Trump and Putin are meeting Friday in Alaska to discuss Ukraine. Ukrainian leader Zelensky was not invited, nor were any representatives of Europe. Trump will hear Putin’s grievances and claims. He will hear no other. After Russia intensified its drone bombing of Ukrainian civilian targets, Trump demanded a ceasefire. Putin ignored him. He gave his a deadline of 50 days (!) to stop the attacks. Putin intensified the attacks. Then Trump said the deadline was 10-12 days. That was two weeks ago. Putin got a face-to-face meeting with Trump on American soil, and his war against Ukraine goes on.
Timothy Snyder is one of the nation’s pre-eminent historians of Europe. He taught at Yale University for many years, but decided to accept an offer to teach at the University of Toronto after Trump was re-elected in 2024. He is the author of many books, including the national bestseller On Tyranny.
In the ancient world, people spoke of “Ultima Thule,” a mythical land in the extreme north, the end of the earth.
By venturing north to Alaska to meet Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump reaches his own Ultima Thula, the arctic endpoint of a foreign policy dreamworld.
The premise of Trump’s foreign relations is that foreign leaders can be dealt with like Americans, with fantastic promises and obnoxious bullying.
The fantasies do not function beyond America’s borders. The empty offer of a “beautiful” future does move dictators who commit crimes for their own visions, or affect people who are defending their families from a criminal invasion.
Ukraine has been resisting Russia’s full-scale invasion for three and a half years. Ukrainians fight because Russians invade their land, steal their wealth, kidnap their children and raise them as Russians, torture civilians in basements, murder people with any sort of association with politics or civil society, and destroy their sovereignty.
Putin, for that matter, has his own vision of a beautiful future, and no reason to prefer Trump’s to his own. Putin’s utopia is one of a Ukraine with no government, with a population cowed by torture, with children stolen and brainwashed, with patriots murdered and buried in mass graves, with resources in Russian hands.
Like Trump’s fantasizing, Trump’s bullying also does not work abroad. To be sure, many Americans are afraid of Trump. He has purged his own political party through stochastic violence. He is deploying the US military as a police force, first in California and then in Washington DC.
But foreign enemies apprehend these intimidation tactics differently. In Moscow, deployments of soldiers inside the United States look like weakness. Trump is signalling that he sees the task of the US military as to oppress unarmed Americans. The very move that shocks Americans delights America’s foes.
The tough talk may resonate in America, where we confuse words with actions. But for Russian leaders it covers a weak foreign policy. Trump has made extraordinary concessions to Russia in exchange for nothing at all. Russia has repaid him by continuing the war and seeking to win it — and by laughing at Trump on state-controlled television.
What are those concessions? Just by meeting Putin in Alaska, Trump gives the Russian dictator a chance to spread his own story of his invasion of Ukraine, both to the Americans around Trump and to the American press. By shaking hands with an indicted war criminal, Trump signals that the killings, the tortures, the kidnapings do not matter.
Even the choice of Alaska is a concession, and an odd one. Russians, including major figures in state media, routinely claim Alaska for Russia. As one of Putin’s special envoys put it, Putin’s journey to Alaska is a “domestic flight.”
Inviting people who claim your territory inside your main military base on that territory to discuss a war of aggression they started without any participation of the country they invaded — well, that is just about as far as a certain logic of fantasy can go. It is Ultima Thule.
It is Ultima Thule, the very end, because Trump has already conceded the more fundamental issues. He does not speak of the need for justice for Russian war criminals, or of the need for Russia to pay reparations. The Trump administration grants that Russia can determine Ukraine’s and America’s foreign policy on the crucial point of NATO membership. They have accepted that Russia’s invasions should lead not only to de facto but also de jure changes in sovereign control over territory.
It would take a longer essay to explain how senseless these concessions are. Accepting that invasion can legally change borders undoes the world order. Granting Russia the right to decide the foreign policy of others encourages further aggression by Russia. Dropping the obvious legal and historical responses to criminal wars of aggression — reparations and trials — encourages war in general.
Trump speaks loudly and carries a small stick. The notion that words alone can do the trick has led Trump to the position that Putin’s words matter, and so he must go to Alaska for a “listening exercise.” Trump’s career has been full of listening to Putin, and then repeating what Putin says.
Trump and Putin are moved by the future perception of their greatness. Putin believes that this can be achieved by war, and an element of this war is the manipulation of the American president. Trump believes that this can achieved by being associated with peace, which, so long as he is unwilling to make policy himself, puts him in the power of the warmaker.
Putin is not moved to end the war when his own propaganda is repeated by the president of the United States. He cannot be enticed by a vague vision of a better world, since he has in mind his own very specific atrocity.
In Alaska, Trump reaches his personal Ultima Thula, the limits of his own personal world of magical talk.
He faces a very simple issue: will Putin accept an unconditional ceasefire or not.
Putin has refused any such thing. The Russians propose an obviously ridiculous and provocative counter: that Ukraine should now formally concede to Russia territory that Russia does not even occupy, lands on which Ukraine has built its defenses. And then Russia can of course attack again, from a far better position.
Putin knows that Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize. And so Putin’s obvious move is to suggest to Trump that war will end someday, and Trump will get the credit, if the two of them just keep talking (and while Russia keeps bombing).
If Trump leaves Alaska without Putin having agreed to an unconditional ceasefire, there are two paths that Trump can take. He can continue the fantasy, though it will become ever more obvious, even to his friends and supporters, that the fantasy is Putin’s.
Or Trump can make the policy that will make the war harder for Putin, and thereby bring its end closer.
The United States has not formalized its outlandish concessions to Russia, and could take them back in one press conference. The United States has the policy instruments to change the direction of the war in Ukraine, and could employ them.
Trump has threatened “serious consequences” if Putin does not accept an unconditional ceasefire. Those are words, and thus far the consequences of Trump’s words, for Russia, have been more words. This all becomes clear now, at Ultima Thule, clear to everyone.
When Trump reaches the border of his fantasy world, what is his next step? Where will he go after Ultima Thule?
Donald Trump is so panicked by what is contained in the Trump-Epstein files that he’s now slamming his own followers demanding its release, calling them “stupid” and “weaklings.” Whine as he may, Trump has lost control of the narrative given a new poll released Wednesday which found nearly 70% of Americans believe the Trump regime has engaged in a cover up of the Epstein files–including 59% of Trump supporters. At the very least it appears that Trump knew Jeffrey Epstein was involved in sex ring where children were raped yet did nothing to stop that evil. But Trump’s actions could be worse than that.
However, lost in the discussion is that Trump’s current Attorney General Pam Bondi was Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019 in the very state that was ground zero for Epstein raping and trafficking children. Why didn’t she investigate and prosecute Epstein for these heinous crimes committed in Florida?!
Taking a quick step back, Epstein received in 2008 the “deal of a lifetime” from local Florida prosecutors and George W. Bush’s Department of Justice. At the time, Bush’s DOJ had identified 36 underage girls who were victims of Epstein. But they offered the well-connected Epstein a deal to plead guilty to just two prostitution charges in state court. He was then sentenced to 18 months in jail–which he served in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail where he was allowed daily work release. In addition, Bush’s DOJ agreed not to prosecute him for federal crimes. Worse, Epstein’s victims were not even told of the deal in advance so they could object.
After Epstein’s release from jail in 2009, Epstein returned to his lavish lifestyle and was able to “continue his abuse of minors”—a point made in a 2020 report by Trump’s own DOJ after Epstein died in the custody of the Trump administration. So again, why didn’t Bondi investigate Epstein for his crimes while she was AG from 2011 to 2019?!
