Project 2025’s section on education proposes that the U.S. Department of Education’s largest funding streams for K-12 schools be turned into block grants to the states with minimal oversight. The two big programs are Title 1 for poor kids and the funding for students with disabilities (IDEA).
The states would be free to convert these funds into vouchers, instead of spending them on low-income students or students with disabilities.
The National Education Association explains here:
Block Grant Overview
Typically, the deal between the federal government and states when specific program funds are block-granted is that the federal government will provide less funding in return for less regulation and requirements. With less regulation, the assumption is that states should be able to do as much or more with less money. While it may be appealing initially to those who administer federal grants at the state and local level, in reality, fewer dollars mean fewer programs and services. States and school districts may have more flexibility in using federal funds but it comes at the expense of the students the federal grant program was designed to help in the first place.
Many states already underfund their commitment to public education. If states and districts don’t cover the shortfall, students receiving Title I and IDEA services will suffer. Furthermore, both Title I and IDEA have maintenance of effort and supplement, not supplant requirements to ensure states and districts hold up their levels of spending when receiving federal funds. Those requirements will fall away, too, and, most likely, so will the funding commitments by states and districts.
Title I of the ESEA and IDEA were created to ensure all students have equal access to an education, regardless of family income or disability. Many states were failing to adequately educate students in these populations, if at all. The federal role here was clear: where a student lived or their circumstances should not determine the quality of their education. ESEA and IDEA enshrined this principle and attached specific conditions and requirements that states must follow, in return for federal financial assistance, to ensure that students from lower-income families and communities and those with disabilities have the same opportunity to learn as any other student. “No-strings-attached” block grant funding turns the clock back 60 years on education policy and progress, and turns its back on our nation’s commitment to educating all students. While one would like to think that we can trust states to do the right thing on behalf of all students, history tells us differently.
Providing states with federal aid and fewer requirements leaves the door open for states to do as they wish. Title I of ESEA and IDEA include important requirements and protections for students and families precisely because they were lacking previously. At its core, the Department of Education is a civil rights agency, providing dollars, regulations, requirements, guidance, technical assistance, research, monitoring, and compliance enforcement to preserve and protect students’ access to a free and appropriate education. Strip it away, and you strip away the rights of certain students to a meaningful education.
Every year, by May 15, the governor has to revise his proposed budget, and this is when the budget season really kicks off.
So, just as individuals are concerned about personal finances, retirements, the impacts of inflation, and uncertainty about government services, the state is facing those same sorts of uncertainties. And in this case, uncertainty really rolls downhill. There’s national uncertainty, which is causing state revenue uncertainty and budget uncertainty, which then impacts the state’s education budget decisions, that will then impact what school districts are facing as they head into adopting their budgets by the end of June.
So, we know that the revenue outlook for the current year that ends June 30 looks pretty good, so will that protect us?
I’d sort of hoped that they would, but the short answer is no, and that’s because of some nuances in how Prop 98 works. A lot of those extra revenues that have come in are actually going to count against last year, the 2023–24 fiscal year. And in that year, the Legislature actually suspended the constitutional guarantee for a year. So even though there are extra revenues, none of those revenues will go to schools.
As we look to the future, to the 2025–26 school year, the forecasts are looking much more pessimistic. The Legislative Analyst’s Office just came out with a projection of revenues for next year being down around $8 billion. That would trickle down to schools getting about $3.5 billion less compared to what their current programs receive.
I would expect schools to get the program that’s in place for the current year, plus a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), which is currently expected to be about 2.3%. That probably seems pretty low to most folks, especially given some of the costs districts might face—salary increases that have already happened due to inflation, the rising costs teachers are facing, plus pensions and other obligations. So, the costs districts are facing may be going up more than the 2.3% COLA they’re getting.
Stockton Unified Superintendent Michelle Rodriguez talks about how she arrived at her goals and plans for improving student achievement.
Credit: Lasherica Thornton/ EdSource
Stockton Unified, a mostly poverty-stricken community in San Joaquin County, has become known for its legal troubles, financial issues and superintendent turnover, which have, for years, distracted the low-performing school district from addressing student achievement. Most of the district’s nearly 40,000 students have failed to meet state standards in English and math.
Becoming superintendent in July 2023, Michelle Rodriguez knew those facts to be true. Rodriguez, the 14th superintendent to lead the district in less than two decades, said she was determined to change SUSD’s troubled reputation by focusing on students, creating stability, restoring public trust and engaging the community “one interaction, one decision, one day at a time.”
But without “actually digging in to find out what is happening,” Rodriguez refused at the start to make assumptions about what the district faced, especially its barriers to student achievement.
“Until I get in the classroom, I probably won’t be able to answer the question about lack of student achievement here,” Rodriguez told EdSource last year.
