The New York Times reported that a cartoon about Trump by Art Spiegelmaan was removed by the executive producer of the PBS show “American Masters.”
Trump has proposed defunding both PBS and NPR.
The Times wrote:
The executive producer of the Emmy Award-winning “American Masters” series insisted on removing a scene critical of President Trump from a documentary about the comic artist Art Spiegelman two weeks before it was set to air nationwide on public television stations.
The filmmakers say it is another example of public media organizations bowing to pressure as the Trump administration tries to defund the sector, while the programmers say their decision was a matter of taste.
Alicia Sams, a producer of “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse,” said in an interview that approximately two weeks before the movie’s April 15 airdate, she received a call from Michael Kantor, the executive producer of “American Masters,” informing her that roughly 90 seconds featuring a cartoon critical of Trump would need to be excised from the film. The series is produced by the WNET Group, the parent company of several New York public television channels.
Stephen Segaller, the vice president of programming for WNET, confirmed in an interview that the station had informed the filmmakers that it needed to make the change. Segaller said WNET felt the scatological imagery in the comic, which Spiegelman drew shortly after the 2016 election — it portrays what appears to be fly-infested feces on Trump’s head — was a “breach of taste” that might prove unpalatable to some of the hundreds of stations that air the series.
Note that the four panels are divided by a swastika.
Art Spiegelman drew a graphic novel called Maus, which received the PulitzerPrize in 1992. The book is about his parents’ experiences during the Holocaust.
When Amy Richter was a little girl, her father often traveled for work. He often came home bearing gifts of music and record albums. They bonded while poring over all that vinyl, she recalls, exploring the world of music from classical and rock to bluegrass.
Richter’s love of music only grew as she got older, and she studied voice and piano. Diagnosed with dyslexia, she also found that music helped her cope with her learning disability. It helped her gain focus and confidence. That’s why she studied music therapy in college. She knows the power of music to supercharge our brains.
“Music really became the guiding force in my education and helped me to connect with other people, helping build confidence through performance, also helping with my mental health,” said Richter, who founded Music Workshop, a free music curriculum designed to cultivate a love of music from a young age, that can help schools beef up their arts offerings on the cheap. Schools across the country, including hundreds in California, from Yuba City to San Diego, now use her program. “It really became a tool in my life to better myself.”
To be sure, aficionados of the arts have long argued that art transforms us, but in recent years, neuroscience has shown just how music can shape the architecture of the brain. This cognitive research illuminates the connection between music and learning and gives heft to longstanding arguments for the power of music education that are newly relevant in the wake of California’s Proposition 28, which sets aside money for arts education in schools.
“The K-12 grades are the years in which brain function is most rapidly evolving and information from all different types of learning and subjects is being processed and absorbed, including connections across what we might think of as different school subjects, but they are all connected in our developing brains,” said Giuliana Conti, director of education and equity for Music Workshop, which is particularly popular at schools that often tap substitute teachers in an era of high teacher absences.
“Music education provides physical and auditory experiences that work like bridges for brain structures. As the brain processes musical sounds and body movements, neural pathways across different regions of the brain grow and strengthen. The more those pathways are activated, the more usable they become across time and other skill sets or learning experiences.”
Amid the ongoing crises in literacy and numeracy plaguing our schools, and the enduring sting of pandemic learning loss, many arts advocates are pointing to music education as a way to boost executive functioning in the brain. This enhanced cognitive function, often coupled with a surge in well-being, may be the secret sauce that makes music education such an academic powerhouse, research suggests. Music may prime the brain to learn.
“Music is this wonderful, holistic way of engaging almost everything that is important for education,” said Nina Kraus, a noted neuroscientist at Northwestern University who studies the biology of auditory learning, in a webinar. “First of all, we know that the ingredients that are important in making music and the ones that are important for reading and literacy are the same ingredients. So when you’re strengthening your brain by making music, you’re strengthening your brain for language.”
Kraus, who grew up listening to her mother play the piano, is passionate about the impact of sound, ranging from the distracting to the sublime, from noise pollution to Puccini, on the brain. The gist of much of her research is how thoroughly sound shapes cognition. Music training, for example, sets up children’s brains to become better learners by enhancing the sound processing that underpins language, she says.
While we live in a visually oriented world, our brains are fundamentally wired for sound, she argues. Reading, for example, is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, while listening keenly for a sound, say a predator, is a primal impulse deeply embedded in the brain. Put simply, what we hear shapes who we are.
“Music really is the jackpot,” as Kraus, author of “Of Sound Mind,” puts it. She has conducted extensive research showing that music education helps boost test scores for low-income children.
Music also helps us manage stress.Perhaps that’s one reason that offering more music and arts classes is also associated with lower chronic absenteeism rates and higher attendance, research suggests. Think of music education as lifting weights with your brain. It makes the whole apparatus stronger and healthier.
“Music is therapeutic because it helps us to regulate our emotions,” said Richter, who adds that a culturally relevant music curriculum can help engage a diverse student body. “It helps us to lower our cortisol levels. It helps promote relaxation. It helps us with focus and concentration. It also helps us with connection. Now more than ever, we know how important connection is, especially among our youth.”
In the post-pandemic era, these insights may well fuel the uptake of music classes in a state struggling with low test scores, but the implications for brain health actually go far beyond academic prowess and social-emotional well-being in childhood.
Indeed, early musical experiences may impart a lifelong neuroplasticity, Kraus has documented. Studies suggest that a 65-year-old musician has the neural activity of a 25-year-old non-musician. A 65-year-old who played music as a child but hasn’t touched an instrument in ages still has neural responses faster than a peer who never played music, although slower than those of a die-hard musician.
“What I would say to everyone who thinks about picking up an instrument: It’s never too late,” said Richter. “Even just practicing scales can help with cell regeneration. So I encourage adults to continue to learn music along the way, whether that’s picking up an instrument or listening to music, it’s always really important for brain development.”
