The project brings Los Angeles in line with other large districts around the country, such as New York City, which have  evidence-backed tactics for teaching literacy, amid a national reading crisis.

But LAUSD faces some unique obstacles. A  by the advocacy group Families in Schools detailed gaps in instruction and disconnects between parents and teachers on how to teach reading. 

LAUSD lags in reading scores behind other districts in California, a state with .  

LA Unified’s plan also places California’s largest district at odds with state lawmakers, who  that would require reading instruction based on decoding words using letters and a focus on phonics. 

The proposed law, which was backed by groups including the California State PTA and the NAACP, died in committee after the state teachers union and English learner groups registered their opposition. 

The legislature’s rejection of the bill swung the nation’s most populous state away from a national trend for mandates of science-based reading instruction. 

Dozens of states , including Mississippi, Ohio, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. 

The push for a unified, evidence-based approach to literacy instruction faces obstacles in Los Angeles Unified, where  on the most recent assessments. 

The district in June  aimed at boosting reading and math skills for struggling elementary school students that had employed materials based on the science of reading.  

The new approach, known as the Literacy and Numeracy Intervention Model, will cost less and reach middle school students as well, according to district officials.

Carvalho said in a December interview that the district had made “significant progress” in rolling out a unified set of curricular options aligned to the science of reading to elementary schools under the effort, and that by June 2024 it would “achieve systemic adoption for all grade levels.”

Last month he adjusted the timeline, saying in a subsequent interview that all elementary schools would have access to the materials by the start of the upcoming academic year in August. 

The superintendent said the district would use the extra time over the summer to conduct training for teachers on the new instructional approaches and materials.

“I think we’re actually in a good place so far, considering the size of our district,” said Carvalho. “It’s a massive undertaking.” 

Under the district’s new approach, Carvalho said, schools will choose from a menu of curricula that contain approaches to literacy instruction including phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary. 

The so-called “science of reading” approach favored by LAUSD and many other districts today stands in contrast to the “whole-language” theory once employed by many schools, which emphasized learning to read by using visual cues and words the student already knows, rather than decoding the sounds of their letters.

“There will be a number of reading series, all meeting the criteria, and then principals and their school councils have the flexibility to adopt for their own school, any one of the ones that meet the criteria,” said Carvalho. 

The adoption of a unified approach to reading instruction will provide consistency across schools and bolster the education of transfer students in a , Carvalho contended.   

Four decades of research show the science of reading works, Carvalho said, with more recent studies showing it can boost literacy rates for struggling students and reverse declines in pandemic learning loss. 

A  found that test scores at 66 of California’s lowest-performing schools jumped after educators adopted approaches in line with the science of reading.  

Students in several other states have already exceeded pre-pandemic literacy levels by employing curriculum with explicit phonics instruction, according to a Brown University analysis of test score data.

Carvalho said Los Angeles schools that have already begun using the district’s approved literacy materials and teaching methods have embraced the changes and begun to show some academic progress.  

Students at Esperanza Elementary School in Westlake have made significant gains on reading assessments following the adoption of phonics-based teaching materials and methods promoted by the district, from Core Knowledge Language Arts, said principal Brad Rumble. 

Less than half of first graders at the school met reading benchmarks before the roll-out of phonics-based lessons began in 2021, according to Rumble, but 65% met standards this year. Likewise, the principal said, second graders reading on grade level rose from 39% to 61%. 

“We start with the sounds, and then we move to more complex skills, like decoding and sight recognition,” Rumble explained. “We don’t just forget what we’ve learned.” 

Students at the school tackle vocabulary development and the understanding of language structure, becoming fluent readers by grade three, Rumble said, “and then, those fluent readers comprehend what they’re reading.”

Core Knowledge Language Arts help teachers at Esperanza Elementary build systematic reading lessons, said Rumble. The gains made by students at his school point the way that Carvalho wants the rest of the district to go.   

With high numbers of students living in poverty, and large populations of homeless children and immigrant families, Los Angeles Unified faces special challenges in reading instruction.     

The Families in Schools report found that just 15% of parents knew what their schools reading curriculum was, while only about half said they had the tools to help their child learn reading. 

Just 40% of Los Angeles students can read at grade level by third grade, the report notes, with just 9% of English learners meeting standards. By eighth grade, less than 1% of English learners met standards.

The report lauded LAUSD’s new efforts to educate teachers in the science of reading and instruct parents to teach literacy at home, but said a “greater, long-term commitment is needed,” to build on recent, slight gains in test scores.  

The group’s CEO Yolie Flores, a former vice president of the LAUSD Board of Education, said the district can do better. 

“Families understand that if their children can’t read, it’s essentially game over,” said Flores. “This is why we urge Superintendent Carvalho and the LAUSD board of education to deepen its efforts.”

Flores said Carvalho’s promise to put the science of reading in every Los Angeles elementary school is a step in the right direction. The district now needs to ensure the new lessons are implemented, she said.   

“We can’t keep kicking the proverbial can down the road,” said Flores.   

Carvalho said that so far he’s heard few complaints with the program, although some concerns have been raised by members of the English-language learning community, he said, with what can been seen as a one-size-fits all approach of uniform curricula. 

The local teachers union, he said, has not registered any opposition to the project. United Teachers Los Angeles did not respond to a request for comment on the matter. 

Although other states have had success in legislative mandates for evidence-based reading instruction, California lawmakers dropped a proposed law after the state’s largest teachers union registered its opposition. 

In a letter opposing the legislation, the California Teachers Association said the bill  would duplicate current literacy programs and limit teachers’ discretion in serving diverse student populations, including English learners. 

Separately, advocates for English learners also sent letters to lawmakers in opposition to the bill, saying the state needs a plan that “centrally addresses” the needs of bilingual students.   

California assemblywoman Blanca Rubio, a Democrat and teacher who authored the bill, said her own time in the classroom informed her belief in phonics-based instruction. 

“For me, it is not one size fits all approach,” said Rubio. “The science of reading takes into account the research on how kids best learn to read. When I was a teacher, we set goals and we used the data to inform our instruction.”  

Carvalho, who supported Rubio’s bill, said results from state reading assessments taken by LA Unified students this spring will help determine whether the district’s roll-out of evidence-based reading instruction is working.   

Regardless, the superintendent is confident in the district’s new approach to literacy instruction. “I’m a true believer that the basics of reading instruction and philosophy, must be rooted in a science of reading,” Carvalho said.

It’s unclear if the CCSA will prevail in court, but the suit is already making an impact on the nation’s second-largest district. 

LAUSD’s new colocation rules were . The CCSA’s suit seeks to prevent the district from enforcing .

The suit alleges the new rules violate a 2000 compelling LAUSD and other California school districts to provide charter schools with classroom space that is “reasonably equivalent” to classrooms used by traditional public schools.  

The new policy prevents charter schools from colocating with low-performing schools, community schools that provide social services, and schools in the district’s . It also prevents charter schools from being sited in places where they could siphon students away from district-run schools. 

The restrictions would prevent charters from being sited at roughly 350 of about 770 public school buildings in the district, according to the CCSA. 

Under the new regulation, impacted charter schools will still be offered space to operate in other LAUSD district buildings. But charter school operators and their advocates say the restrictions will prevent them from serving communities that need them most.

Representatives for LAUSD declined to comment on the litigation. In in January, LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho said he believes the new regulation is legal. 

Attorneys for CCSA and LAUSD will meet with a judge on July 12 to determine whether the case is ready for trial and to set a trial date.

Here’s what’s to know about the looming legal fight: 

1. CCSA has a track record of legal victories, but a win in this case is no sure thing.

The CCSA has sued various California districts numerous times over the years, and has managed victories in the courtroom, including a 2015 win against LAUSD that . But David Bloomfield, an education law professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, said the suit faces a legal challenge in part because the impact of the policy is still unclear. 

“The court may say, well, let’s just see how this plays out,” said Bloomfield.  

2. Even without a legal victory for CCSA, LAUSD’s regulation still may be modified or even abandoned

Carvalho created the district’s new colocation policy only after LAUSD school board members last year issued a resolution calling for the restrictions. But though he favors district-run magnet programs as a tool for reform, Carvalho is not a vocal opponent of charters. At the presentation of the new rules to the board, he said they might have to be changed. 

The regulations also passed the LAUSD board by a slim majority. Bcould bring a pro-charter majority back in control, setting the stage for a resolution calling on Carvalho to alter or revoke the regulation. 

3. The colocation policy may already be having a chilling effect on LA’s once-booming charter school sector 

Los Angeles Unified has more charter schools than any other district in the nation. But today . The district overall is shrinking, and LA’s charter sector is dealing with a hostile school board, falling charter enrollment and the resumption later this year of charter renewals, after they were suspended during the coronavirus pandemic. Charter operators said the new colocation rules have already affected school staff morale and, in some cases, worsened their relationships with traditional public schools. 

4. The impact of the regulation could vary, depending on how it is enforced

Officially, the new regulation will affect where schools can operate starting in the 2025-26 school year, but board members have instructed LAUSD’s charter school office to take “the spirit” of the regulation into consideration in colocation decisions made this year. 

There are currently 50 charters co-located in 52 LAUSD school campuses, with 21 charter schools located in buildings that fall into the categories identified by LAUSD as no-charter zones. CCSA officials said it’s not yet clear if the policy is already being enforced. 

The new regulations provide an exemption for charter colocations, but only if there are no changes to those charter programs. Depending on how this point is enforced, more or fewer schools could be impacted, charter operators and the CCSA officials said.

The survey polled more than 1,000 registered voters, parents of public high school students in L.A. County and students. It intentionally focused on parents and students from “backgrounds disproportionately impacted by inequities in our education system,” particularly those who are Black, Latino and immigrants. There were also four focus groups, two with students and two with parents.The poll was commissioned by Harbor Freight Tools for Schools, a program created by the founder of Harbor Freight Tools to expand skilled trades classes in high schools across the country.

L.A. County is the most populous in the nation, yet fewer than 1 in 5 public high schools in its 80 school districts offer trade programs and classes. Over the last 25 to 30 years, skilled trades classes in high schools have vanished, and the few that remain are seen as important only for students not planning to attend college. Yet, among respondents who overwhelmingly support the expansion and funding of these classes, over 70% believe they can help students prepare for higher education.

“Incorporating skilled trades into high school curriculums is our ‘north star’ goal,” says Belen Vargas, senior director of Los Angeles County Programs at Harbor Freight Tools for Schools. The L.A. County program provides funding to schools that offer trades classes, like La Mirada High School and Port of Los Angeles High School, and supports mobile programs that do not require a dedicated classroom or on-campus equipment, including afterschool, on weekends and during the summer. The organization advocates for industry, labor and education leaders to support and fund the expansion of these classes in L.A.

Vargas says that what stood out to her in the focus groups was students’ recognition of the importance of construction jobs for their local economy and neighborhoods.

“Young people in the focus group really spoke about wanting to work in a career where it’s improving their community, and they spoke very eloquently about driving around and seeing these big projects going up and how they know that’s that’s to better their community, and they want to be part of that,” Vargas says.

She says the organization team met with over 20 big industry leaders last year. They unanimously agreed that these classes are important but said there is no existing pipeline of skilled professionals ready to take on the dozens of infrastructure projects that will be coming to L.A.

Brent Tuttle, a welding teacher at La Mirada High School, says there’s already a shortage of construction workers, but even more will be needed soon as L.A. prepares to host the Olympics in 2028. 

“There’s welding, plumbing and all these trades out there that are in high demand … but nobody’s filling them because nobody’s trained to do it,” Tuttle says.

He has been teaching welding for 24 years, 14 of them at La Mirada. In 2020, Tuttle was one of 18 trade teachers who received $50,000 from Harbor Freight Tools for Schools.

He says there’s often a stigma attached to taking trade classes because people believe those students are less competent than those attending college and couldn’t get in. Yet he believes that perception is changing slowly as parents and students learn about the high wages many trade professions offer and as more people realize the skill and intellect needed for jobs such as auto mechanic. He says students who learn these skills in high school could be making six figures in five years, whereas those who attend college could graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and earn far less.

He says that some of his students who went to college found that working in a trade was a better option.

“I didn’t think they were going to be welders, that wasn’t in their plan, but many went to school and they’re like, ‘You know what? This is tougher than I thought. I have this skill and now I’m falling back,’” he says.

Tuttle, who has about 150 students, models his class like a real welding job. His students in advanced classes are expected to arrive an hour and a half before school starts because that is typically when welding jobs begin. They are expected to come in, get dressed and begin working on projects for the first two hours of class. His freshmen and sophomores learn how to use the machinery and learn the basics of five types of welding.

Jacob Pittman, a senior, has already completed all his graduation requirements, so he spends four class periods in the welding workshop and has become a shop lead, helping his classmates. Like many students, Pittman had a difficult time adjusting when the pandemic began, and his grades suffered. Early into high school, he decided college wasn’t for him. His dad was supportive of his decision and introduced him to the option of trade school. Tuttle says Pittman has been a standout student because of his strong work ethic and how quickly he picks up on skills. Tuttle has received approval from the school to hire a shop aide and says he plans to hold off on filling the position while Pittman attends trade school for a year. After that, he intends to hire him.

Pittman says his favorite part of the welding program is the positive environment where everyone seems to genuinely enjoy their time working on their craft and creating projects.

Like Pittman, 17-year-old Nova Thomas enjoys helping younger students. She recalls the summer program where they helped middle school students build barbecue grills as one of her favorite projects. Tuttle says the summer program La Mirada does through Harbor Freight Tools for Schools has allowed more girls to participate. Thomas says she tries to promote the welding program to the middle school girls because of her great experience.

“I’ve definitely always felt comfortable and never felt inferior in the shop,” she says. “It’s always been a safe space, and I’ve never felt like I had to compete for anybody’s respect, so I always appreciate that. During the summer school program, I tried to stress to the girls how important and awesome it would be if they would actually continue with these skilled trades later on.”

