Despite statewide efforts, California is still struggling to support the personal and educational needs of its students, according to the 2024 California Children’s Report Card conducted by the organization Children Now, which “grades the State on its ability to support better outcomes for kids” and evaluates progress made on California policies and investments.
“California has failed to significantly improve outcomes for kids, allowing unacceptable and economic disparities to stagnate and in many cases grow,” Ted Lempert, Children Now’s president, wrote in a letter included in the report.
“What’s particularly disturbing is that California continues to trail far behind other states on a number of important indicators of child well-being. Despite our relatively high tax burden, our progressive leanings, and our enviable 5th largest economy in the world, California is far from a leader when it comes to kids. That’s not only a threat to our state’s collective future, but to the entire country as well since California is so often a bellwether for the nation.”
Children’s health
Among the health categories assessed, “health insurance” received the highest grade, A-minus. Meanwhile, “birthing health,” “preventative screenings,” “supporting mental health,” “preventing substance abuse” and “health care access and accountability, all received grades in the D range.
The rest of the health categories — including “environmental health and justice,” “oral health care” and “relationships and sexual health” — all received grades in the C range.
Additionally, the report noted that “while many states and municipalities across the country have declared racism as a public health crisis, California has yet to do so.”
According to the report, “children’s poor health outcomes are largely driven by racism at the intersection of poverty, sexual orientation, gender, and geography.”
Children’s education
Of the 12 topics under education, none earned a grade in the A range. Here’s how the report assessed the state on its education:
C-minus for child care.
B-plus for preschool and transitional kindergarten.
B-minus for early care and education workforce.
D for early intervention and special education.
C-minus for education for dual language and English learners.
C-plus for funding.
B for expanded learning programs
D for science, technology, engineering and math education.
C for educator pipeline, retention and diversity.
D for school climate: connections with adults on campus.
C for “school climate: discipline and attendance.
B-minus for higher education.
“California is investing record amounts in public education, yet struggles to effectively support students, especially those who need the most help,” the report reads.
It added that the state’s education system “ranks 43rd of 50 states of outcome gaps by race and ethnicity.”
Support from family
In terms of family support, “voluntary evidence-based home visiting” earned a C-minus, while in “paid family leave,” the state received a B-minus. “Income assistance for low-income families” was given a B.
“Children’s well-being is fueled by good health, enriching learning opportunities, and positive and nurturing relationships with adults. Both adult and child well-being can be undermined by unmet basic needs, economic hardship, social isolation, and stress,” according to the report.
“Throughout the pandemic, California made positive policy changes to bolster families with key supports, even as federal funding withered away,” the report read. “However, too often, families with young children are an afterthought in California policy.”
Child welfare in California
None of the child welfare categories garnered an A or B.
Instead, the state earned a C for “home stability and enduring relationships” and a C-plus in “health care for kids in foster care.”
Meanwhile, the state earned a D in both education supports for students in foster care and transitions to adulthood.
“For children and youth who cannot remain safely at home and must enter foster care, the State must ensure access to stable and nurturing foster homes, trauma-informed services, and targeted, high-quality educational supports to help them heal and thrive,” the report states.
Cross-sector issues facing California children
In terms of “cross-sector” issues, both “food security” and “cradle-to-career data systems” received a B-minus, while support for LGBTQ+ youth received a C-plus, “decriminalization of youth” received a D-plus and support for unaccompanied homeless youth landed a D-minus.
“While all of the issues in the “Report Card” are interrelated, the topics in this section have especially strong implications across multiple sectors and systems,” the report read.
“A whole-child approach to supporting kids incorporates services that meet young people where they’re at and address the many factors that are needed to help them thrive.”
Is this a picture of something bad, or something good?
Cognitive scientists call this the global-local processing dilemma: Do we perceive the overall image, or focus on the details? Education policy often faces the same question: Can a policy be considered “good” if the overall data look promising, but the day-to-day experiences feel “bad?”
This tension is at the heart of California’s college math reforms.
Like the image, the story of these policies may look “good” from a distance, but “bad” up close.
Before recent reforms, community college students who needed extra math support were typically placed in remedial courses like elementary algebra. These classes didn’t count toward transfer requirements, and most students stuck in them never made it to a math course needed to transfer to a four-year university, such as college algebra or introductory statistics. This created an academic dead end for many.
