrooms.
State guidelines for TK and kindergarten classrooms are more stringent than for classrooms for older children. New classrooms must include bathrooms with toilets sized for young children, and be at least 1,350 square feet. Renovated classrooms must be at least 1,250 square feet. In contrast, classrooms for grades 1-12 must be at least 960 square feet.
Victoria Wang, one of the authors of the report, said some districts told the Learning Policy Institute that the lack of classrooms has made it difficult to offer full-day TK and that they are instead offering half-day morning and afternoon TK sessions in the same classrooms, in order to accommodate more students. Parents who need a longer program to meet their child care needs are unlikely to enroll in half-day TK.
Many districts cited not being able to provide bathrooms connected to classrooms as a challenge.
“If they don’t have a bathroom that’s in the actual classroom space, a staff member will need to walk with the child to go to the bathroom,” Wang said. “That’s just an additional layer of challenge staffing-wise.”
In San Juan Unified, near Sacramento, lack of classrooms “has been a concern,” said spokesperson Raj Rai. In 2023-24, 16 of the district’s 28 transitional kindergarten classrooms had waitlists, and about 249 students who applied eventually declined to enroll in TK at the schools where they were assigned, she said. The district has been offering spots in state-subsidized preschool to some families on the waitlist.
San Diego Unified and San Francisco Unified also had waitlists at some schools, but they would not share how many of the children who applied did not enroll.
Some districts that wanted to expand to more 4-year-olds faster than the state’s phased timeline for TK expansion could not because of facilities constraints, Wang said. The state required schools to offer TK to all 4-year-olds who would turn 5 before April 2 in 2023-24, and to all 4-year-olds who would turn 5 before June 2 in 2024-25, but districts could enroll younger children if they had room and met stricter rules: a 1:10 adult-child ratio and a maximum class size of 20.
A spokesperson for Garden Grove Unified in Orange County said the district had to place 84 children who were younger than the TK birthday cutoff on a waitlist this year; 25 had been pulled from the list as of mid-September.
Inequitable access to funding
Districts are often forced to choose between renovating current classrooms, demolishing, then reconstructing new transitional kindergarten classrooms, or purchasing portables, said John Rodriguez, facilities planning director for Central Unified, a 16,000-student district in Fresno County.
“What do you do when there’s growth?” he said. “And where’s the money going to come from?”
This year, overall facilities funding was cut by $500 million to address the budget shortfall, and funding set aside for transitional kindergarten facilities has run out. The state had provided $490 million in grants to construct or retrofit early education facilities, including for TK, in 2021-22 and $100 million in 2022-23, but that funding was “oversubscribed,” the LAO budget brief found. Additional promised funding of $550 million for TK facilities was first delayed to 2024-25, then to 2025-26, and ultimately was eliminated from the budget altogether.
“It puts at risk the ability for school districts who do not currently have the right facilities to provide those proper learning environments,” Sawko, from Children Now, said.
The ability to build new classrooms or renovate old ones is often tied to a district’s property wealth, said Sara Hinkley, California program manager for the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley.
“The only way for districts to do real facility upgrades, like adding bathrooms and reconfiguring a number of classrooms, is by getting capital funding, which means going to their voters or tapping into an existing bond measure, and districts have really different capacities to do that,” said Hinkley. “If they have less property wealth, they just have less ability to tap their voters to pay for those kinds of things.”
Julie Boesch, the administrator for small school district support in Kern County, said some of the county’s small districts don’t have the classrooms to serve transitional kindergartners at all sites, so they bus them all to one school, sometimes far from home. Other superintendents have said they may not offer transitional kindergarten at all, she said.
She said one small school district north of Bakersfield is constructing a new building for transitional kindergarten but could not afford a new playground. Another district was approved for some state funding for a new TK building but had to put it off because it could not afford its portion. The district did not qualify for the state to pay the full share because its total assessed property value was just over the current $5 million limit. That limit for a district to qualify for full financial help would be increased to $15 million in assessed property value if voters pass Proposition 2, the state construction bond.
“People are really struggling with figuring out what to do and having enough money when they do get funding,” Boesch said. “The frustrations are real.”
Winters Joint Unified School District, a small district serving about 1,500 students in Yolo County in the Central Valley, had to divert funds planned for other facilities to meet the urgent demand for TK classroom space. According to Superintendent Rody Boonchouy, voters passed a bond measure in 2020 to address major maintenance issues, including adding a multipurpose room to an elementary school. But then, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation to expand TK to all 4-year-olds.
“It was a big, ‘Uh oh, what do we do?’ Everything came to a halt and everything shifted toward, ‘How do we ensure we have capacity for TK as it expands?’” Boonchouy said.
After a long process that included a demographic study and analysis of all facilities needs, the district is using some of the bond money to build four transitional kindergarten classrooms in a dedicated wing of the elementary school, with its own playground. The district was also able to do some maintenance at other schools, but it no longer has funds for the planned multipurpose room.
Without that bond money, the district wouldn’t be able to build new TK classrooms at all, a situation Boonchouy knows many other districts face.
“Ideally, in a perfect world,” Boonchouy said, “that legislation (expanding transitional kindergarten) would have come with money to build facilities for it.”
Ending several months of uncertainty, the California State Board of Education on Wednesday chose new labels to describe how students perform on the four levels of achievement on its standardized tests.