Tuttle says his female students typically end up being better welders than his male students because they are more meticulous. He says that though they are usually slower than the male students, it’s because they are focusing on perfecting every level.

“I’m super lucky to have the shop I have,” Tuttle says. “I know I’m in a blessed situation where my boss has yet to tell me ‘no’ on things that I’ve asked, as long as it’s within reason.”

He believes the county isn’t doing a good job of giving students options while they’re in high school to pursue these careers.

The survey, conducted by research firm Evitarus, polled 400 registered voters, 495 parents of students attending public high schools in L.A. County and 258 students. Evaritus conducted three online surveys between Nov. 20, 2023, and Jan. 21, 2024. The margin of error for registered L.A. voters was plus or minus 4.9%. The four focus groups were for South L.A. Black/African American parents; L.A. Harbor Latino high school students; L.A.Harbor Latino parents (in Spanish); and South L.A. Black/African American high school students.

With tough, new policies, falling enrollment, and a hostile district school board, the decades-old charter school sector in Los Angeles has never faced headwinds so stiff, operators say.

Los Angeles, which has more kids in charter schools than any city in the country, this month banned charters from nearly half its school buildings, even as dropping enrollment emptied out classrooms across the city. 

Enrollment is cratering for schools across Los Angeles, with district schools seeing larger drops than charters.  

Later this year, L.A. is bringing its charter renewal process back online after a three year suspension due to the pandemic, employing a state law meant to hasten the closure of low-performing charter schools. 

And fewer kids are signing up. Applications for opening new charter schools in the city, which once arrived annually by the dozen to L.A. Unified, this year completely dried up, according to the California Charter Schools Association.

One of the largest charter networks in Los Angeles, KIPP SoCal Public Schools, is this year due to declining admissions. 

“We’re on the brink of a new chapter,” said Joanna Belcher, chief impact officer for KIPP SoCal, which currently operates 23 charter schools. 

“In L.A., specifically related to ed reform, for a long time, the focus was on growth,” said Belcher. “But now, particularly in L.A., our focus is not on growing.”

Instead, Belcher said, the network is focused on making sure existing schools can continue to operate, and deliver on their promise of providing high-quality options for families in need of good schools. 

To accomplish those goals, Belcher said, KIPP SoCal is working to hasten post-COVID academic recovery, attract and retain talented staff and refine its teaching practices based on feedback from graduates. 

Charter schools now account for about 20% of the district’s enrollment, serving more than 150,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade in 275 schools. 

Enrollment in the schools peaked in 2021, when the city’s charters enrolled nearly 168,000 students. Since then admissions have declined by nearly 11%, although not as fast as district schools.  

L.A. Unified enrollment reached 639,337 in the 2015-2016 school year and fell to just 538,295 in 2023, a decline of nearly 16%. 

Experts say reasons for declining enrollment in Los Angeles include a falling birth rate, families leaving the city, and more families choosing homeschools. 

The shuttering KIPP schools aren’t the first charter schools in Los Angeles to close in recent years. More than a dozen other charters have shut down in the city since 2019, with falling enrollment being a chief reason for the closures.

Declining admission is being felt across the city. With vastly more resources than the independently run charters, L.A. Unified has so far avoided the closure of traditional public schools, although Superintendent Alberto Carvalho recently said it is a possibility.

Keith Dell’Aquila, vice president of greater Los Angeles local advocacy for the California Charter Schools Association, said the district’s new colocation policy, which blocks charters from many of the city’s campuses, has also discouraged new schools from opening in the L.A. Unified. 

“Our expectation is for the district to treat charter school students and their families fairly,” Dell’Aquila. “We absolutely do not believe this policy reaches that standard.” 

This year, there are zero petitions to open new charter schools in the district, Dell’Aquila said. 

It wasn’t always this way. 

L.A. Unified, the nation’s second largest district, was one of the first in the country to allow charter schools, converting its first school to charter status in Westchester nearly 31 years ago.  

A period of rapid growth for charters in the district commenced, with enrollments peaking during the pandemic. There are still more than double the number of charters in L.A. Unified than there were a decade ago.

But though the district’s on state tests and post higher graduation rates, charter operators feel they are under attack, said Oliver Sicat, CEO of Ednovate, which has five charter high schools in Los Angeles.   

“It’s the low point now,” said Sicat, who has operated charters in L.A. for a dozen years, following stints as an educator and administrator in Boston and Chicago. 

The district’s enthusiasm for charters, Sicat said, has journeyed through peaks and valleys over time, but in recent years a shrinking pool of students has come to pit district schools against charters. Both types of schools are funded on a per-pupil basis.

“It’s gone from an atmosphere of collaboration to one of competition,” said Sicat. 

Two years ago , giving the board a new majority with a skeptical take on charter schools, and handing opponents of the schools, who argue charters siphon resources from district programs, a powerful upper hand. 

The board in September issued a new resolution for Carvalho to create a policy banning charter schools from collocations at roughly 350 school buildings, and barring charters at collocated sites that could disrupt enrollment feeder patterns for district-run schools.  

Carvalho complied, and at a Feb.12 meeting the board voted 4-3 to approve the union-backed . Board president Jackie Goldberg, a coauthor of the resolution calling for the policy, said the policy is meant to preserve district programs.  

“The whole point of charter schools was not to replace the public schools, but to improve the public schools,” she said. “That has been lost, as soon as you make it a competition.”  

With the board’s majority tilting against them, charters could be closed down in the upcoming cycle for renewals, which the schools face this year for the first time since 2020, said Joni Angel, executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition for Excellent Public Schools, a group that a represents some of the city’s largest charter operators. 

“It feels inevitable, at this point, that charters will close,” Angel said, both due to the new colocation policy and renewal cycle restarting, given the current composition of the board.

But Angel said the board could tip again back in charters’ favor in the coming November elections. Two incumbents are running for reelection and two retiring members, including Goldberg, are leaving open seats. 

If either of those open seats is won by a pro-charter candidate, the board’s current majority could flip, Angel said. 

Fraught school-board races are nothing new in Los Angeles, where for years both unions and charter school backers have thrown their might behind candidates to win elections that could tilt the board in either direction of pro- or anti-charter.

Gregory McGinity, executive director of the California Charter Schools Association Advocates, said the pro-charter group, which has backed candidates in the past, is keeping a close eye on the upcoming school board races, for which primaries will be held next month.  

“We believe that voters will respond positively to candidates who champion policies that foster collaboration between traditional public schools and charter public schools,” McGinity said. 

With the California Charter School Association already against L.A. Unified’s new collocation rules, and the upcoming school board elections, conditions in the country’s largest charter school system could again favor charters, said Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California Rossier.

“It’s not really clear to me what’s likely to happen in this election. But absolutely, if the board changes hands, that could have a serious impact,” he said. 

California Charter Schools Association President Myrna Castrejón said for now the future of charter schooling remains unclear in Los Angeles, and, indeed, all of California, where statewide enrollment in charters reached a peak about three years ago. 

“The value of charter schools in the next ten years is going to be defined less by how fast you can grow, but how responsive you are to change,” Castrejón said. “We see families leaving the public school system, period, in much higher numbers than we ever have before.”

But room rates consume most of the $650 a week her husband earns from construction. The family depends on prepaid grocery cards from the to cover other basic needs.

“Without that, we probably wouldn’t be able to eat some days,” Menkedick said.

Gas station cards allow her to get her 17-year-old daughter to school. A T.J. Maxx gift card purchased a dress for the girl’s first dance. The district, she said, has “gone way above and beyond” to help families in such dire situations.

But those services and others like them could soon be jeopardized. The extra $800 million in federal funding districts across the country have relied on to cover emergency expenses for the nation’s homeless students runs out later this year. 

In , advocates called on lawmakers to extend the spending deadline for another year. Once those funds expire, many will be scrambling to keep serving families in crisis. 

“I don’t think a lot of people realize — especially people in Washington, D.C. — that when they were allocating these funds as a response to COVID, this was money we have actually needed for a really long time,” said Susanne Terry, coordinator of homeless education services for the San Diego County Office Education. “We don’t see it as COVID relief; it’s just relief.”

California’s ‘most vulnerable’

The money came at a critical moment. Since the pandemic, homelessness has continued to rise, with rates hitting last year. Among families with children, there was a over 2022, federal data shows.

The needs are particularly great in California, which has the highest per capita next to Washington, D.C. Last year, the state spent over $7 billion on roughly focused on reducing homelessness, but most of those efforts didn’t reach students. 

Terry’s office used some of its $960,000 from the relief program to create a new position, a specialist who helps shelter staff follow outlining services to  homeless students.

The training came at the right time for Veronica Sandoval, the first-ever education coordinator at Father Joe’s Villages, which runs homeless shelters in San Diego. She was unfamiliar with how to help families, often refugees, who were being turned away from schools because they lacked the required paperwork. The shelter also serves mothers who escaped domestic abuse.

“Their priority is surviving and making sure that their kiddos are fed,” Sandoval said.  “Sometimes education is not at the top of the list.” 

With the specialist’s guidance, Sandoval learned how to help parents find transportation, overcome language barriers and navigate the bureaucracy of registering for school. Now, for the first time in the nonprofit’s 70-year history, all of its school-age children — about 180 —  are enrolled.

Sneakers and backpacks 

The pandemic aid legislation, a bipartisan amendment to the 2021 American Rescue Plan, totaled eight times the amount states typically receive from the federal government to who frequently double up with other families or live out of their cars. Many districts received dedicated funding for homeless students for the first time, according to the SchoolHouse Connection report, which was based on a national survey of over 1,400 homeless liaisons.

Some districts used the money for store and gas cards. Others paid for short-term housing, mental health services and technology like laptops and cellphones. 

More than half of the respondents said they plan to use federal Title I funds to continue some of the services, but 35% don’t plan to provide the same level of support.

Like a ‘widget maker’ 

But not all districts have been as efficient as Hacienda La Puente at spending the money. Because the funds will expire later this year, some districts prohibited departments from hiring extra staff that they’d have to let go.

Without extra personnel to purchase supplies and coordinate short-term hotel stays, finding ways to distribute the funds is often viewed “like an added thing on your plate,” said San Diego’s Terry.

Contracting and purchasing rules have also been “roadblocks to quickly and effectively spending” the money, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection. 

She received one email from a frustrated homeless liaison whose request to purchase a van to get students to school was rejected. A state official responded that “a yellow school bus” was the best way to get students to school. 

The liaison wrote to Duffield: “If we had enough drivers and yellow buses we wouldn’t be asking for a van.”

Such hurdles help explain why a quarter of the homeless liaisons worry the funds will dry up before they have a chance to spend it. Ohio districts, for example, still have not spent almost half of the $18.8 million they received, according to the state’s . And have only spent about 45% of the $9.93 million they received.

Liaisons say they need more time to spend the money. Some received it late, and others proposed ideas that were turned down. One New Hampshire district rejected requests to spend the money on eyeglasses, taxis for students and clothes, according to a liaison quoted in the report. Officials said staff first had to “exhaust all community resources.”

Those findings echo Jennifer Kottke’s experience at the Los Angeles County Office of Education, where she serves as a homeless education project director.  The county received over $3 million from the program. She asked to spend $280,000 on school and hygiene supplies — a request, she said, that should have taken about three months to approve. Instead, it took twice that long. At one point, the paperwork required 12 signatures.

Expected in October, the order arrived just last week. The red tape, she said, hampers her ability to help families in crisis and sometimes makes her feel like another “widget maker in the factory.” 

In July, according to California Department of Education data, the Los Angeles office still had over $2.6 million to spend. Kottke used about $400,000 for a tutoring program that has served 500 students, but will terminate at the end of the school year. 

She said she’s not even sure how much funding is left. Some liaisons across the county’s 80 districts didn’t even know they had received relief funds specifically for homeless students. The same was true for 24% of liaisons nationally, the survey found.

“There are days where I just feel like I’m spending so much time generating paperwork, that I’m not getting to the core of what I should be doing,” she said. “We’ve got a very vulnerable population. We’re trying to change the landscape of homelessness.”

The new rules, presented at a Tuesday, prevent charters from being sited in campuses that have been identified as serving vulnerable students, accounting for roughly 350 of about 770 school buildings in the district. Charter schools would still be offered space to operate in other LAUSD district school buildings. 

The regulations prevent co-locations in low-performing schools, community schools that provide social services, and schools in the district’s — immediately impacting about 21 charter schools — now co-located in those buildings —  enrolling thousands of students who may need to move to new LA Unified campuses in the fall.

“This is one of those situations that, no matter what, we’re going to have some people dissatisfied on either side,” said L.A. school superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who created the new regulations at the direction of the district school board. 

Carvalho said the new regulations are within the bounds of a compelling California districts to provide classroom space for charter schools. There are currently 50 charter schools co-located in 52 LAUSD school campuses, serving roughly 11,000 students. Thirteen additional charters have requested space for the upcoming school year. 

“I believe that what has been presented may in many ways alleviate some of the issues,” he added. “However, we need to be vigilant and honest about unintended consequences of well intentioned policies.”

The new rules are a reversal for a city that historically has been friendly to charter schools and was immediately opposed by charter advocates, who threatened legal action in a letter to the school board as soon as the new policy was announced. 

California Charter Schools Association president Myrna Castrejón said the rules violate state law compelling the district to give space to charter schools, by keeping them out of entire neighborhoods served by schools in the three categories. 

“In the worst case scenario, of course, the schools are literally evicted from campuses,” said Castrejón.

A letter sent to the board by the association said the policy violates a portion of the state law requiring that public school facilities be shared fairly among all public school pupils, including those in charter schools. Castrejón said the policy could create “charter school deserts” in underserved parts of the district.

