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.
Jennifer Berkshire has both good news and bad news about vouchers. The idea of public funding for religious and private schools had some big wins this year, especially in Texas. But most vouchers are subsidizing kids who never attended public schools; that’s a feature, not a bug as it creates strong support for the giveaway among the highest-income people. But, lo! The real cost of have the state pay for everyone’s tuition is beginning to get the attention of taxpayers. And that could cause a backlash against welfare for the wealthy. Florida is already paying $4 billion a year for vouchers. Will taxpayers object?
Champagne corks, storm clouds—I’m mixing my metaphors here. But as we survey the steaming wreckage of the 2025 state legislative sessions, both are present in spades. Let’s start with the popping corks: the school voucher movement really did notch some big wins this year, adding Tennessee, South Carolina, Idaho and the biggest prize of all, Texas, to the list of states with “education freedom.” Now add in the sneaky move to slip a voucher program that is really a tax shelter for the wealthy into the tax code and it’s easy to feel despondent, and not just about the future of public education.
Listen in on the debates that played out in these states, though, and you’ll come away with a very different view. As the economy sours and the tide of red ink rises, alarm bells are sounding and a backlash is brewing.
Let’s start with a quick trip to my neighboring state, New Hampshire, where a familiar series of events has transpired. Now, in the Granite State, vouchers are known as Education Freedom Accounts, and they were sold to notoriously thrifty Yankees as a way to save money as students abandoned “government schools” for less expensive private religious schools, home schools, microschools. But nothing of the sort happened, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for thousands of students who’d never attended public schools. Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s revenue situation has been deteriorating rapidly thanks to yet another round of slashing taxes on businesses.
All of which adds up to some pretty bleak math as the state must now figure out how to pay for an expensive—and expanding—school voucher program even as New Hampshire’s budget pie keeps shrinking. Which is how GOP lawmakers seem to have landed on the worst of both worlds: an austerity budget that slashes funding for the state’s public higher education budget in order to pay for the cost of further undermining the state’s public education system. (If you’re wondering why this recipe sounds familiar, you’re thinking of Indiana, star of a recent episode of Have You Heard, and a cautionary tale about what happens when a state expands school choice while simultaneously cutting school funding and divesting from public higher education.)
Different state, same story
While the libertarian paradise known as New Hampshire may be unique, the dynamic playing out here is the same as in virtually every state that has now adopted school vouchers. 1) Ever-shifting goal posts regarding the purpose of these programs? Check. 2) Ballooning voucher costs as states now pick up the tab for students already attending private schools? Check. 3) Deep tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, meaning less revenue to spend on public education and other social programs? Check.
Consider Louisiana, which last year enacted the so-called LA GATOR program—short for Giving All True Opportunity to Rise. Now if you know anything about the recent history of school vouchers in Lousiana (spoiler: not good!), this is the time for a chuckle of the bitterest variety. What IS rising rapidly is the program’s cost—nearly $100 million in its second year, estimated to reach as much as $520 million as the program scales up. But when Governor Jeff Landry tried to collect the cash from lawmakers, something interesting happened. They said no, or at least, not so much.
“I was not remotely expecting that,” [Senate President Cameron] Henry said about Landry seeking an extra $50 million for the program. “Somehow there was a misunderstanding, which we will rectify.” Despite Landry’s request, Henry said he will hold firm to spending roughly the same amount as vouchers cost this school year: $43.5 million “It will be no more” than that, he said, “because that was the original agreement.”
And it wasn’t just Louisiana. Over in Missouri, lawmakers axed their governor’s request for $50 million to scale up the voucher program known as MoScholars. The GOP senator behind the move offered a simple explanation. “I want to make sure that we’re fully funding our obligation to public schools before we start spending 10s of millions of general revenue dollars on private schools.”
If you’re wondering what’s going on, the answer is fairly simple. As voucher programs have ballooned in size and cost, they’ve become a bigger target, especially in states where they’re now hoovering up state funding at the expense of the public schools—which are still attended by most children in every state. And years of tax slashing in these same states is exacerbating what we might call the ‘pie’ problem. Factor in the worsening national economic forecast and things look even more dire. Texas, which is now on the hook for $1 billion a year to pay for vouchers, plummeting oil prices due to Trump’s tariffs is likely to lead to a recession as soon as this summer.
