Tag: California

California governor signs Cal State direct admissions program into law
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Dive Brief:
- Qualifying high school seniors in California will be automatically admitted to a California State University campus beginning with the 2026-27 academic year under a bill Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law this week.
- Under the program, eligible students will automatically receive letters notifying them that they have been directly admitted to Cal State campuses with enrollment capacity based on their academic records.
- The program expands a pilot announced last year limited to high school students in California’s Riverside County. Out of 17,000 students who received admission offers to Cal State for the fall 2025 term, 13,200 completed the required paperwork, according to state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, who co-sponsored the bill.
Dive Insight:

California’s new legislation, called SB 640, aims to boost college access and help reverse enrollment declines at some of Cal State’s 23 campuses.

A September news release from Cabaldon’s office noted two campuses with the biggest declines were in his district: CSU Maritime Academy — which recently merged with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo — and Sonoma State University, which announced deep budget and program cuts at the beginning of this year.

“Direct admission removes the applications hurdle that stops some students from going to college, and relieves the fear that they won’t get in anywhere,” Cabaldon said after SB 640 cleared California’s Legislature last month.

The lawmaker cited a 2022 academic study of Idaho’s direct admissions program, implemented in 2015, that found the initiative increased first-time undergraduate enrollments by 4% to 8% — an average increase of 50 to 100 students per campus. It also boosted in-state enrollment levels by approximately 8% to 15%, the study found.

Enrollment gains from the direct admissions program were concentrated mainly in community colleges, though it had “minimal-to-no impacts” on the enrollment of Pell Grant-eligible students, according to the study. At the time of publication, one of the researchers noted the lack of change was not surprising, given that the program did not focus on any particular student group.

Meanwhile, a 2023 study of 33,000 students found a Common App direct admissions initiative geared toward marginalized student groups increased applications among Black, Latinx, multiracial, first-generation and low-income students.

California joins a growing number of states incorporating direct admissions into the acceptance process for their public colleges. That list includes North Carolina, which this year offered 62,000 public high school students admissions into one of dozens of institutions through the NC College Connect Program, an expansion of a pilot launched last year.

“The process of applying to college, transferring between institutions, and navigating the maze of financial aid feels like an insurmountable series of hurdles,” Shun Robertson, the University of North Carolina’s senior vice president for strategy and policy, told Higher Ed Dive earlier this fall. “Eliminating these barriers has been a high priority.”

Institutions in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Hawai’i, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Utah and West Virginia also offer direct admissions programs.
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October 10, 2025
Small District to Pay $7.5 Million to Settle Lawsuit Over Sexual Abuse Decades Ago – The 74

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On the eve of what was expected to be a long and gut-wrenching trial, a small school district in Santa Barbara County has settled a sexual abuse lawsuit for $7.5 million with two brothers, now 65 and 68 years old, who claimed a long-dead principal molested them in the 1970s.

The brothers had sought $35 million for the harm they said they suffered, an attorney for the youngest brother said.

The settlement equals about 40% of the 350-student district’s 2025-26 budget, although the district did not disclose the terms and timetable for the payment. The district’s superintendent acknowledged in a statement that there would be an impact on the budget.

Board members of the Montecito Union School District announced the settlement over the weekend. The trial was scheduled to start Monday.

The case was brought under a 2019 state law, Assembly Bill 218, that removed a statute of limitations for filing claims that employees of public agencies, including school districts and city and county governments, sexually abused children placed in their care.

Estimates suggest settlements and jury awards could cost California school districts as much as $3 billion by one projection, and possibly a lot more. Los Angeles County alone has agreed to pay $4 billion to settle abuse claims with more pending, mostly involving plaintiffs who were once in foster care.

With many larger lawsuits with multiple victims yet to be settled or go to trial, the financial impacts are hard to predict. Small districts are worried that multimillion-dollar verdicts could devastate budgets, if not lead to insolvency. Insurance costs, meanwhile, have soared by more than 200% in five years, according to a survey of districts.

In the Montecito case, the brothers were seeking $35 million in damages combined, John Richards, a lawyer representing one of them, said outside of court Monday.

Montecito is not alone in facing decades-old accusations. The San Francisco Unified School District is embroiled in an ongoing suit involving a teacher who allegedly molested a student in the mid-1960s, records show.

School boards association helps with legal fees

The Montecito case drew the attention of the California School Boards Association, which gave the district a $50,000 grant to help with legal costs, said spokesman Troy Flint.

Flint said Montecito Union Superintendent Anthony Ranii has “been a staunch advocate for AB 218 reform because he understands how this well-intentioned law carries such significant unintended consequences that compromise the educational experience of current and future students.”

Montecito Union “is just one example of what potentially awaits school districts and county offices of education statewide,” Flint added.

The settlement came just weeks after state Assembly members let a measure that would have restored a statute of limitations to such cases, Senate Bill 577, go without a vote in the final days of the legislative session. Its sponsor, Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, said he would bring it back next year.

At a brief hearing Monday, Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Thomas P. Anderle called the Montecito matter “a case of real consequence.” He had scheduled 17 days for trial, court records show. The district’s lawyers did not attend the hearing.

