Students in a Mount Tamalpais College class at San Quentin Prison.
Credit: R.J. Lozada/Mount Tamalpais College
Graduates from one of the most unusual community colleges in the country will soon receive guaranteed admission if they choose to transfer to the California State University system.
But first, they’d need to be released from prison.
The nation’s largest public university system is developing a new college transfer program with Mount Tamalpais College, which is located within San Quentin State Prison. The private two-year college is the first accredited institution created within a state prison.
“This transfer program goes right to the heart of our values as an institution and a system,” said Laura Massa, CSU’s interim associate vice chancellor for academy and faculty programs. “People in California, and, well, everywhere, should have access to a high-quality education. There is plenty of data out there on this, that having an educational opportunity is so important to folks who have been incarcerated.”
And that education is one of the main reasons why formerly incarcerated people are successful and become contributing members of their communities, she said.
College-in-prison programs have generally been well received, especially politically, because research shows bachelor’s and associate degree programs in prison reduce recidivism rates and help formerly incarcerated people find jobs once they are released.
Although CSU and Mount Tamalpais are still working out the details, once they are released, students who complete their associate degree at Mount Tamalpais will receive priority admission for a bachelor’s degree program at any of the 23 CSU campuses they apply to. The college currently offers an Associate of Arts degree in liberal arts, and the guaranteed transfer degree with CSU may resemble the Associate Degree for Transfer the university system now accepts from the state’s community college system. There are 26 Mount Tamalpais graduates currently incarcerated in San Quentin.
The program is part of a larger trendunfolding across California’s state prison system. Nearly all the state’s 34 prisons offer associate degree programs through the California Community College system. More recently, the University of California and CSU systems have started offering bachelor’s degree programs in some prisons.
Corey McNeil, a Mount Tamalpais graduate who was formerly incarcerated in San Quentin, said the guaranteed admission agreement is another sign that, despite being in prison, the students are completing quality work. McNeil was released from San Quentin in 2021 and is currently a student at San Francisco State University.
“It’s another level of acceptance,” said McNeil, the alumni affairs associate for the college. “There is a sense among the students that people think the education provided inside the prison is subpar or not the same as in traditional college. So this is huge. It shows that the education you receive in prison, that the CSUs are acknowledging that and saying we’ll accept that.”
Massa said the agreement with the college could only happen because Mount Tamalpais achieved accreditation. The nearly 30-year-old college exclusively for incarcerated people in California’s oldest prison became the first in the country to become fully accredited in 2022. Since then the college has graduated about 25 students, said Amy Jamogochian, chief academic officer at the college.
San Quentin houses about 3,000 people and has 536 students. Some students take a semester off, so enrollment is currently about 300.
“The fact that CSU is so eager to do this is really heartening,” Jamogochian said. “We want to serve formerly incarcerated people, and we want to make sure they’re doing OK.”
The school-to-prison pipeline and the “learning-disability-to-prison pipeline” exist in California and unfortunately can’t be solved at the college level, Jamogochian said. But Mount Tamalpais and other colleges entering prisons are trying to address that reality and offer strong academics and student support, she said.
Massa said the college and the university system will continue working on the details of the guaranteed admission program so that graduates can be admitted as soon as fall 2024.
With tensions still high on college campuses over the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Middle East, California State University officials are offering resources and engaging with more students to ease the mood on campuses.
“The CSU condemns in the strongest terms terrorism, including the horrific acts committed by Hamas on Oct. 7,” Cal State Chancellor Mildred Garcia said during a trustees meeting Tuesday.
“They are hatred and senseless acts of violence, and they are antithetical to our core values. The loss of innocent life in Israel and the Gaza Strip is heartbreaking, and our deepest and most heartened sympathies are with all of those affected by this horrific tragedy.”
The chancellor’s office also delivered a report Wednesday to the CSU board of trustees highlighting hate crimes and incidents that took place last year, while emphasizing the work it was doing to confront bias and extremism across the nation’s largest public university system. The report gave the trustees a chance to learn what campuses and the chancellor’s office are doing now to address on-campus conflicts, rallies and incidents related to the Middle Eastern conflict.
The number of hate incidents reported within the Cal State system is relatively low across the 23 campuses with more than 460,00 students and 56,000 faculty and staff. However, there was a slight uptick in incidents from 2021 to 2022. As of Dec. 31, 2022, the most recent data available, 13 hate crimes and six acts of violence related to hate were committed across the CSU system. The numbers reflect that six more incidents of hate and violence were committed last year than the previous year.
Melinda Latas, a CSU director who is in charge of campus safety compliance and disclosure for the university system, said hate violence includes incidents such as property destruction and verbal threats of force, or physical violence against a person or group of people, that do not meet the definition of a hate crime under California law.
The most common incident type was physical assaults, followed by intimidation and other threats of physical harm, Latas said, adding that bias was most commonly based on sexual orientation, followed by race and ethnicity.
The increase from 2021 is also likely due to fewer on-campus incidents reported during 2020 and 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Latas said, adding that for 2023, most campuses so far have seen no increase in hate incidents.
Latas said CSU campuses want to be an example and leader for other universities over how to handle heightened tensions over religious, racial and other political topics. The chancellor’s office said campus leaders have offered support to Jewish students and Hillel houses, as well as Palestinian and Muslim student groups. Counseling services are available, and campuses are encouraging people to report bias incidents or discrimination.
A preliminary review of hate crimes on the San Jose State campus since Jan. 1 reveals only two incidents were reported. Following the Hamas attack on Israel in early October, the campus also hosted two peaceful protests and rallies, each with diverging points of view, said Cynthia Teniente-Matson, SJSU president.
“Some found (the protests) controversial and had the potential to lead to hate-based disruptive activity,” she said. “The campus took precautionary steps.”
Those steps included working with local law enforcement and activating plans for public safety threats.
“Fortunately, we didn’t have to call on them,” Teniente-Matson said, adding that she’s been consistently engaging with students, faculty, staff and community leaders since the Middle East conflict reignited.
She said that the nature of incidents reported on the South Bay Area campus since Oct. 7 have been “mostly fears and concerns about personal safety, which I and other members of my cabinet have taken seriously and responded with prudence.” The University Police Department increased the number of officers and patrols on campus and investigated reports of suspicious circumstances.
According to Cal State San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, violence targeting people of different religions has been increasing nationally. A 2023 report from the center found that religion-targeted hate crime reports increased by 27% in major American cities in 2022, with 470 religious hate crimes targeting Jewish people and 50 targeting Muslims.
The report explained that antisemitism has grown nationally in recent years due to a spread in conspiracism, religious nationalism and anti-government sentiment.
“There is widespread concern that these numbers could dramatically increase with the response we are seeing to events in the Middle East right now,” said Rafik Mohamed, CSUSB provost, adding that Black Americans remain the most frequently targeted group of hate crimes.
Hate crimes against Asian Americans have also increased since the start of the pandemic, he said.
“These aren’t just individual acts of hate, but fundamental attacks on our democracy,” Mohamed said. “Religion-oriented attacks are disturbingly on the rise, as are attacks based on gender identity and sexual orientation.”
In pursuit of narrowing cavernous gaps in student achievement, Gov. Gavin Newsom this year made changes to the Local Control Funding Formula, the state’s school funding law, that are among the most far-reaching since the law’s adoption a decade ago. School districts are bracing for the extra paperwork and demands.
Newsom’s directive requires that starting in 2024-25, districts and charter schools spell out how they will address poor performance and target funding for improvements in every school where one or more of the state’s 13 student groups rank red — the lowest of five performance bands on the California School Dashboard. Until now, state law required only improvement efforts for districts as a whole.
The revision was made in the language of the governor’s proposed state budget in January. It was discussed in legislative budget subcommittees as one of many items in the education budget but didn’t receive a separate and detailed review.
Last week, the State Board of Education implemented the changes with regulations on what school districts must do to raise the achievement of the schools’ lowest-performing students. They include setting specific goals, committing to actions and spending to achieve them, and a new requirement — determining how to measure if those strategies are effective by the end of three years and what to do if they aren’t.
