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  • Public school choice exists in California, but few districts offer it

    Public school choice exists in California, but few districts offer it


    A Walnut Valley Unified kindergarten teacher shows her students a book during class.

    Credit: Walnut Valley Unified / Facebook

    An underused, little-known public school choice program allowing students to enroll in other districts that open their borders has been reauthorized six times in the past 30 years. Under a bill winding its way through the Legislature, it would become permanent, with revised rules.

    Under the District of Choice program, districts announce how many seats they make available to nonresident students by the fall of the preceding year, and parents must apply by Jan. 1. By statute, enrollment is open to any family that applies, without restrictions — and with a lottery if applications are oversubscribed. The program bans considering academic or athletic ability or, if an applicant is a student with special needs, the cost of educating a student. 

    “This bill is a crucial step towards creating a more inclusive and equitable public education system — one where all students have the opportunity to grow and thrive,” said Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, the author of Senate Bill 897.

    With enrollments dropping statewide — and projected to continue — districts could view District of Choice as a strategy to stem the decline and bolster revenue that new students would bring. But few districts have seized the option. At most, 50 districts out of nearly 1,000, mostly rural or suburban and small, have signed on.

    That number, in turn, has restricted the openings for families; fewer than 10,000 students annually have transferred through the program — about 0.2% of California’s students, according to an evaluation of the program by the Legislative Analyst’s Office in 2021.

    The list of districts for 2024-25 will be 44, the same as this year. That is down from 47 districts in 2021-22, when a total of 8,398 students transferred, according to the latest data available from the California Department of Education.

    Of those, 2,574 students — 31% of the total — transferred to a single district, Walnut Valley Unified, a 14,000-student district in the San Gabriel Valley. The district includes the cities of Walnut and Diamond Bar and abuts Pomona Unified. Newman, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, represents Walnut Valley; his predecessor, Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, also championed District of Choice and shepherded a previous five-year reauthorization.

    Together with five other districts receiving the most students — Oak Park Unified, Glendora Unified, West Covina Unified, Valley Lindo Elementary School District and Riverside Unified — the five received 82% of the students in the program statewide. Riverside, with 1,100 of its 42,000 students enrolled through District of Choice, is the only large district using the program.  

    Robert Taylor, Walnut Valley Unified’s superintendent, said the district had participated in the program for decades, in the belief that the district “should provide any child an opportunity regardless of special needs, socioeconomic status or street address. And that’s still today. We take every kid who wants to come.”

    Taylor cited the “diversity of well-rounded opportunities” that draw outsiders: Arts offerings in elementary schools, starting in kindergarten, include dance, theater and music and are taught by professionals in the arts, he said. There is a counselor in every elementary school, and counselors stay with the same students throughout high school and meet one-on-one with them during the summer. The graduation rate is 100%, he said.

    Responding to an allegation he hears, Taylor said, “No, we don’t cherry-pick students. We don’t want to, and it’s been against the law to.”  The 2017 reauthorization of the law requires that districts give low-income students priority for transfers, and SB 897 would add homeless and foster children as well. The 23% of low-income students from other districts enrolled at Walnut Unified are slightly less than the 25% overall in the district.

    Students from 30 districts have enrolled through District of Choice, Taylor said, and some parents drive from more than an hour away. One district that has not been sending additional students is its larger, less affluent neighbor, Pomona Unified, where 85% of its 22,000 students are from low-income families.

    Under an arcane rule, a district can cap the number of students it permits to leave for districts of choice at a cumulative 10% of its average daily attendance since it first joined the program — even if many students have long since graduated from high school. Pomona reached that limit a half-dozen years ago, after going to court to prove that Walnut Valley had already exceeded the target, said Superintendent Darren Knowles.  

    SB 897 would delete that clause and replace it with a new annual cap: 10% of a district’s current average daily attendance for districts with fewer than 50,000 students and 1% for districts with more than 50,000 students. Sending districts would also be exempt if county offices of education verified that a loss of students to the program would jeopardize their financial stability.

    Pomona Unified was the only opponent listed at a hearing last month in the Senate Education Committee, where the bill passed unanimously. Rowland Unified, a 13,000-student district to the west of Walnut Valley, has also complained about the financial impact of the transfer program. 

    Knowles said he doesn’t oppose the concept of school choice, if the distribution is equitable. But before reaching the cap, Walnut Valley drew disproportionately high numbers of white and Asian families from the wealthier neighborhoods in Diamond Bar that lie within Pomona Unified. The latter may be attracted to the two dual Chinese language immersion programs in Walnut Valley.

    Wealthier families are able to drive their kids to Walnut Valley; low-income Latino families with both parents working more than likely can’t, said Knowles.

    “The District of Choice does not create a good distribution for Pomona Unified,” Knowles said. “We need kids excelling as well as those struggling. Taking out the smartest kids in any district is not a good situation.”

    Pomona Unified already has closed six elementary schools due to declining enrollment, Knowles said. The new cap could “decimate us within five years,” Knowles said. “Give us time to recover, a reprieve.”

    Newman said that he is open to further accommodations for an adverse financial impact. “We don’t want well-intended legislation to have unintended consequences,” he told EdSource. 

    Who chooses?

    In its 2021 evaluation, the Legislative Analyst’s Office found that District of Choice “allows students to access educational options that are not offered in their home districts,” including college prep courses, arts and music and foreign languages. Nearly all the students transferred to districts with higher test scores.

    Newly required oversight measures found no districts discriminating against interested students, and that the program appeared to increase racial balance for some districts and reduce it for others, the LAO said, “although the changes for most districts are small.” It found that statewide, fewer low-income students used the program, compared with other students in their home districts; however, the proportion of those students had risen over four years from 27% to 32%. Participation of Latino students, though also on the rise, was smaller than the Latino enrollment in their home districts — similar to Pomona and Walnut Valley.

    Among the last children to transfer from Pomona to Walnut Valley six years ago, right before the limit was reached, is Ethan Fermin. Then entering kindergarten, he is now in sixth grade at Suzanne Middle School. His sister, now in second grade, was admitted through an interdistrict transfer, a more restrictive permit process that requires both districts to approve the move. A family must make the case for the transfer or cite a hardship — in this case, the transportation challenges of having kids in two different districts.  Parents whose children are denied a transfer can appeal to the county board of education, which often reverses a decision.

    Ethan’s father, Billy, graduated from Pomona Unified schools; he was high school class president and active in many school activities, Fermin said. From his home, he can see the elementary school his kids would have attended — a two-minute walk from their house. Friends from high school are Pomona teachers. His kids would have attended his high school, Diamond Ranch High.

    Leaving the district wasn’t easy, he said, adding, “But it’s a different world from when I went to school.”  What caught his eye in Walnut Valley, he said, was a program in two elementary schools that leads to the International Baccalaureate, a rigorous high school program that stresses inquiry-based learning. He liked the early years’ focus on developing well-rounded, creative and open-minded learners and risk-takers. “Given the choice, it was night and day,” he said.

    Taylor said Walnut Valley doesn’t market its programs as District of Choice, and he doesn’t speak negatively about other districts. Fermin said the district is smart to use social media heavily to show off what’s happening in its schools, and banners go up at the start of the sign-up period.

    Possible reasons for so little participation

    Charter schools are by far the largest public school choice program in California. The more than 1,200 charter schools served 685,553 students in 2022-23 — 11.7% of statewide enrollment, compared with about 2% through interdistrict transfers and 0.02% through District of Choice.  

    The Legislature passed laws permitting charter schools in 1992 and the District of Choice a year later. Both were viewed as strategies to counter a school voucher initiative that would have provided public funding for private school tuition, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office’s analysis. Voters trounced the voucher initiative, which drew only 30% support in the 1993 vote.

    Why so few districts have participated in the program is a matter of conjecture. The five-year reauthorization periods raised the risk for districts and parents that their participation might be cut short. Ken Kapphahn, principal fiscal and policy analyst for the Legislative Analyst’s Office who did the evaluation, said some districts are able to receive as many interested transfer students as they want through the interdistrict permit process, under which they can set academic and behavior conditions.  

