Jon and Sam Bastianelli looked on patiently as their oldest son, the “history buff,” examined the axes, shovels and old farming tools displayed in a blacksmith shop at the Coachella Valley History Museum.

His younger siblings crushed pumpkin seeds with a mortar and pestle in an exhibit honoring the Cahuilla tribe, the first inhabitants of the region. Then they all listened as a volunteer explained the inner workings of a washing machine from 1910.

This wasn’t just a quick detour during their family vacation. You could call it homeschooling, but home in this case is a customized Country Coach RV with a bunk room for the kids — and school is wherever they choose to go next.

The Bastianellis are among a growing number of families who don’t let having school-age children get in the way of seeing the U.S. — or even the world. These “roadschoolers” say their well-traveled kids are getting far more knowledge and real-life experience than they ever could from a book, a computer or even a typical classroom teacher.

“You get sights, sounds and smells — all the things your memory works on at the same time,” Jon said. Cultural visits like this one typically lead to a “rabbit hole of questions” later, Sam added.

Nine-year-old Jonathan Bastianelli listened as Roberta Jonnet, a docent at the Coachella Valley History Museum, explained how families in the early 1900s used a sign to indicate how much ice they needed for the icebox. (Linda Jacobson/The 74)

Led by remote workers who took social distancing to the extreme, RV sales soared during the height of the pandemic. But these buyers differed from the empty-nesters and retirees that long defined this subculture. The newbees are younger — by about 20 years — and more racially diverse. These mobile families include a mix of traditional homeschoolers and newcomers who pulled up stakes during COVID. In fact, with RV sales returning to pre-pandemic levels, industry leaders are counting on this budding customer base for future growth.

“This has always been an older generation, and now it’s become our generation,” said Christian Axness, 37, who left Sarasota, Florida, behind in 2017 with her husband and two children, 2 and 4 at the time. Last year, she co-founded Republic of Nomads with Stephanie Simpson, a former private school teacher from Indiana, where the majority of RVs are manufactured. They plan group outings like the museum visit so parents don’t have to do it on their own.

The Republic of Nomads held a “Noon Year’s Eve” party for kids on Dec. 31 at the Thousand Trails campground in Palm Desert, California (Republic of Nomads)

Over the past year, they’ve organized trips to the Black Hills of South Dakota to study Native American culture and to Bend, Oregon, to hike around the cinder cone of an ancient volcano where lava flowed a thousand years ago.

With a combined 18 years as “fulltimers” — as those who live out of their vehicles call themselves — Axness and Simpson negotiate reduced homeschooling rates for participants at national parks and museums. Some of their events are free, while a weeklong camping adventure under the stars might run around $300. In 2022, they rented an observatory in Joshua Tree where students talked to local astronomers. In January, they took off for Baja, California, to pack in Spanish lessons, oceanography and windsurfing.

“These are not just surface-level experiences,” Axness said, “but immersive events because of the nature of our lifestyles.”

While a non-stop road trip might sound lavish, it doesn’t have to be. Full-time RVers range from families who aim to live debt free to those who drive six-figure luxury vehicles. For many families, monthly living expenses are about the same as if they lived at home, said Tiffany Johnsrud, a mom of three from Dubuque, Iowa.

“We’re not spending money on soccer and softball,” she said. “We’re spending it on experiences.”

Tiffany Johnsrud showed her daughter, Lia, where their family would be traveling in Mexico as part of a Republic of Nomads gathering. (Linda Jacobson/The 74)

‘Lifestyle change’

The RV Industry Association started to pay more attention to roadschoolers in the fall of 2020, when more than half of the nation’s schools offered only remote learning. Its biannual survey showed that 45% of RVers were also educating children.

Drawing on this growing segment of the RV population, Fulltime Families, a membership organization, has a Facebook group for roadschoolers. And Kay Akpan, a Black roadschooling mom with a large Instagram following, founded a nonprofit and launched a Facebook page to connect Black families trading daily carpool lines for interstate rest areas. RV Industry Association data shows that among new buyers, 14% are Black, more than double the rate before COVID.

“There are people who are making more of this lifestyle change,” said Monika Geraci, spokeswoman for the association. “It’s not just a pandemic thing.”

When Dubuque schools shut down because of COVID, Johnsrud called it a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to tour the country. Fourteen-year-old Miley, the oldest kid in the family, was a bit skeptical.

“I thought it was a joke at first,” she said.

But their family of five had previously discussed moving into a tiny house, so getting one with wheels wasn’t a stretch.

Miley had no qualms about leaving. “I hated online school.” She said she learns more from books than virtual programs. But as a roadschooler, she gains much of her knowledge first hand.

The Johnsrud kids — Lia, Miley and Brady — have been “roadschooled” since 2020 when schools in Dubuque, Iowa, shut down for the pandemic. (Tiffany Johnsrud)

“I can tell you facts about the cities, what there is to do there and the campground names,” she said. Her favorite excursion so far was to Oregon, where she tried “cold plunging” in freezing rivers. “We’ve seen so many waterfalls. The forests they have are just really pretty.”

Other families took to the road long before COVID. Victor and Robyn Robledo ran a gymnastics studio near San Diego, but sensed that many of the parents and children they served were stressed out. In 2015, they escaped that world and moved into their 30-foot class C rig. The family traveled through Europe and the U.S. — hiking, skiing, blogging and nurturing an adventurous spirit in their five children, who at the time ranged from 3 to 14.

Robyn, who has always homeschooled, covers core subjects, but mostly takes a “free-flowing” approach to her children’s education. One son wanted to learn everything he could about dogs. Her more entrepreneurial daughter helps run their “adventure travel brand,” offering apparel, virtual coaching and wellness courses. The middle daughter is a charcoal artist and teaches a mindfulness class for kids.

“The big hurdle for me was overcoming this fear that if my child doesn’t do traditional curriculum, how will they get into college,” Robyn said. She said her two youngest, now 12 and 15, “can’t do algebra” — a missing skill that would alarm traditionalists. But she doesn’t care. What’s important to her is that they work as part of a team and develop communication and problem-solving skills. “The ability to learn is more important than what you’re learning.”

Others take a more conventional approach. Axness estimated that about half the students in Republic of Nomads are also enrolled in online public schools.

Erica Pickett, a former Hartford County, Maryland, elementary school teacher, “launched out” with her family in 2022. She purchased a literature-based curriculum for her son and twin daughters that features some of the same books she used as a teacher. But they’re also regulars of the National Park Service’s free Junior Ranger program, where students earn badges based on activities at the park or historical site they’re visiting.

“If I have to put them in public schools, I don’t want them to be blown out of the water,” she said. “I know for sure my kids aren’t missing anything.”

Erica Pickett’s twins Kinsley, left, and Adelyn completed a science project at the Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park. (Erica Pickett)

Leaving the road

Most roadschoolers say they periodically check in to see whether their children still prefer the itinerant lifestyle. Some make it obvious they’re ready for a change.

After trekking through the nation’s wide-open spaces for the past seven years, 11-year-old Eloise Ridley longed for the four walls of a traditional classroom. Her father, Kevin, persuaded her to spend another year traveling by offering a winter at Disney World. But last year, they permanently parked their RV and enrolled Eloise and her 7-year-old sister Eliza at Pagosa Elementary in southwest Colorado.

After years on the road, Eloise Ridley, right, convinced her parents to enroll her and her sister Eliza in a traditional public school. They entered a Colorado elementary school last fall. (Emma Ridley)

“We don’t run a totalitarian dictatorship,” Kevin joked. “We let them participate in the family decisions.”

Prior to ending their travels, The Ridleys didn’t just go from one campground to the next. They were “boondockers,” living off-grid and relying on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network to work online and connect their daughters to Florida Virtual School. Now the girls ride a school bus and bring classmates home for sleepovers.

For their parents, settling down was a sacrifice. They were “ambassadors” for Republic of Nomads and hosted an event for a couple dozen families in Baja last winter.

“Would Kevin and I rather be sitting on a beach right now? Probably,” said Emma. “But our kids come home everyday with big smiles on their faces.”

The Ridleys spent a lot of time “boondocking” instead of staying in campgrounds. (Emma Ridley)

Others who left the road behind said it took just a few months before RV living — and the friendships they’d formed — called them back.

Those tight bonds were apparent on a recent evening at the Thousand Trails campground just off I-10 in Palm Springs. In a large clubhouse, several Republic of Nomad families gathered for a pre-Thanksgiving potluck. Parents sampled vegetable side dishes and pumpkin pie while children chased each other, played dominoes and jumped in the pool.

Many of these families travel together, creating a community of friends that’s not unlike what their children would enjoy in a normal neighborhood. Miley, the Iowa ninth-grader, also earns money babysitting and tutoring younger children from another family.

Charlotte Bastianelli and Brady Johnsrud checked out the 1909 schoolhouse at the Coachella Valley History Museum. (Linda Jacobson/The 74)

She’s still in touch with friends back home, but isn’t longing to return. Unless you count the one-room schoolhouse from 1909 at the Coachella museum, she and her siblings haven’t been in a traditional classroom since 2020. She even has plans to “move out” into her own van at 18 and keep traveling. She marveled at how much of the country she’s seen in four years.

“Until fifth grade,” she said, “I didn’t know there was any other state than Iowa.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

White House Domestic Policy Adviser Neera Tanden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona led Wednesday’s event on President Joe Biden’s agenda for improving student achievement. (U.S. Department of Education)

The Biden administration received high marks for elevating key strategies to help students rebound from pandemic learning loss — addressing chronic absenteeism, offering high-impact tutoring and extending learning afterschool and during the summer.

“These three strategies have one central goal — giving students more time and more support to succeed,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Wednesday at a White House gathering to outline the president’s K-12 agenda. “We’ll use all the tools at our disposal to advance these three pillars.”

The event, featuring three governors and three state chiefs, highlighted successful efforts to spend pandemic relief funds on proven models, like home visits in Connecticut to improve student attendance and the New Jersey Tutoring Corps that now reaches 245 of the state’s 600 districts. The administration aims to make sure more states and districts are implementing effective programs.

But some feel there was scant attention to the role of families in such efforts.

“Amidst all the happy talk, there was no mention that far too many families seem unconvinced that they need to send students to school regularly, or to engage in additional learning opportunities,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The “supply side” of the equation — offering extra opportunities for learning — won’t make any difference if parents don’t see the value, he said.

Since the pandemic, researchers have documented a disconnect between parents and educators over pandemic learning loss. A University of Southern California study released in December documented what some have called an “urgency gap,” with parents expressing little alarm over long-term effects of school closures.

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, said there are other reasons why students aren’t in class everyday or aren’t taking advantage of tutoring opportunities. Schools, she said, aren’t giving students enough reasons to be there.

“Kids are watching movies and listening to people read books on YouTube in the classroom,” she said. And studies conducted in the wake of the pandemic show schools are requiring less effort from students. “Grade inflation will get you a C without even showing up.”

An analysis of federal data from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University shows that roughly 14 million students were chronically absent during the 2021-22 school year, with significant increases among Latino students and those in suburban and rural districts.

The administration hopes to reverse those trends by encouraging more states to regularly track chronic absenteeism and plans to publish examples from districts using strategies such as text messages and home visits. The White House urged more states to include chronic absenteeism as an indicator in their state accountability plans. Currently, 14 states don’t, according to the department.

Officials also outlined ways to use the department’s existing accountability structure under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act to push research-based tutoring programs. A growing body of research points to models that connect students with the same tutor at least three times a week.

The department plans to monitor whether states with tutoring programs ensure that low-performing schools use high-dosage models. And the White House said states should target resources to districts where test scores still trail pre-COVID performance.

“My guess is they have seen states sign contracts for large-scale online homework help, which isn’t evidence-driven,” said Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, which last year awarded $1 million each to five states to support high-dosage tutoring.

To Phillip Lovell, associate executive director at All4Ed, a nonprofit advocacy group, Biden’s agenda signals a shift from using federal relief funds effectively to ensuring successful programs continue to reach students in the lowest-performing schools. While the department is offering states the chance to apply for an extension, the pandemic aid officially expires later this year.

“The reality is that it is going to take much longer than the amount of time states and districts have to spend [relief] dollars to recover academically,” Lovell said.

The White House said it plans to run grant competitions supporting a long list of programs — not just tutoring, but also afterschool programs, and math and literacy coaching for teachers. But funding those programs is still up to Congress, which has not yet reached agreement on the budget for this fiscal year.

Beyond monitoring districts’ use of Title I funds and promoting best practices, the administration was unclear about what other “tools” it might use to get districts to implement evidence-based programs. But some state leaders wish the department could do more to hold districts accountable.

“I could use some help getting schools to really understand the value,” said New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grishamsaid, joining the event remotely. She said “far too many” districts in her state weren’t offering extended learning programs or high-dosage tutoring. “It has been harder than it ought to be to get everybody on the same page dedicated to improved outcomes and well-being for New Mexico students.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Last week, as leading education experts gathered — again —to ponder the nation’s sluggish recovery from pandemic learning loss, one speaker put the issue in stark relief. 

“This is the biggest problem facing America,” Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor, said flatly. Nonetheless, he told those assembled at the Washington, D.C., event sponsored by the Aspen Institute, a think tank, “We do not have our hair on fire the way it needs to be.”

That disconnect is the subject of a new paper released Monday that further explores what many have labeled an “urgency gap.” To pinpoint the extent of the gap, the authors talked to parents about the signals they’re getting from teachers and schools about their children’s progress. Parents expressed little concern about lasting damage from the pandemic and typically thought their children were doing well in school — a view that researchers say is belied by dismal state and national test scores. 

The issue is “genuinely vexing,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate education professor at the University of Southern California and the paper’s lead author.  

“Parents are overwhelmingly getting the message from grades and teachers that kids are doing fine-to-great,” he said. He attributes that upbeat outlook to how little parents pay attention to standardized test scores — the “external measures” that matter most to researchers. “We just never heard anything about standardized tests from the folks we interviewed.”

The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed historic declines in math and flat performance in reading. According to this year’s spring test results, pandemic recovery remains elusive for some states. Several have continued to lose ground in reading and most have not surpassed pre-COVID performance in math. Last week’s release of international scores show U.S. students dropped 13 points in math between 2018 and 2022. 

Ludwig argues that U.S. students have made such little progress that the $190 billion Congress appropriated to address the COVID crisis is insufficient and lawmakers should find another $75 billion to fund high-dosage tutoring.  

“If we don’t remediate this pandemic learning loss, this cohort of 50 million kids will experience reduced lifetime earnings of something like $900 billion,” he said.

Those messages, however, don’t always get to parents. 

Given the gauntlet of tests schools administer, it’s easy for parents to get lost, said Meredith Dodson, executive director of San Francisco Parent Action, a group that advocated for schools to reopen and has recently pushed for improvements in the district’s reading program.

For many parents, “​​it’s hard to understand all the acronyms — this test versus that test, the state versus the national,” she said. “Parents just really want to trust their teachers. Is my kid on grade level or not?”