The long-simmering conflict over charter schools in Los Angeles reached a flashpoint in September when the board issued a compelling Carvalho to create the policy and spelled out many of the specific components it should contain. 

The resolution, which was crafted by board president Jackie Goldberg and board member Rocio Rivas, called for the policy preventing charters from being co-located in school buildings that enrolled vulnerable students in the three groups. 

“Schools that are struggling the most to educate our students should not be added, continuously, more things to do,” said Goldberg, “like figure out a bell schedule, and how to share the cafeteria and how to share the playground.” 

Districts that provide classroom space to charter schools, such as Los Angeles, often decline to offer charters their choice of locations, said Fordham Institute President Mike Petrilli. 

But it’s uncommon for a city to delete such a large chunk of schools from eligibility for co-locations, he said. “It’s unusual for the district to be so flagrant, and put it down in writing, rather than to just find myriad ways to make life difficult,” Petrilli said. “It seems very in-your-face.” 

The new regulations earned generally positive reactions from board members who backed the changes. The board will vote next month to adopt the policy. 

While Rivas and Goldberg spoke in favor of the proposed rules, board member Nick Melvoin, who voted in September against the resolution, spoke against them.  

Melvoin said the new policy is unneeded because the district is facing enrollment declines. The rules presented by Carvalho, he said, neglect potential solutions, such as the use of private buildings or more strategic school sitings, to mitigate the negative impacts of co-location.

“We definitely have enough space for everyone,” Melvoin said Tuesday. “We just don’t allocate it properly.”

Staring down the nearly 80-year history of modern suburbia, Herold finds that the effort produced mostly “disposable communities” across the country. While they served their first few sets of residents — his family included — they have failed to deliver the promise of the American Dream to the families of color who followed. Case in point: He notes that in the north of Dallas, where his reporting takes him, Black mortgage loan applications are now denied at a rate 23 percentage points higher than those of white applicants with similar incomes.

And while many families sought suburban homes in large part for their superior schools, even that isn’t a given anymore, he finds — especially if you’re not white or born in the U.S.A. Instead of an educational upgrade, he reports, many families now find troubled, underfunded schools, intractable bureaucracies, teachers’ union contracts that make “any wholesale changes difficult” and, perhaps worst of all, maddening discrimination in the very place where they’d sought refuge.

A longtime Education Week staffer who now teaches journalism at Temple University, Herold spent four years examining the historical record and found a pattern: As suburbs age, municipal revenues often fall, even as the costs of maintaining infrastructure rise. An “entrenched culture of political backscratching and can-kicking” exacerbates these problems.

In one suburban district in Evanston, Ill., outside of Chicago, crusading superintendent Paul Goren tells Herold, “I landed in a district that had a foundation of quicksand. It was wobbly on the instructional side, with lots of people doing their own thing because that was what they had done for years. We were [also] facing some level of financial doom.”  

Eventually, Herold writes, what befell so many suburbs was what he calls a “relentless cycle of racialized development and decline that took root after World War II, then sucked huge swaths of the country into a pattern of slash-and-burn development that functioned like a Ponzi scheme.”

His book, out Tuesday, follows five diverse families in suburban Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. He actually grew up in the Penn Hills neighborhood east of Pittsburgh, and finds one of his subjects just three doors down from his childhood home.

Herold spent years getting to know these families, offering a deeply reported and closely observed account of five families’ struggles to capture what his family so easily enjoyed. 

���˶���’s Greg Toppo caught up with Herold earlier this month.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

���˶���: You note at the outset that you’re a suburban kid, raised in Penn Hills. Things for you went as they were supposed to. Yet you report that your dad ended up selling your childhood home in 2014 for one-fourth of what it was worth, to a guy he met on Craigslist. Is this the inevitable fate of inner-ring suburbs like yours? What’s at play here? Why don’t suburbs work anymore, and how do public schools play a part in this failure?

Benjamin Herold: Suburbia worked great for my middle-class white family and millions of others like us who received guaranteed mortgage loans, massive tax breaks and sparkling new infrastructure, including public schools we got decades to mold in our own image. But all that was made possible by trading short-term wealth for massive debts and liabilities that we pushed off on to future generations. Eventually, the bills come due. That’s what we’re seeing now.

You write that America’s suburbs since World War II have resembled a kind of Ponzi scheme that has stuck later investors with the bill. So we’re in the “after” part of the cycle, right?

All too often, it’s newer suburban families of color who get stuck paying for all the opportunity that whiter and wealthier families like mine already extracted. Because this cycle plays out over large geographies and multiple generations, it can be difficult to recognize when we take snapshots of a single suburban community at a single point in time. That’s why I followed five families living in five suburban communities that are each at a different stage of this process.

It’s also why public schools are such a valuable lens — we can only really see the bigger picture when we pay close attention to the anger, frustration and disillusionment that so many suburban parents feel when they’ve done everything right, yet still have to deal with their children being called racial slurs, subjected to unfair discipline and denied access to opportunities like gifted programs.

Just three doors down from your old house in Penn Hills, you knock on a door and find one of your five subjects: Bethany Smith, a Black woman who bought the place with her mother. That Bethany’s experience is so different from your family’s seems to reveal what you’re getting at in the book. Tell us about her. [Note: Herold uses pseudonyms for all of his subjects with the exception of Smith, who writes the book’s epilogue.]

Bethany’s family and mine wanted the same things: a quiet street, good public schools, homes that steadily increase in value, systems and services that just work. The difference is that my white family got most of those things without paying full price, while Bethany’s family had to pay extra to receive declining services, a school district that was raising taxes and slashing services and a stagnant housing market. 

Your subjects — almost all of whom are people of color — seem in many ways left to their own devices when it comes to pursuing these dreams in mostly crumbling, formerly white suburbs. What should communities be doing differently to help these families?

That’s the wrong question. Here’s why: In suburban Atlanta, I followed a middle-class Black family named the Robinsons. Both parents have advanced degrees, good jobs, rich social networks, and a strong spiritual foundation. Both also unabashedly love learning. Nika, the mom, was pursuing her PhD in public health, and Anthony, the dad, was a network engineer and former middle school teacher who stayed up late each night re-teaching geometry concepts to his teen son. Both parents were extremely active in their children’s schools, volunteering in the library, going to every parent-teacher meeting and maintaining running email correspondence with their kids’ teachers. And both Nika and Anthony are extremely kind and funny to boot. So for me, the question becomes: How on earth does a well-regarded system like the Gwinnett County Public Schools not only fail to connect with a family like the Robinsons, but actively alienate them, by gradually whittling away their oldest son’s spirit, joy, and sense of self, despite the abundant resources, assets and gifts the Robinsons bring with them?

So how can we understand the Robinsons’ experience through your lens of suburban decline instead of incompetence at the school level?

By 2019, Gwinnett County was nearly two-thirds Black, Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial. But in many ways, the Gwinnett County Public Schools operated as if it were still the early 1990s, when the population it served was still 90 percent white. During the period I write about, this was evident in big racial disparities in school discipline and access to gifted programs; Black and brown children now made up about two-thirds of all the district’s students, but barely one-third of the kids the district identified as gifted and talented.

Above all, though, this dynamic was evident in the district’s leadership. Prior to 2018, Gwinnett had somehow never elected a person of color to its five-member school board, which was largely controlled by three older white women, one of whom had held her seat for 47 years, and all of whom were vocal in their beliefs that changing the way things had always been in order to reflect the priorities and values of a changing population was tantamount to diluting the quality of the education the district offered. There was plenty of incompetence, but it occurred within the larger context of a $2.3 billion organization with policies, practices, and personnel that too often showed flagrant disregard for the majority of families it served. 

Eventually, things start to fall apart for nearly all of your subjects, it seems. Even the Beckers, a conservative and affluent white family, ultimately give up on the public schools in their exclusive Dallas exurb after a single year. They end up in a private Christian academy in a Plano strip mall. That makes me wonder: Is at least some of the “unraveling” you’re describing just the messiness of life, parent restlessness writ large?

I approached writing Disillusioned from two angles. I wanted to illuminate a big economic, social, and political pattern that we all now live within because America is such a suburban nation. I also wanted to explore the choices everyday families make and the lives we build as we try to figure out our relationship to that pattern. So I don’t think the Beckers’ relentless search for better schools is separate or distinct from the cycle of suburban churn they’re trying to navigate. As with the rest of us, these larger forces help determine the available options, and the choices we make in turn help shape those larger forces. 

You note throughout the book that Black and brown students have always had a fraught relationship with their suburban schools: “For so long,” you write, “so much of suburbia had been organized around trying first to keep those kids out, then treating them as a problem to be managed.” Yet in Compton, Calif., which is now almost entirely Black and brown, you find a measure of promise. Can you say more?

Jefferson Elementary in Compton is housed in a ramshackle facility consisting of several rundown bungalow buildings with narrow slits for windows that are almost reminiscent of a prison. But what I saw inside Jefferson and Compton Unified was a multiracial collection of adults — including a Black superintendent and school board chair, a Filipino principal, and a Latino fourth-grade teacher whose classroom I followed — who were unflagging in their belief that Compton’s children were bursting with talent and deserved all the opportunities and supports the system could muster. 

One of my favorite little examples of this was a narrative essay the fourth-graders were asked to write. The kids had to describe what a typical day would look like if they worked at . A boy named Jacob, whose family I was following, wrote this incredible piece about designing new droids and prototyping new light sabers and having water-cooler conversations with George Lucas. Between assignments like that, after-school robotics clubs, the chance to create a class newspaper, engineering lessons through [a well-regarded STEM-focused curriculum], and a class-wide mock trial, the kids were flooded with opportunities to imagine themselves shaping America’s future. And Superintendent Darin Brawley was extremely intentional about this, at a very big-picture level — he recognized that his retirement and his own family’s progress would depend on how well he prepared the students in Compton Unified, and so he took that responsibility not just seriously, but personally.

Your idea to pay Bethany Smith, the Penn Hills mom, to write the book’s epilogue strikes me as a bold choice. She’s quite blunt, for the record, writing that white people “are always fucking some shit up, then expecting everybody else to go fix it.” Why, among all of your subjects, does she deserve the last word? After the century-long narrative you’ve woven, is this the message you want readers to take away?

I love Bethany’s epilogue. I think it’s just tremendous. I’m so grateful she agreed to write it, and I’m even more grateful she was willing to get really, really honest, even when doing so was painful for her and unflattering for me. 

A central question drove me to give four years of my life to this project. I wanted to know how the opportunities my white family enjoyed in Penn Hills a generation ago are connected to the declining fortunes of the families who live in Penn Hills now. And I think Bethany’s epilogue really helped capture and communicate the answer. But it took me a long-time to actually be able to really hear what she was saying, in part because I had to shed a lot of my own illusions.

The breakthrough came when I finally realized I had to engage these questions emotionally, not just intellectually. And that meant putting under a microscope my own experience as a white person who grew up in suburbia, reaped its benefits and left behind a mess so I could go build a comfortable life somewhere else. Doing that made the book much richer, and that was a direct result of the challenge Bethany issued to me. So I’m extremely thankful to her, and to all the families and educators featured in this book who helped create a space that allowed all of us to give as much of our hearts as we felt comfortable sharing. 

Disclosure: Benjamin Herold received support from at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Greg Toppo is a Spencer Fellowship board member.

Carvalho, who nearly two years ago assumed leadership of the nation’s second largest school district, said LAUSD is in relatively good financial standing and that enrollment declines are slowing.

But, he said, California’s most populous city “is not out of the woods yet” when it comes to tight budgets and closing schools.

The headwinds facing Los Angeles public schools are by no means unique to that city. Districts around the country are facing the expiration next year of more than $190 billion in federal funds meant to help schools remain open during the pandemic and aid in the recovery of students.

Carvalho, who previously served as Miami’s superintendent, said LA Unified has avoided the fiscal “Armageddon” he warned of more than a year ago. 

He said a reorganization of the district conducted over the past two years, to streamline school support services has netted LAUSD “dozens of millions” in savings, putting the system in good financial shape. 

But the district is still developing a plan for roughly 1,800 teachers, counselors and other staffers hired during the pandemic whose salaries have been paid for using the one-time federal aid. Carvalho said “strategically essential positions” will be kept. “We need to ask the question,” he said. “Is the need still there and is this the right position? 

To make up for the end of federal aid, he said, LAUSD has imposed a targeted hiring freeze, deciding on a case-by-case basis which of the employees who leave their jobs to replace. 

It will use the funds from jobs that are not filled to pay for those federally funded jobs it decides to keep. 

“We’re going to bank on [attrition] as a key solution” to make up for the loss of federal aid, he said.

A more complicated challenge now facing Los Angeles schools is a historic enrollment decline which has been ongoing for decades but was exacerbated by the pandemic.

While many school districts have experienced large enrollment declines since the pandemic began, several factors make the declines in Los Angeles more dramatic.  

First, Carvalho said, rising housing costs have forced many families to leave Los Angeles. The average price of a single-family home there is now nearly $1 million, according to Zillow, up by more than a third from five years ago. Local with rising costs.  

“The high cost of living has, over the years, pushed a lot of families out,” said Carvalho. “It’s not a function of individuals leaving the school system going to private schools or going to charter schools.”

Enrollment in LA schools for pre-K through twelfth grade from 566,604 in the 2012-2013 school year to 422,276 in the 2022-2023 academic year.

But Carvalho said the exodus may be slowing. show the number of students enrolled this year was down about two percent from the previous year.

The city’s has helped bolster enrollment, Carvalho said. LAUSD stats show 6,471 students are now enrolled in the district’s pre-K programs, up from 5,687 in 2021.  

Whether this is enough students to keep each of the city’s schools in operation, the superintendent said, remains an open question. 

The district is not “making decisions specific to consolidation or closure of schools based on a dire financial position,” said Carvalho.

But, at some point, shrinking schools may become too small to function, he said.   