    Some districts would involve long drives to get to, while others assume they don’t have special offerings to lure lots of students, he said. And it’s his impression, he said, that many districts still don’t know the program exists; the California Department of Education does not promote it.  

    Newman said there is an entrepreneurial potential of the program that many superintendents haven’t recognized. The ability to draw students from nearby districts could inspire “a high level of innovation” that best serves students’ interests, he said. 

    Former President of the State Board of Education Mike Kirst, who said he supports making the program permanent, suggested another reason: It could be that district superintendents consider District of Choice a violation of an unwritten education commandment, Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s enrollment.

    “It’s a professional norm that you don’t try to ‘poach’ students from other districts,” he said.





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  • Anxious California teachers with pink slips await word on jobs next school year

    Anxious California teachers with pink slips await word on jobs next school year


    San Diego Unified teachers attend a school board meeting to protest pink slips last school year.

    San Diego Unified teachers protest pink slips before a school board meeting last year. The district plans to issue 30 preliminary layoff notices this year.

    Courtesy of San Diego Education Association

    Second-grade teacher Jacob Willis has worked in the San Diego Unified School District in different roles since he graduated from high school in 2016. Now, he is one of hundreds of California teachers waiting to see if they will still have a job when campuses reopen next school year.

    Declining enrollment, expiring federal funds for Covid relief, plus a proposed state budget with no new money for education made school leaders in 100 of California’s 1,000 school districts nervous enough about balancing their districts’ budgets to issue layoff notices to 1,900 teachers — 16 times more than the 124 that were issued last spring, according to the California Teachers Association. 

    State law requires that districts send pink slips by March 15 to any teacher who could potentially be laid off by the end of the school year. Although many of the layoff notices are withdrawn by May 15 — the last day final layoff notices can be given to tenured teachers —  the practice is criticized by many for being demoralizing to teachers and disruptive to school systems.

    “It creates serious insecurity and stress for teachers, including those who are ultimately asked to stay,” said Ken Jacobs, co-chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “This will make it harder for districts to hire teachers and leads teachers to leave the profession.”

    Holding out hope

    Willis, 26, knows that with the state’s enduring teacher shortage he could find a teaching job at another school district, but he’d rather not. His heart is at San Diego Unified, where he started as a noon duty assistant at age 18. He watched over students during recess and lunch for four years while completing his teaching credential.

    “I have no intention to stop teaching,” said Willis, who is in his second year as a teacher. “This is what I went to school for. This is what I intended to do for my whole career arc and life.”

    The month since the pink slips were issued has been a tough one for Willis and his class at Porter Elementary, who learned of his potential layoff when he appeared on the local news. They are upset that he might not be on campus when they return for third grade, he said.

    “There’s so much uncertainty,” Willis said. “There’s a chance that my pink slip might be rescinded. There’s a chance that it might not be rescinded, or I have to go to a different site. … It’s really stressful because I don’t know at all what’s going to happen.”

    Almost a quarter of the pink slips issued in California were from Anaheim Union High School District, which issued 226, and San Diego Unified School District, which initially sent out 208 layoff notices. As of Friday, Anaheim had rescinded at least 55 notices and San Diego Unified 30, according to district officials.

    San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest district, employs 4,290 teachers, while Anaheim Union High School District has about 1,346 teachers, according to 2022-23 data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

    “We haven’t seen layoffs on this scale in San Diego since 2017,” said Kyle Weinberg, president of the San Diego Education Association, referring to the notices of possible layoffs.

    Pink slips don’t necessarily mean job loss

    Districts generally send out more notices than the number of positions they might need to eliminate to ensure they meet the state requirement. Some pink slips are rescinded after district officials review credentials, expected retirements and projected enrollment numbers at school sites, and hearings with an administrative law judge are held to determine who stays and who goes.

    In San Diego, all the teachers still holding pink slips by the end of last week were probationary employees, said Mike Murad, spokesperson for the district. When the dust settles, Anaheim Union High School District expects to lay off 119 teachers by the end of the school year, while San Diego has said the number will likely be 127.

    Teachers are generally considered probationary if they have been with the district two years or less, are working in the district on an emergency-style credential or are hired into a position with restricted funding.

    The president of the state’s largest teachers union blamed the pink slips on reduced funding and officials who issue more layoff notices than necessary. “Unfortunately, a lot of districts go to it as if it’s like a playbook,” said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association.

    School districts should look to their reserves to fund these positions next school year, he said. 

    Teacher layoffs are complicated

    Generally, teacher layoffs are based on seniority, although districts can skip more junior teachers if they have special training and experience to teach a specific course that a more senior teacher does not. Pink-slipped teachers, who can prove they have more seniority than another teacher with equal expertise, can also bump that teacher and take that position, resulting in a reshuffling of teachers in multiple schools. 

    In Anaheim, the district protected 16 categories of teachers from layoffs, leading to layoff notices for more senior staff that included a teacher with 25 years of experience, said Geoff Morganstern, president of the Anaheim Secondary Teachers Association. The teacher has since had the pink slip rescinded, but others with 10 to 16 years of service have still not had layoff notices revoked, he said.

    San Diego Unified also is not issuing layoff notices to teachers in some difficult-to-fill positions, and expects to have job openings in some credential areas, including special education, math and science, according to district officials.

    Revenue dips prompt layoffs

    Potential staff reductions at San Diego Unified are the result of the loss of nearly $540 million in Covid-relief funds, declining enrollment and projections of decreased state revenue, said board President Shana Hazan. 

    “As a district, we are committed to balancing our budget without significant impacts to students and school sites,” Hazen said. “Over the last year, our team has worked to thoughtfully and strategically build a budget that considers the needs of our children first and foremost.”

    The district is trying to maximize attrition to minimize layoffs, she said. “We are hopeful we can continue to reduce the actual number of employees affected before May 15, when reductions are to be finalized.” 

    The San Diego Education Association has asked district officials to tap reserves to pay teacher salaries and to eliminate positions as teachers retire or leave the district, Weinberg said. 

    Anaheim Union High School Superintendent Michael Matsuda blamed the layoffs in the district on budget deficits brought on, in part, by the loss of 3,500 students. The district had used one-time state funds to extend a three-year agreement, made during the 2017-18 school year, to temporarily increase teaching staff to address critical needs in core content areas, he said in a video statement to the school community. The funds are running out, according to the district.

    Union officials would have liked to have seen the district offer a retirement incentive this year and to manage declining enrollment through attrition and smaller cuts, but district officials didn’t want to spend the money, Morganstern said. The district has many teachers ready to retire, he added.

    Layoffs can hurt teacher recruitment

    Teacher layoffs during the Great Recession, between 2007 and 2009, are widely considered to be one of the causes of the current teacher shortage because they discouraged people from entering teacher preparation programs.

    “It’s a huge risk that the district is taking (by) not rescinding the layoff notices,” Weinberg said. “We are the only large district and the county that’s doing layoff notices, and there are plenty of vacancies in other districts that our educators will apply for, and they will accept jobs. And that’s going to be devastating for our students who have relationships with those educators.”

    A Commission on Teacher Credentialing report released last week shows that enrollment at teacher preparation programs declined another 10% in 2022-23, the most recent year data is available, following a 16% decline the previous year.

    Issuing layoff notices during a teacher shortage can be particularly tricky for districts that are still trying to find teachers for hard-to-fill positions, like those with special education, math and science credentials. 

    Local teachers unions have been holding rallies to gain community support and to put pressure on district officials to rescind the pink slips. 

    “If we are able to win and have all of the layoff notices rescinded, we will have the smaller class sizes that our students need and that we’ve seen with the additional funds during the pandemic,” Weinberg said.

    Morganstern expects all classes in Anaheim Union High School District to reach their maximum allowed capacity of students if the pink slips aren’t all recalled, with some classes going over the limit. The union will file grievances in those cases because it’s a contract violation, he said.