There comes a time in every profession when it becomes imperative to address the big ideas and to leave aside, at least for a moment, the trivial pursuits that engage us. One big idea that we educators have ignored for too long is the relationship between education and our democracy. Sadly, we have succumbed to the pathology of focusing almost exclusively on reading and math to achieve proficiency cut scores on state tests rather than growing civically competent students. Only 22% of eighth graders tested on the 2022 NAEP assessment were proficient or advanced in civics.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choices are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of our democracy, therefore, is education.”
My colleagues, I suggest to you that we as educators have failed dramatically in our responsibility to help build a strong democratic society. We cannot be solely responsible for this debacle, as our democratic demise has accelerated through the decay of our institutions, money in politics, social media and voter suppression. Nonetheless, we played a significant role in this demise.
Our first failure is the inability to ensure that all our students, especially those from the most marginalized communities, are literate in reading, mathematics and science. Without strong literacy skills, no amount of civics education will make a difference. Over half the children in California cannot read at grade level. Only one-quarter of Black students are at grade level in math. We rank 19th in countries taking the 2018 PISA science test.
We are just too good now at blaming the children, the parents, society, the tests or the pandemic. We redirected our focus from academics to a plethora of distractions like the use of all manner of educational technologies. We moved away from our primary mission of fostering student academic achievement.
We know that the teacher is the key when it comes to student academic achievement, but it would be unfair to lay all the blame for the failure of K-12 education on teachers. We have failed our teachers in their preparation and support throughout their careers. Probably the biggest failure is our inability to recruit the finest teaching candidates and to train them well in content, professional practices and assessment skills. A second failure is the lack of career ladders where teachers advance from novice to master with plenty of guidance, support, monitoring and accountability.
We also have big problems in figuring out what is the right stuff to teach. Over 20 years ago, esteemed researchers on the National Reading Panel handed educators the recipe for effectively teaching reading. What did educators do? They turned away from the science of reading toward the alchemy of the Balanced Reading Approach that even its founder Lucy Calkins recently admitted failed.
Even with the ascendancy of evidence-based approaches to teaching reading, we see a regression toward accommodating the failed Balanced Reading Approach. We are not too keen on paradigm shifts. We like to go along to get along. Keep the adults happy rather than take a hard line on effective ways to teach reading. Who is watching out for the children and families?
Even if by some extraordinary effort, school districts were able to plan, implement and monitor student achievement goals aligned with reading, there is still the problem of teaching reading in ways that intertwine with students’ everyday lives and the democratic needs of the community.
The great Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire, understood the relationship between the fundamentals of learning to read and how reading can be used to effectively transform society when he said, “Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language; rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world.” Freire does not diminish the importance of learning to read but emphasizes the need to make sure that reading with the purpose of improving community is what drives our democracy.
Similar systemic issues exist in the teaching of mathematics and science. Unwillingness to take vaccinations to protect individuals and the community against the ravages of Covid is emblematic of a citizenry that is fundamentally uneducated about the power of vaccinations and the role that vaccinations play in the protection not only of individuals but communities as well. This lack of fundamental scientific knowledge is a real drag on our democracy. Time should have been spent on explicit science instruction rather than project-based learning.
There is no doubt that we educators played a significant role in the demise of our democracy. While there are many outstanding educators, there are not enough highly qualified professionals to turn teaching and administration into a real profession yet. We overemphasize the need for student compliance with ersatz rules like seating assignments at lunch rather than engaging students in their own decision-making and critical thinking — fundamental democratic skills.
The solution is available but still invisible. Many adults in the system are not committed to approaching teaching and learning systematically and scientifically. An educational system that is in crisis should consider adopting a few high-quality research-based teaching and aligned administrative practices like explicit instruction or formative assessment with descriptive feedback. When all teachers within the system can effectively assess, evaluate, intervene and monitor student understanding, especially for struggling students, academic achievement will soar.
Our democracy and its K-12 education system are in the emergency room with a life-threatening disease. Sadly, we educators are more interested in the feng shui of the ER rather than taking the necessary key steps to save the patient.
For me? I will enter the twilight of my career tutoring students in reading, math and science. Best to deploy my formidable teaching skills in saving one starfish at a time.
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Bill Conrad has been an educator for over 45 years and he has worked extensively within school districts throughout the country in a wide variety of capacities including as an Honors Middle School Science Teacher and administrator. His memoir about his educational experiences is The Fog of Education.
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.
When disaster strikes, it feels like time stands still, but we are expected to keep moving. Those with children don’t have a choice — they go to work and address an overwhelming sense of trauma for their families.
The recent fires in Los Angeles demonstrated the worst of what disaster can bring and the best of our communities in their response.
Working in the early childhood space at the Child Care Alliance of Los Angeles, I witnessed child care providers act with urgency and care to ensure babies and toddlers impacted by the fires had a safe place while their families began the journey to recovery. Six months later, the child care providers who stepped up heroically during the devastating fires remain undervalued, and the sector as a whole remains in critical condition. It’s time to prioritize child care before the next disaster strikes.
The Alliance tracked the impact of the fires on the child care sector and found that more than 100 sites providing care were impacted, with 47 of those facilities destroyed.
Even those who lost their homes put their role as professionals first, and figured out how to provide for the children in their care.
The day after the wildfires began, one Altadena provider evacuated to an Airbnb and took in children. This is just one of many stories of providers who lost their homes and everything they owned, and yet, still showed up for the families who rely on them.
This isn’t the first time providers held our community together. When Covid hit, providers responded so frontline medical workers and parents could go to work. No matter the circumstance, child care providers do what it takes to ensure children have a place to go.
That resiliency comes at a heavy cost — and it often happens without the necessary infrastructure from city, county and state leaders to make it sustainable.
The 0-to-3 child care system has needed transformative solutions for years. Families struggle to find and afford care, while providers are some of the lowest-paid professionals in our country. Child care advocates are extremely coordinated, coming together to address longstanding sector challenges. But we cannot transform the system without public-private partnerships driving a holistic approach.
The flames may be gone, but the path to recovery is far from over.
Think about the child care system’s critical yet overlooked role in keeping families afloat during and after disaster. There are still neighborhoods where trucks haul away debris and where child care providers are piecing together arrangements in borrowed community spaces. Their commitment to caring for our youngest remains unwavering, but their capacity is stretched to the limit.
The Alliance has worked to track down displaced families and offer direct support. Some providers reconnected with the children they cared for. Others are still figuring out how to reopen. The unfortunate reality is that many providers have been forced to quit. As recovery inches forward, it is painfully clear: California’s child care system helps us withstand disasters, yet it’s not supported like other essential services.
Despite an outpouring of community and philanthropic support, child care remains largely absent from infrastructure rebuilding conversations. In some LA County disaster response plans, animal shelters and stables are listed as essential locations to check during a fire, but child care homes and centers are not.
I love animals, but the fact that our youngest children and providers are an afterthought in our community planning should alarm all of us.
We need our leaders to commit to building a more resilient child care system. There are simple, tangible solutions on the table now that our leaders can take action on. Our state Legislature and governor could protect provider wages and benefits from potential cuts or delays. This would go a long way to keeping more providers in the profession and supporting them ahead of a future disaster.
Crises don’t create fractures in our child care system. They expose them.
If we want to be truly prepared when disaster strikes, we must treat child care as the essential infrastructure it is and support the providers who keep our kids thriving, happy, and safe.