Even some parents who knew their children’s standardized test scores tended to put more stock in grades, Polikoff found. One parent interviewed for the study knew that a majority of students scored higher than her son on the NWEA MAP test in math. But, she said, “his knowledge is much greater than that” because he received a 3 on a scale of 1-3 on his report card, which “means they’ve achieved the mastery or whatever.” 

Researchers have documented a growing discrepancy  between grade point averages and standardized test scores, especially since the pandemic. One report from three organizations — EdNavigator, Learning Heroes and TNTP — showed an increase in B grades since the pandemic even among students who performed below grade level and were chronically absent.

‘Kids are not stupid’

Schools have also made it easier to do well, a vestige of pandemic-era incentives to get students to complete their work. Dan Goldhaber, director of the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research — and the father of two school-age children — said he’s increasingly “astounded” at how many chances students get to bring up their grades.

“Kids are not stupid,” he said. “They’re going to learn that, ‘No, I don’t need to study real hard for this test because I can just correct it after the fact.’”

It’s not a surprise, he added, that there’s been a lackluster response to some academic recovery efforts. A lot of districts have spent relief funds on less-effective remediation efforts, such as optional on-demand tutoring. And those companies typically get paid whether or not students improve or even use the service, according to a recent CALDER paper. 

In response to disappointing results, some states and districts have shifted course. A few have canceled agreements with large online tutoring companies. Some have turned to “outcomes-based” contracts — in which tutors earn more money for better results. But others are sticking with virtual providers. 

If districts are going to spend funds on tutoring, Goldhaber said, officials should “have some control over” which students receive the help and when it’s delivered.

He and Polikoff are among the experts urging educators to make test score data a much larger focus of their conversations with parents. And there’s some evidence that hard facts about students’ scores can be a wake-up call.

A November Gallup-Learning Heroes poll showed that among parents who knew their children were below grade level in math, improving those skills became their number one concern, more important than curbing the effects of social media and protecting them from bullies.

Being honest with parents starts at the top, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. 

“Superintendents should not say, ‘We’re chugging along. We’re going to get there.’ They should say this is a huge problem,” he said at the Aspen event. Teachers, he added, need “political cover” to tell parents their children are behind. “It’s the truth and we need to deliver it.” 

But the news doesn’t always go over well. When Precious Allen, who teaches second grade at Betty Shabazz Academy, a charter school in Chicago, showed parents test results that indicated their children were a year or more behind, she said they grew “flustered” and complained about doing extra review sheets with their children after work. 

It was tough, she said, for them to “wrap their minds around” the data. She shared passages from a book that explains where children should be for their age to help parents understand how the pandemic threw their kids off track. “I had to bring a lot of science and research into it because sometimes the voice of a teacher is not enough.”

‘Worst possible time’

But not all educators believe assessments provide valuable or reliable information. Polikoff sees the separation between parents and the nation’s education scholars as part of a larger anti-testing movement that started brewing long before the pandemic. The pandemic pause on state assessments and accountability sparked a renewed push to limit the number of tests and try different models.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, for example, is leading a 2024 ballot initiative to remove the state test as a graduation requirement, calling it “harmful.” The proposal drew sharp criticism from National Parents Association President Keri Rodrigues, whose organization trains parents to advocate for quality education.

“This is the dawn of a new era, where high school diplomas now become participation trophies,” she wrote in an op-ed. 

Testing critics complain that assessments take up too much instructional time and that the results rarely benefit teachers because they arrive after students have already moved on to the next grade. Others say high-stakes tests are racially biased against Black and Hispanic students. 

“There’s just very close to zero constituencies advocating for tests or that they matter,” Polikoff said. Republicans, he said, “want only unfettered choice” while the left is not defending the usefulness of tests “to ensure educational quality or equity.”

’The backlash against testing, he said, has come “at the worst possible time given the damage that’s actually been done.”

A new report finds that a parent-led tutoring effort in Oakland produced similar gains in reading for young students as instruction from classroom teachers — a nod that could fuel similar efforts in other districts. 

“The more the children know you and trust you, the more they’re willing to engage in what you’re trying to teach them,” said Susana Aguilar, one of The Oakland REACH’s “literacy liberators.” 

The evaluation, from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, calls community members “untapped pools of talent” in the effort to improve student achievement.

Oakland Unified’s model, said researcher and lead author Ashley Jochim, also has broader implications for how schools teach basic skills in reading and math. For too long, she said, one teacher has been responsible for modifying lessons to meet the needs of 25 or more students. 

“This model is clearly failing students and puts extraordinary demands on educators, especially coming out of the pandemic,” she said. “Oakland’s tutoring model shows what’s possible when we create the conditions needed to individualize instruction based on students’ learning needs.”

‘How far could they go?’ 

The Oakland REACH mobilized to improve literacy instruction before the pandemic and joined with the local NAACP to push the district to adopt a research-based reading program.

The group criticized the quality of remote learning during COVID. But then it created its own online “hub” to focus on structured reading skills and saw promising results. After five weeks of virtual summer learning, some students gained as much as they would from two months of in-person reading instruction, data showed. 

“We saw these big gains. You can’t ignore that,” said Lakisha Young, the organization’s CEO. “We had to ask, ‘What does this look like for a paraprofessional who is appropriately trained, trusted and coached? How far could they go?’ ”

The group expanded to serve students during the school year, and last year, received a significant boost from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, who donated $3 million to the organization. Its work, and its relationship with the district, has evolved, Young said, from “demanding to building.”

In statement to The 74, a district spokesman said its literacy efforts “have only been amplified and supported by partnering with a dedicated organization such as The Oakland REACH.”

As a bridge between the district and the predominantly Black and Hispanic community it serves, The Oakland REACH played a key role in finding a diverse mix of tutors that included a retired educator, a former security guard and several stay-at-home moms. 

“It’s personal to me because my daughter had to go through the process of long-distance learning,” Aguilar said in a video released with the report. “I completely relate to all the challenges that parents had.”

The prospective tutors completed an eight-week fellowship in which FluentSeeds, a nonprofit trainer, taught them how to implement the district’s phonics-based early reading curriculum. But their preparation — the topic of a separate report  — was carefully designed to address the challenges facing Black, Hispanic and lower-income job candidates who are juggling work and family life. The sessions included child care, meals, transportation and a $1,675 stipend.

The fellowship also gave tutors space to discuss personal experiences with literacy instruction — their own and their children’s.

“Their personal struggles,” according to the paper, “deepened their sense of commitment to students’ literacy needs.” 

In total, The Oakland REACH recruited 46 parents and other community members to tutor small groups of K-2 students who were reading below grade level. In a survey, about a third of the tutors said they felt somewhat or very unprepared to teach young children when they started, but grew more skilled with the help of ongoing coaching from FluentSeeds.

Aguilar now works at Manzanita Community School, where her daughter Aliah is in fourth grade. She described the school, which has a mostly low-income Black, Hispanic and Asian student population, as a “melting pot.”

“When you’re serving underprivileged communities,” she said, “kids are more receptive if they see people who look like them.” 

Uneven results, ‘budget challenges’ 

The program has made its greatest impact in kindergarten. From fall 2022 to spring 2023, tutored students gained nearly a full extra year of learning on the widely used iReady assessment, compared to those who did not receive tutoring, according to the report. But there was little to no difference in outcomes between tutored and non-tutored students in first and second grade.

Those results are not unique to Oakland. Another recent study on a virtual early literacy tutoring model called OnYourMark found minimal impact in second grade. The lack of growth could be due to a mismatch between tutoring and testing, said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University professor who leads a nationwide tutoring research center and conducted the OnYourMark research.

If tutors are focusing on skills that an assessment doesn’t measure, “we won’t see learning gains, even if they have them,” she said.

Overall, however, she described Oakland’s tutoring effort as a “proof point” that shows how well-trained community members with credibility among families “can meaningfully improve student learning.”

But there’s still room for improvement. Many tutors were drawn to the position because they care about Oakland students. But the current $16- to $18-per-hour pay rate is a barrier to recruiting more tutors and keeping them, Jochim wrote. 

Aguilar, a single mother, said that while being a tutor is “meaningful work,” it doesn’t pay enough to replace the salary she used to make at her previous human resources job in  Silicon Valley. She makes ends meet by delivering groceries for Instacart and recruiting students for a local college.

The district’s “ongoing budget challenges” make the tutoring initiative a “promising, yet still-fragile set of reforms,” Jochim wrote. In March, the board considered cutting the positions, but rejected the plan. The district has relied on federal relief funds to help pay the tutors and is “working out funding for these important positions” once those funds expire next year, a spokesman said.

The recent results should prompt Oakland to stop funding “less effective approaches” to tutoring and invest in what works, Loeb said. “This model is a good example of how community groups can provide these resources.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to The Oakland REACH and LA School Report’s parent company, The 74.

The latest federal civil rights data confirmed Black and Hispanic students’ inequitable access to STEM courses. The Los Angeles Unified School District has tried to make up the gap by offering college classes in partnership with the National Education Equity Lab. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

About 2.9 million high school students took at least one Advanced Placement course in the 2020-21 school year, according to the latest federal data measuring access to educational opportunity. But Black and Latino students were significantly underrepresented in those college-level math and science courses.

And schools in which at least 75% of students are Black and Latino offer fewer math, science and computer science courses than those with a low-minority population.

Those are among the racial disparities noted Wednesday in the Civil Rights Data Collection — the first released since 2017-18. Considering the data was collected when the vast majority of districts offered only virtual or hybrid learning, officials cautioned against making direct comparisons to previous years. But they also noted that among the many topics covered in the survey, including suspension rates, sexual harassment and school staffing data, course-taking trends might be less affected by the pandemic.

“Sadly, the inequities that have long persisted in our education system are on full display,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, noting the department’s efforts to expand access to STEM learning through partnerships with NASA, nonprofits and the private sector. “We spent years fighting COVID; now we must fight complacency.”

About 35% of schools with high enrollments of Black and Latino students offered calculus, compared to 54% of schools with low enrollments of Black and Latino students, according to civil rights data focusing on the 2020-21 school year. (U.S. Department of Education) 

COVID disrupted all aspects of the U.S. education system, and that includes federal efforts to measure how schools are protecting students’ civil rights. Officials canceled the 2019-20 survey and moved it to the following year, without knowing how COVID would continue to upend normal school operations. Many U.S. schools did not return to in-person learning full time until the 2021-22 school year. Prior to that, steep declines in areas such as out-of-school suspension or the use of corporal punishment are likely because many students were learning at home — not because schools stopped disciplining students.

That doesn’t mean the data isn’t useful for examining gaps based on race and disability. Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon called the release “crucial civil rights data specific to students’ pandemic experience.” Others agreed that the data will help the nation better understand how the pandemic exacerbated inequities for vulnerable students.

“It won’t be an apples-to-apples comparison,” said David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “At the same time, the whole intent behind the collection of this data is for schools, communities and civil rights enforcement agencies to identify and correct any civil rights disparities.”

‘Discipline looked very different’

As the primary source of information on school discipline, the survey shows that despite school closures, students missed more than 2 million days of school due to out-of-school suspensions during the 2020-21 school year.

Black boys were suspended at higher rates than boys of other races — a longstanding disparity. Black boys represented 8% of the total K-12 population but 18% of those that received one or more out-of-school suspensions. Black girls represented 7% of student enrollment, but accounted for 9% of students with one or more out-of-school suspensions. White girls made up 22% of the student population, but represented 13% of out-of-school suspensions.

This data was especially impacted by remote learning, noted Nancy Duchesneau, a senior P-12 research associate at EdTrust, an advocacy organization that focuses on educational equity.

“Exclusionary discipline looked very different during virtual learning,” she said. “Students were locked out of accounts, or removed from virtual learning environments, without official suspensions or expulsions. These instances of unofficial exclusionary discipline will not be reflected in the data.”

Despite 2020-21 being an unusual school year, districts still referred 61,900 students to law enforcement, which officials described as alarming, and 19,400 students received corporal punishment. Earlier this year, the department issued guidance urging schools to replace physical punishment with other methods.

The department also collected 2021-22 data and next month, districts can begin to submit responses for the current 2023-24 school year, putting the program back on its regular biennial schedule.

The 2020-21 findings confirm what some researchers captured during the pandemic — the decline in preschool enrollment, for example. In 2017-18, 1.4 million children attended a school district preschool program, but that dropped to 1.2 million, according to the latest data.

“People did not equitably have access to the internet,” Hinojosa said, “and they weren’t going to have their 4-year-old in front of the screen where they couldn’t learn.”

The survey, for the first time, included questions about students’ access to the internet and devices. Ninety-three percent of schools offer high-speed internet, and there’s little variation between high-minority and low-minority schools. But there were state-level differences.

For the first time, the Civil Rights Data Collection asked districts about students’ in-school internet access. (U.S. Department of Education)

Students in Alaska have the least access, where 59% of schools reported a high-speed connection, followed by Florida with 66%. Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia all reported 99% or more.

While most of the questions focused on in-school availability, the survey also showed that 87% of schools allowed students to take home devices.

Along with a series of national snapshots, the department also launched a new website with access to state and local data. That will allow for comparisons between states and districts that had different rates of in-person learning and home internet access, said Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, president and CEO of the nonprofit Data Quality Campaign.

“We need this data even if it’s not as clear or clean as we might want,” she said. But she added, “It’s almost like a new baseline.”

Other top takeaways from the results are:

• Black students made up 15% of the total high school enrollment, but represented 6% of students enrolled in an AP math course. Latino students represented 27% of high school students, but 19% of those in AP math.

• Boys were more likely than girls to take Algebra I, physics and computer science. But girls had higher enrollment rates than boys in Algebra II, advanced math classes, biology and chemistry.

• White and Asian high schoolers were overrepresented in college dual enrollment courses, while Black and Hispanic students, English learners and students with disabilities were underrepresented.

• American Indian or Alaska Native students were 3.4 times more likely than white students to attend a school with a police officer or security guard, but without a school counselor, social worker, nurse or psychologist.

• There were 20,800 students disciplined for sex-based bullying or harassment in the 2020-21 schools year. White boys made up 24% of the total K-12 student enrollment but accounted for almost half of those disciplined for harassment or bullying on the basis of sex.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Roberta Campbell, a substitute in the Henry County district, worked with a small group of elementary school students. (Henry County Schools)

Post-pandemic staffing challenges have eased up slightly this fall, but many school leaders report that they still have crucial vacancies to fill.

The latest federal data on the public education workforce, released Tuesday, shows 45% of leaders said they were understaffed as the new school year began. That’s down from just over half last year. But the vast majority of schools say they’re still struggling to hire enough teachers and other staff, including classroom aides, bus drivers and mental health professionals.

In the latest results from the School Pulse Panel — a National Center for Education Statistics survey — over 1,300 administrators reported having the hardest time hiring enough elementary and special education teachers as well as classroom aides and custodial staff.

National Center for Education Statistics

“You used to have thousands of applicants for every one vacancy. You don’t have that anymore,” said Mary Elizabeth Davis, superintendent of the Henry County Schools, outside Atlanta. Her team tried to attract candidates this year at local fairs, festivals and civic events, but still has about 100 vacancies districtwide. “We actually had recruiting tables at our high school graduations.”

