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  • Long-term English learners do worse on tests than peers with fewer years in U.S. schools, data shows

    Long-term English learners do worse on tests than peers with fewer years in U.S. schools, data shows


    Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

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    Long-term English learners who have been enrolled in U.S. schools for more than six years without becoming proficient in the language do worse on California’s math and English language arts tests than English learners who have been enrolled for fewer than six years.

    California released data for the first time on long-term English learners’ achievement in standardized tests in math, English language arts and science for the 2022-23 school year, after a bill signed in 2022 required it. Long-term English learners are students who have been enrolled in U.S. schools for six years or more but have not advanced on the English proficiency test in two or more years. The state also released data for those “at risk of becoming long-term English learners,” defined as students who have been enrolled for four or five years and scored at intermediate level or below on the English proficiency test.

    In the past, California had separated achievement data for English learners by those who had been enrolled for less than or more than a year, but not for long-term English learners or those at risk of becoming long-term English learners.

    As a whole, students classified as English learners tend to do poorly on academic tests precisely because they are still learning English, and once they are reclassified, they tend to do much better. 

    Yet the data shows that long-term English learners do worse than their counterparts who have been enrolled in U.S. schools for fewer years.

    Only 5.4% of long-term English learners met or exceeded English language arts standards in 2022-23, compared with 10.9% of English learners as a whole. In math, only 2.1% of long-term English learners met or exceeded the standards, versus 9.9% of English learners as a whole.

    “There’s something really tragic that happens when students are not getting what they need every year, and they’re not feeling successful, and it really shapes their identity as a student,” said Nicole Knight, executive director of English language learner and multilingual achievement at Oakland Unified School District. 

    Knight said Oakland Unified has been separating the district’s own achievement data by the number of years English learners have been in school and found similar results. “The longer they’re in the system as long-term English learners, at least from a statistical standpoint, they tend to do worse and worse,” she said.

    Conor P. Williams, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, said the data is not surprising and is likely due to several factors. 

    In part, these scores may have to do with the way the state defines English learners. Students who do not do well on academic tests continue to be classified as English learners because California requires students to do as well as their English-speaking peers on English language arts tests, in addition to passing the English Language Proficiency Assessment, in order to be reclassified as fluent. 

    “The fact that long-term English learners do particularly worse on a lot of academic metrics likely reflects the fact that there is an academic indicator in California’s reclassification criteria. That is not standard in all states,” said Williams. In many states, he said, students only have to pass an English language proficiency test in order to be reclassified as fluent.

    Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, strategic adviser of Californians Together, said it’s important to note that most English learners do reclassify within six years. She said long-term English learners may not have received strong English language development support in their early years and probably no instruction in their home languages. She added that some English learners with fewer years of enrollment in U.S. schools may have arrived in the country already knowing how to read in their home languages.

    A study by Californians Together showed that more than a third of long-term English learners also have disabilities that qualify them for special education services.

    “Sometimes that is an excuse for folks, but those students can also reclassify, (though) it may take them a little more time,” said Knight. She said English learners with disabilities are less likely to receive quality instruction in English language development and quality special education services. “That’s a big issue that districts and schools need a lot more support and guidance with than what we currently have.”

    Knight added that being classified as English learners for many years can hurt students’ self-esteem and cause them to become disengaged with school and stop turning in assignments or attending class.

    The data is a call to action for districts, said Spiegel-Coleman. She said beginning next year, districts will have to include plans for long-term English learners in their local control accountability plans, or LCAPs. These are plans that every district and charter school must write every year, explaining how they will use state funds to improve educational outcomes for certain groups of students.

    “When they’re writing their LCAPs, they need to look at those kids and say what is it we need to do for them?,” Spiegel-Coleman said. “Now that will happen. It will heighten their visibility, for sure.”

    Knight said districts also need to offer more training and support for middle and high school teachers to incorporate explicit instruction in the English language, no matter what subject they teach. For example, she said Oakland Unified has worked to train middle school math teachers on how to teach students the language they need to understand in order to figure out a math problem.

    She said districts can also help long-term English learners become more engaged in school, for example with internships or career education where they can use their skills in their home language.

    The data also shows districts need to do more to help students learn enough English to reclassify as fluent in their first six years of school, before they become long-term English learners, both Spiegel-Coleman and Knight said.

    “The number of long-term English learners in our system is really an indictment on our system as a whole, in Oakland and outside of Oakland,” Knight said.

    She said some schools in Oakland reclassify almost 30% of their English learner students every year, while other schools reclassify almost none of them. 

    “That tells us that it’s really about the experiences they’re getting,” Knight said. “So how do we make sure more and more of our classrooms and schools are doing what these schools that have high reclassification rates are doing?”





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  • Legislators struggle with how to rein in but not repress ethnic studies

    Legislators struggle with how to rein in but not repress ethnic studies


    Assemblymember Rick Zbur responds to senators’ questions during a July 3 hearing on Assembly Bill 2918.

    Credit: Senate Education Committee

    Legislation authored by members of the Jewish Legislation Caucus to prevent antisemitism and prejudice from seeping into ethnic studies courses passed its first legislative hurdle on Wednesday.

    However, Assembly Bill 2918 faces a hot summer of intense negotiations to persuade legislators who agree with its intent but question whether the bill’s restrictions and lack of clarity could lead to avoidable conflicts. 

    Assembly Members Rick Zbur, D-Los Angeles, and Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, the bill’s chief authors, told the Senate Education Committee they and key education groups are willing to put in the time to fix it.

    “While we actually have issues now that are affecting the climate in schools for Jewish students, this affects all communities that are subject to bias and discrimination,” said Zbur. “We have to get this right for everyone, no matter what your background is.”

    But what supporters see as transparency, opponents see as interference. 

    The bill’s requirements “will expose districts to increased harassment and litigation. The lack of clarity in defining what curriculum and instruction materials are will leave our teachers vulnerable to unwarranted scrutiny,” said Teresa Montaño, a former Los Angeles Unified teacher who now teaches Chicano studies at CSU Northridge. 

    The bill would strengthen disclosure requirements for approving ethnic studies courses and materials. The 2021 law establishing an ethnic studies mandate — that all high schools offer a course in 2025-26 and make it a graduation requirement in 2030-31 — requires districts to hold two hearings before adopting an ethnic studies course. The law also includes a broad warning that the instruction must be free of “any bias, bigotry, or discrimination.”

    But those provisions have proven ineffective, Zbur and others said. Parents have complained they had no idea what their children were being taught; school board members said they were unaware of what was in a course they approved, sometimes on a consent calendar with no discussion.

    The bill, which has the support of State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Thurmond, would require:

    • A committee, including classroom teachers, as a majority, and parents, would formally review instructional materials and a locally developed ethnic studies course.
    • The governing board of a district or charter school would determine that the course doesn’t promote any bias, bigotry, or discrimination and explain why they declined to adopt a course based on the ethnic studies model curriculum that the State Board of Educationadopted in 2018;
    • Parents would be sent a written notice before a course is presented for approval.

    At the suggestion of staff, Zbur and Addis agreed not to apply the bill to already approved courses and not to require school board members to certify with the State Department of Education that the course is factually and historically accurate.

    Tensions over the content of ethnic studies courses have simmered since a protracted process by the State Board from 2018 to 2021 to adopt a voluntary ethnic studies course framework. Gov. Gavin Newsom, State Board President Linda Darling-Hammond, and Thurmond criticized the first draft of the framework, written primarily by ethnic studies experts and faculty members, as ideological and biased. 

    After the state board adopted a substantially changed framework in 2021, the first draft’s authors disavowed the final version and formed the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies. Its member organizations have contracted with districts to buy their versions of ethnic studies, which stress the challenges of white supremacy and an oppressive capitalist system, and solidarity with Palestine’s battle for liberation. 

    As Montaño said during a webinar on ethnic studies last year, “I have no choice but to challenge settler colonialism everywhere and to acknowledge that from the very beginning, our disciplines of ethnic studies were aligned to the global struggles in Africa, Palestine and Latin America.”

    In the past year, without mentioning the Liberated Ethnic Studies coalition by name, both Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Newsom administration have reminded school districts to adhere to the law’s prohibition of discrimination.

    “Vendors have begun promoting curriculum for (districts) to use for ethnic studies courses. We have been advised, however, that some vendors are offering materials that may not meet the requirements of AB 101, particularly the requirement (against bias and bigotry), an important guardrail highlighted when the bill was signed,” Brooks Allen, a Newsom adviser and executive director of the state board, wrote in August 2023.

    Conflicts have flared up in the past year. Jewish parents in Palo Alto have complained they’ve been left in the dark about the development of an ethnic studies curriculum that will be piloted this fall. Opponents are protesting the board of Pajaro Valley Unified’s second thoughts about renewing a contract with a liberated ethnic studies contractor.

