California education news: What’s the latest?

The men’s basketball team at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire voted Tuesday to unionize, a first step toward forming what would be the first labor union for college athletes.

The players voted 13-2, in an election that was supervised by the National Labor Relations Board, to join Service Employees International Union Local 560.

“Today is a big day for our team. We stuck together all season and won this election. It is self-evident that we, as students, can also be both campus workers and union members. Dartmouth seems to be stuck in the past. It’s time for the age of amateurism to end,” said players Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil, according to The Associated Press.

Prior to the vote, the college filed an appeal to the full National Labor Relations Board, hoping to overturn an earlier decision made by a regional officer that classified the players as employees. The college also could take the case to federal court.

In a statement, the college said unionization would be inappropriate for the athletes.

“Classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is as unprecedented as it is inaccurate. We, therefore, do not believe unionization is appropriate,” the college said.

Meanwhile in California, the NLRB is hearing a separate complaint that asks for the University of Southern California’s football and basketball players to be recognized as employees.

Staff at Berenda Elementary School in unincorporated Madera County cleared branches and debris from the campus Sunday, after a tornado touched down there on Friday afternoon, according to ABC7.

A portable classroom and a fence were damaged, but no students or staff were injured.

School had already been dismissed for the day, but students in an after-school program were on the campus when the tornado hit. They were taken to the cafeteria and their parents notified to pick them up.

Sisters Emely and Eilyn Soto were coloring in the cafeteria when the tornado touched down. They spoke to a ABC7 reporter about their experience.

“I just heard everyone screaming and branches and trees just falling down,” said Emely, a fourth grader at the school. “The teachers tried to close the door and they couldn’t. They finally did and grabbed everyone to go on the floor.”

Legislation recently introduced by Bill Essayli, R-Corona, would require school districts and charter schools to hire an armed law enforcement officer to patrol each of its campuses whenever students are present.

Current state law allows school districts to determine whether to hire or contract for armed law enforcement officers or unarmed security officers. The current law asks districts to consider using resources allocated for police officers for pupil support services and professional development for school employees on cultural competency and restorative justice if it is more appropriate for their students.

Essayli’s legislation would remove all options for school districts except to hire or contract with officers authorized to carry a loaded firearm to staff each of their campuses.

Assembly Bill 3038 could be heard in the education committee on March 18, according to the state website.

If the bill becomes a law it would be a state-mandated local program, requiring the state to reimburse each district for its cost.

The California Supreme Court today upheld life-in-prison sentences without the possibility for parole for young adults ages 18-25 in a 5-2 decision, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

The 2013 state law upheld today allows for life-without-parole sentences, often referred to as LWOP, for young adults ages 18 to 25 in cases involving “multiple murders or those committed during a rape or robbery or as a gang member.”

Justices Goodwin Liu and Kelli Evans filed dissenting opinions.

“The LWOP exclusion disproportionately impacts Black and Brown youth. It perpetuates racial disparities in LWOP sentences for youthful offenders,” wrote Justice Evans. “While perhaps unintentional, it nonetheless embodies racial bias that has plagued our criminal and juvenile justice systems since their inception.”

There are big racial and socioeconomic disparities in dual enrollment participation across California, according to a new study by researchers at UC Davis and PACE.

Across grade levels, Asian students were the most likely to take dual enrollment classes, followed by white students, Latino students and Black students. The overall participation in dual enrollment was lowest among ninth graders but also the most equitable: The gap between Asian and Black students who participated in ninth grade was 4 percentage points. Among 12th graders, who participated in dual enrollment at the highest rate of any grade level, the gap between Asian and Black students was 14 percentage points.

Sonya Christian, the statewide chancellor of California’s community college system, has said she wants every ninth grader to participate in dual enrollment.

There are also participation disparities across socioeconomic lines, although that varies by grade level, the study found. Among ninth graders, 5.3% of both socioeconomically disadvantaged students and other students participated in dual enrollment. Among 10th and 11th graders, students who aren’t socioeconomically disadvantaged participated at higher rates. That trend flips, however, among 12th graders, when enrollment rates were higher for socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

Superintendents of rural school districts feel state leaders rarely consider their needs — even though they struggle with providing special education, transportation, teacher recruitment, finding contractors, keeping track of paperwork and staying in compliance with state regulations, CalMatters reported. 

“We have a system that works through an urban and suburban lens, but leaves rural schools behind,” Rindy DeVoll, the executive director of the California Rural Ed Network, told CalMatters. “Everyone in education has challenges, but they are amplified for rural districts.”

Thirty-five percent of schools in California are rural schools, meaning they are at least 25 miles from a city and have fewer than 600 students. 

Students at rural schools are often behind their suburban peers when it comes to meeting state standards in English and math. They also lag behind in their graduation rates and in their completion of coursework needed to attend the state’s public universities, CalMatters reported.

“There are those who don’t understand that California extends past Woodland (near Sacramento),” Jeff Harris, superintendent of the Del Norte Unified School District, told CalMatters. “There’s a lot of well-intended legislation that gives no thought to the impact on rural areas.”

Federal Rural Education and Achievement grants can help with expenses including salaries and internet, but not all districts receive funds — and those that do don’t get much, CalMatters reported. 

“California policy largely does not take into account the needs of rural areas. It’s geared toward wealthier, coastal communities. There might be some lip service, but inland, less wealthy areas are stuck with some pretty expensive burdens,” said Assemblymember James Gallagher, a lawmaker from the Chico area who heads the Assembly Republican Caucus. 

Assemblymember Juan Alanis, R-Modesto, introduced a bill that would require schools to inform parents and guardians about Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, dual enrollment and career technical education courses offered at their child’s school, The Modesto Bee reported. 

Alanis’s team conducted a survey of residents,  71.5% of whom said they were satisfied with the number of courses offered in each of the four categories at local schools. Roughly 74% of respondents expressed satisfaction with the current amount of exposure students receive to college and career pathways, the Bee reported. 