    “Then they’re going to have to scramble to hire teachers, and then they’re going to have to issue massive schedule changes because every kid’s schedule has to be rearranged because of these couple teachers at each school,” Morganstern said. “It’s going to be a disaster.”





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  • High school redesign, dropping enrollment’s silver lining plus more budget miscellany

    High school redesign, dropping enrollment’s silver lining plus more budget miscellany


    Credit: Allison Shelley for EDUimages

    Top Takeaways
    • Declining enrollments are painful for districts, yet may yield revenue options for the state.
    • With $15 million, districts would brainstorm new concepts for high schools of the future.
    • There’s a catch-22 for English learners who are too young to be tested.

    Inside every governor’s voluminous state budget are items that, while not headline-grabbing, are newsworthy and illuminating. 

    Gov. Gavin Newsom’s May budget revision for 2025-26 is no exception, as four examples illustrate. One invites districts to redesign high schools; another adds a billion dollars to spur growth in learning. A third is a quick fix for a legal obstacle to help young English learners; a fourth reveals an important long-term funding trend. Here are the details. 

    Reimagining high school

    Asked to describe how they felt about high school, 3 out of 4 students chose “tired,” “stressed” or “bored” in a 2020 nationwide survey by Yale University. Closer to home, about 4 out of 10 students in the 2024-25 California Healthy Kids Survey reported they lacked a relationship with a caring adult in high school.

    State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond has read those numbers and similar data. She has also seen schools, like MetWest High School in Oakland Unified, and districts like Anaheim Union High School District, that have explored project-based learning, work internships, team teaching, and individual learning plans with alternative measures of achievement. One of the challenges has been scaling models within a learning system that measures learning in terms of periods, course credits, and minutes of seat time.

    That’s why Darling-Hammond encouraged Newsom to include $15 million in the May budget revision for a pilot program to redesign middle and high schools “to better serve the needs of all students and increase student outcomes.”

    “If public schools are to survive, they will have to be transformed to be more responsive,” Darling-Hammond said. “Students should not have to leave public schools for microschools and school pods to get a personalized environment.”

    Newsom is proposing that a yet-to-be-chosen county office of education guide a network of between 15 and 30 districts in a multi-year program to examine innovations, propose alternatives, and learn from each other. 

    State law allows districts to seek waivers from state requirements, and existing independent study regulations permit some flexibility for experimentation. But an independent study was designed to accommodate individual schedules, not a systemic response that reorients the school day to a changing vision for a high school graduate, Darling-Hammond said. 

    “The state board can’t spend time doing workarounds for 2,000 districts,” she said.

    Ron Carruth, the retired superintendent of the El Dorado Union High School District, said he is encouraged by the proposal. This month, he helped establish the California High School Coalition, which will hold its first conference in Sacramento on Oct. 26-28. 

    Anaheim Union High School District Superintendent Michael Matsuda said that “in the age of AI, we need to be more innovative than ever, considering tectonic shifts in jobs and employment. If we’re not preparing students for that world, shame on us.”

    The state-funded network will be “an opportunity to innovate,” he said, while noting that changing systems and culture are a lot harder than people think. “School leaders need to think more like entrepreneurs.”

    Ideas for accelerating learning?

    Parents and community members with ideas for moving districts beyond their post-pandemic learning lag will have a chance to share them under the May budget revision, with an extra $1.1 billion for districts to spend on them.

    Newsom is proposing to add $378 million in each of the next three fiscal years to the Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant program — a massive, five-year state grant program approved in 2022-23. The grant program, targeted for the most struggling students, provides what districts in other states lack: state money to replace federal Covid funding that expired in September 2024.

    It’s unclear how much of the original $6.8 billion remains. As of a year ago, $4.8 billion hadn’t been spent, according to an analysis of the most recent state data by School Services of California. The proposed $1.1 billion would add to what’s left.

    Under the terms of the program, districts must solicit community views on spending the money on “evidence-based practices,” like tutoring or investing in teacher residences to retain new teachers. Districts will then have to spell out uses for the funding as a new entry in their annual Local Control and Accountability Plans.

    The timing is good. For example, the Legislature is likely to move districts toward adopting effective early literacy textbooks and effective ways to teach them. This new block grant money could amplify the more than $700 million that Newsom is also proposing for districts to improve early math and reading instruction.

    More districts are also indicating interest in high-impact tutoring, with additional research showing its effectiveness. Along with providing districts with a free, step-by-step guide and counseling for setting up a program, Stanford University-based National Student Support Accelerator is cosponsoring an effort for 40 California districts to design their own tutoring programs over the next year (go here for information on signing up).

    TK English learner funding workaround

    A decision by the Legislature that 4-year-olds in transitional kindergarten (TK) are too young to be tested for English proficiency could delay funding for services the children need before kindergarten. 

    Recognizing the problem, Newsom proposes a temporary fix in the May budget revision by providing $7.5 million in one-time money for 2025-26 and 2026-27.

    All students who speak a language other than English at home are required to take the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC) when they enroll in school to determine if they are English learners. But the law that legislators passed last year exempts students in transitional kindergarten from taking the test because of concerns that it was not age-appropriate. Without identifying English learners and providing funding for them under the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, schools are not required to provide unidentified students with language services or report their academic progress on the state dashboard.

    “It’s critical that we have funding to support our children, that we have the requirement to support our children, and that we’re doing so in the age and developmentally appropriate way that really keeps their assets in mind,” said Carolyne Crolotte, director of policy for Early Edge California, an organization that advocated for the exemption of TK students from ELPAC testing.

    Crolotte said Early Edge California has been researching what other states do to identify young English learners and is working with the State Board of Education and the National Institute for Early Education Research to identify alternative assessments.

    Newsom is also proposing $10 million for selecting and making available a new screener for schools to use with TK students to identify their language needs. However, there is a catch. The language the governor is suggesting for the budget bill states that the screener should not be used to identify students as English learners. Unless the Local Control Funding Formula is changed, schools would still not receive funds specifically for these students or be required by law to provide them with help to learn English.

    Declining enrollment’s ‘dividend’

    There’s a silver lining to the continued decline in TK-12 student enrollment in California. Per-student funding could grow statewide during much of the next decade if, according to state projections, student enrollment statewide drops by nearly 10%, to 5.25 million by 2033-34.

    That’s because the state will be apportioning money through what’s called Test 1 under Proposition 98, the formula that determines the minimum portion of the state’s General Fund that must be spent on TK-12 schools and community colleges. Under Test 1, that’s about 40% of the total. If state revenues grow at the same time as the number of kids shrinks, the result will be more money per student.

    The increase won’t be enough to prevent spending cuts or school closures in those districts with big drops in enrollment. But it should help ease the pain, and for districts with flat or growing enrollment, provide a modest increase in their share of the Local Control Funding Formula, which provides the bulk of their state funding; it is tied to average daily attendance. 

    Funding through Test 1 is a relatively recent development. In 1988, when they wrote Prop. 98, its authors didn’t foresee a period of declining enrollment. For the first 25 years, as student enrollment grew by more than 1 million, growth in student attendance, along with increases in personal income (Test 2) or increases in General Fund revenue plus 0.5% (Test 3), determined funding levels above or below the previous year.

    First invoked in 2011-12, Test I has been used in seven of the past eight years and will be in effect in 2025-26, and likely in the coming years. 

    The extra money systemwide will also give the Legislature and future governors new options. They could decide which new programs with soon-to-expire one-time funding, such as community schools, should receive permanent support. Or they could choose to phase in much-talked-about changes to the Local Control Funding Formula. These could include raising the base funding for all districts or building in a regional cost adjustment. Those are among the ideas in Assembly Bill 1204, which will get serious attention next year.

    The declining enrollment “dividend,” as it’s been called, “is kind of a boon for the education system,” said Julien Lafortune, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. 





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  • Grassroots contributions fueled bid to oust two from Orange County school board

    Grassroots contributions fueled bid to oust two from Orange County school board


    Packed crowd anticipates discussion on Orange Unified Parental Notification Policy on Sept. 8, 2023.

