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  • Bay Area district settles suit alleging inequitable education practices

    Bay Area district settles suit alleging inequitable education practices


    Black students and English learners were disproportionately placed in special education in Pittsburg Unified, according to a lawsuit recently settled.

    Alison Yin/EdSource

    A Bay Area school district has settled a lawsuit claiming that Black students and English learners were denied a proper education and were disproportionately suspended, expelled or funneled into special education classrooms offering poor instruction.

    Pittsburg Unified School District in Contra Costa County reached the settlement on Oct. 23 in a suit filed in 2021 by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.

    As part of the agreement, the district agreed to hire two independent consultants to help address the issues raised in the case — the district’s disciplinary practices, special education placement and literacy education for students with disabilities, especially English learners. 

    “This is an excellent settlement that is an important step in the right direction for Pittsburg Unified,” said Linnea Nelson, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “It seeks to dismantle past practices that have marginalized students, particularly Black students, English learners and disabled students.”

    The case

    The lawsuit claimed that the district illegally denied meaningful instruction to Black students, students with disabilities and English learners; that special education teachers were not trained to teach disabled students grade-level standards, and that general education teachers were not trained to differentiate their instruction for disabled students.

    According to the complaint, one plaintiff, special education teacher Michell Redfoot, claimed that the district dissuaded teachers from holding special education students to the same standards as general education students. Another plaintiff, Mark S., an English learner with autism, spent his school days doing arts and crafts and watching Disney movies, instead of learning to read and write.

    Pittsburg Unified meted out discipline, including suspensions and expulsions, to disabled students and Black students at disproportionate rates, the complaint stated. The district had one of the largest disparities between Black and white students in the state for days of instruction missed due to disruption or defiance, according to the suit. It also claimed that Black students were transported to psychiatric wards at three times the rate of other students. 

    Jessica Black says her daughter, who has since graduated from high school, is still traumatized from an incident when she was in the sixth grade and the school called police, strapped her to a gurney and transported her to a psychiatric ward.

    “The fact that the state sanctions this level of violence — that we pay for with tax dollars — is egregious,” Black said.

    After the approval of the settlement at a meeting on Oct. 23, Pittsburg Unified board President Heliodoro Moreno read a statement on behalf of the board, stating that district practices affecting Black students, English learners and disabled students were not consistent with a district that views itself as a champion of equity and inclusivity. 

    “For instance, Black/African American students have and continue to have suspensions at a disproportionate rate than their peers,” according to the statement. “Our system requires consistent courage, honest dialogue, and continuous growth to interrupt practices that lead to disproportionate outcomes for our scholars, especially for some of our African American scholars and scholars receiving special education services.”

    The settlement

    Superintendent Janet Schulze said the district had been working to address issues even before the suit was filed and that the settlement process will ultimately improve the district in the long run.

    “The settlement agreement is focused on areas where we still have work to do, and I see it as a positive outcome of a hard process,” Schulze said in a statement to EdSource.

    The district agreed to hire two independent experts who will create a plan to address the issues.

    One expert, Mildred Browne, will address how the district disciplines students and places students into special education, while the other, Linda Cavazos, will address the district’s early literacy program for special education students with an emphasis on English learners.

    The district had previously been working with Browne and recognized the importance of retaining her.

    “It will allow us to continue and deepen the work we have been doing and were already doing when we were served with the lawsuit,” Schulze stated in an email to EdSource.

    Under the agreement, working with the district, Browne and Cavazos will create a plan by next May, and then, through 2028-29, monitor the district’s progress in implementing their recommendations. They will submit reports twice a year that will be publicly presented to the board.

    The district had previously come under scrutiny for its special education practices. The 2021 suit alleges that the district failed to implement recommendations to improve special education evaluations made in 2016 by Frances Stetson, another consultant. 

    According to Stetson’s report, “the positives to report are few and the concerns are many.” It noted that the district fell below the state requirement that disabled students spend at least 80% of their day in a general education classroom — a concern echoed in the 2021 suit.

    Nelson, the ACLU attorney, is hopeful that the district will address the issues this time because the settlement agreement is legally binding with accountability measures. 

    She added that the district has already taken important steps demonstrating good faith, such as eliminating “willful defiance” as a reason for suspension, ahead of a statewide requirement.

    Pittsburg Unified was flagged by the California Department of Education for having significant “disproportionality“, which happens when students of a certain race or ethnicity in a district are three times more likely to be identified as having a disability, receiving discipline or being placed in special education for three years in a row.