The brothers’ lawsuit was filed in 2022 and alleged that Montecito Union’s former superintendent and principal, Stanford Kerr, molested them in the early 1970s, including raping one of them. Kerr died in 2013 at 89. He never faced criminal charges.

A third plaintiff who also claimed Kerr abused him settled earlier with the district for $1 million. He had described a full range of abuse covering many types of conduct, which included rape, court filings state.

Just recompense for years of suffering

The brothers, identified in court documents as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, pushed forward, Richards said, hoping to be compensated for years of agony. The younger of the two, Richards said, has suffered a lifetime of substance abuse, which is blamed on Kerr’s assaults.

“The money is nice,” Richards said, but the younger brother also seeks “social acknowledgment that what happened to (him) was terrible. He has a long way to go,” in recovering.

The district admitted no liability in making the settlement.

Montecito Union has no insurance coverage going back to the period the brothers said the abuse occurred — 1972 to 1978, Ranii said in a statement.

“We were prepared to mount a vigorous defense,” he said. But the possibility of a jury awarding far more than the district could afford pushed the idea of a settlement after years of pretrial maneuvering.

The superintendent’s statement did not directly address the brothers’ claims. It also did not mention Kerr.

“We are deeply mindful of the enduring pain caused by sexual abuse and feel for any person who has experienced such abuse,” Ranii said in the statement.

A large award in the event of a trial would have “diminished our ability to serve students now and well into the future,” Ranii said. “Continued litigation created exceptional financial vulnerability. Settling now allows us to stabilize operations and remain focused on today’s students.”

Montecito is an unincorporated oceanfront community just south of Santa Barbara in the shadows of the Santa Ynez Mountains. Its residents include Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The district is one of the state’s richest, with more than $40,000 per student in funding due to tax receipts from high-value properties.

The district will manage the costs through a hiring freeze, staff reductions “when natural attrition occurs,” and redirecting “funds previously designated for capital repair,” Ranii said. The settlement allows the district to avoid layoffs, he said.

The brothers’ case was built around the testimony they would have given about Kerr’s abuses, Richards said. There was no physical evidence. At one point, a district employee went to the brothers’ home and forced their parents to sign a document requiring them to make sure the boys came right home after school and avoided Kerr, according to court filings.

Richards said the district did not produce such a document in discovery. It had no records that the boys ever attended the school, he said, although their photos appear in yearbooks. The district also had no records that Kerr ever faced accusations of abuse or sexual misconduct.

Two school board members from Kerr’s time as superintendent said in depositions taken for the brothers’ suit that they would have taken action had they known he was abusing students, Richards said. But with the case settled, the elderly former members won’t be called to testify.

All that remains is a final hearing that the judge scheduled for Nov. 19 to make sure the payment has been received “and that the check’s been cashed,” he said.

Editor-at-Large John Festerwald contributed to this story.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.

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October 4, 2025
Newsom vows to pull state funding from California colleges that sign Trump’s compact
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Dive Brief:
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday threatened to pull state funding from colleges that signed a proposed compact from the Trump administration seeking to impose sweeping policy changes in return for priority in research funding.
- “If any California university signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding,” Newsom said in a statement. “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”
- First reported by the Wall Street Journal, federal officials offered the compact to the University of Southern California and eight other high-profile research universities this week.
Dive Insight:

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his administration have waged a legal and financial campaign against colleges in an effort to transform them ideologically. It comes after Trump on the campaign trail described colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics” and full of academics “obsessed with indoctrinating America’s youth.”

With the compact, the administration has gone from using mainly sticks — typically in the form of civil rights investigations and canceled research grants — to using carrots as a means of pushing institutions to make reforms.

The Trump administration offered to prioritize colleges for research grants and other funding if they agree to give the government unprecedented control over internal institutional decisions and governance.

That includes:
- Taking a position of institutional neutrality on events that don’t directly impact the college.
- Committing not to consider race, gender, religion and other characteristics “explicitly or implicitly” in admissions. (The compact would grant exceptions for religious and single-sex institutions to limit admissions based on religious belief and gender, respectively.)
- Conducting broad, public assessments of the viewpoints of employees and students.
- Changing governance structures and potentially dissolving or taking over departments that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
- Adopting policies that recognize “academic freedom is not absolute” and prevent “discriminatory, threatening, harassing, or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.”
- Capping international undergraduate enrollment at 15% of the broader student body while screening out “students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.”
- Freezing tuition for five years.
- Requiring applicants to take standardized tests such as the SAT.
- Committing to using “lawful force” and “swift, serious, and consistent sanctions” to handle protests that “delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations.”
The compact would also require colleges with endowments worth $2 million or more per student to waive tuition for students studying hard sciences, though the memo didn’t define the field.

Along with USC, eight other colleges received the administration’s memo detailing the compact: the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.

The compact has drawn alarm and stern rebukes throughout the higher education world.

“College and university presidents cannot bargain with the essential freedom of colleges and universities to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom,” the American Association of Colleges and Universities said in a statement Friday.

Denise Forte, president and CEO of the policy analysis and advocacy organization EdTrust, described the compact in a statement as an “existential threat to all institutions of higher learning and the latest example of the federal government overexerting its power to intimidate colleges and universities viewed as ideological enemies.”