    Tension has further escalated in reaction to the massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas in October and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Gaza by Israel, causing tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths. The Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education is investigating charges that Berkeley Unified failed to respond properly to rising incidents of antisemitism in its schools. 

    Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, said his concerns about bias when the ethnic studies law was adopted have come true. “Now we see in practice, particularly for those of us in the Jewish community, how, in my view, bad actors have hijacked the process to promote a curriculum that does the opposite of what the goals that we had established,” he said during the discussion on the bill.

    However, more than a dozen ethnic studies teachers and parents, including several Jewish parents opposed to the Israeli military’s invasion of Gaza, disagreed, saying at that hearing that they opposed the bill.

    Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, said he was troubled by ambiguities in the bill and the possibility that the strength of ethnic studies could be weakened. “Everything in my core being is telling me that as it’s currently put together, (the bill) is actually going to have the unintended consequence of exacerbating the intensity of disputes at the local level,” he said.

    Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, the committee chair, said he shared Cortese’s concern that ethnic studies could “get unproductively caught up in controversies over whose version of history should be taught in our schools.” 

    “It’s fair to worry about the consequences, absent clarity in the bill, of organizations and individuals without teaching experience involved in developing high school courses,” he said.

    “I think it’s important that the bill move forward. It’s an important discussion,” he added. Encouraging Zbur and Addis to work through unresolved issues with the Latino Caucus and others, he joined the majority in passing the bill, with Cortese dissenting.

      





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  • Proactive campus policies, communication with students critical under ‘antagonistic’ federal actions, panel says

    Proactive campus policies, communication with students critical under ‘antagonistic’ federal actions, panel says


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUqMDwwZbO8

    How might federal funding to colleges change under the current federal administration? What to tell students who are worried their financial aid packages might be impacted by proposed changes to federal education funding? Is it possible to find common ground with President Donald Trump?

    A panel of education experts on Tuesday provided few definitive answers to those questions, leaving several unanswered, reflecting the uncertainty facing many in education today as they examine how the Trump administration’s approach to higher education may impact them.

    The panelists on an EdSource roundtable, “The future of California higher education under Trump,” described a barrage of executive actions — banning diversity efforts, withdrawing already budgeted funds, blacklisting colleges, canceling visas of international students and threatening college leaders — actions that Dominique J. Baker, associate professor at the University of Delaware, described as “antagonistic.”

    Baker stated that while many of the funding threats and proposed changes to education come from the executive branch of government, it’s important to consider the role of “the entirety of our federal apparatus” when discussing the future of higher education in this country, including Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Panelists agreed that proposed changes to student loan repayment options and to the federal Pell Grants, which are awarded to students with exceptional financial need, would be detrimental to many students.

    “If all of these policies went into place the way that they are currently written out, we would expect to see a stark drop in low-income students enrolling in higher education, whether that’s for the first time or students who had previously enrolled leaving higher education before they can earn any sort of credential or degree,” said Baker, in a blunt assessment of what could occur if the proposed changes to those programs are approved.

    Panelist Cristian Ulisses Reyes, a master’s candidate in higher education counseling and student affairs at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who received the Pell Grant, said that threats to such funding are instilling fear in his peers.

    “Students aren’t just numbers and policy debates,” Reyes said. “We’re the ones that are being directly impacted.”

    Potential scenarios in case of cuts

    Gregory A. Smith, chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, said that of around $64 million in annual federal funds, about $43 million goes toward financial aid for students, much in the form of Pell Grants.

    The rest of the funds go to programming — about $3.5 million in yearly Title III grants from the federal Department of Education are geared toward the enrollment and retention of Hispanic students in STEM fields; the community college district is a Hispanic-serving institution.

    If threats to funding continue, Smith said the San Diego Community College District needs to be prepared for these scenarios:

    • The funding could be withheld altogether.
    • The funding may remain intact, but the staff who process the payments may have been laid off during recent staff terminations at the federal Department of Education, which could lead to funding delays.
    • “The most catastrophic version” of events, he said, would be if Congress amended Title III of the Higher Education Act, which would eliminate the Hispanic-serving institution’s STEM program.

    And if any of these scenarios were to occur, “[the program] may need to look different, it may need to be funded differently, but we’re certainly committed to continuing the work in any of those three scenarios,” Smith said.

    “Especially for a lot of the populations that we’ve listed — like low-income students, first-generation students — the administration’s attacks on student protections feel personal for many of us,” said Reyes, the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo master’s student.

    Reyes urged colleges and universities to be more transparent with their students about discussions and involve them in decisions being made. “Institutions shouldn’t be making decisions about us, without us,” he said.

    Relying on long-standing California policies

    California has decades of practice in implementing anti-affirmative action policies after approving Proposition 209 in 1996, the panelists noted, as a reminder that the state is protected from some of the changes being made at the federal level.

    “Legally, we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out what that looks like to not consider race in hiring, race in admissions, while still being equity-minded,” said Gina Ann Garcia, professor in the School of Education at UC Berkeley.

    Affinity graduation ceremonies, for example, have been criticized by the federal administration as part of its attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

    Garcia, however, not only recently attended a cultural graduation, but said she feels supported by her university to say such graduations will not be canceled.

    “We’re talking about a state that’s been anti-affirmative action for 30 years, so we’ve had 30 years to get in compliance,” she said. “We’re not really the state you want to come for, if they’re smart.”

    Smith, from San Diego community colleges, echoed Garcia’s sentiments about feeling no fear when the federal Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter in February, threatening cuts in federal funding if schools did not eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

    The letter has not changed their DEI programming, Smith said, but it has led to fear in their school community, and they are afraid about the security of these programs.

    Smith also shared strategies his district has implemented to keep their students and staff informed, including:

    • Discussions on what DEI activities are offered and why.
    • Communicating that campus policies on civility, academic freedom, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech remain intact.
    • Proactive action by their board in adopting resolutions related to institutional protection from certain government threats.

    “It is really important in this moment that we say these are lines around which there is no negotiation, they are fundamental to higher education in America, they’re at the core of a free democratic society, and so there is no negotiation,” Smith said, echoing what Baker and others noted during their discussion. “We can’t give up any margin on it whatsoever at all without crumbling the entire foundation of our institutions.”

    While the panelists agreed on this point, they also warned of a future in which the state’s present-day policies on education may change. Upcoming state elections, they said, will determine the direction California heads in regardless of who is in power at the federal level.

    “We could swing in a few years … there are many red districts in California,” said Garcia. “It changes what happens as far as funding and commitments to education when we change political leanings.”





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  • Cal Maritime pleads for merger with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to save the academy

    Cal Maritime pleads for merger with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to save the academy


    Cal Maritime is the smallest campus in the California State University system.

    Credit: Cal Maritime / Flickr

    This story has been updated to include reporting from the Board of Trustees meeting on Tuesday.

    A steep drop in enrollment has put Cal Maritime, the smallest of the California State University’s 23 campuses, on a path to merge with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

    Under the plan, which went before the Cal State board of trustees Tuesday, Cal Maritime’s 761 students would blend into San Luis Obispo’s 22,000-person student body with the goal of saving on overhead and ultimately attracting more students to the maritime academy.

    Recruiting out-of-state students and competing for federal dollars are two pieces of the turnaround plan, according to newly released details about the proposal.

    But faculty at both institutions said they have received little guidance about how the plan would impact their day-to-day jobs. And CSU officials’ proposal to the board does not address what one investigation into sexual harassment at Cal Maritime called a “history of pervasive male toxicity.”

    The CSU board of trustees opened discussions on the proposal on Tuesday and plan to raise the subject again in September. A vote on the proposed integration is set for November. If approved, CSU officials estimate bringing the two institutions together will cost $35 million over seven years. The plan would go into effect in July 2025 and affect students in the fall of 2026.

    Cal Maritime Interim President Michael J. Dumont appealed to the Board of Trustees to support the proposal on Tuesday, saying the campus has already made deep budget cuts that include leaving positions unfilled. Without dramatic improvement in the campus’ enrollment and revenue, Dumont said he does not “see the maritime academy continuing.”

    “Quite frankly, we’ve taken a chainsaw to every expense on our campus,” he said. “We are working drastically to save money everywhere we can. I don’t know how much longer that can continue … I have cut muscle, bone, and I’m now down to tendon and arteries.”

    In response to questions seeking more information about admissions, degree conferral and recruitment strategy under the proposal, CSU spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said it would “be speculative and premature to respond to questions about details yet to be determined.” Bentley-Smith said privacy concerns limit what the university can say regarding incidents and reports related to Title IX, the federal sex discrimination law. She said Cal Maritime responds “appropriately with measures aimed at holding individuals accountable for their actions and providing equity to affected members of the community. The university has placed a great deal of focus, energy and commitment on creating a stronger culture of safety and inclusion on campus and on cruise.”