“What I knew was that because I was the 14th superintendent in 19 years, and because of just the headlines that we had seen, we knew that we needed to make sure that we solidified the system,” she said in a recent sit-down. “Instead of making the assumption that I knew specifically what was happening, I identified four key areas that effective systems have”: quality assurance, high expectations, continuous improvement and community trust.
A little over a year since her start — aligned with those areas and guided by an initial 100-day plan, over 40 school visits and dozens of listening sessions and town halls — Rodriguez is implementing a public accountability system, 44 priority recommendations, and a district culture in which data and feedback drive change.
“Something that I’m trying to do is create new traditions and new systems to hear feedback, make changes and, kind of, move the work forward,” Rodriguez said.
A system of accountability
At the start of her superintendency, Rodriguez hosted meet-and-greets and community listening sessions in English and Spanish to identify concerns that the district needed to address; based on the sessions, there were in-person and virtual town halls to create priority recommendations with “fingerprints” of community feedback.
“We want to reach the hardest-to-reach parent. We want to reach the hardest-to-reach student,” Rodriguez said a year ago about listening and collaborating with the community to develop a plan. “And within those priority recommendations, you will see your fingerprints.”
As a result, all 44 priority recommendations, including a goal to create student success plans for certain student groups, came from those engagements.
Setting those goals was merely one part of Rodriguez’ approach.
Visit Stockton Unified’s Pubic Accountability Dashboard, here
Read the 2023 State of District, here, which detailed last school year’s priorities
The dashboard includes each goal, its complexity, which of the four areas it falls under, the department(s) responsible, actions, whether it’s completed or not, outcomes and the impact of those outcomes.
Simply put, the dashboard shows the district’s progress and holds the superintendent and the other officials accountable to the goals.
Rodriguez said she didn’t want the Stockton Unified community to feel as though “we did all this work, we did all these 21 listening sessions, and now nothing happened.”
44 goals is a lot. What’s been accomplished?
Within weeks of setting the goals, Rodriguez and the district completed “easy wins.”
An easy win, for example, was providing radios for special education classrooms to address student safety. Since the pandemic, dozens of teachers and staff had reported high numbers of “elopers,” mostly special education students but also young learners, running from the classroom — a recurring problem that “no one necessarily was able to solve, or chose to solve, until now,” she said.
For each radio purchased, a staff member felt better equipped to support students, Rodriguez said.
“Things like that seem insignificant, but to the system, they had a lot of impact because now those teachers feel more at ease that if they do have a student leave the classroom, there’s a way to get help to retrieve them,” she said.
Rodriguez, also in her first few weeks, formed a student advisory group of 90 students from the district’s high schools.
The formation of the Superintendent’s Student Advisory, the first of its kind in Stockton Unified, allowed her to listen to students, such as Emily Gomez Valle, a Chavez High School junior, who said the advisory was a way for her to advocate for her peers.
Then, the district tackled short-term goals, accomplishing them in three months. The district, for instance, started conducting thorough exit interviews to understand why staff were leaving the district.
The easy wins and short-term goals were intentional, so that “people knew the superintendent was getting things done,” Rodriguez said.
In the 2023-24 school year, under Rodriguez’ leadership, Stockton Unified’s graduation rate increased to 83.9% — the highest in the district’s history.
Long-term goals completed in the 2023-24 school year included increased access and participation in Educators Thriving, a program that provides social-emotional support and training for teachers and other school staff. Stockton Unified is set to have two program cohorts with up to 100 educators participating this school year, according to its accountability dashboard.
Based on the need to “focus on our most vulnerable students and have an action plan that is linked to them,” Stockton Unified created specific student success plans for Black students, English learners, homeless youth and students with special needs.
Other long-term goals have addressed the district’s legal and financial woes. The San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office, with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI, launched a criminal investigation into Stockton Unified in April 2023, after a state audit by the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) found evidence that fraud, misappropriation of funds or other illegal fiscal practices may have occurred between July 2019 and April 2022.
Millions of dollars in federal one-time Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding, which school districts received to address the impacts of the pandemic, was the subject of the investigation. Under Rodriguez’ leadership, the school district didn’t have to repay the federal government the $6.6 million in ESSER funding that was improperly awarded for a contract.
Rodriguez’ challenge was spending the ESSER funds by their timeline.
As of March 2023, just months before she started, Stockton Unified had spent only 1.84% (over $5 million) of the more than $156 million it received in ESSER III, which must be returned to the federal government if not budgeted this month and spent by January 2025. According to Rodriguez, the district has now used all the funding, completing over 40 projects.
But the allegations about the misuse of ESSER funding triggered a 2021-22 grand jury investigation into the district’s overall spending as well. Stockton Unified, Rodriguez said in 2023, relied on and spent a lot of money on consultants, which the grand jury attributed to district staff lacking the “necessary training and guidance to execute complex district business needs.”
Stockton Unified has since identified and evaluated the consultants and increased staff expertise to take over the work, leading to a reduction in consultant costs from $886,561 last school year to an estimated $275,000 this year.