In a joint statement Thursday, top leaders of the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers described the compact as offering preferential treatment “in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological agenda” and said that it “stinks of favoritism, patronage, and bribery.” They urged all governing boards and administrators to reject the agreement.

American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell in an interview with The New York Times described the compact as a power play “designed to divide the higher education community.”

And then there is Newsom, who has been among the most vocal Democrats opposing Trump, especially since the president sent the National Guard into Los Angeles this summer, a move that a judge later ruled illegal.

In a press release, Newsom’s office described the compact as tying access to federal research funding to “radical conservative ideological restrictions on colleges and universities.” The governor also specifically threatened to “instantly” pull colleges’ eligibility for Cal Grants, a form of state aid for students from low- and middle-income families.

USC on Friday confirmed it had received and was reviewing the administration’s letter, but the university did not offer further comment.

Most of those institutions have remained quiet about their plans, if any, to sign or reject the agreement. A leader from one, however, voiced enthusiastic openness to the compact.

In a widely shared statement, Kevin Eltife, chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents, said that the system was “honored” that its flagship in Austin was selected among the nine to receive the compact.

“We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately,” said Eltife, a former Republican state senator.
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October 3, 2025
Majority of California Community College Students Lack Basic Needs

Two in three community college students in California lack reliable access to food or housing, according to a new study.

The 2025 Real College CA Student Survey, led by the Community College League of California, found that 46 percent of students are food insecure and 58 percent are housing insecure, which is higher than national estimates: The most recent study from the Hope Center at Temple University found that 41 percent of all college students are food insecure and 48 percent indicated housing insecurity.

Community college students in California reported slightly lower rates of basic needs insecurity in this survey than in 2023, but the number of students needing help remains high.

“It is important to highlight when trends are moving in the right direction, but also that there’s still a lot of work to do,” Katie Brohawn, director of research, evaluation and development at the Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges, said in a Sept. 24 webinar.

Methodology

Over 76,000 community college students responded to the survey, 3,300 of whom completed it in Spanish. The respondents represented 102 of the 116 institutions in the California Community College system.

The background: For many community college students, financial and mental health concerns can be among the top barriers to completion.

“Before students can thrive academically, their basic needs must be met,” said Tammeil Gilkerson, chancellor of the Peralta Community College District in Oakland, during the webinar.

A fall 2023 study from EdSights found that students at public two-year institutions report the highest levels of financial distress, even though those are among the most affordable institutions across sectors.

One recent study from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found that nearly 41 percent of community college students experienced food insecurity and 60 percent reported housing insecurity.

Compared to their four-year peers, community college students are also more likely to be from low-income families, racially minoritized, first-generation, immigrant and adult learners. Each of these groups faces unique challenges in their persistence and retention in higher education.

The previous Real College CA survey, administered in 2023, helped college leaders and others in the state identify the role basic needs insecurity plays in students’ academic progress and overall success, particularly as the state was recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, Gilkerson said.

“While we are no longer in the height of the pandemic, its ripple effects remain and they collide with record housing costs, persistent inflation in food and basic goods, and continued debates about the role of higher education, equity and access in our society,” Gilkerson said.

The data: The latest survey found that only 38 percent of students had high food security, while 46 percent had low or very low food security. The most common concerns students identified were worrying about food running out before they can afford to purchase more (52 percent) or being unable to afford balanced meals (49 percent).

Nearly three in five students said they experienced some level of housing insecurity, and one in five reported being homeless in the past 12 months. While only 8 percent of respondents self-identified as homeless, more said they were couch-surfing (16 percent) or staying at a hotel or motel without a permanent home to return to (6 percent).

Basic needs insecurity also varied by region and institution across the state, with the highest reported rates of food and housing insecurity at 70 percent and 78 percent, respectively. The report did not identify which colleges had the highest and lowest rates of basic need insecurity.

Basic needs insecurities disproportionately impact African American and Black students as well as American Indian or Alaska Native students, compared to their peers. Older students (ages 26 to 30), LGBTQ+ students, independent students, Pell Grant recipients, single parents, former foster youth and those with a history of incarceration were also more likely to indicate food or housing insecurity.

The data also points to a correlation between students’ grades and their rates of basic needs insecurity. While students at all levels had some degree of food or housing insecurity, those earning grades lower than B’s were much more likely to indicate they lacked essential resources.

“If we really are dedicated to improving the academic success of students in our colleges, it’s the basic means that we need to meet. Because if we don’t do that, it doesn’t matter how wonderful a student you are, you’re not going to be able to succeed at the rate that you would otherwise,” Brohawn said.

Not every student is aware of or utilizing campus resources that could address these challenges; over one-third of respondents said they were unaware of basic needs supports at their college, and only 25 percent had accessed the Basic Needs Center. Among students who used resources, most did so to obtain food.

Identifying solutions: Over the past five years, California has made strides to better support learners with basic needs insecurity, recognizing housing challenges as a significant barrier to student success.

The state launched a rapid rehousing program to support learners at public institutions including the CCC, California State University and University of California systems. A 2022 bill began requiring colleges to stock discounted health supplies, such as toiletries and birth control, addressing students’ basic needs in a new way.

