In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers set out a plan to create the largest universal preschool program in the country for 4-year-olds, through a massive ramp-up of an elementary grade known as transitional kindergarten, or TK.

At a , Newsom  “a commitment that all 4-year-olds will get high quality instructional education,” and said that the investment could close learning gaps. “People aren’t left behind, as often as they start behind,” he added.

The state set a deadline that every district offer transitional kindergarten to all eligible 4-year-olds by fall 2025, and in the intervening years, schools have enrolled more than 175,000 children in TK. They’ve also had  and  so that kids have enough space and quick access to .

LAist spoke to more than a half dozen early childhood researchers who say a key piece has been missing in the state’s implementation: California itself hasn’t evaluated the program as it’s expanded, nor does it have plans to going forward. This, despite studies showing how critical the early years are for a child’s learning, and research from another state’s public preschool program that found students tested lower on state assessments and had more behavioral problems compared to those who weren’t in that program..

“ It is a huge mistake to not evaluate the implementation of TK and whether or not the classrooms are providing developmentally appropriate practice,” said Jade Jenkins, associate professor of education at the University of California, Irvine.

The criticism comes as California has invested , and is paying about  to administer the new grade level.

“ We need to know whether this investment is actually lifting kids. We know it’s a huge economic windfall for parents, and that’s a great boost for families. But is it lifting kids without government research?” said Bruce Fuller, a professor emeritus of education and public policy at UC Berkeley.

A spokesperson for the California Department of Education said money for research has not been allocated in the state budget, and the department would “welcome a legislative appropriation” to “study the impacts of TK on students and families.”

“At this time, the Legislature and Governor have not appropriated funding for the CDE to conduct evaluations,” the agency said.

It’s not the first time the agency has brought up the need for a study — especially as the program was rolling out statewide. A state official told LAist in 2022 , but they opted not to suggest how it should be funded.

“You could launch a very high quality study at a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the total funding for that program, and that would help people figure out what we are actually offering our families and how to improve it — and that seems really important,” said Alix Gallagher,  director of  for the research organization Policy Analysis for California Education. “As a taxpayer, I don’t find it acceptable that billions of dollars are being spent with no attention to how our systems can learn to use that in ways that are most beneficial for kids.”

TK experiences can look different school to school

The state sets , which can have a max of 24 kids and need a 10:1 student to adult ratio. Teachers must be credentialed with early childhood educational experience or units. And while the state  should learn in TK, it has — meaning  to more academic.

Lyse Messmer, a parent of a TK child in northeast L.A., has seen even variation between two schools her son has attended in the same area. His first program relied more on screen time and worksheets; Messmer transferred him to another program with more outdoor play. And the teacher at the former school had not previously taught TK, she said, which made for a harder transition into school.

But she said the overall experience has been beneficial for her child, and a welcome financial relief. “I think the benefits of him getting used to a bigger classroom and like a bigger elementary school and navigating all that stuff for him has been really positive,” she said.

Adding a new grade is a massive endeavor for districts. As in Messmer’s case, it can be especially hard to find teachers with experience teaching kids this age, said Austin Land, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Equity and Excellence in Early Childhood.

“ You can’t require that every kid that wants a TK spot gets a TK spot and then also require this workforce to exist that has all this preexisting training,” Land said.

Land, who has been studying TK before the expansion, said he would like to know basic characteristics of TK classrooms today.

“Do you have a sixth grade teacher that got reassigned leading your classroom or is it somebody who’s been working with little kids for a while?” Land said. “ Is the teacher having a one-on-one interaction with a child or a one-on-two interaction with some children? Or are they spending most of their time up at the front?”

Lack of data on quality

Without data, it’s hard to know what children are learning, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an associate research professor at the  at Rutgers University.

“We want to make sure we’re investing in quality for kids. And one way to know that we’re doing it is to be able to monitor it… we want to make sure that the state can sort of have a pulse on what’s going on in the classroom,” she said.

The institute  across the country on a number of benchmarks of quality. According to the institute’s tracking, about two-thirds of public preschool programs in the country have a classroom observation system in place, she said. California’s TK program does not.

Researchers said it’s especially important to know what these youngest students are doing because early experiences can affect their learning later on.

“At the very least, we want to make sure it’s not doing harm,” Jenkins said.

Tennessee: A cautionary tale

Researchers point to  as an example of where good intentions were not enough to benefit kids. The state has similar standards to what California put in place: max class sizes, low ratios, specialized teachers.

Dale Farran, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, found in her research that children who attended the pre-K program ended up faring worse academically and behaviorally than their peers who didn’t attend. Farran said standards don’t guarantee quality, much less equity between students from different social, economic and racial backgrounds.

“Those structural elements  are the easiest things for states to make rules about, but are they having the kind of interactions in the classrooms that will be positive for children? That’s much harder to put into place,” she said.