Music pricks up our hearts and minds, as well as our ears. Children must persevere to master a piece of music and collaborate to perform it in the spotlight. They must learn focus, patience and grace under pressure. That kind of electrifying shared experience, working as a community, is something new to many of them, experts say.
“When music is more regularly incorporated as part of children’s everyday lives,” said Conti, “it can move the needle in their learning and development more effectively across many different parts of their lives: socially, emotionally, musically and academically.”
It’s the intangible effects of music education, the elements that can’t be reduced to data points and parameters, that strike Kraus as the most profound. Music builds a feeling of joy, a sense of belonging between musicians, and their listeners, that little else in our age of digital background noise can.
“Music connects us, and it connects us in a way that hardly anything I know does, so it’s very, very important,” said Kraus. “We live in a very disconnected world. Depression, anxiety, alienation, the inability to focus, all of that is on the rise. Intolerance is on the rise. Music is a way to bring us together.”
On May 10, Dana Goldstein wrote a long article in The New York Times about how education disappeared as a national or federal issue. Why, she wondered, did the two major parties ignore education in the 2024 campaign? Kamala Harris supported public schools and welcomed the support of the two big teachers’ unions, but she did not offer a flashy new program to raise test scores. Trump campaigned on a promise to privatize public funding, promote vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, home schooling–anything but public schools, which he regularly attacked as dens of iniquity, indoctrination, and DEI.
Goldstein is the best education writer at The Times, and her reflections are worth considering.
She started:
What happened to learning as a national priority?
For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy.
At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, nor even a single major political figure, is vying to claim that mantle.
President Trump has been fixated in his second term on imposing ideological obedience on schools.
On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”Since taking office, he has pursued this goal with startling energy — assaulting higher education while adopting a strategy of neglect toward the federal government’s traditional role in primary and secondary schools. He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress, and ended efforts to share knowledge with schools about which teaching strategies lead to the best results. A spokeswoman for the administration said that low test scores justify cuts in federal spending. “What we are doing right now with education is clearly not working,” she said.
Mr. Trump has begun a bevy of investigations into how schools handle race and transgender issues, and has demanded that the curriculum be “patriotic” — a priority he does not have the power to enact, since curriculum is set by states and school districts.
Actually, federal law explicitly forbids any federal official from attempting to influence the curriculum or textbooks in schools.
Of course, Trump never worries about the limits imposed by laws. He does what he wants and leaves the courts to decide whether he went too far.
Goldstein continued:
Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one. Governors and congressional leaders are defending the Department of Education as Mr. Trump has threatened to abolish it. Liberal groups are suing to block funding cuts. When Kamala Harris was running for president last year, she spoke about student loan forgiveness and resisting right-wing book bans. But none of that amounts to an agenda on learning, either.
All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper and deeper into the realm of screens and social media. And it is no wonder Americans are increasingly cynical about higher education. Forty percent of students who start college do not graduate, often leaving with debt and few concrete skills.
“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after running Chicago’s public school system. “There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.”
I have been writing about federal education policy for almost fifty years. There are things we have learned since Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. That law was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s agenda. Its purpose was to send federal funds to the schools enrolling the poorest students. Its purpose was not to raise test scores but to provide greater equity of resources.
Over time, the federal government took on an assertive role in defending the rights of students to an education: students with disabilities; students who did not speak English; and students attending illegally segregated schools.
In 1983, a commission appointed by President Reagan’s Secretary of Education Terrell Bell declared that American schools were in crisis because of low academic standards. Many states began implementing state tests and raising standards for promotion and graduation.
President George H.W. Bush convened a meeting of the nation’s governors, and they endorsed an ambitious set of “national goals” for the year 2000. E.g., the U.S. will be first in the world by the year 2000; all children will start school ready to learn by 2000. None of the goals–other than the rise of the high school graduation rate to 90%–was met.
The Clinton administration endorsed the national goals and passed legislation (“Goals 2000”) to encourages states to create their own standards and tests. President Clinton made clear, however, that he hoped for national standards and tests.
President George W. Bush came to office with a far-reaching, unprecedented plan called “No Child Left Behind” to reform education by a heavy emphasis on annual testing of reading and math. He claimed that because of his test-based policy, there had been a “Texas Miracle,” which could be replicated on a national scale. NCLB set unreachable goals, saying that every school would have 100% of their students reach proficiency by the year 2014. And if they were not on track to meet that impossible goals, the schools would face increasingly harsh punishments.
In no nation in the world have 100% of all students ever reached proficiency.
Scores rose, as did test-prep. Many untested subjects lost time in the curriculum or disappeared. Reading and math were tested every year from grades 3-8, as the law prescribed. What didn’t matter were science, history, civics, the arts, even recess.
Some schools were sanctioned or even closed for falling behind. Schools were dominated by the all-important reading and math tests. Some districts cheated. Some superintendents were jailed.
In 2001, there were scholars who warned that the “Texas Miracle” was a hoax. Congress didn’t listen. In time the nation learned that there was no Texas Miracle, never had been. But Congress clung to NCLB because they had no other ideas.
When Obama took office in 2009, educators hoped for relief from the annual testing mandates but they were soon disappointed. Obama chose Arne Duncan, who had led the Chicago schools but had never been a teacher. Duncan worked with consultants from the Gates and Broad Foundations and created a national competition for the states called Race to the Top. Duncan had a pot of $5 billion that Congress had given him for education reform.
Race to the Top offered big rewards to states that applied and won. To be eligible, states had to authorize the creation of charter schools (almost every state did); they had to agree to adopt common national standards (that meant the Common Core standards, funded wholly by the Gates Foundation and not yet completed); sign up for one of two federally funded standardized tests (PARCC or Smarter Balanced) ; and agree to evaluate their teachers by the test scores of their students. Eighteen states won huge rewards. There were other conditions but these were the most consequential.