    Credit: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource

    A grassroots movement propelled by small contributions from teachers and local residents ousted two board members from an Orange County school district who supported controversial causes.

    The victory came despite opposing big money contributions from conservative organizations, Republican political figures and business leaders.

    More than 85% of the $227,000 raised by recall supporters came from over 400 individuals giving an average of about $450 each, with the rest coming mostly from teachers’ unions. More than 1 in 10 of the donations came from people who listed their employer as Orange Unified, including more than 25 teachers and board member Andrea Yamasaki.

    The money raised, said the recall movement’s co-chair, Darshan Smaaladen, “reflects the passion for our schools and our students in the district, and the care that our entire community has that we have great public schools.”

    By contrast, just under a third of the nearly $260,000 raised by opponents of the recall came from 115 individual donors, with the majority coming from conservative groups — led by the Lincoln Club of Orange County, which describes itself as “the oldest and largest conservative major donor organization in the state of California.” 

    Contributions also came from the re-election campaigns of Assemblymember Bill Essayli and Orange County Board of Education member Jorge Valdez, both Republicans, and the law firm of Shawn Steel, co-founder of the successful campaign to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003. 

    The donations are listed in disclosure forms filed Feb. 17, with some additional large donations reported before the election in early March. Board members Madison Miner and Rick Ledesma — who were repeatedly accused of promoting their own political ideologies at the expense of student learning and well-being — were removed when the recall passed by 3,500 votes.

    Following the money

    The No OUSD Recall group received a number of hefty donations — and was led by the Lincoln Club of Orange County, which gave a series of donations totaling $80,500, just under the $83,261 given by all individuals to that same campaign. 

    The Lincoln Club’s donations, which came from their State PAC and Issues PAC, accounted for 46% of the total campaign’s organizational contributions and 31% of donations across the board. 

    The Lincoln Club of Orange County is funded by various business groups, and more than half of its income comes from the group Angelenos for Outstanding State Leadership, which gets all its money from one organization singly funded by the McDonald’s Corp. 

    The McDonald’s Corp. did not respond to EdSource’s multiple requests for comment.  

    On top of the contributions from the Lincoln Club, three organizations connected to Mark Bucher — the CEO of the California Policy Center, a think tank that stands for the belief that “until we rein in government union power, there’s little hope for reform in our state” — collectively gave $66,000. 

    Bucher said in an interview with EdSource that he “was always an advocate” for the donations to the campaign. 

    He also said he previously served on the board of the Lincoln Club and that he left about a year ago. He claimed that unions have “financed the campaigns of just about every elected official,” and that the donations were an attempt to “offset, very frankly, corrupt practices.”

    Bucher, who supported the election of Ledesma and Miner, also said that “the trustees that got recalled were doing a spectacular job of representing parents and citizens and kids, and they were attacked constantly for it, and school board meetings have been a circus. It’s just ridiculous.”

    He added that his future in political advocacy and spending, including in the upcoming November election, depends on the candidates and issues at stake. 

    The law firm of Shawn Steel — the co-founder of the recall campaign, who has also served as the Republican Party of California’s national committeeman and wrote for the California Policy Center — also supported the No on Recall movement. Assemblyman Essayli, R-Riverside, who authored a failed statewide Assembly bill that would have required schools across California to notify parents if their child may be transgender, also contributed.

    His bill AB 1314 laid the foundation for a similar policy that has been adopted by more than a half-dozen school districts throughout the state.

    The Lincoln Club of Orange County’s executive director, Seth Morrison, along with Bucher criticized the teachers’ unions for backing the recall effort, and Morrison also claimed they were “tied in with a larger Democratic Party.” 

    He said that “they were looking for an excuse to do something like this. This is a bigger thing for them. …That’s something we saw, and we’re happy to engage to defend the people who just got elected.” 

    On the other hand, the recall campaign collected more money for their campaign from a number of individual contributions.

    Most donors to the recall effort gave small amounts, and Smaaladen said that the recall movement’s strategy of asking community members to “donate in honor of” a teacher, along with their matching events, made a large impact on the campaign. 

    Among a wealth of smaller contributions is also a series of sizable donations from the Orange Unified Education Association, which gave $52,086.50 — or 74% of the campaign’s organizational money and 19.5% of total contributions. 

    Educators and the unions representing them played an important role in both organizational and individual contributions. Teachers — including both the union and individual educators — gave the recall campaign $61,048.82, or 22.9%, of its money.

    Teachers unions from neighboring districts, alongside organizations and political action committees representing educators’ interests, also pitched in, giving just over $7,000 collectively. 

    Local organizations with political affiliations — including the Democratic Women of South Orange County and Democrats of North Orange County — carried far less weight, while the Josh Newman for Senate campaign donated $5,000. 

    Women for American Values and Ethics, which identifies itself as a “grassroots group dedicated to advancing progressive values and ethics,” gave $1,041 to the campaign, and the Community Action Fund of Planned Parenthood donated $2,500. 

    What drove each side of the recall 

    After OUSD’s board fired then-Superintendent Gunn Marie Hansen without explanation in January 2023, a group of OUSD parents and teachers banded together to start the grassroots recall movement. 

    The OUSD recall website explains that the group was motivated by decisions made by the school board, including a series of alleged violations to the Brown Act, banning the pride flag, passing a policy that requires school administrators to notify parents if their children show signs of being transgender and a temporary suspension of the district’s digital library because it included the book “The Music of What Happens,” a coming-of-age story about two boys who are in love. 

    “We knew that this board was not going to listen to parents and the district, and they weren’t going to do what was best for our students,” Smaaladen said. “We became this kind of ragtag group that has evolved into a grassroots movement of hundreds of involved parents.” 

    Smaaladen said the group opted to pursue the recall during the March primary in an effort to save the district money. The recall effort started gathering signatures in June 2023, and by October had collected enough to place the recall question on the ballot. 

    Recall leaders also decided to focus their effort on Ledesma and Miner — and dropped the attempt against board member Angie Rumsey and board President John Ortega because they are up for re-election this coming November. 

    However, the No OUSD Recall group has repeatedly stated in social media posts dating back to April 2023 that the recall effort is an attempt to attack parents’ rights. 

    “When we won our elections to the OUSD Board less than two years ago, we did so on the promise of defending parents’ rights, fighting for curriculum transparency, working to improve test scores, prioritizing student safety and ensuring education is not replaced with indoctrination,” Miner said in a statement to EdSource. 

    “We proudly followed through on those promises, and the radical recall attempt is the resulting backlash.” 

    Now, the five remaining school board members will have to decide whether to appoint two new members or to hold a special election; plus, three of the remaining board members’ terms expire this year. 

    “It has been a tumultuous year with the numerous changes within Orange Unified. The voters have spoken, and I look forward to our board being able to move past the politics and collaboratively focus on how to best support our districts’ students,” said Orange Unified School board member Ana Page in a statement to EdSource. 

    “I deeply appreciate the diverse perspectives and expertise that my fellow trustees will bring to future civil discussions that directly impact OUSD students and look forward to continuing the valuable work of supporting public education.”

    Beyond Orange Unified

    Before the voting started, both sides believed that the recall election against Ledesma and Miner would be consequential — not just for their district but for the state, and possibly, the nation as a whole. 

    “We’re going to see more of this, which is all the more reason why … we’re getting involved to stop it, to tell them that turning around and recalling someone not even a year after they’ve been in office is just a waste of taxpayer dollars. It’s just wrong,” the Lincoln Club’s Morrison said.

    Efforts to recall members of a school board aren’t uncommon in California and across the nation — though relatively few actually make it to the ballot, said Joshua Spivak, a senior research fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Law’s California Constitution Center and author of “Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom.” 

    Spivak said the number of school board recall efforts across the country grew especially during the Covid-19 pandemic — which he described as “arguably the biggest impact that a government ever had on our lives in our lifetime unless you were in WWII. But hardly any of them resulted in the removal of an elected official, he said.