A 2017 law, Assembly Bill 705, changed that. It used high school grades for placement and gave more students direct access to transfer-level courses, with corequisite support (a support course taken concurrently with a transfer-level course) when needed. Instead of multi-semester remediation, students could move into transfer-level math courses faster.
While challenges remain, the approach led to significant improvements. In 2016-17, before AB 705 was announced, only 27% of students passed a transfer-level math course within one year. But in 2019-20, the first full year of AB 705’s implementation, that number had nearly doubled to 51%. And by 2023-24, it reached 62%. About 30,000 more students were fulfilling their math requirements each year. The story is similar in English courses, and so it’s undeniable that AB 705 has helped California’s community college students get one step closer to transfer.
Despite these gains, many faculty don’t see AB 705 as a success. As one instructor put it, “There are a lot more people failing than before … largely students of color. … By making this change (i.e., AB 705) around equity, we’ve created an inequitable system.” And the data do show that pass rates have declined.
But here’s the catch: Far more students are now taking those courses. The graph below helps illustrate this shift using data from one community college district. Before AB 705, only a small fraction of students reached transfer-level math, but with high pass rates, as shown by the darker blue shading within the dashed box. After AB 705, access expanded, but pass rates declined from 80% to 70%. Critically, that’s 70% of a much larger group.
With such an improvement, why do some faculty feel like the policy is a failure?
Because of this paradox: AB 705 absolutely led to more students passing. But it also led to more students failing.
People respond more strongly to stories than to statistics, and losses loom larger than gains. The students we see struggling — their faces, their frustration, their stories — linger longer than a bar graph showing statewide gains. As faculty members, we know this all too well. We remember the students who didn’t make it. We think about what we could’ve done differently. We agonize over them.
And often, faculty haven’t been given the full picture. Our research has found that many instructors hadn’t even seen outcome data on AB 705’s impact. So, without that context, and given the classroom experience, it’s reasonable to assume the policy failed.
This disconnect is a classic challenge in public policy: a policy can be effective overall but still feel painful on the ground. And this tension is always a part of the hard work of building systemic justice. AB 705 succeeded in dismantling long-standing barriers and expanding access to transfer-level math. But that progress has introduced new classroom dynamics that feel personal, urgent and overwhelming to faculty. Good policy must account for both the big-picture gains and the human cost of change. Reforms don’t succeed on data alone. They require understanding, empathy and support for those doing the work.
And just as faculty were beginning to adjust to AB 705, we face Assembly Bill 1705, a sharper and even more controversial new policy. It asks colleges to stretch even more, limiting their ability to offer even prerequisite math courses. Understandably, many educators are still reeling. They’re trying to adapt to new expectations while managing unintended consequences in their classrooms. Recent guidance has softened the rollout, but confusion remains. The stakes are high, and many faculty feel mistrustful and angry.
If AB 705 taught us anything, it’s that mistrust grows when there’s a gap between what the data show and what people experience. This is why the next phase of work cannot be just about compliance or policy enforcement. It must be about storytelling, listening and solutions. Faculty need to see the big picture. Policymakers need to understand life on the ground. The policy “worked” in aggregate, but not without professional and emotional cost. If we ignore that, we risk undermining the very equity goals these reforms were meant to achieve.
Like the image above, the truth lies in seeing both levels clearly. We must acknowledge the trade-offs, the tension, and the very real pain of transition. Let’s take concerns seriously without retreating from hard-won progress. Let’s keep asking the harder, more honest questions: How do we support both students and faculty through ambitious change? How do we ensure that every student, not just the most prepared, has a real shot at success?
If we can do that, maybe we’ll find a way forward that is both honest and hopeful, one that sees the whole picture.
•••
Ji Y. Son, Ph.D., is a cognitive scientist and professor at California State University, Los Angeles and co-founder of CourseKata.org, a statistics and data science curriculum used by colleges and high schools. Federick Ngo, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research examines higher education policy, with a focus on college access and community college students.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the authors. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Let me start by saying I love The Washington Post. To me, it has always been the greatest newspaper in the nation, with outstanding journalists, opinion writers, and content.