“I am excited that the first bill I introduced this year, AB 1796, is one that opens up new pathways to students who may not be interested or able to pursue a higher education,” Alanis said in a news release.

The repeat campaign for Measure E, a ballot measure to fund facility improvements at Fresno State,  is raising and spending more money than it did for the previous election, The Fresno Bee reported. The measure was defeated in November 2022.

Ahead of the March 5 primary election, as of Feb. 17, the Yes on Measure E campaign has raised over $2.14 million, according to The Bee. Most of the donations come from unions that would benefit from new construction on campus. 

The campaign has spent more than it has raised, with $2.15 million in expenses so far — up from the $1.9 million in the failed effort to pass Measure E in the previous election. 

If it passes, Measure E would impose a 0.25% sales tax on goods and services throughout Fresno County for 25 years and would pay for facilities and academic program improvements at Fresno State, The Bee reported. 

After a decade as the El Segundo Unified superintendent, Melissa Moore is retiring, the Daily Breeze reported. 

Less experienced superintendents are becoming common across the state, EdSource found in reporting on the rise of California superintendents leaving the job. Fresno Unified Superintendent Bob Nelson, in late January, also announced he will be retiring in the summer. 

“It has been my distinct honor and privilege to lead this school district for a decade, alongside an extremely talented team of dedicated faculty, staff, teachers, administrators, cabinet and board members,” Moore said.

Moore was named superintendent of the 3,000-student school district in 2014 at the height of her 30-year career in education. 

In her time as El Segundo superintendent, she adopted a social-emotional learning program and helped develop a comprehensive graduate profile, according to the Daily Breeze. 

Moore’s last day will be June 30, and the school board will start a superintendent search immediately, the Daily Breeze reported. 

Two Jewish civil rights organizations filed a federal civil rights complaint against Berkeley Unified on Wednesday on behalf of Jewish families, charging that their children have been “subjected to severe and persistent harassment and discrimination” since the escalating conflict between Israel and Gaza began in October.

District principals and administrators failed to protect these children despite repeated reports of student misconduct and some teachers’ antagonism, the complaint says. The district has “knowingly allowed” schools to become “viciously hostile environments for Jewish and Israeli students,” the complaint said. As a result, the complaint said, ”The environment is so bad that Jewish and Israeli students are often afraid to go to school.”

The 41-page complaint by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League is the first antisemitism case filed with the U.S.  Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights against a public school district since the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas and invasion of Gaza by the Israeli military in response, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The complaint charged that students took the lead from pro-Palestinian teachers who organized unauthorized walkouts in October and again this month. Students from the MLK Middle School chanted “Kill the Jews,” “KKK” “Kill Israel,” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” a phrase that implies the elimination of Jews from their nation.

The district issued a statement Wednesday. While stating it had not yet received the complaint, the statement read in part. “We acknowledge the difficult moment we are in and the pain some members of our community are experiencing due to the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza. … The district continuously encourages students and families to report any incidents of bullying or hate-motivated behavior.”

The complaint cited a history teacher at Berkeley High School who expressed antisemitic stereotypes in class, showed a one-sided perspective of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and asked students to respond to the prompt, “To what extent should Israel be considered an Apartheid State?” The district’s response, the complaint said, was to transfer Jewish students who complained to another class, instead of enforcing district policy that prohibits a teacher from using “his/her position to forward his/her own historical, religious, political, economic or social bias.”

The complaint charged that indoctrination began in one second-grade classroom in Malcolm X Elementary, where the teacher hung a Palestinian flag in the window, visible to parents walking into school, and encouraged students to write “Stop Bombing Babies” on sticky notes as an exercise in anti-hate messages. They were then attached to the wall outside a classroom with the only Jewish teacher, the complaint alleges.

This is the second federal civil rights complaint against a Bay Area school district for teacher-organized protests over the Gaza-Israeli conflict. On Jan. 16, the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education notified Oakland Unified that it had received a complaint that the district discriminated against students on the basis of their shared Jewish ancestry.

The complaint alleges that teachers led an unauthorized teach-in on Palestine during the Dec, 6 school day and taught elementary school students that a “free Palestine means the annihilation of Jews.” The department will investigate whether the district failed to respond as the federal law requires to harassment of students by district employees.

The story was updated Feb. 29 to include a similar complaint against Oakland Unified. 

A new study’s findings suggest Covid-19 could have longer-term effects on cognition and memory that lead to measurable differences in cognitive performance, The Washington Post reported.

The study was published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. It found participants who recovered from Covid symptoms had a cognitive decline of three IQ points compared with those who weren’t infected, according to The Post. But those who have Covid symptoms lasting 12 weeks or more lost the equivalent of six IQ points. 

However, researchers did say the decline in IQ points could be temporary, The Post reported. Participants who had lingering symptoms recovered by the time they took part in the study were found to have cognitive deficits comparable to those who quickly recovered.

Eight online tasks were taken by participants to measure cognitive function, according to The Post. More than 140,000 people completed at least one of the tasks and nearly 113,000 completed all of them.

The participants were randomly selected from a cohort of more than 3 million adults to track the spread of Covid between May 1, 2020, and March 21, 2022.

California State University was awarded $750,000 through The Great Admissions Redesign, a competition by the Lumina Foundation to “revolutionize” the admissions process and increase accessibility to higher education.

The money will be used to automate admissions to the CSU system through California’s official K-12 college and career readiness platform, according to CSU officials. There are a total of seven winners. 

To expand outreach to ninth through 11th graders, CSU will partner with the California College Guidance Initiative, officials said. Qualified 12th grade students will be offered admission to most CSU schools and the opportunity to apply to more competitive universities and impacted majors. 

“The CSU is the engine of opportunity to a quality education that leads to a successful career, and we are grateful to the Lumina Foundation in helping us advance our outreach to prospective students across California,” said April Grommo, assistant vice chancellor of Strategic Enrollment Management. “This generous award will advance strategies and partnerships including the California College Guidance Initiative to ensure more students are academically prepared to meet CSU admission requirements and go on to earn a CSU degree.”