While conditions vary from district to district, the overall uptick in teacher turnover since the pandemic has forced district and school leaders to rely on substitutes, contract with virtual teaching companies and offer attractive incentives to lure new hires. Meanwhile, temporary federal relief funds offered the chance to create new positions to help with academic recovery efforts, but there haven’t always been enough candidates to fill those roles. Whether job seekers are leaving for other districts or finding positions outside of education, they clearly have the upper hand in this current market.

“It is harder to hire than it was pre-pandemic,” said Chad Aldeman, a researcher who focuses on the teacher job market. “The labor force participation rate is really high, unemployment is really low and basically anyone of working age who wants a job can find it.”

Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirms that what many have called a crisis in teacher employment is slightly less severe this year. Compared to last fall, there’s a 2% increase in the number of public school employees — or about 150,000 more. But districts have to work harder to win over those sought-after candidates and get creative when they can’t.

To fill the gaps, the Henry district has hired more teachers from overseas and attracted 25 new college graduates through a “retention scholarship.” In exchange for a two-year commitment, the district covers the cost of their teaching credential program.

Henry has also joined the growing number of districts across the country using virtual teaching companies. While a substitute or aide supervises students in the classroom, licensed teachers provide instruction remotely — sometimes from several states away. Davis tells parents the remote arrangement is far better than using a substitute. Without it, she added, their children might not be able to take Spanish III or A.P. Calculus.

“This is what kids are going to need to be able to do in college, so we actually see this as a good thing,” she said.

‘Double-edged sword’

Even districts with traditionally stable workforces have had to take unusual measures to ensure students have teachers. The 5,600-student Rush-Henrietta Central School District, south of Rochester, New York, typically loses no more than five teachers a year. This past summer, Superintendent Barbara Mullen saw 28 leave, mostly to neighboring districts that offer more money. She organized a job fair — something the district has never had to do.

“We issued a press release. I went on the news,” she said. “People were walking in off the street.”

When that effort only filled 12 positions, she gave educators an unexpected pay raise — a minimum of $1,600 for veteran teachers and up to $5,000 for newer teachers. Non-teaching staff also received raises. With federal relief funds expiring next year, she said staff members recognize there could be leaner years ahead.

“I needed to send a strategic message that compensation is important and working conditions are important,” she said.

Like many districts, Rush-Henrietta uses a grow-your-own approach to address staff shortages. Parents can work as interns in the district’s Cub Care Zone afterschool program and then take the exam to become a teaching assistant.

National Center for Education Statistics

Other districts offer an accelerated route to a teaching job to classroom aides, professionals changing careers and even those without four-year degrees. States were relaxing teacher training requirements long before the pandemic, but have expanded those policies to address the current emergency.

But such actions can also leave holes to fill.

Kimberly Winterbottom, principal of Marley Middle School in Glen Burnie, Maryland, said her state offers so many new pathways to become a teacher that it can be harder to find candidates still willing to work as substitutes and classroom assistants — the staff members schools have been relying on to give students extra support.

“It’s like a double-edged sword,” she said.

Larry Ascione, assistant principal at Marley Middle School in Maryland, welcomed Andrea Del Rio, a career-changer-turned Spanish teacher at an ice cream social for new employees. (Courtesy of Kimberly Winterbottom)

Her school had 35 open positions this year. She was able to fill them, but candidates, she said, weighed offers between multiple districts and have grown choosy about which grade levels they want to teach.

“The candidate holds the cards,” she said.

As the numbers show, however, leaders say this fall feels like more of a return to earlier years when it was tough to find teachers in areas such as science and special education, but shortages didn’t overwhelm the system. In several cases last year, districts even had to close some schools because there weren’t enough teachers.

Davis, in Henry County, said one sign of progress is that 89% of substitute positions have been filled this fall, compared to 40% last year.

“Part of the retention challenge was exhaustion. People were doing multiple people’s jobs,” she said. “We’ve not arrived, but we’re on a path to people being able to do their job most of the day and to start feeling effective at it. That will turn the corner for us.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Westcliffe Elementary was among the first schools in South Carolina to revamp its reading program. The state is now offering the same training to all K-3 teachers. (Westcliffe Elementary School)

In 2019, Westcliffe Elementary in Greenville, South Carolina, got troubling news: It was one of 265 schools in the state where more than a third of third graders failed to meet literacy standards.

Then the pandemic hit and “there were bigger fish to fry,” said Principal Beth Farmer.

But the state had a plan.

Teachers in those schools would receive two years of training in what’s known as the science of reading and use a new curriculum with explicit phonics instruction. Farmer has already seen the payoff: Seventy-five percent of third graders met the goal this year, with similar improvement in fourth and fifth grades.

“What appeared to be some penalty … has ended up being a gift,” she said.

The progress sunk in when she recently talked to a student after a quiz. “She said, ‘I was reading 14 words per minute, and now I can read 43 words per minute.’ When a kid can verbalize that to you, that’s real impact.”

Greenville, with roughly 77,000 students, is South Carolina’s largest district, so the results figure significantly into the state’s overall average. Fifty-four percent of third through eighth graders statewide scored proficient or above this year in English language arts — a big jump from the 45% of students at that level in 2019.

While most states remain behind, South Carolina and three others — Iowa, Mississippi and Tennessee — are recovering from or exceeding COVID-related declines in reading, according to researchers at Brown University. Iowa and Mississippi have also surpassed their 2019 performance in math. Experts say improvements in literacy instruction and an accelerated return to in-person learning are among the key policy decisions contributing to the rebound.

“I am encouraged to see some states surpassing 2019,” said economist Emily Oster, who leads Brown’s COVID-19 School Data Hub. “This suggests substantial recovery is possible, and it provides an opportunity for learning.”

She said it’s “crucial” to understand what those states have done right.

In Iowa, more than 80% of schools offered in-person learning during the 2020-21 school year, according to state officials. In January of 2021, Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law mandating that schools offer families in-person learning five days a week.

That’s likely one reason why the achievement declines in Iowa were not as steep as those in other states, said Heather Doe, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Education. Between 2019 and 2021, the proficiency rate in English language arts dropped just 2 percentage points, compared with at least twice that much in several other states.

Once more state results are released, Oster plans to match the data with the length of time schools were closed during the 2020-21 school year, as she did last year. The overall takeaway from the previous report was that states where schools were closed longer saw bigger drops in proficiency — as high as 20%.

In the other states, leaders overhauled the way students learn to read, a shift that is now showing up in test results.

South Carolina and Mississippi were among the first states to adopt reform efforts that included a strong emphasis on foundational reading skills.

The turnaround in Mississippi — which in 2019 saw a dramatic leap in fourth grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — has garnered much attention and analysis. But a similar push was underway in the Palmetto State.

The state assigned reading specialists to schools that needed to improve, like Westcliffe. And it gave districts a list of recommended curricula. Greenville chose a program from Savvas Learning Company, which Jeff McCoy, the district’s associate superintendent for academics, described as more “scripted” than the district’s prior approach.

“We recognized that phonics was a missing component,” he said.

The 2023-24 state budget passed this year included $39 million to make a highly regarded training course — Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling — available to all K-3 teachers.

Tennessee is a more recent addition to the states requiring training and curriculum on foundational reading skills. Its literacy law passed in 2020. The state also used relief funds for summer learning and high-dosage tutoring.

Dale Chu, a fellow with the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a policy consultant who focuses on assessment, sees an additional reason for achievement gains in Tennessee: Despite the pandemic, the state was less divided over education.

“Unlike any other state, they’ve largely had bipartisan continuity on education policy across three administrations,” he said.

Parent advocate Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville Propel, said the scores are good news for students in the early grades since Tennessee “spent several decades” near the bottom in most educational rankings. But she’s less optimistic about older students’ opportunities to catch up. Many, she said, are “several grade levels behind.”

‘Give this some time’

Despite the positive developments, researchers and testing experts urge caution about interpreting the increase in proficiency rates as a sign of true recovery.

Scott Marion, president and executive director of the Center for Assessment, said Oster provides “a pretty useful look” at where states stand. But assessments aren’t comparable across states; what counts as proficient in one isn’t necessarily the same in another.

Overall proficiency rates also tell just part of the story. In South Carolina, for example, racial achievement gaps haven’t changed much. In 2018, there was a 45 percentage point difference in proficiency rates between Asian and Black students in English language arts. Now it’s 43 points. In math, the gap has actually increased — from 52 to 54 percentage points.

Additionally, some students never cross the threshold from one achievement category to the next, in terms of going from “does not meet expectations” to “approaches expectations,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research.

“I’m particularly worried about kids at the bottom, who were unlikely to be proficient before or after the pandemic,” he said.

In most states, proficiency rates in reading are still stuck below pre-pandemic levels. Scores in math are headed in the right direction; nearly all are “making progress,” according to Oster.

But her summary serves as a reminder of how long it will take for some students to rebound, Chu said. “If you look at learning loss and what schools need to do to catch up, there’s no precedent,” he said. “The [education] system has never done this before.”

Despite billions in federal relief funds for tutoring, summer school and extra staff in the classroom, five states — Arkansas, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Nevada — have continued to lose ground in reading since 2019. The percentage of students scoring proficient or above dropped this year.

Minnesota, for one, is several years behind states like Mississippi in requiring reading instruction to include phonics. Just this year, the state passed the READ Act, legislation that provides $70 million for “science of reading” training and curriculum.

Last month, the Minneapolis district’s disappointing literacy results sparked a sobering discussion at a school board meeting.

“I would not say that it is a privilege to share this data,” Sarah Hunter, the district’s executive director of strategic initiatives, told the board. Since 2022, the percentage of district students who scored proficient decreased from 42% to 41% — the third consecutive year of decline. Board members blamed the pandemic and urged patience.

“I know our scores are still low,” said Ira Jourdain. “Let’s give this some time.”

Such comments left some advocates feeling uneasy.

“How do we hold districts accountable?” asked Josh Crosson, executive director of EdAllies in Minneapolis. “We have a lot of funding that goes to schools that aren’t doing well in literacy.”

He thinks the READ Act is a step forward, but doesn’t do enough to integrate literacy training and teacher preparation.

“I don’t think we’re going to see improved outcomes in these first couple months,” he said. “I think we’re going to see improved outcomes in the next few years.”

The percentage of schools with extreme chronic absence rates tripled during the pandemic, according to a new analysis released Thursday. (Meghan Gallagher/LA School Report)

It’s well established that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. But a new analysis of federal data shows the problem may be worse than previously understood.

Two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme rates of chronic absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year — more than double the rate in 2017-18, the report found. Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.

The analysis, from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, shows a fivefold increase in the percentage of elementary and middle schools with extreme rates, where at least 30% of students are chronically absent.

In addition, the researchers released an early look at 2022-23 figures from 11 states. The data shows that overall chronic absenteeism levels remain extremely high at 28%  — well above the pre-pandemic level of 16%.

Empty desks have a negative impact on both teachers and students who are still trying to make up for lost learning during the pandemic, said Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works.

“It makes teaching and learning much harder,” she said. She finds the increase at the elementary level especially alarming because absenteeism becomes “habit forming.”

Many students started preschool and kindergarten remotely during the early years of COVID and missed out on a normal transition into school. “When they start off not ever having a routine of attendance, what does that mean for addressing it in middle and high school?” she asked.

The analysis — the first of three researchers plan to release on the federal data — shows that the percentage of high schools with extreme rates increased from 31% to 56% during that time period. A November release will focus on demographic disparities and one in January will examine state-level trends.

Soaring absenteeism rates have contributed to declines in math and reading scores on national tests, the White House said last month. Despite billions available to schools to address learning loss, students can’t take advantage of extra help if they’re not in school. Districts are tackling the problem by dedicating staff to attendance, offering home visits with families and targeting voicemail messages to alert parents that their children’s absences are piling up. Experts say it takes multiple strategies to make a dent in what might seem an insurmountable challenge.

“If we aren’t careful, the problem can feel overwhelming,” said Terri Clark, literacy director at Read On Arizona. The nonprofit began efforts to improve attendance seven years ago when research showed that reading performance declined as chronic absenteeism increased. But when schools tailor their strategies to students’ needs, they can make progress, Clark said.

“Often the focus is on awareness and getting the word out,” she said. “But you can’t stop there. What if a family can’t get [to school] everyday?”

Her organization is working with about 60 districts across the state to better identify the barriers that keep students from attending school regularly. One is the Tanque Verde Unified School District, near Tucson, where chronic absenteeism has more than doubled to 27% since 2018. Superintendent Scott Hagerman pointed to a practice that he hopes will bring the rate back down.

When students are absent, teachers are required to make sure they get their assignments. He knows from experience how important that connection can be to a student.

“When I was a kid, I had a chronic health issue, and the back and forth, in and out of school, without any idea of what was happening when I was gone made coming back harder,” he said. “We are trying to deal with that issue — absences causing more absences.”

Health- and transportation-related issues contributed to high absenteeism before the pandemic, Chang said. But now a school bus driver shortage has further complicated daily commutes. And in focus groups, she’s heard from kindergarten parents who are confused about when they can send children back to school after a fever or illness.

“These are lingering effects of COVID protocols that aren’t helpful,” she said. She stressed the need for frequent, two-way communication between parents and school staff and the importance of reversing a “more-relaxed attitude” about attendance that has permeated school culture.

The risk of ‘wasting precious time’

Sometimes a robocall from an NFL player emphasizing the importance of daily attendance is the added boost a student needs. That’s one of the methods an Ohio district used as part of the Cleveland Browns Foundation’s Stay in the Game initiative.

“If you want to make your dreams become a reality, whether that’s getting into college, getting a good job or even becoming a champion on the playing field, it all starts with hard work,” said cornerback Greg Newsome II, one of three players to record the same message.

The East Cleveland City Schools found that the player’s messages caused a 1.6% decrease in absenteeism among students who had missed school within the previous two weeks. That’s on top of a 6.3% reduction in absences after families received an automated message from a district staff member.

The experiment was part of a Harvard University effort to help schools find the right combination of strategies to address absenteeism.

Mekhi Bridges attended a Cleveland Browns game last year as a reward for improving attendance as part of the team’s Stay in the Game program. (Courtesy of Tasia Letlow)

“How do we layer in the right supports, at the right intensity, for the right students, at the right time?” asked Amber Humm Patnode, interim director of Proving Ground, a project of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research. The team works with districts to test solutions before scaling them districtwide. Without gathering evidence on what works, Patnode said, “we risk wasting precious time, resources and energy on things that may not result in actual reduced absences.”

The Euclid City School District has also participated in Stay in the Game. One kindergartner last year received three tickets to a Browns game after making significant progress in attendance. Six-year-old Mekhi Bridges had a speech delay, which made his mother Tasia Letlow extra cautious about getting him to school everyday.

“I wasn’t comfortable with him riding the bus because of not being able to necessarily communicate everything,” Letlow said. But she also had car trouble, and it wasn’t long before Mekhi amassed over 20 absences. The district sent a letter alerting her to the problem.