A pilot program also provides cash to financially vulnerable students at California colleges, including those who were formerly incarcerated, former foster youth and parents.

The report’s authors recommended providing targeted interventions for vulnerable populations and enhancing accessibility and awareness of supports, as well as advocating for systemic changes, such as increased funding for basic needs initiatives or policies that provide living wages and affordable housing for students.

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September 29, 2025
California School Board Member Stipends Could Change Under New Bill – The 74

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There’s more to being a diligent school board member than attending a couple of meetings a month.

Those meetings require preparation, research and one-on-one conversations with school leadership. There are school site visits. Many districts require regular board training. Sometimes there are spinoff committee meetings about parcel taxes or school nutrition. There’s also an expectation that board members attend events like football games, PTA meetings and retirement ceremonies. Meetings with parents and other constituents are a core part of the role, too.

For all of this, Woodland Joint Unified School District board president Deborah Bautista Zavala says she earns a stipend of $240 a month, minus taxes — the maximum allowed by the state for her district with just under 10,000 students.

“You don’t do it for money, but to improve the education of students,” said Bautista Zavala.

But the lack of money, she said, is a real problem for attracting and retaining qualified school board members who truly represent the community.

That could change if Gov. Gavin Newsom signs Assembly Bill 1390, which would raise the maximum monthly stipend for school board members in both school districts and county offices of education.

This would be the first time in over 40 years that school board members’ compensation has been reconsidered — and the measure comes at a time when school boards are grappling with financial deficits, consolidation, uncertainty about federal funding and potential school closures.

Proponents of the bill have argued that while school board members dedicate large amounts of time to their position, they are not compensated adequately. Currently, school board members can earn no more than $60 each month in small districts or up to $1,500 for the state’s largest districts.

There is also a clause in the current law that allows board member stipends to be raised by 5% each year beyond the maximum, but 7 out of 10 boards still have stipends at or below the maximum, according to Troy Flint, chief information officer for the California School Boards Association.

Raising school board compensation has been a longstanding issue for the California School Boards Association, which sponsored the bill, but it has become more pressing in the years since the pandemic, Flint said.

“The job is vastly more complex than it used to be,” said Flint. “It requires a strong knowledge of finance, an aptitude for community engagement, a working knowledge of educational theory and an ability to deal with culture wars and political issues.”

The role is at an inflection point: More than 6 out of 10 school board members did not run for reelection over the past three cycles, Flint said.

Legislative analysis referenced an EdSource article, which found that 56% of 1,510 school board races across 49 California counties did not appear on a local ballot in 2024, either because there was one unopposed candidate who became a guaranteed winner or because there were no candidates at all.

The bill’s author, Assemblymember José Luis Solache Jr., D-Lynwood, argues that increasing board members’ compensation could lead to bigger, more diverse candidate pools. School boards often attract retirees or other professionals with stable income and spare time. Low stipends put the job out of reach for those from working families or younger people who are already struggling to make ends meet, Solache said.

Solache would know: He began serving on the board for the Lynwood Unified School District starting in 2003, when he was 23 years old. He has since worked with other young elected officials to find ways to recruit young people into office. Solache sees this bill as a way to improve recruitment for an important community role.

“It’s an underpaid job. We compensate the president, senators, Assembly members, state senators,” Solache said. “Why can’t you compensate the school board members that have jurisdiction over your child’s education?”

Raising the stipends of elected officials can raise eyebrows in Sacramento, Solache said. The bill set the maximums by setting an amount between inflation since 1984, when rates were set, and what the maximum would have been if the boards had raised the rates 5% annually as allowed by law.

Maximums for board members in the smallest districts saw the greatest increase. Currently, the maximum for a board member at a school district with fewer than 150 students is $60 a month. Under this bill, that same board member could earn up to $600 monthly, which Solache said is more equitable.

But board members won’t necessarily see raises, even if Newsom signs it into law. The bill merely raises the ceiling for compensation. The decision to actually offer raises to school board members will happen at the local level, and that could be a tough sell given the budget constraints school districts are facing in the coming year.

“There’s no getting around that: that in a time of limited resources, adding money for board members is taking money away from other places,” said Julie Marsh, a professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education, who recently served as the lead author of a study analyzing the experiences of 10 school board members across the state.

“We need to just really keep in mind the demands of that role and the decisions that they’re making around the superintendent, the budgets for these places, the curricular decisions that are being made. And as a state, there’s been a lot put on these positions in terms of making really important decisions,” she said.

Bautista Zavala believes it will be tough to make the case to some of her fellow board members at Woodland Unified, which is in a community 20 miles northwest of Sacramento. The district of 9,500 students struggled to pass a facilities bond last November, despite facilities in dire need of improvement. The optics of board members giving themselves a raise could be tricky if they’re also negotiating with teachers or classified staff.

“You have to be strategic about bringing this forward,” she said.

She encourages board members to raise stipends to bring new voices to school boards. She says members who believe they don’t need a raise can donate the stipend.

Some people believe serving on a board is a civic duty, and compensation shouldn’t factor into the role, said Jonathan Zachreson, board member at Roseville City School District. But he said that’s not realistic for many people. He hopes that raising the stipends for board members will also mean raising the expectations for board members.