Tennessee won $500 million. It is hard to see what, if anything, is better in Tennessee because of that audacious prize. The state put $100 million into an “Achievement School District,” which gathered the state’s lowest performing schools into a new district and turned them into charters. Chris Barbic, leader of the YES Prep charter chain in Houston was hired to run it. He pledged that within five years, the lowest-performing schools in the state would rank among the top 20% in the state. None of them did. The ASD was ultimately closed down.
Duncan had a great fondness for charter schools because they were the latest thing in Chicago; while superintendent, he had launched a program he called Renaissance 2010, in which he pledged to close 80 public schools and open 100 charter schools. Duncan viewed charters as miraculous. Ultimately Chicago’s charter sector produced numerous scandals but no miracles.
I have written a lot about Race to the Top over the years. It was layered on top of Bush’s NCLB, but it was even more punitive. It targeted teachers and blamed them if students got low scores. Its requirement that states evaluate teachers by student test scores was a dismal failure. The American Statistical Association warned against it from the outset, pointing out that students’ home life affected test scores more than their teachers.
Race to the Top failed. The proliferation of charter schools, aided by a hefty federal subsidy, drained students and resources from public schools. Charter schools close their doors at a rapid pace: 26% are gone in their first five years; 39% in their first ten years. In addition, due to lax accountability, charters have demonstrated egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse.
The Common Core was supposed to lift test scores and reduce achievement gaps, but it did neither. Conservative commentator Mike Petrilli referred to 2007-2017 as “the lost decade.” Scores stagnated and achievement gaps barely budged.
So what have we learned?
This is what I have learned: politicians are not good at telling educators how to teach. The Department of Education (which barely exists as of now) is not made up of educators. It was not in a position to lead school reform. Nor is the Secretary of Education. Nor is the President. Would you want the State legislature or Congress telling surgeons how to do their job?
The most important thing that the national government can do is to ensure that schools have the funding they need to pay their staff, reduce class sizes, and update their facilities.
The federal government should have a robust program of data collection, so we have accurate information about students, teachers, and schools.
The federal government should not replicate its past failures.
What Congress can do very effectively is to ensure that the nation’s schools have the resources they need; that children have access to nutrition and medical care; and that pregnant women get prenatal care so that their babies are born healthy.
So the U.S. government accepted the luxurious jet offered by Qatar to serve as Air Force 1, the President’s official airplane.
The New York Timespublished a lengthy story –“the inside story”–of Trump’s longing to accept the jet as a gift from the government of Qatar. It explains that the Qataris had been trying to sell the opulent jet for five years, with no success.
Trump wants an opulent jet, even if it is a used jet. He thinks the U.S. should have the biggest airplane for its president. The Qataris flew the jet to Palm Beach, so he could personally inspect it. He fell in love with it. He always falls for gold trappings. He thought there was no problem accepting a gift from another nation. Who would turn down a “free” gift?
The inside story begins:
President Trump wanted a quick solution to his Air Force One problem.
The United States signed a $3.9 billion contract with Boeing in 2018 for two jets to be used as Air Force One, but a series of delays had slowed the work far past the 2024 delivery deadline, possibly beyond Mr. Trump’s second term.
Now Mr. Trump had to fly around in the same old planes that transported President George H.W. Bush 35 years ago. It wasn’t just a vanity project. Those planes, which are no longer in production, require extensive servicing and frequent repairs, and officials from both parties, reaching back a decade or more, had been pressing for replacements.
Mr. Trump, though, wanted a new plane while he was still in office. But how?
“We’re the United States of America,” Mr. Trump said this month. “I believe that we should have the most impressive plane.”
The story of how the Trump administration decided that it would accept a free luxury Boeing 747-8 from Qatar to serve as Air Force One involved weeks of secret coordination between Washington and Doha. The Pentagon and the White House’s military office swung into action, and Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, played a key role.
Aeronautical experts say that it would cost as much as $1 billion to renovate the jet and give it the security of an Air Force 1. It might not be ready until the end of Trump’s term, when (they said) it would be retired to the Trump Library.
The story failed to mention the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits the President or other federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign nations.
The emoluments clause, also called the foreign emoluments clause, is a provision of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 8) that generally prohibits federal officeholders from receiving any gift, payment, or other object or service of value from a foreign state or its rulers, officers, or representatives. The clause provides that:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
The Constitution also contains a “domestic emoluments clause” (Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 7), which prohibits the president from receiving any “Emolument” from the federal government or the states beyond “a Compensation” for his “Services” as chief executive.
I have so far not seen a story that explains that the gift is unconstitutional, unless Congress gives its consent.
I think we have become so accustomed to Trump ignoring and violating the Constitution that it isn’t even worth mentioning. This is a classic demonstration of the Overton Window.
Members of the Los Angeles Unified School District school board continued to discuss student safety Tuesday — and are still a ways away from determining whether to revamp its police presence on individual campuses.
A safety task force — which previously recommended each campus choose whether to have police stationed at its site — made a presentation about LAUSD’s approach to student safety, including community-based safety methods such as restorative justice. They will continue to meet in the coming school year.
Discussions about reintroducing police to individual LAUSD campuses are taking place for the first time since George Floyd’s murder amid a 45% increase in incidents between 2017-18 and 2022-23, including suicide risk, fighting/physical aggression, threats, illegal/controlled substances and weapons.