Does hitting the court help you when you hit the books? A recent University of Chicago analysis shows a strong link between school sports participation and academic achievement. 

Unfortunately, data suggest that rates of children’s school-based physical activity may be declining with many schools having reduced athletic opportunities in recent years. This may be caused by schools becoming overly focused on core academic areas such as reading and math, hot-button issues amid falling literacy and numeracy rates.

However, evidence linking physical activity and academic achievement is particularly strong in a series of recent observational studies. This enhancement of cognition is directly related to core academic ability and positive outcomes such as higher grades and test scores, this University of Chicago research suggests. There exists a need for additional research, the paper concludes, to extend the robust findings connecting school sports to academic success.

The number of job postings requiring college degrees — or any educational attainment at all — may be declining, according to research from Indeed, a job posting platform, as The Hill reported.

Indeed noted that more than half of jobs, 52% of its postings, had no formal education requirement as of January, up 4% from 2019. Postings requiring four-year degrees went from 20.4% to 17.8% in the past five years.  

“Employers are loosening their formal education requirements as the labor market remains tight and attitudes towards skills-first hiring practices change. Those same employers seem more willing to consider candidates who can demonstrate the required skills without necessarily having a degree,” Indeed researchers said in their analysis, as The Hill reported.

The data also showed that formal education requirements are decreasing in most job sectors. STEM-related fields had the most postings that require higher degrees while sectors such cleaning, sanitation and food service had the fewest.

Recent data analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California confirmed that the number of K-12 students experiencing homelessness during the 2022-23 school year increased to pre-pandemic levels.

Some school staffers have noted that the decreases in student homelessness rates in recent years was most egregious during pandemic-era remote learning, largely because staff rely on in-person interactions to identify students who might need housing support. As students returned to campuses, homelessness rates rose.

The data analysis, published by research associate Brett Guinan and research fellow Julien Lafortune, noted that the sharpest increases in homelessness were among Native American, Black, English learner and migrant students.

“Student homelessness has increased to pre-pandemic levels, and disproportionately affects high-need students and students of color,” the researchers wrote in a blog post published Monday. “Amid budget constraints and the end of one-time pandemic funding, state policymakers will need to consider new ways to effectively identify and serve this vulnerable population.”

California legislators are again trying to attain paid pregnancy leave for teachers and school staff. A bill introduced earlier this month would require school districts and colleges to give teachers and other school staff up to 14 weeks of paid leave for a pregnancy.

The legislation, introduced by Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry and co-authored by members of the Legislative Women’s Caucus, would give school employees full pay if they miss work because of a pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, termination of pregnancy or recovery from these conditions.

Currently, teachers are exempt from paying into or benefiting from state disability insurance. They can take unpaid maternity leave, but most use vacation and sick time if they want a paid leave.

“As a new mom, physically recovering from pregnancy and birth while also caring for a newborn, it is unfathomable that most of us must consider whether or not we are going to get paid,” said Erika Jones, a kindergarten teacher and the secretary-treasurer of California Teachers Association in a news release.“ Educators devote their lives to their students; yet, when it comes to their own families, they have to constantly sacrifice because of the lack of basic supports such as said pregnancy leave. In a field that is primarily women, we need to do better.”

In 2019 Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a similar bill that would have given teachers and school staff at least six weeks of fully paid maternity leave, saying it would be too costly for school districts and colleges. The length of the leave would have been determined by the woman’s physician.

Former Gov. Jerry Brown also vetoed a paid maternity leave bill for school staff in 2018, saying that leave policies for school employees are best resolved through the collective bargaining process at the local level.

Beverly Hills Unified School District is investigating AI-generated fake nude photos of students at Beverly Vista Middle School, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.

Students generated the photos by superimposing photos of other students’ faces on AI-generated nude bodies. Students reported the photos to administrators. It is uncertain how many photos were generated.

“As the investigation is progressing today, more victims are being identified,” according to message from the school district. “We are taking every measure to support those affected and to prevent any further incidents. We want to make it unequivocally clear that this behavior is unacceptable and does not reflect the values of our school community. Although we are aware of similar situations occurring all over the nation, we must act now. This behavior rises to a level that requires the entire community to work in partnership to ensure it stops immediately.”

The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it has updated how it calculates the amount of federal aid students receive when they use the new and simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.

With the update, 7.3 million students in total will be eligible for Pell Grants in 2024-25. So far, more than 4.7 million applications have been successfully submitted, according to the department. The update won’t affect the timeline for delivering completed applications to colleges and universities in the first half of March.

The department also announced last week that students who have at least one parent without a Social Security Number will be able to successfully submit FAFSA forms in the first half of March.

Since unveiling the simplified FAFSA form Dec. 30, delays and technical problems have hindered students from completing the application and forced colleges to wait for information and adjust their timelines.

Sacramento State University collaborates with local faith-based organizations that predominantly serve Black and African-American communities to promote college preparation, KCRA 3 reported.

The university specifically holds “Super Sunday” during the month of February at local churches, where representatives from the university come to visit. 

Currently, less than 6% of Sacramento State University’s student body is Black, according to the KCRA 3 report.  

“A college degree is achievable, is affordable, is doable,” David Zeigler, the interim vice provost for student academic success, told KCRA 3, while emphasizing that their camps is home to a new Black Honors College.

More than 200 families displaced by widespread flooding in San Diego County on Jan. 22 received support through Project Rest, a school program that provides homeless families with temporary housing. But its funding stream of one-time Covid money is dwindling, and the program is set to expire in September, the San Diego Union Tribune reported. 

“It highly affects attendance when you’re that transitory,” Andrea Frost, homeless and foster youth liaison for La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, told the Union Tribune. “And when you affect attendance, it affects everything else.”

Since the program’s creation two years ago, it has provided motel stays for more than 1,500 families — and its demand has only grown. Nearly 17,000 public school children in San Diego were counted as experiencing homelessness, the Union Tribune reported. 

“The need for this funding is not less than during the pandemic. It’s actually more,” Barbara Duffield, the executive director of youth homelessness nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection, told the Union Tribune.