“It has nothing to do with the finances,” Carvalho said. “It’s actually something to do with the type of offerings we provide our students. At a certain point a very small, secondary schools cannot offer the elective programs that kids need.”

“It certainly is a tool in the toolbox,” Carvalho said of closing or consolidating schools. “But it’s one that is used as a measure of last resort, and we are nowhere near that point.”    

Still the district is looking at high schools with less than 300 students as possible candidates for closure or consolidation, he said.  

High schools that enroll fewer than 300 students struggle to muster a variety of classes and extracurricular activities to adequately serve their communities, said Carvalho, adding that LAUSD has few schools of that size, and is still developing a plan for them.   

Decisions to close or consolidate schools are almost always unpopular. But for Los Angeles, it’s not a question of if, but when, said Pedro Noguera, dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education.

“People have these traditional attachments, but schools that serve 1,000 kids do much better than two schools serving 500 kids a piece,” Noguera said. “The challenge will be, not just to shrink, but to shrink and get better simultaneously, so people don’t feel like they’re losing.”

Noguera said he’s encouraged by steps he’s seen Carvalho take, but declining enrollments and the need to make academic progress systemwide are still the big issues facing the district.   

On the academic front, Carvalho said gains in math scores on state and show the district is making progress. He also pointed to rising attendance rates as a sign LAUSD is on the upswing. The system’s average daily attendance has risen from 83% to 93% during his tenure, Carvalho said. 

The superintendent also provided a few additional updates on the district in his exclusive interview with the 74:

• Carvalho said he has created a draft version of a controversial, new policy to limit the colocation of charter schools in certain buildings, and that next month he will present the policy as a recommendation to the district’s board. 

• He said LAUSD is working on a plan to reinforce its efforts to promote literacy after showed a third straight year of declining rates of reading proficiency. 

• Carvalho, who previously turned down an offer to lead New York City’s school system, said he intends to stay on as LA’s education boss for the foreseeable future. “There will be no additional superintendency for me… beyond Los Angeles,” he said.“There’s something to be said about stable, sustainable leadership.”

The Portuguese immigrant, who worked his way up from washing dishes and stints of homelessness to become one of the nation’s most celebrated educators, has already done much to earn the gratitude of his adopted home on the west coast, said Ana Ponce, executive director of GPSN, a local advocacy group.

“He’s earned the respect of educators and families,” said Ponce. “We’re all rooting for his success.”

The center offers services to help parents support children through school, along with career workshops and financial stipends.

As the district introduces more digital tools and platforms, such as the parent portal and the AI chatbot program “Ed,” it can be challenging for parents to adjust to new technologies. The centers, especially in elementary schools, will target struggling parents early. 

“We like to explain the resources we have for parents early to get them involved,” said LA Unified’s chief facilities officer Krisztina Tokes. “It just makes sense.”

At the new center’s opening, parents were assured they had a “home” at the school and were encouraged to take advantage of the resources offered. Besides workshops to help promote career, financial, and child-rearing success, parents will also have access to laptops on loan as well as Change Reaction, a new program helping struggling families make ends meet with charitable donations.

“This is a safe place for students, but the support of parents matters,” said Lenya Crowell who helped found the parent center. “We have got to keep our parents updated.”

LAUSD engagement officer Antonio Plascencia Jr. said bilingual programs are offered through parent centers across the district; and that remote sessions would also be offered. 

“Every research study that we have seen from over 50 years shows that when we engage and empower our students and our families we accelerate outcomes,” said Plascencia. 

Mexican-born Markham Middle School principal Juana “Yumi” Kawasaki described how a parent center in the community where she grew up helped her parents acclimate to life in the United States and acquire the know-how to help Kawasaki be successful later in life. 

“I am who I am because of the parent center,” Kawasaki said.

This article is part of a collaboration between ���˶��� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

At 32nd Street School near University Park in East Los Angeles, a big, bright trophy goes to the class with the least absences and latenesses — and Cristales’ students are eager to win.

“My kids are motivated, we want that trophy, and we want to keep it,” said Christales, explaining the winning class gets to display the trophy in their classroom for a month. “They tell each other ‘Don’t be late, don’t be late.’ “

For Cristales, the nationwide problem of chronic absenteeism has hit home, with roughly three of her 22 students not attending class regularly, and the problem seeming to be getting worse. Last school year Cristales’ class won the trophy twice – but this year they have not won it at all.   

LA Unified schools saw a severe decline in students’ attendance post-COVID-19, with 40% of students chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year — a 19.8% increase compared to before the pandemic, an LAUSD spokesperson said. 

“Where do I start,” said Cristales when asked what challenges chronic absenteeism creates for her. 

“Each day is vital to the content being delivered to the students,” she said. “Each day missed is a loss. As an educator [we do] not have the luxury to waste any time.” 

Cristales compared learning to climbing a mountain, with each day in the classroom a step towards reaching the top. Missing just a day of school can impact a student’s learning, she said.

“You feel the obligation to help that student to catch up,” she said, “ [even] when you have other students to help…it is frustrating to me as a teacher because I know what the loss of the day means for those students.” 

Cristales’ school also has a partnership with the University of Southern California, which provides tutors and mentors to students twice a week for 30 minutes.

“But if the student is not present, they are missing out on the support that they so much need,” she noted. 

LA Unified identify students as chronically absent if have they missed at least 10% of school days or about three and a half weeks of classes. 

“We’ve seen a lot of difference [in my classroom] after COVID,” said Cristales. “Many of them are not coming, and when you ask them why, many will tell you they woke up late, the traffic was bad…It’s like their priorities have changed, and that’s what I’ve observed.”

Morgan Polikoff, associate professor of USC Rossier School of Education, said COVID has changed many students’ and parents’ behaviors toward school. 

“Certainly, COVID has made people more sensitive to illness and more likely to keep kids home if they’re not feeling well,” Polikoff said. “There’s also some evidence to suggest that kids are just less engaged in school than they were before.” 

Online classes also created an unintended consequence, creating the belief among families that it’s not a big deal if kids miss school, Polikoff added.

A conducted by Polikoff and his colleagues found there are clear demographic trends in the increases in absenteeism among Black and Hispanic students. These declines have been especially large for historically underserved student groups, with those students not recovering to pre-pandemic levels.

“What we know about the pandemic and its impact on students is that it just widened every gap,” Polikoff said. “The way that our education systems and our society are set up is that all these disadvantages are sort of stacked on top of one another.”

Polikoff said some factors that can lead Black and Hispanic students to have a higher absence rate are , which can lead to sickness or aversion to getting sick.

“There are a million reasons, but they all point in the same direction: Black and Hispanic students are subject to many different forms of cumulative disadvantage both within school and outside of school,” Polikoff added. To combat higher absent rates, LAUSD has established the aimed to improve student attendance and help prepare students to be “ready for the world” through accumulated data, community outreach, and improvement on staff education.

This article is part of a collaboration between ���˶��� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

It was 2018, and 17-year-old Daniella was one of our students at Da Vinci RISE High School. She was an artist interested in graphic design and braiding hair. 

But as a young person in Los Angeles’s foster care system, she spent less time thinking about her passions and more time worrying about her day-to-day survival because her 18th birthday was approaching. On that date, she’d age out of the foster care system overnight, lose access to youth housing resources and be on her own financially. On top of that, Daniella, whose name has been changed in this piece to protect her privacy, was pregnant. 

She was increasingly focused on questions like, “How do I find housing?” “How do I prepare for motherhood?” “How will I afford to live?”

In Los Angeles County alone, there are . Another 7,000 of the county’s children are in foster care. The vast majority of these young people, like Daniella, face challenges that would disrupt the lives of even the most well-resourced adults. The result is that many attend school intermittently, if at all, and are invisible to the traditional school system, which rarely meets their complex needs.

We created to serve Daniella and many others like her in our community. We’re able to do so because we designed a school that bucks the traditional model, with more flexible, personalized learning and supports tailored for each individual student’s needs. 

For Daniella, we helped tailor her education to address her changing life circumstances: as a part of her project, she created a personalized budget, applied for jobs, explored mothering classes, investigated the process to access housing, and what it means for foster youth, all while still demonstrating her individual subject mastery on nationally recognized growth assessments. We use these assessments to inform our teaching and to help young people who feel beaten down by standardized tests get a more nuanced view of where they are making progress.

Listening to students is just one way to rethink high school. For more, check out The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

We, as principal and executive director of RISE, both know this student population well. We are born and raised Angelenos, and while we started our teaching journeys on opposite sides of the country — Naomi at an independent study charter school in L.A. and Erin as a Teach For America instructor in Miami — we’ve both spent our careers witnessing firsthand the stabilizing and healing power of flexible, personalized education for students whose lives are complicated and unstable outside of the classroom. Our shared belief that each student’s unique journey is worth embracing is what drives Da Vinci RISE, which opened in 2017 with support from the nonprofit XQ Institute.

No two RISE students are exactly alike, but almost all of the 200 young people we serve each year have been failed by the traditional school system. Of the 108 RISE alumni to date, 15% were in foster care, 7% were homeless, 8% were on probation, and 10% were involved in more than one system. These are students who may be older than the typical high school student, they might be on probation, they might be young parents and/or they may have full-time jobs, all of which can get in the way of school being their number one priority. Compared with other students across the L.A. school district, RISE students are twice as likely to have diagnosed disabilities, three times as likely to be experiencing homelessness, and 20 times as likely to be in the foster care system. 

Just like any other young person, our students want to be successful. They have passions, big dreams and goals; they just haven’t had access to the resources to achieve them. At RISE, we know our students are resilient and have had to be more strategic and agile than even many of the most successful adults. We work to access their hearts and minds, learn each student’s individual needs and circumstances and then build the education around them. 

In the traditional, one-size-fits-all school system, the challenges outside the classroom for a student like Daniella are beyond any school’s scope of responsibilities and resources. But at RISE, Daniella knew a team of people were there to help meet her needs. She trusted us enough to ask for that help. And we responded by asking ourselves: how can we design an educational track to help her build the skill sets she needs for survival while also building the academic mastery she needs to graduate?

Watch this video to learn more about Da Vinci RISE:

When we first partnered with XQ, we moved through a design process that put the needs of these diverse young people front and center. We realized that for our students, everything starts with a physical environment where they feel secure and supported. RISE’s classrooms are essentially one- or two-room schools, integrated on-site at three community-based social service providers in high-need areas across Los Angeles. These clean, high-quality sites provide a sense of physical safety to our students and allow mental health professionals, case managers, behavior interventionists, psychologists and counselors to collaborate directly with teachers and students about each individual young person’s needs so students can access critical services and resources as a part of their everyday academic experience. 

We recruit staff and volunteers with a keen eye for folks who have shared experiences with our youth and RISE centers our students in the hiring process to provide them with a voice into who comes into the community. We build a strong, small, tight-knit, nurturing community, and our educators receive special training in trauma-informed care, nonviolent crisis intervention, and restorative practices. are among the six research-backed for creating high schools that prepare all students for the future. On XQ’s latest Social Emotional Learning Survey of the class of 2023, 98% of RISE students said they had at least one teacher or other adult in the school they could talk to if they had a problem. 

Every conversation our staff has with our students, whether it’s about their circumstances outside of school, the schedules of their daily lives, or their different learning pathways, is always based around the question, “How can we make school most relevant to you?” We use the , research-based skills describing what all students should know and be able to do to succeed in the future — whether that’s college, career or another path. All students need to be critical thinkers who can master content while collaborating and problem-solving. And because tests alone aren’t sufficient, we use the to track our students’ individual progress toward these goals and toward California’s requirements for getting into four-year state colleges and universities.

We also provide RISE students with personalized, project-based learning tailored to their individual needs, passions, and goals, working closely with each student to meet them where they’re at. Each student’s schedule is flexible, combining in-person learning on two to four days a week at one of our three locations with online learning year-round. We bring in partners from arts, medicine, media, engineering, business and beyond. We just bought a van to pick up students who aren’t able to come to school. Our students are not well served by the traditional testing models, so we engage with students head-on about testing in order to shift their mindset and show how testing can be an opportunity to demonstrate their growth and mastery of academic subjects and recover credits toward graduation.

Ultimately, Daniella graduated from RISE. She had a beautiful, healthy child. She developed the life and parenting skills she needed to navigate into the next chapter of her life as an independent adult and mother. Daniella graduated from cosmetology school and continued her passion for styling hair. She is a RISE success story. 

But there are a lot of Daniellas in Los Angeles, and the reality is that after the pandemic, the stakes for these students are the highest they’ve ever been. The foster population is . In traditional schools, there’s an uptick in unfair disciplinary practices, and more students than ever are entering the school-to-prison pipeline. Even before COVID, California students who experienced homelessness were twice as likely to be chronically absent, . What we’re learning at RISE is relevant for schools throughout the country struggling with since the pandemic. 

Our model is expensive, no doubt. In California’s funding system, we can’t get money for keeping students enrolled and working if they’re not coming to campus or completing school work on a traditional schedule, which is why we rely on outside fundraising. But RISE is more than a national model for other schools that want to serve these students. It’s a movement built around completely reimagining how we treat and respect young people in this country. And it starts by seeing and engaging with the individual needs of every single student so they have the agency, power and joy of determining their own future.

Do you want to learn more about how to rethink high school? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of ���˶���.

Like other educators in Los Angeles, the CEO of Magnolia Public Schools is awaiting the unveiling of a new policy limiting the use of nearly half the city’s school buildings by independently run charter schools.

But with LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho on the verge of issuing the new policy, Rubalcava is not sure where he’ll be holding classes next year.

“It’s weighing on me,” said Rubalcava, who has submitted six requests for space in LA Unified school buildings. “We don’t know what’s coming.”

LAUSD’s school board in September gave Carvalho a directive to craft a policy barring charter collocations in schools in three categories providing special support to students, including social services and resources for Black students. The board is expected to discuss the issue Tuesday. 