Here’s what the board members said at Tuesday’s meeting. Their remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
School board President Jackie Goldberg: ‘Not really desirous of having armed police on campus’
I spent 17 years teaching in Compton. … We had two sets of gangs. … We then hired school police to come onto campus. The problem was that there were two (officers). The problem was that when the gangs came over the fences, they came over in 10s and 20s. … How did they have guns? They came over in sufficient numbers to disarm the police. So, I’m not really desirous of having armed police on campus. …
LAUSD Board Member Jackie Goldberg
What do I think school police can do? I think school police can be in neighborhoods where most of the problems happen. … What we mostly had to do was to have them in the community around the school and for us to be able to find out from trusted — usually — graduates of ours when trouble was about to happen. And so, (police) could be not in twos, but they could be sent in fours and fives to neighborhoods where things were about to come down.
… If you want to stop drug abuse, are you going to have a police officer sitting in the bathrooms because that’s where the exchanges take place? No, we’re not. We’re not going to put a police officer to sit in classrooms. Do we want school police on campus when there’s a fight? Yeah, that may be useful.
… Most of the fights are not bad. And I think as we keep statistics, I would like us to have a notion of what the types of fights were. Was this two or three kids who … called your mother something and they’re fighting and it gets stopped? I think they should be counted, but I think they aren’t the problem. The problem is the massive fights, and those do need to be treated differently.
Secondly, we do not have restorative justice in this district. Period. I visited all 151 of the schools I represent, several of them several times, and in only a handful of them did I see anything that resembled restorative justice.
School board Vice President Scott Schmerelson: ‘I also believe in school police’
Let me just tell you what really bothers me: when people think that school police are supposed to do discipline at school. They’re not supposed to be doing discipline at school. That’s the teacher’s job. That’s my job as the principal, or the assistant principal, or the dean. …
LAUSD Board Member Scott Schemerelson Credit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
I do believe that we need climate advocates at school. Absolutely — all the help that we can get at making peace at school. Very, very important. … Yes, I do believe in restorative justice. I do. Our kids need to see what they’ve done wrong and how to make amends for what they have done. Very, very important. I also believe in school police.
We are responsible from the minute the kids leave home to the minute they get to school. And, we’re responsible from the minute they leave school to the minute they go home. … That’s why safe passage is really so important too. Kids need to have check-in points along the way home to and from school. Extremely important. Everybody has a job at school, and we should not be pushing people under the bus whether you’re a school police officer, or a climate control officer.
Board Member Rocio Rivas: ‘We do have the data on what we need to do’
We’re not the same since the pandemic. Things have changed. Our students are suffering. They have high anxiety. There’s increase of suicidal ideation.
LAUSD Board Member Rocio Rivas
… We have (positive behavior intervention and support) and restorative justice, but they’re not strengthened. They’re not bolstered. So, the district does have that system in place where we can create safe, loving, culturally responsive schools, but we’re not giving the investments or the support that our schools need.
… The area that needs that support are middle schools. … That is where we start seeing the suicide ideation, when we start seeing the fights, when we start seeing our students needing to medicate themselves.
… We love our kids, and at early ed centers, we love them; we want to protect them. But once they leave those early ed centers, it’s almost as if they lost that system of love and compassion and care. And we put in other systems, and we look at them (as though) all these kids are deviants. No, they are children. They are children until even after they’re 18 … because their brains are still developing.
… We know exactly what we need to do, but we’re not putting the money or the strength or the emphasis. … We’re talking about test scores, but you know what? You are not going to see increases … in student achievement unless that child feels that they’re being heard, that that school cares about them, that they have somebody in there.
… We do have the data on what we need to do. We have the funds. We just don’t have the buy-in from this district, from this building, because it’s so disconnected from our schools and from our communities.
Board Member Tanya Ortiz Franklin: ‘We’ll keep the conversations going’
LAUSD Board Member Tanya Ortiz Franklin
I’ll just bring our attention back to the Community Based Safety Resolution. The last resolve does ask us … to strengthen community-based safety approaches … and resources as a primary means of cultivating and maintaining positive school climates and keeping school communities safe even in emergency situations.
… We need the (restorative) training throughout for all of the staff members — as many folks can come back before the school year starts. We’ve got $350 million invested in people who are focused exclusively on safety. If we can focus on this community, restorative approach as the primary means — really shifting away from that punitive, traditional, policing model — I think we’ll get even closer to the vision of this resolution that we all passed. I think we’ll keep the conversations going next year in the school safety committee.
Board Member Kelly Gonez: ‘It’s about creating a true infrastructure around community-based safety’
I was looking just at the (Local Control and Accountability Plan) information for our meeting later, and it highlights different demographic groups of students and the percent of students reporting that they feel safe in the school experience survey, and there are significant gaps — like for our Black students, who are rating the lowest in terms of whether or not they feel safe, which obviously is very concerning, as well as the number of students who feel like they are part of their school.
LAUSD Board Member Kelly GonezCredit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
Those numbers, it looks like, took a significant dip in the wake of the pandemic and have not really fully recovered, and I would just surmise that there’s a connection between feeling disconnected or not seen at your school site and whether or not there is true safety and belonging for students.
… It’s not just about restorative justice and the practices, but it’s about creating a true infrastructure around community-based safety. And, I think that’s inclusive of a number of staffing positions as well — beyond, just for example, your restorative justice teachers and beyond the partnerships with community based organizations, which are also integral. It’s about, for example, our classified staffing positions. We know that a number of our incidents happen during lunch, during dismissal.
… I would just ask that in any plan … that we’re providing for the necessary staffing and supervision that our schools and our students really deserve — and especially looking at our secondary schools, because we know that’s where the majority of these incidents are happening.
Board Member Nick Melvoin: ‘The glaring omission (is) … the data on the fights.’
LAUSD Board Member Nick MelvoinCredit: Julie Leopo / EdSourc
Regardless of our views of what’s happening outside of the school, our responsibility is for school safety on the school campus, and we have different ideas. … But I do think really the glaring omission (is) … the data on the fights.