Elementary and middle schools have seen the largest increases in chronic absenteeism since 2017-18. (Meghan Gallagher/LA School Report)

Targeted letters are just one way the district has addressed a chronic absence rate that reached 73% in 2021. This fall, Jerimie Acree, attendance and residency coordinator for the district, is trying a different approach for middle and high school students who miss class — a deterrent he calls “working lunch.” Students who cut three times have to spend lunch in the media center away from their friends and without their phones.

“It is totally in place to inconvenience them,” Acree said.

The district’s attendance clerks — staff members who are supposed to focus on improving attendance — now report to him. Previously, they reported to principals, where they frequently got sidetracked with other duties.

“[Administrators] would pull that person to do supervision of field trips” among other things, he said. “Attendance work wasn’t being done everyday.”

To respond to the absenteeism crisis, districts and nonprofits across the country have tapped federal relief funds for dedicated positions or to pay educators stipends for home visits. With the deadline to use those funds coming up next year, the ability of districts to sustain those efforts has become “a huge question,” Chang said.

Gina Martinez-Keddy, executive director of Parent Teacher Home Visits — which began in Sacramento 25 years ago — said she’s talking to districts about how to use other sources of federal funding, like Title I, to support the efforts. Research shows the model can have what she called “spillover effects” on chronic absenteeism even if the original intention was to build trust with families.

“Relationship-building works,” Chang said. “That was proven before the pandemic. One-on-one engagement is really essential.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Charter supporters held a rally Sept. 19 to protest the Los Angeles school board’s proposal to limit charter school’s access to space in district schools. (California Charter Schools Association)

Los Angeles charters could lose access to space in nearly 350 district schools under a resolution the school board approved Tuesday. The action is likely to upend decades of practice in one of the more charter-rich districts in the country.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has 45 days to draft a policy that makes co-location — as the arrangement is called — off limits at schools that serve low-performing, minority and poor students.

Charter school advocates lobbied hard against the plan, arguing that it unnecessarily pits the two sectors against each other and violates a state law requiring school systems to provide classrooms for both charter and district students.

The state’s charter school association is threatening legal action.

“We will not back down from protecting the rights of students,” said Keith Dell’Aquila, an advocate for the California Charter Schools Association in the greater Los Angeles area. “The board is bringing forward this notion that charter school students only deserve the leftovers. That’s not what the law says.”

“There should be a sensible and reasonable way of looking at co-locations that makes it much less likely that schools that are struggling to raise student achievement will be interfered with,” board president Jackie Goldberg, who wrote the resolution with board member Rocio Rivas, said during Tuesday’s meeting. The resolution has support from United Teachers Los Angeles, and Rivas — a union-backed board member — promised to address the facility-sharing issue last year during her campaign.

Los Angeles Unified School Board President Jackie Goldberg wrote the resolution that would limit co-location with Board Member Rocio Rivas. (Los Angeles Unified School District)

Rivas and Goldberg want Carvalho to write a policy preventing co-location at schools that fall into three school improvement categories — the Black Student Achievement Plan, which provides extra staff and emphasizes culturally relevant curriculum; the 100 low-performing “priority” schools, and community schools, which offer services for families like food pantries and counseling services. These schools “have enough on their plate,” said Goldberg, who argues that co-location hurts enrollment because charters lure families away from district schools.

Karla Griego, a special education teacher running to replace Goldberg, who is retiring from the board, said co-location requires schools to relinquish classrooms often used for meetings with parents or restorative justice programs.

“This resolution protects all of the investments that the district has made in bringing innovative programs to our schools,” she told the board.

Board Member George McKenna, is also retiring from the board, which means the charter-district conflict would likely carry over into next year’s election.

‘Detrimental to families’

Those who oppose the resolution say it could actually lead to more shared facilities. If a charter school has to vacate its space, it might have to split its grades up across multiple sites. That’s what worries David Garner, the principal of Magnolia Science Academy-2, a charter.

“We believe that this resolution is detrimental to families — most importantly, high-need families,” he told The 74. Parents who depend on public transportation, he said, might not be able to send their children to his school if it has to relocate.

Magnolia Science Academy-2, part of the Magnolia Public Schools network, is currently one of seven schools — four district schools and three charters — on the same property in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles County. Despite limited use of athletic facilities and other common areas, he said he has good relationships with administrators of the other schools. One of his daughters even attended Daniel Pearl Magnet High School, a district facility on the same campus.

“I’ve been on both sides of the district and charter space,” he said. “I don’t care about the politics; I just care about what the kids and the families want.”

Goldberg said the vote won’t disrupt the 52 current co-location sites. But Dell’Aquila isn’t convinced, and said it will depend on how Carvalho writes the policy. The association wants the district to offer co-located charters long-term facility agreements to create more stability for staff and families.

The meeting underscored long-standing confusion over which spaces are available to charters. Goldberg said she’s always understood the law to say that charters could take over any empty classroom not assigned to a certified teacher with a roster of students. That interpretation would favor charter schools because it would make more rooms used for a variety of purposes, including the arts, STEM or discipline programs, up for grabs.

But José Cole-Gutiérrez, who runs the district’s charter school division, said that was a district practice and not written into state law. McKenna added that no one challenged it while charter-friendly board members were in the majority.

Rivas called the revelation an “injustice” that has disadvantaged district schools for years.

Carvalho, meanwhile, said ambiguity over the issue has only contributed to the conflict.

The superintendent’s challenge is to write a policy that protects the district from litigation. The charter association has sued the district three times over facility arrangements and in a Tuesday letter, accused the district of having a “sordid history of undermining and not complying” with the law.

The resolution has been unpopular, not just with charter supporters, but also among organizations that work closely with the district.

Ana Teresa Dahan, managing director of GPSN, a nonprofit advocacy group that opposed the resolution along with 25 other organizations, said she understands the challenges on both sides. It’s difficult for district schools to plan for growth because they don’t know which classrooms they might have to give up. Charters, meanwhile, have to frequently relocate and struggle to find “normal” office and cafeteria space.

“Clearly, there’s a need for a better policy,” she said. But she called Tuesday’s resolution a “failure-to-launch effort” because it still favors district schools. Ultimately, she said, it will be difficult to implement anything that completely resolves the dispute.

“There’s no uniform way that all of these campuses use their space. Every school prioritizes their space differently,” she said. “I don’t know how a school board can make these decisions.”

Harvard students rallied in protest to the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action. (Craig F. Walker/Getty Images)

Universities can continue to target recruitment efforts at predominantly Black and Hispanic high schools even if race can’t be used as a factor in admissions, the Biden administration said in new guidance released earlier this month.

The parsing is part of a package of materials responding to the June U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action in admissions. The education and justice departments — which argued in favor of maintaining racial preferences in admissions — said summer enrichment camps for students from groups underrepresented in college are also allowed, as well as “pathway” programs that guarantee high school graduates a spot in the freshman class. Awarding slots in those programs based on race, however, would “trigger … strict scrutiny” from courts in light of the ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

“This moment demands a sense of urgency,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a call with reporters. “This moment demands the same courageous commitment to equal opportunity and justice we saw from leaders at the height of the civil rights movement.”

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action in admissions demands ‘a sense of urgency.’ (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

The release of the resources — a letter to institutions and a question-and-answer document — is the second formal action the administration has taken on admissions since the decision. Last month, the Education Department held a day-long summit on ways colleges and K-12 schools can continue to legally foster diversity. And in a few weeks, Cardona said, the department will issue a report on strategies colleges already use.

Rep. Bobby Scott, ranking Democrat on the House education committee, welcomed the guidance, but wants the department to do more to investigate racial disparities in K-12 schools in areas like discipline, and college practices like legacy admissions that have historically favored white students. Following the court’s decision, Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston nonprofit, sued Harvard over such policies.

“This is important because race-conscious admissions policies were able to provide a counterbalance to factors — such as inequitable K-12 schools, racially biased admissions tests, and developmental and legacy admissions — that have discriminatory impact against students of color,” Scott said in a statement.

He argued that some Republican leaders have misinterpreted the court’s decision, pointing to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s warning, for example, that racial preferences in scholarships and employment would violate the law.

Biden officials did not specifically discuss scholarships Monday, but the document suggests institutions review policies — such as application fees, standardized testing requirements, early decision deadlines and prerequisite courses, like calculus — that could prevent Black, Hispanic and low-income students from applying to a selective institution.

Universities can still collect race and ethnicity data to plan which geographic areas to target for recruitment, for example, or where to participate in college fairs, the Biden administration said, so long as the resulting information doesn’t influence admissions decisions

Universities don’t have to “unsee” the racial makeup of their applicants, a senior department official said on the call. Students may continue to discuss race in their admissions essays, and guidance counselors can discuss a student’s battles with discrimination in a letter of recommendation.

“Although this decision changes the landscape for admissions and higher education, it should not be used as an excuse to turn away from long-standing efforts to make those institutions more inclusive,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta.

Richard Kahlenberg, a school integration expert who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions and is a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, said some higher education institutions have taken the court’s ruling seriously and are pursuing “authentic race-neutral alternatives to achieve diversity.” Those “perfectly legal” strategies include increasing financial aid for low-income students and adopting plans like those in Texas that accept a percentage of top students from every high school.

But he said he’s also hearing that some universities are taking the “much riskier route” of basing admissions decisions on what students say about race in their personal essays.

“If universities magically get similar racial numbers without announcing new race-neutral alternatives or showing an increase in socioeconomic diversity,” he said, “I think they’re putting a litigation target on their backs.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Meghan Gallagher/LA School Report

Actions in the nation’s two largest school districts are testing the idea that charter and traditional schools can exist under one roof.

In Los Angeles, the school board is expected to vote this fall on a measure that could significantly limit the practice, known as co-location.

And in New York, the United Federation of Teachers plans to appeal a judge’s Aug. 11 decision that allowed Success Academy, a large and high-performing charter network, to open new schools in two district facilities.

“In both New York City and L.A., the general relationship between traditional public and charter schools is not great, so asking schools from these two different sectors to share a building could be contentious,” Sarah Cordes, an associate professor at Temple University who has studied co-location, told The 74. “If schools view each other as competitors rather than collaborators, it will make co-location challenging.”

Charter schools have long faced challenges securing facilities and financing renovations. California voters passed a law in 2000 that requires districts to provide facilities for charters, including through co-location. Research shows the policy can work if district and charter leaders are willing to compromise, and can even benefit district students. But such partnerships are hard to come by in cities with strong teachers unions, where disputes over issues like parking and access to the gym can spark resentment between charter and district families.

Co-location bubbled up as a major issue in United Teachers Los Angeles’s strike against the district in 2019. Following the strike, board President Jackie Goldberg and fellow Board Member Nick Melvoin pushed through a $5.5 million pilot program on facility upgrades that could make co-location more tolerable, such as designated entrances for charter students and staff and separate drop-off and pick-up areas. But that wasn’t enough to overcome the union’s argument that charters take space away from district students.

For Board Member Rocio Rivas, who wrote the proposed resolution with Goldberg, the current proposal is a step toward fulfilling a promise to her supporters during last year’s campaign. In an interview for Jacobin, a left-wing website, she called co-location ”a cancer that comes in and then metastasizes and spreads.

Rocio Rivas, center, a member of the Los Angeles Board of Education, demonstrated with United Teachers Los Angeles in October over contract demands. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

A draft of the resolution says the practice “has a tangible negative impact” and would require Superintendent Alberto Carvalho to write a new policy that would prohibit co-locations at the district’s 55 community schools, which offer food pantries, health clinics and other services for families. The resolution, which the board is expected to discuss Sept. 19, would further bar co-location at the district’s 100 low-performing “priority” schools and those targeted by the Black Student Achievement Plan.

Those special programs shouldn’t displace charter students who need classrooms for “core educational coursework,” wrote the California Charter School Association. The group would consider suing the district if it moves forward with the policy. The association has taken the district to court over the issue before. The proposal, the group says, would lock charters out of at least 236 schools and impact 28 facilities that are currently co-located.

Charter parents said animosity toward their schools, including protests outside the school gates in recent years, has affected students.

“It’s simmered over into the community,” said Angelica Solis-Montero, who has two children at Gabriella Charter School, which shares a campus with Logan Elementary in the Echo Park neighborhood. “These families shop in the same places; they access the same public resources. One group of students has been pitted against another group of students.”

Logan Academy, a district school in Los Angeles, shares space with Gabriella Charter School. (Angelica Solis-Montero)

But charter advocates aren’t the only ones opposed to the proposal as currently written. Twenty-six organizations, including Educators for Excellence Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Urban League, wrote a letter to the board, saying the resolution is filled with “hateful rhetoric.”

“The charter fight is over. [Charters are] under enrolled. They’re not growing,” said Ana Teresa Dahan, managing director of GPSN, one of the nonprofits that signed the letter. “We need to really focus on improving the experience for kids in all our public schools.”

‘In limbo’

Co-location is a more recent policy in New York. A 2014 law permits new charters or those adding grade levels to access space in district buildings. But in allowing Success Academy to move into those two buildings, UFT said New York Supreme Court Judge Lyle Frank didn’t consider a new state law that sets caps on class sizes, putting an even greater premium on available classrooms.

While the dispute focuses on just two schools, it exemplifies the challenges that arise when multiple schools occupy the same building.

Students at Success Academy Sheepshead Bay arrived for the new school year last week after a judge threw out a lawsuit filed by the United Federation of Teachers. (Success Academy)

Ken Zhang, principal at Success Academy Rockaway Park Middle School, said it’s taken about four years to get a permanent site. Until this year, his students shared a building with another Success Academy elementary and two district schools. Now they’ve moved into P.S. 225 in Queens, site of the district’s Waterside Leadership School.

“We were in limbo at every turn,” he said. Co-location can work, he said, when principals are clear about what’s important to them — for him, it’s access to the stage for his theater students — but are willing to bend in other areas. “I’m not going into these meetings looking to take space away from their kids.”

But Elli Weinert, a district music teacher and one of the plaintiffs in the UFT lawsuit, said just because a building has unused space doesn’t mean it’s suitable for young students. She teaches at Professional Pathways High, one of three small schools serving high school students or adults in the Frank J. Macchiarola Educational Complex in Brooklyn.

Success Academy Sheepshead Bay, a K-4, moved into a space in the Macchiarola complex previously occupied by another high school.

“We do need something in that space,” said Weinert. “But it was built for the young adults in that neighborhood.”

She’s not opposed to co-location in general. Staff and students from the four schools within the Macchiarola complex, she said, learned to accommodate each other “like roommates.”

“At first it wasn’t easy — four different schools with four different visions,” she said. “We’ve been able to work through some difficult stuff.”

Sharing space with a charter can actually boost math and reading performance among students in traditional schools, according to research Cordes published in 2017.

But she agreed that given the practical challenges co-located schools face, it can be hard to “maintain a unique school climate.”

“I’m not sure anyone has created a framework for how to make this kind of arrangement successful,” she said. “There needs to be a lot more work done in this area.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

For the past three years, districts have received more federal money than ever — $190 billion — to hire staff, dole out hefty bonuses and address the learning loss and mental health problems fueled by the pandemic.

The expiration of these funds in about 14 months could be the biggest jolt to school finances that districts have ever faced. But an analysis by The 74 has found that the majority of states lack laws to protect districts from a fiscal emergency like this one — a fact that could leave school systems unprepared for the upheaval to come.