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Cristina Alvarado is the executive director of the Child Care Alliance of Los Angeles and leads A Golden State for Kids, a campaign that brings together families, providers, child advocacy organizations and businesses to build demand for accessible child care in California.
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.
Knowing which cybersecurity threats pose the biggest danger to your business can be a tricky task. Even the smallest security incidents involving critical systems can result in large-scale disruptions and costly expenses when trying to resume normal operations.
One form of cybercrime that businesses encounter on a regular basis that has the capability of crippling critical systems and applications is ransomware. These cyberattacks are highly sophisticated in both their design and their orchestration. The simple act of visiting a webpage or opening an infected file can quickly bring a business to a standstill.
To mitigate the impact of ransomware threats, proactive security planning is essential. Below are some important best practices you can follow to reduce your attack surface and lower your chances of becoming a target.
Minimizing Vulnerabilities at the User Level
Every device used to access your company’s systems or networks is known as an “endpoint.” While every organization has several endpoints that require management, companies with remote employees tend to have a much higher volume that requires regular monitoring and protection.
With fully remote and hybrid working arrangements increasing the average number of endpoints businesses have to manage, the potential for bad actors to exploit these connections also increases.
To mitigate these risks, the organization’s perimeter security needs to be thoroughly evaluated to identify and protect any potential entry points. After this is accomplished, companies can use a combination of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems and access control measures to reduce the chances of unauthorized individuals posing as legitimate users.
Additionally, enforcing personal device usage policies is also essential to improving cybersecurity posture. These policies outline specific measures that employees should follow while using personal devices to conduct company business. This may include avoiding open public internet connections, locking devices when unattended, and updating software and firmware regularly.
Educating Your Team on Password Best Practices
Your employees are key assets to preventing ransomware attacks, even if they don’t realize it. Using weak login credentials, coupled with limited password management practices, leads to a high probability of organizational security becoming compromised.
As convenient as using easy-to-remember passwords may be for a user, businesses need to educate employees and enforce certain best practices when maintaining company credentials. Establishing strong password protocols is essential to maintaining security. Employees should be required to update their credentials periodically throughout the year and avoid reusing passwords across multiple platforms to reduce the risk of compromise.
Building a Reliable Recovery System
Creating regular copies of databases and infrastructure configurations is a critical step to increasing the digital resilience of any organization. In the event that your operations face a malicious attack and assets become encrypted, reliable backups help you to bring your systems back online more efficiently. While system restoration may still take some time, it is a much more reliable solution than trying to pay a ransom demand.
A widely recognized guideline for structuring your backup strategy is the 3-2-1 rule. This recommends:
Always keep three up-to-date backup files of critical data
Use two different storage formats (internal and/or external)
Keep at least one copy of the data stored outside your business infrastructure
Following this advice reduces your chances of all backups being compromised during an attack and improves your chances of successful recovery.
Creating Secure Zones Within Your Infrastructure
Decentralizing your network into smaller segments helps when containing the rapid spreading of ransomware. This ensures that a compromised system doesn’t automatically allow a bad actor to freely navigate the entire system. Creating secure network zones helps to limit potential damage and gives response teams more time to address the issue.
Strict user access management is also important for reducing your risk exposure. These measures restrict the amount of open access a person has to a system at any given time. This makes it easier to track access levels if employees leave the company and minimize the amount of data exposure with all employees.
Improving Security Through Proactive Testing
As your organization grows, there becomes a need for additional security protections as your digital footprint expands. Still, it’s important to remember that the measures you put in place won’t necessarily stay as effective over the long term. This is why proactive security testing is so important.
However, for many companies, trying to find security weaknesses across a larger underlying infrastructure can be very resource-intensive. Penetration testing services are a great way to help address this challenge.
Pentesting can help organizations identify where various security mechanisms may be failing. By conducting simulated attack scenarios, these ethical hacking teams isolate critical weaknesses that can lead to a data breach. Once receiving a report back from the team, organizations can then prioritize filling high-priority security gaps that could lead to increased attack susceptibility or costly data security and compliance issues.
Maintaining Compliance and Building Customer Trust
Aside from operational disruptions, ransomware can lead to compromised client and customer data security, which can cause serious legal and reputational harm.
Using strong encryption on all of your critical company data is imperative for reducing this risk. This process makes it difficult for any unauthorized person to access information without the necessary encryption keys. While this step may not eliminate all chances of data being accessed, it will go a long way in preventing the illegal trading of this information on dark web markets.
When trying to maintain customer trust, it’s also important to remember that although there is a greater reliance on AI-powered security systems, certain regulatory and ethical considerations need to be taken into consideration. This includes being transparent with customers regarding how these solutions may use their data and how their information will stay protected.
Build a Stronger Defense Against Ransomware
It’s important to maintain a proactive approach when protecting your business from ransomware threats. By following the provided guidelines, you’ll ensure that your organization is less susceptible to these attacks moving forward and that you have effective response plans in place to help you recover if necessary.
Los Angeles City College, one of the state’s 116 community colleges.
Larry Gordon/EdSource Today
Latino students are enrolling at low rates in bachelor’s degree programs at California’s community colleges. But many of those who do enroll are graduating quickly and finding work after leaving college.
But, in many of the programs, Latino students are not applying or enrolling at high rates. Across the programs, which range from equine and ranch management at Feather River College to dental hygiene at West Los Angeles College, just 30.1% of students are Latino. That’s much lower than the 46% of students at those colleges who are Latino.
To address that gap, the study calls for greater recruitment of Latino students to the programs and for the state to invest more money in the programs.
However, for the students who do enroll, 64% of them finish their degree within two years after starting their upper-division coursework. That’s comparable to non-Latino students, 68% of whom graduate within two years after starting those classes.
Following graduation, the vast majority of Latino students in the bachelor’s degree majors — 94% of them — reported being employed. On average, they earned $22,600 more annually than they did prior to starting the program.
Those outcomes are encouraging, but the colleges could benefit from a “public awareness campaign” to make sure Latino students know about the bachelor’s degree programs available to them, said Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, one of the report’s authors.
“We have this tool now, so let’s make sure people are aware. We’re seeing very promising results once they’re there. But we want to make sure that they get there,” added Rios-Aguilar, who is a professor of education and the associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.
The bachelor’s degrees are more affordable for students than attending a University of California or California State University campus. Students can finish their degree for just $10,560 in tuition and fees, less than half of what it costs at UC or Cal State. Lower-division classes at the community college are $46 per unit, while the upper-division courses in the bachelor’s degree programs cost the same $46 enrollment fee plus a supplemental $84 fee.
Community college students with financial need can often qualify for state aid to fully cover those costs. That typically includes a California College Promise Grant to cover their lower-division fees and a Cal Grant to cover the $84-per-unit upper-division fees.
The 15 programs examined in the study are California’s original 15 community college bachelor’s degree programs. The state established those programs in 2015 as part of a pilot program.
The state then built on that pilot program with the passage of a 2021 law that allows the community college system to approve up to 30 new bachelor’s degree programs annually. Since the fall of 2022, at least 18 additional programs have been approved, according to the state chancellor’s office.
Not every college included in the study struggled to enroll Latino students in the programs. At two colleges — Antelope Valley and Bakersfield — the share of Latino students in those programs exceeded the overall share of Latino students at the college.
At Bakersfield, which offers a bachelor’s degree in industrial automation, getting those students enrolled starts in high school. Students in the Kern High School District have the option of earning an associate degree in industrial automation while they work toward their high school graduation.