Before they voted, board members heard repeated warnings from dozens of superintendents and school district administrators that piling on more extensive documentation would make districts’ three-year strategic plans, called the Local Control and Accountability Plans, unbearably long and unreadable.
“In smaller school districts, where time and resources are already significantly limited, the current requirements of the LCAP add an undue burden,” Helio Brasil, superintendent of Keys Union School District, a two-school district in Stanislaus County, wrote to the board.
“In my experience, every addition of a new table or box or check box or prompt to the LCAP makes it less and less useful as the tool to promote equity-focused, locally informed strategic resource allocation,” Joshua Schultz, deputy superintendent of the Napa County Office of Education, testified. “Already, practitioners in the field will tell you that the LCAP document is not useful for informing and engaging educational partners because of its length and complexity.”
Equity multiplier schools
Included in the revisions is a new category of “equity multiplier” schools serving many of the state’s most vulnerable students. Among the factors for their selection are the proportions of students from low-income families and parents lacking a high school diploma, and school stability — the rate of student transience. Many will likely be small alternative high schools serving students who have been expelled, bullied and struggled at standard high schools or are at risk of dropping out.
The idea was initially proposed by Black educators through a bill authored by Assemblymember Akilah Weber, D-San Diego, to dedicate $300 million to improve the achievement of Black students as the lowest-scoring student group on the dashboard. Newsom agreed to the new level of funding, but, concerned about violating Proposition 209, the 1996 voter initiative that bans affirmative action in public schools, he broadened the idea. The money will require districts to address and fund the specific needs of any lowest-performing student group on any dashboard indicator — whether math scores or absenteeism and graduation rates — and create overall goals for a school. Weber and the California Association of African American School Administrators endorsed the final plan.
The schools have yet to be designated, but the California Department of Education is projecting there could be 1,000 schools. Many will likely have student groups performing in the red and will have to address them like other schools. But equity multiplier schools additionally will be eligible for technical help from designated county offices of education and their share of the extra $300 million, based on student enrollment.
Intense focus on school spending
While not providing explicit funding for each student group, districts are held accountable for their performance. Student groups are determined by race and ethnicity, family income, students learning English, students with disabilities, and foster and homeless youth. Next month, the California Department of Education will release the 2023 dashboard, with color ratings for the first time since Covid interrupted testing in March 2020.
The statutory revisions will mark a major shift in attention and accountability for the billions of dollars in extra “supplemental” and “concentration” money that the funding formula provides to districts annually based on the enrollment numbers of English learners and low-income, homeless and foster students.
The state already reports in the dashboard every school’s test scores and other indicators of student performance. Some districts funnel supplemental and concentration dollars directly to high-needs schools, as Los Angeles Unified does through its Student Needs and Equity Index. But the state steers funding formula dollars only to districts, which in turn determine how the funds are spent: which schools get tutors, extra counselors, teacher training or additional aides. Districts determine whether supplemental and concentration dollars are given to schools or through the central office. Districts are not required to track supplemental and concentration funding by school.
Stepped up accountability
The revisions indicate Newsom agrees that either not enough funding reached the schools where high-needs students attended or funds were spent ineffectively.
“The experience of the past decade is that we haven’t seen districts consistently identify schools with specific needs and take actions tailored to those needs,” said Brooks Allen, an adviser to Newsom and executive director of the State Board of Education.
There has been overall progress in raising graduation rates and cutting suspension rates statewide. But the vast differences in proficiency rates on state test scores between Black (17% in math in 2023), white (48.2% in math) and Asian students (70% in math) have not narrowed, and absenteeism rates remain disproportionately high among Black and Hispanic students.
“Newsom is saying we should move faster and stronger to close gaps in outcomes,” said John Affeldt, managing attorney for Public Advocates, a public interest law firm, one of the advocacy groups that called for the changes that Newsom adopted.
The latest iteration of the LCAP template is at least the sixth in the past nine years. The state board designed the LCAP both as a strategic plan for district improvement and as an accountability tool to verify that districts are directing the $13 billion in supplemental and concentration funding to students for whom it was intended.
Over time, the goals of accessibility and transparency have worked at cross-purposes. A previous iteration, for example, eliminated a potentially huge spending loophole, which the California State Auditor and Public Advocates identified, allowing districts to dump unspent supplemental and concentration dollars into their next year’s general fund to spend for any purpose on all students. Fixing it required adding yet another section to the LCAP accounting for the unspent money from year to year.
A challenge to follow the money
The Legislature hasn’t dedicated funding for research or evaluations to determine whether the funding formula was working. Consistent with his view that legislators should not meddle with local control, former Gov. Jerry Brown, the funding formula’s architect, made it difficult to compare districts’ spending from the funding formula and fought proposals to standardize spending through accounting codes.
Despite the obstacles of limited data, researchers have persisted and found evidence for optimism and skepticism. In separate research studies, both UC Berkeley labor economist Rucker Johnson and Public Policy of Institute of California research fellow Julien Lafortune concluded that the funding formula succeeded in creating a much more equitable finance system and worked as designed for those districts getting the most extra money — those in which low-income students and English learners account for at least 95% of enrollment. Johnson calculated that a $1,000 increase in per-student funding, sustained for three consecutive years in the highest-poverty districts, produced significant increases in math and reading scores.
But Lafortune, in an analysis he co-authored this year, also found that 60% of districts do not report spending on high-need students at or above the level of supplemental and concentration funding they receive. His 2021 research found that statewide only about 55% of supplemental and concentration dollars reached school sites whose students generated the funding, although some of the remaining money could have funded districtwide activities benefiting those schools.
Thus, there have been increasing calls from advocates for low-income students for more fine-grained reporting on spending.
“We don’t report in a standardized way how much we spent at a school site. Getting that would go a long way to build trust that districts are doing what the policy intended,” said Rob Manwaring, senior policy and fiscal adviser for Children Now.
Despite efforts by California Department of Education staff to eliminate redundancies, combine goals for multiple equity multiplier schools, and convert spending listings into data tables, the latest version will undoubtedly lengthen LCAPs that already are often several hundred pages for medium and large school districts, and will take extra labor to complete.
The LCAP instructions will increase from 45 to 57 pages. Districts will have to engage parents, students, and teachers in every equity multiplier school and document how the engagement shaped goals and actions. Districts will add dozens to hundreds of entries for schools with student groups in the red.
“No one wants to fill out paperwork for the sake of it,” said Allen. “But if the result leads districts to conduct further needs and data analyses, and not a compliance exercise, the result could lead to positive change and better support for kids who need it most.”
Representatives of advocacy groups who had been calling for more transparency in the LCAP expressed support for the revised template. “The governor’s proposal, combined with other improvements, would get California closer to ensuring equitable educational opportunities and outcomes,” wrote Guillermo Mayer, president and CEO of Public Advocates, and Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust-West, a nonprofit organization, in an EdSource commentary earlier this year.
In letters and comments to the state board, no superintendent or lobbyist for school groups commended Newsom’s decision to strengthen the funding formula law and add a new category of highest-need schools. Instead, celebrating seemingly small victories, many praised Department of Education administrators for holding the line by making only those changes to the template that were required by law. They also called for additional efforts to slim down the LCAP.
Advocates and school administrators are hoping that software engineers from Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence will somehow resolve their differences. They’re assuming an interactive, electronic template can reduce confusion and duplication with links to both AI-generated LCAP summaries for curious parents and detailed financial data for accountability hawks.
“I’m sure there’s technology out there that can help to take that large document that’s now being streamlined and put it into an even more user-friendly format for those who desire (it),” said state board Vice President Cynthia Glover Woods, who, she said, had read more than her share of LCAPs as chief academic officer of the Riverside County Office of Education.
The idea of an electronic fix has been mentioned for several years — so far to no avail.
Last week, the California Legislature let its widely heralded 2021 high school ethnic studies bill, AB 101, silently lapse after it and Gov. Gavin Newsom passed a 2025-26 state budget that did not appropriate funds for it. Without that funding, school districts will not be bound by AB 101’s Fall 2025 deadline to offer students an ethnic studies course.