    Cal Maritime, which has a campus in Vallejo and operates a training ship, serves a strategically important niche in higher education. Six state maritime academies together educate most of the nation’s merchant marine officers, the civilian workforce that operates commercial shipping vessels and supplies U.S. military ships and bases. Almost 80% of Cal Maritime students are men, according to fall 2022 enrollment data.

    Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, located 250 miles south, is known for its architecture, agriculture and engineering programs. The campus has increased enrollment by 13% over the past decade and receives more qualified applicants than it can accommodate.

    Merging the campuses would bolster both institutions’ academic strengths in areas like engineering, oceanography, logistics and marine science while allowing degree programs that lead to a merchant marine license from the U.S. Coast Guard to continue, according to the CSU proposal. Cal Maritime would also enjoy access to Cal Poly’s marketing and fundraising resources — a leg up to recruit prospective students and right the school’s finances.

    If the marriage of the two schools goes forward, the maritime academy would be led by a superintendent who is also part of Cal Poly leadership, according to documents describing the proposal. Maritime academy faculty and staff, similarly, would become Cal Poly employees. 

    Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo campus.
    Credit: Ashley Bolter / EdSource

    Righting the ship

    Cal Maritime’s finances are so dire that last spring the university projected that it would have only $317,000 in operating reserves at the end of June 2024 — less than it would need to run the university for three days, according to the merger proposal.

    Declining enrollment is a major culprit. Student headcount fell 31% between the 2016-17 and 2023-24 school years. Even if Cal Maritime meets future enrollment targets, Cal State officials write, a growing budget deficit “is inevitable.”

    The campus has already slashed spending to save money, CSU officials say, but further cuts would threaten the university’s ability to carry out its educational mission. As it is, CSU officials acknowledge that falling enrollment and budget woes may have had “an impact on the quality of essential student support services such as housing, dining, health and counseling.”

    The hope is that maritime academy students will benefit from plugging into Cal Poly’s student services.

    Other changes would be subtle. The maritime academy would keep its Vallejo campus during the integration, though additional majors with maritime industry ties could be located there in the future. 

    Kyle Carpenter, who graduated from Cal Maritime in 2014, said he hopes the proposal can save Cal Maritime. But depending on whether and how majors are folded into Cal Poly, he said, he worries that students who are now required to understand the maritime application of their education could lose that important focus. 

    “We need to maintain a strong maritime presence, so any bit of maritime education is a great thing,” Carpenter said.

    The proposal flags possible benefits for Cal Poly students, too. First among them: Cal Poly students would get access to Cal Maritime laboratory space and, crucially, a $360 million training vessel the campus is set to receive in 2026. 

    The chance to take advantage of the Vallejo campus is welcome news to Yiming Luo, a sophomore city and regional planning major at Cal Poly. He said he hopes the proposal would expand course offerings and give Cal Poly students from the Bay Area like him the “possibility of taking classes at Maritime over the summer for credit.”

    Faculty react

    Faculty at both campuses said they have lots of questions about how the proposal could impact them. 

    Steven Runyon, an associate professor of chemistry at Cal Maritime and vice president of the campus California Faculty Association chapter, said the proposed integration “came out of nowhere” and has garnered mixed reactions. 

    “Many faculty are very optimistic,” he said. “If we’re going to be integrated with any other university, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is probably top of our list in terms of who we would like to be associated with.”

    But Runyon said a lack of clear communication from the university’s leaders makes him worry about how the proposal would impact colleagues, especially those who do not work in a tenure track position, such as lecturers and librarians.

    Faculty learned of the merger plan when it was announced on June 5. They can comment “both individually and through their represented body” before the board acts, a Cal Maritime spokesperson said.

    Jennifer Mott, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Cal Poly, said she has heard little about the proposed integration. 

    “Will we have to teach more students? Will they be teaching more students?” she said. “Will it not affect anything? We just don’t know any information.”

    Mott also questions whether her department would remain independent or merge with Cal Maritime’s mechanical engineering department — a process that would impact her department’s gender makeup. 

    “We made a huge push in mechanical engineering to hire more women faculty,” she said. “I looked at the faculty (at Cal Maritime) and it’s only men, and so I don’t know how that would affect us going forward.”

    Cal Maritime is one of six state maritime academies in the country.
    Credit: Cal Maritime / Flickr

    A reckoning with sexual misconduct

    Reports of sexual misconduct in both the maritime industry and the California State University system have put pressure on Cal Maritime to do more to address sexual misconduct on its campus.

    In 2021, an outside investigator commissioned by Cal Maritime reported “several instances of inappropriate, discriminatory, vulgar or offensive writings or other imagery, especially toward female cadets” as well as “concerns over anti-LGBTQIA+ behavior and language used frequently aboard cruises and on campus.”

    A Los Angeles Times investigation echoed those issues and found that Cal Maritime failed to follow consistent procedures to address reports of sexual misconduct.   

    The resignation of Joseph I. Castro as CSU chancellor in 2022 over his mishandling of a Title IX sexual harassment case involving an administrator when he was president of Fresno State resulted in a system-wide reckoning. Cal State retained the law firm Cozen O’Connor to assess programs at each of its 23 universities to deal with sexual harassment and assault complaints under the federal Title IX law that prohibits sex-based discrimination. The probe found that the system lacks resources and staffing to adequately respond to and handle sexual harassment or discrimination complaints from students and employees.

    At Cal Maritime, a July 2023 report by the firm found “significant improvements to process, responsiveness, training, and prevention programming” over the previous two years. But Cozen O’Connor reported that those improvements were overshadowed by a lack of a permanent Title IX coordinator, distrust of former university leaders and a culture that discouraged reporting misconduct.

    Cal Maritime now has a six-person Title IX implementation team, including a director of Title IX, to implement Cozen O’Connor’s recommendations. 

    In March 2023, Cal State hired Mike Dumont to serve as the maritime academy’s interim president. A 2024 profile of Dumont in the San Francisco Chronicle names several recent reforms at the campus, including improving training on sexual harassment, hiring a full-time victim advocate and updating uniform, naming and housing policies to meet the needs of nonbinary and transgender students.

    In a statement, Bentley-Smith said the work of improving campus safety and inclusion “continues and will continue, both at Cal Maritime and throughout the CSU. One of the CSU’s highest priorities is ensuring all students and employees across our 23 universities are protected from discrimination and harassment.”

    This month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring CSU to implement the recommendations of a state audit into its handling of sexual misconduct. CSU officials say the system is already in the process of meeting the audit requirements.

    But Mott, the Cal Poly professor, said reports of sexual harassment and assault at Cal Maritime give her pause.

    “I know it’s an issue across a lot of campuses, not to say that we don’t have issues here,” she said. “But if it is a more toxic culture up there (at Cal Maritime), that is definitely a concern that we don’t bring that here, or that the students aren’t forced to go up there if they don’t feel comfortable going to that environment.”

    Funding from fees, feds and more

    The proposal anticipates a combined institution could raise more philanthropic and federal dollars. It is possible Cal Poly’s fee model — increasing one fee and levying a second on out-of-state undergraduates to pay for more financial aid — could be applied to the maritime academy.

    The proposal also argues that Cal Maritime has a great story to tell prospective students and can use San Luis Obispo’s “unquestioned expertise in strategic enrollment management, marketing and brand-building” to tell it.

    One draw is graduates’ future earnings. An analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that a Cal Maritime degree had the highest return on investment of any bachelor’s degree from a public university in California as measured by its net present value.  

    Under the proposal, increased outreach would extend to prospective students in Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. Pacific territories.

    Michael Fossum, the superintendent of the Texas A&M Maritime Academy, said maritime academy graduates are in high demand. But schools like his don’t always have the marketing budget to pitch prospective students on pursuing the career.  

    “It’s a massive industry that people don’t know about,” he said. “We don’t have the reach to help educate people on how important the industry is and what great opportunities there are working in this industry.”

    ‘A nationally known name’

    If the integration proposal wins board approval, Cal Maritime’s future might look a little more like Fossum’s institution, ​​Texas A&M Maritime Academy. 

    The Texas maritime academy is not an independent institution, but is part of Texas A&M at Galveston. In terms of leadership structure, Fossum, the school’s superintendent, is also chief operating officer at Texas A&M University at Galveston and a vice president at Texas A&M University. That structure reduces some overhead on his campus.

    “I don’t have to replicate every single vice president and every single function that’s on the main campus,” Fossum said. 

    The Cal Maritime integration proposal suggests the two campuses could experience similar consolidation in areas such as facilities maintenance, information technology, cybersecurity and administrative services like payroll and accounting. 

    Fossum said he hopes that if Cal Maritime links up with Cal Poly, it will enjoy some of the same reputational benefits his campus experiences from its close association with Texas A&M.