“This innovative collaboration enables these students to seamlessly transfer into our baccalaureate program. Innovations that bring opportunity to students help explain Bakersfield College’s success in successfully recruiting Latinx students to our program,” Jessica Wojtysiak, the college’s associate vice president of instruction, said in an email.
In addition to that program, Bakersfield also now offers a bachelor’s degree in research laboratory technology.
At another college, MiraCosta, the share of Latino students in the college’s bachelor’s degree program in biomanufacturing was only 0.8% less than the college’s overall share of Latino students.
“In our diverse and vibrant student body, we are proud to observe that the majority of those enrolling in our programs — specifically the bachelor’s degree in biomanufacturing — represent a majority of non-White/Asian backgrounds, showcasing our institution’s appeal across various ethnicities,” Dominique Ingato, MiraCosta’s biotechnology department chair, said in an email.
To ensure that other colleges have similar success, the study released Tuesday suggests that the state should invest more money in the community college bachelor’s degree programs.
That could include spending more on outreach, marketing and recruitment to attract more Latino students. It could also mean investing in “research infrastructure” at the colleges, Rios-Aguilar said. She pointed out that community colleges don’t have the same research capacity as traditional research institutions like UCLA and other four-year colleges.
“It’s important to highlight that community colleges are severely underfunded compared to other sectors of higher education and yet they’re doing these amazing things and these promising tools are emerging,” she added. “Colleges are working really hard to make this happen.”
Glenn Kessler is a professional fact-checker for The Washington Post. He recently reviewed a controversy about the consequences of the Trump administration’s shutdown of USAID. Democrats said that people have died because of the cuts; Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not agree. Kessler reviews the record.
He writes:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “No one has died because of USAID —” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California): “The people who have died …” Rubio: “That’s a lie.”
— exchange at a congressional hearing, May 21
“That question about people dying around the world is an unfair one.” — Rubio, at another congressional hearing later that day
When Rubio testified last week about the State Department budget, Sherman confronted him about numerous anecdotal accounts of people around the world dying because the Trump administration, at the direction of billionaire Elon Musk, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and shut down many of its programs.
Sherman used his time mainly to pontificate, and Rubio’s attention must have wandered. He asked Sherman to repeat the question after Sherman said: “We next focus on USAID. Musk gutted it. He said no one died as a result. Do you agree no one had died yet as a result of the chainsawing of USAID? Yes or no.”
Sherman repeated: “Has anyone died in the world because of what Elon Musk did?”
Rubio stumbled a response — “Uh, listen” — and Sherman cut him off. “Yes or no?” he said. “Reclaiming my time. If you won’t answer, that’s a loud answer.”
That’s when Rubio said it was “a lie.” As Sherman’s staff held up photos of people alleged to have died because they stopped receiving services from USAID programs, Rubio denounced the claim as “false.”
Later in the day, at another hearing, Rep. Grace Meng (D-New York) gave Rubio an opportunity to clean up his statement. “Do you stand behind that testimony?” she asked. “And has there been any assessment conducted by the department to this point of how many people have died?”
Rubio said it was “an unfair question.” He tried to reframe the question, arguing that other countries such as Britain and France also have cut back on humanitarian spending, while China has never contributed much.
“The United States is the largest humanitarian provider on the planet,” he said. “I would argue: How many people die because China hasn’t done it? How many people have died because the U.K. has cut back on spending and so has other countries?”
There’s a lot to unpack there.
The facts
At least until the Trump administration, the United States was the largest provider of humanitarian aid in the world — in raw dollars. In the 2023 fiscal year, the most recent with complete data, USAID’s budget was about $42 billion, while the State Department disbursed about $19 billion in additional aid, and other agencies (such as the Treasury Department) did, as well. Now USAID is all but gone, folded into the State Department. Nonetheless, when the dust settles, the United States might still be the biggest aid donor — again, in raw dollars.
When measured as a percentage of a country’s economy, even before the Trump administration, the U.S. was far behind nations such as Britain, Norway, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. The United Nations has set a target of contributing 0.7 percent of gross national income in development aid; the U.S. clocks in with less than 0.2 percent, near the bottom of the list of major democracies, according to a 2020 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Most economists would say that a percentage of a nation’s economy is a more accurate way to measure the generosity of a country.
Rubio is correct that Britain and France have cut back, and that China has not been much of a foreign-aid donor. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for instance, said he would pay for increased defense spending by cutting the foreign-aid budget from roughly 0.5 percent of gross national income to 0.3 percent. (That is still higher than the U.S. share before President Donald Trump began his second term.) China’s aid budget is a bit opaque — numbers have not been published since 2018 — but it appears to be an average of just over $3 billion a year, according to the Brookings Institution.
But when it comes to whether people have died as a result of the Trump administration’s cuts, we have to look at how the cuts unfolded. Starmer announced his plans in a pending budget proposal. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 imposing a 90-day freeze on all U.S. foreign aid — and then Musk forced out thousands of employees who worked at USAID, helping to manage and distribute funds. The resulting chaos was devastating, according to numerous news reports.
Sherman’s staff held up a photo of Pe Kha Lau, 71, a refugee from Myanmar with lung problems. On Feb. 7, Reuters quoted her family as saying she died “after she was discharged from a U.S.-funded hospital on the Myanmar-Thai border that was ordered to close” as a result of Trump’s executive order. The International Rescue Committee said it shut down and locked hospitals in several refugee camps in late January after receiving a “stop-work” order from the State Department.
Another photo held up as Rubio said the death claims were false was of 5-year-old Evan Anzoo. He was featured in a March article by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof titled: “Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.” Kristof focused on South Sudan and the impact that a suspension of HIV drugs — under a George W. Bush program called PEPFAR — had on the poor country ravaged by civil conflict. PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is regarded as a singular success, saving an estimated 26 million lives since it was created in 2003. Kristof focused on individual stories of people who died after they lost access to medicines because of Trump’s order.
“Another household kept alive by American aid was that of Jennifer Inyaa, a 35-year-old single mom, and her 5-year-old son, Evan Anzoo, both of them H.I.V.-positive,” Kristof wrote. “Last month, after the aid shutdown, Inyaa became sick and died, and a week later Evan died as well, according to David Iraa Simon, a community health worker who assisted them. Decisions by billionaires in Washington quickly cost the lives of a mother and her son.”
Anecdotal reports can go only so far. It’s clear that people are dying because U.S. aid was suspended and then reduced. But it’s difficult to come up with a precise death toll that can be tied directly to Trump administration policies. The death certificates, after all, aren’t marked “Due to lack of funding by U.S. government.”
Kristof cited a study by the Center for Global Development that estimated how many lives are saved each year by American dollars: about 1.7 million HIV/AIDS deaths averted; 550,000 saved because of other humanitarian assistance; 300,000 tuberculosis deaths prevented; and nearly 300,000 malaria deaths forestalled. But that shows the positive impact of U.S. assistance, not what happens when it is withdrawn.
Brooke Nichols, a Boston University infectious-disease mathematical modeler and health economist, has developed a tracker that attempts to fill this gap. As of Monday, the model shows, about 96,000 adults and 200,000 children have died because of the administration’s cutbacks to funding for aid groups and support organizations. The overall death count grows by 103 people an hour.
With any calculation like this, a lot depends on the assumptions. The methodology uses a straight-line estimate of program terminations based on 2024 data and published mortality data to estimate the impact of loss of treatment. Nichols said that because it is not entirely clear what aid has been restored, she has not updated the tracker to account for that. But she noted that Rubio claimed on Capitol Hill that “85 percent of recipients are now receiving PEPFAR services.”