Ethnic studies’ popularity has been built on a false narrative: that California requires high school students to pass an ethnic studies course to earn a diploma. What’s been omitted from this narrative is that shortly before AB 101’s passage the Legislature added a barely noticed but hugely consequential sentence to AB 101 — that the ethnic studies graduation requirement will become “operative only upon an appropriation of funds” in separate legislation.
In other words, from its inception, AB 101 was, and remains, aspirational.
Upon learning this surprising news, Mountain View-Los Altos High School District Superintendent Eric Volta dubbed the state’s ruse “a hot mess” (view recording hour 3:37). “Everyone was moving in one direction until December,” he said, scrambling with limited resources to meet the state’s pressing deadline.
The Senate Appropriations Committee estimated that an ethnic studies requirement would cost taxpayers a staggering $276 million a year — for a subject rife with controversy and concern.
California’s decision not to trigger AB 101 was undoubtedly made easier given the turmoil wracking school districts that had already prepared this coursework, including Newsom’s alma mater, Tamalpais Union. Heated school board meetings extended into the night when ethnic studies landed on board agendas. Parents statewide were distraught to see their districts selecting “liberated” ethnic studies like in Tamalpais, centered on race-based resentment that seemed to encourage armed militancy.
Attorney General Bonta, in a rare Legal Alert sent to all local superintendents and school board members, obliquely signaled the state’s hesitation to move forward. This public alarm and skittishness followed state leaders’ receipt of a detailed June 2023 policy paper from the non-partisan Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, cc’d to 3,000 school board superintendents and trustees, alerting them that the California Legislature did not appear to require ethnic studies after all. The Los Angeles Times and EdSource confirmed it, EdSource reporting that state officials agreed — “no money, no requirement to develop or offer classes.”
The California Department of Education’s (CDE) years of silence on this funding caveat, pertaining to the first change in the state’s graduation requirements in decades, is not what local education leaders and taxpaying parents should expect from a state agency with a $300 million annual administrative budget and a duty to help districts operate their schools.
This silence was not just consequential for California’s 430 school districts with high schools. It became a recurring issue for the University of California’s Academic Senate and its governing bodies as they contemplated making passing an ethnic studies course a UC admissions requirement, grounded largely in the mistaken belief that the state requires high school students to enroll in it. The Academic Senate rejected that proposal in April after a letter signed by hundreds of UC faculty members pointed out its many flaws, including this faulty premise.
It appears that CDE’s silence about this funding caveat was intentional. Believing for years that ethnic studies was mandated, school districts developed courses expecting the state to cover their expenses. Neither the CDE nor the State Board of Education advised school districts differently. In fact, CDE’s website states that students must take ethnic studies to graduate. The state board’s comment that ethnic studies is not required was in 2025, and directed only to the University of California’s Academic Senate.
Over one-quarter of California school districts with high schools now offer ethnic studies, 85% employing the controversial liberated ethnic studies framework according to my recent sampling. Liberated Ethnic Studies is political education, teaching students to view the world through the narrow lenses of skin color and oppression, often so they will try to change it with anti-Western activism.
School districts just now learning about this reprieve are reversing course or pausing their ethnic studies work. In January, San Dieguito Union turned its new required 9th-grade Ethnic Studies English course into an elective, only to discover that student interest in the course was so low that it might not offer the class at all its high schools. This spring, Ramona Unified, Glendora Unified, Chino Valley Unified, and others paused their work mid-stream. Parents in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Newsom’s Tamalpais Union are pressing their school boards to do the same.
The lesson here for local school leaders: verify narratives before acting, including those advanced by California state education officials.
•••
Lauren Janov is a California lawyer, education policy analyst, and political strategist. She is a legal consultant for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, advised the University of California faculty team which opposed a proposed Ethnic Studies admissions requirement, and co-founded the Palo Alto Parent Alliance. The opinions expressed are her own.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Chico State University followed proper procedures in how it handled the sex investigation of suspended professor David Stachura and its lengthy aftermath, including not informing faculty and students that Stachura allegedly threatened gun violence on campus, an independent investigation has found.
The 20-page report by San Diego lawyer Nancy Aeling was released late Monday afternoon by the university, nearly a year after EdSource first reported on findings that Stachura had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a student and allegedly threatened to shoot two colleagues who cooperated in an investigation of the matter, and was later named the university’s Outstanding Professor of the 2020-21 school year.
“The university acted consistently with policy by not notifying the Chico State community of Stachura’s alleged threats of violence,” Aeling wrote. Stachura, according to court testimony by his estranged wife, had told her of his intent to kill two professors who cooperated in the 2021 investigation that found he had an inappropriate relationship, which included sex in his office, with a student. Separately, a biology lecturer revealed — and later testified — that Stachura spoke to her about committing a shooting in the biology department.
Aeling did not respond to a phone message left at her office on Monday.
The report was also not critical of the university’s Campus Violence Consultation Team, which recommended that Stachura be allowed to return to campus after investigating the alleged threats against his colleagues and “did not find that he posed a threat of violence.”
A member of that team, Chico State Police Chief Christopher Nicodemus, testified in a court proceeding earlier this year that he did not agree with the team’s findings.
“There were concerns” about Stachura, Nicodemus said on the stand in a legal proceeding that resulted in a judge issuing a three-year workplace violence restraining order against Stachura that bars him from going on campus or near the people he threatened.
Nicodemus said on the stand that he believed “it’s safer to err on the side of caution” when making a threat assessment. He added that it would have been better to have mistakenly fired Stachura than live with the aftermath of a violent event.
Aeling wrote in the report that she did not consider “the appropriateness of Stachura’s actions or communications with his colleagues nor his colleagues’ responses to Stachura and his continued presence on campus, or the overall effectiveness of the procedures or policies in place to address the situation presented by (his) actions or communications.” Rather, the report was limited to “whether (the) responses were reasonable given the information available at the time and were consistent with the policies and procedures governing them.” The report makes no policy recommendations.
A faculty union officer ripped the report Monday night.
“It’s absolutely demoralizing and heartbreaking that no one has taken any accountability for what has happened,’’ Lindsay Briggs, a public health professor and a California Faculty Association Chico Campus Executive Board member, wrote in an email to EdSource.
“This is why survivors of violence don’t speak out and why we don’t feel safe at our jobs; because we’re not. No one cares to do anything other than offer empty platitudes.” Eleven “months of hand wringing and we’re no better off than we were before,” she said.
Gordon Wolfe, a professor who turned over court records about Stachura’s alleged threat to kill witnesses, said in a phone interview Monday evening that he received an email from Chico State saying that Aeling wanted to interview him, but that “she never followed up.”
Stachura remains on administrative leave as the university finishes an investigation of his alleged threat to kill witnesses in the sex case. He was recently ordered by a judge to pay more than $64,000 for the legal fees of a lecturer he unsuccessfully sued for libel. His lawyer did not respond to a request to comment on Aeling’s report.
In a prepared statement that accompanied the report’s release, Chico State President Stephen Perez said, “I appreciate the thorough review and the opportunity to consider our practices moving forward.”
Without mentioning her by name, the report found that former Chico State President Gayle Hutchinson considered the sex case against Stachura as well as the alleged threats he made when approving “Stachura’s promotion to” full professor in 2021. Hutchinson found him “to be a highly productive citizen of the academy, with a strong record of teaching, service and research,” the report states.
Hutchinson retired in June. She could not be immediately reached Monday night.
The center photo features Tom Boroujeni, Fresno City College academic senate president.
Credit: Mark Tabay, Fresno City College & Fresno State/Facebook
A Fresno City College communication instructor and president of the school’s academic senate was found to have committed an “act of sexual violence” against a professor and former colleague at nearby Fresno State University, where he taught for years until he resigned under pressure last year, documents show.
The allegations against Tom Boroujeni stayed hidden from public view, EdSource found, before surfacing in 2020, when Fresno State opened an investigation based on the federal anti-discrimination law known as Title IX, records show.