… I’m trying to understand where we can trace that based on grade levels, and Covid, and the effects of the pandemic and the success or lack thereof of our positive behavioral intervention supports and restorative justice. … (and) on school campuses with the current deployment model, which is not having police there, except for rare emergencies.
… We have different ideas … and I just hope that we can engage, starting from the premise that we all want kids to be safe and talk to each other and not just about or past each other.
And then the last thing, too. … I just want to make sure that the city and the county aren’t off the hook for this — and that as we’re talking amongst each other, we’re also bringing them in.
Board Member George McKenna: ‘We still haven’t come to grips with the reality of what makes the schools safe’
I’ve been in this for 62 years — I’ve never seen police criminalize the children. I’ve seen them respond.
… Do you know that there is no guideline in a teacher’s contract — or even an administrator’s contract — that says you must go break up a fight? The only one that has to do that is someone who’s trained to do that. And that will be a school police officer.
Board Member Dr. George J. McKenna IIICredit: Julie Leopo / EdSource
… I have no problem with the climate coaches or whatever they’re called, in addition to the people that have been there in uniform with the licensure and the legal responsibility for student safety … And the only people that have voted for the safety of school police being on campus are people who have been on the campus as administrators, including principals. … The most important people in the school district are the people who run the school, that’s the principal.
… The most police officers we’ve ever had on the campus … is two, and I think it’s understaffed if you only put one on it because they have no backup. They need to be visible in order to assist the students and the prevention of incidents that occur because … the students will confide in them.
….We’re not OK the way we are. And we still haven’t come to grips with the reality of what makes the schools safe and whether or not our school safety officers are a benefit to us. When you start with the premise and use the word the “punitive school police” and that’s the way you introduce it, you are already biased because that means you don’t understand what they do. And you can fill up the room with your accolades and your people that you’ve encouraged to be here, but we have to go to the schools on a regular basis. It makes a school safe.
Former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin.
Credit: John Joanino/Advancement Project California
Despite the office’s imposing title, California’s superintendent of public instruction has little actual power to do much about education.
The governor has far more influence, as does the State Board of Education. And then there are the local school boards, which, by law, are responsible for the nearly 1,000 school districts in the state.
That is why it was remarkable that at least 500 people packed into the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Sacramento last week to honor Delaine Eastin, who was superintendent of public instruction over two decades ago. She was the first, and so far, only, woman to occupy the post.
The state superintendent position is largely what you make of it — and Eastin, who died in April at the age of 76, made the most of it.
Part of her success had to do with her outsize personality. She regularly girded colleagues for any number of political battles with Shakespeare’s rallying cry, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”
Part of her impact was rooted in her sustained belief in public education, of which she herself was a product. A native of California, she attended public schools and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of California.
“Children are the living messengers we are sending to a time we will never see,” she would say. To those who argued that public education costs the state too much, she would offer the rejoinder, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
And to those who wondered why they should support children in districts other than their own with their taxes, she argued, “This country runs on other people’s children.”
Some of her success had something to do with her oratory, which was honed in her high school drama classes. As an assemblymember before becoming state superintendent, she was regarded as one of the best speakers in the Legislature. She regularly got standing ovations in the multiple speeches she made around the state. Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a legendary speaker himself who attended the memorial service, would often send her to speak in his place.
Her legacy includes her single-mindedness in promoting smaller class sizes in California’s K-3 grades. She was a force in creating California’s Academic Performance Index in 1999, the first statewide system for ranking schools based mostly on test scores.
She was also a leader in promoting California’s first efforts for universal preschool — a vision that is now coming to fruition with the expansion of transitional kindergarten to all 4-year-olds.
Less well known was her backing of Alice Water’s Edible Garden Project, which began at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley in the mid 1990s. “If it had not been for Delaine, we would not have had an Edible Garden Project,” said Waters, the founder of the renowned Chez Panisse restaurant just blocks from the school. On a video, Waters shared that there are now 6,500 edible school gardens around the world.
Above all, Eastin was a huge backer of California itself. Californians, she would often say, “are people who grew up somewhere else and came to their senses.”
Throughout her life, she was single-minded in promoting women for public office.
Eastin’s last appearance on the political stage was in 2018 when she “had the audacity to run for governor,” as Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis described the run. It was a quixotic effort at best — something Eastin was well-aware of, Kounalakis said. “She ran largely to talk about the importance of public education.”
As the two of them traveled together around the state during the campaign, Eastin would say, “This is what the future could look like” if they both were elected. But Eastin only got 4% of the vote. Kounalakis was more successful, becoming California’s first woman lieutenant governor.
While she did not make it to the governorship, there was something biblical in the arc of the life of a woman who did not have her own children, despite wanting them — but was nonetheless able to improve the lives of millions of them in her home state.
Her staff in the Department of Education recalled the many times they would set out early, half awake, on yet another trip to an outlying district.
“It’s going to be a great day,” Eastin, ever the motivator, would tell them. “We get to visit schools.”
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Louis Freedberg is interim CEO of EdSource.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
As California expands services needed to grow the number of foster youth enrolling in college, more work is needed to help those students graduate.
Julie Leopo/ EdSource
Foster youth are seldom top-of-mind in efforts to promote broader college access, but many would aspire to attend and have the skills to thrive there, argues Royel M. Johnson, a tenured professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, in his forthcoming book.
The idea for the book developed when Johnson was a professor at Penn State University, where his research largely focused on youth impacted by the foster care and criminal legal systems.
Royel M. Johnson is a tenured professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, with a courtesy appointment in the Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.Photo Credit: Royel M. Johnson
“I’d been building an area of work, a program of research around system-impacted populations who are not always thought of as college material, and not always even just centered in national efforts to promote college access and post-secondary success,” he said in a recent interview.