    Since then, the number of recalls has dwindled, Spivak said. 

    In 2023, he said there were 102 recall attempts across the country — 29 of which were in California. Michigan, which is known to be the state where recalls are most popular, had 35 attempts that same year. 

    “Orange Unified will be setting a precedent,” Smaaladen said before the election. “But I hope the precedent we set is to send a clear message to those that are elected to school boards: to listen to their community and to make moderate decisions that are in line with what is best for the students and not necessarily their own personal agendas.” 

    She added that the recall election has forced the community to pay more attention to local politics, which she said has already and will continue to “change the trajectory of the district.” 

    “I’ve had numerous voters say, ‘Oh, I didn’t vote in November 2022,’ or even ‘I voted for Madison and Rick, but, you know, I wasn’t really paying attention because everything was fine,’” Smaaladen said. 

    “And when things are fine, it’s good, you can let it be. But now (voters are) paying attention.”





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  • Californians without high school education by county

    Californians without high school education by county


    Match your donation today

    EdSource has been on it when big shifts happen – like the Department of Education shutting down many areas of their work. But we also remain committed to following the long-term stories in our communities and having an impact through our reporting.

    Help us have an impact through data-driven, factual reporting. Your donation will be matched through June 11.





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  • Dozens of fixes proposed to deter more mega-cases of charter school fraud

    Dozens of fixes proposed to deter more mega-cases of charter school fraud


    A multi-ethnic group of elementary age children are playing with blocks in class at their desks.

    Credit: Christopher Futcher / iStock

    Audacious, multimillion dollar scandals by two California charter school operators within the past decade exposed vulnerabilities to fraud resulting from inept and negligent oversight and inadequate auditing. A pair of inquiries into those weaknesses have concluded that several dozen actions could help spot, address and potentially deter future attempts by charter school operators to evade state laws and regulations.

    Both reports were issued within the past two months. One is a joint effort of the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) and the Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team, a state fiscal oversight agency known as FCMAT. 

    The other is by the Anti-Fraud Task Force of the California Charter Authorizing Professionals, a nonprofit association for school districts and county offices of education. Its report reminded legislators and policymakers what’s at stake in failures of oversight: “Every theft of funds from our public schools not only harms the students, but also undermines public confidence in our public education system.” 

    A third and final report, concentrating on auditing reforms, will be released before June 30 by a multi-agency task force. Chaired by state Comptroller Malia Cohen, it was commissioned by San Diego Superior Court Judge Robert Longstreth, who presided over a jaw-dropping case of financial abuse.

    That case involved the now-defunct virtual charter school network A3 Education, which thrived because of a total breakdown of accountability systems. Its founders, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock, pleaded guilty in 2021 to a conspiracy to commit theft of public dollars, extracting $400 million in attendance-based state revenue, much of it based on phantom enrollments. They siphoned at least $50 million to a company they owned while promising services to students that were never provided. In return for serving four years on house arrest, the executives pledged to repay $37 million.

    A3 operated 19 charter schools approved by small school districts in a half-dozen counties that relied on the 1% to 3% in annual fees to balance their budgets. Collectively, the fees produced millions of dollars. The districts didn’t supervise effectively, because they lacked the capacity, expertise and, in some cases, motivation to hold charter schools accountable. 

    Big revenue for a tiny district

    Among them is Dehesa School District, with 84 students and one school in the San Diego County foothills. It chartered three A3 schools. Dehesa’s former superintendent was the only superintendent of the 11 people indicted in the A3 scandal.

    Dehesa also granted charters to two schools for Inspire Charter Schools, the other suspected perpetrator of large-scale fraud. Inspire, a home-school charter network with a dozen schools in multiple counties with, at one point, 24,380 students, directed 15% of its more than $100 million income to a corporation created by its founder, Herbert “Nick” Nichols III.

    Inspire enticed families to enroll by awarding $2,600 per student to spend on academic enrichment activities of their choice, including annual passes to Disneyland and Big Air Trampoline Park.

    An audit by FCMAT found that the records of financial expenditures and transfers of money from school to school, all run by Nichols’ central office, were so poorly kept and hard to track that FCMAT couldn’t prove fraud or other illegalities — although the deficiencies in recordkeeping increased the likelihood of them, the audit said. Nichols, who received $1,056,000 in advance pay, agreed to pay it back in a severance agreement in 2019 but declined repeated requests to speak with FCMAT, according to the audit.

    A3 and Inspire may have committed the largest-scale fraud, but they weren’t the only cases of embezzlement and probably won’t be the last. Last week, Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, who chairs the Assembly Education Committee, and Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, requested approval of a state audit of a charter school and related operations after whistleblowers told Sacramento TV news channel ABC10 about suspected fraud, waste and abuse of public funds. The audit would include examining oversight of the district authorizer, Twin Rivers Unified.

    The employees of Sacramento-based Highlands Community Charter School asserted problems that include falsified student attendance numbers, cronyism and misuse of public funds for luxury gifts for staff and students, staff bonuses, and political contributions. Highlands Community Charter enrolls adult immigrant students for career and technical courses and English language instruction.

    Reports by both LAO-FCMAT and the authorizers’ task force make similar recommendations for effective oversight, such as demanding that nonprofit charter school boards scrutinize third-party contracts for conflicts of interest and annual financial audits. In return for authorizers doing more work, the LAO-FCMAT report would raise their fees to 3% of a charter school’s Local Control Funding Formula revenue.

    The LAO-FCMAT report calls for limiting small school districts’ ability to authorize charter schools with enrollment no larger than the district’s own. It suggests creating a new entity to approve and oversee all-virtual charter schools, which currently must seek multiple distinct authorizers in many counties, complicating coherent oversight. 

    The task force calls for establishing a statewide Office of Inspector General, perhaps under the state Attorney General, to investigate and prosecute financial fraud in school districts, community colleges and charter schools. The office would have the power to issue subpoenas and prosecute.

    Demand more of charter authorizers

    Past attempts to legislate reforms broke down amid contention between school districts and charter schools’ advocates. But David Patterson, a founding member and now president of the California Charter Authorizing Professionals, said he’s optimistic that collaborative work over two years will resolve disagreements.

    He said the bulk of recommendations would not require statutory or regulatory changes and could be adopted immediately. They’d involve creating a fraud risk management program for all charter schools and charter management organizations, as well as district and county authorizers. Elements would include regularly training charter school board members and fleshing out expectations and statutory obligations for authorizers which, Patterson acknowledged, are “outmoded and insufficient.” Even some of the small authorizers “that everyone wants to pick on, deservedly so, probably met minimal requirements” under the state’s 30-year-old charter school law, he said.

    There also would be clear procedures for filing complaints of suspected fraud, including a statewide hotline, Patterson said. Currently, there are no formal channels for reporting suspected fraud. Jeff Rice, founding director of APLUS+, which advances personalized learning models for 91 member charter schools in California, said he called out Inspire for the Disneyland passes, and others complained to authorizers and county offices about illegal enrollment practices, to no avail, he said.

    ‘The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office charged A3’s founders and administrators with defrauding the state by inflating tuition revenue by purchasing children’s personal information from private and public schools and then enrolling them without families’ knowledge. FCMAT suspected Inspire did something similar by manipulating enrollments in a multitrack attendance schedule.

    Eric Premack, executive director of the Charter Schools Development Center in Sacramento, a veteran charter school adviser and advocate, put the blame on auditors and authorizers for not detecting the fraud.

    “Even the smallest authorizer spending 20 minutes in the school could have and should have found this. If it’s a brick-and-mortar school, go visit at least a couple of classrooms,” he said. “And if there’s no students in the classroom and no teaching going on, you know you have a problem. In an independent study program, go in, look at the enrollment list. And then say, ‘I want to see this kid’s work.’”

    Both reports suggest improvements in the auditing process.