“For HIV, the total mortality estimates reflect either a 3-month complete cessation of PEPFAR, or 12 months of PEPFAR reduced by 25 percent (the total results are the same),” Nichols said in an email. “If what Rubio says is true … and 85 percent of PEPFAR is back up and running, then the numbers here are still very accurate.” In a statement to The Fact Checker, the State Department put it differently from Rubio: “85 percent of PEPFAR-funded programs that deliver HIV care and treatment are operational.” We asked for documentation for the “85 percent” figure, because the phrasing might not include funding for drugs that prevent HIV infection. We did not receive a response.
Nichols acknowledged that the tracker was not adjusted for double counting — a child counted as dying from malnutrition and diarrhea — though she didn’t think it would affect the overall results much. Some of the estimates are based on country-specific information; others are not. Data limitations required her to assume an equal distribution between children treated for pneumonia and diarrhea through USAID.
“The biggest uncertainties in all of these estimates are: 1) the extent to which countries and organizations have pivoted to mitigate this disaster (likely highly variable), and 2) which programs are actually still funded with funding actually flowing — and which aren’t,” Nichols said.
A key source document for the tracker is an internal memo written on March 3 by Nicholas Enrich, then USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health, estimating the impact of the funding freeze on global health (including how such diseases might spill over into the United States). Enrich, a civil servant who served under four administrations over 15 years, estimated that a permanent halt in aid would result in at least 12.5 million cases of malaria, with an additional 71,000 to 166,000 deaths annually, a 28 percent to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally and an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year.
As a result of writing the memo — and others — he was placed on administrative leave.
Nichols said the death toll would not be so high had the administration pursued a deliberate policy to phase out funding over a 12-month period, which would have permitted contingency planning. “It’s true that other countries are cutting back on humanitarian spending. But what makes the U.S. approach so harmful is how the cuts were made: abruptly, without warning, and without a plan for continuity,” she said. “It leads to interruptions in care, broken supply chains, and ultimately, preventable deaths. Also, exactly because the U.S. is the largest provider of humanitarian aid, it makes the approach catastrophic.”
When we asked the State Department about Rubio’s dismissal of the idea that anyone had died as a result of the suspension of aid — and that it was clearly wrong — we received this statement: “America is the most generous nation in the world, and we urge other nations to dramatically increase their humanitarian efforts.”
The Pinocchio Test
Given numerous news reports about people dying because they stopped getting American aid, you would think Rubio’s staff would have prepared him with a better answer than “lie” and “false.” His cleanup response wasn’t much better. The issue is not that other nations are reducing funding — but how the United States suddenly pulled the plug, making it more likely that people would die. There is no dispute that people have died because the Trump administration abruptly suspended foreign aid. One might quibble over whether tens of thousands — or hundreds of thousands — have died. But you can’t call it a lie. Rubio earns Four Pinocchios.
Four Pinocchios
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Middle schooler allegedly attacks classmate twice, choking him severely. Police recommend attempted murder charges to district attorney.
School staff calls police to report squirrel with injured leg in school courtyard.
Unknown man in swimsuit briefs adorned with Australian flag trespassing at high school pool. Lifeguard sees a man follow boys 9 and 12, into the locker room. Man strips, pulls back the shower curtain to see the boy and asks: “Does this make you uncomfortable?” Man flees. Police list indecent exposure and lewd acts as possible offenses.
Officer dispatched to investigate ringing school alarm. Burnt English muffin found in teachers’ lounge.
From Crescent City, Weed and Alturas in the far north to Calexico and El Cajon nearly 800 miles south, all along the Pacific Coast, across the sprawling Central Valley and up into the High Sierra and down into the Mojave Desert, police are dispatched to California schools thousands of times on any given day classes are in session.
Reasons are myriad: Students bringing guns and knives — and even a spear and a bow and arrow — to school, sexual assaults and “perversion reports” and fights. Then there are lost keys, malfunctioning alarms, and dogs — even cattle — loose on school grounds. Once, police were called for help with a swarm of bees.
Calling the Cops Investigation
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a continuing investigation into school policing in California.
Monday: San Bernardino County: growing hotspot for school-run police
Local reporting: Emma Gallegos (Kern County), Lasherica Thornton (Fresno), Mallika Seshadri (Los Angeles and San Bernardino County) and Monica Velez (Oakland)
Project manager and editor: Rose Ciotta, Investigations and Projects Editor
Database design, data gathering, scraping, cleaning: Daniel J. Willis, Thomas Peele and Justin Allen
Website design: Justin Allen
Graphics and website design: Yuxuan (Sunny) Xie
Social media, photo editor: Andrew Reed
Copy Editor: Chuck Carroll
Cops rush to reports of students attempting suicide and overdosing on drugs, bullying, sexual assault and unwanted touching. They surveil high schoolers leaving campuses for lunch. They break up fights between parents over spots in elementary school pickup queues. They haul drunken adults from the stands at school sporting events. They once investigated a teacher’s claim that someone stole $10,000 from her classroom desk.
Mostly the call logs capture the anguish of youngsters with mental health challenges, victims whose nude photos are showing up on social media for all to see and parents turning to school administrators to deal with it all.
The data offered a raw, first-blush look at why school staff summon cops, reasons that sometimes lead to juvenile and adult arrests.
All incidents included in the police logs largely remain out of public view due to state laws that shield juveniles and allow police to withhold information on investigations. As a result, the data collected as a representative sample of the state is also clearly an undercount of what routinely occurs in California schools.
An EdSource analysis found that nearly a third of all calls for police were for incidents deemed serious. After consulting police experts, EdSource tagged the data with a definition for serious incidents as those that reasonably required a police presence. Included among serious incidents are those tagged as violent, which include anything involving a violent act, including self-harm.
The share of serious incidents increases to 4 out of 10 when police patrols are set aside. They make up about a third of all records, but most have little detail on what police were doing at or near the school.
The analysis also showed that high school students in districts with their own police departments are policed at a higher rate than in districts that rely on municipal police and sheriffs.
School police calls across California
Four years after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, igniting a national revolt and the defund-the-police movement, only about 20 of California’s 977 public-school districts made significant changes to school policing.
Most that acted ended contracts with municipal police departments to post cops — commonly called school resource officers — in schools. And three districts that made changes reversed course and brought police back after short hiatuses.
EdSource’s investigation sampled records showing calls from and about schools to city and school district police departments and county sheriffs. In some cases, officers stationed in schools dispatch themselves to a problem by radioing their dispatcher. Schools without campus police often call 911. Typically, police record their activity as “patrol” or “school check,” vague descriptions that raise questions about the use of public resources.
Whenever a school resource officer ran along a corridor, one hand on a radio microphone, or a sheriff’s deputy raced along a country road with lights and sirens on to reach a distant rural school, they contributed to what data showed is a vast, continuing police presence in California’s pre-K to 12 public education, EdSource found.
The records resurfaced a debate lingering years after Floyd’s killing about how much policing schools need and if deploying armed officers does more harm than good.
Similarly to police debates at the municipal level, school policing can be polarizing. Across California, the issue emerges as a political divide, with some seeing the police as necessary to ensure safety and others seeing them as agents of racial injustice.
In 2021, the ACLU of Southern California issued ascathing report that recommended an end to school policing in the Golden State, calling it “discriminatory, costly, and counterproductive.” In schools with regularly assigned cops, students across “all groups” were more likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement, researchers found.