Farran has said that one possible reason for this was the overly academic nature of the program and structured settings: kids sitting at desks and listening to a teacher up front, when kids this age need to move around and play.

Katie Flynn, a mom of a TK student in Pasadena, said while she’s had an overall positive experience with her son in TK this year, it still feels more like elementary school than preschool.

At the beginning of the year, her son wouldn’t drink his water all day, or avoided going to the bathroom until he got home, because teachers didn’t remind or prompt him like they did in private preschool.

“ I know it’s also his responsibility, right? Like he needs to listen to his body. So it’s a mutual, collaborative enterprise, but it just shows how limited this age group is in ensuring that that happens,” she said.

What can the state do?

The California Department of Education said absent funding from the state Legislature for the department to evaluate the program, it convenes a regular group of early childhood researchers in the state to share their work into TK. But researchers LAist talked to from that group said that approach can only go so far.

Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said he wasn’t familiar with the Tennessee study, but funding for evaluation is something he will look into.

“We definitely need to make sure that we’re again evaluating our most effective programs so that we can focus on best practices to continue to support those statewide,” he said.

When LAist asked how the state will assess the current program, Muratsuchi and a State Board of Education spokesperson pointed to one large-scale study of TK done by the , in 2017. (The governor’s office also directed LAist to the state board.)

That AIR study found that kids who went to TK when it first started in California had stronger literacy and math skills when entering kindergarten compared to similar-age peers who didn’t go to TK at the beginning of the year. (Those differences mostly faded by the end of the year).

Land, the UC Berkeley researcher, and Gallagher, of PACE, said the AIR study was done nearly a decade ago, and on a TK program that looks different from TK today.

That’s because when TK started in 2012, they said, it was intended for kids who were nearly 5 years old, but had just missed the cutoff for kindergarten. Today, kids as young as 3 are entering TK in California.

LAist also reached out to Karen Manship, principal researcher of the AIR study. She said they’re still investigating topics related to transitional kindergarten, “but we do not have any funding or current plans to evaluate the program overall now that it is fully rolled out.”

The state education board spokesperson also cited research by economist Rucker Johnson, who looked at TK between 2013 and 2019, which found low-income children had greater reading and math gains by third grade than students who did not attend TK.

“These points tell us that an early start has proven to be beneficial for California students,” said a spokesperson for the board, which sets state policy.

LAist reached out to Johnson, who said that while his study of TK in the early years is promising, it’s “not a sufficient condition.”

“For improvements to be sustained, meaning even if they were good in the past, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to be monitoring the success as they’re expanded and expanded that scale to universal,” he said.

Kevin McCarty, Sacramento’s mayor and a former state assemblymember who championed the legislation to expand TK, told LAist funding is a challenge — given  — but that he welcomes evaluation.

“We want to make sure that it’s effective, that it works, and if there are any issues that we need to address and improve going forward,” he said. 

In the meantime, he said the program has given many parents a huge economic relief — and parents have a choice on whether to send their kids.

“This is free, this is — California paid for free universal pre-K,” he added, “which is a big deal because, we reminded people, paying for  than sending a kid to UCLA.”

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At an event to promote , the California Democrat revealed that he “cannot read a speech” and feels he hasn’t overcome dyslexia even after a decades-long struggle. His learning disability has in his home state, but Newsom’s phrasing would soon lead to a flurry of headlines.

“I’m just trying to impress upon you, I’m like you,” he told the Atlanta audience. “I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy.”

A raft of conservative influencers and media figures seized on the remark to accuse Newsom, currently in the 2028 Democratic primary field, of insulting his African American supporters by association with his own reading challenges. (Black residents make up a plurality of Atlantans, though the crowd Newsom addresses was reportedly .) South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, an African American Republican and close ally of President Trump, for stereotyping their own voters as academically underachieving. 

The tempest soon passed, with the governor dismissing the criticism as “MAGA-manufactured outrage.” Yet the episode stood out as a wobbly foray from a Democratic star into the evolving discussion around literacy education. 

Over the past few years, lawmakers in over a dozen states around what experts call the science of reading, a long-running corpus of research reflecting what is known about how people learn to recognize and use written language. Many of the early leaders in that movement have been Republican-controlled states like Mississippi and Louisiana, generating widespread plaudits for the so-called Southern Surge in standardized test scores. But the problems surrounding early literacy is one that voters around the U.S. recognize, with achievement in the subject still mired in a post-COVID slump.

With Democrats preparing for both a slew of gubernatorial campaigns this fall and a race for the presidential nomination next year, a question remains over how to address reading within the wider portfolio of K–12 education priorities. Most blue states, including California, have taken action on the science of reading, but some voices on the left have also been skeptical of the academic progress made in the South and elsewhere. With his personal background and national profile, Newsom could make the issue his hallmark. Some political observers are waiting for him and others to step into the spotlight.  