Zachreson is concerned that some boards outsource policymaking to groups, including the California School Boards Association, rather than doing in-depth research themselves to find a solution that works best for the community.

“It’s worth the time commitment to actually learn and not just rubber-stamp proposals,” said Zachreson.

But some believe there could be unintended consequences in raising the stipends of board members.

“The worst-case scenario, I think, from a superintendent’s point of view, would be if the increase in pay becomes attractive to the wrong kind of people, who want to micromanage the superintendent and want to be well compensated for that,” said Carl Cohn, a former superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District and State Board of Education member.

Some boards are exempt

Some school districts and county boards of education are exempt from this model because they have their own local charter. This includes the Los Angeles Unified School District, the state’s largest school district with an $18.8 billion budget this academic year; it won’t be impacted by the bill should it become law. A separate LAUSD Compensation Review Committee outlines board members’ salaries — a strategy that Marsh said makes the district appear less self-serving.

In 2017, Los Angeles Unified school board members who didn’t work elsewhere received a 174% pay increase.

“With the increase in compensation in Los Angeles Unified, we saw candidates earlier in their careers, single parents, women of color, immigrants and others with similar lived experience to our students step up,” said board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin in a statement to EdSource. “I hope that will be the trend across the state and improve decision-making for California’s public schools.”

According to a 2023 committee resolution, Los Angeles Unified board members made $127,500 annually if they weren’t employed elsewhere and $51,000 if they had another source of income. And on July 1 until 2027, board members would receive a 1% annual increase — leading most recently to salaries of $128,775 and $51,510, depending on outside employment.

Meanwhile, compensation in the San Francisco Unified School District, currently $500 monthly for board members, is governed by the city and county and is also exempt. The board of supervisors must approve compensation for county board members in Alpine, San Benito and San Bernardino counties.

Beyond compensation

Increasing school board members’ compensation might help address issues such as poor recruitment and retention, Marsh said. But professional development and other non-financial support could go a long way, since board members come in with varying degrees of knowledge on data, governance and technology.

“With the rapidly changing context around us — whether that’s around the politics and the political climate and the divisiveness, or shifting technology — I think there’s a need to further support folks,” Marsh said.

This story was originally published on EdSource.

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September 28, 2025
Ethnic Studies Mandate in California Schools Stalls Over Money, Politics – The 74

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

This fall, every high school in California was supposed to offer ethnic studies — a one-semester class focused on the struggles and triumphs of marginalized communities.

But the class appears stalled, at least for now, after the state budget omitted funding for it and the increasingly polarized political climate dampened some districts’ appetite for anything that hints at controversy.

“Right now, it’s a mixed bag. Some school districts have already implemented the course, and some school districts are using the current circumstances as a rationale not to move forward,” said Albert Camarillo, a Stanford history professor and founder of the university’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. “But I’m hopeful. This fight has been going on for a long time.”

California passed the ethnic studies mandate in 2021, following years of debate and fine-tuning of curriculum. The class was meant to focus on the cultures and histories of African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans and Latinos, all of whom have faced oppression in California. The state’s curriculum also encourages schools to add additional lessons based on their student populations, such as Hmong or Armenian.

The course would have been required for high school graduation, beginning with the Class of 2030.

But the state never allotted money for the course, which meant the mandate hasn’t gone into effect. The Senate Appropriations Committee estimated that the cost to hire and train teachers and purchase textbooks and other materials would be $276 million. Some school districts have used their own money to train teachers and have started offering the class anyway.

Accusations of antisemitism

Meanwhile, fights have erupted across the state over who and who isn’t included in the curriculum. Some ethnic studies teachers incorporated lessons on the Gaza conflict and made other changes put forth by a group of educators and activists called the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium. That’s led to accusations of antisemitism in dozens of school districts.

Antisemitism has been on the rise generally in California, not just in schools. Statewide, anti-Jewish hate crime rose 7.3% last year, according to the California Department of Justice. In Los Angeles County, hate crimes — including slurs— against Jewish people rose 91% last year, to the highest number ever recorded, according to the county’s Commission on Human Relations.

Those numbers in part prompted a pair of legislators to propose a bill addressing antisemitism in California public schools. Assembly Bill 715, which is now headed to Gov. Gavin Newsom, would beef up the discrimination complaint process in schools and create a statewide antisemitism coordinator to ensure schools comply. Another bill, which died, would have directly addressed antisemitism in ethnic studies classes by placing restrictions on curriculum.

‘On life support’

But the delays and public controversies have taken a toll. No one has tracked how many schools offer ethnic studies, or how many require it, but some say the momentum is lost.

“It’s already on life support and this could be one more arrow,” said Tab Berg, a political consultant based in the Sacramento area.

Berg has been a critic of ethnic studies, saying it’s divisive. A better way to encourage cultural understanding is to eliminate segregation in schools and ensure the existing social studies curriculum is comprehensive and accurate, he said. “We should absolutely find ways to help students appreciate and understand other cultures. But not in a way that leads to further polarization of the school community.”

Carol Kocivar, former head of the state PTA and a San Francisco-based education writer, also thinks the class may be stalled indefinitely.