    “Cal Poly has got a nationally known name,” he said. “When you get the power of Cal Poly, just like me having the power of Texas A&M University, that absolutely helps. The association is good.” 

    Ashley Bolter, a recent graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.





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  • Trump proposals for students with disabilities create confusion and fear

    Trump proposals for students with disabilities create confusion and fear


    Students rely on an array of services in special education classes.

    Christopher Futcher/iStock

    Top Takeaways
    • A proposal for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to oversee special education draws criticism.
    • Trump has promised stable levels of funding for special education, but critics worry about his plan to reduce oversight of those funds.
    • Advocates worry that a “brain drain” from the U.S. Department of Education could weaken the quality of education for students with disabilities nationally.

    Javier Arroyo has been impressed with the education his 9-year-old son with a disability receives.

    “This country provides so many resources,” said Arroyo, whose son attends Kern County’s Richland School District.

    Arroyo’s wife has family in Mexico, but he believes his son, who has Down syndrome, is better served here than he’d be in most other countries because of the services he receives: “We don’t have resources like this in Mexico.”

    But because of changes happening at the federal level, he said, it’s hard to tell what education will look like for his son.

    Arroyo has heard that federal cuts are already affecting disabled students and that President Donald Trump has proposed moving oversight of special education from the U.S. Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services. Local school leaders have told him that they also don’t have much clarity about how special education is likely to change.

    “It’s confusing right now, what’s going on federally,” Arroyo said. “Not even experts really know.”

    Arroyo isn’t alone. There are 850,000 students with disabilities in California. These students, their parents and educators in California say they have a lot of questions — and serious concerns — about federal proposals that could transform the way schools deliver education to students with disabilities.

    Saran Tugsjargal, 18, is a high school senior and one of the first students to sit on the state’s Advisory Council for Special Education. She said her own initial response to moving special education outside the U.S. Department of Education was confusion: “I was like, ‘What the flip?’”

    Tugsjargal attends Alameda Community Learning Center, a charter school in the Bay Area, and she often hears from students like her who have disabilities. Many have told her they are confused and fearful about how the proposed federal changes could affect their education.

    “A lot of my peers at my school were very scared. They were terrified,” she said. “They were just like, ‘What’s going to happen to me? What’s going to happen to my parents, who need to fight for those accommodation services? What’s going to happen to a lot of us?’ There’s a lot of fear.”

    Education for students with disabilities has historically received broad support across party lines. The federal government provides approximately 8% of special education funding. That’s a critical amount, though it falls well short of the original 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) promise that the federal government would pay 40% of special education funding.

    Because of that bipartisan support, most experts believe that federal funding for special education isn’t at serious risk right now. However, they say that other changes proposed by this administration could adversely impact students with disabilities. 

    Reg Leichty, the founder of Foresight Law + Policy, an education law firm in Washington, is one of those experts.

    “I said often the last few weeks, ‘Don’t over or underreact,’” Leichty said. “But we have a job to do making sure that the system continues to work for kids.”

    In his budget, Trump proposes keeping federal funding for special education at current levels — $15.5 billion nationally — while consolidating funding streams, which would reduce oversight and give more control to local governance.

    His proposal to dismantle the Department of Education requires moving oversight of special education to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which previously oversaw the education of students with disabilities.

    “IDEA funding for our children with disabilities and special needs was in place before there was a Department of Education, and it managed to work incredibly well,” U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon told a Fox News host.

    In an April 4 letter to the California congressional delegation, California administrators of Special Education Local Plan Areas, or SELPAs, vehemently disagreed, stating that the proposal undermines the rights of students with disabilities and jeopardizes key funding and resources for these students.

    Scott Turner, chair of SELPA Administrators of California, wrote that moving oversight of the education of students with disabilities to a health department “reinforces an outdated and ableist, deficit-based model where disabilities are considered as medical conditions to be managed rather than recognizing that students with disabilities are capable learners, each with unique strengths and educational potential.”

    Including students with disabilities in the general education classroom to the maximum extent possible is the model that the Department of Education has aimed at over the decades.

    Before the passage of the IDEA, students with disabilities were routinely institutionalized or undereducated, if they were offered a public education at all, according to Robyn Linscott, director of education and family policy for The Arc, a national advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

    Moving special education to a health agency “promotes this medical model and continues the othering of students with a disability,” Linscott said.

    Arroyo wants to see his 9-year-old included in more general education classes, such as physical education, and activities like field trips. High staffing ratios make this kind of inclusion possible, ensuring the quality of his son’s education. His son is in a class with nine students, three aides and one teacher. He worries federal cuts could have major consequences for his son and others in his class.

    “I couldn’t imagine if (the teacher) even lost one aide,” Arroyo said.

    The Coalition for Adequate Funding for Special Education has come out in support of a federal bill that would keep the U.S. Department of Education intact and free from any restructuring, according to the organization’s chair, Anthony Rebelo. 

    “We want to make sure that folks understand students with disabilities are still students, that they don’t just get lumped with disabled people,” said Rebelo, who is also the director of the Trinity County Special Education Local Plan Area. 

    Joshua Salas, a special education coordinator at a charter school, Alliance Renee and Meyer Luskin Academy in Los Angeles, worries that the quality of education for students with disabilities will be “put on the back burner” and that there won’t be enough federal oversight to make sure schools are serving students with disabilities. 

    “What I’m worried about are the long-term implications,” said Salas. “I’m wondering about what will get lost in the transition.”

    Education attorney Leichty said it’s hard to know what education for students with disabilities would look like under a new department, but he worries about the “brain drain” of experts from the Department of Education who view education as a civil right.

    “Over time, could it be made to work? Certainly,” Leichty said. “But I think there’s a major loss of institutional knowledge and expertise when you try to pursue a change like this.”

    He said Trump’s executive order to close the Department of Education acknowledges that the Constitution limits the ability of the executive branch to do so without congressional approval.

    The federal Department of Education and other federal offices, including the Department of Health and Human Services, have already experienced wide-scale cuts proposed by the “Department of Government Efficiency.”

    The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) lost half of its staff, including shuttering the San Francisco-based office dedicated to California complaints, which had over 700 pending cases, more than half involving disability rights. A spokesperson for the administration said that it will use mediation and expedited case processing to address disability-related complaints. Those cuts have been challenged in court.

    Advocates are concerned that doubling the caseload for existing staff means there will be a federal backlog of complaints, weakening enforcement.

    Student advocate Tugsjargal has been telling students with disabilities and their parents to call their legislators and attend town hall meetings and public rallies to protest Trump’s proposals.

    “When we talk with each other about our stories, when we speak out, we learn a lot from each other,” she said. “We drive a lot of change.”





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  • LAUSD ordered to hand over records in long-running funding dispute with archdiocese

    LAUSD ordered to hand over records in long-running funding dispute with archdiocese


    Credit: Julie Leopo/EdSource

    Despite Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s promise two years ago to settle the conflict, Los Angeles Unified continues denying millions of dollars in federal aid that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles argues it is owed for ongoing services to low-income students in Catholic schools. The archdiocese maintains that the district is diverting the money to bolster its students’ funding.

    Both the California and the U.S. departments of education have chastised the district for breaking federal regulations in dealings with the archdiocese. Now, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has ordered the district to turn over documents and data that it withheld.

     That information, which should illuminate the district’s decisions, could either restart stalemated talks or lead the archdiocese to turn to the courts to order a settlement after seven years of fighting.

    “We do not believe further litigation is necessary, and we can achieve equity for non-public school students,” said Paul Escala, the archdiocese’s superintendent of schools. “However, we will pursue all means to see that all students receive their legally entitled services.”

    Title I rules for private schools

    Congress requires that low-income students in private and public schools receive equivalent Title I funding to pay for counseling, tutoring, teacher aides, and learning specialists. The dispute with LAUSD concerns how much money should be allocated for the archdiocese’s schools and how to ensure the funding gets to the students.

    Under Congress’s rules, private and religious schools do not receive Title I funding directly. Instead, districts determine the eligibility of private and religious schools within their borders, administer the funding, and provide the services directly or through vendors after consulting with the schools. Los Angeles Unified, until recently, hired the Title I staff and put them on its payroll (see Frequently Asked Questions by the California Department of Education).

    The system worked amicably for years. Districts can choose from several ways to determine Title I eligibility, and LA Unified picked the fairest and most efficient method for the 100-plus schools within the archdiocese with low-income students, Escala said. The district used census data to determine the number of Title I-eligible students in an attendance area, then awarded a proportionate share of the money to archdiocese schools. Long Beach Unified uses the same method.