Santa Rosa City Schools is considering consolidating with nine small elementary school districts that surround it, The Press Democrat reported. Santa Rosa City Schools is the largest of 40 school districts in Sonoma County.

The consolidation would save millions of dollars in administrative costs each year, unify programs and services and potentially close underutilized school sites, according to The Press Democrat. 

Consolidation would also mean a new school board and new superintendent to serve more than 27,000 students.

There are three ways that Santa Rosa City could move forward with the consolidation, The Press Democrat reported: Have support from the nine elementary districts that would be impacted, submit a petition with signatures from 25% of voters living in what would be the unified district or have an elected official submit the petition on behalf of the district. 

The process could take at least two years. 

The Campus Opioid Safety Act requiring most of California’s colleges and universities to offer life-saving resources for students to reverse an opioid overdose has been applied differently at schools, CalMatters reported. 

According to the CalMatters story, some campuses provide Narcan or a generic equivalent, naloxone — a nasal spray that can reverse an opioid overdose — to its students, while others do not. 

Enacted last year, the legislation requires health centers on California State University campuses and community colleges to order Narcan, Cal Matters reported. Schools must educate students on overdose prevention and inform them of where to find overdose reversal medication. The law “requests” that the University of California system does the same. 

At least 100 public colleges in the state have Narcan on its campuses, including all but one CSU and UC campus, Cal Matters reported. Though not required, some private universities also have Narcan on campus. 

But more than a year after the law went into effect, some colleges lag behind and have yet to put Narcan in the hands of students, CalMatters reported. 

For instance, Taft, Ridgecrest and Bakersfield community colleges in Kern County — one of the deadliest counties for opioid-related overdoses among young people — do not have a Narcan distribution program for students. 

A San Jose State University professor was put on administrative leave this week following an altercation with a student during a protest on campus related to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. 

A San Jose State professor told the Chronicle the history professor placed on leave was Jonathan Roth, who was the 2019 recipient of the university’s Distinguished Service Award. The altercation occurred on Monday outside of the classroom where a guest speaker was scheduled. 

The guest speaker was Jeffrey Blutinger, a Long Beach State University professor specializing in Jewish history, the Chronicle reported. Students and at least one professor protested outside the classroom. 

Roth was seen trying to film protesters and a student attempted to block the filming, the Chronicle reported. 

“So she was trying to protect the demonstrators by using her hand to block him from filming and he violently took her hand, twisted it down with her arm toward the ground,” Sang Kil told the Chronicle, a co-chair of the Palestine, Arab and Muslim caucus and of the university’s justice studies.

There were no serious injuries or police charges, SJSU President Cynthia Teniente-Matson said, but more “administrative actions” could occur.

There are deep partisan divides regarding LGBTQ+ inclusion and racial justice in K-12 curriculum, according to a new study by University of Southern California researchers. 

“That said, there are major partisan differences in beliefs about what children should be learning in public schools, particularly regarding topics related to LGBTQ and race,” said Anna Saavedra, a co-author of the study, research scientist and co-director at USC’s Center for Applied Research in Education. “Local districts have the challenge of reconciling these differences in the coming years.” 

More than 3,900 U.S. adults took an internet-based survey from September to October, with 40% identifying as Democratic or leaning Democratic, 34% as Republican or leaning Republican, and 27% as independent or belonging to other political parties, according to researchers. Out of those surveyed, 1,763 households had at least one child in grades K-12 living in the home, and 2,142 households were without children.

Those surveyed across political parties overwhelmingly agreed on the importance of a free, public education, the study said. People also agreed on the core functions of teaching literacy, numeracy and civics, and positioning children to have a financially secure future. 

About 80%-86% of Democrats support high school students learning about LGBTQ+ topics, while less than 40% of Republicans approve, researchers found. Teaching these topics to elementary students dipped to 40%-50% among Democrats and only 10% approval from Republicans.

“Our survey highlights the deep divisions about not just what children should be learning in school, but also when,” Morgan Polikoff said in a statement, a co-author of the study and associate professor of education at USC. “Policymakers need to really think about these nuances if they are going to craft policies that reflect what Americans really want.”

More than half of adults support discussing race-related topics in high school classrooms, the study said. Democrats support elementary school children learning about slavery, civil rights and race-based inequality, but Republicans do not.

Read the full report here.

Educational challenges for the increasing number of homeless youth nationwide will get worse with the upcoming loss of federal funding targeting them, according to a report released Wednesday by SchoolHouse Connection, a national homeless advocacy organization.

That pandemic-era federal American Rescue Plan allocated $800 million to help schools identify and support homeless students.

The report authors found money the increased the number of homeless youth receiving educational support and that about 6,000 school districts nationwide received funds for homeless students for the first time.

While the federal government does provide some dedicated funding for homeless youth education such as the McKinney-Vento Act’s Education for Homeless Children and Youth (EHCY) funding, youth advocates have long identified two big problems with relying on such funding streams: Not all school districts are eligible to receive the money, and the available money is are nowhere near the amounts included in the pandemic-era funds.

The report also found that homeless liaisons were able to provide more flexible support, such as offering gas gift cards and housing an evicted student and their family in a hotel room for a few days.

In the report, SchoolHouse Connection calls for Congress to consider funding EHCY at the same level as the American Rescue Plan, to extend the date by which school districts must obligate pandemic era funds to September 2025, and for local education agencies to include homeless liaisons in decision-making regarding how to spend any remaining American Rescue Plan funds they may have.

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it would automatically discharge another $1.2 billion in student loans for nearly 153,000 borrowers across the U.S.

“With today’s announcement, we are once again sending a clear message to borrowers who had low balances: if you’ve been paying for a decade, you’ve done your part, and you deserve relief,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “Under President Biden’s leadership, our Administration has now approved loan forgiveness for nearly 3.9 million borrowers, and our historic fight to cancel student debt isn’t over yet.” 