That investigation determined that Boroujeni committed the sexualviolence in 2015, when he was a graduate student and part-time instructor at Fresno State. The case wasn’t fully resolved until February, when the alleged victim reached a $53,300 settlement with the university after claiming it hadn’t done enough to protect her, university records show.
Boroujeni was also a part-time instructor at Fresno City College while finishing a master’s degree at Fresno State in 2015, records show.
Boroujeni, 38, of Clovis, is also known as Farrokh Eizadiboroujeni and Tom Eizadi, documents show.
City College’s parent agency, the State Center Community College District, became aware of the matter in August 2021 when the alleged victim, who also teaches there part-time, “requested a no-contact order” against Boroujeni “as a result of a sexual misconduct investigation” at Fresno State, according to an internal district document obtained by EdSource.
The district granted the order based on a report by its former general counsel, Fresno attorney Gregory Taylor, who conducted interviews and combed through Fresno State’s investigation. Taylor concluded Fresno State’s finding was “well-reasoned and supported by sufficient evidence.”
In 2023, despite the findings and stay-away order, the State Center Community College District gave Boroujeni tenure. A district spokesperson said laws governing the granting of tenure were followed.
In both Fresno State’s investigation and in interviews with EdSource, Boroujeni denied committing what Fresno State concluded was “an act of sexual violence.”
Asked if he raped the alleged victim, Boroujeni replied in a sharp tone, “No, I did not.”
Boroujeni claimed he and the alleged victim, who was a professor at Fresno State at the time, had consensual sex in her apartment in June 2015,shortly after they started dating. But the investigation found that she told Boroujeni “no” when he asked if they could have sex. He then “pinned down (her) upper region” and she “zoned out” during what followed, according to the 2021 university report.
EdSource doesn’t identify sexual-abuse victims. The alleged victim declined to be interviewed for this story.
Boroujeni appealed the findings to the California State University’s Chancellor’s Office in June 2021. The appeal was denied a month later.
EdSource sought documentation about the case from Fresno State earlier this year.
“Given that Mr. Boroujeni remains active in the educational community and is teaching at a local community college, there is strong public interest in knowing that a college instructor has been previously found to have committed an act of sexual violence at another university.”
John Walsh, the CSU system’s general counsel
Walsh wrote in an Aug. 4 letter to Boroujeni’s lawyer, Brooke Nevels, informing her the report would be released as “a matter of public interest.”
Boroujeni said his 2015 graduate-student status should have blocked the release of the investigative report to EdSource under the state’s public records act. He also was a part-time instructor at the time. But in a decision made at the CSU system’s Chancellor’s Office, the report was released over his objections.
Boroujeni complained to the U.S. Department of Education’s Student Policy Privacy Office, claiming the release violated the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, according to a generic confirmation email he provided to EdSource. The response states the complaint wouldn’t be answered for at least 90 days. The department didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A tale of two colleges
January 2015 – Graduate student Tom Boroujeni begins working as a substitute instructor and teaching assistant at Fresno State University.
May 2015 – Boroujni begins working as an instructor at Fresno City College
June 21, 2015 – Boroujeni allegedly commits an “act of sexual violence” against a Fresno State professor.
June 22-30, 2015 – The alleged victim confides in friends that she was assaulted. She declines to call police, telling a friend she is afraid making a report would negatively impact her at Fresno State, where she is working toward tenure.
2016 – Boroujeni finishes his master’s degree at Fresno State and continues working at the university, becoming coach of the school’s debate team.
2016 -The victim of the alleged sexual violence begins teaching as an adjunct at Fresno City College in addtion to working at Fresno State.
Aug. 2019: Boroujeni gets a tenure track instructor position in Fresno City College’s Communication Department.
Oct. 2019 – Boroujeni is told he will be assigned to non-debate classes and removed as debate team coach at Fresno State.
July 9, 2020 – Boroujeni files a complaint with Fresno State alleging that the alleged victim had made “unwelcome advances of a sexual nature” to him in 2015. He claimed he entered into a relationship with her only because he feared that not doing so would hurt his chances of receiving his master’s degree and full-time employment at the university. He further claims his removal as debate coach and change in teaching assignments is retaliation for her rebuffing further advances in 2016.
Oct. 6, 2020 – While being interviewed about Boroujeni’s complaint against her, the alleged victim tells an investigator that on June 21, 2015, Boroujeni allegedly committed an act of sexual violence against her. Fresno State opens an investigation.
May 2021 – Boroujeni becomes president-elect of Fresno City Colleges academic senate for a two-year term, meaning he will ascend to the senate presidency in 2023.
May 18, 2021 – Investigator Tiffany Little issues two findings. She rejects Boroujeni’s claims of sexual harassment and finds that, based on a preponderance of the evidence, Boroujeni committed an act of sexual violence against the victim.
May 25 2021 – The alleged victim is notified that the university’s remedy is that she and Boroujeni have no contact with each other. A no-contact order is issued by Fresno State.
June 16, 2021 – Boroujeni appeals the finding to the CSU Chancellor’s Office of Investigations Appeals and Compliance. His appeal was rejected on July 29, 2021.
August 2021 – The alleged victim asks Fresno City College – where she and Boroujeni both still teach – for a no-contact order on campus, similar to what was put in place at Fresno State. The order is issued months later.
2022 – The alleged victim tells Fresno State that it “failed to take adequate actions” to address her safety concerns with Boroujeni. She threatens to take legal action against the university.
Feb. 8, 2022 – Boroujeni files a grievance with Fresno State over a decision to place the report on the act of sexual violence in his personnel file as he approaches a performance review for a three-year lecturer contract.
March 7 2022 – Boroujeni tells Fresno State that he intends to resign at the end of the academic year.
March 11, 2022 – Fresno State placesBoroujeni on administrative leave, pending the outcome of an unrelated allegation of misconduct.
May 5, 2022 – Boroujeni resigns from Fresno State, agreeing that he “will not apply for, seek, or accept employment with CSU Fresno or any other campus or department of California State University or its auxiliaries.”
Nov. 14 2022 – Boroujeni received a letter of reprimand from the dean of Fresno City College’s Division of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts in part for unprofessional conduct including an allegation he referred to a colleague with an apparent racial slur and threatening “to get” that person.
Feb. 8, 2023 – The alleged victim settles her claim with Fresno State over her safety concerns. She is paid $53,300 and is given a paid year off from teaching to do academic research.
March 7, 2023 – the State Center Community College District board of trustees grants tenure to Boroujeni and 24 other faculty members at Fresno City College.
May 10, 2023 – Boroujeni becomes academic senate president of Fresno City College
“It was in the greater good of the public to disclose it,” Debbie Adishian-Astone, Fresno State’s vice president for administration, said of the heavily redacted 43-page document. “The public has a right to know.” EdSource obtained an unredacted copy of the report.
CSU’s Title IX history
In May 2023, Boroujeni started a two-year term as Fresno City College’s academic senate president, a position that gives him input on behalf of the faculty on academic policy and personnel matters and puts him in frequent contact with college and district leaders. “I am a politician. I am a public figure,” he told EdSource.
The revelations about Boroujeni come as Fresno State attempts to move past a CSU-sanctioned report released earlier this year that said the school had “the most high profile and incendiary Title IX issues plaguing the CSU.” That’s a reference to the scandal that took down former CSU Chancellor Joseph Castro, who resigned in 2022 after it was revealed that while serving as Fresno State’s president, he ignored years of sexual misconduct allegations against Frank Lamas, his vice president of student affairs.
When the allegations were finally investigated, Castro agreed to let Lamas resign in exchange for a $260,000 settlement, retiree benefits and a promise of a glowing letter of recommendation.
The Boroujeni case also raises questions regarding the State Center Community College District’s response after learning of Fresno State’s determination of sexual violence and how Boroujeni went on to receive tenure and become academic senate president.
The Fresno State case was not taken into account as Boroujeni became senate president at Fresno City College and achieved tenure in 2023, even after the district investigated the alleged victim’s request for a stay-away order and found that sexual violence occurred.