I have another reason to love thea Post. I worked there as a copyboy in the summer of 1959. While there, I met my future husband. So I would not be wrong to say that the Post changed my life.
But the estimable Graham family made a terrible mistake when they sold the paper to multibillionaire Jeff Bezos. To the Grahams, the Post was a sacred trust. To Bezos, it’s a business, one of many he owns.
When he first bought the paper, he said he would respect its values, notably its commitment to independent journalism. As publisher, he would not interfere with the editorial side.
He kept his promise until 2024, when he realized that he could not antagonize Trump, because his other businesses dare not antagonize Trump. First, he stopped the editorial board from endorsing Harris. The editorial was written but never printed.
Then he donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural festivities. Then he made a deal to buy Melania’s video about her life for $40 million. The film is expected to cost $12 million. The remaining $28 million goes into her pockets.
Then he told the opinion writers that they should focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” Most understood that diktat to mean “stop criticizing Trump so much,” although one could write many columns about his assault on personal liberties and free markets.
A significant number of acclaimed journalists, editorial writers, and opinion writers left the Post, rather than submit.
So Bezos has a new idea. Cultivate writers from other publications, bloggers, freelance writers, even nonprofessional writers. Use AI to
Edit their submissions. Let humans make final decisions. Sad…especially for a great newspaper that is bleeding talent.
The New York Times wrote about Bezos’ new approach:
The Washington Post has published some of the world’s most influential voices for more than a century, including columnists like George Will and newsmakers like the Dalai Lama and President Trump.
A new initiative aims to sharply expand that lineup, opening The Post to many published opinion articles from other newspapers across America, writers on Substack and eventually nonprofessional writers, according to four people familiar with the plan. Executives hope that the program, known internally as Ripple, will appeal to readers who want more breadth than The Post’s current opinion section and more quality than social platforms like Reddit and X.
The project will host and promote the outside opinion columns on The Post’s website and app but outside its paywall, according to the people, who would speak only anonymously to discuss a confidential project. It will operate outside the paper’s opinion section.
The Post aims to strike some of the initial partnership deals this summer, two of the people said, and the company recently hired an editor to oversee writing for Ripple. A final phase, allowing nonprofessionals to submit columns with help from an A.I. writing coach called Ember, could begin testing this fall. Human editors would review submissions before publication.
Students who are chronically absent from school are much more likely to struggle with mental health challenges, with pre-teen boys and teen girls reporting some of the highest signs of distress.
When students need help, availability of mental health support often depends on the income of families. “As household income increased, so did the availability of mental health services” in children’s schools, University of Southern California researchers found in a survey of 2,500 households nationwide.
Their findings are part of an in-depth report on the continuing national school absenteeism crisis in which 25% of students, or about 12 million children, across 42 states and Washington, D.C., were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year. That rate remains higher than the pre-pandemic national rate of 15%.
EDITORS NOTE
This in-depth report on chronic absenteeism is part of an EdSource partnership with the Associated Press and Stanford Professor Thomas Dee.
“Chronic absenteeism in California is still twice what it was prior to the pandemic, and roughly 1 in 4 kids in public schools are chronically absent. That is just really striking and is a serious barrier to achieving academic recovery for this generation of students who were so harmed by the pandemic,” said Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor and economist who gathered nationwide data in collaboration with The Associated Press and the release of the USC research.
Emotional and behavioral problems also have kept kids home from school. University of Southern California research shared exclusively with AP found strong relationships between absenteeism and poor mental health.
For example, in the USC study, almost a quarter of chronically absent kids had high levels of emotional or behavioral problems, according to a parent questionnaire, compared with just 7% of kids with good attendance. Emotional symptoms among teen girls were especially linked with missing lots of school.
Families with the lowest incomes reported a much higher rate of using mental health services if they were offered to their children in school — more than five times higher than those with the highest incomes. And, crucially, the researchers also found that 1 in 5 respondents would have used mental health services if they were made available at their school, with higher rates among Black and Hispanic families who were surveyed.
“There is tremendous opportunity here for schools to increase the offerings but also, if they have the offerings, to increase the outreach to the kids and the families that need it because there is clearly an unmet need,” said Amie Rapaport, who co-authored the report and is the co-director of Center for Economic and Social Research at USC.