And as of June, the district has finalized 32 of 44 priority recommendations, including the easy wins, short-term goals and long-term priorities.
Still there are larger systemic and structural projects and objectives that are taking more than a year to accomplish, up until this school year or longer.
What’s left to do
Three weeks after school started in the 2023-24 school year, Rodriguez said she met a homeless student who hadn’t attended school at all. She told the student about district supports, such as transportation to school and other available resources once on campus.
“And what she said to me is, ‘How do you expect me to come to school when I haven’t bathed in a week?’” the superintendent recalled.
Such encounters highlighted the need to expand family and community partnerships, increase expectations and develop equitable action plans, all of which are among the remaining priorities meant to support students and improve their experience in Stockton Unified, Rodriguez said.
More than 82% of Stockton Unified students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, according to EdData, with many facing challenges such as the student Rodriguez encountered. Even so, there must be increased expectations for students to perform at high levels with strong support.
Using her saying, “You change experiences to change beliefs to change expectations,” Rodriguez said, “I actually have to reframe your experiences so that it changes your beliefs about students, and, then, that changes your expectations for students.”
The district will also conduct an equity audit to develop a three-year action plan. The equity audit is meant to evaluate district and school policies, practices and procedures that are inequitable and create barriers “that are getting in the way of our students,” Rodriguez said. The goal requires the district to form teams of employees from each school, which will develop a multiyear action plan.
In fact, Stockton Unified’s 2024-2027 LCAP goals are to increase student academic achievement; center the whole child; provide systemic and innovative programs aligned to students’ passions, interests and talents; create meaningful partnerships; provide access and opportunities to ensure success for students with disabilities; and provide positive learning conditions and experiences for Black students to thrive.
Some of the other district priorities include:
Investing in facilities by putting $50 million of ESSER funding into schools so that students have access to amenities such as classrooms with science labs.
Equitably offering arts programs at the district’s 55 schools and for all students, specifically those who are Black, English learners, homeless, have special needs and/or are foster youth who benefit from “differentiated instruction,” Rodriguez said.
Launching school and district administrator classroom visits, allowing classroom staff to get feedback and administrators to gain a better knowledge of the adopted curriculum.
Resolving the remaining findings and corrective actions reported by the California Department of Education and the San Joaquin County Office of Education as well as the findings of grand jury, FCMAT and audit reports.
Knowing if and when to change course
In some areas, such as chronic absenteeism, Stockton Unified identified a systemic goal and improved that metric in a year’s time, but still must find solutions to continue addressing the problem. In this case, the goal was to identify solutions to chronic absenteeism, in which students miss 10% or more days in a school year. Stockton Unified data shows that chronic absenteeism, though still higher than prepandemic numbers, decreased by 3.1 percentage points from the 2022-23 to the 2023-24 school year.
“How can we celebrate that?” Rodriguez asked, “but at the same time say, ‘OK, well, what we’re doing is working. Is it working fast enough? Are there any shifts that we could continue to do?’”
Chronic absenteeism, performance indicators and other data measured over time create the challenge of knowing if, when and how to pivot a district response.
For example, even though there isn’t a specific district goal about it, Stockton Unified has been adding an intervention teacher to each K-8 school based on district data. Seventeen of 41 such teachers have been hired so far.
“When we’re looking at our KPI (key performance indicator) data, what we know is that our students aren’t making the growth that we need them to make,” Rodriguez said. The district is now using iReady data, which allows teachers to deliver adaptive lessons and includes data on student progress.
Based on fall 2023 iReady data, 35% of fourth graders were one grade level behind in English, 13% were two grade levels behind and 39% were three or more grades behind, meaning that just 12.6% were on grade level. In math, 35% of fourth graders were one grade level behind, 25% were two grade levels behind and 32% were at least three years behind, meaning only 8.4% of students were on grade level.
“What is our data actually telling us? Every quarter we’re looking at the data because we want to be able to pivot and shift quicker than just yearly,” she said.
And the district was able to do that by the end of the 2023-24 school year. In the spring 2024 semester, 24.3% of fourth graders were on grade level in English – an 11.7 percentage point increase from the previous semester. In math, fourth graders on grade level grew from 8.4% to 29% — an improvement of 20.6 percentage points.
Maintaining focus
The priorities that Stockton Unified has identified are what the district has and will continue to focus on moving forward, Rodriguez said. While the equity audit will identify needed changes over the next three years, and while the district will respond to data, the district won’t shift much from the priorities it has identified.
“If you aren’t actually focused on what you need to do, then you can be too scattered and not really have the impact that you want,” she said, adding that, “Some of these changes will not change in one single year.”
Rodriguez maintains her pledge to make those changes by dedicating the last eight years of her career to Stockton Unified — a plan that became more attainable when the school board extended her contract until 2028, or year five.
“Why aren’t kids being successful?” she said. “That cannot happen until people even believe that I’m going to stay put. I won some people over at the six-month mark. I (won) some people over at the year mark. Some people will take the two-, three- year mark.”