    More paperwork, more confusion, less money

    Then in 2018-19 and the following year, coinciding with the new administration of Superintendent Austin Beutner, the district chose another option for calculating private schools’ eligibility — student registrations for the federal school lunch program. Not only did this method require a lot more time, paperwork and verification by the schools, but the district changed the reporting rules several times with little notice and failed “to engage in timely and meaningful consultation,” the California Department of Education concluded in a 58-page report issued in June 2021 in response to a formal complaint by the archdiocese.

    Los Angeles Unified’s Office of Inspector General removed hundreds of students’ eligibility after examining parents’ school lunch forms in the two dozen schools it chose to audit and failed to include any students from other schools it didn’t audit.

    The result was to cut Title I funding to the archdiocese by more than 92%, from about $9.5 million in services 2017-18 for 102 schools to $767,000 for fewer than two dozen schools, according to Escala. In 2023-24, funding crept up to about $2 million for 43 schools. The district cut its total share allocated to private schools from between 2% and 2.6% of about $291 million to 0.5%, according to the California Department of Education.

    ‘Totally unreasonable’ demands 

    The state Department of Education harshly criticized the district. The timetable for demanding documentation was “totally unreasonable,” and the district “engaged in a pattern of arbitrary unilateral decisions” and failed to justify its decisions to the archdiocese, the report said.

    In ignoring the archdiocese’s Public Records Act requests for documentation to justify the cuts, the district took a “hide-the-ball approach (that) breached both the spirit and the letter” of the law, the report said.

    The spirit of Title I, as stated in the law’s preamble, Escala said, is to maximize participation. The intent of other options like surveys and free-lunch verification is for schools to prove they have higher proportions of low-income families than neighboring schools, he said.

    LAUSD is doing the opposite, Escala said.

    “The district’s using these other methods as a way of filtering and screening and reducing participation,” he said. “You’re extracting children you know qualify simply because a “t” wasn’t crossed or an “i” wasn’t dotted. It is beyond reproach, because they (LAUSD officials) don’t apply the same standard to their own schools.” 

    LAUSD had an obligation to give (the Archdiocese) the requested information. LAUSD’s hide-the-ball approach breached both the spirit and the letter of the duty to consult. — The California Department of Education in a June 2021 ruling

    LA Unified declined to comment on the state’s report, and last week, a spokesperson wrote in an email that “Los Angeles Unified does not typically comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”

    Districts have a financial incentive to minimize private schools’ funding eligibility. The federal government awards the total Title I funding to districts, which determine how much should be allocated for services to private and religious school students. Lawyers for the archdiocese point out that the less money that districts award, the more Title I funding they can spend on their own students.

    The district appears to understand this, said Kevin Troy, an attorney for the archdiocese, citing a Jan. 29, 2019, email from the principal auditor of the district’s Office of the Inspector General to the archdiocese, in which the auditor stated that the archdiocese “receives over $10 million of Title I funds from the LAUSD every year — money that could otherwise be allocated to LAUSD schools.”

    “There’s a moral and ethical question on the table,” Escala said.  “You (LA Unified) have got children in need, and you’re not serving them right,” he added, referring to students in archdiocese schools.

    The impact on one high school

    Mark Johnson, principal of Bishop Mora Salesian High School, has seen the effect of the cuts on students. Before the cutback, Title I paid for a reading intervention teacher and part-time aide who worked with 40 to 50 students weekly — about 1 out of 8 students at the all-boy, 400-student school in the low-income Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Although on the district’s payroll, the teacher fit in like any other staff member, building personal relationships with the students and collaborating with their teachers. 

    “She (the teacher) had her own classroom and was just a regular teacher as far as any of our kids knew,” he said. She would work with the lowest-performing students on basic reading comprehension skills. “If they were working on a tough piece of literature, she would help them break it down so that they could write an analytical paragraph or essay.”

    Pulling out students also reduced the class size for the remaining students, he said. Now, there is only enough money for a two-day-a-week coach from a contractor who sees at most a dozen students a week.

    “We’re serving kids who are significantly behind grade level and families that deal with poverty and all the things that come along with that,” Johnson said. “So this kind of antagonistic relationship that has developed (with the district) ultimately hurts kids.”

    The California Department of Education gave the district 60 days from its June 2021 ruling to consult with the archdiocese to fix deficiencies pointed out in the report and then recalibrate the proportional share of Title I funding for archdiocese schools. It ordered the district to begin providing the increased services for 2020-21, the next school year.

    Instead, the district appealed the decision to the U.S. Department of Education, which issued its own findings in November 2023. In his decision, Adam Schott, deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs, found that the district could justify reducing the eligibility count based on its analysis of parents’ forms. But by doing that, they cut the funding for the dozens of schools that the district did not audit. He credited the district with consulting with the archdiocese to an extent, but said the district’s overall approach in demanding documentation was “inconsistent and confusing.”

    Schott also ruled that the district violated federal regulations by claiming it didn’t have to share data with the archdiocese on how much it spent on Title I services for students and how much was unspent at the end of each year. 

    In December 2021, the archdiocese sued the district in Los Angeles Superior Court for ignoring multiple requests under the state Public Records Act to turn over Title I spending records and other relevant information. The court held off ruling until the complaint process played out.

    On July 16, Judge Curtis Kin ordered the district to turn over all relevant documents, emails and records to the archdiocese by Aug. 20 and to pay $82,141 to the diocese in attorneys’ fees.

    An appeal to Superintendent Carvalho

    Weeks after he started work as Los Angeles Unified superintendent in February 2022, Alberto Carvalho told EdSource he had familiarized himself with the case and added, “I’m going to resolve this issue sooner rather than later.” He declined to elaborate due to litigation.

    “What I can tell you,” he added, “is that we need more objective, transparent tools by which we assess and fund this guaranteed federal entitlement that’s driven by poverty.”

    Escala said he remains hopeful. “I believe that Superintendent Carvalho has the ability to direct his staff towards that outcome. I have a great degree of confidence that when brought to him, this can get adjudicated appropriately.”





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  • Opening of L.A. schools coincides with earthquake

    Opening of L.A. schools coincides with earthquake


    District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho welcomes students back to campus on Aug. 12, 2024.

    Credit: Los Angeles Unified / X

    A light 4.4-magnitude earthquake and an industrial explosion near one school rattled the Los Angeles Unified School District’s first day of school for the 2024-25 academic year on Monday.

    District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said at a news conference on Monday afternoon at Venice High School that no LAUSD buildings were damaged in the temblor, and nobody was injured.

    He was only aware of one school — Woodrow Wilson High School — that had to evacuate. 

    Students elsewhere had to duck under their desks and stay far from windows. Meanwhile, Carvalho said LAUSD is working with the district attorney to investigate the report of a fireball and explosion near Jordan Senior High School on Monday. He said the explosion likely took place at an Atlas metal recycling plant.

    The superintendent also addressed the progress LAUSD made this past year — and provided an overview of his goals for the year to come. School board Vice President Scott Schmerelson also weighed in, along with board members Nick Melvoin and Rocio Rivas, and other district officials. 

    “We know that for some of our students and their teachers that the summer felt too short, but we’re glad you’re here. We’re grateful that you’re in seats,” Melvoin said Monday. 

    “We have a lot of work to do to make this a successful school year and make sure that LA Unified is the greatest urban district, not just in the state, not just in the country, but in the world.” 

    Academics

    On top of improved California Smarter Balanced Assessment scores across the board, Carvalho touted the district’s graduation rate, which he said was nearly 87% and the highest in LAUSD history. 

    He also pointed to the district’s Summer of Learning program, which he said was attended by roughly 120,000 students. 

    Schmerelson also briefly discussed adult education and emphasized the importance of recruiting more women into the district’s airplane mechanics programs. 

    “It’s free to our LAUSD students, and adult ed is free — and adult ed students are our students too,” he said. 

    Melvoin, meanwhile, noted that more than 14,000 students are enrolled in LAUSD’s transitional kindergarten (TK) program this year. 

    School facilities and transportation

    Carvalho said LAUSD made history by having enough bus drivers on the road on the first day of school — with no substitute drivers needed. He added that the district hired more than 100 drivers during the summer. 

    The district also made its single largest acquisition of electric buses, 180. Melvoin added that LAUSD students receive a free Metro pass to help with transportation needs. 

    Carvalho also emphasized the importance of the bond measure the school board recently voted to add to the November ballot. 

    “Today’s earthquake underscores the need for our system to be serious… about seismic resilience,” he said Monday. 

    Melvoin added that the district will also be unveiling a new outdoor education center in January. 

    Staffing 

    Carvalho said on Monday that the district has a fully credentialed, certified teacher in every classroom this school year. Meanwhile, he said the district is currently home to an unprecedented network of health care professionals. 

    “The teachers are so welcoming,” Rivas said. “And the students were just so ready, ready to learn.”