A 2020 University of Maryland study published in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, found school districts that increased policing through federal grants “did not increase school safety.” Researchers recommended improving safety through “the many alternatives” to police in schools.
In California, school policing is “a structure. It’s part of the budgets, it’s part of the vocabulary of the schools. It’s part of what the expectation is from the parents and the students,” said Southwestern Law School professor Jyoti Nanda, who has researched school policing for 25 years and calls it “completely unnecessary,” adding, America is the lone civilized country where it is practiced.
In rural California, school policing is seen as routine, allowing students to become “comfortable interacting with someone in a uniform, wearing a badge, and carrying a gun, so that as they grew older, they see those people as a friendly face, a resource that they could go to as opposed to someone that they should be afraid of,” Tulare County School Superintendent Tim Hire told EdSource. The practice is spreading in Tulare, where three small districts recently agreed to share a resource officer to travel among them.
Such decisions are often couched as safety matters, a vigilant effort to prevent the next school shooting and avoid the failure of Uvalde, Texas police to stop the gunman who slaughtered 19 students and two teachers in 2022.
When state Assemblymember Bill Essayli, R-Riverside, introduced legislation in February to require an armed police officer in each public school with more than 50 students, he described the need in base terms: “We need good guys and girls with guns, ready to act.”
Essayli’s idea is “a step backward,” Assembly Education Committee member Mia Bonta D-Alameda, said at a hearing where the bill died in April. “We know it to be true that there’s a disproportionate impact on Black and brown students when police officers are in schools.”
A matter of local control
The state Department of Education offers no guidance or best practices, calling policing a local matter, a spokesperson said. There’s little consistency statewide in whether police are deployed in schools. Nineteen school districts have their own police departments, including Los Angeles Unified, which refused to release its police call data, some with only a handful of officers.
Los Angeles Unified cut its police department’s budget by 35% in 2020 and banned officers from being posted in schools. Following reports of escalating violence, the district recently reinstated police to two schools through mid-June. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho had informed the school board that he was planning to return police to 20 schools, but he got community and trustee backlash.
Oakland Unified disbanded its police department in favor of non-police staffers to keep peace in schools and respond to emergencies. Principals were trained on when to call city police only as a last resort. Still, data shows eight of the district’s 18 traditional middle and high schools combined to call city police 225 times, with nearly half of them serious, between Jan. 15 and June 30, 2023. Reasons include assault with a deadly weapon, suicide attempts, battery and terrorist/criminal threats.
Retired Long Beach and San Diego school Superintendent Carl Cohn, who served on the California State Board of Education from 2011 to 2018, said Oakland’s model of deploying people to talk students through peaceful resolutions of disputes can work. In the early 1990s, he ran the Long Beach schools anti-gang task force, hiring people with “street cred,” including former gang members.
They “could stop instantly what was going on on a campus by their mere presence,” Cohn said. “Their credibility with youngsters that might be on the verge of gang affiliation was really powerful.”
Yet Cohn’s “not on board with this notion of ‘let’s abandon the school police altogether.’ It’s the type of thing where ultimately there’s enough bad things from time to time happening that the safety of children has to be front and center.” Police must be well-trained, and school officials must cooperate with them, he added.
Shutting down the Oakland Unified police department of 11 officers and changing its policing culture is tough and ongoing, said a leader of a racial-justice group that pushed for the change.
“There’s still the ideology of policing that exists on campus and is embedded in the infrastructure of schools that we’re also up against,” said Jessica Black, a Black Organizing Project activist. “The criminalization of young people, implicit bias, and anti-Black racist practices” still need to be confronted.
It was only after Floyd’s murder that Dr. Tony Moos, a physician, learned that her four children who had each attended high school in the affluent Santa Clara County city of Los Altos had “negative interactions” with school resources officers “that they’d kept to themselves,” she said.
Moos was motivated to act and got the city to examine school police practices and make changes.
After hearings that included a Black high school teacher saying a resource officer had once pushed her to the ground, the city pulled police from the high school. The city also replaced its police chief in 2022. The new hire, a Black woman, came with much-needed experience.
Out of public view
California law grants police wide powers to withhold documents, including investigatory records, requested under the Public Records Act without revealing how many such records are being withheld. Many departments withheld from EdSource some — or even all — of the school calls they received.
The same is true about what information police can reveal in news releases or public statements about individual school incidents, especially involving juveniles. The public is often then not informed about police activity in schools.
That means that the serious incidents — weapons, death threats, rapes, assaults, fights, drugs — that police are responding to in 3 out of 10 calls often remain confidential.
Police in Crescent City, Del Norte County, for example, didn’t release information about the attempted murder of a student at Crescent Elk Middle School by a classmate who allegedly repeatedly choked him on Jan. 23, 2023, until EdSource asked about the incident more than a year later.
When EdSource asked police in Avenal, Kings County to elaborate on a call record of a late-night report of “shots fired” at the city’s high school, a lawyer responded claiming the information was exempt from disclosure.
“The problem is that (the exemptions) apply to virtually everything law enforcement does. They never expire. So, every police report is potentially covered by the investigatory records exemption,” said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, an open government group. The lack of disclosure of police activity in schools makes it all the harder to determine what the correct level of policing should be, he added.
Given the importance of the issue, the lack of information is troubling, Loy said. The debate over school policing “should be held on the basis of full and complete data and not driven by anecdote.”
A day of policing
The one-day record of police responding to a school for serious incidents was 10, the data sample shows.
That was May 17, 2023, at Burroughs High School in the Sierra Sands Unified School District in Ridgecrest, a desert city of 28,000 in eastern Kern County near Death Valley.
The first occurred at 8:38 a.m. when a school resource officer arrested a student for battery and released him to his parents. District Assistant Superintendent Brian Auld, who’s in charge of security, told EdSource the student “didn’t even go to the police station.”
That was followed at 9:09 a.m. by reports of two students who appeared to be under the influence of drugs. They were evaluated and returned to class. Another report of two students apparently under the influence came in at 10:26 a.m. One student was impaired and released to their parents, Auld said.
Less than 10 minutes later, the resource officer responded to a student in “mental distress” who was taken for a psychological evaluation.
At 1:23 p.m., police were alerted to a terrorist threat that ended up involving a student threatening to beat up someone, Auld said.
About 20 minutes later, two girls began fighting in art class.
One grabbed what Auld called “an art project” — apparently a ceramic object — and allegedly swung it at the other girl’s head. Police called it assault with a deadly weapon, arresting the aggressor. “Deadly weapon sounds like a knife or a gun. The officer made the decision that (the object) could have done serious bodily harm,” Auld said. “I’m not downplaying it.”
At 3:14 p.m. a report of disturbing the peace came in. No details were provided.
At 10:26 p.m, a vandalism report to the police turned out to be benign — police found that soon-to-graduate seniors had decorated the school with toilet paper.
Ridgecrest is “a unique, isolated community” near a military base. The school district considers its relationship with the police as a successful partnership, Auld said.
District officials “have some, or even total, discretion regarding whether or not an arrest is made,” he added. The district has 15 counselors, mental health therapists and a registered behavioral therapist, Auld said. It’s also implementing restorative practices and social-emotional learning to “change behaviors before they result in suspensions, expulsions and arrests.”
The Kings of calls
The most total call and dispatch records in the data for one school that relies on calling 911 was Lemoore High School, in Lemoore, a city of 26,600 in Kings County with 471 calls over a nearly six-month period.
Lemoore police, which refers to school police as youth development officers, provided scant detail on the reasons for the calls, listing hundreds in records as premises checks.