‘I had a very bad year’
If Jennifer Hwang’s son made it to his first grade classroom, it was rarely without a fight.
He struggled with severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and Hwang says his teacher’s habit of discarding art work in front of him would spike his anxiety, leading to violent outbursts and refusing to even get in the car or walk onto campus.
“I thought I would have a good year in first grade, but I didn’t,” said her son, 8, whose name Hwang declined to share to protect his privacy. “I had a very bad year.”
The absences began piling up during the second semester of that 2022-23 school year; he started missing two to three days most weeks. He soon became chronically absent, meaning he missed at least 40 days total. That classified him as chronically absent because he had missed at least 10% or more days in one school year. He began to see a therapist outside the L.A. Unified district.
Hwang tried getting her son an individualized education program (IEP), which would grant him access to school-based counseling services given his ADHD diagnosis. But because her son’s academic performance was up to par, the school said he didn’t need it.
She also inquired about him seeing a child psychologist who went to his Riverside Drive Charter campus in Sherman Oaks once or twice a week — but the waitlists were too long. Because he was already seeing a therapist outside of school, Hwang gave up on pressing for school resources.
The USC report published Thursday highlights that pre-teen boys, which includes children ages 5 to 12, are struggling significantly with symptoms of hyperactivity and conduct problems, while teen girls, ages 13 to 17, are struggling most with emotional symptoms, such as depression and anxiety.
Morgan Polikoff, a co-author of the USC report, said they cannot confirm there is “a cause and effect here,” noting that the correlation between chronic absenteeism and mental health challenges could “go both directions.”
“In reality, it’s probably both ways. There’s probably some kids for whom increasing anxiety is leading them to stay home, and there’s probably kids who are missing a lot of school and that’s increasing their anxiety. So it probably is bi-directional or multi-directional,” Rapaport agreed.
Both the USC researchers and Dee advocated for more research to better understand the causes of persistently high chronic absenteeism rates.
LAUSD’s chronic absenteeism problem
Last year, for second grade, everything changed, Hwang said, largely thanks to a teacher who adapted assignments to suit her son’s social-emotional needs and incorporated “brain breaks” into the school day, which Hwang’s son said helped him concentrate.
“She understood him. She knew that he was bright and he felt things much more deeply, and he saw things differently and with a very different perspective,” Hwang said. “She allowed him to feel heard.”
“One day (his teacher told me), ‘Oh, my goodness, your son just gave me a hug!’ Hwang said. “That doesn’t come cheap because he does not give out hugs very often. So that he actually hugged the teacher … that says a lot.”
Hwang and her family aren’t sure what third grade will bring, but they were able to at least secure a 504, a type of plan that helps level the playing field for students with disabilities, so her son could have access to a special chair and space to doodle.
LAUSD, the second-largest school district in the nation, has struggled with high rates of chronic absenteeism since the onset of the pandemic. Nearly 33% of their over 400,000 students were chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year, down from about 40% the previous year.
Most recently, in 2023-24, preliminary data shows their rate is hovering at 32.3%, a spokesperson said.
Still not enough
LAUSD has increased its staffing of social workers and pupil attendance workers, but staffers say it’s just not enough.
“We have what we can afford at this point — more than ever before — but still not at an appropriate ratio that I think this board, or myself, would feel comfortable,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said at a news conference Monday.
Carvalho described the district’s staffing as “an unprecedented network” but did not specify how much staffing had increased.
Ofelia Sofia Ryan is one of roughly 400 LAUSD pupil services and attendance workers trying to bring students back to school.Credit: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource
Ofelia Sofia Ryan is one of LAUSD’s roughly 400 pupil services and attendance counselors who are on the front lines helping get chronically absent students connected with mental health resources and Medi-Cal so they can get back to school.
This year, the 20-year district veteran works in five elementary schools, including Orchard Academies in the city of Bell.
“Poverty is the No. 1 issue. Financial issues are … second — the inability of a parent to monitor because they are having two jobs, which also relates to the poverty issue,” Ryan said. “Mental health, I would say that will be maybe next.”
Darlene Rivas, one of the district’s 800 psychiatric social workers (PSWs), is assigned to two East Los Angeles elementary schools: William R. Anton and Lorena Street.