“I think the people who supported ethnic studies didn’t realize they were opening a can of worms,” Kocivar said. “Until there’s an agreement on the ideological guardrails, I just don’t see it moving forward on a broad scale.”

Kocivar supports the ethnic studies curriculum generally, but thinks it should be woven into existing classes like English, history and foreign language. That would leave room in students’ schedules for electives while still ensuring they learn the histories of marginalized communities.

Schools moving ahead

In Orange County, nearly all high schools are offering ethnic studies as a stand-alone elective course or paired with a required class like English or history. Teachers use curriculum written by their districts with public input, drawn from the state’s recommended curriculum. They also have the option of adding lessons on Vietnamese, Hmong or Cambodian culture, reflecting the county’s ethnic makeup.

“The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Marika Manos, manager of history and social science for the Orange County Department of Education. “Students see themselves in the curriculum and in the broader story of America. … It’s a wonderful opportunity for them to get some joy in their day.”

A handful of districts are waiting to see if the state authorizes funding, but the rest have found their own money to hire and train teachers and purchase materials. There was some pushback against Santa Ana Unified when two Jewish civil rights groups sued, claiming the district’s ethnic studies courses contained antisemetic material. The district settled earlier this year and changed the course curriculum.

Polarized political climate

Camarillo, the Stanford professor, said the national political climate “no question” has had a significant effect on the ethnic studies rollout. Parents might have genuine concerns about what’s being taught, “but we’re also seeing the impact of extremist groups that are fomenting distrust in our schools.”

He pointed to book bans, attacks on “woke” curriculum and other so-called culture war issues playing out in schools nationwide.

But the fight over ethnic studies has been going on for decades, since the first student activists pushed for the course at San Francisco State in the 1960s, and he’s hopeful that the current obstacles, especially the fights over antisemitism, will eventually resolve.

“I hate to see what’s happening but I think there’s hope for a resolution,” he said. “Ethnic studies can help us understand and appreciate each other, communicate, make connections. I’ve seen it play out in the classroom and it’s a beautiful thing.”

‘A really special class’

In Oakland, Summer Johnson has been teaching ethnic studies for three years at Arise High School, a charter school in the Fruitvale district. She uses a combination of liberated ethnic studies and other curricula and her own lesson plans.

She covers topics like identity, stereotypes and bias; oppression and resistance; and cultural assets, or “the beautiful things in your community,” she said. They also learn the origins of the class itself, starting with the fight for ethnic studies at San Francisco State.

Students read articles and write papers, conduct research, do art projects and give oral presentations, discuss issues and take field trips. She pushes the students to “ask questions, be curious, have the tough conversations. This is the place for that.”

She’s had no complaints from parents, but sometimes at the beginning of the semester, students question the value of the class.

“When that happens, we have a discussion,” Johnson said. “By the end of the class, students learn about themselves and their classmates and learn to express their opinions. Overall students respond really well.”

Johnson, who has a social studies teaching credential, sought out training to teach ethnic studies and feels that’s critical for the course to be successful. Teachers need to know the material, but they also need to know how to facilitate sensitive conversations and encourage students to open up to their peers.

“It’s a really special class. I’d love to see it expand to all schools,” Johnson said. “The purpose is for students to have empathy for each other and knowledge of themselves and their communities. And that’s important.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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September 27, 2025
California Unions Sue Trump Admin Over Threats to UC System

The Trump administration has frozen more than $500 million in federal funding to UCLA.

A coalition of California education unions and faculty associations is suing the Trump administration to challenge what they say is “the illegal and coercive use of civil rights laws to attack the University of California system and the rights of their members,” the American Association of University Professors announced Tuesday.

The coalition comprises 19 groups—including the AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers and 10 University of California campus faculty associations—and is represented by the legal organization Democracy Forward.

“We will not stand by as the Trump administration destroys one of the largest public university higher education systems in the country and bludgeons academic freedom at the University of California, the heart of the revered free speech movement,” AAUP president Todd Wolfson said in a statement. “We stand hand in hand to protect not only our individual rights to free expression, debate, and association, but also to safeguard the health, safety, and economic mobility of our communities—all of which is at risk.”

The Trump administration has issued a litany of demands to the University of California in exchange for restored federal funding, including unfettered government access to faculty, student and staff data; cooperation with immigration enforcement; a ban on gender-inclusive restrooms and locker rooms; an official statement that the UC does not recognize transgender identity; and over a billion dollars in penalties. So far, the University of California, Los Angeles, has borne the brunt of the demands, but university system officials fear that funding freezes could extend to the system’s other campuses.

On Sept. 4, University of California, Berkeley, officials notified 160 faculty, staff and students that their names appeared in documents given to the Trump administration as part of the administration’s investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus.

“UCLA [faculty association] is honored to stand with this coalition, which presents as an important reminder of what the UC really is—the people who day in and day out do the work on UC campuses,” Anna Markowitz, president of the UCLA faculty association executive board, said in a statement Tuesday. “Today, we join the people of the UC in standing up against federal extortion, job loss, bans on speech and expression—against any effort to dismantle core public values that have made the UC great.”