    • Charter school audits are not required to extensively examine enrollment and attendance records. The LAO-FCMAT report would require an auditor to flag for the board and authorizer any monthly variation in enrollment or attendance numbers exceeding 5%. 
    • Sampling records and transactions for compliance is critical to detecting discrepancies. The standard practice is for the auditor to choose what should be sampled. But the LAO-FCMAT report said that in recent cases of fraud, the school had provided the sample. The report calls for mandating that the auditors choose. 
    • Charter schools must choose an auditor from a state-sanctioned list. But there’s no requirement that auditors have any expertise in doing school audits. That would change. Auditors on the state list would be required to take regular training in school financing and regulations.

    The anti-fraud task force and LAO-FCMAT reports focused on non-classroom-based charters because that’s where cases of fraud, including A3 and Inspire, have largely been concentrated. Non-classroom-based charters are defined as schools in which less than 80% of instruction occurs in a classroom.

    Contrary to widespread belief, few of them are strictly online schools, as the LAO and FCMAT discovered. About a quarter of the state’s 1,200 charter schools are non-classroom-based, serving 38% of charter school students. Post-COVID, the combination of hybrid schools and home-based schools that spend part of the week in school facilities is a fast-growing sector of schools. Most report they offer no virtual instruction or are primarily classroom‑based.

    Classification as a non-classroom-based charter imposes a set of requirements to qualify for full funding. Class sizes can be no larger than 25 to 1; schools must spend at least 40% of their revenue on certificated teachers and staff and 80% of their budget on instruction.  

    In a recommendation that surprised and pleased most charter advocates, the LAO-FCMAT report recommends narrowing the definition of non-classroom schools to those offering less than 50% instruction in a classroom. Schools would be able to count facilities expenses as part of instruction, and qualify for after-school funding that other schools receive.

    “We question whether a whole bunch of charter schools should have to go through the funding determination process,” said Mike Fine, FCMAT’s CEO. “The name non-classroom-based charter school is a misnomer for many schools that don’t have a virtual component, have a robust facility (operation) and a cost structure that isn’t any different from any other school.”

    In 2019, the Legislature imposed a two-year moratorium on passing new non-classroom-based charter schools, and has twice extended it. The moratorium expires in 2026.

    Fine said the idea behind the LAO-FCMAT report was to air issues and propose solutions in order to avoid another moratorium extension. “Come next year,” he said, “this will provide a foundation for a starting point of a discussion.”





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  • NYC: ICE Snatches High School Student Who Entered Legally

    NYC: ICE Snatches High School Student Who Entered Legally


    Michael Elden-Rooney wrote in Chalkbeat about the arrest and detention of a public high school student in New York City, which has spurred protests on the student’s behalf. He was attending a school for students learning English. His earnings after school were devoted to helping his mother and two younger siblings move out of a shelter and into an apartment. He entered the country legally. Mayor Eric Adams, who is indebted to Trump for pardoning him, has remained silent.

    The campaign pushing for the release of a Bronx high school student arrested by immigration authorities last week continued to escalate with a new legal petition challenging the validity of his detention.

    Attorneys for Dylan, 20, a native of Venezuela, made several moves Thursday they hope will slow, and ultimately stymie, the government’s efforts to fast-track his deportation following his arrest last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents after a routine court date.

    Dylan is the first known current New York City public school student to be detained by immigration authorities in President Donald Trump’s second term. In the days following Chalkbeat’s Monday report on Dylan’s arrest, his case has become national news and galvanized local efforts to oppose Trump’s immigration policies, including a rally Thursday on the steps of the city’s Education Department headquarters in lower Manhattan.

    Dylan’s attorneys from the New York Legal Assistance Group, or NYLAG, filed a “habeas corpus” petition late Thursday night in federal court in Western Pennsylvania, where Dylan is being held, arguing that immigration officials violated his due process rights by preventing him from making full use of the court system. They assert that Dylan is ineligible for “expedited” deportation because he had legal permission to enter the country under a Biden-era humanitarian program.

    Dylan’s arrest was part of a nationwide enforcement blitz where government lawyers move to dismiss migrants’ immigration cases, allowing authorities to arrest them on the spot and thrust them into a fast-tracked deportation process with fewer legal protections.

    Officials from the Department of Homeland security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new legal petition. They previously criticized former President Joseph Biden’s policy allowing migrants like Dylan to enter the country and said “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been.”

    For the first week of his detention, Dylan’s lawyers could not reach him because he was shuttled so rapidly between four different states, according to a NYLAG spokesperson and his mother, Raiza, whose last name is being withheld at her request to avoid retaliation.

    His lawyers finally managed to make contact Wednesday morning — just in time to prepare him for an interview with an asylum officer about whether he has a “credible fear” of returning to Venezuela — a hurdle Dylan must clear to avoid immediate deportation.

    The interview took place early Thursday morning, with no advance notice to Dylan’s lawyers. They were only able to get a lawyer patched into the interview after Raiza alerted them shortly before, according to one of the attorneys….

    “Dylan’s arrest and ongoing detention cause him enormous and continued harm,” the filing alleges. “He has been ripped away from his high school studies, his work, and his mother and young siblings who rely on him.” The full-time student at ELLIS Prep, which caters to older newly arrived immigrants, has also been working part-time as a delivery worker, helping his mom and two younger siblings move out of a shelter and into their own apartment. 

    His attorneys argue that Dylan’s arrest and detention have curtailed his ability to access the court system — a violation of the due process rights guaranteed to anyone in the U.S., regardless of immigration status. In addition to his asylum claim, Dylan is applying for Special Immigration Juvenile Status, a type of legal protection for youth under 21 who can’t be reunited with both parents (his father passed away years ago), according to the petition.

    Dylan was scheduled to have a hearing in family court for that case Friday morning but was unlikely to be able to attend from detention — endangering his case, according to his attorneys.

    The lawyers argue that Dylan was never eligible for “expedited removal” in the first place, since the procedure is not meant for people who were “admitted or paroled” into the country like Dylan was, according to federal immigration law.

    Adding to the urgency of the situation is the fact that Dylan is facing severe gastrointestinal issues that doctors were still trying to diagnose when he was detained. “These specialists are currently in the process of assessing whether Dylan’s symptoms are the result of cancer or [Crohn’s] disease,” and recommended an “immediate in-person follow up appointment,” the filing states...

    Meanwhile, Dylan’s case has continued to pick up public attention. An online fundraiser that launched Wednesday to help Dylan’s mom with expenses related to his legal case and caring for her two younger children had collected more than $27,000 by Friday morning.

    And hundreds of supporters — including elected officials and city schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos — rallied outside of the Education Department’s downtown Manhattan headquarters calling for his release.

    Chants of “Free Dylan” echoed through the crowd of teachers union members, immigration advocates, students, and anti-Trump protesters.

    “Dylan is a student, a worker, and part of our community. He did everything right, and still, ICE tore him away from his life and family in New York,” U.S. Rep. Nydia Velasquez said in a statement, the second federal elected official to publicly challenge Dylan’s detention.



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  • State’s school awards dinner at Disneyland comes with hefty price tag

    State’s school awards dinner at Disneyland comes with hefty price tag


    State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, center, stands with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, alongside Lisette Estrella-Henderson, center right, the Solano County Superintendent of Schools, at Disneyland in Anaheim during the California School Recognition Program in 2019.

    Credit: Lisette Estrella-Henderson / X

    California schools that have significantly improved student achievement will be honored in a ceremony hosted by the California Department of Education at Disneyland on Friday, but the $500 per person ticket price has some superintendents fuming.

    Districts pay between $460 and $500 per person to attend the California School Recognition Program Awards Ceremony, depending on when they register. They also pay the cost of employee travel to Anaheim and for their lodging. The Disneyland Hotel is offering a conference rate of $324, plus taxes and fees. Parking is $60 per vehicle. 

    The price tag is leaving some superintendents conflicted. Do they send teachers and other staff to celebrate their school’s success, or do they use the money to pay for other needs, such as professional development, tutors or supplies?