“We have to be team players because it can’t just be one person,” Rivas said. “I think that’s why you see a lot of exhaustion within PSW professionals.”
There is a long waitlist for students in need of therapy, she said. If a parent can’t make it to an initial appointment, it can take months to reschedule.
Adding staffing can come from school funding, but there are competing demands.
This year Ryan said she started on an LAUSD campus two days a week. At the last minute, “boom,” they dropped a day, she said.
“That’s very unfair, because (the district tells) you, on one hand, mental health matters, attendance matters. You’re working your butt off to get attendance improved. I improved attendance in all my schools. Everything was done by the book, and then (the school) just took the money away,” said Ryan. “You cannot do anything. You are powerless.”
Carvalho regularly touts the district’s iAttend program, where he, among others, visits the homes of chronically absent students to coax them back to school. The district made more than 34,000 home visits last school year, contributing to a more than 4 percentage point decrease in chronic absenteeism, according to the district.
What the public doesn’t know is how much work it takes after the house visit to get the child back in school, Ryan said.
Local barriers require local solutions
Researchers like Dee offer advice for lowering chronic absenteeism rates: “Be acutely aware of the problem” and “look to the really local barriers.”
That advice appears to be playing out successfully farther north, in Placer County, where more and more of Roseville City School District’s 12,000 students are attending school regularly each year.
Placer’s 2023-24 absenteeism rate is expected to be about 11% — nearly double what it was pre-pandemic. But that is down from 20% in 2022-23 and 26% in 2021-22.
School staff have found the two main reasons for the absences are “misinformation and a lot of struggle,” said Jessica Hull, the district’s executive director of communication and community engagement. They zeroed in on these top reasons by closely tracking absenteeism over several years with their attendance system plus a notification system managed by a third-party team, SchoolStatus, that they hired specifically to address chronic absences.
The misinformation largely centers on families being unsure of whether to send a child to school when they are sick, not knowing they can rely on independent study if the family is going on a lengthy vacation, or not understanding the importance of enrolling in pre-kindergarten known as TK.
Roseville City School District’s attendance roadmap for parents.
This misinformation is part of what Dee and other researchers are calling “norm erosion.”
“The learning experiences of families and students during the pandemic, in particular the experience of remote schooling, may have reduced the perceived value of regular school attendance among students and parents,” said Dee.
He cautioned against blaming parents for the erosion, saying that “we’re in a crisis now that merits immediate attention and perhaps a little less finger-pointing.”
The struggles that Hull, from Roseville, said families face are often mental health challenges, particularly with middle schoolers, or families with unmet basic needs, such as unstable housing.
One of their solutions to both barriers has been constant check-ins with those chronically absent students in order to offer resources, such as access to mental health specialists, gas cards to families facing transportation issues, and offering families bags of food from the local food bank.
Another help is clearly explaining the notices behind their child being absent. “Schools are all about the acronym and all about words that no one else understands, so we start sending letters home and talking about truancy and chronically truant and excused absence and unexcused absence — all of that’s a mess,” Hull said.
Instead, parents can expect to see at schoolshalf-sheets of card stock paper explaining the terms andprinted in five languages from English to Ukrainian to Pashto.
“It’s really trying to remove that language barrier when we are talking jargon, and they’re just saying, ‘my kid needs help, we need help figuring out how to get them to school,’” Hull said.
Kids who identify with their educators are more likely to attend school, said Michael Gottfried, a University of Pennsylvania professor. According to one study led by Gottfried, California students felt “it’s important for me to see someone who’s like me early on, first thing in the day,” he said.
Daylarlyn Gonzalez organizes a class project among freshmen at Arvin High taking a dual enrollment course through Bakersfield College.
Credit: Emma Gallegos/EdSource
A new report delivers bad and good news for the Central Valley.
The bad news: The vast majority of parents, 79%, want their children to get a bachelor’s degree, but just 26% of students in the region are on pace to achieve that.
The good news: Central Valley educators in both K-12 and higher education are pioneering strategies that could transform the region’s low college attainment rates. That includes broadly expanding dual enrollment opportunities; increasingthe number of students meeting requirements to graduate from high school; and creating regional partnerships to smooth key transitions between high school, community college and four-year universities.