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September 17, 2025
Parents Sued LAUSD Over Remote Learning. How the Settlement Will Benefit Students – The 74

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More than 250,000 students in Los Angeles Unified will be eligible for extra tutoring, summer school and other academic help after the district settled a class-action lawsuit alleging that its remote learning practices during the pandemic were discriminatory.

The settlement, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, was announced Wednesday by the law firm representing families who said their children fell disastrously behind during the Covid-related school shutdown in 2020-21.

“After five years of tireless advocacy on behalf of LAUSD students and families, we are proud to have secured a historic settlement that ensures students receive the resources they need to thrive,” said Edward Hillenbrand, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. “This critical support will help pave the way for lasting educational equity.”

Los Angeles Unified had no comment on the case because the settlement has yet to be approved by the court. A hearing is set for December, although the settlement goes into effect immediately.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Los Angeles and nearly every other school district in California closed for in-person learning from March 2020 through fall 2021. Students attended classes virtually, and most fell behind academically. Test scores statewide plummeted after schools reopened. Chronic absenteeism soared.

In fall 2020, a group of families whose children were languishing during remote learning sued Los Angeles Unified, saying the district wasn’t doing enough to ensure students were receiving an adequate education.

One parent, Akela Wroten Jr., said that his second-grade daughter was behind before the pandemic and became even more lost during remote learning. She struggled with reading and never got the extra attention she needed because teachers weren’t assessing her progress.

Another parent, Vicenta Martinez, said her daughter didn’t get any instruction in spring 2020, in part because she never received logon information for remote instruction and the school never followed up. When she finally did access remote classes, the lessons were short and teachers offered little feedback.

“LAUSD’s remote learning plan fails to provide students with even a basic education and is not preparing them to succeed,” the lawsuit alleged.

The suit singled out an agreement between the district and its teachers union that said teachers would only be required to work four hours a day, wouldn’t have to give tests and weren’t required to deliver live lessons — their lessons could be asynchronous, or recorded beforehand. In addition, the agreement said the district wouldn’t evaluate or monitor teachers during that time.

United Teachers Los Angeles supports the settlement, saying it provides more assistance for students while leaving teachers’ “hard-won contractual rights” intact and avoiding “unwarranted judicial interference” in the district.

The union also noted that student test scores have recovered significantly since the pandemic..

The plaintiffs argued that the district’s policies discriminated against low-income, Black, Latino, disabled and English learner students, because those were the students least likely to have adequate support to succeed in remote learning. Those student groups also comprise the vast majority of students in the district, the nation’s second-largest.

The settlement requires the district to offer a host of academic support, including summer school and after-school tutoring, to the 250,000 students who were enrolled in L.A. Unified during the pandemic and are still with the district. Among those students, 100,000 who are performing below grade level will be eligible for 45 hours of one-on-one tutoring every year through 2028.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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September 6, 2025
California discipline data show widespread disparities despite reforms
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Dive Brief:
- California’s Black, foster and homeless student populations are experiencing persistent and widespread discipline disparities despite state reforms to reduce inequities, a new report from the National Center for Youth Law said.
- The report found that students in the foster system lost 76.6 days of instruction per 100 students enrolled in 2023-24 due to out-of-school suspensions — seven times the statewide average for all students of 10.7 days lost per 100 students. And in many districts, the suspension gap between Black and White students has increased significantly over the past seven years.
- NCYL warns that discipline disparities could widen even more as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate school discipline practices meant to address racial inequity for historically marginalized student populations.
Dive Insight:

NCYL’s analysis of discipline data in California shows that while some districts have made progress in reducing disparities, many continue to suspend and expel students at disproportionately high rates.

For example, students experiencing homelessness lost 29.1 days because of out-of-school suspensions per 100 students enrolled in 2023-24. Students with disabilities lost 23.4 days of instruction per 100 students enrolled the same school year, which is nearly three times higher than students without disabilities, according to the report.

Black foster youth had the highest disproportionate discipline rate with 121.8 days per 100 students enrolled due to out-of-school suspensions. That’s 15 times the rate of lost instruction for all enrolled Whites students, which was 7.9 lost days per 100 students.

The report’s analysis pulls from discipline data between the 2017-18 and 2023-24 school years. California doesn’t publicly report on the number of school days lost by offense category. Rather, NCYL developed the metric to compare rates across districts, over time and between student groups, the report said.

Additionally, NCYL’s data analysis shows that most suspensions are for minor misconduct that did not involve injury, such as the use of profanity or vulgarity. The 2024-25 school year was the first in which no suspensions were allowed for willful defiance in grades K-12 in California, although the policy had been phased in for younger grades in the years before.

The report recommends that the state disaggregate discipline data for the offenses with the highest rates so the public can see which are for violent and nonviolent behaviors. Currently, most suspensions in California schools, even for profanity and vulgarity offenses, can be reported under a category titled “violent incident, no injury,” which can be misleading, NCYL said.

When most suspensions are reported under the category of ‘violent incident, no injury’ or ‘violent incident, injury’ people will assume the offenses were violent, but they could be mostly profanity and vulgarity, said Dan Losen, co-author of the report and senior director for education at NCYL.

“Don’t call obscenity violence. It’s not violent,” Losen said. “These very subjective determinations about what’s profanity, what’s vulgarity, what’s obscene, what’s not obscene is fertile ground for implicit racial bias.”