“Deficits will creep up quickly and really destabilize a district,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “In the end, the students will suffer if districts wait too long to rein in their spending.”

School systems currently face compound pressures. Declining enrollment means less state funding, and they’re paying higher prices for staff because of a tight labor market and more for supplies because of inflation. To better withstand the strain, experts like Roza advise districts to estimate their revenues and spending a few years in advance, taking into account enrollment trends, taxes and the potential for an economic downturn.

But only six states have such requirements. Experts also recommend setting aside money for fiscal emergencies, but just 10 states mandate the practice.

Most states view district budgets as a local matter. Officials say they can offer little more than advice as the education system heads for what Roza calls a “wild ride.”

“For these next few years, … state monitoring of finances is an absolute must,” she said. Relief funds have “distorted district finances. Many are overcommitting at a time when they should be downsizing.”

She pointed to the San Diego school district as an example. In June, the board approved a 15% raise for teachers to avoid a strike, at a cost of $517 million. But projections show a nearly $129 million budget shortfall by the 2024-25 school year.

The end of relief funds could also collide with tax cuts in some states, further impacting what programs, like tutoring and summer school, districts will be able to sustain. In addition, Congress’s recent deal to prevent the government from hitting a debt ceiling and defaulting on its financial obligations could affect how districts wean themselves off pandemic money.

The deal between conservative Republicans and the White House wiped out the chance for an increase in federal K-12 spending next year — money that could have cushioned the blow once COVID money dries up. Now the House is proposing a 15% cut in the education budget.

“If I’m a state budget director, the debt limit deal tells me I’m on my own to try to soften the cliff landing with added revenue,” said Jonathan Travers, managing partner at Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that advises districts on financial matters. “I might have been holding out hope for help from Title I, but that seems gone now.”

‘Grounded in the truth’

Districts have been down this road before.

The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in the wake of the Great Recession, was at the time the federal government’s largest one-time investment in schools, providing districts close to $71 billion in extra funding. When those funds ran out, however, many districts were unprepared: They cut jobs, imposed hiring freezes and increased class sizes.

A 2012 report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General examined spending decisions in 22 districts, including the Wichita Public Schools in Kansas.

Susan Willis, the district’s payroll director at the time, remembers a “pretty ugly” seven-to-eight year period with no raises for teachers. The district eliminated its grants department and several facilities and professional development positions. Enrollment was growing, so leaders “couldn’t be looking into the classroom for reductions,” said Willis, now the district’s chief financial officer.

A decade later, Wichita’s enrollment is declining, and as pandemic aid expires, leaders are looking to eliminate positions they could have cut earlier, but didn’t — particularly at the elementary level. The challenge, Willis said, is how to offer salaries high enough to compete against suburban districts while continuing to fund counseling and mentoring programs that she thinks have lifted graduation rates back above 80%.

The 2012 report said that a funding cliff doesn’t mean that districts didn’t make good use of temporary funds or that the relief funds weren’t the “right call.” Leaders just need to be “grounded in the truth, no matter how brutal,” Travers said.

Mark Harmon, right, is with Pando Initiative, a nonprofit organization that helps school districts address chronic absenteeism and maintain connections with students who could be at risk for dropping out. Federal relief funds are paying for the program in the Wichita Public Schools. (Wichita Public Schools)

Budget reserves

Whether the fiscal cliff turns out to be a gradual slope or a precipitous drop could hinge on how much federal money a district received. A March report from Education Resource Strategies identified 15 states where the expiration of those funds will hit harder because they received more federal aid and have a lot of districts with high poverty rates.

Travers said it will be easier to identify which districts “have the potential for a painful landing” later this summer when auditors review districts’ finances from the past year. It’s “critical,” he added, that states keep a close watch on districts where relief funds total more than a quarter of their annual budget. The more money districts received, the harder it could be to reduce spending once the funds disappear. That could include some of the nation’s largest districts, including New York City and Houston and those with high-poverty levels like Detroit and Philadelphia.

Education Resource Strategies identified 15 states where districts are more likely to face a fiscal cliff. (Education Resource Strategies)

To prepare for lean years, Ohio, for example, requires districts  to estimate their budgets five years in advance. Washington mandates four years. But in some cases, school finance officials’ desire to plan ahead conflicts with budget timelines.

“We can’t forecast because we never know what our state aid is going to be every year,” said Susan Young, executive director of the New Jersey Association of School Business Officials.

The state doesn’t require districts to put aside funds for emergencies. But those that choose to could find themselves brushing up against a state cap that limits reserve funds to 2% of their budget. Young’s organization would like lawmakers to raise that limit, especially as relief funds expire. Some have already made drastic cuts and are asking voters to raise property taxes.

Reserves can help school systems with a temporary shortfall, but can’t do much for a financially strapped district that has ignored enrollment loss or failed to issue layoff notices in time for the next school year. Like COVID aid, reserves eventually dry up.

“There are no reserves that are going to buy you a whole school year,” said Michael Fine, CEO of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which was created by a state law in 1991.

The California law also created an early warning system in which county education agencies must sign off on district budgets and, when a district is headed for insolvency, can wrest authority from a superintendent and school board.

Sixteen states have similar processes, some more extensive than others. Texas, for example, grades districts on whether they pay their bills on time and post financial information. The Kentucky state board monitors any district that adopts a budget with less than 2% of its revenues set aside for reserves.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

In California, 13 districts are now in serious financial trouble. Ten may not be able to meet their financial obligations in the next couple years, and three, Fine said, “are running out of cash.”

Given the pandemic windfall, he’s surprised any hit that point. But with the state’s gloomy financial outlook, he expects more to find themselves on the list.

“The news probably only gets worse for 2024-25, not better,” he said.

In southern California’s San Bernardino County, where 33 districts are spread over 20,000 square miles, Thomas Cassida, director of business advisory services, expects the majority of them — 28 — to have a budget deficit in 2024-25 or the year after.

They still have time to scale back. For example, some have spent relief funds to open health centers, but might have to cut positions for the counselors and other mental health professionals hired to run them.

He’s most worried about districts that were in bad financial shape before the pandemic. When the relief funds are gone, they could find themselves in the same place.

“Every county has at least one district that is a problem child,” he said.

In Ventura County, it was the Ojai Unified School District, where Fine said leaders ignored multiple warnings about the need to cut roughly $3 million. About 30 minutes from the coast, Ojai is known for boutique hotels and wellness retreats. But tensions ran high at a  Feb. 21 school board meeting where Fine showed up unannounced to deliver a sobering message.

“You are beyond financial trouble, and you are in fiscal distress,” he told the board and superintendent. “If you were a private business, you would now be out of business.”

Less than a month later, the board cut more than 30 positions and fired the superintendent.

“Parents were extremely frustrated and upset by the news of the budget deficit,” said Sherrill Knox, an Ojai native and former assistant superintendent who took over as the district’s new chief this month. The crisis, she added, was “nestled in an ongoing, long-term issue of the need to downsize our district.”

While Ojai was an extreme case, Fine said declining enrollment is affecting districts statewide, and smaller school systems can quickly downgrade from financial difficulty to fiscal distress. He largely blames “inadequately trained” school board members.

“In most cases, it’s stupid governance and leadership that got them into this spot,” he said, “and it will be good governance that gets them out.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Chinese Americans are challenging the New York City district’s efforts to increase diversity in specialized high schools, like Stuyvesant High School. The lawsuit is one of four over selective admissions in K-12 schools led by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation. (Getty Images)

A landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to ban race-conscious admissions at colleges could apply more broadly to a handful of federal cases that center on efforts to diversify selection at elite K-12 schools.

“What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion in the case against Harvard University.

Several conservatives are glomming on to that quote as a warning to school districts that rely on admission criteria they claim is race-neutral even as they pursue a goal of increasing the number of Black and Hispanic students they accept.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” said Erin Wilcox, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation. The right-leaning nonprofit law firm represents families in four East Coast districts suing over policies that determine who gets into competitive schools.

This summer, the firm will ask the Supreme Court to hear its case against the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia over changes to the admissions policy at the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

“Treating students based on their experiences as individuals, not on the basis of race, is what we’ve been fighting for,” Wilcox said.

Pacific Legal, part of the conservative State Policy Network, is making the same argument on behalf of plaintiffs in Montgomery County, Maryland, New York City and Boston. In revising their selection processes to pursue greater equity, the complaints say district leaders openly expressed a desire to limit the numbers of white and Asian-American students attending those schools.

Advocates for racially balanced schools, however, call the firm’s argument far-fetched and maintain there’s still legal backing for policies that take socioeconomic status into account when admitting students. K-12 leaders, they argue, shouldn’t scale back those efforts out of concern for what the courts may do.

“Rather than try to guess how this [ruling] affects them, I think schools and districts should continue to promote diverse, equitable learning environments for students because research tells us that’s what’s best for kids,” said Stefan Lallinger, executive director at Next100, a progressive think tank affiliated with The Century Foundation.

Racial segregation is “pernicious,” he said, and with the end of affirmative action in college admissions, K-12 schools still need tools to address educational inequities.

“For hundreds of years in some cases, selective institutions have discriminated against people of color,” he said. “If the Pacific Legal Foundation’s argument is that there are no legal remedies available … we’re really in trouble.”

‘Proxy discrimination’

Amid the racial reckoning following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, in which districts nationally tried to expand educational opportunities for minority students, Fairfax leaders eliminated a rigorous test for applicants and a $100 fee. They reserved seats at the school, known as TJ, for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school.

“We firmly believe this admission plan is fair and gives qualified applicants at every middle school a fair chance of a seat at T.J.,” John Foster, an attorney for the Fairfax County Public Schools, said in May when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled against Coalition for TJ, the plaintiff in the case.

But that’s no consolation for families who thought their children had a good shot of being admitted to TJ under the old system. Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a member of the coalition, said her oldest son, who is half Asian, did well in accelerated math classes and took three semesters of engineering.

“He should have been a competitive candidate,” she said.

But after making the waitlist, his application for this fall was rejected. Lundquist-Arora has two younger sons — one of which is taking honors algebra in seventh grade — but she’s concerned they could also be shut out of what is considered the nation’s best high school.

Members of Coalition for TJ addressed the press in 2020 when they sued Fairfax County Public Schools over admissions criteria at the district’s elite STEM high school. (Getty Images)

Although Asian-Americans still make up the majority of students at the school, their enrollment numbers dropped from 73% to 54% in the year after the metrics changed — evidence, Wilcox argued, that the new policy is biased.

The complaint offers text messages from Fairfax County school board members alluding to their policy’s “anti asian [sic] feel” to show that race-neutral admissions can be “proxy discrimination.”

Similar disparaging remarks from board members about white students are part of the complaint in the Boston case, currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp., a nonprofit, sued last year when the district replaced an admissions policy for its prestigious “exam” schools based solely on merit with one that drew students with high GPAs from all ZIP codes. (The system is now based on census tracts, small geographic areas within a county.)

Parents demonstrated in 2020 in support of the Boston school district’s changes to exam school admissions. (Getty Images)

In a text exchange cited in court documents, former board member Lorna Rivera wrote, “I hate W[est] R[oxbury],” referring to a predominantly white neighborhood. Alexandra Oliver-Davila, another former member, responded: “Sick of westie whites.” Another board member resigned after being caught on Zoom mocking ethnic-sounding names.

But advocates who support the new policy say the comments reflect years of frustration with the district prioritizing the exam schools and offering fewer resources to schools serving Black and Hispanic students.

Ruby Reyes, director of the Boston Education Justice Alliance, said affluent white and Asian parents might think their children have lost the chance to get into those elite schools because of the policy change.

“It isn’t a loss,” she said. “It’s a beautiful thing. The admission policy has had a great impact in terms of diversity.”

In addition to more Black and Hispanic students attending the schools, the rates of students with disabilities and English learners receiving invitations to attend has also increased as a result of the new policy.

Families at one of the schools, however, oppose Mayor Michelle Wu’s proposal to move O’Bryant School of Math and Science — the most racially diverse of the three exam schools — from its current Roxbury location, a historically Black neighborhood, to West Roxbury, which is predominantly white.

The new location would provide the school with much-needed space, but with fewer public transportation options in West Roxbury, the change could affect which students choose to attend, Reyes said.

Boston Public Schools data shows that the percentage of Black and Hispanic ninth graders admitted to the three exam schools has increased under the new policy. The percentage of Asian and white students admitted declined at two schools. (Boston Public Schools)

In Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools, leaders amended the admissions process for four sought-after magnet middle schools. Under a new provision, the selection process favors high-achieving students who don’t attend school with a lot of other gifted peers.

As a result, high-performing Asian-American students, who tend to be concentrated in a small group of elementary schools, are less likely to be admitted while more Black and Hispanic students who attend schools spread across the district get in, the complaint said.

Finally, Pacific Legal represents Chinese Americans in New York City who say the district has limited their children’s opportunities to attend any of nine top-ranked high schools, such as Stuyvesant High, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School. Students are admitted based on entrance exam scores, but in 2020, former Mayor Bill de Blasio increased the number of students considered for admission from low-income schools that predominantly serve Black and Hispanic students.

The plaintiffs appealed a lower court ruling in favor of the city to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, where it awaits a decision.

‘Mere reflections upon race’

Joshua Dunn, executive director of the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, is among those who think that if district leaders aimed to reduce the number of white and Asian-American students admitted, their race-neutral policy might not pass constitutional muster under this Supreme Court.

The ruling in favor of Students for Fair Admissions, the advocacy group that sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, “reinforces that racial balance can’t be the goal and the [Fairfax] board made it clear that’s what it was after,” Dunn said. “Bottom line, I don’t see how the appellate decision survives in light of the court’s ruling and the factual record.”

But others agree with the 4th Circuit, which said that texts or other statements expressing a desire to increase diversity aren’t enough to “inflict adverse effects” on a particular racial group. David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law — which represented UNC before the court — called Pacific Legal’s argument an “extreme colorblind interpretation.”

“Nowhere in the Harvard/UNC opinion does the court suggest that mere reflections upon race are unlawful,” he said.

Richard Kahlenberg, a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an expert on integration, added that districts are on firm legal ground if their admission policies promote the selection of promising students who have shown determination despite poverty or other obstacles.

He points to past comments from Justice Clarence Thomas defending such programs. Thomas reiterated that position in his concurring opinion in the Harvard/UNC ruling.

In his concurring opinion in the Harvard/UNC cases, Justice Clarence Thomas said the barriers students face matter the most in college admissions. (Getty Images)

“Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments,” he wrote. “What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them.”

Kahlenberg, who served as an expert witness on race-neutral policies for Students for Fair Admissions, suggests the court might take the TJ case to further clarify what schools can still do to increase diversity. But he added, “The high court does not have an appetite for going further and eliminating preferences based on socioeconomic status or geography.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

The graph shows how many months of school students need to reach pre-pandemic levels in reading and math. (NWEA/Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report)

Pandemic recovery has essentially stalled for most of the nation’s students, new data shows, and upper elementary and middle school students actually lost ground this year in reading and math.