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  • Helping students with mental health struggles may help them return to school

    Helping students with mental health struggles may help them return to school


    Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

    Students who are chronically absent from school are much more likely to struggle with mental health challenges, with pre-teen boys and teen girls reporting some of the highest signs of distress.

    When students need help, availability of mental health support often depends on the income of families. “As household income increased, so did the availability of mental health services” in children’s schools, University of Southern California researchers found in a survey of 2,500 households nationwide.

    Their findings are part of an in-depth report on the continuing national school absenteeism crisis in which 25% of students, or about 12 million children, across 42 states and Washington, D.C., were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year. That rate remains higher than the pre-pandemic national rate of 15%.

    EDITORS NOTE

    This in-depth report on chronic absenteeism is part of an EdSource partnership with the Associated Press and Stanford Professor Thomas Dee.

    For earlier coverage, go to EdSource’s Getting Students Back to School.

    — Rose Ciotta, investigations and projects editor

    While California saw a decrease of 5 percentage points in chronic absenteeism during the same school year, to 24.9%, districts statewide are still struggling to get all students back to school.

    “Chronic absenteeism in California is still twice what it was prior to the pandemic, and roughly 1 in 4 kids in public schools are chronically absent. That is just really striking and is a serious barrier to achieving academic recovery for this generation of students who were so harmed by the pandemic,” said Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor and economist who gathered nationwide data in collaboration with The Associated Press and the release of the USC research.

    Emotional and behavioral problems also have kept kids home from school. University of Southern California research shared exclusively with AP found strong relationships between absenteeism and poor mental health.

    For example, in the USC study, almost a quarter of chronically absent kids had high levels of emotional or behavioral problems, according to a parent questionnaire, compared with just 7% of kids with good attendance. Emotional symptoms among teen girls were especially linked with missing lots of school.

    Families with the lowest incomes reported a much higher rate of using mental health services if they were offered to their children in school — more than five times higher than those with the highest incomes. And, crucially, the researchers also found that 1 in 5 respondents would have used mental health services if they were made available at their school, with higher rates among Black and Hispanic families who were surveyed.

    “There is tremendous opportunity here for schools to increase the offerings but also, if they have the offerings, to increase the outreach to the kids and the families that need it because there is clearly an unmet need,” said Amie Rapaport, who co-authored the report and is the co-director of Center for Economic and Social Research at USC.

    ‘I had a very bad year’

    If Jennifer Hwang’s son made it to his first grade classroom, it was rarely without a fight.

    He struggled with severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and Hwang says his teacher’s habit of discarding art work in front of him would spike his anxiety, leading to violent outbursts and refusing to even get in the car or walk onto campus.

    “I thought I would have a good year in first grade, but I didn’t,” said her son, 8, whose name Hwang declined to share to protect his privacy. “I had a very bad year.”

    The absences began piling up during the second semester of that 2022-23 school year; he started missing two to three days most weeks. He soon became chronically absent, meaning he missed at least 40 days total. That classified him as chronically absent because he had missed at least 10% or more days in one school year. He began to see a therapist outside the L.A. Unified district.

    Hwang tried getting her son an individualized education program (IEP), which would grant him access to school-based counseling services given his ADHD diagnosis. But because her son’s academic performance was up to par, the school said he didn’t need it.

    She also inquired about him seeing a child psychologist who went to his Riverside Drive Charter campus in Sherman Oaks once or twice a week — but the waitlists were too long. Because he was already seeing a therapist outside of school, Hwang gave up on pressing for school resources.

    The USC report published Thursday highlights that pre-teen boys, which includes children ages 5 to 12, are struggling significantly with symptoms of hyperactivity and conduct problems, while teen girls, ages 13 to 17, are struggling most with emotional symptoms, such as depression and anxiety.

    Morgan Polikoff, a co-author of the USC report, said they cannot confirm there is “a cause and effect here,” noting that the correlation between chronic absenteeism and mental health challenges could “go both directions.”

    “In reality, it’s probably both ways. There’s probably some kids for whom increasing anxiety is leading them to stay home, and there’s probably kids who are missing a lot of school and that’s increasing their anxiety. So it probably is bi-directional or multi-directional,” Rapaport agreed.

    Both the USC researchers and Dee advocated for more research to better understand the causes of persistently high chronic absenteeism rates.

    LAUSD’s chronic absenteeism problem

    Last year, for second grade, everything changed, Hwang said, largely thanks to a teacher who adapted assignments to suit her son’s social-emotional needs and incorporated “brain breaks” into the school day, which Hwang’s son said helped him concentrate.

    “She understood him. She knew that he was bright and he felt things much more deeply, and he saw things differently and with a very different perspective,” Hwang said. “She allowed him to feel heard.”

    “One day (his teacher told me), ‘Oh, my goodness, your son just gave me a hug!’ Hwang said. “That doesn’t come cheap because he does not give out hugs very often. So that he actually hugged the teacher … that says a lot.”

    Hwang and her family aren’t sure what third grade will bring, but they were able to at least secure a 504, a type of plan that helps level the playing field for students with disabilities, so her son could have access to a special chair and space to doodle.

    LAUSD, the second-largest school district in the nation, has struggled with high rates of chronic absenteeism since the onset of the pandemic. Nearly 33% of their over 400,000 students were chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year, down from about 40% the previous year.

    Most recently, in 2023-24, preliminary data shows their rate is hovering at 32.3%, a spokesperson said.

    Still not enough

    LAUSD has increased its staffing of social workers and pupil attendance workers, but staffers say it’s just not enough.

    “We have what we can afford at this point — more than ever before — but still not at an appropriate ratio that I think this board, or myself, would feel comfortable,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said at a news conference Monday.

    Carvalho described the district’s staffing as “an unprecedented network” but did not specify how much staffing had increased.

    Ofelia Sofia Ryan is one of roughly 400 LAUSD pupil services and attendance workers trying to bring students back to school.
    Credit: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource

    Ofelia Sofia Ryan is one of LAUSD’s roughly 400 pupil services and attendance counselors who are on the front lines helping get chronically absent students connected with mental health resources and Medi-Cal so they can get back to school.

    This year, the 20-year district veteran works in five elementary schools, including Orchard Academies in the city of Bell.

    “Poverty is the No. 1 issue. Financial issues are … second — the inability of a parent to monitor because they are having two jobs, which also relates to the poverty issue,” Ryan said. “Mental health, I would say that will be maybe next.”

    Darlene Rivas, one of the district’s 800 psychiatric social workers (PSWs), is assigned to two East Los Angeles elementary schools: William R. Anton and Lorena Street.

    “We have to be team players because it can’t just be one person,” Rivas said. “I think that’s why you see a lot of exhaustion within PSW professionals.”

    There is a long waitlist for students in need of therapy, she said. If a parent can’t make it to an initial appointment, it can take months to reschedule.

    Adding staffing can come from school funding, but there are competing demands.

    This year Ryan said she started on an LAUSD campus two days a week. At the last minute, “boom,” they dropped a day, she said.

    “That’s very unfair, because (the district tells) you, on one hand, mental health matters, attendance matters. You’re working your butt off to get attendance improved. I improved attendance in all my schools. Everything was done by the book, and then (the school) just took the money away,” said Ryan. “You cannot do anything. You are powerless.”

    Carvalho regularly touts the district’s iAttend program, where he, among others, visits the homes of chronically absent students to coax them back to school. The district made more than 34,000 home visits last school year, contributing to a more than 4 percentage point decrease in chronic absenteeism, according to the district.

    What the public doesn’t know is how much work it takes after the house visit to get the child back in school, Ryan said.

    Local barriers require local solutions

    Researchers like Dee offer advice for lowering chronic absenteeism rates: “Be acutely aware of the problem” and “look to the really local barriers.”

    That advice appears to be playing out successfully farther north, in Placer County, where more and more of Roseville City School District’s 12,000 students are attending school regularly each year.

    Placer’s 2023-24 absenteeism rate is expected to be about 11% — nearly double what it was pre-pandemic. But that is down from 20% in 2022-23 and 26% in 2021-22.

    School staff have found the two main reasons for the absences are “misinformation and a lot of struggle,” said Jessica Hull, the district’s executive director of communication and community engagement. They zeroed in on these top reasons by closely tracking absenteeism over several years with their attendance system plus a notification system managed by a third-party team, SchoolStatus, that they hired specifically to address chronic absences.

    The misinformation largely centers on families being unsure of whether to send a child to school when they are sick, not knowing they can rely on independent study if the family is going on a lengthy vacation, or not understanding the importance of enrolling in pre-kindergarten known as TK.

    Roseville City School District’s attendance roadmap for parents.

    This misinformation is part of what Dee and other researchers are calling “norm erosion.”

    “The learning experiences of families and students during the pandemic, in particular the experience of remote schooling, may have reduced the perceived value of regular school attendance among students and parents,” said Dee.