The president of the State Center Community College District’s board of trustees, Nasreen Johnson, declined to talk to EdSource, and Chancellor Carole Goldsmith declined to be interviewed and answered questions through a district spokesperson.
Other than the no-contact order, the district “took no other action as there were no civil or criminal findings, judgments and/or convictions surrounding (Boroujeni) at Fresno State, nor were there accusations or reports of similar misconduct” at Fresno City College, district spokesperson Jill Wagner wrote in an email to EdSource. The no-contact order requested by the alleged victim wasn’t effective until the spring of 2022, in part because the process of obtaining records from Fresno State was “slow and arduous.”
Wagner said the tenure committee assigned to Boroujeni “considered multiple factors in favor of granting tenure. Areas of concern were not identified” at the time Boroujeni was reviewed. Asked if the committee that considered Boroujeni’s tenure had access to or was aware of Taylor’s report confirming that an act of sexual violence had occurred, Wagner did not respond directly. She wrote that the district followed state law and the district’s union contract, “which prescribes what information can be included in tenure review.”
Boroujeni told Edsource that he “got tenured with the district’s knowledge of everything that had happened.”
Boroujeni resigned from Fresno State on May 9, 2022, agreeing to a demand that he never apply for, or accept employment, in the 23-campus California State University system again, according to the resignation document.
When he accepted those terms, he was being investigated for other unrelated misconduct allegations that were later found to be not substantiated, documents show.
Despite its findings about the 2015 incident, Fresno State couldn’t discipline Boroujeni — such as suspending or firing him — because he was a graduate student when the alleged act of violence occurred, Adishian-Astone, the school’s vice president for administration, said in an interview.
Boroujeni started working for Fresno State as a teaching assistant and part-time instructor in January 2015, nearly six months before the incident, records provided by the university show. But Adishian-Astone said his status at the time was as a graduate student.
The university can’t “discipline an employee for something he did as a student,” she said. But the findings still contributed to Boroujeni leaving his faculty position at Fresno State.
Boroujeni told EdSource that he agreed to resign because if he hadn’t, the act-of-sexual-violence report would have been placed in his personnel file. He said he was up for a performance review at the time and a three-member committee of communication-department academics would have had access to the report. He said he was concerned his reputation would be harmed and his contract not renewed.
“They threatened me, basically,” Boroujeni claimed. “They said, ‘If you don’t (resign), we’re going to hand this over to your department for review.’ They said, ‘It becomes part of your employment record.’”
Although the university couldn’t directly discipline Boroujeni, Adishian-Astone said placing the report in his personnel file was allowable. If Boroujeni hadn’t resigned, the university would have done that, “particularly given the egregious nature of this incident,” she said.
Information sharing limited
California has no mechanism for its three public higher-education systems — CSU, the University of California and the California Community Colleges — to share information about employees with sexual misconduct-allegation records.
In response to EdSource’s questions, Wagner, the State Center Community College District spokesperson, said the district is now calling on the state to require that “educational institutions have a mechanism to share information about employee misconduct, harassment and sexual violence.”
The practice of someone in higher education being employed at another college despite sexual misconduct allegations is dubbed “Pass the Harasser,” which the Chronicle of Higher Education once called “higher education’s worst kept secret.”
Boroujeni’s employment at Fresno City College after resigning from Fresno State is a variation of that, said Michigan State University professor Julie Libarkin. She tracks alleged offenders through the Academic Sexual Misconduct Database, which aggregates abuse cases based on news reports. It contains nearly 1,100 cases nationwide, which she said is just a fraction of what occurs.
Too often, she said, faculty members move to another institution after being disciplined or fired. “It’s a problem all over the country,” she said, enabled by secrecy and schools that “don’t want to have their names sullied” by publicly identifying an abuser. If an accused person quietly resigns, they’re often able to keep their records confidential, she said.
In Boroujeni’s case, he was already working as a Fresno City College instructor when Fresno State made its findings. There was no communication between the schools about the matter until the alleged victim asked for the stay-away order.
Adishian-Astone said Fresno State “would not have advised (the State Center Community College District) about this matter on our own as it was a confidential personnel matter and at that time the respondent was already an existing (district) employee. If (the district) had reached out about a reference for the hiring of a new employee, we would have advised them accordingly. Our system does not track if faculty also teach at other institutions.”
Shiwali Patel, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, said the alleged victim could be “in a vulnerable position” at Fresno City College with Boroujeni serving as president of the academic senate.
Boroujeni “shouldn’t have any impact on her experience there, promotions or anything to do with her employment. If he holds this position of power over the victim who told the community college about what happened at the other institution, she could be in a vulnerable position,” she said.
The district “should have checked with the victim to see what impact that could have on her, given that she’s employed by the same institution,” Patel said.
Asked about the alleged victim, Wagner wrote in an email that the district “unequivocally supports survivors of violence.”
A dean’s complaint
Boroujeni told EdSource he is also facing allegations regarding his interactions with three other women at Fresno City College. They have each filed pending complaints against him, which he characterized as allegations of “gender discrimination.”
Wagner, the district spokesperson, said she could not discuss the complaints because they are personnel matters. Boroujeni said one is a Title IX investigation and the others are being treated as grievances. The women declined to discuss their complaints.
He identified one of the women as Dean Cyndie Luna of the college’s Fine, Performing and Communication Arts Division. He declined to provide details of her complaint.
Last year, Luna reprimanded Boroujeni for incidents of unprofessional conduct that she wrote were “becoming more frequent and aggressive” and “causing me grave concern as your supervisor,” according to a November 2022 letter of reprimand, which EdSource obtained from a source.
Luna also wrote that in a conversation with her, Boroujeni referred to a colleague with an apparent racial slur and, in a “menacing and threatening” tone, said he “will get” the colleague for gossiping about him.
Boroujeni told EdSource that Luna fabricated the accusations in the letter. “She makes up a lot of things,” he said. Luna declined to discuss his allegation or the letter of reprimand.
Boroujeni said other aspects of the reprimand challenge actions he’s taken as senate president, which he claims cannot be subject to a reprimand. The senate’s executive committee, which he heads, filed a lengthy response to the portion of the reprimand dealing with administrative matters. More than a year later, Boroujeni is trying to get the reprimand withdrawn.
Luna’s “using my employment as a way to mitigate a political situation,” he said, claiming that she is trying to reprimand him for positions he has taken on behalf of the faculty.
“She’s punishing me for doing my job when she’s not even my supervisor as the president of the academic senate. We don’t have supervisors,” Boroujeni asserted.
‘Unwelcome advances’
Born in Iran, Boroujeni said he lived in Greece before eventually coming to the United States and enrolling at Fresno State. In Greece, he said he started using Tom as a first name instead of Farrokh and continued using it in America. He also began shortening his last name to Boroujeni — although Eizadiboroujeni remains his legal last name, according to voter registration and other public records.
Boroujeni was ambitious about a career in academia. He began working in Fresno State’s communication department as “substitute instructional faculty,” in 2015, records show, while finishing his master’s degree, and beginning to climb the teaching ranks.
By 2020, Boroujeni was worried that a job within Fresno State’s communication department was being taken away from him, Fresno State records show.
He was the coach of the school’s nationally prominent debate team, the Barking Bulldogs. But he was losing the job, and the classes he was assigned to teach were being changed in a communication department shakeup, documents show. The publication Inside Higher Ed reported on Boroujeni losing the debate coach job in October 2020.
A few months before the Inside Higher Ed story was published, he retroactively filed a complaint stating that in 2015, when he was a graduate student, a professor lured him into a romantic relationship — the same professor he would eventually be found to have committed an act of sexual violence against.
Boroujeni claimed she sexually harassed him with “unwelcome advances.” But he began a relationship with her because “he feared rejecting (the) advances would jeopardize both his ability to graduate from Fresno State with his master’s degree and his future employment opportunities because (the professor)” taught in the communication department, the investigative report states.
Five years after the alleged harassment, he claimed “the personnel changes were made because of the termination of the relationship with” the professor. But the investigator assigned to Boroujeni’s complaint found communication department leaders had “legitimate reasons” for the personnel shakeup and that no harassment occurred.