Borrowers are eligible for this first round of discharges if they enrolled in the president’s income-driven Saving on a Valuable Education plan, have made at least 10 years of payments, and originally took out $12,000 or less in student loans for college. Borrowers will begin receiving emails immediately alerting them to the forgiveness.

The Supreme Court blocked Biden’s plan to cancel $400 billion in student debt for about 43 million borrowers, but the White House has since responded by targeting smaller programs to forgive debt for specific groups. Biden has now canceled $138 billion of student debt through about two dozen executive actions, according to the White House.

Undergraduate enrollment declined across much of the Cal State system during and after the coronavirus pandemic — and for some campuses, it remains down. 

A new report by the Campaign for College Opportunity analyzed enrollment changes within the nation’s largest public university system and found a 6.5% enrollment decline from pre-pandemic numbers from fall 2020 to fall 2023. 

During the pandemic, enrollment declined by about 10,000 students from fall 2020 to fall 2021 and dropped an additional 17,000 students to 404,820 in fall 2022 — the lowest since 2014. By fall 2023, the number of students declined by  an additional 2,500.

Despite the declines, 11 of the 23 CSU campuses saw a growth in Latino enrollment and seven grew their Black enrollment totals. Only four campuses saw their enrollments grow: CSU Fullerton, CSU Long Beach, San Diego State and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. 

The largest decrease in enrollment was at Sonoma State, which has seen a 34% decline in students.  

Unlike the CSU system, national undergraduate enrollment grew by 1.2%  nationally for last fall, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. Public and private nonprofit universities increased by 0.6%, for the first time since the pandemic. In California, community college enrollment has rebounded from the pandemic, and numbers in the University of California have also increased. The campaign’s report highlighted that overall enrollment in the UC system increased 3.2% between 2019 and 2023.

Enrollment across California’s 116 community colleges was up more than 8% this past fall, surpassing 2 million students for the first time since before the pandemic, statewide Chancellor Sonya Christian said Wednesday.

Addressing the state Assembly’s budget subcommittee on education finance, Christian said the college system in fall 2023 enrolled more than 100,000 additional students compared to fall 2022. That brought the statewide enrollment total above 2 million for the first time since 2019.

Like community college across the country, the system suffered steep enrollment declines during the pandemic. But enrollment has been recovering since last spring.

In the fall, some of the strongest enrollment growth was among students from underrepresented groups, Christian added.

“Our Black students, our Latino students, students with disabilities, and students aged 35 and older,” she said.

Hundreds of educators who are part of the East Bay Coalition for Student Success are picketing Wednesday afternoon to advocate for student needs in about a dozen locations.

It’s the first time the coalition, comprised of 21 California Teachers Association (CTA) chapters, has held a coordinated picket, according to union officials. 

“It doesn’t have to come down to this, but several management teams from different districts are giving us no choice,” Celia Medina-Owen, president of the Pittsburg Education Association, said in a statement. “Together, we are saying loud and clear that bad behavior will not be tolerated in our communities.”

Educators, students, and families are rallying at nearly a dozen locations from 3:30 to 5 p.m., CTA officials said. 

The Association of Pleasanton Teachers and the Dublin Teachers Association, picketing at Dublin Sports Goods, are both soon entering fact-finding — the last step in bargaining before leadership in local chapters can legally call an economic strike.

Other East Bay union locals that are rallying aren’t far behind Pleasanton and Dublin, including Antioch Education Association, Pittsburg Education Association, Contra Costa County Schools Education Association, Clayton Valley Education Association, Martinez Education Association, Association of Piedmont Teachers and Moraga Teachers Association.

“Chapters are also considering Unfair Labor Practice strikes depending on management’s actions through these processes,” union officials said in a statement. “Management from various districts are putting up barriers to reaching negotiated agreements, which means that many chapters may be strike legal at the same time.”

Chronic student absenteeism has spiked in the wake of the pandemic but there is another problem that has also left some school districts in the lurch: Teachers across the country are also missing more school, as the New York Times reported. 

Over the 2022-23 school year in New York City, nearly 1 in 5 public school teachers were absent 11 days or more, up from the previous year. In Michigan, roughly 15% of teachers were absent in any given week last school year, compared with about 10% in 2019, researchers found.

Teacher absences led a school in Ohio to close for a day and left high school students in Massachusetts to gather in the cafeteria during class time with little supervision. 

“The proof in the pudding is how many people have exhausted their leave and are asking to take days off that are unpaid,” said Jim Fry, the superintendent in College Place, a small district in southern Washington state, the Times reported. “That used to be a really rare occurrence. Now it is weekly.”

Research shows that a large number of teacher absences can have a negative impact on student learning, which has already been hit hard by pandemic disruptions.

Certainly, employees in many professions have been taking more sick days since the pandemic. Women, the majority of the teaching work force, may also be juggling child care, as children stay home from school or from day care more frequently. Mothers are 10 times as likely as fathers to take time off work to care for a sick child.

Most American students are struggling in math, as The 74 reports. Sixty-five percent of fourth graders scored “below basic” or “basic” in math on the most recent NAEP test, and nearly three-quarters of eighth graders scored the same. That means that the majority of students have only a partial understanding of math and the skills key to proficiency, not to mention college readiness.

Math disabilities, present in about 7% of students, get less attention than reading disabilities and often go undiagnosed. Meanwhile, students may not have a disability but are still working below grade level. 

However, while the majority of schools across the country have strategies to help students learn to read, fewer offer the same help for math, as The 74 reports.  Nearly 50% of schools have trained literacy specialists, while only 23% have numeracy specialists.

Student athletes, once considered amateurs, now have the opportunity to profit from their name and likeness. A new class at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is helping them to navigate the market.

“It’s a senior-level marketing class that serves as an internal sports agency to support their student-athlete peers and also get the local community to help facilitate opportunities,” said Randy Rovegno, a professor in the Orfalea College of Business at the university.

Rovegno, who was vice president of marketing at Fox Sports and CBS and owns Longboard Marketing, launched the Athlete Lab last fall after he began teaching at the university.

The class has found work for several Cal Poly athletes including Aidan McCarthy, a record-breaking Mustangs track star, who is promoting a local food delivery business, according to the university.