Xavier Zamora graduates from Cal State LA in a commencement ceremony at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Credit: Myles Bridgewater-Jackman/Cal State LA
My academic career was delayed and nearly derailed by ADHD, and I didn’t have a clue.
I started my academic journey in 2002. At the time, I had a 2-year-old son with another child on the way. I enrolled at the University of New Mexico and, within a few years, started working part time as a mental health technician at a youth mental hospital. Little did I know that a single, off-the-cuff conversation with one of the doctors there would change my life forever.
He asked if I had ever been diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder), which, to me, was an absurd question to ask because I am certainly not hyperactive. At the time, when I thought of ADHD, I imagined little kids running around like they had just drunk 2 liters of soda. I can’t remember what answer I gave him, but his question planted a seed in my brain, and there it remained for years.
While I loved studying photojournalism at that time, my grades gradually went from OK to bad. I didn’t have a problem understanding the concepts. I struggled with time management, completing tasks and procrastination.
I had responsibilities. I thought it best to return home to California and pivot. In 2009, I dropped out of college and became a freelance photographer, shooting everything from weddings to commercial photography. I missed college and photojournalism, but I needed to pay bills.
Fast-forward to 2017. With both my boys now attending high school, I re-evaluated my first attempt at college to see where I went wrong.
Reflecting on the conversation about ADHD I had years ago, I decided to consult my doctor and a psychiatrist. I was diagnosed with a condition called attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, predominantly inattentive or ADHD-PI.
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders offered me this explanation: “Inattention manifests behaviorally in ADHD as wandering off task, lacking persistence, having difficulty sustaining focus, and being disorganized and is not due to defiance or lack of comprehension.”
All this gave me flashbacks to high school. I clearly remember the decline in my attention span. I was reading books by authors like Michael Crichton, Anne Rice and Carl Sagan before my freshman year. By the end of that same year, I struggled to retain anything I read from a few pages of a class textbook.
I had so many thoughts in my head, and they were all vying for my attention simultaneously. A song I heard the day before, a conversation with a friend, a scene from a movie I hadn’t seen in years. It felt like trying to read a book while in a packed sports bar during the Super Bowl. These explanations for my inattentiveness and procrastination were seen as thinly veiled excuses and had been regularly dismissed by teachers, counselors and my parents. They told me I was lazy and needed to snap out of it. I never could.
I am not alone. Roughly 3% of adults in the U.S. live with inattentive ADHD, the most common variation of the disorder.
Talk about a revelation. I had been fighting with one hand tied behind my back and didn’t even know it. When I realized what I was dealing with, I did my research and found ways to manage the effects.
I created an office space free from distractions like loud conversations and easily accessible video game controllers. I don’t often play video games, but giving in to a quick game of Call of Duty can send me down a rabbit hole of distractions that can easily consume hours of my time.
I also started using apps like Calendar, Reminders and Evernote to keep track of notes, appointments, tasks and deadlines.
I restarted my academic journey in 2019 at Pasadena City College, and at 41 years old, I approached it with care and discipline. In two and a half years, I graduated with two associate degrees, in communication arts and social and behavioral sciences.
Next, I enrolled in Cal State LA in 2022, ready to knock out two more degrees.
I wrote notes for every class lecture and every reading and class assignment. By the time I graduated, I had amassed a collection of 65 notebooks, one for each class I took.
My ADHD made it hard to retain what I read, so I used text-to-speech features to make my laptop read my books aloud while I read along. Also, I isolated myself. I used my noise-canceling headphones to study as if in the silence of a monastery.
When I returned to college, I placed myself in a better place to succeed. My kids were old enough to take care of themselves. I had my ADHD in check and built an incredible support structure among professors and therapists. The support of my family helped immensely.
And, I was blessed with professors who understood what I had on my plate.
Today, I am chasing a master’s degree. And I will not care whether a fellow student asks me “Are you a professor?” Every gray hair holds a story worth telling.
•••
Xavier Zamora recently graduated from Cal State LA with a double major in journalism and TV, film and media studies. He is a member of the EdSource Student Journalism Corps.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. We welcome guest commentaries with diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
You know the Bad MAGA, the one that wants to drag us back a century.
There is also a good MAGA: Mothers Against Greg Abbott.
It’s led by Nancy Thompson, who spends her time trying to help others, unlike the other MAGA.
My leading nominee for silliest bill of the year is this one: “Rep. Stan Gerdes filed HB 54, a bill that aims to ban non-human behaviors in Texas public schools.” This is an adult man who took seriously the absurd claim that some children asked for litter boxes because they identify as cats. That’s a wack-a-doo rumor, not a reality. Why not legislate about the best way to respond to men in flying saucers if they should land and disembark in Texas?