“By way of that, you get exposed quite early to systemic inequities, whether it be policing, child welfare policies, education,” he said. “My own lived experience became the lens through which I developed my curiosity for research and trying to understand better the pathway and structural disadvantages and opportunities that some folks have and other folks do not.”
While studying political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Johnson met and studied alongside graduate students enrolled in the university’s doctoral program for educational policy.
They inspired him to remain at the university to pursue educational policy. He earned a master’s degree in the subject there and, ultimately, a doctorate in higher education and student affairs from Ohio State University.
Johnson, whose book will be published in October, recently made time to discuss how the book project came together and what he learned from the foster youth he interviewed. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Where did the inspiration for this book come from?
Too much of the work on young folks in foster care is sort of around, ‘What explains the failure?’ We need to understand why some students don’t succeed. But there’s also a lot that we can learn from young people who do succeed, and that becomes the model we sort of move from. I wanted to do asset-based work and resiliency-based work versus deficit-oriented work.
Your book features the stories of 49 college students and graduates with experiences in the foster care system. How did you meet and interview them?
Around 2019, I launched a national study working with folks who run programs for young people in foster care at colleges and universities. We contacted administrators at universities and asked them to recommend students to participate in the study, we shared fliers and recruited on social media.
We paid students a stipend to participate. My team and I interviewed them, on average an hour or so each for two to three interviews, to get really comprehensive insights, from their time in foster care to their preparation and transition to college, to the realities of what it’s like to be a college student in foster care. Many of them were young people who were currently in college. Few had graduated, even fewer were graduate students.
We wanted to cast a wide net of folks who were diverse in racial and ethnic backgrounds because it’s mostly youth of color who are disproportionately impacted, specifically Black youth and native and Indigenous youth. We wanted to oversample those who identified their sexual orientations beyond heterosexual. And diversity in the time spent in care: we know that those who age out of the foster care system are most vulnerable to experiencing homelessness, contact with the criminal punishment system, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, etc. We were really intentional in building a robust cohort of students to learn from.
Once we started interviewing, many of them recommended their peers to participate in the study, in part because, for so many of them, what they shared is that they have so few opportunities to give voice to their own experiences.
What did you learn from the students you interviewed?
One of the things that we learned is that many of the young people in the book choose college through a framework of belonging: ‘How do I identify in institutions that demonstrate value for me and my identity as a young person in care?’ Institutions that have college access and support programs for young folks in foster care — they see that as a signal that that’s a place that they might be able to find community and belong.
We also see that navigating the transition to college can be difficult, especially when you don’t have familial support moving you in and buying you all the things that you need, so they rely on a really broad constellation of kinship networks — their chosen family. They’re savvy in developing supportive and authentic relationships with not just their peers who become family, but former social workers, former teachers and educators. That familial capital becomes a resource for them in accessing college.
What did you learn about students in California?
Going Deeper
Guardian Scholars is a chapter-based organization on college campuses that helps support former foster and homeless youth. The program supports students with financial aid, basic needs resources, mentorship, career advising and more.
Guardian Scholars was founded at CSU Fullerton in 1988 and has since expanded to all CSU campuses in addition to community colleges and other universities statewide.
The national recognition of the Guardian Scholars program and that being so visible is an attractive motivator for young folks in care because it signals to them that that’s a place where there’s going to be people like me and that I won’t be stigmatized in the way that I might be at a different place.
Most student affairs administrators who work at a college oruniversity may not know about federal funds or state-specific policies and resources that young people in care might qualify for. Those who work in and lead Guardian Scholars programs are keenly aware of those kinds of resources and of many of the challenges that young folks in care experience.
You include concepts such as “aspirational capital” and “resistant capital” in your book. What do these terms mean in the context of youth in foster care?
One of the frameworks that I draw on is what’s called community cultural wealth. This is a framework that Tara Yosso wrote about in 2005. What she argues is that people of color naturally have what she says is community cultural wealth, and these are the various undervalued, underrecognized forms of capital that we often use to navigate systems that weren’t designed for us.
One of those forms of capital is aspirational capital: How is it that people of color are able to maintain such high aspirations in the face of such structural failures?
Navigational capital is where the experience that we get navigating systems that weren’t designed for us becomes a resource to us, whether it’s navigating the bureaucracy of the welfare system or local politics, or even inequities in school. Being able to strategically manage and maneuver across these systems becomes a resource to us as we get into different situations, like applying to college and persisting in college.
Community cultural wealth is a framework that lots of scholars of color who are doing work on communities of color have found a lot of value in trying to contextualize the experiences of people of color in education.
How is it that we successfully navigate this system and structure that isn’t designed for us and that continues to fail us? I think community cultural wealth offers some language for the strategies, resources and work repertoires we draw on in order to maneuver.
Fresno Unified’s interim superintendent, Misty Her
Credit: Fresno Unified / Flickr
Since assuming the role of interim superintendent of California’s third-largest school district, Misty Her has been doing two things that she hopes will shape her tenure: listening and learning.
Despite being in the school district for over three decades, she’s conducting what she calls “listening” sessions with those in the Fresno Unified school community. In the two months since taking over, she’s held 16 sessions with students, district leaders, principals, retired teachers, graduates, parents, city officials and other community members, with more scheduled for next week and in the new school year.
Interim superintendency
On May 3, the school board appointed Misty Her, previously the district’s deputy superintendent, to lead the district on an interim basis during a national search to fill the permanent position. She started the interim superintendency on May 8 with outgoing superintendent Bob Nelson moving into an advisory role until his last day.
Misty Her has met with Fresno Unified district leaders to set expectations for her tenure as interim superintendent.Credit: Fresno Unified / Flickr
“People have been asking me ‘Why are you doing that?’” she said. “They were like, ‘You’ve been in the district for 30 years. Why would you still need to go listen and learn? Shouldn’t you already know a lot about the district?’”
“My role, now, is different,” she said, “so I’m really intentionally listening and learning.”