    He cautioned against blaming parents for the erosion, saying that “we’re in a crisis now that merits immediate attention and perhaps a little less finger-pointing.”

    The struggles that Hull, from Roseville, said families face are often mental health challenges, particularly with middle schoolers, or families with unmet basic needs, such as unstable housing.

    One of their solutions to both barriers has been constant check-ins with those chronically absent students in order to offer resources, such as access to mental health specialists, gas cards to families facing transportation issues, and offering families bags of food from the local food bank.

    Another help is clearly explaining the notices behind their child being absent. “Schools are all about the acronym and all about words that no one else understands, so we start sending letters home and talking about truancy and chronically truant and excused absence and unexcused absence — all of that’s a mess,” Hull said.

    Instead, parents can expect to see at schools half-sheets of card stock paper explaining the terms and printed in five languages from English to Ukrainian to Pashto.

    “It’s really trying to remove that language barrier when we are talking jargon, and they’re just saying, ‘my kid needs help, we need help figuring out how to get them to school,’” Hull said.

    In Oakland, districtwide efforts include creating a sense of belonging. Oakland’s African American Male Achievement project, for example, pairs Black students with Black teachers who offer support.

    Kids who identify with their educators are more likely to attend school, said Michael Gottfried, a University of Pennsylvania professor. According to one study led by Gottfried, California students felt “it’s important for me to see someone who’s like me early on, first thing in the day,” he said.

    The Associated Press contributed to this story.





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  • Stefan Bean’s remarkable journey: Q&A with Orange County’s new superintendent

    Stefan Bean’s remarkable journey: Q&A with Orange County’s new superintendent


    Stefan Bean is sworn in as Orange County’s 12th superintendent of schools on July 3, 2024.

    Credit: Orange County Department of Education

    Families of English learners and students with disabilities in Orange County can find inspiration and an ally in Stefan Bean. Supporters of school choice can find an advocate. In June, the five-member Orange County school board unanimously decided Bean has the perspective and skills they were looking for in a superintendent of the Orange County Department of Education.

    Two years from now, voters will decide if the board made the right choice.

    Bean, 53, was sworn in last month as superintendent to fill out the remaining two years of the term of former Supterintendent Al Mijares, who resigned because of a lengthy battle with cancer. First elected in 2012, Mijares, a past member of the EdSource board of directors, had battled the politically conservative board majority in court and at board meetings. So the board turned to Bean, who lost to Mijares by nearly 10 percentage points in 2022 but promised to consult with them over policies and control of the office’s $380 million budget.

    Stefan Bean is the superintendent of the Orange County Department of Education.
    Credit: Orange County Department of Education.

    Bean has lived a remarkable life and has an unusual resume for a county superintendent. Paralyzed from the waist down from polio as an infant, he was abandoned on the streets of Saigon before being taken in by an orphanage and then airlifted in 1975 to the United States as part of the Operation Babylift rescue during the chaotic end of the Vietnam War.

    Judy and Gregory Bean took him and dozens of other foster children into their San Diego home and later adopted him. A scholarship recipient to USC, Bean became a public elementary school teacher in Fresno and Long Beach, and has spent the last 25 years as a charter school administrator — as the principal, then associate superintendent and superintendent for 11 Aspire Public Schools in Los Angeles.

    Most recently, he served as the executive director of the Irvine International Academy, a Mandarin language immersion charter school.

    Since his wife died of breast cancer in 2020, Bean has raised their four children, ranging from a daughter who has just graduated from USC, to the youngest daughter, who is in middle school.

    EdSource interviewed Bean about his childhood, his perspective on education, and his priorities as county superintendent for two years before an election contest in 2026. His remarks have been edited for length and clarity.

    Superintendent, talk about your upbringing and experiences in school.

    Judy Bean really taught her family to have compassion for the most vulnerable in our community. She and Dad decided they would care for children who were abused, had issues or disabilities. They had two of their own children and adopted 10, several with disabilities. I had three Black sisters, two Latino brothers, and a Latino brother who passed away at 2 because he had suffered so much brain trauma.

    I went to public school in San Diego, where I struggled in elementary school because English was my second language and because IDEA (the landmark federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) just came out in the ‘70s, and schools were still trying to figure out how to educate students with disabilities. I often found myself in small groups out of the classroom. It didn’t really help with my education to isolate me, and it shaped my drive to be inclusive in education.

    I didn’t do very well until I met Donald Geisinger, my sixth-grade teacher. I remain friends with him 43 years later. He saw right through the challenges that I had and said, “Stefan, you’re just going to give oral presentations and skits on the things that you’ve learned — no need to write.” That whole year I just worked on my verbal skills. I spoke Vietnamese quite a bit, and by the end of that year, I began to speak pretty fluent English. From sixth grade on, I began to get straight A’s and (earned) a scholarship to USC.

    His heart for students and his seeing my strengths was a springboard to do other things, such as speaking in front of 15,000 people in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the disabled.

    How did your experiences shape your perspective on education? 

    Mr. Geisinger and my father saw people and students through an asset lens. Whether they’re on the autism spectrum or have a physical disability or emotional disability — sure, these are deficits, but we as educators must see the assets in those students, and then lift them up and empower students.

    Leading from the heart

    When you say lead from the heart again, how does that translate into action?

    You lead with empathy. My mantra has been you involve those who are most affected by decisions. It’s not top-down directed. Obviously there are certain legal and personnel decisions that would have to be made without input. But a lot of decisions that impact educational programming can involve the community and can involve the stakeholders that are impacted by it.

    I assume that would be a particular strength in dealing with parents of English learners and parents of students with disabilities.

    Absolutely. I now represent many students who have traditionally been left behind. I certainly identify with those students, and I hope that they will look to me as a voice for them.

    Your predecessor had a contentious relationship with the board.  Since the board chose you, I assume you are more philosophically in tune with them.  

    I can’t speak on behalf of Dr. Mijares, but I certainly have the utmost respect for his leadership. If I can lead in a collaborative, transparent manner, then I think we can resolve any dispute between the board and the County Department of Education. In my appointment process, I shared my commitment to building collaboration, transparency, and trust and continuing to support our 28 school districts.

    How will you do this?

    It is common for school districts to have committees in which two (out of five members), sometimes three if you have a larger board, can serve on these committees to really give input (without violating the Brown Act governing open meetings) and receive feedback.  

    You have been quoted as saying you want to “further expand” the board’s work supporting charters and open up more parental options for education, including charter schools and home schools.  Is this a matter of using the bully pulpit?  What can and will you do?

    As people have been learning about me and meeting me and hearing my vision, they would say that I’m far from using this as a bullying pulpit. It’s the complete opposite, actually. My vision is to lead from the heart in which we serve our principals and serve our schools in this work. But to answer your question, this board certainly believes in alternative education models and therefore charter schools. I believe that most of the superintendents that I’ve met believe that our students have different needs. Therefore, in the name of equity, we must provide what our students need. 

    How does that work with homeschooling, though?

    Many home schools now are charters, and charters are heavily regulated in all aspects. We support charter schools that do the independent study model, which is a lot like home school. We don’t support the private home school models. We do have within the department an independent study model in which students learn from home.

    County offices can approve countywide charters but don’t charter proposals go through their individual districts for approval?

    A charter school’s initial application goes to a local school district, and then if it’s denied there, they can bring it to their county as a county charter school. That’s one pathway. And then usually, those county charter schools can then later submit to be a countywide charter school. We have over 30 charter schools.

    But don’t county boards have restrictions on when they can overturn a local decision?

    If a district has denied a charter, they of course have to explain the reasons why. Then that charter can take it to the county board of education and say, “OK, this district denied us for A, B and C. And here’s how we have responded to A, B, and C. So now we would like you to authorize the charter.” There are few restrictions. Our county can certainly do that. 

    The importance of social-emotional learning

    What is your view of social-emotional learning (SEL)?

    Social-emotional learning is very important in schools when we do it as a team in a collaborative way. That includes our parents. Social emotional learning is simply helping our students navigate through the challenges of their lives. Helping them to become resilient. That’s exactly what I grew up with. I’ve had many adversities that our students experience. To overcome those, adults, including my parents, teachers, counselors, speech pathologists, special education providers, all of these people helped me to overcome my challenges to become resilient and competent. And that’s what SEL should be doing.

    I have cautioned educators (not) to use it as a political tool to push forward something that may not be protecting our students. For instance, I believe 100% that parental involvement is absolutely critical in our education system. And so, if SEL is being used to exclude some of our parents, then we’ve missed the mark. That’s where I’m critical.

    What are your priorities for the next two years?

    The first priority is just to continue understanding the assets and the values of the department of education throughout Orange County.

    My second vision is to remain at the forefront of 21st century competencies and skills and lead the way for our students through our OC Pathways partnerships with districts and ACCESS (Alternative, Communit​y, and Correctional Education Schools and Services) what we call our 29th school district. We serve thousands of students across our county in an alternative education setting and model.