“It’s all scale,” Rovegno said. “Here we’re working for product, trade or cash. And it allows them to get their profile up, it gives them some swag, and they’re out there in the community — so if someone sees them doing a promotion, they might think, ‘I want to hire that person.’ ”

A new school safety plan at Willow Glen High School in San Jose has increased attendance and resulted in fewer students who are tardy to class and more students on track to graduate, according to the San Jose Spotlight.

The school site council adopted the safety plan after a series of  incidents in San Jose Unified schools last year, including the arrest of a student who came on the Willow Glen campus with a loaded gun and knife. Earlier last year, a student at Herbert Hoover Middle School was found with a loaded firearm, and a student from Abraham Lincoln High School was arrested for making threats on social media to shoot classmates with an assault rifle, according to the news article.

The Willow Glen safety plan calls for students to be supervised at all times, removes gaps in students’ schedules, requires passes for students to leave classes and requires parents to check students out of school if they need to leave. Administrators patrol the campus and check security cameras often.

Since the safety plan was put in place, attendance has increased 22.4%, tardiness has decreased 56%, and the number of seniors on track to graduate has increased by 33%, according to the council.

California State University faculty members voted in favor of a new agreement with the nation’s largest public university system.

After eight months and two strikes, 76% of California Faculty Association members, which represents about 29,000 professors and lecturers, voted in favor of an agreement that would provide two salary increases totaling more than a 10% raise for all faculty in the next six months. Voting on the agreement started last week and ended Sunday.

CSU trustees must approve the agreement, which is expected to happen at their next meeting in March.

“We will continue advocating against management’s self-defeating austerity policies, affordability and access for students, and combatting anti-Black racism to create campuses that serve all of us,” said Sharon Elise, a CFA associate vice president of racial and social justice and a CSU San Marcos professor. “We know that some members had strong concerns about the process and questions about the result. We will only be successful if we’re working together to continue building a CSU that empowers students and provides work environments that support faculty and staff.”

Under a plan proposed by the Biden administration, to determine student loan relief, the Education Department would consider the life challenges preventing borrowers from paying down their debt, USA Today reported. 

Specifically, the federal government would consider whether a borrower has a disability or other “high-cost burdens for essential expenses,” such as costs for health care or care of a loved one, according to USA Today. 

Household income, assets and age would also be a part of that consideration. 

The proposal would automatically bring student loan relief to those who are highly likely to be in default in two years, which could be at least hundreds of thousands of borrowers, USA Today reported. The exact number is unknown. 

“Upon enacting this proposal, federal policy will finally recognize what Americans from all walks of life have known for decades — too often, higher education does not deliver on its promise of economic mobility and financial stability, and borrowers and their families should not be sentenced to a lifetime of debt as a result,” Persis Yu, the deputy executive director at the Student Borrower Protection Center, told USA Today in a statement.

In an effort to address bias and racism in the school district, Pacific Grove Unified is partnering with community-based organizations to provide cultural proficiency and incident response training for district and school administrators, the Monterey Herald reported. 

The National Coalition Building Institute and the Black Leaders and Allies Collaborative will develop a program of professional development training, the Herald reported. 

“Through this framework building, we’re going to have very clear expectations on what will happen when an incident of bias occurs,” Buck Roggeman, the district’s director of curriculum and special projects, told the district’s school board. “Currently that’s one of the things that is missing in our schools.” 

According to the Herald, the school board directed staff to include community partners and focus on diversity training in its professional development after the Monterey County chapter of the NAACP said students in the district were enduring “racial trauma.” Also, feedback from the community informed the district that it had no reporting system for families who have experienced or witnessed racist incidents within the district.

“The end product of this combined effort will be a consistent framework for preventing and responding to bias incidents in our schools,” the district said.

The state’s corrections oversight board, the Board of State and Community Corrections, has once again deemed Los Angeles County juvenile detention facilities “unsuitable for the confinement of juveniles.”

The two facilities are the Secure Youth Track Facility, referred to as SYTF, at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar and Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey.

During site inspections made by board inspectors over the last year, it was found that youth were routinely late to class and missing instruction time, that the county’s probation department did not meet the minimum staffing levels in the facilities, and that there was inconsistent availability of recreational and rehabilitation programs. Inspectors also found a lack of complete fire safety plans, safety checks within required timeframes, room confinement documentation, trainings among all probation staff regarding use of force, and more.

Nidorf’s SYTF is a unit for youth adjudicated for serious crimes such as assault and homicide. This unit remained opened at Nidorf as the state board did not have oversight power it, even as they found the rest of the facility “unsuitable for the confinement of minors” due to compliance issues and shut down other units in May 2023.

Youth detained at the shuttered units and at Central Juvenile Hall, which was also deemed unsuitable at that time, were transferred to Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall. That facility had been previously shut down in 2019 after abuse allegations.

But many of the same issues with non-compliance that led to the previous closures quickly surfaced at Los Padrinos, plus accounts of high levels of violence, drug abuse, and an escape attempt, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.

For hours on Thursday, the state board listened and posed questions to L.A. County probation leadership who noted the ways in which they’d made progress toward compliance. But the board ultimately decided that the state’s largest county had failed to reach compliance.

“I’m literally at a loss for words,” Linda Penner, the board’s chair, said during the meeting. “It seems to me that at the 12th hour you’ve come in with what you believe is documentation of compliance in many of the areas that we found you out of compliance with. And I struggle with that because we’ve been here before.”

With more than a dozen new co-sponsors announced on Thursday, a bill to expand protections to children online has a clear path to passing through the Senate, The Washington Post reported.

The Kids Online Safety Act was first introduced in 2022 and if passed would be the most “significant congressional attempt in decades to regulate tech companies,” according to The Post. Senators announced the bill has more than 60 backers as of Thursday.

The bill would require companies to prevent their products from endangering kids, The Post reported, such as design features that could worsen depression, harassment, bullying, sexual exploitation, and others. The most protective privacy and safety settings would have to be enabled on platforms by default for children and guardians would be offered greater tools to monitor their kids’ activity.