The report highlights several California districts making improvements in reducing discipline disparities. Merced Union High District, for instance, has reduced its rate of lost instruction from 58.3 days per 100 Black students in 2017-18, to 8.8 days per 100 Black students in 2023-24. Lost instruction days for students with disabilities went from 32 in 2017-18 to 6.1 in 2023-24 per 100 students with disabilities.

The report credited the reductions in lost instruction to the district’s efforts at problem-solving rather than punitive measures and for providing student supports like individualized interventions and behavioral services.

NCYL recommends several statewide initiatives to reduce discipline disparities, including strengthening state civil rights enforcement and oversight of district discipline practices, as well as expanding support for students in the foster system, students experiencing homelessness, and students with disabilities.

However, statewide reforms in California could be in jeopardy under the Trump administration’s efforts to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion programs nationally, the report said. Such state reforms have included a ban on suspensions for willful defiance in grades K-12 and the explicit inclusion of school discipline in the California Department of Education’s statewide accountability system.

Specifically, the report points to a White House executive order issued in April that calls for a stop to “unlawful ‘equity’ ideology” in school discipline. The order requires the U.S. Department of Education to issue guidance on states’ and districts’ obligations “not to engage in racial discrimination under Title VI in all contexts, including school discipline.”

Critics of equity-based discipline policies say they hamper school safety.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in federally funded programs.

The federal discipline guidance required by Trump’s executive order has not yet been issued, and the Education Department did not respond to inquiries about its status. While discipline policies are typically set at the school, district or state levels, the federal government can issue guidance and investigate schools for discriminatory practices under Title VI.

The civil rights law has historically been invoked to protect the rights of historically marginalized students, including when they are overrepresented in school discipline — and especially exclusionary discipline — data. However, the current administration has used the law to protect White and Asian students, sometimes at the expense of DEI efforts meant to level the playing field for those historically marginalized groups.

“One should expect that, soon, all student groups that have experienced unjustifiably high rates of removal will be excluded from educational opportunities on disciplinary grounds even more often,” the NCYL report said.
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September 5, 2025
University of California would need $5B if it lost federal funding, leader says
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Dive Brief:
- The University of California system’s president warned state lawmakers Wednesday that it would need at least $4 billion to $5 billion to minimize harm in the event of a major loss of federal funding.
- In a letter to state Sen. Scott Wiener, chair of California’s joint legislative budget committee, UC President James Milliken said the Trump administration’s actions “place the entire University of California system at risk,” noting there is a“distinct possibility of more to come.”
- The federal government in August suspended $584 million in grants to the University of California, Los Angeles over antisemitism-related allegations. Milliken responded at the time that cuts “do nothing to address antisemitism.”
Dive Insight:

In his letter to Wiener, Milliken detailed the many ways the University of California depends on federal funding. That includes $5.7 billion in research funding and $1.9 billion in student financial aid per year. UCLA alone received over $875 million in federal grants and contracts in fiscal 2024, according to the latest system financials.

He also described the potential impacts of losing this funding in dire terms.

“Classes and student services would be reduced, patients would be turned away, tens of thousands of jobs would be lost, and we would see UC’s world-renowned researchers leaving our state for other more seemingly stable opportunities in the US or abroad,” he wrote.

Cutting off research funding, largely for scientific studies, has been the primary tool of the Trump administration when targeting colleges. Federal officials often link the cuts to allegations that colleges aren’t doing enough to respond to campus antisemitism that the administration ties to protests over Israel’s war against Hamas.

In some cases, the tactic has paid off for the federal government. Columbia University agreed to settle allegations by paying $221 million to the federal government in return for having most of its $400 million in suspended research grants restored.

The administration is also seeking $500 million from Harvard University, which has been navigating a multi-agency attack from the federal government.

However, a federal judge on Wednesday ruled that the Trump administration’s suspension of $2.2 billion of Harvard’s funding was unlawful. The judge in the case concluded that the evidence does not “reflect that fighting antisemitism was Defendants’ true aim in acting against Harvard.”

On the West Coast, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in June it was investigating the UC system over “potential race- and sex-based discrimination in university employment practices.”

Meanwhile, the administration has also demanded $1 billion from UCLA specifically. While the UC system and UCLA have negotiated with the administration, Milliken in August said the sum “would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.”

State officials have panned the administration’s demand in fiercer terms, with both Gov. Gavin Newsom and Wiener describing it as extortion.

In an August statement, Wiener likened the $1 billion demand to “classic mob boss behavior,” describing the administration as “threatening to illegally revoke funding — here, science funding — or take other punitive steps unless the university submits to his control, pays him off, and submits to his racist, transphobic, xenophobic dictates.”

As it navigates the numerous financial risks at the federal level, as well as other structural financial pressures, UCLA has paused faculty hiring and is moving to consolidate its IT operations to save costs on top of past budget moves.

In his letter to Wiener, Milliken described the current moment as “one of the gravest threats in UC’s 157-year history,” and suggested further actions from the Trump administration could be in store later.

In outlining the amounts the UC system would need to survive a blow to federal funding, he said that the UC system “will need the resolve and partnership of our state’s leaders.
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September 5, 2025