A sweeping new report, “Pathways to College Completion in the San Joaquin Valley,” by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found a multitude of factors contributing to lower college attainment rate in the region, compared to the rest of the state, including a lack of preparation in high school, low university application rates (especially to the UC system), financial constraints, campus proximity, and a perception of less access. That’s a problem for the state, as well as the region.
“When we look to the state’s future, the San Joaquin Valley is especially important,” said Hans Johnson, one of the report’s authors.
That’s because the Central Valley is populous, young and growing rapidly — 4 million and counting — compared with other parts of the state. But it is also a region that requires attention, because, over the last 50 years, it has fallen behind the rest of the state economically. In 1974, residents in the Central Valley made 90% of the state’s per capita income. In 2020, that number had fallen to 68%.
“When you increase the educational attainment rate here in the Central Valley, it lifts the entire region socioeconomically and culturally as well,” said Benjamin Duran, executive director of the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium.
He said that too few students obtaining any kind of degree — associate, bachelor’s or advanced — means the valley will continue to have too few people in critical professions, such as nursing, medicine and teaching.
“It’s way below what our economy in general demands,” said Johnson, a senior fellow with PPIC. “We know the value of a college degree statewide is incredibly strong — and in the Valley as well. So, not everybody has to go (to college), but more people and more students should be going than are going right now.”
The report finds that students in the Central Valley tend to graduate from high school at nearly the same rate as other students in the state, but show a sharp decline during the critical juncture of transitioning from high school to college and, for students who register at community colleges, which a majority of Valley college students do, transferring to a four-year university or college.
High school students lack preparation
According to the PPIC report, students in the Valley have wildly different experiences based simply on which school districts they attend.
“That’s both encouraging and kind of discouraging that we have such a wide variation that where you go to school, to not a small extent, is going to determine what kind of possibilities you have for going on to college,” Johnson said.
School districts that do a good job preparing socioeconomically disadvantaged students tend to also prepare their wealthier peers well, the report shows.
Two of the Valley’s largest districts, for example, demonstrate this. The college-going rate for Fresno Unified’s socioeconomically disadvantaged students is 64%, compared with 67% of their more advantaged peers. Those same rates for the Kern High School District are 48% and 53% respectively.
The problem is that many Central Valley students are not graduating from high school with the preparation that they need to succeed in college, according to Olga Rodriguez, one of the report’s authors.
One important metric is how many students have taken the full college preparatory sequence — known as A-G — required for admission to California’s public universities. In the Central Valley, 4 out of 10 high school graduates met the A-G requirements, compared with 6 out of 10 for Los Angeles and Bay Area students.
“If you want to increase the number of college graduates, that’s where we have so much potential,” said Rodriguez, director of the PPIC Higher Education Center.
Students who do not meet A-G requirements are not able to begin their college career at a CSU or UC school. Additionally, this lack of preparation makes it more challenging for students at community colleges to successfully transfer to a four-year university, Rodriguez said.
To improve their rates, some school districts have shifted to mandating that students graduate with A-G requirements; others have simply dropped classes that are not A-G eligible. However, many other districts are not prioritizing A-G classes.
“A-G policies often seemed centered on politics and local industry needs — as opposed to being focused on students’ needs and aspirations,” the report states.
An analysis by EdSource found that 56% of high school seniors do not complete the A-G requirements. EdSource found that the problem is particularly dire among Black and Latino students, as well as in certain regions, such as Northern California and the Central Valley.
For many communities in the Central Valley, higher education is considered more “aspirational” than realistic, Duran said, adding that it’s the job of all educators across the spectrum to educate both students and parents about how to make college a reality.
The default choice for many Central Valley students is to stay at home and attend a local community college, rather than attend a CSU or UC — even for students who have the grades. The perception is that it ends up being cheaper and maybe a safer option, but that’s not always the case.
“When you look at the net price, it’s actually more affordable to go to a CSU than it is to stay at a community college,” said Rodriguez. “Especially when you think about the likelihood of completion and how long it’s going to take you.”
Partnerships make the difference
Because the transitions between institutions is where students tend to fail, the report says that partnerships between high schools, community colleges, CSU campuses and the region’s only UC campus, in Merced, are important for Central Valley students.