This her latest report on the Republican-dominated legislature in Texas, which does nothing to help others:
TX LEGE BREAKDOWN
📚 Education Legislation 📚
On April 24th, the Texas Senate voted to redirect $1 billion in taxpayer funds to their favored private schools in passing Greg Abbott’s school voucher bill. We (and tens of thousands of folks across Texas) organized hard to stop it, but a final phone call from Donald Trump sealed the deal. This scam on the taxpayers, I mean voucher bill, has just been signed into law by Abbott.
While voucher programs and charter schools are getting our hard-earned pennies, the TX Lege hasn’t passed a single public education funding bill yet this session. This is BS.
🏠 Housing and Water Legislation 🏠
HB 32 and its Senate companion, SB 38, would escalate the Texas housing crisis by making evictions faster, easier, and far more common. These are being sold as a fix for “squatters,” but in reality, the bills are Trojan horse policies that would dismantle due process, weaken eviction warnings, and reduce opportunities for legal protections for all renters in Texas.
😵💫 Wtf Legislation 😵💫
The Texas legislature has considered a record number of bills this year that only serve to bully transgender people. On April 23rd, the Senate approved SB 240, the ridiculously named “Texas Women’s Privacy Act,”which requires Texans to use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with the gender assigned on their birth certificate — even if they’ve transitioned.
The Texas House passed HB 366, a bill that would make it a crime to distribute altered media, including political memes, without a government-approved disclaimer. Violators could face up to a year in jail. WTF?
Rep. Stan Gerdes filed HB 54, a bill that aims to ban non-human behaviors in Texas public schools.
The Texas Senate passed SB 1870, a bill that would prohibit cities from putting any citizen initiative on local ballots that would decriminalize marijuana.
The Texas House is expected to consider House Bill 2436, to exempt law enforcement officers from being charged for “deadly conduct” (killing members of the public) while in the line of duty. The Senate approved a similar bill in early April. This is a dangerous escalation of the power of state violence and a lack of accountability for the harm it causes.
The Texas Senate also approved SCR 42, which declares that the state only recognizes two genders. Let’s be clear: trans and intersex people have always existed. This is just more dangerous bullying toward a vulnerable minority from Texas Republicans.
HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED
Follow us on social media — we’ll be posting live updates, actions you can take to speak out on legislation, and more.
DONATE It’s important to be clear-eyed about the damage Texas Republicans — arm in arm with the Trump Administration — are inflicting on our state. When the consequences come, like underfunded classrooms, law enforcement officers shielded from legal consequences, and discrimination and violence against vulnerable people, we need to be ready to make sure Texans know who to hold accountable – Texas Republicans.
Police and protesters faced off on May 31, 2024, at UC Santa Cruz.
Credit: Photo by Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
Civil rights groups representing two students and one professor are suing the University of California Santa Cruz, alleging that the campus unlawfully banned students and faculty from campus last spring after they participated in pro-Palestinian protests.
By filing the lawsuit, the civil rights groups, including the ACLU of Northern California, are seeking an injunction to prevent the university from banning students again, if there are additional protests in the upcoming fall term, which begins later this month.
The complaint, filed in Santa Cruz County Superior Court on Monday, says that more than 110 students and faculty were banned from campus for up to 14 days after being arrested at a pro-Palestinian encampment on May 31. Campus officials at the time invoked section 626.4 of California’s penal code, which allows campus chancellors to ban individuals from campus for up to two weeks if they disrupt the orderly operation of the campus.
The lawsuit, however, alleges that campus officials violated the law by not first providing the individuals with a hearing before banning them. The lawsuit cites precedent in a California Supreme Court case, Braxton v. Municipal Court, when the court ruled that campus officials can ban someone without a hearing only if their continued presence “constitutes a substantial and material threat of significant injury to persons or property.” According to the lawsuit, the campus didn’t provide the banned individuals with findings about how they presented such a threat.
The bans had consequences for students and faculty. One of the student plaintiffs, Laaila Irshad, ended up failing multiple classes required for her biology major because she wasn’t able to turn in assignments, meet with her professors or access her computer. Christine Hong, another plaintiff and a professor of critical race and ethnic studies, struggled to prepare for a summer class she would teach on the Korean War.
“Even though these were short-term bans, they had a significant impact on the students as well as faculty members who were instantly banished from campus,” said Rachel Lederman, senior counsel with the Center for Protest Law & Litigation. “And it’s blatantly illegal.”
UC Santa Cruz officials were not available for an interview. In a statement, a campus spokesperson said “the decisions made in the spring were necessary and critical to preserve safety, access, and operations of the campus.”
The lawsuit comes on the heels of UC President Michael Drake announcing that encampments would be banned across the 10-campus UC system this academic year. He asked each campus to come up with its own policy to enforce those rules.
Fall classes at Santa Cruz begin on Sept. 26. If the plaintiffs are successful in getting an injunction before then, it would apply only to the Santa Cruz campus. But Lederman said she’s hopeful that such a decision would “send a message” to all UC campuses that they “can’t just summarily ban people from campus without a hearing and without finding that the individual poses a danger.”