The board’s directive was a dramatic escalation of a longstanding fight over the use of the district’s school space by charters. A 2000 state law compels districts to provide space for charters, which are publicly funded and operate tuition-free.

But experts are questioning the need for the policy at a time when LAUSD enrollments have shrunk drastically leaving empty and underused classrooms. Carvalho has suggested some schools might have to be closed if the trend isn’t reversed. Charter schools in Los Angeles but not as dramatically as district schools.   

It’s all about money, experts said.  

Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California Rossier, pointed out both district and charter schools are funded by the state on a per-pupil basis. Shrinking enrollments mean shrinking school budgets.

“If the district passes a policy that makes it more difficult to operate for charter schools, in the grandest of terms. that’s good for the district,” Polikoff said. “If fewer kids enroll in charter schools and those kids instead enroll in the district schools, they’ll get more money to operate. They’ll be able to hire teachers or not lay off teachers.” 

But Polikoff questioned whether the policy is centered on “who’s actually serving kids the best. We would like to think that’s what is always driving policy, but isn’t.”  

Margaret Raymond, director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, said the school board’s decision to prevent the collocation of charter schools is best understood as a tactic to preserve market share.

“This roughly goes under the heading: ‘you can’t play with my toys.’ It’s what happens when monopoly providers are facing serious competition,” said Raymond.

“It’s an assumption that somehow the current local education agency is the only legitimate user of public investments in facilities,” she added.

Raymond also questioned whether the policy is about what’s best for students. 

“When you prioritize survival of institutions over the outcomes of the customers they serve,” said Raymond, “you’re taking a very, very short run calculus that has desperate long run consequences.”

But parents and educators in LAUSD buildings that are co-located said conflicts over space in schools are significant.

Maria Mikhail, whose son is a junior at Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets high school, said charter programs in the building have consumed valuable space needed by the district school, depriving students of classrooms and outdoor space.

“Our kids are losing classrooms,” Mikhail said. “We don’t have a lot of enrollment, we’re losing kids. And I feel like there should be plenty of room for everyone to share.”

Mikhail’s husband, Peter, said charter programs in the Westchester campus have benefitted from renovations and new paint, while spaces occupied by the district school have not.

“It’s disheartening for the kids, because the kids see this happening,” he said. “They just don’t really have a voice.”

Angelica Solis-Montero, whose two children attend Gabriella Charter School in Echo Park, worries the new policy will worsen the situation by pitting charter school families and educators against those from district schools.

“My concern is that this resolution will make it harder to have workable conversations,” about sharing school buildings, said Solis-Montero. 

The placement of charter schools in district buildings is a common feature of large, urban districts like Los Angeles. New York City engages in the practice as well, and conflicts over space there have recently intensified after years of battles over classrooms. 

Teachers’ unions in Los Angeles and New York have sought to limit the practice, arguing districts should instead invest in existing school programs rather than offer space to independently run charters. The teachers’ union in Los Angeles urged the passage of the board’s resolution. 

Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab and Research Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, said LAUSD is under financial pressure from dropping enrollment funding as well as the loss of federal pandemic aid. 

Data collected by Roza’s team found staffing levels at LAUSD have continued to grow in recent years, even as enrollment plummeted. Reasons for declining enrollment include a declining birthrate and outflow of families from the city, she said, and a host of other factors beyond the district’s control. 

Public school enrollment is plunging nationwide, with cities such as Chicago, New York and San Francisco also experiencing declines, Roza said.  

Roza said she was sympathetic to the district’s efforts to keep its space and make itself attractive to families that might otherwise choose charter schools or other schooling options.

“I think it’s not unreasonable for the district to try to keep kids so that they have fewer disruptions in finances,” Roza said. “At the same time, another way to keep kids is to give them choices that they prefer.”

Arelia Valdivia, executive director of Reclaim Our Schools LA, a coalition of community and labor groups supporting the policy, said it will protect valuable programs serving the city’s most vulnerable students.

“We want to make sure that there is a process to ensure that our public schools are first able to serve the students that are already enrolled before offering the space to collocating charters,” she said.

Valdivia said the district has made a huge investment in programs like the Black Student Achievement Plan and the Community Schools Initiative over the last few years. “We want to ensure that those programs are allowed to succeed and thrive,” she said.

A meeting of the board’s charter school committee last Tuesday to collect community input on the policy was dominated by charter school educators who pleaded with the board to reconsider the change.

Keith Dell’Aquila, who is Vice President, Greater Los Angeles Local Advocacy for the California Charter Schools Association, said at the meeting that the district had not responded to requests for consultation with the superintendent.

Dell’Aquila said his group is ready to take legal action if the new policy violates the state law compelling districts to provide charters with space. “The preferred option is always to work with this district and build partnership,” he said.

David Tokofsky, a former board member who testified at Tuesday’s meeting, called it “a shame” that the district, which has so much empty space, has not figured out a way to house both charters and district schools, and maximize the return from unused classrooms.

“It’s wasting a lot of energy and not bringing enough creativity to the table,” Tokofsky said.

From teacher to congressional candidate, Nick Melvoin has accomplished much in his years of public service. Now he is one of 18 candidates running in the March 4, 2024, primary for U.S. House of Representatives California District 30. 

Melvoin started his career as an English teacher at Markham Middle School in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood. Motivated to see more change in the school district, he obtained a law degree and worked in the Obama administration with the Domestic Policy Council and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He was elected to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education in 2017 where he has served as a representative for LAUSD’s fourth district and the board’s vice president. With his term ending in 2023, Melvoin has decided to take the next step and run for California’s 30th district, striving to enact the permanent change he wished for as an educator. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

���˶���: What are the main issues you are focusing on in your campaign?

Nick Melvoin: The three top issues for me are … education, affordability and infrastructure. As my generation has come to bear the brunt of climate change, that is also important to me. Gun violence protection, marriage equality, and reproductive justice are all critical platform elements for me.

Before deciding to run for California’s 30th District, what made you want to become a teacher?

I realized … that there were so many barriers that were holding kids back who lived only a few miles away from me in Los Angeles. So I graduated college and became a teacher because I thought that’s what I wanted to do and I immediately saw the barriers that are holding kids back, that are holding teachers back, the bureaucracy, the underfunding. I have just been on this journey to find ways to remove those barriers for kids and that led me to law school then to the school board and now to running for Congress. 

The issues that the Los Angeles school district has faced have been exacerbated in the past few years after post-pandemic issues with high absenteeism and staffing. What do you believe is the best way to deal with these issues?

L.A. Unified led nationally in food security, in internet and service provider, in COVID testing and vaccination. We were not just educating kids, we were making sure that they were fed and their families were fed, that they had internet and computers, that they had tests, and that they had the vaccine…The things we’re doing now are things like expanded time in school, summer school, Saturday school, and still serving three meals a day at most of our schools. We’ve built housing on district property to help employees and, increasingly, families. I have created partnerships with legal service entities to embed lawyers in school communities, to help families with immigration, wage gap, and eviction protection…We partner with Planned Parenthood and put health clinics on campuses. We do vision screening and give kids thousands of pairs of free glasses every year, we do oral health screenings … There’s still more we have to do to get kids there, but we’re doing a lot of work.

You touched a little bit on inclusivity as a huge part of your campaign. What does equity and inclusivity mean to you? And then specifically within the school district how can you encourage equity and inclusivity? 

I think at the higher level, it’s about creating a culture where everyone feels they belong … At the school district level … where 84% of kids are living in poverty, and 90% of kids are of color, equity means righting historical wrongs … We have one of the most equitable school funding formulas in America. It’s called our student Equity Needs index and it looks at factors like poverty asthma rates and non-fatal gun violence and says those communities that have higher rates in all those, receive more money, they need more support in their schools. We’re directing money where it’s needed most.

You mention on your website that it was important for you to ensure good-paying jobs for everyone, how do you think this can be achieved in the district? 

I’m proud that under my leadership of the school board, we have led to the highest minimum wage for public school workers in the country … We need to be creative around other parts of their compensation, so health care, and housing, the district has taken on an ambitious program to look at our underutilized land and build housing for employees… If we can through infrastructure improvement, maybe lower the cost of building housing, we can lower housing costs … I support the public option, medicare for all who want it. Ultimately, I think these things, when braided together, will lower the cost of things for families in LA.

What sets you apart from other candidates? 

There are a few things that set me apart, one is my age … and I think it is important for the next generation to take the helm … I think we are more inclined to work together to solve problems because we have seen the consequences of the failure to solve problems … Also, I have seen implementation, which is so critical, because good ideas often die during implementation. … So I think the mix of age, but also pragmatism, and solution-oriented thinking sets me apart. 

The program was introduced after LAUSD’s chronic absenteeism rate skyrocketed to 40% for the 2021-22 school year after students returned to in-person classes following remote instruction during the pandemic, according to the California Department of Education. In the 2022-23 school year, the district has been able to decrease that number to 30%, Carvalho said.

“We are here to give resources and make parents aware of all of the benefits of ensuring their [children] are at school everyday,” said Andre Spicer, LAUSD regional superintendent, who oversees 200 schools.

Carvalho visited Daisy Morales, mother of four attending LAUSD schools who have been attending classes sporadically. 

Last year, Morales’s children averaged 64 absences.

After working with district officials, that number has been brought down to only two to three absences. Morales said the biggest challenge to getting her kids to school had been transportation issues.

“They don’t like to catch the bus in the morning because of their anxiety,” said Morales, adding she struggled to get her kids to school once they missed the bus. 

But after the district arranged for the bus to pick up her kids as close to their home as possible in what the district calls “concierge transportation,” they began attending school more regularly. 

Carvalho also met with families who hadn’t enrolled their children in the school system, adding many of them didn’t even know they were legally required to sign them up for classes.

For the current school year, LAUSD increased enrollment with 20,000 new students, most of whom were 4-year-olds, an increase driven largely by the district’s new pre-K program.

 “After a decade of 6% to 7% of declining enrollment, we have stabilized to 1.9%,” said Carvalho. 

Sherree Lewis-DeVaugh, principal of 135 Street Elementary, said the school had begun hosting interventions with families who struggle to get their kids in school; bringing chronic absences down from 36% to just 10%. 

“If a student is not in school, how can they learn?” said Lewis-DeVaugh. “We need to make sure the students are educated, and to make sure that we provide support to our parents as well.”

The school has begun hosting interventions directly with family members who struggle to get their kids in school; bringing chronic absences down from 36% to just 10%.

This article is part of a collaboration between ���˶��� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Alcove was co-founded in January 2020 by Alexis Burgess, a former philosophy professor who taught courses at Stanford University, University of California, Los Angeles, and Claremont McKenna College before turning his attention to alternative education.

“So many of the kids I was encountering when teaching Intro to Philosophy felt a little rudderless to me,” Burgess told me in a recent interview. “They didn’t really know why they were at college at all… I think it’s a failure of the system. I think one of my Alcove kids recently described it as a ‘people mover.’ ”

Burgess began thinking more critically about his own “people mover” educational experience and that of his college students, while considering what he wanted for his own children’s education. He started reading about creative learning models and discovered , a self-directed learning center in Massachusetts founded in 1996 by former public school teacher Kenneth Danford.

Burgess was hooked. He connected with Danford, and launched Alcove as part of the microschool network that Danford and his colleague Joel Hammon created in 2013 to scale the North Star model, which prioritizes non-coercive, self-directed education.

At Alcove and other Liberated Learner-affiliated microschools across the country, young people attend optional classes throughout the week, choosing from part-time and full-time enrollment offerings. Most Alcove learners are legally considered homeschoolers, although some students enrolled in California virtual charter schools also attend Alcove as a complement to their learning programs.

Tuition is typically a fraction of the cost of traditional private schools, making it more financially accessible to more families. Alcove uses a “pay-what-you-can” tuition model, with some families paying nothing while others pay the full $1,600 monthly rate. The average Alcove family pays between $500 and $600 a month.

Burgess describes his microschool as an “unschool,” referring to an educational philosophy that jettisons adult-imposed curriculum and traditional schooling practices in favor of emergent, bottom-up, out-of-system learning tied to a young person’s curiosity and interests.

“There is no set curriculum,” Burgess said. “You can pursue your strengths at Alcove. You can pursue your weaknesses or growth areas. You can do whatever it is that you feel like doing. We’re going to make it up as we go along every semester.”

Class offerings this semester include math, French, political science, magic, psychology, debate, art, and more. It’s “education as improv,” Burgess said.

While programs similar to Alcove have been around for decades, interest in these models has accelerated in recent years, as families look for the personalization in education that they enjoy in other areas of their lives.

“When we started North Star in 1996, there were a few pioneering homeschoolers and unschoolers, and there was the ,” Danford said. “Now, I am meeting people every day who are interested in creating alternatives to conventional schooling, and these people sometimes show up with partners, teams and resources.”

With the expansion of school choice policies enabling education funding to go directly to families rather than school systems, self-directed schooling alternatives are poised for further growth. Nine states have adopted universal school choice programs, including Arizona, Florida, Utah, and West Virginia, which have implemented flexible education savings account programs that include schooling alternatives like Alcove.

Danford is focusing his attention on finding and facilitating founders in these choice-friendly states.

“I have become very interested in exploring public funding for educational alternatives, and am deeply engaged with how we can identify and support these founders and their interested families to build sustainable programs,” he said.

He is currently broadening the training and development services that Liberated Learners offers to prospective founders. He’s also growing his team to provide greater support to these entrepreneurs — many of whom are former public school teachers.

“For the most part, the people I meet are not businesspeople seeking a clever way to make money; in fact, most are willing to work for lower wages than they could earn in public schools,” Danford said. “These people have initiative, vision, and a need to find a different way to work with youth.”

Even in states like California that don’t have robust school choice policies, entrepreneurial parents and teachers are working to offer low-cost, learner-centered education options.