In this area, the region is “ahead of the game,” said Rodriguez.
The Associate Degree for Transfer (ADT) is a program that guarantees community college students who meet certain requirements a spot at a CSU campus, but the UC system has not joined in. However, UC Merced — the only UC in the Central Valley — is unique in having its own version of an ADT guarantee for regional community colleges, Johnson notes. The university also has a similar guarantee program aimed at high school students in regional districts.
There are similar partnerships throughout the Valley that are trying to ease those transitions. For instance, Fresno State has a new Bulldog Bound Program that guarantees admission to high school students in over 40 school districts who meet requirements — and also gives them support during their high school career.
The region has three K-16 collaboratives that focus on making sure that schools are able to prepare students for college at a young age — whether that is through educating parents or helping high school teachers, particularly in English and math, get master’s degrees so they can teach dual enrollment courses.
Dual enrollment has thrived in the Central Valley, thanks to partnerships largely between community colleges and K-12 schools in the region. Dual enrollment allows students to take college credit courses during high school, which makes them more likely to continue on to college after high school.
The work being done in the Central Valley serves as an incubator for what can happen in the rest of the state, said Duran.
“The work we do is collaborative,” said Duran. “We try to bring projects and initiatives that can not only be replicated here, but in the rest of the state.”
If these changes lead to a swell of enrollment, the report notes that there is plenty of higher education infrastructure in the region. Few colleges or universities have programs that are impacted — unlike in other parts of the state. Both CSU and UC are banking on growth in this region.
West Contra Costa Unified’s Stege Elementary School in Richmond.
Photo: Andrew Reed/EdSource
West Contra Costa Unified School District is on the cusp of a new and uncertain era following the retirement of its superintendent, Chris Hurst, who stepped down in December after just over three years on the job.
Whoever is chosen to permanently replace him will face a daunting set of concerns, including ensuring that the district is not placed under state control. For now that job is in the hands of interim Superintendent Kim Moses, who until December was the district’s associate superintendent for business services.
With an enrollment of just under 30,000 students, more than half from low-income families, the district comprises 54 schools in El Cerrito, Richmond and other East Bay communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Chief among the issues the district faces are declining enrollment, persistent budget deficits, a sluggish improvement in post-Covid test scores, teacher shortages, and meeting the multiple needs of a diverse and largely low-income student body, along with a sometimes-contentious school board not always in alignment with its superintendent.
To a greater or lesser extent, these are problems facing many urban districts across California, including some larger neighbors around the Bay Area.
San Francisco Unified also got a new superintendent last month and is grappling with severe budget deficits and intense pressure to close schools.
While Oakland Unified’s superintendent, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, is still in her job after seven years, surviving a teacher strike, the pandemic, and other travails, the district is dealing with similar profound challenges. Both San Francisco and Oakland also face the prospect of a state takeover.
Last Wednesday, at West Contra Costa’s first board meeting of 2025, Moses issued a blunt warning about the need to make further budget cuts to avoid insolvency.
After making $19 million in cuts during the current year, the district still has a “significant structural deficit,” she said, and warned that under current scenarios, its budget reserves “will be exhausted within three years.”
Without further reductions in the next two school years, the district would be “placed under (state) receivership, which means we’ll no longer be in charge of making financial decisions for our district,” she said.
In 1991, the district had the unfortunate distinction of being the first in the state to go insolvent. To rescue it, the district received a $29 million bailout loan, which took 21 years to pay off. Now it is trying to head off a similar fate.
In December, the West Contra Costa school board passed a budget that members said met the standard to receive a “positive certification,” which under state regulations means it would not spend its entire reserve over the next three years.
But the county office of education has refused to approve that certification without the district providing a multiyear deficit-reduction plan. That is what Moses presented to the board on Wednesday night, involving cuts of $7 million next year, and an additional $6 million the following year.
Declining enrollment — by 8% over the past four years alone — is perhaps West Contra Costa’s primary concern, according to Michael Fine, CEO of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, an agency created by the state to help districts resolve financial and management problems.
Fine largely attributes the decline — which is mirrored in many other districts, and the state as a whole — to lower birth rates.