    Assuming you do want to run in two years, what will you point to and say, “I’ve made this change, and it’s visible and it affects the way students succeed or not.”

    It will be in the areas of where we will lead the nation, in college and career readiness. I wholeheartedly believe in that vision. One of my pushes will be to use some of our reserves to provide grants to our school districts in order to create and promote innovative programming. Three groups I spoke with recently were focused on artificial intelligence, different technical skills and student leadership. Our districts will come up with great ideas, and we will honor them with resources to implement them.





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  • State bailout for California school districts comes with long strings attached

    State bailout for California school districts comes with long strings attached


    Credit: Andrew Reed/EdSource

    Top Takeaways
    •  Plumas Unified in northeast California, with an enrollment of about 2,000 students, will be the first district in over a dozen years to seek a state bailout.  
    • California’s system of financial oversight of school districts has mostly worked, having kept all but nine of them from seeking a state bailout loan to avert insolvency.  
    • The key to keeping school districts from financial disaster has been close oversight by county offices of education and monitoring by the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team. 

    Plumas Unified, a small school district in the Sierra Nevada in far northeast California, is on track to become the first district in over a dozen years to join nine others that have had to get a bailout loan from the state to avert bankruptcy.

    In the last week of April, its school board voted to request an emergency state loan of up to $20 million, explaining that it has “exhausted all of its sources of alternative liquidity and any external sources of short-term cash.”

    The district joins a select group of districts that no one wants to belong to.    

    A state bailout is accompanied by rigorous state and county oversight, loss of local control, extra expenses in paying off the loan, and other conditions that last for years. 

    “Manage your finances because you don’t want this,” said James Morris, the administrator appointed to oversee Inglewood Unified in Los Angeles County, which has been in state receivership for 13 years. 

    Carl Cohn, a leading educator who was superintendent in Long Beach Unified and San Diego Unified, and a former member of the State Board of Education, says getting a state bailout is a fate to be avoided at all costs.  

    “It’s really important to maintain that sense of an empowered community through locally elected officials,” he said. 

    From the state’s perspective, “There’s no way the state is itching to get its hands on these districts either,” said Richard Whitmore, the first state-appointed administrator at Compton Unified after it got an emergency bailout loan in 1993.  

    “It’s bad for public education to have these districts fall into what is essentially bankruptcy,” said Whitmore. “It costs the state a ton of money to intervene and do all this work, which they are not well-prepared to execute, so they have to go into crisis mode when it happens.”

    On the face of it, however, it is remarkable that fewer than 10 school districts, out of close to a thousand in California, have had to submit to state receivership in return for getting a bailout. 

    It suggests that the state’s system of oversight is mostly working as planned.   

    Districts Placed Under State Receivership

    West Contra Costa Unified, 1990* 
    Loan amount: $28.5 million.
    Low-income students:  63%**

    Coachella Valley Unified, 1992
    Loan amount: $7.3 million. 
    Low-income students:  92.4%

    Compton Unified, 1995  
    Loan amount: $19.9 million  
    Low-income students: 93% 

    Emery Unified, 2001
    Loan amount $1.3 million.  
    Low-income students: 52% 

    Oakland Unified, 2003 
    Loan amount: $100 million  
    Low-income students:  80%

    West Fresno Elementary:  2003***
    Loan amount: $1.3 million 
    Low-income students: 86%

    South Monterey County Joint Union High, 2009
    Loan Amount: $13 million 

    Low-income students:  85%

    Vallejo City Unified 2004
    Loan amount: $60 million 
    Low-income students: 85% 

    Inglewood Unified, 2012
    Loan amount: $29 million  
    Low-income students:  87 pct. 

    *Date refers to the year the loan was awarded.

    **Low-income refers to the percentage of students qualifying for free and reduced price meals.

    ***District merged with Washington Unified; low-income figure is for Washington Unified. 

    That system came into existence in response to West Contra Costa Unified’s insolvency in 1990, when it became the first district to get a bailout from the state. 

    Assembly Bill 1200 in 1991 decreed that, as a condition of receiving a loan, the state superintendent of public instruction must appoint an administrator to oversee the district. Under 2018 legislation (AB 1840), it is now the county superintendent of schools who appoints the administrator. 

    The 1991 legislation also established an independent fiscal oversight agency, the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, or FCMAT (universally pronounced “Fickmat” in education circles).

    One reason only a small number of districts have had to turn to the state for a bailout has been the effectiveness of FCMAT, and the stability of its leadership. Since its founding, it has had only two CEOs, Joel Montero and Michael Fine, its current leader. Both are highly regarded in education circles. 

    Another factor is that school districts must submit their budgets to county superintendents for review at least three times during the year, known as the first and second interim budgets, and the final budget, which must be approved by July 1. 

    “They’re the early warning system,” said Karen Stapf Walters, executive director of California County Superintendents, referring to the school superintendents in all 58 counties. “When they see a district going south, they jump in with body and soul and give a district whatever it needs to get back on track.” 

    Fine said FCMAT’s role is to steer school boards to the point that they ultimately sit down and do what they need to do when they need to do it.”

    But getting out of receivership is an arduous process. Districts have to meet over 150 standards set by FCMAT, in areas such as financial management, pupil achievement, personnel and facilities management, governance and community relations. 

    Even after it meets those standards, and the administrator leaves, the district is likely to be paying off its loan still. The county superintendent then appoints a trustee with fewer powers than the administrator, but who can still veto financial decisions made by the elected school board until the last loan payment is made.  

    Many school leaders say the funds and years that districts spent paying off a loan could have supported current education programs. “The children sitting in classrooms in Inglewood today are paying for mistakes made, many of them before they were even born, by folks who are not here any longer,” said Inglewood’s Morris. 

    In West Contra Costa’s case, it took 21 years to pay off its bailout loan of $28.5 million, plus $19 million in interest and fees. 

    When the district paid its final installment in 2012, then-board member Madeline Kronenberg called it “Independence Day” for the district. But she regretted that years of loan payments meant “thousands and thousands of children were unable to get what other districts provide.”

    And yet, enduring years of state receivership doesn’t necessarily translate into a district’s long-term financial health. 

    Just the opposite. Of the nine school districts that have been through state receivership — all serving mostly low-income students — at least five are still experiencing severe financial difficulties.  

    Coachella Valley Unified, which got a bailout loan in 1992, is cutting hundreds of jobs as it tries to close a $6 million shortfall. Inglewood Unified is about to close five schools, including its storied Morningside High School. 

    In what should be cause for celebration in Vallejo and Oakland, both will pay off their state loans next month and regain full control of their districts for the first time in 20 years. 

    But both districts still face major financial challenges. Vallejo City Unified, dealing with a budget shortfall of $36 million, is on the verge of closing two schools. Oakland is similarly struggling, with considerations of another insolvency not yet off the table.   

    West Contra Costa, whose budget just received a “positive certification” from the county office of education, is still operating with a structural deficit and will rely on reserves to get through the next two years. 

    At times, the underlying conditions that got districts into trouble persist, such as declining enrollments and the absence of strong fiscal leadership by subsequent school boards or superintendents. Too often, the lessons learned from earlier financial meltdowns are forgotten or ignored. 

    One district that has turned around is Compton Unified, which, under the leadership of Superintendent Darin Brawley, has made significant improvements not only on the academic front but also in achieving financial stability. 

    Brawley said he only calculates his budgets based on funds actually in district coffers, not on funds it is slated to receive. In addition, he made cuts gradually over the years as conditions warranted, and did not wait until the district was in crisis.   

    He says district officials are too often “conflict-averse,” and “rather than make the tough choices, and what may be the right decisions to remain fiscally stable, they will oftentimes not make decisions, and then the problem balloons into a much bigger issue.” 

    Now it’s Plumas Unified’s turn to cede control to the state. In late April, facing an $8 million deficit on its $42 million budget, Plumas Unified’s board called a special meeting to request a state bailout loan. 

    The district covers 2,600 square miles, a vast area in the Sierra Nevada, providing schooling for about 2,000 students with few other options. 

    How did it escape the oversight system that has, over the past dozen years, kept every other district but nine from having to turn to the state to bail them out? 

    “Plumas unfortunately came up on the radar too late for us to help them,” said FCMAT’s Fine. One reason, he said, is because “I don’t think they were being 100% honest about their numbers.”

    For example, the district awarded staff a 14% pay increase, without having a viable way to calculate its costs, he said. “Without reliable numbers, it is difficult to know the condition of a district and thus to get in early enough to assist.”

    Editor’s note: Richard Whitmore is a member of the EdSource board of directors.

    Next Week: Inglewood Unified’s unfinished journey to get out of state receivership





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