In an interview, Lt. Alvaro Santos, who supervises Lemoore’s school policing, attributed the numbers to the department’s practice of having all available officers “drop what they’re doing” during the times students arrive at school and leave for lunch and later go home, basically surrounding the buildings, some on side streets out of view of students.
“They’re around the school. They could be either parked on a side street or they could be driving by looking for vehicle code violations or anything that would pose a danger to the students,” Santos said. He said the schools are near a main road through the city and that there are concerns about drunk drivers in the area.
More serious calls
Sampled data shows that middle schools have a higher rate of serious incidents reported to police than high schools. At Cesar Chavez Middle School, in East Palo Alto, 41% of calls to police reported violent incidents, threats and sexual misconduct, data shows.
In one of two calls that East Palo Alto police labeled “perversion report,” a student allegedly used a phone to make “a TikTok” of another girl using the restroom, according to a recording of a heavily redacted 911 call to police from a school official. Police refused to release any details.
Fresno’s Gaston Middle School is in a neighborhood plagued by violence, gangs and drugs, all of which follow students through the school doors, both police and Fresno Unified Superintendent Bob Nelson said.
A patrol car for a Fresno Unified student resource officer sits outside of Gaston Middle School and its health clinic. Credit: Lasherica Thornton / EdSource
“I would love for there to be no acts of any physical harm on another person, but that’s impossible,” Sgt. Anthony Alvarado said.
Fresno Unified has been debating what level of policing to have in its schools for several years. In 2020 police were pulled from the district’s middle schools but remained in high schools. After several violent incidents, police were returned to some middle schools in 2022 and the rest in 2023.
School “feels like a prison”
The daily presence of Kern High School District police at Mira Monte High in Bakersfield “feels ghetto,” sophomore Jose Delgado said.
The school “feels like a prison. It’s like they don’t trust us at all.”
Still, Delgado said, he understands the need for police, noting a lot of fights at the school. “It’s for the best, but it makes us feel ghetto.”
Data shows 163 police call records at Delgado’s school for the five-and-a-half month period. They describe incidents including assault with a deadly weapon, an irate parent, out-of-control juveniles and resisting a police officer.
Delgado’s sense of school as a prison and not being trusted are among the reasons why the negatives of school policing “completely outweigh the positives,” Nanda, the Southwestern Law School professor said.
The students who police typically interact with “are not the children that are doing well in school,” Nanda said. “Part of why there isn’t an outrage, a global outrage, is because it’s not impacting the people that are in power, the people who have agency.”
Children seeing police in schools can be akin to going to an airport and encountering armed officers at a security checkpoint, said University of Florida education professor Chris Curran, who has studied school policing extensively. “It’s natural to wonder what’s wrong, why are there people with guns?” he said. “You find yourself saying, ‘What do I not know about? What’s this danger that has necessitated assault rifles?’”
No state guidance
When he was a state Assembly member in 2020, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Assemblymember Mia Bonta’s spouse, clearly came down on the side of removing police from schools when he spoke at a forum after Floyd’s murder.
“It’s just really important to call out this incredible moment,” he said, lauding districts, including Oakland, that ended policing. “There’s a general dehumanization of children of color, a belief that they need to be surveilled and monitored and watched and policed.”
“The outcomes don’t make our students safer,” he said. School policing is “not achieving what we’re seeking,” a video of the forum shows. It was hosted by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.Credit: Andrew Reed/EdSource
Asked recently if Bonta’s position on school policing as the state’s top law enforcement officer mirrors what he said in 2020, his press secretary replied “no” via email.
Bonta, who’s expected to enter the 2026 governor’s race, “has always believed that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for school safety, and that schools need to work towards data-driven policies that fit their community,” Alexandra Duquet wrote.
“School resource officers can be an important component of ensuring students and school personnel safety,” Duquet wrote. “Their primary focus should be ensuring the safety of all on campus — not discipline — and they be given tools such as implicit bias training that ensure the equitable treatment of all students.”
Thurmond, a declared 2026 gubernatorial candidate, took no position on school policing during the forum. He recently told EdSource he favors “well-trained school resource officers to handle serious situations.” He also called for “more training of school staff so they’re not calling police for something that’s a student discipline matter.”
Thurmond also said that during his time as a member of the West Contra Costa Unified School District board from 2008-2012 he saw police officers help students, calling them “some of the best social workers I’ve worked with.”
State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who during Thurmond’s forum praised Oakland’s shuttering of its school police department, said in an interview that school districts should consider alternatives to police the way some cities have started using trained civilians to respond to 911 mental-health-crisis calls.
State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley.Credit: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
“Kids are emotional. Kids don’t have impulse control the way adults should, and to bring an officer in, especially since all of our officers are armed, can, rather than defuse the situation, make it worse,” Skinner said. Kids can act out what they experience at home or on the street, she added.
Skinner, the author of several major police accountability bills, also said she saw value in the data EdSource obtained and published.
Police logs can help officials decide if civilian staff should deal with more school incidents at a time when California’s suffering a police shortage, she said. That could leave sworn officers available for “real public safety needs. We never want to prevent a school from calling 911 if that’s needed. However, there might be some appropriate guidelines or boundaries that cities and schools could work out.”
Stopping a police chase
The executive director of the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers, Mo Canady, a retired cop, said districts would be mistaken to remove resource officers from campuses. Police will always be needed to respond to schools, and “we need for students and faculty to be able to feel like this officer is more than just a law enforcement officer, that they really are another trusted adult in that school environment.” A trained and well-known officer, “may be the person who comes into a situation with the coolest head,” he said.
Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California School Counselors Association, has seen what can happen when police approach a student situation lacking the cool-headedness Canady described.
As a school counselor in the Monrovia Unified School District in Los Angeles County, she once worked with a child who ran away from school multiple times. Finally, an exasperated principal called the police, who chased after the student.
“The principal didn’t stop them. I felt as (officers) went on in their rant this kid is getting more damaged. So, I said, ‘Stop, stop,”’ Whitson said. “We already had a very damaged kid, and this wasn’t helping.” The student was later found to need special education services, she said.
Tom Nolan, a retired Boston police lieutenant turned sociologist who’s taught at several universities and studied school policing, said when law enforcement officers are called into a school situation, “they become the shot callers,” deciding what to do whether it is in the child’s best interest or not. Too often, principals are calling them for minor problems like lost keys and disciplinary matters, he said.
“The research is unequivocal in demonstrating that the police coming into schools, or police being assigned to schools, is almost always a bad idea. It has bad outcomes for children. It has bad outcomes for school safety.”
Nolan said police are not school counselors and shouldn’t play that role. “That’s something that’s a very specific skill set that is attained through years of graduate level study by mental health practitioners and clinicians.”
The California Police Chiefs Association declined to make anyone from its leadership available for an interview. In an email, its executive director described school policing as a matter best discussed at local levels.
Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, a powerful federation of police unions, wasn’t available for an interview, a spokesperson said. In a statement, Marvel, a San Diego police officer, said cops assigned to schools “play an important role in” schools. They act as “educators, emergency/crisis managers, first responders, informal counselors, mentors, and model the kind of behavior that builds trust and respect between law enforcement and the communities they serve.”
Data shows that sometimes, regardless of who might be available to counsel or advise a student, one may just do something dumb, like putting a death threat in writing.
On June 15, 2023, James Morris, the county administrator who also acts as Inglewood Unified superintendent, received a death threat via email, police call records show. Morris, a veteran administrator, was brought on to lift Inglewood out of years of state receivership because of fiscal woes.