But the harassment complaint led to revelations about a deeply held secret.
The investigator, Tiffany Little, found that the alleged victim had confided in a conversation with a close friend “in which (she) described the experience as rape,” Little’s report shows.
Little met with the alleged victim. She confirmed what she had told her friend in 2015, making “an allegation of sexual violence” against Boroujeni, Little wrote.
Boroujeni told EdSource that the alleged victim fabricated the claim as retaliation for his harassment complaint.
Dating colleagues
Boroujeni and the alleged victim were the same age — 30 — when they began dating in 2015, after he had taken one of her classes as a graduate student.
On the night of June 21, 2015, they were at her apartment. Both were married. She was in the process of divorcing. He told her he had worries about his own marriage, documents show.
Both acknowledged that during a make-out session, Boroujeni asked her if they could have sex. He claimed she said yes and that she provided a condom in a pinkish wrapper, according to documents.
But the alleged victim told Little that she didn’t consent. She first said she couldn’t remember if there was a condom, then later said she was sure she hadn’t provided one, as Boroujeni claimed, because she did notkeep condoms in her apartment.
Little’s report states that when the alleged victim told her friend what happened, the friend wanted to call the police. But the alleged victim did not want to make a criminal complaint because “she did not want any of this to come out to the university because she was this young tenure track professor,” Little wrote.
In his statement, Boroujeni said he asked the alleged victim if she wanted to have sex and she replied “mhm,” which he understood as consent.
The alleged victim continued to see Boroujeni, the report states. As she did, the alleged victim described to a friend how he “disregarded (her) boundaries sexually,” Little wrote. That friend told Little that the alleged victim had told her there were times she did not want to have sex with Boroujeni, but “he pressured her until she did.”
Another person told Little that the alleged victim confided in 2017 that Boroujeni “forced me to have sex with him.”
Boroujeni refused to speak with Little, choosing instead to answer her questions in writing. Those answers, Little noted, were written “with the benefit of first having seen (the alleged victim’s) account and the details she provided and didn’t provide.”
Boroujeni said he didn’t speak to Little because “I was seriously worried about criminal exposure.”
He said he couldn’t get legal representation for an interview because of scheduling problems.
He described Little as untrained and “just somebody who works in an office in CSU who is now in charge of a very serious allegation. … How do they hire these people? They are not an attorney. (sic) They are not an investigator. (sic) They go through minimal training.”
Little, who received a law degree from the University of Illinois in 2014, is now the director of civil rights and Title IX Compliance at Northwestern University. She didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Unlike Boroujeni, the alleged victim spoke with Little.
She “didn’t have time to reflect upon, ponder, deliberate about, and compose her answers. Instead, she answered this investigator’s questions in the moment, and based only on her personal recollection. Put simply, a reasonable person could find that (her) manner of testimony supports a finding that her account was credible.”
Little wrote that Boroujeni told her “there are text messages that corroborate his account and requested that (the victim) submit these materials.” But the alleged victim told Little she had already submitted all the texts she had. There was nothing in them that matched what Boroujeni described, Little wrote.
“Told this,” Boroujeni “never submitted or described the messages” himself, Little wrote. Boroujeni told EdSource he’d deleted the messages.
“A reasonable person could find Boroujeni‘s assertion that there is evidence to corroborate his account, and his failure to produce or describe such evidence … to diminish the likelihood that his version of events can be corroborated and therefore the credibility of his account,” Little wrote.
Little concluded that she found the alleged victim had proven herself credible. Boroujeni, she wrote, “did not likely obtain consent for sexual intercourse.”
Fresno State ordered Boroujeni and the alleged victim to avoid each other on campus. He continued teaching.
The alleged victim wasn’t satisfied that the university was doing enough to protect her. She then filed a grievance and gave notice to CSU “of her plans to pursue litigation,” records show.
She reached a settlement in February. The university paid her $53,300 with a paid year off from teaching to conduct research.
In March 2022, Fresno State notified Boroujeni about a new allegation of misconduct against him. The university placed him on administrative leave. He was notified on July 25, 2022, that the complaint was not substantiated.
By then, he had resigned from Fresno State and was pursuing his career at Fresno City College.
Wards at N.A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility talk at a table in Merced Hall in Stockton, Calif.
Credit: Lea Suzuki / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris
California is failing to provide a high-quality education to students in the juvenile justice system by not addressing the inadequacies of academic data collection practices, according to a recent report from the national Youth Law Center. Current collection practices, the report authors argue, do not accurately measure student needs and outcomes.
“A failure to design better metrics would be a disastrous choice on the part of California stakeholders to keep these students out of sight and out of mind,” the report’s authors wrote.
The report, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” is a follow-up to a 2016 report that similarly found the state to be failing in its mission of providing students in juvenile detention with high-quality education via its disproportionate representation of multiple student populations, high rates of chronic absenteeism, low high school graduation rates, inaccurate or incomplete data, and more.
The most recent report highlighted data from two school years — 2018-19 and 2021-22 — using publicly available data from the California Department of Education as well as public records requests sent to 10 county offices of education that oversee court schools, which are education facilities for youth in the juvenile justice system. Students enroll in court school as they await adjudication or disposition, after they’ve been committed to a juvenile facility, or if they’re in a home placement under the supervision of probation.
During 2018-19, nearly 20,000 students attended court schools in the state. In the 2021-22 school year, the number dropped to 10,891. This decrease likely reflects the lower number of youth in the juvenile justice system, which has trended downward in recent years, per the report.
California’s current academic data system does not capture one crucial data point — that the majority of students attend a court school for less than 31 instructional days, the report noted. This means that few students attend for an entire school year, which is typically the time frame that data collection practices are based on.
What’s more, currently available data does not distinguish between academic needs and outcomes of students who spend days or weeks attending a court school versus those who attend for years.
The report highlighted that it has long been anecdotally understood by researchers, probation staff and others working in education within the juvenile justice system that student attendance is often transitory given the dynamic nature of the legal system. The report’s authors argue that instructional programming should reflect this knowledge by calculating any partial credits earned by recording them in student transcripts once they leave juvenile detention. Students also need additional services to more seamlessly move back into their local schools.
While the report’s authors acknowledge that less time in the juvenile justice system is most beneficial, they maintain that the time youth do spend attending a court school should be as minimally disruptive as possible to their education. Minimizing disruption, they said, could include a heightened focus on the transition process out of juvenile detention.
An ongoing challenge with inadequate data collection is that improvements are difficult to highlight. For example, the report authors found that the college-going rate at 10 court schools exceeded the average for the state’s alternative schools.
“The data doesn’t really care if it’s positive or negative. The limitations exist on both sides,” said Chris Middleton, an Equal Justice Works fellow at the Youth Law Center and a primary author of the report. “And I think here where a really positive story could be told, there’s still a set of limitations that’s very evident.”
Much of the data contained in the report reflects a dire reality.
For example, the overall number of youth in the juvenile justice system decreased significantly from 2018 to 2022, yet the number of students with disabilities rose from 20.1% to 29.8%.
The report suggests a few potential reasons: improved screening and identification, improved communication between schools regarding disability status, or a failure to capitalize on the systemic changes that drove the decrease in youth detention statewide.
The report’s authors also found that foster youth are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system.
While foster youth represent less than 1% of all students enrolled in California schools, in 2018-19 they made up 21.44% of court school enrollments; by 2021-22, they were almost 31 times overrepresented in court schools versus traditional schools. This data was either redacted or unavailable for 27 of 51 court schools.
“The extremely high rate of disability status and the extremely high rate of foster care overlap,” Brady said. “We have long known that young people with disabilities are more likely to be impacted by the juvenile justice system. … The numbers for foster care were still surprising.”
Similarly, high rates of students experiencing homelessness were found at some court schools, but the data for this population of students was particularly unclear; much was either redacted or unavailable. While foster youth status is centrally tracked by the state, homelessness is largely screened by school districts — an identification process that has only in recent years improved through legislation and enforcement.