She’ll continue the sessions throughout her tenure and expects to make changes as progress is made, she told EdSource in a sit-down interview.
What she believes, even now, is that knowing and identifying each student “by name” and “by need,” much like she did as a classroom teacher, will define her time in the role.
“Sometimes when you step away from the classroom, people don’t see you as a teacher anymore … because they start to see the title,” Her said as she talked about her journey, her interim superintendency, the “teacher within” and her focus on students – first and foremost.
“At the heart of who I am, before anything else, I’m always going to be a teacher.”
First woman to lead district
When the Fresno Unified school board named Her as the interim superintendent, she became the first woman to lead the district since its 1873 inception.
“I’ve walked this hallway a thousand times,” she said about seeing her picture on the wall of the district office. “It took 151 years in this district, as diverse as this district (is), before a woman’s face got on that wall.”
Lasherica Thornton/ EdSource Lasherica Thornton/EdSourceMisty Her, Fresno Unified’s interim superintendent, is the first woman to ever lead the 70,000-plus-student school system.
A Hmong leader
According to Her and the Hmong American Center in Wisconsin, Hmong people, an indigenous group originally from parts of China and other Asian countries, have continually migrated, first to Laos, Thailand and Vietnam with many eventually coming to the United States, settling in states such as California and Minnesota, so “we don’t have a country.”
“The reason why Hmong people came here to the U.S. was because of the Vietnam War,” she said.
The CIA recruited Hmong soldiers for the “secret war” in Laos to prevent communism from spreading further into Southeast Asia. Congressional investigation and other events eventually brought the war to light.
“It was secret because no one knew that we existed, and no one knew that we were used to help the Americans fight,” Her said. “When the war ended, all the Hmong people were just left to die because (following their victory), the communists started coming after anybody who was helping the U.S. That’s actually how my family ended up here.”
Her face on that wall – and as the face of the district – embodies the fact that she is the first woman at the helm of the district as well as its first Hmong leader.
Born in a prisoner-of-war camp in Laos, Her’s family escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand after the end of the Vietnam War before coming to the United States and moving to Fresno when she was a young child, according to a district statement announcing her appointment. That firsthand experience and her understanding of the challenges faced by students from diverse backgrounds have shaped her into a passionate and effective leader, the district’s statement said.
Of the more than 92% of Fresno Unified students who are from ethnic minority groups, around 6,500 are Hmong. Behind Spanish, the Hmong language, which was only developed in written form less than 75 years ago, is the second most common home language of Fresno Unified’s English learners with over 10% speaking Hmong.
“Having someone that knows our kids, looks like our kids — that representation matters,” Her said.
Still, she wants to be in classrooms, constantly gaining a better understanding of the district’s students.
Classroom-centered, kids-first approach
With a mindset that keeps classrooms and kids first, Her started the listening and learning tour by seeking out student perspectives from elementary, middle and high school students.
“Our students … can teach us a lot about our system,” she said, “the things that we’re designing for them — what’s working, what’s not working.”
And she has gained insight from those conversations.
Among the students’ comments and questions that have stuck with Her: “We want to be engaged in classrooms” and third graders asking, “What are you and our teachers preparing us for?”
“I started with kids first because I wanted to put their voice in the middle of designing my 100-day plan,” she said.
Her drafted the plan for the district in May and June, following the initial listening sessions.
For third grade — the school year believed to be pivotal in determining reading proficiency and predicting future success — just 29% of third-graders are at grade level, a GO Public Schools 2023 student outcome report for Fresno Unified showed.
Her plans to implement, measure the effectiveness and monitor the progress of the district’s recently launched literacy initiative to achieve first-grade reading proficiency for students, two years before third-grade, when future success is predicted.
The Every Child Is a Reader initiative includes literacy plans to address students’ unique needs. The plans embrace high-quality instruction, interventions and parent and community partnerships, according to the initiative description.
“Every Child Is A Reader is a groundbreaking initiative that will lead our district to better instruction of reading for our youngest learners and ensure far better academic outcomes for our students,” she said.
Based on the 2023 GO Public Schools report, only 20% of seventh graders are at grade level in math, an indicator that most students are not prepared for algebra.
Her said the kids she has talked to reaffirmed the need to focus on those student outcomes, but also challenged her to reshape how student comprehension and application are taught.
“I was talking to (a) group of students and they said, ‘Don’t just teach us how to read and write and do math, but teach us how to apply that,’” she said.
An eighth grader told her his test scores indicate that he’s on a sixth-grade proficiency level.
“He said, ‘I’m so much smarter than that. I can do this, this, and this, but it’s just that, in my home, I never got books. I don’t have a tutor that comes in to help me. I rarely see my mom … because she works two jobs. My test shows that I should only be in sixth grade, but there are things that I can do. Can you guys use what I know to help me get me there?’” Her said.
“It really shifted what I thought would be goals for us to what are goals that can resonate with our students.”
Improving student outcomes
Her said she wouldn’t be leading Fresno Unified, based on what her test scores showed, if not for the support of teachers and mentors.
“If I was just measured by my proficiency level when I was a kid, then I probably wouldn’t even be here,” she said. “A lot of people poured into me because I had counselors who said, ‘You can go to college.’ Coming from a home where no one knew how to fill out a college application, my counselor filled out the application for me.
“But why do we reach some students and not others? That’s my question. (My brother) and I had some of the very same teachers, but there was an investment in me and not in him.”
That lingering question guides her.
To improve student outcomes across the entire district, she said, “We have to get everybody across the finish line” of proficiency.
“The goal is to get them there in whichever way works for them,” she said. “That’s really going deep to understand every single child by name, by need.”