On average, students need four more months in school to catch up to pre-pandemic levels, according to the results from NWEA, a K-12 assessment provider. This fall’s ninth graders need far more — roughly a full extra school year.

“There’s still a pretty big distance between the COVID and the pre-COVID trends,” said Karyn Lewis, director of NWEA’s Center for School and Student Progress. “We’re not doing anything to shrink that distance.”

The graph shows that the gap between a pre-COVID sample of students and the COVID sample grew wider during the 2022-23 school year, except for students in first through third grade. (NWEA/Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report)

Within the grim results, however, there was a spark of hope for the youngest students. First- through third-graders were the only students to make above-average gains. But that progress only returns them to “an already significantly inequitable state of academic achievement,” researchers said.

They described the data from 6.7 million students who took the organization’s MAP Growth tests last school year as “education’s long COVID.” The results come just weeks after the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed sharp declines in reading and math for the nation’s 13-year-olds, continuing a downward trend that began a decade ago.

Students who experienced the greatest setbacks during the pandemic — the intended beneficiaries of billions of dollars in federal aid — have the most ground to make up. But time is running out to use the remaining relief funds for tutoring, expanded summer school programs and other recovery efforts. The extended emergency, Lewis said, has kept her up at night.

“I very much worry that these results will fan the flames of ‘Schools didn’t use these dollars wisely,’ and I don’t think that’s the case at all,” she said, noting that many are using proven teaching methods for students below grade level. “It’s just not enough. The dosage is not in line with the magnitude of the crisis.”

But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, is more critical of efforts to reach students who have fallen the furthest behind. The data, he said, lines up with CALDER’s research on 12 districts showing low participation in optional interventions like tutoring and summer programs.

“You’d never know that there had been a pandemic,” he said. He acknowledged the views of those who argue there’s too much emphasis on test scores, but added that such assessments still predict the types of courses students take and whether they’re on track to go to college. “The education ecosystem is not healthy.”

The NWEA results show students who finished eighth grade this year need an additional 7.4 months of learning to reach pre-pandemic levels in reading and 9.1 months in math. Black and Hispanic students need even more extra instruction to get there, the data shows.

The graphs show how many more months of school students in each racial group need to reach pre-pandemic performance in reading and math. (NWEA/Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report)

Lewis compared pandemic learning loss to tornado damage. A hammer and nails, she said, might be sufficient to repair a lost shingle or a loose shutter. But if a garage is flattened or the roof is gone “a hammer and nail is not going to cut it,” she said.

To Kimberly Radostits, last year’s Illinois Teacher of the Year, that’s an apt metaphor. Her house was leveled by a twister in 2015. She spent 18 months rebuilding and sees a parallel between recovering from that literal destruction and schools’ efforts to put the pandemic behind them.

“We’re back to normal, but everybody is just tired,” she said. “I do think there’s a burnout that comes with that.”

The NWEA results, she said, point to the need for more efforts to support ninth graders — like the Hawks Take Flight mentoring program she co-founded in the Oregon Community Unit School District.

The program typically serves 15 students who struggle with missed assignments, poor grades and behavior problems in eighth grade. But Radostits said she would double that number if she could find additional teachers willing to volunteer as mentors. To fill some of the gaps this fall, the high school will replace one elective with an extra “skill-building class” in math and English for students who need it.

“We need to be more flexible with our scheduling than ever before,” Radostits said.

But some districts that have tried to add school days or reconfigure the traditional calendar have faced stiff opposition. The Los Angeles Unified School District last year had to move extra learning days to holiday breaks after the teachers union fought a plan to embed them throughout the year. And an effort to implement a year-round calendar in the Richmond, Virginia, schools — to prevent further summer learning loss — was ultimately adopted at just one school after parents, teachers and board members pushed back.

Researchers studying the pace of recovery worry that schools aren’t always straightforward with parents about the long-term effects of the pandemic.

“Schools never say to parents, ‘Hey I’m really worried that given these test scores or attendance patterns, I’m not sure that your kid’s going to go to college,’ ” Goldhaber said.

Oregon High School’s mentoring program begins “planting a seed” in eighth grade with parents whose children could benefit from the program, Radostits said. Using an early warning system that shows parents a dashboard of their child’s grades, attendance, discipline record and work completion often makes the difference.

“We can click a button that will fade every other student’s name on this database except for the one you are looking at,” she said. “That’s a powerful visual for parents.”

Some advocates say parents still get mixed messages from schools. Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville Propel, pointed to recent comments from district leaders about third graders’ performance on Tennessee’s reading test. Nashville Director of Schools Adrienne Battle said that just because students didn’t reach proficiency — required to advance to fourth grade — didn’t mean they failed or couldn’t read.

“To me, that message was toxic,” Thomas said. “We have a literacy crisis that has gone on for decades.”

The organization is holding a six-week literacy institute this summer to help parents better understand the components of reading and their children’s performance.

Parents are learning more about how to track their children’s progress in reading at Nashville Propel’s summer literacy institute. (Nashville Propel)

‘It was shocking’

The fact that the gap between pre- and post-pandemic achievement for fourth through eighth graders grew larger this year instead of smaller was a hard pill to swallow, said NWEA’s Lewis.

“There was a hope that a lot of lessons learned in 21-22 could be applied in 22-23,” she said. “We actually see the opposite. It was shocking to us.”

In a summary of the results, she and Megan Kuhfeld, an NWEA senior research scientist, said the backslide was likely due to ongoing “behavioral, academic and staffing challenges.” Many districts are still reporting high chronic absenteeism rates.

They attribute the encouraging signs in first- through third-grades to younger students’ tendency to learn faster. Their scores were 4% above pre-COVID levels in reading and 2% above in math — largely echoing mid-year data released earlier this year from Amplify, a curriculum provider.

Lewis said perhaps “word got out” that younger students were missing basic skills and “that’s where schools have leaned in.”

Some districts have also heeded warnings from researchers about the most effective types of recovery efforts. In the 4,700-student William Penn School District, outside Philadelphia, students attending summer school get 90 minutes each of reading and math instruction followed by more traditional camp activities in the afternoon.

“With rising third graders, we’re making sure they’ve mastered everything they were supposed to learn in second grade,” said Ed Dunn, curriculum supervisor. He still gets emails from parents asking if spots are open. About 1,100 students are enrolled this summer, up from 750 last year.

William Penn teacher Lisa Myles reads to students during summer school. Over 1,100 students are enrolled this summer, up from around 750 last year. (William Penn School District)

The district considered offering students voluntary, online tutoring during the school year, but instead opted for organizing small groups for extra help during class.

“We want to make the most of the actual school day,” Dunn said. “Our students need too much support to just leave it to chance.”

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George Clooney, one of the actors behind the new Los Angeles magnet school focused on jobs in TV and film, took a selfie with a student during a visit last fall. (Getty Images)

The outdoor walkways of the Roybal Learning Center offer a panoramic view of the Los Angeles skyline that would be a fitting backdrop for any Hollywood movie.

That’s what grabbed Jaison Noralez when he visited the downtown high school last year. Now a freshman at Roybal’s celebrity-backed Film and Television Production Magnet program, he’s training to become part of the next generation of behind-the-scenes movie professionals: sound and lighting technicians, make-up artists and other production staff who never appear in front of a camera.

On a recent Wednesday, he and classmate Aiyanna Randolph worked on a concept for a post-apocalyptic science fiction feature set in the year 2053.

Jaison Noralez, left, and Aiyanna Randolph — freshman in the Roybal Learning Center Film and Television Production Magnet — have worked on several projects together this year. (Linda Jacobson)

“It’s not writing a script. We’re designing the set, make-up, hair and costumes,” he said about their assignment in Brittany Hilgers’s first period film production class. “She wants us to understand how those aspects could affect the movie. If you’re in a horror movie, you wouldn’t wear a bright dress or something. That wouldn’t match up.”

Launched last fall, the program opened with the fanfare of a blockbuster premiere, with Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto Carvalho joining actors George Clooney, Don Cheadle and Mindy Kaling. Studios, networks and streaming services like Amazon and Disney have put up $4 million to launch the program, but leaders know that to keep it going, they’ll need sustainable public funding.

Students from the Roybal Learning Center Film and Television Production Magnet took a field trip to the KNB EFX studio, co-owned and founded by Howard Berger, a special effects artist and a member of the program’s industry council. (Roybal Learning Center Film and Television Production Magnet)

The goal is to give Black, Hispanic and Asian students who might lack the right connections to break into Hollywood a pathway into good-paying jobs in the industry and make them “part of the machinery of storytelling,” said Bryan Lourd, Clooney’s agent and an executive at Creative Artists Agency.

Traditionally, in entertainment, “it’s who you know and who … gives you just enough of a vocabulary to get into it,” said Lourd, a member of the magnet program’s advisory board. “George called me and said, ‘Shouldn’t we do something?’ ”

Before he resigned in 2021, then-L.A. Superintendent Austin Beutner connected them with Roybal Principal Blanca Cruz and her staff. At the time, the school had a fledgling music and film production magnet program, but lacked resources to give students real-world experience.

“We wanted to do something that wasn’t available in the immediate area,” Cruz said, “We knew nothing about the industry.”

But now she exposes students to those who do. During Hilgers’s first period class, Cruz popped in to announce that the following week, students would spend the day at the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot and tour the local NBC affiliate.

“You can see what behind the scenes of a broadcast looks like,” she said.

Actor and producer Kerry Washington, a member of the Roybal Film and Television Production Magnet advisory board, participated in a Q&A with students in December. (Ikenna Okoye/Creative Artists Agency)

The school’s faculty includes teachers with strong industry credentials. Hilgers is a former production assistant and screenwriter whose resume includes movies like “Jerry McGuire” and seven seasons of the comedy-crime drama “Psych.”

In her lesson for the day, she told students they could make a diorama, digital presentation or moodboard — a poster that displays the setting and feel of a film — to display their concepts for a story set after a catastrophe wipes out most of civilization. She offered an example of a moodboard from the Netflix period drama Bridgerton, a collage with photos of furniture and clothing styles typical of the early 1800s.

“This designer probably researched that time frame quite thoroughly,” she told them.

This year, students made fake movie trailers and wrote, produced, filmed and edited a horror adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz.” In the process, they learned technical skills such as cinematography and where to position a boom mic to pick up voices.

Students in the film and TV magnet program learn about the multiple jobs in the industry. (Linda Jacobson)

Next year, the school will add an editing studio, courtesy of Advancement Via Individual Determination, the nonprofit college prep organization better known as AVID. Post-production is one of three concentrations students can pick for 11th and 12th grade, along with technical and craft areas.

The school will match students with mentors in the industry and eventually develop an apprenticeship program to give them early experience in their chosen field. The goal, said Deborah Marcus, who manages education efforts at Creative Artists, is for graduates to not only land their first job on a crew, but their second and third as well.

Aiyanna applied for the program after her mother saw an article about it.

“She was like … ‘I’m gonna sign you up right now.’ I guess she wanted me to have something going for me,” she said. “The people who run it, like the actors Mindy Kaling and George Clooney, those are like big people.”

‘A lot of hard work’

Those already in the field know students’ future success hinges on more than technical knowledge or creative ability.

Assistant director Frankie Pagnotta on the set of a commercial. (Courtesy of Frankie Pagnotta)

“I tell production assistants all the time: ‘Half of your position is personality. The other half is skill,’” said Frankie Pagnotta, first assistant director of “Abbott Elementary,” the hit ABC sitcom about teachers in a Philadelphia school.

Pagnotta graduated from Streetlights, a Los Angeles nonprofit that runs a private school with a mission similar to Roybal’s — diversifying the entertainment industry. Now, she mentors young Black production assistants, urging them to be early on set, know their way around the city and not get distracted by talking to friends on the job.

She said she’s worked with a range of young people, from those who balk at menial tasks like passing out call sheets to children of successful directors who are still hungry to prove themselves.

“It’s a lot of hard work,” she said, “and someone is not going to just hand you a career.”

The magnet program generated lots of favorable buzz at Roybal this year, but like many film characters, the school has a complicated backstory.

The Roybal Learning Center opened in 2008 after multiple delays and a scandal involving the construction site — an abandoned oil field. (Linda Jacobson)

The former Belmont Learning Complex sits between two major Los Angeles freeways, atop an abandoned oil field and an earthquake fault. Beset by numerous delays and investigations over potential health and safety hazards, the cost of the project ballooned to nearly $400 million.

The fiasco prompted then-mayor Richard Riordan to support a slate of school board members who ousted the superintendent. When it finally opened in 2008, more than 10 years after construction began, the school was renamed for Edward R. Roybal, the first Latino city councilman in Los Angeles who later served 30 years in Congress. Other programs at the school focus on careers like social work, business and computer science.

Today, the boxy green and tan facility — with its grassy quad and views of the city’s skyscrapers — figures prominently in student-made videos. U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona holds up the new magnet program as a model for other districts.

Second gentleman Douglas Emhoff, (left to right) and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona joined actor George Clooney at Roybal in January. (U.S. Department of Education)

“I’m asking superintendents … to learn Roybal’s example,” he said in March during a panel discussion at SXSW Edu. He visited the school in January with second gentleman Douglas Emhoff and said he wants schools in production hubs like New York, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta to replicate the magnet’s model.

In California, magnet schools don’t receive more funding than traditional schools, despite higher costs for specially trained teachers and industry-specific equipment and facilities. At Roybal, the initial funding from Amazon Studios, Fox Corp., Paramount and other entertainment companies pays for a managing director who serves as a liaison between the school and the studios. A program coordinator plans events like field trips and master classes taught by professionals.

The partners also hired a curriculum consultant and are developing online lessons to share with students around the world. But in another year, they’ll need to secure future funding. Cardona noted that the Biden administration’s 2024 budget proposal includes $200 million to support “career-connected learning.”

For now, Jaison and Aiyanna are soaking up as much as they can. Jaison is an aspiring animator who already knows how to edit manga panels — the comic book style that originated in Japan.

Aiyanna said she’s “sampling” and wants to learn all aspects of the business, but is leaning toward writing.

Despite its entertainment focus, the program doesn’t ignore traditional high school content. Hilgers and an English teacher collaborated on a project inspired by The History Channel in which students researched female poets and made 30-second documentaries about their work.

Roybal Learning Center Principal Blanca Cruz, left, stopped into a film production class to tell students about a field trip to NBC4 and the backlot at Universal Studios Hollywood. (Linda Jacobson)

“Say you’re doing a horror film, and [a character has] a deep cut. You want to have the right body parts in place,” he said. “You need to know about science to make a science film.”

When Lourd and Clooney visited the school, they observed a math lesson based on production budgets and the daily cost of making a film like “Black Panther.”

Lourd said, “George and I were standing there saying, ‘I wish I’d gone to this high school.’”

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Advocates for maintaining race-conscious admissions in higher education protested outside the U.S. Supreme Court in October when the justices heard oral arguments in two cases that seek to end affirmative action. (Getty Images)

With a conservative U.S. Supreme Court widely expected to overturn race-conscious admissions in higher education, attention in the education community has already shifted to what happens next.