Theory of change
As regular readers of this newsletter know, I’m an avid reader of conservative treatises. As I type, I’m surrounded by anti-public-education screeds by Pete Hegseth, Kevin Roberts, Betsy DeVos, and Corey DeAngelis. It’s the last one, Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools, that has proven to be a particularly useful guide to our times. How, for example, did school choice for the very wealthy become the civil rights cause of our times? Dr. DeAngelis explains:
“Allowing politically advantaged groups to benefit from the program is also a smart way to keep the policy protected for years to come.”
You see, there’s a theory here: that as monies grow scarce and one state after another devolves into a pitched battle over what’s left, the richest and most connected will fight the hardest to keep what’s theirs. For a preview of what this looks like, I recommend a pitstop in West Virginia, where lawmakers just wrapped up another session by shoveling money at tax cuts for the wealthy and school vouchers, while cutting programs that help people get clean water, find work after struggling with addiction and get child care. Oh well…
But for the theory of change to work, people have to want to live in a West Virginia-like reality, and I’m not at all convinced that that’s the case. Don’t believe me? Let’s head to Florida, which school choice proponents like to point to as a model for the rest of our states, and which now spends $4 billion a year on vouchers. Since the state made the program available to even the wealthiest Floridians, surprise, surprise, they’ve leaped at the opportunity to have tax payers pay their children’s private school tuition:
More than 122,000 new students started using vouchers for the first time in the 2023-24 school year, and nearly 70 percent were already in private school, many in some of Florida’s priciest institutions.
But Florida is also an example of the bad math, and shoddy assumptions, that drive the push for school privatization. As public education advocate and blogger extraordinaire Sue Woltanski has been tirelessly documenting, vouchers are indeed succeeding in defunding Florida’s public schools:
This isn’t because the money follows public school students fleeing to private options, but because, when families, whose children are ALREADY in private schools, are offered a tax-funded discount for their private school tuition, they flock to apply, and private schools encourage it.
As Sue keeps pointing out, the big flaw in the school choice lobby’s theory is that Florida’s public schools aren’t going away. A state that used to brag about how little it spent on its students is now funding two parallel education systems: “one for the nearly 3 million students still enrolled in public schools, and another for the hundreds of thousands already in private or home education, all out of the same funding formula.”
So what gives? The GOP’s solution is to slash funding for popular programs in public schools: AP, IB, CTE. When I asked a reader in Florida what he thought was motivating the lawmakers, he saw a longer-term conspiracy at work. Get rid of programs that parents care about and eventually they’ll abandon their local public schools. But that assumes that these parents are powerless and that lawmakers can eviscerate programs and institutions that matter to them without paying a price. I’m not so sure.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting Sarasota to speak to a group called Support Our Schools. SOS is a phenomenal advocacy group, and in partnership with a youth-led group that’s “organizing school boards to fight fascism, protect democracy, and build power from the ground up,” they’re having a real impact in a community that’s been ground zero for the right-wing takeover of public education. I headed south anticipating that my hosts would be despondent over the state of Florida and the nation, but what I found was the opposite. These local activists were energized, convinced that their cause—defending and strengthening public education—is finally breaking through. In their words, the situation for Florida public schools is now so dire that it’s impossible to ignore.
Throughout my visit, one theme echoed repeatedly. A backlash is coming. It can’t come soon enough.
Construction site at Murray Elementary in Dublin Unified in 2022.
Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Legislators are poised to place a $10 billion construction bond for K-12 schools and community colleges on the Nov. 5 statewide ballot. If voters agree, the money will replenish a pool of state matching money that ran dry for building new schools and for fixing old ones – benefiting many districts.
With 34 authors and co-authors, Assembly Bill 247, laying out the details of the bond, is expected to pass easily. It will receive a hearing today, only two days after it was made public after weeks of negotiations. The Assembly and Senate are expected to approve it on Wednesday, the deadline for final wording for November initiatives. Approval will require two-thirds majority support.
“California urgently needs a statewide school bond to repair dilapidated and unsafe school facilities and to invest in our children to meet 21st century educational and workforce needs,” stated Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), chair of the Assembly Education Committee and primary author of AB 247.
The last school construction bond, passed in 2016, was for $9 billion. Since then, needs have piled up. The Legislature has added a new grade, transitional kindergarten, and appropriated $4 billion to turn schools into community schools, demanding more space for services, from tutoring to mental health. Increasing threats from flooding, heat, and fires raise the need for climate-resilient responses, from shade structures to energy and air conditioning upgrades.