The newest version of the bill was also updated to ease the concerns of human-rights groups that it would prevent free speech and be weaponized to target LGBT youths, according to The Post. 

Although learning loss over the pandemic has affected many California students, Latino and low-income students in rural districts are even further behind, according to a recent analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California. 

Math and English proficiency fell for students in both urban and rural school districts, data from the Policy Institute shows. But overall, learning losses were bigger for low-income students and Latino students in urban areas than in rural areas in both math and English. 

Average math proficiency also improved at a slightly lower rate for urban and rural districts than the rest of the state, the analysis said. 

“This urban-rural divide is puzzling, but consistent with national findings,” researchers said in the analysis. “It is not entirely clear what may contribute to the divide; it may be a consequence of staff shortages and urban districts reopening much later than rural districts.”

Urban districts fell further behind in math while rural districts lost more in reading between 2019 and 2022, according to data. Average math proficiency fell by 6.2 percentage points in 2022 for urban districts and dropped by 5.6 percentage points among rural ones. 

Rural districts saw a larger drop in English, data shows, with the average proficiency falling by nearly 5 percentage points – one percentage point higher than in urban districts.

Low-income students saw a smaller decline in reading proficiency in both urban and rural districts, the analysis said. Both low-income and Latino students had larger drops in math proficiency compared to the overall student population in each area.

To look at data by district go here.

Approximately half of community college students who stopped attending school cited having to work as a major reason, according to a new survey commissioned by the think tank New America.

The 2023 survey found that 49% of stopouts cited work as a major reason — an increase from 42% the previous year. Other financial reasons were heavily cited by respondents: 31% said they could no longer afford a program and 24% cited inflation.

Community college enrollment has rebounded, but many current or former students struggle to stay enrolled because of the financial hardships they have faced. New America writes, “in order to regain the level of enrollment seen before the pandemic, community colleges must do more to support their students.”

From November through December, Lake Research Partners surveyed 1,242 current or former community college students, including 598 “stop-outs” who were no longer enrolled in college this fall.

About three in four stopouts said they experienced four or more hardships, including going hungry, getting threatened with foreclosure or eviction or not having health insurance.

Stopouts were increasingly likely to experience financial hardship: 60% said they have fallen behind on paying important bills, up from 49% in 2022. Most stopouts (58%) applied for public benefits, and 48% skipped meals because they did not have enough food.

Fewer stopouts than in years prior plan to reenroll: 36% said it’s very likely, compared to 42% in 2022.

Stopouts said they would be more likely to reenroll with free tuition (54%), free textbooks and course materials (44%) and more institutional support (39%).

California ranks among the top five states with the least affordable child care in a national survey. Some local officials say Santa Clara County may be even worse, as San José Spotlight reports.

California ranked third, second and fifth for least affordable nanny care, babysitting and infant day care in 2023, based on a national survey of 2,000 parents with children under age 14 conducted by Care.com. On average, Californians shelled out $890 for a nanny, $197 for a babysitter and $304 for infant day care per week. States with the most affordable child care include Oklahoma, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Child care in techie Silicon Valley is even costlier, with the average annual cost of infant child care at $26,830 or roughly $516 weekly, and $20,500 or roughly $394 weekly for preschoolers in 2022, according to the 2023 Joint Venture Silicon Valley Index. 

Heidi Emberling, executive of community impact at FIRST 5 Santa Clara County, a child advocacy group, said families often pay 40% or more of their income on child care, far above the 7% the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services defines as affordable. 

“Child care provides the solid foundation for all other sectors of the economy,” said Emberling, as San José Spotlight reports. “Without access to child care, working families cannot go to work in any sector.”

Experts argue that the status quo for in-service teachers, low-stakes assessments and rigid salary schedules, must change to improve student outcomes, as the 74 reports. 

In general, teacher compensation hues to single-salary schedules that structure pay according to years of experience and qualifications (such as a graduate degree) that do not predict teacher effectiveness. This approach has origins in efforts to eliminate overt discrimination and capriciousness in teacher pay but critics allege that this inflexibility has led to low and undifferentiated salaries that do little to attract, motivate, and retain the most-effective teachers while ushering the least-effective teachers out of the classroom.

Furthermore, this approach to pay is coupled with low-stakes, “drive-by” teacher evaluations that capture little of the variation in teacher performance and do not provide reliable guidance for professional learning.

Several states and districts have experimented with providing teachers with extra pay and career-ladder recognition for merit but these reforms have tended to be short-lived despite encouraging results, as the 74 reports. 

Chronic absenteeism has spiked since the pandemic, with more than one out of four students missing at least 18 days of school a year. An even higher percentage of poor students, more than one out of three, are chronically absent, as the Hechinger Report noted.

Indeed, Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, argues that chronic absenteeism, and not learning loss, is “the greatest challenge for public schools.” 

“It’s the primary problem because until we do something about that,” he said, as the Hechinger Report noted, “academic recovery from the pandemic, which is significant, is a pipe dream.” 

Common approaches to combating absenteeism, such as calling home and writing letters, may well be more effective with higher-income families, experts say. They are more likely to have the resources to follow through with counseling or tutoring, for example, and help their child return to school. 

Low-income families, however, may have problems that require help schools cannot provide. Many families need housing, food, employment, healthcare, transportation or help with laundry. That requires deep partnerships with community organizations and social service agencies. 

After hearing from nearly a dozen candidates to replace former board member Danny Gonzalez who resigned in December, the Temecula Valley Unified School District school board failed to reach a decision at Tuesday’s meeting and, instead, voted to pursue an election.

In December, as calls for improved governance rang, the board opted to move forward with an appointment process in hopes of avoiding an election. Each candidate was given the opportunity to speak for 15 minutes — during which they gave a two-minute opening statement and answered a series of five questions from the board.

Before the public interviews, each candidate also had to submit information on their academic and professional background, along with responses to 14 written questions.