Regarding chronic absenteeism, the rate was 12.9% among court schools and 12.1% statewide during the 2018-19 school year, and by the 2021-22 school year, that rate was 16.8% among court schools and 30% statewide.
Though lower than the state average, this was alarming for the report’s authors.
Students who attend a local education agency for less than 31 days are not eligible to be considered chronically absent, which indicates that the true rate of chronic absences is much higher, given that most court school students attend for less than 31 instructional days, the report authors wrote.
Additionally, the authors found while some students refuse to attend class, some cannot attend due to decisions made by probation staff. Two examples shared in the report include a practice in Los Angeles County “of barring entire living units of young people from attending school if one of them misbehaved” and refusal by probation staff to provide “timely transport” of students to school.
According to the report, “A necessary element of addressing chronic absenteeism in court schools must include better documentation of missed instructional time and the reasons why students are absent from class.
“Additionally, efficient and effective coordination between probation and school staff is critical to ensuring the basic educational responsibility of students being present in their classrooms is met.”
While the rate of chronic absences was lower among court schools during the 2021-22 school year, it should be noted that the percentages across court schools varied. Some schools reported a rate of over 30% while other schools reported 0%.
One recent allocation of $15 million toward post-secondary education programs for youth in the juvenile justice system might turn the tide on better understanding outcomes. The funding will create and expand community college programming inside juvenile facilities, and a portion is intended to go toward evaluating such programs.
This ongoing funding “is the single most positive and exciting thing that’s going on in the area of juvenile justice and education right now,” said Lauren Brady, managing director of the legal team at Youth Law Center.
Many of the issues with data collection that researchers found were due to unavailable data or redactions — when a group includes fewer than 10 students, data is withheld to protect student privacy.
“We can’t tell the complete story. That’s where we’re at right now. … In order to truly transform the experience for students and to give them the best chance to have a brighter future, we have to be able to measure what they’re experiencing,” report co-author Middleton said. “And I think that we have the capability. I have faith in California and our institutions that we are able to properly develop these measures and ensure that the data’s actually being reported.”
Wards at N.A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility talk at a table in Merced Hall in Stockton, Calif.
Credit: Lea Suzuki / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris
California is failing to provide a high-quality education to students in the juvenile justice system by not addressing the inadequacies of academic data collection practices, according to a recent report from the national Youth Law Center. Current collection practices, the report authors argue, do not accurately measure student needs and outcomes.
“A failure to design better metrics would be a disastrous choice on the part of California stakeholders to keep these students out of sight and out of mind,” the report’s authors wrote.
The report, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” is a follow-up to a 2016 report that similarly found the state to be failing in its mission of providing students in juvenile detention with high-quality education via its disproportionate representation of multiple student populations, high rates of chronic absenteeism, low high school graduation rates, inaccurate or incomplete data, and more.
The most recent report highlighted data from two school years — 2018-19 and 2021-22 — using publicly available data from the California Department of Education as well as public records requests sent to 10 county offices of education that oversee court schools, which are education facilities for youth in the juvenile justice system. Students enroll in court school as they await adjudication or disposition, after they’ve been committed to a juvenile facility, or if they’re in a home placement under the supervision of probation.
During 2018-19, nearly 20,000 students attended court schools in the state. In the 2021-22 school year, the number dropped to 10,891. This decrease likely reflects the lower number of youth in the juvenile justice system, which has trended downward in recent years, per the report.
California’s current academic data system does not capture one crucial data point — that the majority of students attend a court school for less than 31 instructional days, the report noted. This means that few students attend for an entire school year, which is typically the time frame that data collection practices are based on.
What’s more, currently available data does not distinguish between academic needs and outcomes of students who spend days or weeks attending a court school versus those who attend for years.
The report highlighted that it has long been anecdotally understood by researchers, probation staff and others working in education within the juvenile justice system that student attendance is often transitory given the dynamic nature of the legal system. The report’s authors argue that instructional programming should reflect this knowledge by calculating any partial credits earned by recording them in student transcripts once they leave juvenile detention. Students also need additional services to more seamlessly move back into their local schools.
While the report’s authors acknowledge that less time in the juvenile justice system is most beneficial, they maintain that the time youth do spend attending a court school should be as minimally disruptive as possible to their education. Minimizing disruption, they said, could include a heightened focus on the transition process out of juvenile detention.
An ongoing challenge with inadequate data collection is that improvements are difficult to highlight. For example, the report authors found that the college-going rate at 10 court schools exceeded the average for the state’s alternative schools.
“The data doesn’t really care if it’s positive or negative. The limitations exist on both sides,” said Chris Middleton, an Equal Justice Works fellow at the Youth Law Center and a primary author of the report. “And I think here where a really positive story could be told, there’s still a set of limitations that’s very evident.”
Much of the data contained in the report reflects a dire reality.
For example, the overall number of youth in the juvenile justice system decreased significantly from 2018 to 2022, yet the number of students with disabilities rose from 20.1% to 29.8%.
The report suggests a few potential reasons: improved screening and identification, improved communication between schools regarding disability status, or a failure to capitalize on the systemic changes that drove the decrease in youth detention statewide.
The report’s authors also found that foster youth are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system.
While foster youth represent less than 1% of all students enrolled in California schools, in 2018-19 they made up 21.44% of court school enrollments; by 2021-22, they were almost 31 times overrepresented in court schools versus traditional schools. This data was either redacted or unavailable for 27 of 51 court schools.
“The extremely high rate of disability status and the extremely high rate of foster care overlap,” Brady said. “We have long known that young people with disabilities are more likely to be impacted by the juvenile justice system. … The numbers for foster care were still surprising.”
Similarly, high rates of students experiencing homelessness were found at some court schools, but the data for this population of students was particularly unclear; much was either redacted or unavailable. While foster youth status is centrally tracked by the state, homelessness is largely screened by school districts — an identification process that has only in recent years improved through legislation and enforcement.
Regarding chronic absenteeism, the rate was 12.9% among court schools and 12.1% statewide during the 2018-19 school year, and by the 2021-22 school year, that rate was 16.8% among court schools and 30% statewide.
Though lower than the state average, this was alarming for the report’s authors.
Students who attend a local education agency for less than 31 days are not eligible to be considered chronically absent, which indicates that the true rate of chronic absences is much higher, given that most court school students attend for less than 31 instructional days, the report authors wrote.
Additionally, the authors found while some students refuse to attend class, some cannot attend due to decisions made by probation staff. Two examples shared in the report include a practice in Los Angeles County “of barring entire living units of young people from attending school if one of them misbehaved” and refusal by probation staff to provide “timely transport” of students to school.
According to the report, “A necessary element of addressing chronic absenteeism in court schools must include better documentation of missed instructional time and the reasons why students are absent from class.
“Additionally, efficient and effective coordination between probation and school staff is critical to ensuring the basic educational responsibility of students being present in their classrooms is met.”
While the rate of chronic absences was lower among court schools during the 2021-22 school year, it should be noted that the percentages across court schools varied. Some schools reported a rate of over 30% while other schools reported 0%.
One recent allocation of $15 million toward post-secondary education programs for youth in the juvenile justice system might turn the tide on better understanding outcomes. The funding will create and expand community college programming inside juvenile facilities, and a portion is intended to go toward evaluating such programs.
This ongoing funding “is the single most positive and exciting thing that’s going on in the area of juvenile justice and education right now,” said Lauren Brady, managing director of the legal team at Youth Law Center.
Many of the issues with data collection that researchers found were due to unavailable data or redactions — when a group includes fewer than 10 students, data is withheld to protect student privacy.
“We can’t tell the complete story. That’s where we’re at right now. … In order to truly transform the experience for students and to give them the best chance to have a brighter future, we have to be able to measure what they’re experiencing,” report co-author Middleton said. “And I think that we have the capability. I have faith in California and our institutions that we are able to properly develop these measures and ensure that the data’s actually being reported.”
Students, faculty and staff protest a potential tuition increase across the California State University system on Sept 12, 2023.
CREDIT: MICHAEL LEE-CHANG / STUDENTS FOR QUALITY EDUCATION
Thousands of California State University faculty are preparing to shut down their classes and strike for one day next week as labor negotiations have stalled.