One likely effect is obvious. “There is going to be some closing of doors,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “It’s going to be a landscape in which it’s harder to secure access in most competitive schools.”

But further down the line, a ruling against schools that factor race in admissions could affect a host of other academic mainstays, from scholarships to the centrality of tests like the SAT and ACT.

The ruling might not end diversity efforts outright. Granting preferential admission to low-income students, children of single parents or those from communities where students often don’t go to college could achieve similar results, experts say, without courting legal trouble.

“Most Americans don’t want race used in admissions, but Americans do want selective institutions to be racially diverse,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank, and an expert on integration. He thinks the court’s decision could reflect that paradox. “They don’t want to be seen as simply dismissive of the aspiration of racial diversity.”

The court is expected to issue decisions in two lawsuits — brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina — later this month. The plaintiff in both cases argues that the weight universities place on race in admissions violates anti-discrimination laws and puts Asian American students at a disadvantage.

‘Next generation’

While the cases don’t deal directly with K-12 schools, the high court’s decision could elevate the importance of a recent lower court ruling rejecting a legal challenge to diversity efforts at an elite Virginia high school. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., removed a rigorous admissions test and a $100 application fee, and reserved seats at the school for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. Coalition for TJ, the plaintiff in the case, called the revised admissions criteria discriminatory against Asian American students.

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that view. “The policy challenged here is not just race-neutral: It is race blind,” Fourth Circuit of Appeals Judge Toby Heytens wrote in the May 23 opinion. 

The conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, said board members’ desire to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students at the school motivated the new policy. They plan to ask the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit.

Kahlenberg, who testified on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions about race-neutral alternatives, called the TJ case a “next generation issue.”

If the Supreme Court rules that universities can no longer ask applicants to identify their race, they might see the Fairfax case as a chance to “spell out in further detail the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable,” he said. “I think the answer will be that the TJ program is perfectly fine.”

‘Formative experiences’

The college admissions industry, meanwhile, has been preparing for the end of affirmative action for months. Beginning in August, for example, colleges can hide a student’s race if it’s included in the Common App, a uniform application for undergraduate admissions accepted at more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide.

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Counselors advised institutions earlier this year to review all of their policies and practices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and to examine any area, such as mission statements and recruitment efforts, where race is a factor — “no matter how minor” — to determine if changes are needed.

Organizations that focus on high school graduation and college enrollment say they plan to continue to identify students who would be the first in their families to attend college, regardless of race.

“In some ways for us, it will be business as usual — to serve underserved students. That’s been really the heart of our work long before this became a hot-button issue,” said Pam Johnson Davis, director of fellow support for OneGoal, a nonprofit that works in eight states to increase graduation and college enrollment rates. Eighty-six percent of the students served by the organization are Black or Hispanic. She supports 400 “fellows” in the Chicago area who are already in college or another postsecondary program.

If students are barred from bringing up their race even in their admissions essays — a hypothetical scenario that came up during Supreme Court oral arguments — teachers at OneGoal schools would still encourage students to write about barriers they overcame to pursue education, Davis said.

Pam Johnson Davis, left, director of fellow support for OneGoal, greeted students at the organization’s 15th Anniversary Gala in Chicago in May. (OneGoal)

Facing discrimination, raising younger siblings, translating for parents who don’t speak English — “these are really formative experiences in students’ lives,” she said. “Their stories will be shaped by their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Stephen Barker, a spokesman for the organization, added that opportunities for Black and Hispanic high school students to earn college credit could become more important for colleges and universities if the court strikes down affirmative action in admissions.

“Institutions need to double down on those partnerships [with districts] if they want to keep that diversity going in a race-neutral way,” he said.

But he said it’s hard to predict what importance universities might place on other aspects of a student’s application, including GPAs, honors classes, and SAT and Advanced Placement exam scores if race no longer factors into the equation.

The potential end of affirmative action in admissions could further accelerate a growing movement away from requiring the SAT or ACT for admission, with some researchers and advocates for educational equity arguing the tests are biased against Black and Hispanic students and reinforce racial inequities. According to FairTest, an advocacy group, 1,900 institutions are now test-optional or don’t even accept the exams.

But others say that criticism of the tests is misguided and that they still serve as a good predictor of how well students will perform in college. Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, said the tests are “deeply vetted” to remove content that might disadvantage minority students. GPAs, he added, are less controversial, but large racial gaps remain.

He doesn’t think the test-optional trend is only about removing barriers for Black and Hispanic applicants. Admissions officers may have other motivations, he said.

“Either [universities]think that the exams aren’t so important or … they, for financial reasons, desire an excuse for admitting more affluent students with less academic preparation,” he said.

With or without admissions exams, the end of race-conscious admissions would put more pressure on K-12 counselors serving Black and Hispanic students, Kahlenberg said.

“For years, the [private] prep school kids have had the upper hand. There are fewer students per counselor and they can put time into writing impressive letters [of recommendation],” he said. “Here’s an opportunity for public school counselors to paint a picture of students who have done remarkably well despite the barriers.”

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California’s transitional kindergarten was originally limited to children who turned 5 in the fall. By the 2025-26 school year, it will be available to all 4-year-olds. (Allen J. Schaben/Getty Images)

The nation’s public pre-K programs saw a rebound last year as enrollment nearly reached pre-pandemic levels, new data shows.

Thirty-two percent of 4-year-olds attended a state-funded program in the 2021-22 school year — up from 28% the year before, when the National Institute for Early Education Research, which publishes the annual “yearbook,” reported that COVID had “erased” a decade of growth in public pre-K.

A recent push in several states to expand universal pre-K, meanwhile, could more than make up for that decline in the coming years, said Steven Barnett, founder and senior co-director of the research center based at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

California, Colorado, Hawaii and New Mexico recently passed laws to provide universal access to early-childhood education while governors in Michigan, Illinois and New Jersey have all taken initial steps in that direction.

“I don’t think we’ve had a wave like this. That dramatically changes the landscape,” Barnett said. Georgia was the first state to launch a universal pre-K program in 1992, followed by Oklahoma in 1998, but Barnett said, “That’s in the distant past.”

Seven states have recently taken steps toward universal pre-K, but five states don’t have any publicly funded programs. (National Institute for Early Education Research)

The institute’s latest report — its 20th — provides some perspective on how far states have come since researchers began tracking the data in 2001. Forty-five states now have publicly funded pre-K programs, seven more than when the institute issued its first report. The percentage of 4-year-olds served and the overall amount states are spending on pre-K has more than doubled.

But in some areas, there’s been little change. Taking inflation into account, average per-child spending has been relatively flat. And states only serve 6% of 3-year-olds. In New York City, where former Mayor Bill de Blasio aimed to make pre-K for 3-year-olds universal, his successor Eric Adams has eliminated the expansion from the city’s budget, citing the expiration of pandemic relief funds.

While overall state spending increased to nearly $10 billion, about $400 million of that was in COVID relief funding. Barnett, however, said he doesn’t expect states to cut funding when the funds run out because most of the expansion nationwide stems from voter-approved initiatives.

“Florida voters amended their constitution. That’s why they have universal pre-K,” he said during a call with reporters Wednesday. “At the local level, cities all over the country have taken it on themselves.”

The Biden administration is also urging districts to spend more of their Title I funds on pre-K and has proposed a $500 million grant program in the 2024 budget to expand pre-K in Title I schools.

While more states are adding universal pre-K, Barnett doesn’t see the same emphasis on improving quality. During the pandemic, several states paused efforts to strengthen programs and widely granted waivers from certain staff training requirements because of teacher shortages.

Delaware, for example, hasn’t yet reinstated classroom observations to help teachers improve, and North Carolina stopped limiting long-term substitutes to 12 weeks a year, according to the report. Substitutes are required to have an associate’s degree, but not a bachelor’s.

By noting these exceptions, Barnett said he hopes the report will “encourage states to not make this leniency permanent.”

Five states — Alabama, Hawaii, Michigan, Mississippi and Rhode Island — meet all 10 of the institute’s quality standards, the same as last year. Among the indicators are a strong curriculum that includes literacy and math, teachers with at least a B.A. and a staff-child ratio of 1 to 10.

Eleven states meet fewer than half of the standards, including three that serve the largest number of children: California, Florida and Texas.

Polis calls parents

California’s existing state preschool program for low-income children has been in place since 2008. The state then launched transitional kindergarten in 2012, but it was originally available only to 4-year-olds with fall birthdays who missed the state’s Sept. 1 kindergarten eligibility date. The state is now gradually expanding the program, which will be open to all 4-year-olds by the 2025-26 school year.

A state report shows enrollment in transitional kindergarten this school year fell well below projections, but that wasn’t the case everywhere. The Oxnard School District in Ventura County, up the coast from Los Angeles, expanded its program to younger students ahead of the state’s timeline. Leaders planned for nine classes and ended up having to open 25 due to demand.

“California will have the largest preschool program for 4-year-olds in the U.S.,” Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge California, an advocacy organization, said during the press call.

Even though K-12 enrollment in California and several other states is declining, Barnett said that’s actually a boon for early childhood programs because states can serve more preschoolers without having to increase spending.

In Colorado, voters in 2020 approved a nicotine tax to fund universal pre-K, and last year Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed legislation creating the program, which will provide up to $4,300 per child annually.

He’s also been reaching out to families who secured a spot this fall. He called Mitchell Smith of Colorado Springs about two weeks ago to congratulate him on getting his first choice school for his daughter Arrow.

The Smith family — Alex (from left), Summit, Arrow and Mitchell. Arrow will enter Colorado’s new universal pre-K program this fall. (Courtesy of Mitchell Smith)

“I was blown away,” said Smith, a high school science teacher who also has a daughter in kindergarten. “Monday through Friday, [Arrow] sees her sister go to school. She wants to know, ‘When am I going to go?’”

Allie Caracillo, another Colorado parent, will be able to keep her daughter Giovanna in the KinderCare center that she already attends in Denver. But now the state-funded pre-K program will cover 15 hours a week.

“It was a no-brainer,” she said. She thinks she’ll be able to save several hundred dollars a week.

‘We’ve got a model’

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy is allocating $120 million in federal relief funds toward preschool facilities and expanding classes to more districts as part of his pledge to phase in a universal system. The model will expand on the state’s Abbott Preschool Program — mandated by the state supreme court in 1998 as a remedy to longstanding inequities in the state’s poorest school districts.

Barnett, who is involved in planning the program’s expansion, urged leaders not to cut back on components that have contributed to positive gains for students, such as class sizes of 15 with a teacher and an aide. A long-running evaluation showed that two years of attendance reduced half of the achievement gap between low-income children and those from more affluent families.

“We’ve got a model. We know it works. Let’s just do it,” Barnett said.

He predicts lawmakers without plans to offer universal access will likely feel pressure from neighboring states.

“If you’re a legislator in Oregon and Washington,” he said, “and California has universal pre-K, do you just say, ‘That’s nice, but we’re not going to do it’?”

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Meghan Gallagher/LA School Report

Three years and counting since the pandemic shuttered schools and tethered students to their laptops, new data shows that enrollment in the vast majority of the nation’s largest school districts has yet to recover.

Kindergarten counts continue to dwindle in many states — evidence of falling birth rates and an ever-growing array of options luring parents away from traditional public schools. Experts fear those trends, as well as a possible recession and the looming cut-off of federal relief funds, amount to a perfect storm for U.S. education.

The $190 billion in pandemic aid that was provided to schools allowed many districts to temporarily salve the loss of funds tied to falling enrollment and delay cuts to staff and programs. Those funds dry up in 17 months. As budget deficits grow and housing costs drive families out of urban areas, education leaders are staring down a host of unpalatable options, from closing half-empty buildings to laying off staff.

“I’m not a pro-school closure guy. That’s the worst part of school reform,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant and a former Denver Public Schools official. “But if anyone was holding out hope for a bounce back, we have put that to rest.”

The Parkrose School District, outside Portland, Oregon, is one of many grappling with a budget shortfall.

“We have some decisions to make in the next few months,” said Sonja McKenzie, a board member in the district, where enrollment has fallen 12% since 2018. Now leaders might have to slash positions for special education assistants. Talk of layoffs is also surfacing in California, Washington and Wisconsin.

Parkrose School District Board Member Sonja McKenzie, center, with district students. (Parkrose School District)

McKenzie went door-to-door last fall asking voters to approve a tax levy to fund 22 positions, reminding them that the district, where nearly 30% of students are Hispanic, heeded their call to hire bilingual family liaisons. Voters rejected the measure.

Some families, she said, have been “priced out” of the area, heading east to Gresham or across the Columbia River to Vancouver, Washington, where they can find more affordable housing. Those areas, McKenzie said, have “benefited from our challenges.”

Desperation and aspiration

The 74’s enrollment analysis is based on figures from 41 states provided exclusively by Burbio, a data company, and additional data from the nation’s 20 largest school systems.

Since last year, enrollment has declined 2.5% in Chicago, 2.4% in Houston and 2% in Nevada’s Clark County, while New York and Los Angeles saw drops of just under 2%. The Hillsborough County district in Florida, which includes Tampa, and the Gwinnett County School District, near Atlanta, are the only two large districts where enrollment now exceeds pre-pandemic levels.

Large district enrollment trends from 2018-19 to 2022-23

The graphic below shows enrollment trends for the nation’s 20 largest school districts. Divided by region, the breakdowns include changes in overall enrollment as well as in kindergarten. (Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the chart)

In California, which has seen a whopping 5% drop in its student population since 2020, the enrollment decline has slowed, according to statewide data. But the downward slope in birth rates and exodus of parents from high-priced areas has left district and charter leaders with limited options.

Summit Public Schools in California’s Bay Area — a well-established charter network that spawned an online learning platform still used by 300 schools nationwide — will shutter one of its campuses at the end of this school year.

Following a community sit-in and hunger strike in Oakland, the local school board decided in January not to close several schools. Now, amid an ongoing teacher’s strike, the board is reconsidering whether to merge some schools because of enrollment decline.

“There is always this quality and convenience tension,” said Lakisha Young, CEO of Oakland Reach, a parent advocacy organization. “Everyone wants a school in their neighborhood that they can walk their kids to.”

But she called the emotional debate over closing schools a distraction from more important issues — namely that a majority of students aren’t reading on grade level. A third of families in the city don’t choose district schools, and some have moved further inland to Antioch or southeast to the Central Valley.

“If people have the opportunity to move to other places that are slower and quieter and safer, they are going to do that,” she said. “These decisions are not just made out of desperation, they are also out of aspiration.”

‘You just come here’

Some of those same aspirations are fueling a Republican push to give unhappy parents more options. Twelve states now offer education savings accounts, which allow families to use public funds to pay the costs of private school or homeschooling. Despite pushback from critics who argue such programs take funding away from public schools and lack accountability, similar legislation has been introduced in several more states, including Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina.

“This pandemic was the perfect incubation event that really caused homeschooling to thrive,” said Bob Templeton, another enrollment consultant with Zonda, a housing market research company. “We’re seeing this dramatic change in how we educate kids.”

In Texas, where the legislature is currently battling over an ESA bill, existing options like charters and homeschooling have contributed to a decline in what Templeton calls the “capture rate” — the percentage of children from a particular community attending their local public school.