Irshad, now entering her third year at Santa Cruz, said she ended up changing her major as a result of being banned from campus for 12 days in the spring. She wasn’t able to turn in several assignments during that period, and she couldn’t go to her professors’ in-person office hours to ask for extensions.
She eventually got a hearing on June 11 and her ban was lifted the next day. But by then, it was too late, she said. She ended up failing a chemistry course required for her biology major, as well as a writing course she needed to fulfill one of her general education requirements.
Irshad has since changed her major to critical race and ethnic studies. She previously hoped to pursue a career in environmental restoration, but has set aside that goal.
“I spent the past two years of my college education paying for classes within bio and now have to make up for lost time, I guess,” she said.
Ahead of the fall quarter, Irshad isn’t sure if she will participate in protests again. “I know I have a right to protest. I just am very scared about the impact or the ramifications of what might happen,” she said.
It wasn’t only students who were impacted by the bans. Hong, the faculty plaintiff, had planned to spend the final weeks of the spring term preparing to teach a summer class about the Korean War.
Hong needed to record lectures for the course, which was online and asynchronous. She said she had a “critical window of time” in late May and early June when she wanted to record them, but she didn’t have access to the campus recording studio nor to the tech staff who would have helped her edit the lectures. She also couldn’t use her office, where she keeps books and other course materials that would have helped her further prepare for the class.
Hong’s ban from campus was lifted after 11 days. She ended up offering the class anyway, which had about 75 students. But she said there’s “no question” the quality of the course suffered because of the time she wasn’t able to spend preparing to teach it.
“Who gets impacted by this? It’s the students; the students get impacted by this,” she said.
A teacher’s aide sits with a kindergartner on the first day of school at George Washington Elementary School in Lodi Unified.
Diana Lambert
In today’s world, families have numerous school choices for their children and often rely on the experiences of neighbors, family and friends for advice. Families’ perceptions of the school — how they feel when they walk into the front office, their ability to provide feedback and feel heard and valued, and their access to school staff — are all crucial to improving student attendance, engagement and performance.
This might sound a lot like customer service, and that’s precisely what it is.
Just as in the business world, positive interactions between schools and their families directly influence satisfaction, loyalty and trust. According to the K12 Insight report on customer service in schools, these interactions can enhance student outcomes, enrollment, attendance and behavior.
Children in poverty, children of color and children with disabilities are three times more likely to be chronically absent. A welcoming school that goes the extra mile to create a sense of belonging and build bonds with families can take proactive measures to address attendance challenges.
This school year, schools should aim to create and nurture a sense of belonging and common purpose with families and the community. Here are some actionable suggestions:
Create a family-friendly environment
Families should feel comfortable touring and visiting the school. A welcoming environment includes convenient parking, clear signage, cleanliness, a friendly and helpful front office staff, a comfortable and inviting waiting area, translated materials, posted family engagement activities and events, and flyers informing families of enrichment opportunities available after school and in the community. When interacting with the school, families should find the staff knowledgeable, helpful and responsive to their concerns. To go the extra mile, schools can:
Advertise principal office hours when parents and students can stop by.
Promote networking among families during an open house by organizing grade-level meet-and-greet events and team-building activities.
Use student pickup and drop-off times as golden opportunities to make quick and friendly connections with families.
Post empowering messages for families on the school outdoor sign.
Actively recruit families to support decision-making and help identify the school’s vision and goals.
Enhance family engagement with clear and honest communication
Effective communication with families is clear, relevant and personalized. Go beyond good intentions and engage in meaningful conversations that can lead to improved student learning.
Teachers can make a great first impression before school starts or at the beginning of the year by making a welcome phone call, sending a postcard, email, letter or any other form of communication that helps families get to know their child’s teachers.
Encourage teachers to be relatable by sharing tidbits of their own lives; being a real person goes a long way in building relationships. Let families know the best way to contact their teacher for questions, guidance or updates on student learning progress.
Transparent and honest communication builds trust. Prioritize communication linked to learning. Share student progress data promptly, inform families when and how students will be tested, and show parents specific activities and strategies for home support. Report cards and parent-teacher conferences are not enough; families need concrete and personalized information and guidance to support learning. To go the extra mile:
Implement quarterly listening circles with diverse groups of families to value parents’ perspectives and ideas and support school improvement.
Anticipate communication barriers by understanding each family’s preferred language and communication method.
Create school policies to allow teachers to regularly connect with families and build time into the schedule to make it possible.
Expand engagement access for all families
Traditionally, schools collect family engagement data based on family attendance at school events and activities. Often, this means counting the regulars — the ones who come time after time. This school year, challenge your team to count the families who were unable to attend the event, especially if the event is focused on student learning.