    “The state understands that most districts, a majority of districts right now, are in budget constriction and deficit spending,” said Anne Hubbard, superintendent of the tiny 900-student TK-6 Hope Elementary School District in Santa Barbara. “And it seems just crazy that the CDE would be the host of this event, this honoring, this lifting up of education, with a price tag that just does not make sense to me.”

    The annual awards ceremony celebrates California Distinguished Schools, National Blue Ribbon Schools, Green Ribbon Schools Green Achievers and Civic Learning Awards Schools. It is expected to draw 1,300 people to the hotel, according to event organizers.

    The event, which has been held at the venue for decades, will cost more than half a million dollars. It is paid for with registration fees and sponsorships.

    School may have a nacho party instead 

    Hubbard was proud and excited when she learned that Vieja Valley Elementary — one of the district’s three schools — had been named a California Distinguished School. She quickly booked a few rooms at the Disneyland Hotel and proceeded to the registration page to see if there was a limit to the number of employees she could send.

    “I was completely floored when I got to the checkout and saw the price tag for attending the ceremony — $490, plus a $10 processing fee,” Hubbard said. 

    Hubbard asked event organizers if her staff could forgo the dinner and be in attendance to receive the award. She said she was told everyone must pay to attend. Hubbard decided it would be less expensive and more inclusive to celebrate with the entire staff and is considering a nacho bar.

    Demian Barnett, superintendent/principal of nearby Peabody Charter School, will pick up the award for Vieja Valley Elementary. He and another administrator plan to make the three-hour round trip to avoid room charges. Two teachers from the school will stay overnight.

    “We found a way to be able to support four people to go, but I would be using that money to do programming with kids here if I wasn’t doing this,” he said last week.

    Funding help available, CDE says

    The California Department of Education can not directly fund awards or recognition programs because the Legislature has not authorized it to spend taxpayer funds in this way, said Elizabeth Sanders, director of communications for the CDE.

    She says honorees should first look to their district foundation to cover the cost of attending the awards dinner, but can also contact the department for help obtaining a sponsor or a scholarship, if funds are available. Honorees who do not attend will receive their award by mail at no charge, she said.

    A check of the registration website last week found no mention of scholarships, and superintendents who spoke to EdSource were not aware that funding could be available.

    The only district team that directly requested financial assistance this year has been able to find local support and is registered for the event, Sanders said.

    Photos and giant mice

    The California School Recognition Program Awards Ceremony will start at 10 a.m. with group photos taken throughout the day, according to the California Department of Education registration webpage. 

    Guests can also wait in line to take photos with Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, passing sponsor and district booths as they move along. Mickey and Minnie Mouse are on hand for photos as well. 

    The awards dinner begins at 6 p.m. with entertainment usually provided by student musicians, according to past attendees. It is scheduled to last three hours.

    Distance can make travel costs prohibitive

    Ferndale Unified in Humboldt County will spend more than $10,000 from its general fund to send Principal/Superintendent Danielle Carmesin and two Ferndale Elementary School teachers to Anaheim.

    Because of the school’s distance from the event — 662 miles — the school’s staff will fly to Anaheim and stay two nights.

    The cost is steep for a district struggling with budget cuts, but district leaders decided it was important to celebrate the big improvements the school has made in math, English and science scores on the state’s California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, or CAASPP tests.

    “It’s all just a publicity stunt, but if you don’t show up, then that’s not fair for my school,” Carmesin said. “So they have you kind of over a barrel, and it’s like, we haven’t won it in over 10 years; my face is going to be in that picture.”

    Live Oak Unified is sending half its teachers

    The cost of the event is prohibitive for rural schools, said Yuri Calderon, executive director of the Small Schools Districts’ Association. Calderon said many small districts are struggling to make ends meet, and have staffing shortages that take precedence.

    Live Oak Unified in rural Sutter County is sending the principal of Encinal Elementary School and two teachers to the dinner in Anaheim to collect a Distinguished School Award. The school won the award for the first time by improving test scores and suspension rates, said Superintendent Mathew Gulbrandsen.

     Gulbrandsen would have sent more staff to the awards ceremony, but the cost limits the number of people who can participate, he said. Additionally, the school would have to pay substitutes $120 each to cover classes because the event is on a Friday.

    “I mean that school itself is a small school — 120 students,” he said. “Five teachers, a principal, a secretary. There’s no way all of them could attend on a workday. You’d have to shut the school down. So we can’t do that.” 

    They want more for their money

    Sanders said that a $500 registration fee is pretty standard for a daylong conference, but superintendents interviewed by EdSource said they expected more for the money — possibly some workshops or a keynote speaker.

    “So, I thought, OK, is Taylor Swift playing? What’s going on? Hubbard said. “And really to find out that there is nothing, and you have to attend the banquet in order … to just pick up the award. I would have taken a team down there, taken them out to dinner for under $500 by the way.”

    Hubbard said she has attended many two- and three-day conferences that include multiple meals that cost less than the awards dinner at Disneyland. 

    When she previously attended the National Blue Ribbon School Award celebration in Washington, D.C., Hubbard paid for travel and rooms, but no registration fee. The event included three days of speakers and workshops. Every school receives a National Blue Ribbon School flag and plaque at the awards luncheon, according to the website. 

    The California School Boards Association offers one free ticket to the Golden Bell Awards Ceremony to each school district or county office that wins. Each additional ticket is $150. The event, which will take place at the Hyatt Regency in Sacramento on Dec. 4, includes appetizers and dessert. It honors outstanding programs and governance practices of California school boards.

    Conference breaks even 

    With 1,300 attending this year, the registration fees for the California School Recognition Program Awards Ceremony will bring in at least $600,000, plus contributions from corporate sponsors such as Pearson, Garner Holt Education Through Imagination, Smart School, the California State Lottery and the California Association of School Business Officials.

    “We’re not accumulating a big pile of money that we kick back to the department or anything like that,” said Ed Honowitz, chief executive officer of Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation, the CDE’s nonprofit foundation. “It really is kind of essentially a break-even kind of thing. Sometimes, there’s some carryover from one year to the other, but it’s kind of minimal.”

    Registration and sponsorship funds are collected, and bills for the awards event are paid by the Californians Dedication to Education Foundation, but the event is run by CDE staff, Honowitz said.

    Rising conference costs are causing challenges for organizations across the state, he said.

    The CDE has worked to make the conference as affordable as possible, even considering cutting the visits from Minnie and Mickey Mouse to save money, Sanders said. In the end, it was decided that the cost of the mice — a few hundred dollars, according to Sanders — was worthwhile.

    Suites for top CDE executives

    According to a former manager who has attended the event within the last five years, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and other high-level CDE staff stayed in suites with access to a VIP area with complimentary food and beverages.

    The former manager described the room as a corner suite with a kitchen, living room and bedroom, and large windows that allowed a view of the nightly fireworks at Disneyland. Similar rooms as the one described go for $1,252 at the regular rate, according to the website.

    Rooms, travel and meals for volunteers and staff are paid for by sponsors and do not come from registration costs, Sanders said. 

    Carmesin says the cost of the event shows that CDE leaders are disconnected from the work educators do.

    “You know, they think they’re celebrating us, but giving me an invoice didn’t make me feel very celebratory,” she said.





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  • Peter Greene: The Perverse Incentives of School Choice

    Peter Greene: The Perverse Incentives of School Choice


    Peter Greene nails one of the many flaws of school choice. The choice movement hurtles forward despite its record of failure to fulfill any of its promises but one: It provides choice. Not necessarily good choice or better choice. Just choice.

    Greene writes:

    When researcher Josh Cowen is talking about the negative effects of school vouchers on education, he often points at “subprime” private schools— schools opened in strip malls or church basements or some other piece of cheap real estate and operated by people who are either fraudsters or incompetents or both.

    This is a feature, not a bug. Because as much as choice advocates tout the awesomeness of competition, the taxpayer-funded free market choice system that we’ve been saddled with has built in perverse incentives that guarantee competition will be focused on the wrong things.

    The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. Now, the marketing can be based on superior quality, but sometimes it’s just easier to go another way.