John White, the former state superintendent of Louisiana and a longtime voice for reading reforms, said he was puzzled by the apparent reluctance of leaders in both parties to put their achievements in that area front and center. He struggled to name a politician who has built a brand predominantly around the science of reading.

“Literacy is a complicated issue, not like cutting taxes or landing a new corporate headquarters,” White argued. “If you don’t articulate what’s been accomplished, and you don’t place big political stakes on it, there’s no political gains to be reaped from it.”

Linda Diamond, a former teacher and veteran advocate for evidence-based reading instruction in California, said she believed that lawmakers in most blue states have woken up to the need for improved reading legislation. The mission now, she added, was for presidential contenders like Newsom to preach that gospel from a national pulpit.

“I think the message to convey to Democrats is to take this up, make it a winning issue,” she said, acknowledging what she called her governor’s “unfortunate turn of phrase.” 

“Sure, look at the Republican states that have done so well on reading. But don’t let the myopia of thinking that it’s only Republicans distract from the fact that the greatest harm [of literacy failures] is being done to children in poverty.”

‘We need to see action’

Local Democrats’ legislative agenda on K–12 schools has been fairly busy over the last few years. 

In 2023, Newsom signed a bill to mandate dyslexia screenings for children between kindergarten and second grade, making California the 40th state to adopt such legislation. The legislature last year, passing a law that will provide elementary school teachers training in the science of reading and mandate the use of teaching materials that reinforce that pedagogy.

But those steps were taken only after years of intra-Democratic battles in Sacramento. The state as a laggard when it comes to literacy reforms, and previous bills had been sunk by a coalition of advocacy groups for English learners and the California Teachers Association. That faction argued that universal dyslexia screening would over-identify students with the disability and that mandates for evidence-based teaching would threaten educators’ autonomy.

Megan Potente, head of the nonprofit group Decoding Dyslexia’s California branch, said she was heartened by the recent legislative activity and considered Newsom an inspiration to children diagnosed with the condition. Still, she added, the party needed to speak more loudly on the issue — both in California and elsewhere.

“The topic has been elevated, as it needs to be, but we need to see action,” Potente said. “I hope that the Democratic Party can uplift it and not ignore the successes of other states, as they’ve done so far, and really hone in on how they’ve achieved what they’ve achieved.”

At least one prominent Democrat has questioned whether blue states have anything to learn from those that have pursued strategies based explicitly on the science of reading. While running her winning campaign for governor of New Jersey, then-Democratic Rep. Mikkie Sherill seen in Louisiana and Mississippi, calling schools there “some of the worst in the entire nation.” 

The bad feelings run both ways, with Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves to send Newsom assistance from his state’s core of reading tutors after the book forum last week.

It’s possible that Newsom’s personal experience with dyslexia could give him credibility in speaking for the interests of the tens of millions of Americans who struggle to read. Reeves’s predecessor as governor, Phil Bryant, cited his own early setbacks in the subject as the reason he pursued a lengthy slate of new reading laws in 2013. But in the wave of partisan brickbats against Newsom, some have even whether he truly is dyslexic, pointing to alleged inconsistencies in previous recountings of when he was assessed. 

In his memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom describes grappling with the condition “one of the struggles of [his] life, writing that his difficulty spelling in childhood could cause him to “run out of the room screaming that I didn’t know what was wrong with my brain.”

White called Newsom’s frankness about his diagnosis a “double-edged sword” in the context of U.S. politics. Though he hoped it could lead to bipartisan cooperation with others who have focused on dyslexia awareness — including of Louisiana — he warned that the needs of dyslexic children could be “lost in the partisan swirl.”

“While the issue will benefit from the attention, it is almost inevitable that it will be wrapped up in questions of veracity and identity politics and ugliness,” he concluded.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday proposed paring down the responsibilities of California’s elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction and shifting more power to the State Board of Education.

“California can no longer postpone reforms that have been recommended regularly for a century,” Newsom said, referring to numerous reports over the years that have suggested streamlining the state’s system of K-12 school governance.

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“These critical reforms will bring greater accountability, clarity and coherence to how we serve our students and schools,” Newsom said.

The move is intended to simplify California’s convoluted education governance, which have said can be inefficient, redundant and sometimes at cross purposes.

Under his proposal, the State Board of Education, an 11-member body appointed by the governor, would take over the California Department of Education. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction would have broader responsibility to “foster coordination and alignment of state education policies from early childhood through post secondary education.” The proposal didn’t offer further details.

For more than a century, the state’s public K-12 schools have been governed by a web of authorities, both locally and at the state level. In Sacramento, the governor, state superintendent, State Board of Education and the Legislature all share policy-making duties, which may shift every few years depending on the political winds. The Department of Education, under the direction of the state superintendent, is supposed to carry out those policies.