The bond will allow districts to use the money for all of those purposes and seek a supplemental grant to construct or renovate transitional kindergarten classrooms and build gyms, all-purpose rooms, or kitchens in schools that lack them. The bond would also set aside $150 million to remove lead from school water.
School districts must pass bonds through property taxes to take advantage of state subsidies. Critics have long charged that the formula for matching money—60% of any qualifying cost of a modernization project and 50% for new construction—has sharply disadvantaged school districts with low property values per student. With larger tax bases and the ability to spread the tax burden, property-rich districts can issue larger bonds, gobbling up a disproportionate share of the state-matching money.
The state’s $10 million bond will use a slightly different formula, offering a little more to districts with lower property rates. But the system will remain largely intact – and unconstitutional, said reform advocate John Affeldt, managing attorney for the public interest law firm Public Advocates. In February, it filed a complaint with state officials, threatening a lawsuit on the grounds that the facilities program discriminates against students in low-wealth districts and denies them an opportunity for an equal education.
The bill’s authors have slightly modified the distribution formula. A sliding-scale system will give districts with high rates of low-income students and, to a lesser extent, low assessed property per student as much as an additional 5 percentage point match: 65% for renovations and 55% for new construction.
Public Advocates recommended using assessed property value per student, which it says is the most important variable when measuring capacity to raise local money to modernize schools, as the yardstick to determine the size of districts’ state match.
The bill creates a point system for rewarding extra money that emphasizes the percentage of low-income students, foster children, and English learners in a district. Affeldt said it likely will award Los Angeles Unified, with a high rate of poor students but above-average property tax wealth per student, extra undeserved state money.
The maximum 65% match won’t help property-poor districts, from 3,500-student Del Norte Unified in the rural north to 46,000-student San Bernardino City Unified, highlighted in Public Advocates’ complaint. Districts like these districts would need an 80% to 90% state match to raise enough money to fix critical conditions and add facilities that property-wealthy districts take for granted – but there cannot be enough funding for them as long as every district is guaranteed a 60% state match, Affleld said.
Public Advocates will consult the residents and community organizations it represents in property-poor districts about what the next step will be, Affeldt said. “But what I can say is the Legislature could not have written a better roadmap to get sued.”
The $10 billion bond will be divided as follows:
$8.5 billion to K-12. Of that:
$3.3 billion for new construction, which will include seismic retrofits, climate measures, preschool and health facilities, and replacement of unrepairable school buildings at least 75 years old;
$4 billion for modernization, which would include replacing portables at least 20 years old and $115 million carved out for the lead in water abatement;
$600 million for qualifying charter schools;
$600 million for career technical education facilities.
$1.5 billion for community colleges.
The $8.5 billion will cover only a portion of districts’ needs, and more than $3 billion may already be spoken for. The State Allocations Board keeps a list of approved projects that have not received funding. As with past state construction bonds, the bill would put these projects at the front of a new line; they’d get first dibs on the new money.
Funding for the state bond will be distributed, as in the past, on a first-come, first-served basis for those districts that can navigate the complex application process. Here, too, critics say favors large districts, which have full-time facilities staff who are well-versed in the system, and small property-wealthy districts that can afford consultants.
The authors of AB 247 have included two provisions to mitigate this. It will send the California Department of Education $5 million to provide technical expertise for completing applications for priority schools in small districts — those with fewer than 2,500 students with low assessed value per student and high numbers of low-income students.
Additionally, the bill calls for setting aside 10% of the new construction and modernization money for small districts and front them a piece of their expected award for grant management. However, the set-aside applies to all small districts, including property-wealthy districts that could consume a big share of the 10% total.
In another nod to fairness, the bond will expand financial hardship assistance in which the state covers the full cost of projects for districts too small to issue a bond; since 1998, these districts have received about 3% of state bond money. Eligibility would increase from a maximum of $5 million in bonding capacity to $15 million.
California has no regular or consistent method of helping with school facilities. Since 1998, when the current formula for sharing state bond proceeds took effect, voters have approved $54 billion in bonding. A string of successful bond approvals was broken in 2020 when voters defeated a proposed $15 billion bond measure, which, by bad luck of the draw, was Proposition 13. Voters may have confused it with the anti-tax measure of the same number in 1978.
Prop. 13 would have given CSU and UC $4 billion of the total. A bill competing with AB 247 would have, too. Weeks of negotiations settled with a smaller bond and no money for the universities. And that cleared the way for a separate $10 billion non-education bond that will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. It will focus on climate change, with funding to shore up defenses against wildfires, floods, and rising sea levels.
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.”