The series of one-day rolling strikes will begin at Cal Poly Pomona on Monday, with San Francisco State following on Tuesday, Cal State LA on Wednesday and Sacramento State on Thursday. Some faculty from other campuses are expected to join their colleagues and not teach on those days.
Salary remains the largest disagreement between the 23-campus Cal State system and the California Faculty Association, which represents about 29,000 professors and lecturers. The faculty is fighting for a 12% general salary increase for this year and has not specified the size of the raises it will seek after that. However, the university system is proposing a total increase of 15% over three years, including this year.
“A lot of what we’ve been offered by management is dependent on the state budget,” said Kate Ozment, an English professor at Cal Poly Pomona who will participate in the strike. “That doesn’t work for faculty who have to pay bills right now.”
Many faculty members have student loan debt and want to start families or are struggling to support the families they do have, she said.
“So many of us chose to work for the CSU specifically because we believed in the mission and we believe in the student body,” Ozment said. “The CSU talks a really big game about recruiting first-generation faculty and underrepresented faculty, but the reality is those populations are less likely to have generational wealth to fall back on, and they’re way less likely to have had good jobs that helped them save before they went to graduate school.”
But CSU officials say the system can’t afford to give more than 5% a year to the faculty group.
“We recognize the need to increase compensation, and we are committed to doing so. But our resources are limited, and our financial commitments must be fiscally sustainable,” said Leora Freedman, CSU’s vice chancellor for human resources, during a call with media. “CSU is prepared to return to bargaining with CFA at any time.”
Freedman added that the university system has already successfully negotiated 5% annual increases with four other labor unions. However, negotiations have also stalled with Teamsters Local 2010 representing 1,100 of CSU’s skilled trades workers. The Teamsters also announced they plan to join the faculty in their strike.
“Any larger salary increases would force very difficult and painful decisions on our campuses and would trigger a reopening of salary negotiations with other labor unions,” Freedman said.
In August, the faculty union and the CSU entered a state labor mediation process. A fact-finding report written by a third-party labor negotiator was released by both sides Friday. The negotiator ultimately recommended a 7% general increase in faculty salaries for one year while noting that this would be below the rate of inflation.
In an email to its members, the faculty association said it appreciated the fact-finder’s work but believes the 7% proposal is not enough to address the loss in buying power.
The fact-finding report also highlighted that reaching an agreement has been challenging because the union and the university system have “radically different views” of the ongoing financial situation. The faculty union, as well as some student groups, have argued that the university system can use its reserves to cover expenses like faculty salaries. However, CSU has stated that its reserves are intended for one-time emergency purposes and can’t go to salary increases.
Much of the wage dispute comes as CSU has granted salary increases to campus presidents and hired the new system chancellor with a nearly $800,000 base salary, even as the system faced a budget deficit.
As for the series of one-day strikes, Ozment said at the start of this semester that she alerted her students to the potential disruption of their classes in her syllabus.
“Being a teacher is about transparency and consistency, so I felt that if I told them from the beginning about a possible disruption they would be emotionally and intellectually prepared for it,” she said. “My students have been really upset when they learn how many of their faculty are not paid a living wage, especially how many classes are taught by lecturers who can’t afford rent or are constantly driving from campus to campus in order to put food on the table.”
Ozment said she did receive some concerns about the impact of the strike on grading or the ability to graduate on time eventhough just one day’s classes will be canceled.
“I told them the same thing that I always tell them, which is: ‘I’ve got your back,’” she said. “There’s going to be a disruption. That’s the nature of the thing I have to disrupt, but I’m disrupting management. I’m not trying to disrupt (students). I encouraged them to be a part of it because the better the disruption, the quicker this is over and the quicker they get the education they deserve.”
Students have also received communications from the chancellor’s office about the strikes and have been encouraged to speak with their faculty members about the impact on their courses and grades. And not every faculty member will participate in the strike, Freedman predicted.
The chancellor’s office is caught between “a rock and a hard place,” she added.
“We need to be responsible and protect the university and our students and our operations,” Freedman said. “At the same time, we also need to pay our employees fairly and competitively. We are in a very tough situation. I wish we had more money. I wish we had more money to use and to make different choices, but we’re very limited.”
Schools and community colleges likely will face a $19 billion, three-year state funding deficit, the Legislative Analyst’s Office reported Thursday. The funding for TK-12 this year is $108 billion.
The LAO’s annual projection is a forecast of what to expect from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first pass next month on the 2024-25 state budget. It reflects a decline in funding in Proposition 98, the 35-year-old constitutional amendment that determines the portion of the state’s general fund that must go to schools and community colleges. Complicating the picture is that about half of the education deficit covers money that schools and community colleges spent in 2022-23.
The overall projected state general fund budget deficit of $68 billion could also jeopardize 5% annual increases for the University of California and California State University systems that Gov. Gavin Newsom had agreed to, as well as children’s services not covered by Proposition 98.
The projected shortfall is the largest financial challenge schools and community colleges will face since the Great Recession budget of 2009. However, the LAO said that schools are better positioned now because of an education rainy-day fund that the Legislature was required to sock away in the record-high revenue years of the past half-decade.
Edgar Zazueta, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators, cautioned that state leaders must avoid the sort of harsh cuts made during the Great Recession. They included forcing districts to borrow billions of dollars with the expectation they would be repaid later.
“Fortunately, we have tools, including the Proposition 98 reserve, that we can leverage to protect Proposition 98 funding levels,” he said. “Even during fiscal times like these, public education must be prioritized and protected. We must continue to build on our state’s great momentum and investments that have been made these past few years.”
The LAO report lays out several options to balance school spending, some of them jarring for schools and community colleges.
One option is for the Legislature to preserve TK-14 funding approved last June and find the full $68 billion in cuts in the general fund. That would spare schools, but other programs for children outside of Proposition 98 funding would more likely be hit, including support and subsidized costs for child care.
The opposite approach — the most painful to schools and community colleges and politically risky for legislators — would be to revise the 2022-23 and the current 2023-24 Proposition 98 funding downward to meet the minimum required by law. That would slash funding by $9 billion from 2022-23 and $6.3 billion for the current year, with a ripple effect of lowering the minimum guarantee for 2024-25 by $3.5 billion.
The Legislature could ease the burden by draining the $8.1 billion rainy day fund. That would still leave about $10 billion in cuts. Billions of dollars in one-time funding, whether unspent so far this year, or allotted by the Legislature for the next several years, could be targets. These could include $1 billion as yet unallocated for developing community schools or money set aside for learning recovery and for after-school extended learning time. It could be politically unpopular for legislators to make significant school cuts in an election year. And they would have to approve a resolution that there is a fiscal emergency to reduce the Proposition 98 appropriation.
The third alternative is somewhere in the middle — cuts to K-14 and cuts from other general fund programs.
The Legislature had an inkling that economic conditions were worsening but no hard numbers when they passed the 2023-24 budget in June: The deadline for paying state and federal income taxes had been extended from April 15 to Oct. 16. So they didn’t know the impact on state revenues in 2022-23 and 2023-24 from slowing home sales, a drop in new startups in Silicon Valley, and from declining income of the top 1% of earners, who contribute 50% of the personal income tax receipts.
The LAO’s forecast for state revenues for the general fund shows a big drop in 2022-23, a flat line in 2023-24 and a slight uptick in the next fiscal year. But the gray area shows the possibility of an additional decline or a quick recovery. Source: The Legislative Analyst’s Office.
The LAO cautioned that economic conditions are volatile, and revenues will remain unpredictable. A graph of its revenue outlook shows slow growth in 2024-25, with a large gray penumbra of uncertainty above and below that line.
Kevin Gordon, president of Capitol Advisors Group, an education consulting company based in Sacramento, said he was pleased that the LAO listed several options and did not recommend resetting funding to meet the Proposition 98 minimum, with “devastating cuts.”
“The numbers are worrisome, but the approaches laid out are significant efforts to demonstrate how lawmakers might work to protect basic investment in education funding,” he said.