Not far from Alcove Learning, former teacher and school librarian Lizette Valles founded in 2021 as an independent microschool with a focus on experiential learning and trauma-informed education. Just outside of Los Angeles, Danelle Foltz-Smith runs , part of the fast-growing Acton Academy network that now includes over 300 learner-driven microschools.

There is a groundswell of demand for new and different educational options, and entrepreneurial parents and educators everywhere are stepping up to create them. Philanthropic nonprofits like the provide grant funding and community support to many of these everyday entrepreneurs to help catalyze and cultivate their efforts.

“I think it’s beautiful what’s happening,” Burgess said, noting that Alcove’s little yellow house is now at capacity with 30 learners. He’s wondering about the possibility of leasing the house next door to meet continuing demand, and is optimistic about the growth of decentralized educational models both in Los Angeles and across the country.

“We’re seeing a large scale reorientation away from a top down, federal organization of schooling in the country to something much more bottom up, that was expedited by COVID and by the failures of No Child Left Behind,” Burgess said, referring to federal education policy that has shaped American education for the past two decades.

“We need something better,” he added. “The kids need something better urgently. And so I’m not ashamed anymore to be offering an alternative to the public system. I think we need microschools.”

After California invested billions to help students rebound from the pandemic, K-12 math and English language arts scores remained mostly stagnant last year and still well below pre-COVID levels. 

The annual Smarter Balanced scores, released today, showed that English language arts scores dropped slightly and math scores inched , although both scores lagged behind pre-pandemic numbers. Science scores were also .

Overall, 46.7% of students were at or above grade level for English language arts, and 34.6% met or exceeded the standard in math. In 2019, before the pandemic disrupted education, 51.1% met the reading standard and 39.7% did in math. 

“We’re not where we want to be. We have a long road to go, but we are making headway,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education and president of the Learning Policy Institute, an education research organization. “It looks like we’re turning the corner from the pandemic, and some of our investments are beginning to pay off.”

Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism — defined as missing 10% or more of school days — fell significantly, according to data also released today. In 2021-22, 30% of students were , more than three times the rate pre-pandemic, an alarming trend that advocates feared would have dire consequences for California. But in 2022-23 the number dropped to 25%, an encouraging sign for social workers, counselors and others who’ve been working to bring students back to the classroom.

“This is wonderful news,” said Cristina Dobon-Claveau, president of the California Association of School Social Workers. “After the pandemic, school social workers played, and are still playing, an integral part in ensuring students are attending school and have their basic social-emotional and academic needs met.”

The decline in chronic absenteeism suggests students are more engaged in school, and the numbers might have been even better without the disruptions caused by lingering COVID outbreaks and climate disasters such as floods, storms and fires, Darling-Hammond said.

One explanation for the flat test scores is a rise in students with high needs, said Mao Vang, director of assessments for the California Department of Education. Last year California saw an uptick — from 60% to 63% — of students from low-income families, as well as higher numbers of students experiencing homelessness. There were also more students in foster care, migrant students and those with disabilities. The numbers are even more pronounced because overall enrollment has declined. 

‘A sense of complacency’

But overall, the Smarter Balanced scores were disappointing, said Christopher Nellum, executive director of the Education Trust–West, a research and advocacy group focused on students of color and low-income students’ success.

“One- or two-point gains are not to be celebrated when we have hundreds of thousands of students who are below grade level,” Nellum said. “I’m concerned that there’s a sense of complacency about student achievement.”

While he applauds the state’s investments in transitional kindergarten, community schools and other initiatives, he also believes schools need to be held accountable for students’ academic performance. The state’s school funding system, for example, should include more concrete goals with rewards for schools that show improvement and penalties for schools that don’t meet certain benchmarks.

“Money is important, but we need to put more teeth into our accountability measures,” he said. “California is an amazing state, and getting it right matters — not just here, but across the country.” 

Billions in school investments

The Smarter Balanced tests, given each spring to students in grades three to eight and 11, are one of the primary measurements of student achievement in California. Prior to the pandemic, scores had been rising steadily for most groups of students, although some groups, such as students with disabilities, English learners, Black, Latino and low-income students, lagged significantly behind their peers.

But when most schools shifted to remote learning in March 2020, thousands of students fell behind. They either lacked access to technology, had no quiet place to study during quarantine, were busy caring for younger siblings, or they felt overwhelmed by mental health challenges.

When campuses re-opened, some students were so far behind that the state and federal governments poured  into helping them catch up. Schools received money to hire tutors, expand after-school and summer programs, expand transitional kindergarten, and serve free breakfasts, lunch and snacks to all students.

The state also invested $3 billion to create hundreds of new community schools, which are campuses that include social services and health care programs available to students and their families. The idea is that students whose basic needs are met will be more engaged in school and perform better academically.

Meanwhile, the state also unveiled a , intended to boost math scores, and invested millions in a statewide . , which passed last year, will bring up to $1 billion annually for schools to expand their arts programs.

Heather Hough, executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education, a nonpartisan research center, noted that some of those investments — such as the federal COVID relief grants — will be expiring soon. And the lackluster test scores suggest that money alone might not cure California’s education challenges.

“The concern is that we’re settling in, that the pandemic was not a blip,” she said. “I think we need to look closely at how these investments are actually going to affect teaching and learning, and whether teachers are getting the resources they need to really help students in the classroom.”

Big improvements for some districts

There were some bright spots in the Smarter Balanced results. Compton Unified, in Los Angeles County, showed big improvements for many students, especially among 11th-graders. Black students, in particular, saw jumps in both English language arts and math. Latino students also gained ground in math and English language arts scores. At a Monday press conference, Ayanna Davis, the district’s board vice president, noted that the graduation rate among Black students has jumped from 50% in 2010 to nearly 90% in 2023. More than 40% of Black students completed the required coursework for California’s public universities last year, up from just 3% in 2011, she said.

“We have really focused on African American achievement, I think successfully,” Davis said.

Fresno Unified also bucked the trend, posting increases for most student groups in both  English language arts and math. Eleventh-graders saw some of the most significant improvements, with English language arts scores jumping almost 10 percentage points and math scores increasing by nearly 3 percentage points from the year before.

Statewide, scores among Black, Latino, English learner and low-income students reflected the overall trend: slight dips in English language arts scores and slight increases in math scores, but still well below the 2019 scores.

Manuel Buenrostro, director of policy for Californians Together, which advocates for English learners, cautioned that test scores are important, but only one way to gauge student achievement. Schools and families should also pay close attention to attendance and discipline data, as well as , which measure topics like mental health, bullying, drug use, violence and whether students feel safe and connected at school. 

The  were released in December, showing improvements in some categories but still high rates of mental health struggles, lack of motivation and other challenges.

“We have to look at what’s not captured in scores, and that’s students’ social and emotional needs — are our students being well taken care of,” he said.

Several parents and bus drivers told LA School Report the feature is often inaccurate, creating confusion in what can already be tough pick up and drop off schedules. 

“I was looking yesterday and my daughter managed to get on the wrong bus so I was able to track her from my own air tag,” said a parent of an elementary school child who has a daily bus ride of up to an hour and 45 minutes. The parent asked to remain anonymous because speaking out about education issues in the past led to a confrontation with school officials.

“However when I looked on the app just to see where her bus was, before I learned she got on the wrong bus, the app showed it was in Hollywood near Sunset, which was totally wrong,” the parent said. 

Parents and guardians use several means to track students on the bus, including Apple air tags, cell phones, as well as the district’s GPS.  

“It’s definitely helpful,” said the parent of the LAUSD GPS, “but with today’s technology and with the school district’s budget, they can do better.”

Parents discussed bus delays on a LAUSD parent as the school year started amid Tropical Storm Hilary, voicing their frustration with the GPS’ inaccuracies. 

“Real time tracking was not working on the app while my kids were riding the bus this past week, hoping it starts working at some point,” one parent wrote. 

“I used the tracking system when it began last semester. It was 50% accurate. I’m not counting on it being any better this year,” another commented. 

Los Angeles Unified handles an estimated 2,700 bus routes daily across 70,000 miles, carrying an estimated 43,000 students, a district spokesperson said. 

The new bus tracking feature was unveiled as part of a slew of updates with the latest version of the , available in English or Spanish, including viewing the school menu, and reporting criminal or suspicious activity anonymously. 

“I don’t know anyone whose GPS is running correctly,” said John Lewis, who has been driving an LAUSD bus for 30 years.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” said Lewis, who has been driving about 50 students on his current route from the San Fernando Valley to middle and high schools in Central LA for the last seven years. “I have a new bus and it doesn’t work. But the thought is a great thought.” 

Lynniere Boyd-Peterson, an LAUSD bus driver of 33 years, said the GPS is a good tool in theory, but also has not seen it work accurately. 

She said sometimes parents blame drivers for delays in getting their children home by not sticking to the bus route.   

“We have a lot of parents that sometimes will say things that are incorrect,” Boyd-Peterson said. “And when they do that, the GPS can prove where we’ve been. But if the GPS is not working properly, it’s really not proving the case.” 

Los Angeles is known for heavy traffic, and the district has a system where if drivers are running 10 to 15 minutes behind, they will call and alert a dispatcher who will send out a text to parents and families. 

But some parents said those texts can also be delayed and inaccurate.

“I have received texts about delays but it’s generally after I get my kids to the bus or after the bus has already picked them up,” said the parent whose daughter carries an air tag. 

In an email to the LA School Report, a district spokesperson refuted the claims of problems with the new GPS feature.  

“Our systems currently indicate that the bus GPS functionality in the LAUSD App is operating at full capacity with no disruptions,” the spokesperson said. “The LAUSD App simply takes the GPS data from our buses and conveys that information through the Parent Portal.”

The spokesperson added if families are having issues with the app, to contact the district at transportation.division@lausd.net.

This article is part of a collaboration between ���˶��� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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.”

While conflict over co-location has flared up in , the tug-of-war over facilities has been most intense in Los Angeles, which is home to almost a quarter of the state’s 1,285 charters. The arrangement has offered some benefits to districts. When voters passed in 2000, the measure made it easier to pass local school construction bonds by lowering the percentage of yes votes needed from two-thirds to 55%. That compromise seems less relevant now to board members and district staff who argue that charters squeeze district students out of space they need for everything from special education therapy rooms to clothing closets.

“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.

Rivas and Goldberg want Carvalho to write a policy preventing co-location at schools that fall into three school improvement categories — the , 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.

, 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 ���˶���. 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.”

Yet even before the first class started, the 133,000-student district in Prince George’s County, Maryland, faced an assault on its security — one carried out completely online. 

Rather than barge through the front entrance of a school, threat actors appeared to break in through a backdoor in the district’s computer network. The mid-August intrusion meant the high-performing school system — among the nation’s 20 largest — joined a growing list of school district ransomware victims, another proof point that the education sector is now a primary target of cyber gangs. 

“Schools have this delicious trove of data and do not have the same protections” as banks and other for-profit businesses, said Jake Chanenson, lead author of a recent University of Chicago report on school district cyber risks. 

In the case of Prince George’s County Public Schools, the attack appeared to enter its final stage on Tuesday when the Rhysida gang posted to its leak site a collection of data it purportedly stole nearly a month ago. A cursory review of the files suggest they date back two decades. 

The back-to-school season, already a particularly busy period for school technology leaders, has become a prime time for district ransomware attacks, according to cybersecurity experts. In August alone, ransomware gangs claimed new attacks on 11 K-12 school systems, according to an analysis by ���˶��� of the cyber group’s dark web leak sites. Among them are three New Jersey districts, two in Washington state, a Denver charter school network and a district in remote Alaska. Several additional districts have disclosed cyberattacks since the start of the new year, including news of a breach last week against Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools, the seventh-largest district in the U.S. 

In Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, district officials said for three days in just the second week of the academic year. 

At the Lower Yukon School District in Alaska, technology director Joshua Walton said a hack and subsequent data breach by the burgeoning ransomware gang NoEscape was first initiated in late July, before the fall semester began. 

“Your confidential documents, personal data and sensitive info has been downloaded,” the group wrote in a ransom note obtained by ���˶���. “Published information will be seen by your colleagues, competitors, lawyers, media and the whole world.” 

Ultimately, the district refused to pay the group’s $300,000 ransom demand, leading to a small data breach that doesn’t appear to include sensitive information about educators or students. Rather, an analysis of the leak suggests stolen files center primarily on campus maintenance work. 

Previous data breaches following district ransomware attacks, such as the ones in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, have led to widespread disclosure of sensitive information, including student psychological evaluations, reports of campus rape cases, student discipline records, closely guarded files on campus security, employees’ financial records and copies of government-issued identification cards. 

Though Walton was confident that similarly sensitive records had not been stored on the breached computer server, he told ���˶��� the Lower Yukon hack could have been far more disruptive had it been carried out just a few weeks later. Instead, they had a few remaining weeks of summer to restore their systems before their returned. 

“It was an inconvenience for sure, but I’ve seen a lot of data breaches over the years and ours is nothing comparable,” Walton said. “I couldn’t imagine that happening when school starts because we’re all rushing to get all of the support tickets taken care of and making sure that school is starting off on the right foot. If it would have happened then, it would have been a whole different ball game.” 

This year, the return-to-school season kicked off with a warning from federal law enforcement about the growing threat that cyberattacks pose for school districts. During a cybersecurity summit at the White House in early August, federal officials warned the coming months could be particularly volatile. Harm isn’t limited to victim districts but rather encompasses their employees, students and families whose sensitive records, including financial information, are vulnerable to data breaches. 

WIth “Social Security numbers and medical records stolen and shared online,” such attacks have left “classroom technology paralyzed and lessons ended,” First Lady Jill Biden said. “So if we want to safeguard our children’s futures, we must protect their personal data.”