Fresno Unified’s interim superintendent, Misty Her, adopted a 100-day plan for the school district.Credit: Fresno Unified / Flickr
As part of Her’s 100-day plan, Fresno Unified gathered state, district, school and student data to identify and prioritize ways to enhance learning for each child while also focusing on historically underserved student groups, such as English learners and students with disabilities, who have significant achievement gaps compared with other groups.
This upcoming school year, educators will be able to adapt teaching and leadership strategies based on real-time data via a district dashboard, according to Her’s plans.
“And, then, how do we provide the appropriate scaffolds and interventions so that we do get them there,” Her said, “but that we never take away their grade-level rigor that is needed for them to excel.”
Identifying student needs: ‘It’s ‘personal’
Her knows all too well the importance of providing such intervention while still offering challenging, grade-level content.
“This is very personal for me,” she said. “I remember when I was in first grade … I was put in a remedial class, pulled out for like three hours a day, missing core instruction,” she recalled. “There was no way I was ever going to get caught up.”
At the time, the young Her was learning English as a second language as she primarily spoke Hmong.
“And so if we keep doing that with our students, we’re actually doing them a disservice,” she said.
Challenges in leading Fresno Unified
Fresno Unified interim Superintendent Misty Her and district leaders talk about about her goals and set expectations for her interim role.Credit: Fresno Unified / Flickr
There is no “silver bullet… to fix this,” Her said, so “I think people have to be open to new ideas that may be unconventional.”
This week, she and the district leadership team were at Harvard University for the Public Education Leadership Project meant to foster greater educational outcomes.
While employing new ideas and methods may be key to reaching her goals, there will be times when she must say “no.”
Fresno’s teachers union leadership has criticized the district for initiating programs just for the sake of expanding, rather than implementing the programs well.
“We are a district that says we want to do a lot of things,” Her said. “I am going to say no.”
But not without noting ideas that can work — at some point.
“Everybody knows I have a for-later folder, and it’s pretty thick right now,” she said, laughing. “So, as people bring really great, wonderful ideas, I just have to say, ‘Let me put it in my for-later folder.’”
Quality over quantity: Top priorities first
To Her, the district has had so many objectives that it impacts the quality of the goals. She spent weeks narrowing down those goals to what will be the most important for the entire district: improving student outcomes and achieving operational excellence.
“When a kid enters our system, we have to be able to say to our parents, ‘These are the … goals we’re working on. These are the guarantees that we can give you.’”
Student outcomes
Identify and focus on the needs of each child
Implement and measure the district’s first-grade literacy initiative
Empower educator autonomy, but with accountability measures
Adapt teaching and leadership strategies based on real-time data
Visit schools to observe the goals in action
Operational excellence
Her characterized operational excellence as each part of the Fresno Unified school system working together instead of in isolation.
“I think that sometimes we’ve created this very complicated system for our parents to figure out, and we need to simplify … for people to understand,” she said. “I took a call from a parent. By the time the parent got to me, the parent had gone through four different calls” because her English wasn’t strong, and people didn’t know what to do with her.
“I finally got on the phone; she’s like, ‘I just need my child’s homework, but I need it modified.’ And it was as simple as that.”
Holding interim position impacts chances for permanent role
The interim superintendency is an opportunity for Her, board members, students, staff and the community to see if she’s the best person to lead the district.
“It could go either way,” she admitted. “If I can’t get results, then, I shouldn’t be the superintendent.
“I just want it to be a win for our students.”
A change in perspective because of the search
So far, the search process has been engulfed in community angst over an alleged lack of transparency and accusations that the process had been tainted by politics, EdSource reported.
The school board in April said it would broaden its search — a shift from its initial decision to interview district employees first. Community outrage spurred the changes.
“Having gone through the challenges of the search, it really has strengthened me. It’s given me resilience that I didn’t think I had,” she said. “I describe it as (being) in a tornado, and you don’t quite know what you’re going to get hit with. Then, you start to get centered.”
That centering moment was in April when the search stalled.
“I just got up and said, ‘Cancel everything on my calendar for this week. I want to be at schools,’” she said. “I spent every moment with kids. I read. I did recess duty. I did lunch duty. (I told teachers), ‘I’ll teach your class for a little bit.’ I had to go find myself again. I went back to being a teacher and that got me centered (and) saved me in every way.
“I started to … dig deep to really understand why I want this job.”
‘More than a test score’
“I want to be superintendent because … I’m tired of people defining them by a test score at the end of the year,” Her said. “I want to find a holistic way in which we can still get our students there, but that our students feel valued and they feel important and they feel like they’re a part of something greater than just that proficiency level that is given to them.”
WASHINGTON—House Republicans pushed President Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax-and-spending bill past a key hurdle late Sunday night, but the last-minute grappling has them colliding with a stark reality: The plan won’t reduce federal budget deficits and would make America’s fiscal hole deeper.
The bill could reach the House floor this week, and it is a tenuous balance between the party’s tax-cut wing and factions seeking larger, quicker spending cuts. To get a bill through the House with their 220-213 majority, GOP tax cutters trimmed their ambitions and scheduled some breaks to expire. Many spending hawks, meanwhile, backed the plan while groaning that it doesn’t go far enough fast enough. Others are holding out for more…
Moody’s Ratings, in downgrading the U.S.’s AAA rating on Friday, said it didn’t expect Congress to produce material multiyear spending or deficit reductions. Publicly held federal debt stands at about $29 trillion, nearly double the level when Trump and Republicans passed the 2017 tax law. Nearly $1 in every $7 the U.S. spends goes toward paying interest, more than the country spends on defense.
Trump signed an executive order demanding the defunding of public television (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).
Since both are a valuable source of news and information about science, politics, history, nature, significant people and events, their defunding would be a great loss for the American people.
Why does Trump hate PBS?
His hatred originated on Sesame Street in 1988, where he was portrayed as Ronald Grump, a developer who planned to build a huge high-rise building on the site of Sesame Street.