Divide the number of absent families by grade level and ask teachers to reach out to their families to share the information they missed and build trust. Take this opportunity to learn more about the family, build trust, and open new lines of communication. Create space for teachers to share what they learn with their grade-level team. To go the extra mile:
Adjust engagement opportunities using family feedback and suggestions from prior years.
Leverage nonclassroom staff to facilitate mini-make-up sessions for families who were unable to attend the learning-focused events.
Genuine family engagement happens away from school — it happens at the dinner table, in car rides and during everyday parent-child interactions and family dynamics. Strengthening relationships with families can enrich the way families support learning and provide valuable insights into the children you teach.
There’s something incredibly heartwarming about reading parents’ social media posts expressing their appreciation for their child’s school. These parents highlight their favorite and trusted teachers, describe a sense of community and belonging, and invite new families to join in on school activities, volunteer opportunities, and decision-making committees. Their loyalty to the school is unmistakable.
Efforts like those listed above can enable schools to build stronger, more supportive communities that foster student success and create a welcoming environment for everyone involved.
Let’s make this school year the best one yet by going the extra mile for our families.
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Maria Paredes is a senior engagement manager on WestEd’s Family and Community Engagement team. A version of this post first appeared in the WestEd Bulletin in August and is reposted here with permission.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. We welcome guest commentaries with diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Nearly a quarter of California’s K-12 students missed several weeks’ worth of school during the 2022-23 school year — a decrease of 5 percentage points in chronic absenteeism from the previous school year, but a sign of the lingering effects of the pandemic.
Even as schools re-opened for in-person instruction, chronic absences shot up from 12.1% pre-pandemic to 30% during the 2021-22 school year.
Such a sharp rise has increased discussion about why the absences are occurring. But having a certain number of absences in one school year can lead to various different outcomes for students, and potentially for their parents, depending on how they are recorded.
If recorded as unexcused, the student can be considered chronically truant. If recorded as excused, or as a mix of excused and unexcused, the student can then be considered chronically absent.
But what is the difference between the two, and why does it matter?
This guide aims to clarify those questions and inform both students and parents on the importance of how absences are recorded.
Truancy, habitual truancy, chronic truancy — what is the difference? California law states that a student is considered truant after three unexcused absences of more than 30 minutes each during a school year.
If a student is reported as truant three or more times during the same school year and a school staff member has made a concerted effort to meet with the student and their parents to discuss the absences, they are then considered habitually truant.
Once a student is habitually truant, they can be referred to a local student attendance review board, or SARB. The SARB will open a case during which the family must sign an attendance contract stipulating their child will attend school regularly.
A student who is labeled as chronically truant has unexcused absences for 10% or more days during the school year. Given that a typical school year totals about 180 days, a student missing 10% of the school year would equal about a month’s worth of instructional time.
It is at this point, once the student is chronically truant, that a school district can refer the case to a district attorney’s office. Once there, the district attorney has the discretion to charge the parent or guardian with an infraction or misdemeanor that could potentially result in fines or jail time for the parent.
How is that different from chronic absenteeism?
The difference is in the way that a student’s absences are reported.
Chronic absenteeism is defined as a student missing 10% or more of the school year — regardless of whether the absences are excused or unexcused.
If a student’s absences are mostly excused, they are more likely to be labeled as chronically absent. If they go unexcused, a student could quickly end up being labeled as truant.
Why does it matter to understand the difference between chronic absenteeism and chronic truancy?
Both chronic absenteeism and chronic truancy include various levels of intervention from schools. Schools ar supposed to check in with students who are missing classes and be offered support to address their basic needs, including meetings with parents to discuss solutions, and more.
But if those interventions do not solve the problem and a student continues missing class, only one of the two — truancy — involves potential fines and jail time for parents.
The involvement of the court system in truancy, but not in absenteeism, is why it is important to understand the difference between the two.
Additionally, information from families regarding student absences can provide school staff with insight into what a student might be experiencing and, in turn, help them better support the family. If the school knows a student is dealing with housing insecurity or transportation issues, for example, it could connect the family with the local homeless liaison, who would then refer them to available resources.
What is considered an excused absence?
California law has a list of over a dozen reasons for excusing an absence. That list includes, but is not limited to:
Illness, which includes mental and behavioral health
Quarantine
Appointments with medical professionals such as optometrists, dentists or physicians
Funeral services
Jury duty
Illness of a student’s child
Participation in cultural events
The full list of excusable reasons can be found at this link.
Included in the list is the option to excuse an absence at the discretion of a school administrator. For example, a school might know that a child has unstable access to transportation, which results in being late to school or absent. In such cases, a school administrator could excuse the absence without requiring a note.
Is one label worse/better than the other?
Both chronic absenteeism and chronic truancy involve a significant number of student absences, and education experts agree that loss of instructional time negatively impacts students in their academic and personal development. With that in mind, both chronic absenteeism and chronic truancy are considered detrimental to students.
Certain demographics, however, are more likely to have unexcused absences: Black, Native American, Latino, and Pacific Islander students, regardless of socioeconomic status, according to a 2023 PACE report.