There isn’t any hard data on the frequency that ransomware groups exploit back-to-school season compared to other times, said Doug Levin, the national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange. He said it’s also difficult to identify when attacks first begin, with threat actors sometimes infiltrating district servers months before the ransomware attack is initiated. That said, the existing evidence suggests about a quarter of cyber incidents affecting school districts appear to occur during those first few weeks and months of school. He said the chaos of getting technology into students’ hands and setting them up with new online accounts creates an ideal opportunity for criminals to catch district tech officials off guard. 

“With all of these new devices being deployed with all sorts of new tools and applications coming online, I certainly have heard reports of upticks in against school districts already,” Levin said. “It’s definitely a time where you know people are more likely to make mistakes.”

Similar concerns were included in by the New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell, where officials warned that cybercriminals routinely exploit holiday breaks to target schools. 

“Threat actors take advantage of this pastime when staff is away or just prior to busy seasons, such as the beginning of the school year, long weekends or before the end of a marking period when final grades are due,” the warning notes. “Within the last few weeks, publicly announced ransomware attacks sharply increased.”

‘Exclusive, unique and impressive’

Following a common ransomware playbook in Prince George’s County, the Rhysida gang claimed the theft of sensitive documents, posting screenshots online showing birth certificates, passports and other records purportedly stolen from the district. Unless the district agreed to pay the group 15 bitcoin worth some $375,000, Rhysida threatened to publish the “exclusive, unique and impressive” data on its leak site. 

Such negotiations appeared to expire by Tuesday morning: A trove of files purportedly stolen from the district were published to the cyber group’s leak site, suggesting education leaders had refused to pay the ransom. The development comes after a ticker on the gang’s leak site, meant to signify the district’s approaching ransom payment deadline, was paused or delayed on several occasions. 

A day after the district detected the breach on Aug. 14, it said in a statement that some 4,500 user accounts out of 180,000 were affected, forcing district employees to reset their passwords. Impacted individuals, the district said, “will be contacted in the coming days.” 

The school system is “offering free credit monitoring and identity protections to all staff,” district spokesperson Meghan Gebreselassie said in an email Tuesday morning but declined to comment further. In a Sept. 1 update, the district said staff, students and their families would receive a year of free credit monitoring and identity protection services, acknowledging the attack “may result in unauthorized disclosure of personal information.” 

“We are working diligently to confirm the extent of information that was impacted by this incident, and we will move quickly to provide direct notice to those who are impacted once this determination is made,” the statement says.

Yet special education advocate Ronnetta Stanley said the Prince George’s district hasn’t done enough to keep the community in the loop about the attack and its potential effects on students and parents. The types of information that may have been breached, she told ���˶���, “has not been clearly communicated.” Special education records, which have been exposed in previous attacks like the one against the Los Angeles Unified School District near the start of the 2022-23 school year, could be at risk in Prince George’s County, she fears.

“There have not been any specific details about exactly what was breached, who may have been affected by it and, then what is the remedy for what should be happening with compromising information?” said Stanley, founder of the special education advocacy group “Not knowing what was leaked and who was affected, it’s difficult to say what the ramifications will be.” 

The by the University of Chicago researchers found that district leaders are frequently unaware of the peril that cyber gangs pose, often implement education technology tools without considering privacy implications and routinely endorse digital tools that present potential privacy issues. While banks and large corporations have become harder targets as they bolster their cybersecurity defenses, schools have fallen behind, said lead author Chanenson, a doctoral student studying computer science. 

“This is only going to get worse,” he said, “until we give schools the resources they need to up their defensive game.” 

Ransomware’s long tail

Among the school districts listed on ransomware gang leak sites in August is the one in Edmonds, Washington — a development that for locals may feel like déjà vu. The Akira group named Edmonds as being among its latest victims on Aug. 24, just six months after district officials announced that a “data event” was to blame for a two-week internet blackout in late January. 

Data stolen in the winter 2023 breach, the district warned in February, could include names, Social Security numbers, student records, financial information and medical documents. The district is still analyzing the extent of the attack and plans to notify affected individuals once their review is finalized, district spokesperson Harmony Weinberg said in a Sept. 8 email to ���˶���. 

It’s unclear, however, whether the district was victimized a second time this summer, a development officials deny. Cybercriminals routinely target victims on multiple occasions — especially those that pay ransoms to retrieve stolen files. In Edmonds, the district recently became “aware of a public allegation by the group believed to be responsible for our winter 2023 data security incident,” Weinberg said. 

“We reviewed the district’s network systems in relation to this data security incident, and found no evidence that any systems were infected with ransomware,” Weinberg continued. “Further, we are not aware of any malicious activity occurring within our network systems since the winter 2023 event.” 

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles and Minneapolis school districts continue to grapple with the fallout from cyberattacks that crippled their systems last school year and led to the widespread data breaches of sensitive records about students and educators. After the Los Angeles district was targeted in a back-to-school ransomware attack over Labor Day weekend last year, the nation’s second-largest school system kicked off this school year by announcing to bolster its cybersecurity defenses. 

Seven months after Minneapolis Public Schools fell target to a cyberattack that it euphemistically called an “encryption event,” tens of thousands of individual victims are just beginning to learn their sensitive records were compromised as community members blast education officials for leaving them in the dark about key details. 

On numerous occasions over the last several months, educators have complained to district officials that they were being targeted by fraudsters, obtained by The Daily Dot. “I had my bank account drained last week and had $3 to my name,” one person wrote in an email to Minneapolis schools. Another individual reported getting hit with a fraudulent $2,500 charge on a credit card, while parents reported receiving emails from unverified senders related to their children’s college financial aid. 

In a Sept. 1 update on the Minneapolis district website, said school officials undertook a “time-intensive” review to determine what information had been stolen, which included names, Social Security numbers, financial information and medical records. 

“Although it has been difficult to not share more information with you sooner, the accuracy and the integrity of the review were essential,” the district notice notes. Meanwhile, by the law firm Mullen Coughlin stated that the district had provided written notices to more than 105,000 people whose personal information had gotten caught up in the attack. 

The documents were Minneapolis Public Schools’s first public comments on the attack since April 11.  

Such disclosures often fall short in providing victims enough information to keep themselves safe, said Marshini Chetty, a University of Chicago associate professor focused on privacy and cybersecurity. 

“Disclosure is not enough because people may not fully realize what could actually happen and how their data can be misused,” Chetty said. While victim districts routinely offer credit monitoring and other tools to mitigate financial crimes and fraud, she said it’s more challenging to remedy situations where sensitive information, like medical records or student disciplinary records, are disclosed. 

“A lot of times schools are reactive rather than proactive,” she said.  If district leaders aren’t doing enough to protect the data from being stolen in the first place, “then it’s almost too late.”

LAUSD, like other big city school districts such as New York City and Chicago, are now admitting 4-year-olds, a plan that will certainly help boost enrollment.

But since 2015, LAUSD’s enrollment has been dropping rapidly. According to data obtained and analyzed by ���˶��� and , LAUSD has the second largest percentage decline in California after San Jose Unified School District.

“Enrollment declines in LAUSD can be attributed to people enrolling in charter schools, which LAUSD is one of the top largest charter sectors in the nation,” said Morgan Polikoff, education associate professor at the University of Southern California. 

The LAUSD trend of declining enrollment is also a result of families leaving California because of the rising cost of living in the state and a declining birth rate.  

COVID also accelerated the decline, Polikoff said. 

For the 2015-2016 school year, LAUSD enrollment numbers stood at 639,337. For the 2022-2023 school year, enrollment numbers hit only 538,295 — more than a 15% decline and a loss of about 100,000 students. 

The data is similar for San Diego Unified, which saw an estimated 12% enrollment decline, losing over 15,000 students in the ‘22-23 school year compared to its 129,380 cohort in 2015-2016. Similarly, Chicago public schools saw a 15% decline, losing more than 70,000 students. 

New York City public schools had an enrollment of 1,141,232 students in 2016-17. Data from the 2022-2023 shows a decrease to 1,047,895. This September,  to resume classes. 

Losing students can spell big financial trouble for school districts. 

“Every state has a different average daily attendance, so fewer seats in attendance on top of fewer kids enrolled, can greatly decrease the support and funds of districts,” Polikoff said. “Having less funding can affect the overall structure of districts since it covers operating buildings, hiring teachers, labor costs and programs” 

Polikoff explained that due to absenteeism and enrollment decline, it’s possible for more teacher layoffs in districts like LAUSD as funding decreases. On Sept. 5, however, LAUSD announced in a that “teachers will receive an incremental salary increase totaling to 21% across three academic years (2022-2023, 2023-2024 and 2024-2025).”

This article is part of a collaboration between ���˶��� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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 a judge’s Aug. 11 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 ���˶���. “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 that requires districts to provide facilities for charters, including through co-location. 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 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 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 , she called co-location ”a cancer that comes in and then metastasizes and spreads.

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 , 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 .

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 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 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.”

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 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 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.

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.”

Such unrelenting attacks — this time against a Bergen County, New Jersey, district —are what brought the first lady as well as some 200 federal cybersecurity officials, school district leaders and tech company executives together for a first-ever White House summit on strengthening school district defenses.

“It’s going to take all of us,” Biden said. 

The breaches have grinded school technology systems nationwide “to a halt,” the first lady said at the East Room gathering, forcing some districts to cancel classes as reams of sensitive student, parent and educator data were stolen and leaked online. In March, a Medusa attack on Minneapolis Public Schools exposed records about child abuse inquiries, student mental health crises and campus physical security details. 

“If we want to safeguard our children’s futures, we must protect their personal data,” she said. “Every student deserves the opportunity to see a school counselor when they’re struggling and not worry that these conversations will be shared with the world.”

Among the new strategies announced Tuesday is the creation of a Government Coordinating Council that will provide “formal, ongoing collaboration” between all levels of government and school districts to prepare for and respond to data breaches. Officials with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the agency would provide individualized assessments and cybersecurity training to 300 K-12 education entities over the next year. 

Tuesday’s cybersecurity event didn’t come with the announcement of any new federal regulations but was instead positioned as the first step in a new-found federal urgency around cybersecurity in schools. The Federal Communications Commission in late July proposed a $200 million pilot program to enhance cybersecurity in schools and libraries that still needs to be approved.

“When schools face cyber attacks, the impacts can be huge,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said. “Let’s be clear, we need to be taking these cyber attacks on schools as seriously as we do the physical attacks on critical infrastructure.”

In released by the Education Department and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the agencies recommended that school districts implement multi-factor authentication, enforce minimum password strength standards and ensure software is kept up to date. They should also consider moving on-premises information technology services to cloud-based systems. 

“Do not underestimate the ruthlessness of those who wish to do us harm,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. “They have proven their willingness to steal and leak such private student information as psychiatric hospitalizations, home struggles and suicide attempts. Do not wait until the crisis comes to start preparing.” 

School cybersecurity expert Doug Levin, who attended the summit, said it was a positive development to see the federal government, and the Education Department in particular, focus on the effects of ransomware on schools. The Education Department has been “mostly absent from these conversations” in the past, said the national director of The K12 Security Information eXchange.

Meanwhile, several companies, including education technology vendors, unveiled new commitments to help facilitate digital security in schools. Amazon Web Services announced a new $20 million grant program to bolster K-12 school cybersecurity while Cloudflare committed to providing free cybersecurity tools to small districts with 2,500 or fewer students. 

Schools are now the single leading target for hackers, outpacing health care, technology, financial services and manufacturing industries, according to a global survey of IT professionals released last month by the British cybersecurity company Sophos.

In the U.S. school district cyber attacks reached a record high of 37 in the month of June alone, , but Tuesday’s event centered largely on a crisis that unfolded in Los Angeles nearly a year ago. 

Last September, a notorious ransomware group carried out an attack on the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, that resulted in some 500 gigabytes of district data being published to the Russian-speaking group’s dark-web leak site. 

A major theme of the White House summit was the politically connected superintendent’s swift outreach to federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That collaboration, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and federal education officials said, set into motion a response plan that mitigated the attack, limited the number of files breached and avoided class cancellations. 

Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, called it “the Harvard Business School case study on how to get this right.” 

Other school districts should respond similarly, said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. When school leaders suspect they’ve been the target of an attack, he said, it’s incumbent that they “please call us immediately.” In L.A.’s case, the FBI was able to have a team of agents on the ground in less than 24 hours, he said, enabling them to freeze vulnerable accounts and secure sensitive information that had been sought out by the threat actors. 

That coordinated response didn’t prevent some 2,000 current and former students’ highly sensitive psychological evaluations from being leaked on the dark web, an investigation by ���˶��� revealed. Carvalho initially denied that such records were exposed in the attack, but the district acknowledged they were after the story was published. The district also initially said the attack began and ended on Sept. 3 — the Saturday of Labor Day weekend — but a follow-up investigation determined that an intrusion began as early as July 31, the .

While Carvalho didn’t comment Tuesday on the leak of sensitive psychological information, he said the number of stolen files “could have been much worse,” adding that the hackers “encrypted and exfiltrated very little thanks to our actions.” Among the actions they didn’t take, the schools chief said, was paying the undisclosed ransom demand because “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

Last year, a startling 80% of schools suffered ransomware attacks, according to and released last month. That’s a surge from 2021, when 56% claimed they were victims. The rate has doubled over two years, making ransomware “arguably the biggest cyber risk facing education providers today,” researchers found.

 The victimization rate against schools was higher than all other surveyed industries, including health care, technology, financial services and manufacturing. 

While the Sophos survey included responses from 400 IT professionals working in education globally, U.S. institutions are “the prime target for many of these gangs,” particularly since Russia invaded Ukraine, said Chester Wisniewski, field chief technology officer of applied research at Sophos. 

Yet even among American institutions, he said two factors have made schools particularly vulnerable to threat actors. Costly cybersecurity safeguards in schools often fail to rival those in place at major businesses like banks and technology companies. And schools aren’t just easy to hack, they’re also easy to exploit for profit, he said. Nearly half of attacks against schools last year — 47% — led to ransom payments, researchers found, and their willingness to shell out cryptocurrencies to retrieve stolen files may have backfired. 