    Black students at Pittsburg Unified were more likely to be identified as having an emotional disability or other health impairment. But Schulze said the district is no longer flagged for significant disproportionality.

    Malhar Shah, an ACLU attorney who previously worked on the case as an attorney for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, said the settlement could create a program that is a model for other districts.

    Literacy is a hot-button topic in education right now, but Shah said that literacy instruction in California doesn’t always address the individual needs of a student. For instance, plaintiff Mark S. has unique needs as both an English learner and a student with autism. Teachers in California need training on how to best support all students with evidence-based literacy instruction, Shah said.

    However, Black, one of the parent plaintiffs in the suit, is not optimistic that the settlement will result in the serious change that students like her daughter would have needed. Her daughter’s time at Pittsburg Unified was marked by fighting to get her daughter the social-emotional support and tutoring she needed, Black said. But even under the threat of litigation, her daughter’s education didn’t improve. She said she lost faith in the district and the state of California.

    Ultimately, Black pulled her daughter out of Pittsburg Unified and sent her to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with family members. She thrived in the school system there, graduating from high school early. A teacher at Pittsburg Unified told her daughter that welding or manual labor were her only career options. Black is proud that her daughter is currently studying to be a registered nurse.

    She said educators in Minnesota “stopped, paused and listened” to her daughter, and “considered what she needed.”

    The case against Pittsburg Unified also named the state of California as a defendant, claiming that, by not intervening, the state failed to protect students’ fundamental right to an education. The state settled its part of the case separately this summer.

    Shah said the state previously took a “hands-off approach,” relying on school districts to monitor themselves when data showed that certain racial or ethnic groups were disproportionately harmed by school practices.

    The state agreed in a settlement to monitor districts much more closely by reviewing individual student files, observing classrooms and conducting interviews. 

    Malhar said this is important because there are plenty of problems in school districts that don’t “pop up on paper.”





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  • LAUSD settles lawsuit over federal money it unlawfully denied to Archdiocese schools

    LAUSD settles lawsuit over federal money it unlawfully denied to Archdiocese schools


    Isabel Dueñas teaches her transitional kindergarten students how to read at San Miguel Catholic School in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.

    Credit: Archdiocese of Los Angeles

    The article was updated to include a statement that LAUSD Supt. Alberto Carvalho issued on Dec.23.

    Los Angeles Unified has settled a 3-year-old lawsuit with the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles over how much federal Title I funding low-income students within the archdiocese are entitled to receive. The district agreed to pay the $3 million it improperly withheld from archdiocese schools and to comply with federal regulations requiring transparency and consultation with the archdiocese it had repeatedly violated.

    The agreement covered 2018-19 and 2019-20, when Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) first changed the method of determining student eligibility for Title I and cut funding by more than 90%, from $9.5 million for the eligible 13,000 students in the archdiocese to $757,000.

    The LAUSD school trustees signed off on the agreement in a closed session Dec. 11 and did not publicly disclose details after announcing the vote. A district spokesperson declined comment before publication of the article. 

    But Paul Escala, superintendent of the Los Angeles Archdiocese schools, said the agreement sends a clear message. It “ensures that non-public school students who are eligible for these services will get them. While that may seem basic, when we’ve operated in an environment where that was not clear and was not being upheld, that is a win for kids,” he said.

    “This recognizes that kids who attend Catholic schools in urban Los Angeles, not only are they eligible for Title I services, but in fact suffer with poverty and needs just like their public school district peers,” he said.

    Since its passage in 1968, Congress extended Title I funding to poor students in private schools, including religious schools, to boost their chances for success. However, to avoid directly funding religious schools, Congress decided that districts in which private and religious schools are located should determine student eligibility and consult with the schools on which services, such as counseling, the students should receive.

    Districts have a menu of methods for determining Title I eligibility. The simplest and generally most advantageous for private schools is to use census data to determine the level of poverty in a neighborhood and calculate eligibility as the proportion of low-income students that attend a private school. It’s the method most large urban districts have used, Escala said, including LAUSD and Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where Alberto Carvalho was superintendent before becoming LAUSD superintendent in 2022. That approach also meets the spirit of Title I, he said.

    An incentive to deny Title I to private school kids

    Under Superintendent Austin Beutner’s incoming administration, the district changed the eligibility process for 2018-19 without prior notice to require schools to document family incomes through surveys or the number of income-eligible students registered for the federal subsidized meals programs. Along with requiring more time, paperwork and verification by the schools, the district changed the reporting rules several times in a short period and failed to engage the archdiocese about its decisions meaningfully, the California Department of Education wrote in 2021 in response to a formal complaint by the archdiocese. In addition to slashing funding, the district cut the schools served to fewer than two dozen out of 116 schools in the archdiocese. According to the California Department of Education, the district cut its total share allocated to private schools from 2% and 2.6% of $291 million to 0.5%.