“It’s a long-term problem” for schools, he said. “Right now, schools are feeling it most in kindergarten and elementary school. In 10 years, it will be middle school, then high school.”
The problem translates directly into money. In California, schools have a variety of sources of funds, but they are primarily based on “average daily attendance,” that is, the number of kids in the classroom each day. In 2022-23, the district received nearly $24,000 per student from various sources, most of it from the state based on actual attendance, according to Ed-Data.
As enrollment declines — either through lower birth rates or families leaving the expensive Bay Area — so, too, does the district’s revenues. Another factor reducing income is the end of the federal government’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund, designed to help with Covid-19 recovery. The fund brought the district some $53 million by 2023.
All of which has had an effect on West Contra Costa Unified’s budget.
One approach the district is examining to reduce its deficit is so-called “purpose-based budgeting.” The method, designed to more tightly control expenses, is to evaluate how well specific funds match the district’s priorities.
But that may not be enough.
“Look, I understand. No one joins a school board to lay off people,” Fine says. “But your revenue is going away, and they’re overstaffed compared to their enrollment.”
But Francisco Ortiz, president of United Teachers of Richmond, the union representing teachers, says there are already too many unfilled positions in West Contra Costa, and the district cannot afford to save more by further reducing staff.
“In secondary schools alone, we have 27 vacant FTEs — full-time equivalent (positions),” he says. “And in elementary, it’s 30.8 vacancies and 22 in special ed. The majority of these folks are teachers, some counselors, in elementary, but the majority are classroom teachers.” Most schools, he said, have to use substitutes on a daily basis.
At the board meeting this week, interim Superintendent Moses argued that increasing student attendance and enrollment is the only realistic way to reduce the district’s deficits without making further cuts. For every 1% increase in attendance, the district would generate $2.75 million in additional state funding. To that end, the district is launching what it calls its “Why We Show Up” campaign. “It’s really cut and dried,” Moses said. “We only get revenue based upon the number of children we have in a seat.”
At last week’s board meeting, many parents and teachers expressed concerns that there would be cuts in district offerings like its International Baccalaureate and bilingual and dual immersion programs.
But Moses tried to reassure the school community that no programs would be cut. A big chunk of reductions she is proposing would come from central office reductions, moving teachers out of classrooms with small numbers of students, and so on.
Part of the problem, union leader Ortiz says, is that the district has done a poor job of budgeting for how many teachers it will need each year. As for covering the district’s deficit — to pay for more teachers — he says the district should draw further on its reserve. “The reserve is for a rainy day, and right now it’s flooding. Our most vulnerable students are the ones receiving the blunt end of this. Cutting classroom teachers is not the answer.”
But FCMAT’s Fine argues that has to be part of the equation. “Lots of school boards say cut as far away from the classroom as you can, but when you have declining enrollment, you cut at the classroom level. But it’s really tough. It’s difficult as heck. It is horrendous.”
Fine argues that the issue of teacher vacancies is a nuanced one, and that there may be possible solutions. There may, for example, may be too many English teachers and not enough math teachers, or too many PE teachers and not enough special education teachers. He suggests that districts consider offering programs to re-credential teachers, even though this is not a short-term strategy.
“The solution doesn’t work for everyone, but why don’t we pay, say English teachers, to get credentialed to teach the sixth grade? Or invest in someone to get a special ed credential?”
Before his departure, outgoing superintendent Hurst outlined several of the district’s recent accomplishments in his State of Our District report — a reminder that putting all the attention on finances can obscure progress in other areas.
Among those is the return to 100% in-person learning in the district after the pandemic. Another is “improved staff recruitment, development and retention,” with teacher vacancies declining from 143 two years ago to 64 in the current school year.
Test scores have also improved somewhat in the district, according to results of the Smarter Balanced assessments students took last spring, though they still lag statewide averages, and, like almost all districts in the state, are not yet up to pre-pandemic levels.
The board recently hired David Hart as chief business manager, at least through the remainder of the school year. He’s the highly regarded former chief financial officer of the massive Los Angeles Unified, a district 20 times the size of West Contra Costa. Fine is hopeful Hart’s experience with a vastly more complex district will accelerate the district’s path to recovery.
“They are hiring a very skilled interim CBO,” he said. “I hope they listen to him.”