The candidates included Suzette Jacobsen, Cole Everi Mann, Danny Shaw, Emil Barham, Angela Talarzyk, Martin Bermudez, Cynthia Allen, Gary Oddi, Aaron Hoover, Andrew Letona and Susan Evans. 

Roughly two-thirds of California’s early educators are women of color, yet a new report from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at UC Berkeley shows that racial and ethnic inequities impact how much early educators are paid.

This bracing new report draws from a 2020 statewide survey of 7,500 California early educators, providing details on disparities in wages, leadership roles and education.

“The people of color who care for and teach California’s youngest learners are losing out, simply because of their race or ethnicity,” said Yoonjeon Kim, lead research analyst at CSCCE. “The lack of state policy helped to create these inequities, but policymakers can change that with standards that take individual biases out of decision making,” she said. “For example, the state’s new rate reform methodology should build in equitable salary standards that are tied to an equitable career ladder.”

The report finds that while the child care sector is poorly paid as a whole, Black and Latina educators are paid less than Asian and white educators. Also, Black educators are overrepresented in the home-based provider sector, which often faces the most acute financial stress. Black lead teachers earn $6,000 a year less than Asian lead teachers, for example.

The analysis also found that white educators are more likely to serve in leadership roles and are consistently paid higher wages, regardless of education level. 

San Francisco could become the site of a historically Black satellite campus.

The San Francisco Human Rights Commission met with local university leaders and HBCU administrators recently to explore the possibility of establishing a satellite campus in the Bay Area city, according to Inside Higher Education.

Because HBCUs must be established prior to 1964, an entirely new campus cannot be established.

Representatives from Morris Brown College and Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Tuskegee University in Alabama and Howard University in Washington, D.C. attended. Representatives from Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a historically Black graduate school in Los Angeles, also attended, according to the article.

The commission expects some financial support from the Dream Keeper Initiative, a citywide initiative to invest $60 million a year into Black communities, according to Inside Higher Education.

A police investigation is ongoing after four homicides in southeast Los Angeles County between late Sunday and early Monday, including two outside L.A. Unified schools: Martha Escutia Primary Center in Bell and Ellen Ochoa Learning Center in Cudahy.

In a statement shared Monday, the district said the shootings were “a non-school incident and our school community is safe.”

At Martha Escutia, the campus remained closed on Monday and students were rerouted to nearby Corona Avenue Elementary School, where mental health services were offered, according to the Los Angeles Times.

At Ellen Ochoa, the body of one of the victims fatally shot, 14-year-old Javier Pedraza Jr., remained on the ground covered by a black tent as the school opened Monday. Students entering the school were routed to an entrance away from the crime scene.

But parents were alarmed that they learned of the fatal shootings as their children were dropped off at school on Monday, with some calling for schools to be closed until further information is known or a suspect is in custody.

“There was really no alert to the parents. When it’s raining, we get alerts right away, but for a body, we didn’t really hear anything until 8 o’clock in the morning,” parent Karla Lopez told a KTLA 5 reporter.

The homicides occurred within a three-hour timespan across 5 miles between four different cities — Bell, Cudahy, Huntington Park and Florence-Firestone. Such concentrated gun violence across the area is unusual. Authorities said the shootings are likely unrelated to each other, but further information, including information on a suspect, remains unclear.

A GoFundMe fundraiser began circulating late Monday for Pedraza’s funeral services.

Legislation introduced last week would make kindergarten mandatory for all California children.

Assembly bill 2226, introduced by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, would require parents to send their children to school for one year of kindergarten before they attend first grade. The legislation would go into effect in the 2026-27 school year.

Senator Susan Rubio also has introduced a similar piece of legislation – Senate Bill 1056.

“As a public school teacher for over 17 years, I have witnessed firsthand the detrimental impact on young students who miss out on fundamental early education,” Rubio said. “The voluntary participation for kindergarten leaves students unprepared for the educational environment they will encounter in elementary school.”

Research shows that the majority of students who are not enrolled in kindergarten are Latino, creating an equity issue and worsening the achievement gap, Rubio said.

Currently, kindergarten is not mandatory in California, despite the fact it is considered a grade level and is included in academic content standards and curriculum frameworks. Instead, children must be enrolled in school at age 6.

“Kindergarten is a fundamental piece of early learning,” said Meredith Yeh, co-president of the California Kindergarten Association.  “As California expands transitional kindergarten and other preschool opportunities, kindergarten becomes more important than ever in making sure all kids enter first grade ready to succeed.”

A recently-reopened juvenile facility in Los Angeles County, Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, is facing possible shutdown when state regulators meet this Thursday to discuss ongoing, key compliance issues.

Since 2021, the Board of State and Community Corrections has found Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall and Central Juvenile Hall, two out of three juvenile halls in the county, “unsuitable for the confinement of minors,” with problems ranging from insufficient staffing to youth being confined for too long in their rooms to lack of proper training on the use-of-force policy.

Last May, the board voted to move 300 detained youth from those two juvenile halls to Los Padrinos, which had been shuttered since 2019 and was reopened specifically to help the L.A. County Probation Department address these compliance issues.

But many the same problems that shuttered the Barry J. Nidorf and Central are at Los Padrinos as well.

Just last month, state inspectors found that a significant number of staff that had been reassigned to the juvenile hall in order to increase staffing numbers were not showing up to work — even though many of the L.A. County Probation Department’s proposed solutions for the compliance issues hinge on staffing. In one example as to how this directly impacts youth, state inspectors found that detained youth were late to school 49% of the time.

The probation department must now address those failures with the board on Thursday. If Los Padrinos is shut down, it is unclear what the next steps will be for the several hundred youth currently detained there.

Homeless camps will have to be more than 500 feet from schools in California if newly introduced legislation becomes law.

Senate Bill 1011, introduced by Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, R-Santee, would prohibit homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools, open spaces and transit stops, according to the Los Angeles Times. The bill also would prohibit camping on the sidewalks when shelter beds are available.

People who violate the law could be charged with a misdemeanor or infraction.

The legislation would provide 72-hours notice before encampments are removed.