    Districts have a financial incentive to minimize private schools’ Title I eligibility, since the federal government awards Title I funding to districts. After subtracting the amount going to private schools, a district gets to keep unallocated dollars for its own Title I students.

    “There’s a moral and ethical question on the table,” Escala said at the time. 

    In its 58-page report, the California Department of Education called the funding cuts “totally unreasonable.” Its report concluded that LAUSD “engaged in a pattern of arbitrary unilateral decisions,” including giving archdiocese schools 12 days during a summer break to produce income surveys for families and then removing all the schools that were unable to meet the deadline. It characterized the district’s approach as a “hide-the-ball approach (that) breached both the spirit and the letter” of the law.

    LAUSD appealed the ruling to the U.S. Department of Education, which largely affirmed the California department’s findings in a November 2023 ruling. It gave the district 60 days to consult with the district, as the Title I law required, and fix the inaccurate count of ineligible students. It gave the district 90 days to provide the services that it had denied.   

    The archdiocese returned to Los Angeles Superior Court in the spring of 2024 because, Escala said, the district dragged its feet and declined to hand over documents the archdiocese was entitled to.

    The turning point in the case came on July 16, 2024, when L.A. County Superior Court Judge Curtis Kim ordered the district to turn over all relevant documents, emails and records by Aug. 20 and to pay $82,141 to the diocese in attorneys’ fees.

    The documents confirmed what the archdiocese had assumed, said the archdiocese’s chief academic officer, Robert Tagorda. “For years they had insisted that they were following the law. We had suspicions that if you’re cutting us this much, it can’t be lawful. We had the documents to show we had far more low-income students than they had originally counted.”

    With revelations of public records, the archdiocese reached out to LAUSD to resume settlement talks. Within several weeks in November, there was a deal. The terms correspond to what the U.S. Department of Education had recommended, Tagorda said. LAUSD would recalculate how much was owed in 2018-19 and apply the corrections to 2019-20. It would disclose how the Title I obligation was calculated and confer with the archdiocese on the services to be provided. The archdiocese also will be able to pool Title I money so that it can direct it to the most intensive-needs schools — a practice that LAUSD had prohibited.

    The combined $3 million owed for the two years was far below what had been received the year before the district changed the eligibility method. But staff turnover in the district and the archdiocese, and incomplete records in some schools, undermined the claims, Tagorda acknowledged. The eligibility process in years since 2019-20, unaffected by the lawsuit, changed little. In 2023-24, the archdiocese received $2 million in Title I funding.

    Title I rules allow districts to annually change the process of determining eligibility. Escala said the archdiocese will continue to request that LAUSD return to the proportionality method that produced more funding; LAUSD, by law, must give the rationale each year for denying it.

    Escala acknowledged that the archdiocese could have chosen to litigate the case — and likely won. But the outcome would have potentially taken years and legal expenses that archdiocese schools don’t have. “We recognized that we could not afford another day, another year, another generation of students not having the ability to fairly access legally entitled services,” he said.

    Tagorda said the additional money from the settlement would be used for tutoring, after-school and summer programs, and academic counseling that schools have been requesting.

    In an interview with EdSource in March 2022, soon after becoming LAUSD superintendent, Carvalho said he had familiarized himself with the archdiocese lawsuit. “I’m going to resolve this issue sooner rather than later,” he said. “What I can tell you is that we need more objective, transparent tools by which we assess and fund this guaranteed federal entitlement that’s driven by poverty,” regardless of whether for a public or private school.

    It took nearly three years since then, after exhausting appeals and losing one ruling in Superior Court, for the district to resolve the case. Escala said he is optimistic it will be enforced.

    “When we came back to the table, it was clear that Carvalho took a personal interest to make sure we have the conditions on his side to get a settlement done. We have seen a change in approach by district staff. He is committed to abide by Title I regulations and consultation that is fair, I take him at this word,” said Escala.

    “In the course of these negotiations, trust and faith had to be rebuilt. I think that we’re in a far better place than we were six months ago.”

    On Dec. 23, a day after the article was published, Carvalho issued the following statement: “I am grateful for our partnership with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. I look forward to the ways we can work together in the future and serve the students of Los Angeles. Thanks to Superintendent Paul Escala for his steadfast leadership over the Department of Catholic Schools.”





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