The decision was difficult. The 90 minutes of presentations and discussions offered lessons in the subtleties of language and the inferences of words.
Board members said they were aware of the need to send the right messages to many parents, who had criticized the California Department of Education’s previous choices for labeling low test scores as vague euphemisms for bad news.
“Labels matter,” said board member Francisco Escobedo, executive director of the National Center for Urban Transformation at San Diego State. “Knowledge is a continuum, and how we describe students in different levels has a powerful impact.”’
Researchers have warned that parents are getting confusing messages, with inflated grades on courses and declining scores on standardized tests of how well their children are doing in recovering from Covid setbacks in learning. The new labels will apply to scoring levels for the state science assessments and for the Smarter Balanced English language arts and math tests.
Board members quickly agreed on “Advanced” for Level 4 and “Proficient” for Level 3 labels, the top two levels of scores. But their selection of “Developing” for Level 2 and “Minimal” for Level 1 differed from the consensus of parents, students and teachers who had been offered various options during focus groups in December and January.
They had preferred “Basic” for Level 2 and “Below Basic” for Level 1. The terms are clear, simple and familiar, a summary of the discussions said. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) classifies Basic as the lowest of its three levels, and California’s old state tests, which the state abandoned a decade ago to switch to Smarter Balanced, used Basic and Below Basic for scoring criteria as well.
But for some veteran educators on the board, familiarity has bred contempt, or at least bad memories, of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the federal law under the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Schools were under heavy pressure to increase their math and English language arts scores, or potentially face sanctions.
“I had a visceral reaction to the word Basic,” said board member and veteran teacher Haydee Rodriguez. “I remember NCLB and how finite that felt for students.” The feedback should be encouraging, not a label that discourages growth, as Basic did under NCLB, she said.
She and Kim Patillo Brownson, a parent of two teenagers who served as a policy director at the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, also pointed out that “basic” has a different connotation for students in 2025. It’s slang for a boring and uninteresting person.
“Calling a student Basic is an absolute insult in 2025,” said Rodriguez. “It could shut a child down.”
Board President Linda Darling-Hammond agreed. “If Basic is being used derogatorily, one can only imagine how Below Basic will be used. It is a real consideration; the meaning is different for adults.”
Board members turned to other words that had been presented to the focus groups. They agreed the choices should be frank, not Pollyannaish or dispiriting.
With Level 2, the purpose should be “trying to light a fire under parents to realize there is work to do,” said Patillo Brownson.
Stating that “Below Basic” says a student is failing, Escobedo preferred “Developing” for Level 1 and “Emerging” for Level 2. These terms are consistent with labels used for scoring the progress of English learners.
Patillo Brownson called Emerging “vague” and supported “Basic.”
Board Vice President Cynthia Glover Woods, who was chief academic officer of the Riverside County Office of Education before her retirement, favored “Minimum” for Level 1 because “it is important we are clear for students and parents that students scoring at the level have a minimal understanding of grade-level knowledge.”
Sharing the perspective of her peers, the student board member on the board, Julia Clauson, a senior at Bella Vista High School in Sacramento, recommended substituting “Approaching” for “Basic,” so as not to deter students from trying challenging courses. “Older students make academic decisions (based on what signals they get), so language matters,” she said.
The County Superintendents association also endorsed “Approaching” for Level 2 and “Developing” or “Emerging” for Level 1.
The board initiated what turned into a multi-month decision because of growing dissatisfaction with the labels that had been used since the first Smarter Balanced testing in 2015. They were Standard Not Met for Level 1, Standard Nearly Met for Level 2, Standard Met for Level 3 and Standard Exceeded for Level 4. Focus groups by the California Department of Education found that parents were confused about what “standard” meant. They found Standard Not Met as discouraging and Standard Nearly Met as unclear.
But a coalition of student advocacy groups, including Teach Plus, Children Now and Innovate Public Schools, along with the County Superintendents association and the Association of California School Administrators, criticized the labels for Levels 1 and 2 that the California Department of Education recommended as their replacements as soft-pedaling euphemisms for poor scorers. The department had proposed Inconsistent for Level 1 and Foundational for Level 2.
At its December meeting, the board told the department to try again with more focus groups.
Changing the labels to Advanced, Proficient, Developing and Minimal won’t change how scores are determined; the individual scores within each achievement band have remained the same in all the 18 member states that take all or some of the Smarter Balanced tests, which are given to students in grades three through eight and once in high school, usually in 11th grade.
However, additional work is needed to communicate the changes to parents and students. The department and its testing contractor, ETS, will spell out the differences between performing at the various levels in each subject and grade and the level of improvement needed to raise scores.
Tony Alpert, executive director of Smarter Balanced, pointed out that performance differences are a continuum with students showing gaps in some grade-level skills but not others. A student scoring at Level 1 may have answered some questions showing knowledge at grade level. As scores progress from Levels 2 to 4, students demonstrate increasing accuracy and complexity in their knowledge and skills.
Students who reach Level 3 have the knowledge to succeed in future coursework. Research has determined that for California high school students, Level 3 correlates with preparation for first-year courses at California State University.
The state board hoped that the label changes and new explanations would be ready for this spring’s testing results. Instead, they will take effect in 2026.