“I can just say, generally, it was a student,” Morris said when asked about the threat. Police took a report, but Morris said he didn’t want charges filed.
“I’ve been doing this for 44 years. It takes a lot to rattle me,” he said. “It was a young person who just needed help.”
During a recent work trip to another state, I ran into an acquaintance I’d met a few times at education conferences. After our initial chit-chat about jet lag, they brought up a sentiment I’ve increasingly heard lately: Surely I must be glad to do education work in California, where equity isn’t a bad word; where diversity is championed, and state leaders are quick to defend the programs, practices and policies that support students of color.
It’s becoming harder to fix my face when I hear these words. Rhetoric is one thing, actions and data are another. And in a state where the current trajectory won’t have all Black students at grade level in math until at least 2089, I worry that our focus on saying the right words is taking the place of doing the right thing.
Before I get written off as too angry, let me be clear that there are absolutely things to celebrate in California’s approach to education. But here is where the conundrum lies for me. Why is it that California pursues so many positive steps forward in education, but continually sidesteps significant action that would lead to tangible results for Black students?
EdTrust—West’s report “Black Minds Matter 2025: Building Bright Black Futures,” comes a decade after we originally issued a call to action for California leaders by launching the Black Minds Matter campaign in 2015. We found a big disconnect between the dreams and aspirations of Black students and the opportunities our education systems give them to succeed. Black students are more likely to attend schools with novice teachers. Black students have the lowest high school graduation rate in California. Fewer Black students are going to college after high school than 10 years ago, and Black students are still underrepresented at California State University and the University of California. On nearly every indicator we analyzed, the education systems charged with caring for our students fail to support Black students. Wouldn’t you be angry if these were your kids or family members?
Our reports, policy work, and that of other researchers and advocacy organizations show how many efforts proclaimed as supportive to Black students are performative and piecemeal, or watered down or abandoned altogether, like the changes made to the Black Student Achievement Program in Los Angeles and the quashing of 2023’s Assembly Bill 2774.
This work, and some of our previous statements about the pace of progress in the state, have pissed people off. It confounds me that some folks in power are more upset about the ways we describe the data on how schools and colleges are doing for Black students than they are about how schools and colleges are doing for Black students. We have to remember that there are real people behind these data points.
Some folks told us not to share this data and advocate strongly for Black students right now. The political climate is too tenuous to speak up for Black students, they said. We need to fly under the radar rather than speak loudly and boldly, they said. It is not lost on me that the individuals suggesting this quieter path are well-intentioned. However, as professor Shaun Harper points out, now is precisely the time for organizations and educational institutions “to showcase DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) activities to confirm that they are not the racist, divisive, discriminatory and anti-American activities that obstructionists erroneously claim”.
California may be in the crosshairs, but we are also at a crossroads.
The dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education is being framed as returning education to the states. So, let’s take them up on that in ways that not only reaffirm our values verbally, but also through new, bolder actions.
Many of our recommendations are not new, except one: We need a California Commission on Black Education Transformation. Our current education infrastructure is failing far too many Black students. As we outline in our report and will continue to share in upcoming materials, we are not proposing that this commission act as another task force, but rather that it serves as an entity with power and authority around resources and accountability measures. We need an overhaul, and now —when states are being told they are empowered to lead on education — is the time to do it.
What I reminded the colleague I saw at the recent conference is this: The fight for racial justice has always been an uphill battle, even in California. Yet what we have in California — or at least what I am hoping we have — are leaders who will not only not back down, but will embrace the call to be bold.
I’ve advised college students and been an adjunct professor. I would never tell a student to temper their expectations for themselves. I would never say to a student not to fight for what is right because it is hard. I hope California doesn’t, either.
•••
Christopher J. Nellum, Ph.D., is executive director of EdTrust—West, a nonprofit organization advancing policies and practices to dismantle the racial and economic barriers embedded in the California education system.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. We welcome guest commentaries with diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Joyce Vance was US Attorney for Northern Alabama and a steady voice of reason. She wonders in this post what it will take to awaken Republicans to Trump’s erosion of the Constitution and our rights.
She writes:
Why doesn’t any of this break through? Why do Republicans still support Trump?
The reporting in The Atlantic on the Signal chain? The voter suppression executive order Trump issued…? The foul-ups in deporting supposed gang members who turn out not to be? Why aren’t Americans out on the streets protesting in massive numbers like we have seen people in other countries doing—Israel, Georgia, Turkey, South Korea, and others? In part, it’s because a large number of people who are Trump supporters just don’t care. Their guy can do anything, and they don’t care. They’ll believe any lie, and they’ll ignore any horrible; they’re all in for Trump for reasons the rest of us still struggle to understand.
The question is, how many of the rest of us are there? By that I mean Americans who, regardless of party affiliation, still care about truth and democracy. Those words are no longer just philosophical notions to be bandied about, an elite construct. They are the reality of what we are fighting a rearguard action to try and save.
Statistics from the last election provide reason for some optimism. Donald Trump won with 49.9% of the popular vote. Although he has claimed he has a mandate for a radical transformation of government, the numbers just don’t back that up. And they don’t suggest there’s a mandate for putting out military information on a Signal chain being used on personal phones, rather than on secured government systems. If there ever truly was a mandate for Trump, the reality is, it’s evaporating day by day as egg prices stay high and people lose their jobs. And now, there’s this, a cavalier disregard for the safety of our troops, lax security with one member of the Signal group apparently in Russia while communications were ongoing, what looks like an effort to do an end run around government records retention procedures.
Will the Atlantic story break through? It should. Trump’s Vice President, his Secretary of Defense, his CIA director, his DNI, all put American pilots in harm’s way. If that’s not enough for Senate Republicans to break ranks with Trump, especially those on subcommittees that have oversight into military and intelligence community operations, it’s hard to imagine what would be.
Why use Signal in the first place when American leaders have some of the most secure communications technology in the world available to them? Is it just for convenience? If so, that’s sloppy, and they should be committing to do better, not arguing over whether the information was classified or not. (But if it looks like a duck…)
The truth is that by going to Signal, they avoided leaving a paper trail. No annoying records that could be unearthed down the road. Remember Trump’s first impeachment? It came about in large part because after the call where he threatened Ukraine’s president with withholding security aid if he wouldn’t announce his country was investigating Joe Biden for financial misconduct, records of the call were buried inside a classified information system where they didn’t belong. That was what got the ball rolling. It was about trying to hide records of an official call that everyone knew was wrong.
As far as we know at this point, there was nothing improper about the attack on the Houthis. So why were high-ranking members of the Trump administration communicating off the books? How pervasive is the practice, and who knows/authorizes it? We are a government of the people. Transparency isn’t optional. There are rules about public records that have to be followed, and this president who likes to operate in secret and at the margins of our laws has frequently tried to skirt them.
It’s hard to imagine that the Signal chain for the Houthi attack was just a one-off, that they only went to Signal for this moment. Is this how this new government is operating routinely—off the books, in a hidden fashion designed to avoid scrutiny and accountability?
It may seem like a minor point with everything else that’s going on, but this is how autocrats work, not how a democracy operates. That’s the danger we are now facing, and this is another marker on the path to tyranny.
Calls are mounting for Hegseth and others to resign. Anyone who would engage in this kind of behavior and then argue that it was not improper rather than apologizing and promising to do better should leave government, whether voluntarily or not. But they should never have been confirmed in the first place. There is a cancer on the heart of the presidency, to quote from the Watergate era, and it’s infecting all of us.