    The thing about voucher schools is that quality is not what makes them money. What makes them money is signing people up.

    That’s it. Voucher school operators don’t have to run a good school; they just have to sell the seats. Once the student is signed up and their voucher dollars are in the bank, the important part of the transaction is over. There is no incentive for the school to spend a pile of money on doing a good job; all the incentive is for the school to come up with a good marketing plan.

    Betsy DeVos liked to compare the free market for schools with a row of food trucks, which was wrong for a host of reasons, but one was the market speed. Buy lunch at a food truck, and you become part of the marketing very quickly. Within minutes, you are either a satisfied customer telling your friends to eat there, or warning everyone to stay away. Reputations are built quickly.

    But for schools, the creation of a reputation for quality takes a long time, time measured in years. The most stable part of the voucher school market is schools that already have their reputation in place from years of operation. But if you are a start-up, you need to get that money for those seats right now. If you are a struggling crappy private school with a not-so-great reputation, you don’t have time to turn that around; you’ve got to up your marketing game right now.

    So the focus (and investment) goes toward marketing and enrollment.

    Won’t your poor performance catch up with you? Maybe, but the market turns over yearly, as students age out and age in to school. And you don’t have to capture much of it. If you are in an urban center with 100,000 students and your school just needs to fill 100 seats, disgruntled former families won’t hurt you much– just get out there and pitch to the other 99,900 students. And if you do go under, well, you made a nice chunk of money for a few years, and now you can move on to your next grift.

    This is also why the “better” private schools remain unavailable to most families holding a voucher. If a reputation for quality is your main selling point, you can’t afford to let in students who might hurt that record of success.

    Meanwhile, talk to teachers at some of the less-glowing private and charter schools about the amount of pressure they get to make the student numbers look good.

    Because of the way incentives are structured, the business of a voucher school is not education. The business of the voucher school is to sell seats, and the education side of the business exists only to help sell seats. Our version of a free market system guarantees that the schools will operate backwards, an enrollment sales business with classrooms set up with a primary purpose of supporting the sales department, instead of vice versa.

    Charter schools? The same problem, but add one other source of revenue– government grants. Under Trump, the feds will offer up a half a billion dollars to anyone who wants to get into the charter biz, and we already know that historically one dollar out of every four will go to fraud or waste, including charter businesses that will collect a ton of taxpayer money and never even open.

    “Yeah, well,” say the haters. “Isn’t that also true for public schools”

    No, it is not. Here’s why. Public schools are not businesses. They are service providers, not commodity vendors. Like the post office, like health care in civilized countries, like snow plows, like (once upon a time) journalism, their job is to provide a necessary service to the citizens of this country. Their job should be not to compete, but to serve, for the reasons laid out here.

    And this week-ass excuse for accountability– if you do a bad enough job, maybe it will make it harder for your marketing department– has been sold as the only accountability that school choice needs.

    School choice, because its perverse incentives favor selling seats over educating students, is ripe for enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s name for the process by which operators make products deliberately worse in order to make them more profitable. The “product” doesn’t have to be good– just good enough not to mess up the sales. And with no meaningful oversight to determine where the “good enough” line should be drawn, subprime voucher and charter schools are free to see just how close to the bottom they can get. It is far too easy to transform into a backwards business, which is why it should not be a business at all.

    If your foundational belief is that nobody ever does anything unless they can profit from it (and therefor everything must be run “like a business”) then we are in “I don’t know how to explain that you should care about other people” territory, and I’m not sure what to tell you. What is the incentive to work in a public education system? That’s a whole other post, but I would point to Daniel Pink’s theory of motivation– autonomy, mastery and purpose. Particular a purpose that is one centered on making life better for young human beings and a country better for being filled with educated humans. I am sure there are people following that motivation in the school choice world, but they are trapped in a model that is inhospitable to such thinking.



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  • How school districts can better manage disagreement about difficult topics

    How school districts can better manage disagreement about difficult topics


    Credit: Alison Yin/EdSource

    School districts nationwide are grappling with whether, how and when to teach about LGBTQ and race-related issues. Deep-seated divisions are playing out in school board meetings, local social media, and directly between parents and educators.

    We have been surveying American adults’ beliefs about the potentially contested topics elementary and high school children should be learning in school since 2022. Based on our results, here are eight suggestions for those struggling to thread the needle between students learning to respectfully engage with diverse opinions, honoring parental authority and avoiding indoctrination.

    Start with common ground.

    Among the most surprising and hopeful results was strong bipartisan support for public schools. Adults are overwhelmingly supportive of public education, while wanting to see it improve. This bipartisan support for public schools provides a critical foundation necessary for communities to thread the needle.

    Seek to understand others’ underlying beliefs.

    Key to compromise is understanding others’ perspectives. We found large gaps related to core values; for example, three-quarters of Democrats think teaching children to embrace differences is a very important purpose of education, compared with just one-third of Republicans. More Republicans (81%) are worried about children feeling guilty if they learn about historical racism compared with Democrats (33%). More Republicans are worried than Democrats that learning about transgender or gay people might make children think about whether they are or want to be trans or gay. In both groups, people are somewhat more concerned about their children learning about trans people (66% of Republicans versus 23% of Democrats) than they are about lessons about gay people (55% versus 20%). We are better at listening to others’ perspectives when we feel heard ourselves.

    Come up with processes for reconciling disagreement.

    Adults disagree about processes for reconciling disagreement regarding the content children are learning in school. This means communities need to develop mutually agreeable consensus-building processes like public panel deliberation, advisory groups and provisions for dissent. Involving children and teens could develop their current and future civic capabilities.

    Educate adults about the challenges and consequences of opting children out of classroom content.

    We learned that a brief message specifying potential benefits of children learning diverse perspectives, and the logistical drawbacks of opting individual children out of lessons, substantially reduces the opt-out preference, by 15 percentage points (25%), from 57% to 42%. This approach was equally effective for Democrats and Republicans and when considering younger and older students. Educators and school boards could use this model to craft messages sharing potential challenges and benefits relevant to their own communities.

    Double down on approaches with broad support, like assigning diverse texts.

    Three-quarters of adults (64% of Republicans and 87% of Democrats) agree children should read books written by people from racial minority groups because they provide different experiences and perspectives. Teachers may find assigning and discussing age-appropriate books written by diverse authors to address topics of race, gender and sexuality to be an approach their communities will accept.

    Support teachers in facilitating discussion of potentially contested topics.

    Rand’s nationally representative survey of teachers shows many are afraid to facilitate potentially contentious discussions and lack guidance from their leadership. Curriculum and aligned professional learning should be designed to equip teachers with the skills and confidence they need to facilitate their students’ discussions of potentially contested topics. School and district leaders can also make clear their support for such discussions.

    Inform and involve parents.

    Transparency about how district curriculum content addresses state learning standards provides this insight. Parents will also benefit their children and themselves by learning about the diversity of perspectives within their community, and of the necessity of collaboratively resolving competing perspectives. Once processes are defined, parents, school board members and educators will need to build safeguards and respect for the system they collectively design.

    Remind everyone that children will live, study, work and be citizens of diverse local, national and international communities.

    Students need to learn about and how to communicate effectively with others, including those with different beliefs and backgrounds. Schools need to provide open forums allowing for sharing and evaluating both dominant and nondominant perspectives without fear of reprisal. A difficult tension for schools and teachers to manage is avoiding “indoctrination,” while maintaining norms of respect and care for others. Schools must intervene if/when students’ values negatively affect how they treat each other, indeed upholding the Golden Rule (i.e., “do unto others as you’d have done to you”)—a fundamental tenet of most religions and belief systems worldwide — requires they do.

    Educating children in our pluralistic democracy is challenging. We suggest a path forward for educators, parents, and school boards, ultimately to children’s benefit.

    •••

    Anna Saavedra is a research scientist in the Center for Applied Research in Education within the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research. USC is a private research university located in Los Angeles.

    Morgan Polikoff is a professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

    The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors. 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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