“If they’re down 200 kids in kindergarten and it doesn’t return, then in five to seven years, that district is going to be down several thousand kids,” Templeton said. “You need to get ready to close schools.”

Statewide enrollment shifts since 2021-22

*Click the circle next to state to see districts with the greatest enrollment gain, greatest enrollment loss and % change for state’s largest district. (Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the chart)

He consults for districts surrounding some of the state’s large urban systems and used to be able to reliably calculate that 100 new homes would result in 50 more students. Not anymore.

He also monitors transfers between districts. One school system he works with, Pflugerville, near Austin, took in 584 students from other systems this year. But almost 5,400 transferred out to both charters and other districts. Leaders have put off closing schools for now, which Templeton said just “kicks the can down the road.”

He and Eschbacher advise districts to stay competitive by designing school models that parents want. In some cases, that’s paying off.

The San Antonio Independent School District has had success with a 2017 state law that provides incentives to partner with charters and nonprofit organizations to run schools.

Rebecca McMains decided to enroll her daughter in one of them, Lamar Elementary, after considering close to 10 public, private and charter schools in the area. Because her daughter has disabilities and an “elaborate” special education plan, the choice wasn’t easy.

Lamar Elementary in the San Antonio Independent School District is among those run in partnership with an outside charter organization. The schools have helped prevent enrollment loss. (Lamar Elementary)

“I knew I was going to be heard at Lamar. They are very parent-focused,” said McMains. She said staff members respond to her texts and don’t push back when she has a request, like having a nurse accompany her daughter on a field trip to NASA. “I’m now being thanked for my advocacy.”

But some parents have found their local public schools loath to accommodate the needs of those they are used to seeing as a captive audience.

Jana Wilcox Lavin, a Las Vegas mom, runs Opportunity 180, a nonprofit that supports school choice and formerly led a statewide district that converted low-performing schools into charters. Nonetheless, she was willing to consider her Clark County neighborhood school for her daughter, who starts kindergarten in 2024.

When she called the local school to ask for a tour, officials turned her down, citing concerns about student privacy. She turned to a district administrator, who said she could visit the building but not observe classrooms. Spokesman Tod Story said that while no policy prohibits parents from visiting schools, officials “err on the side of caution to protect our students.”

Lavin said she just wanted to make a well-informed choice.

“When I asked how I should assess if the zoned school was a good fit,” she said, “I was told, ‘We are your neighborhood school. You just come here.’ ”

An ‘absolute asteroid’

That’s less true than ever before. The options available to families have expanded so rapidly that researchers are struggling to keep up.

Counts of how many students are homeschooled are estimates at best and private school enrollment figures can be a year or two behind. That’s one reason Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor who tracks enrollment trends, was unable to account for more than a third of students who left public schools.

That uncertainty makes it hard to tell whether the American school system is experiencing temporary chaos or a more permanent sea change.

Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called the pandemic an “absolute asteroid” of a disruptive event. Still, he doesn’t expect ESAs or other emerging models to cause as much damage to the public education system as some critics predict.

“It’s hard to overestimate the incumbent’s strength,” he said.

That’s the case in Florida, where enrollment grew 1.3% this year and the Hillsborough district expects to keep building schools for years to come to accommodate growth.

In states with declining numbers, like Oregon, district leaders are more wary. School choice advocates hope to get an ESA initiative on the ballot next year, but McKenzie, the Parkrose board member, is concerned such a program would hobble district schools that are already strapped for cash.

“I can understand a parent may feel like they have a better option,” she said.“But it creates a divisive system of who has the resources and who doesn’t. Less resources for the classroom impacts the whole community.”

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy held a press conference after passage of the Parents Bill of Rights. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The GOP-led House on Friday passed a bill that would force schools to offer parents far greater transparency about what their children learn, but that Democrats argue could lead to book bans and discrimination against LGBTQ students.

The Parents Bill of Rights passed 213 to 208, with five Republicans voting against it.

“Teachers unions and education bureaucrats worked to push progressive politics in classrooms while keeping parents in the dark,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House education committee, said during Thursday’s floor debate. “The Bill of Rights …aims to end that and shine a light on what is happening in schools.”

But with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeting that it would face a “dead end,” the legislation is unlikely to get far in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

House Democrats — who renamed it the “politics over parents act” — say the legislation duplicates existing policies and rights and would micromanage how local schools interact with families.

“This legislation has nothing to do with parental involvement, parental engagement, parental empowerment,” said Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. “It has everything to do with jamming the extreme MAGA Republican ideology down the throats of the children and the parents of the United States of America.”

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries discussed books that some districts have removed from classrooms and libraries. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

For years, educators who work with families have longed for this level of national attention to the role parents play in their children’s education. But some experts called the Republican approach adversarial and heavy-handed. Republicans view parents rights as a cornerstone of their Commitment to America agenda and are expected to carry the issue into next year’s elections. Even if the House bill dies in the Senate, the debate likely won’t.

Family engagement experts, meanwhile, say they’re hoping for a less-partisan discussion about building trust between educators and parents.

“If we’re creating bills that pit parents against teachers, kids lose,” said Vito Borrello, executive director of the National Association for Family, School and Community Engagement.

Democrats, he said, have sent the wrong message at times, pointing to former Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s comment that parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach and the National Education Association’s tweet that educators know “better than anyone” what students need. But the GOP legislation, he said, approaches parents rights from a “vigilante perspective.”

Among other provisions, the bill would require schools to post curricula online, provide lists of all books and other reading materials in the library and notify parents of the affiliations of any outside speakers at school events.

Prior to the vote, the House approved several amendments, including one that would make schools disclose when they eliminate any gifted and talented programs and another requiring educators to turn over videos or recordings of any “violent activity” at school. Another stating that parents have a right to “timely notice” of a cyberattack against a school that could expose student or parent information received overwhelming support from both parties, passing 420 to 5.

But amendments that would have eliminated the Department of Education, sent Title I funds directly to families to use for private schools or homeschooling, and block grant education funding to the states failed.

Dozens of education organizations, including AASA, The School Superintendents Association, the NAACP and The Education Trust, endorsed an alternative bill, led by Rep. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, that emphasized inclusion, high-quality schools and a well-rounded education. But the bill failed, 223 to 203, with one Democrat, Sharice Davids of Kansas, voting against.

Representatives of the National Parents Union took a photo with Democratic Rep. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon outside the Capitol. (Samuel Radford/Twitter)

Charles Barone, vice president for K-12 policy at Democrats for Education Reform, said the Senate would likely let the bill GOP die and not try to negotiate a compromise. The question is whether passage of the bill gives Republicans momentum going into the election next year.

“As a general election strategy, it’s pretty ill-advised,” Barone said. “There is a set of voters that buys their line of argument, but that set is pretty narrow. This is such an old playbook.”

The Biden administration has already expressed its disapproval. “The administration strongly supports actions that empower parents to engage with their children’s teachers and schools, like enabling parents to take time off to attend school meetings,” the White House statement said. “Legislation should not politicize our children’s education. It should deliver the resources that schools and families actually need.”

Gender identity provision

The administration’s statement drew attention to a provision that it said would make LGBTQ students feel less welcome. The legislation would require schools to get parental consent if a student wants to officially change their gender markers or pronouns or use facilities inconsistent with the sex they were assigned at birth. During the debate, Foxx clarified that the bill would not require counselors or teachers to “out” students if they discuss such topics in confidence.

During the education committee’s mark-up of the bill March 8, several Democrats said not all trans students have supportive parents and that a “one-size-fits-all” federal mandate could put already-vulnerable students at a greater risk.

But Republican Tim Walberg of Michigan, who pushed for notification, said that informing parents of their child’s request would alert educators to potential maltreatment.

“When a child goes on a field trip or fails a test … their parents are told and often required to sign some sort of acknowledgement,” he said. “Why should the small things require notification but something as significant as a child’s pronouns or a change in accommodations be withheld from the people who raise them care for them?”

Civil rights advocates argue that even if the bill fails in the Senate, the House’s move still harms trans students.

“More trans kids are going to wake up reminded that there are leaders in this country who don’t want them to be safe,” said Liz King, senior director of the Education Equity Program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

The GOP’s bill is inspired by laws that have already passed in several states, like Florida, that allow parents to contest books used in school lessons and libraries and prevent discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the early grades. Gov. Ron DeSantis now plans to apply those restrictions to all grades.

Melissa Erickson, executive director of Florida’s Alliance for Public Schools, said the laws are “exacerbating the flood from teaching” and don’t reflect the concerns of most parents. She doesn’t see the need for a national version.

“I thought education was left to the states,” she said. “Parents have a right to be heard, but there is a difference between being heard and being accommodated.”

This week’s events in the nation’s capital drew 75 representatives from the National Parents Union, who lobbied against the GOP bill and in favor of Bonamici’s amendment. They met with U.S. Department of Education officials and they visited every House member’s office.

But their highlight was getting a shoutout from New York Democratic Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who cited their latest poll results. The survey showed parents support teaching students about diversity but reject policies that would allow one parent to have curriculum removed for all students.

“We’re all gripping our seats,” said National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues. “When we got up to leave, the Democrats stopped on the floor and waved at us. For these parents, it was a powerful moment.”

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After 13 months on the job, Los Angeles Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has dealt with opioid overdoses, a cyberattack and now an impending strike.
(Los Angeles Unified School District)

8 p.m. Update: Los Angeles Unified workers will proceed with a strike early Tuesday morning after efforts to prevent the walkout fell apart Monday afternoon. News of a “confidential mediation” session leaked to the press before Service Employees International Union Local 99’s bargaining team knew about it, according to a union statement. 

During an afternoon press conference, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said the two sides were never able to be “in the same room,” but that the district’s latest offer of a 23% raise was still on the table.  “We’ve run out of time,” he said.

After Alberto Carvalho’s first three months as superintendent of the Los Angeles schools, Nery Paiz, president of the district’s administrators’ union, predicted the job would only “get exponentially harder.”

He was right.

Thirteen months into his post as chief of the nation’s second-largest district, the former Miami-Dade superintendent has had to contend with declining enrollment, opioid overdoses and a cyberattack that exposed students’ mental health records. Now the district’s two largest unions are poised to walk off the job for three days, closing schools for the system’s 430,000 students.

Service Employees International Union Local 99, which represents roughly 30,000 custodians, cafeteria staff, bus drivers and other service workers, announced the strike last week. United Teachers Los Angeles, also in contract talks with the district, is joining in support.

Last week, Carvalho braced families for another disruption.

“You deserve better,” he said in a statement. “Know that we are doing everything possible to avoid a strike.”

But some education advocates say Carvalho — who never faced a strike in his 14 years as Miami-Dade schools superintendent — hasn’t done enough to avert the work stoppage and may have underestimated the strength of California’s labor unions. While observers give him credit for trying to polish the district’s image and fill teacher vacancies, they say reaching an agreement with the employees who served meals, sanitized schools and delivered devices to students’ homes during the darkest days of the pandemic should have been one of his first priorities.

“This is a defining moment for the superintendent and for LAUSD. This is a union town and that’s a huge lesson,” said Elmer Roldan, executive director of Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, a nonprofit that serves many students whose parents are Local 99 members. “When we were praising school employees for their bravery, this is who we were talking about.”

SEIU Local 99 members distributed grab-and-go meals during school closures. (Al Seib/Getty Images)

Local 99’s leaders say their three-day stoppage is technically not about money. The union called the strike because they said supervisors have tried to prevent or retaliate against them for participating in union meetings. They were offended that Carvalho referred to the union’s organizing activities as a “circus” in a Feb. 10 tweet that was later deleted.

On Sunday, the state’s Public Employment Relations Board denied a Friday request from the district to seek a court order to prevent the strike. The agency’s general counsel is still considering the district’s allegation that the strike is illegal. Officials contend the union hasn’t exhausted efforts to resolve its differences with the district.

Carvalho’s latest offer, made Friday, is a one-time 5% bonus for 2020-21 and a 19% raise spread over 2021-22 though 2024-25. But the union, whose members earn an average of $25,000, wants a 30% increase, increased staffing levels and more full-time work.

They argue that with almost $5 billion in reserves, the district can afford to meet their demands. But district financial data shows that all but $140 million of that money is spoken for. Carvalho has also warned of an impending fiscal cliff — “Armageddon,” he called it — as enrollment continues to decline and federal relief funds run out.

Local 99 has been without a contract for nearly three years, but relations with Carvalho began to sour after he rescheduled four optional “acceleration days” to help students catch up from learning loss due to school closures. Originally scattered throughout the school year, Carvalho moved them to coincide with winter and spring break after UTLA pushed back.

Local 99 leaders said they weren’t consulted and that almost half of their members wouldn’t be able to work on those days. They filed an unfair labor practice charge in October over the move, calling it “disrespectful” and a violation of collective bargaining laws.

Carvalho, meanwhile, said during a Wednesday press conference that Local 99 has not responded to the district’s last two offers. Jackie Goldberg, the school board’s pro-union president, said she’s confused by Local 99’s determination to strike even though the district was willing to increase the offer.

“This is the first time since I’ve been doing this that there’s been no back and forth,” she said. “That’s not negotiation. It makes me very disappointed.”

The district declined to make Carvalho available for an interview.

‘Relatively rare’

Unlike Local 99, UTLA hasn’t reached an impasse yet and was in a bargaining session with the district on Friday over its demand for a 20% pay increase.

The teachers union’s involvement in this week’s strike, however, could complicate the narrative that the action — and another disruption for families — is primarily about demanding respect and wage increases for low-wage workers.

State law allows one bargaining unit to go on a sympathy strike with another union, but
Bradley Marianno, an assistant education professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said it’s “highly unusual,” for a teachers union to join a walkout with non-teaching employees.

“They may issue statements of support, but to join in strike is a different, and relatively rare, matter,” he said. UTLA, he said, “can jump in and leverage it to influence their own bargaining negotiations without much fallout in terms of public perception.”

The joint walkout is further surprising because the two unions are often at odds politically. Just last fall, they supported different candidates for a highly contested seat on the school board. UTLA’s candidate Rocío Rivas, defeated Maria Brenes, who was backed by Local 99.

Members of SEIU Local 99 rallied outside the Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters in December. (Linda Jacobson/The 74)

The solidarity over the strike, however, doesn’t mean there’s no division in the ranks. Paiz, the administrators union head, said he thinks some UTLA and Local 99 members will report to schools this week along with the administrators, secretaries, plant managers and others not on strike. The unions, he said, are “portraying 100% buy-in from both groups, but I don’t think that’s the case.”

Even so, Carvalho’s troubled relationship with the two unions makes it tougher for him to keep the district moving toward the ambitious goals set last year, including 70% of students earning a C or higher in college-prep courses and increasing the percentage of third graders proficient in reading by 30 percentage points.

Board member Tanya Ortiz-Franklin said the board has given Carvalho the go-ahead to negotiate “a significant raise” and she said Carvalho has been handling the situation “prudently.” But she acknowledged the need for repair.

“There are important lessons to be learned about communication and respect that I hope can be used to improve relationships crucial to serving our students, families and employees,” she said.