In an example provided by the report’s co-author, Hedy Chang, she explained: Two students can be absent from school due to illness but only one of them has health insurance. The student without insurance is less likely to see a doctor and, as a result, less likely to return to school with a doctor’s note. In this example, the student who is socioeconomically disadvantaged has a higher likelihood of reporting an unexcused absence.
Jeff Tiedrich is a graphic artist who writes a popular blog called “Everyone Is Entitled to My Own Opinion.” He is irreverent, profane, outrageous, and very funny.
The College of Cardinals must have been conclaving the shit out of their search for a new pope, ’cause it only took those honchos two days find their boy.
meet Robert Prevost. he’s an American, born in Chicago. he roots for the White Sox. he’s 69 years old, and he’ll be popin’ up a storm as Leo XIV.
“According to his X/Twitter feed (@drprevost), the newly selected pope trashed Trump, trashed Vance, trashed border enforcement, endorsed DREAMer-style illegal immigration, repeatedly praised and honored George Floyd, and endorsed a Democrat senator’s call for more gun control.”
the diaper-fillers are not entirely wrong — the current top-most thing on Robert/Leo’s not-twitter feed is a retweet taking Donny Convict to task for disappearing Venezuelan migrants off the streets and fuckity-byeing them into a Salvadoran slave-labor gulag.
furniture molester/eyeliner model JD Vance now has the distinction of being called out for shithead behavior by two consecutive popes— which I believe is a world record.
School is back in session. In California, we ended the prior school year with promising data that student attendance rates throughout the state are rising from historic lows during the pandemic. While having students in seats is cause for celebration, we must ensure that we have enough teachers in classrooms.
The initiative we should be champing at the bit to implement is high-impact tutoring: tutoring in one-on-one situations or very small groups meeting at least 30 minutes, three or more times a week. Here’s why this is an effective, scalable way to provide students with high-quality educators:
You can’t argue with data. Research shows that high-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective ways to help students make academic progress. Yet few students actually receive it. A recent study from Stanford University demonstrated the many positive effects of tutoring, including increased reading and math scores, attendance and a feeling of belonging. Teach For America’s (TFA) tutoring program, the Ignite Fellowship, finds and develops tutors who connect virtually with students during the school day. Fellows, who are paid for their work, are supported by a school-based veteran educator to customize instruction. Seventy-one percent of the 3,500 students across the country being tutored by Ignite fellows meet their semester-long reading and math goals.
Tutoring is a pipeline to teaching. Teacher morale is an ongoing issue. Because teaching is so unique, it can be hard to fully prepare aspiring educators for what it’s like to lead a classroom. Tutoring serves as a way for college students to step behind the wheel, with a professional providing roadside assistance before they are given full control. This can be key to teacher recruitment and retention — before people fully enlist in becoming a teacher, they have the opportunity to see if this profession is right for them. AmeriCorps, which also invests in employing young people as tutors to help them jump-start service-oriented careers, has found that more than half of its tutors hope to pursue a career in education after their service. When teachers are more confident stepping into their classrooms, students are the ones who reap the rewards.
Tutors ease the burden for teachers. Tutors can focus on small groups or individual sessions with students — something that lead teachers don’t always have the capacity to do. This way, tutors can address specific learning gaps for individual students, meeting more individual and diverse needs, and allowing students to build authentic relationships with multiple educators/mentors. I have had teachers tell me they wish they could clone themselves so they could work with more students to meet different needs and speeds. In our reality, tutors may be the closest thing we have to clones.
Prioritizing diversity. To provide a diverse experience for our nation’s students, we must have their educators — their role models — reflect them. This means we should prioritize recruiting and retaining teachers of color. Throughout California’s public schools, 77% of the K-12 population is composed of students of color, whereas only 37% of educators identify as people of color. This kind of ratio is true for Los Angeles, where I am based. That’s why I’m excited to be welcoming the Ignite Fellowship to schools throughout Los Angeles (and expanding even further throughout California) this year, helping bring more diverse and locally rooted teachers into classrooms. People of color face historically more hurdles than white people in the workforce, and this is even more extreme in the teaching profession. Tutoring is a way to expand the diversity of the teacher pipeline and can increase students’ access to educators from diverse backgrounds. Virtual programs like Ignite also allow for more flexibility and accessibility, meaning fewer hurdles for aspiring teachers to become tutors, and more opportunities for students to connect with tutors and mentors.
The school year may already be underway, but the reality is that schools will be fighting to staff their classrooms all year. Anything we can do to mitigate the detrimental effects that understaffed schools have on students should be a priority. Investing in tutors is an actionable way to help staff schools with diverse educators, with an added benefit of creating a pipeline of tomorrow’s teachers.
We have the proof that it will help our students, so what are we waiting for?
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Lida Jennings is the executive director of Teach For America Los Angeles and San Diego.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. We welcome guest commentaries with diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