“If a given sector pays more often than another sector, then they get targeted more often and if a given sector is really insecure and it’s super easy to break in, they’ll also get targeted more,” he said. “In the case of education, unfortunately, it’s a double whammy because they do pay very often and they also are really easy to break into.”

The rise in ransomware attacks on schools coincides with the growth in double-extortion schemes, researchers found. In double-extortion ransomware attacks, threat actors gain access to a victim’s computer network, download compromising records and lock the files with an encryption key. Criminals then demand their victim pay a ransom to regain control of their files. If victims don’t pay, the criminals sell the data or publish it to a leak site. 

Files contained in those data breaches routinely contain sensitive and confidential information about students, their parents and educators. After an attack last year against the Los Angeles Unified School District, threat actors published highly sensitive psychological evaluations of some 2,000 current and former students. Following a computer breach this spring at Minneapolis Public Schools, a cyber gang uploaded to the internet a trove of stolen files including ones detailing campus rape cases, child abuse inquiries, student mental health crises and suspension reports. 

While both incidents were large-scale attacks, many others likely unfold on a much smaller scale, Wisniewski said. Of the 80% of districts reporting attacks, he said the figure likely includes instances of a single student’s or educator’s computer being compromised. 

“The sophistication is very low, it’s smash-and-grab stuff,” he said. “They literally are just encrypting a laptop and saying, ‘Pay us $500 for the keys,’ and they don’t have the time nor the skills to bother exfiltrating data and stuff like the big groups do.” 

Scott Elder, the superintendent of Albuquerque Public Schools, knows firsthand the challenges that education leaders face when their districts become the targets of cyber criminals. A r last year, forcing the district to cancel classes. Ultimately, the district and law enforcement were able to resolve the attack without paying a ransom. He told ���˶��� he was surprised that schools have become the top ransomware target because “we don’t have any money.” But he’s well aware that districts are vulnerable. 

“The reality is, we have incredibly dedicated people who are working incredibly hard to keep our data safe, but we  just can’t pay as much as the private sector,” Elder said. “I’d imagine there are a lot of districts that are struggling to attract top-tier talent to do this type of work.” 

Last year, stolen data was encrypted in 81% of cases against schools and attacks were stopped in just 18% of cases before district information was locked, according to the Sophos report. Of schools that had their documents locked behind an encryption key, threat actors made their own copies of the information in 27% of cases. 

While schools may be tempted to pay ransoms to retrieve stolen data quickly and minimize harm, the Sophos report offers counterintuitive findings. Recovery costs were higher in districts that shelled out ransoms, even before factoring in the cyber gang’s financial demands. It also took those districts longer to get back up and running, according to the report. While 35% of districts that relied on file backups for their data recovered within a week, the same was true for 32% of those that paid ransoms. The report doesn’t explore the number of school districts which didn’t pay ransom demands and then had their confidential data leaked online. 

The confidential nature of compromised data, and the potential damage of its public release, influence districts’ decisions to pay ransom, Elder said. 

“This is highly confidential information, some of it can be harmful, and we’re educators: We like to take care of people,” Elder said. “But I do think sometimes we have to draw a hard line to manage our property. It’s a hard decision. I doubt there’s any single answer for anyone.”

Insurance appears to be a motivating factor in districts’ decisions to pay ransoms, Wisniewski said. In school systems with standalone cyber insurance, 56% of victims paid the ransom compared to 43% with broad insurance policies that included cybersecurity coverage. Ransom demands are often covered by insurance, Wisniewski said, and companies who have to pay off the claims are likely to have significant influence over which districts come across with the money.

“The only conclusion I can draw from that is the insurance companies think that paying the ransom is going to save them money because in the end the insurance company is on the hook for helping you recover,” he said, despite emerging data to suggest the contrary. “The insurance companies are constantly playing catchup trying to figure out how they can offer this protection because they see dollar signs while everybody wants this protection, but they’re losing their butts on it.”

Part of the recently approved , the move responds to teachers and parents who protested Carvalho’s plan to revamp the program, known as Primary Promise. 

Primary Promise used small group instruction to help struggling K-3 students master basic reading and math skills. But Carvalho said it was unsustainable, relying on non-recurring pandemic relief funds. 

This month Carvalho unveiled a new math and reading program that would have required many schools to shoulder the cost of those teachers, known as interventionists. 

With the new funds, that’s no longer the case — at least for next year.

In contrast to Primary Promise, Carvalho’s Literacy and Numeracy Intervention model relies less on dedicated interventionists and more on training regular classroom teachers to deliver different levels of instruction. It also extends support to students in middle and high school.

Supporters of Carvalho’s plan say its expanded reach is more equitable, targeting struggling readers at all grade levels. Primary Promise advocates say there’s no better time to address future academic success than the earliest grades, and that the district should be able to both preserve Primary Promise and pay for the new program.

With the recent budget approval, the new plan will take effect this fall. A number of factors suggest the district has its work cut out for it. 

Research that programs that put too much onus on classroom teachers are difficult to pull off. Board members, teachers, parents, and advocates are demanding accountability, asking the district to clarify how the new program will be assessed and regularly update parents on its progress. And they want to see a continued commitment to early literacy despite the planned phaseout of Primary Promise. 

“I worry about this cycle of remediation that we often get, I believe, in this school district, and not setting a strong enough foundation, districtwide, for students to be proficient readers,” said board member Kelly Gonez at a June 6 meeting during which district officials presented the new program. 

While all agree that investment in early literacy will pay off down the road, supporters of the Carvalho plan call extra attention to the present — to poor reading and math achievement at all grade levels.

“We are hearing from parents, their desperation,” said former LAUSD board member Yolie Flores, now president and CEO of the LA-based Families in Schools, one of 24 organizations that signed a letter supporting the new plan.

“And I think they started to see a glimmer, a glimpse of what was happening — that their kids couldn’t read — during the pandemic, ‘cause they were home,” she said.

Only 35% of LAUSD , 39% of , and 46% of met or exceeded state reading standards in the 2021-22 school year. For math, respectively, the figures are 37%, 21%, and 18%. 

Flores added the district should “do a deep-dive in informing parents.” 

“[Parents] need support in knowing what good instruction looks like, because they can be the best monitors,” she said. “I’d like at least a quarterly, ‘here’s what’s happening, here’s how many children we are reaching.’”

LAUSD’s board members also see communication as a key challenge going forward. Board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin said that she first heard about the cuts to Primary Promise through the advocacy of upset teachers who’d been notified of potential job reassignment.

“I do think we often have an opportunity to learn about how we communicate, to staff in particular, when shifts are impacting their jobs, whether that’s the scope of the work or the location of their work,” she said. 

Primary Promise cost the district $134 million this year and would have cost $192 million had it been expanded to all elementary schools. Those interventionist positions were centrally funded, with individual schools footing none of the cost.

Before last week’s announcement about the extra funding, the new model would have shifted more of the burden to schools, lowering the district’s financial responsibility.

But the district identified $40 million of unused federal funding earmarked for the district’s high-poverty schools. That brings the total 2023-24 cost of the new intervention program to $122 million, according to a district spokesperson. 

While that money will allow some schools to retain their Primary Promise interventionists, many teachers have already moved on. 

Another major difference between Primary Promise and the Carvalho plan is the latter will invest more in teacher training — and depend more heavily on those who receive it. 

Teachers at all grade levels will receive training in math and reading intervention, with the goal they could then break students into smaller groups, delivering different levels of instruction. Some will have dedicated interventionists to aid them, but many won’t.

George Farkas, a distinguished professor emeritus of education and sociology at the University of California, Irvine, says it’s not easy for a teacher to simultaneously serve students at grade level and those below it without instructional aides to assist them. 

“I don’t think it’s possible for a teacher with a full class to do that,” Farkas said. “In addition, you know, these extra training programs don’t have a very good record in my reading of the literature.” 

At Cohasset St. Elementary School in Van Nuys, former Primary Promise teacher Dana Sapper will continue to work in a similar interventionist role, though with the possibility of taking on students in more grades. 

“I’m happy because I’m going to be able to spread it into the upper grades. I think that that’s a lovely thing,” Sapper said. But still, she worries about the limits of her effectiveness. 

“There’s only so far you can spread yourself,” she said.

But Yolie Flores says the fact that some form of intervention will be reaching more students under the new model makes it extremely promising. 

“It’s not just a few that need intervention services. It’s, like, almost everybody,” she said. “Going from a pull-out [for] a few students to serving more students who need support in literacy is a good thing.” 

Primary Promise was introduced in 2020 by then supt. Austin Beutner with the goal of tackling LAUSD’s persistently low reading scores at the earliest level. 

By the 2022-23 school year, the program was running in 283 elementary schools. Teachers with specialized training would work with three to five struggling readers at a time, every day, on basic literacy skills like phonemic awareness and decoding. 

Parents, teachers, and have pointed to evidence that reading skills greatly improved under the program — which the district doesn’t dispute.

“Of course it works,” Carvalho said at the June 6 board meeting. The problem, he said, had to do with Primary Promise’s reliance on pandemic aid set to expire in September 2024.

The one-year extension of the program using the anti-poverty funds will help schools transition into the new model, Carvalho said at last week’s board meeting. 

“With that said,” he added, “we’re going to be very clear and honest that there’s no guarantee that beyond next year we’re going to be able to use the same strategy.”

Latino students make up nearly three-quarters of the LAUSD student population.

But Carvalho’s 100-day plan, which promised to narrow academic achievement gaps and increase community engagement, has fallen short for some Latino parents. 

Five members of Parent Warriors, an advocacy group that is part of Families In Schools, spoke about unprecedented challenges, their eagerness for parent engagement, and Carvalho’s future — which they hope prioritizes a seat at the table for them. 

Parent Warriors members:

• Lissette Duarte, parent of a graduate and current LAUSD student.
• Raquel Toscano, parent of a graduate and current student at an LAUSD school.
• Sonia Gonzalez, parent of two students attending a charter school in Los Angeles  
• Mireya Pacheco, parent of a college student and two students attending a charter school in Los Angeles. 
• Monica Martinez, parent of five graduate and current LAUSD students. Her grandchildren also attend LAUSD schools.
• Sandy Mendoza, Director of Community Engagement and Advocacy for United Way of Greater Los Angeles

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As a parent, do you feel superintendent Carvalho is promoting parent engagement across the district?

Duarte: I had really high hopes for him because he was a teacher and then an assistant principal and then a superintendent that was able to turn around Miami-Dade schools during a recession. And so I was like, wow, this is going to be a really great superintendent for us. But I don’t see that we’ve addressed the widening gaps in proficiency. 

Toscano: He started with the 100-day plan, but I feel that it’s too much on his plate…. I feel that the communication is still not as clear as I would want it to be…As he said, I feel we can come together and work together. But I still think that there’s a gap between all of us. I still feel that even being part of these committees…there’s still no connection. 

Gonzalez: So being a charter school parent, I have yet to see any outreach to charter school parents…what I know about the superintendent has been what comes through news…and things I’ve seen on the internet.  

Martinez: I think it’s a lack of communication because they talk about projects and bring them to the Board of Education but we’re not seeing it in the schools.  

Pacheco: When Mr. Carvalho came to the community, honestly, I didn’t see an invitation to speak to him closely…it was disappointing…I can tell you that I was expecting more. There’s a lack of communication. There’s a lot to be done. 

What has been the most challenging issue you have faced with your child’s education this past year or this school year?

Pacheco: There have been threats using Instagram threats for certain schools. The threat said we’re going to attack and then the school said, no, it was so-and-so. It was a child from the school making a joke…It’s very concerning… for them to not feel safe in the schools. 

Toscano: I feel that we’re failing them. There’s lots we can do but if Carvalho would take a minute to listen to all of us, we all have a story… and it’s just frustrating…There are lots of voices, but we haven’t been heard. 

Duarte: We have a critical issue with the achievement gap and loss of learning. There are around 1100 schools in LAUSD. We’re the second-largest school district in the country. We have nearly 9000 homeless students and about 84% of the students are living below the poverty level. 

How did the three-day strike by school workers affect your family? How do you feel about these strikes, like the teachers’ one a couple of years ago happening during the school year, and what preparations should be implemented?

Gonzalez: …many parents…are just really tired of having the strike used because ultimately nobody’s there to protect the children. Nobody’s there to take care of the missed days.

Martinez: In one way or another, they’re already behind academically… And I don’t want to say anything wrong about teachers. I’m so glad they received their increase. But our children…where is that balance? 

Toscano: My question was, do we really need it? Obviously, I’m for it. They need to get paid. They have families to support… There has to be a different way of negotiating. I think we parents need to be at this negotiation table.  

In terms of college and career readiness, how would you rate LAUSD on its ability to prepare students for college and its ability to help students navigate through the college/career process?

Duarte: They’re not properly preparing students and there isn’t enough support… because …especially with very large campuses, there’s probably only one college counselor. There’s no way to meet the need of getting the FAFSA done or linking them to those services and supports in a timely manner.

Martinez: They don’t have enough staff. The parents do not all have the opportunity to learn to be able to guide their children…And when they graduate, basically go to college blind. 

Gonzalez: There are a lot of good organizations out there that can be brought into the LAUSD school district to help them. The reality is the budgets can’t afford it. 

I’d like to give you this time to speak about the overall rate you give to superintendent Carvalho’s work in his first year in office and also to speak about the issue you care about the most.

Duarte: For me, I’d like to see him focus on a kid first agenda like Students First and allow for collaboration.

Pacheco: What I’d like to add is…Mr. Carvalho, please don’t forget that our children come first… Do not forget that they’re our priority. We will get old and they will continue living in this world.

This article is part of a collaboration between ���˶��� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.