Locally, school boards and county offices of education also hold power over schools, especially since the state switched to a funding system about a decade ago that gives . County offices, among other duties, are charged with overseeing school district budgets.

California has a somewhat unique system of school governance. It’s one of only nine states that elects a schools chief. In other states, the top schools officer is appointed by the governor or the board of education, by Education Commission of the States.

Newsom’s proposal echoes a by Policy Analysis for California Education which called for an overhaul of the state’s school governance structure.

“The need for stronger, more coherent governance has never been greater. Schools are grappling with fiscal challenges alongside deepening inequities, persistent opportunity gaps, and the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning and well-being,” the report’s authors wrote.

The issue is especially urgent, they said, as the federal government reels back its involvement in K-12 schools. President Donald Trump is in the process of shuttering the federal Department of Education, spinning off its duties to the states and other federal agencies. Federal education funding is also increasingly precarious, giving states more direct responsibility for educating children.

The PACE authors suggested several solutions, including the proposal that Newsom put forth. Under the PACE recommendation, the Department of Education would be run by an administrator appointed by the State Board of Education, and the superintendent would act as an independent advocate, with an eye on accountability. Most of the power and responsibility for schools would lie with the governor.

Previous proposals

This is not the first time the issue has arisen. Several ballot measures over the years — none successful — have sought to change the role of the state superintendent. In 2023, , by former , a Democrat from Sacramento, would have made the position . McCarty withdrew it amid opposition from the California Teachers Association, the California School Boards Association and other groups.

In his proposal, Newsom cited other previous reports recommending changes to state schools governance, including one from 2002 and another from 1920.

The state’s current superintendent, Tony Thurmond, is winding down his second term. During his tenure, the department has expanded literacy efforts, community schools, student wellness programs and other initiatives. He’s also faced criticism for and creating a “.”

Thurmond, who terms out in 2026, is running for governor.

Newsom’s proposal has backing from a wide array of education players, including the Association of California School Administrators, California Association of School Business Officials, Californians Together, which advocates for English learners, and EdTrust-West, a research and advocacy organization focused on equity.

”For far too long, California’s fractured education governance system has contributed to persistent inequities disproportionately impacting low-income students, students of color and multilingual learners,” said Christopher Nellum, executive director of EdTrust-West. “EdTrust-West commends Governor Newsom for championing these essential reforms.”

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Every 4-year-old in California can now go to school for free in their local districts. The new grade is called  — or TK — and it’s part of the state’s effort to expand universal preschool.

In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state legislature  in a $2.7 billion plan so that all 4-year-olds could attend by the 2025-26 school year. (Prior to this, TK was only available for kids who missed the kindergarten age cutoff by a few months). While it’s not mandatory for students to attend, districts must offer them as an alternative to private preschool.

As a free option, it can save parents a lot of money. Parents  how sending their kids into a school-based environment compares to a preschool they might already know and like, as well as other needs like all-day care, and .

One big question we’ve heard: What do kids actually do and learn in a TK classroom? Educators say it’s intended to emphasize play, but what does that mean?

To help parents get a better sense of this new grade as they make their decisions, LAist reporters spent the day in three different classrooms across the Southland. Here are five things we saw children do.

Get used to the structure and routines of school

For many students, transitional kindergarten is their first introduction to a formal school preschool setting. Crystal Ramirez sent her 4-year-old to TK at Marguerita Elementary School in Alhambra, so he could get used to the rhythm and rigors of school.

“I didn’t wanna put him straight into kindergarten when he was five, six, so he at least knows a routine, already,” she said. “Now, as soon as he sees that we’re in school, he loves it.”

TK students, like other elementary school students, follow a schedule: morning bell, recess, lunch, second recess and dismissal. They’re also learning how to listen to instructions or stand in a line. Some are learning to go to the cafeteria for lunch.

“ I wanna make sure that their first experience in a public school setting is one that is joyful, where they feel loved, where they feel welcomed, where they get to really transition nicely into like the rigor of the school,” said Lauren Bush, a TK teacher at Lucille Smith Elementary in Lawndale.

Claudia Ralston, a TK teacher at Marguerita Elementary, said it can be hard for young kids to get up early and leave their moms and dads. But seven weeks in, many of her students have learned their routines already. She helps with the morning transitions by turning on soft instrumental music in the classroom, and allowing them free play until they regroup on the mat to discuss the day.

“They’re four years old. I want them to feel safe at school, know that this is a special place for learning and that they play,” she said.

Learn how to socialize and communicate

In TK,  learning is a big part of the curriculum. That’s a fancy word, but it just means they’re learning how to be in touch with their emotions

At Price Elementary in Downey, the teacher has her kids give an affirmation: “I am safe. I am kind. I matter. I make good choices. I can do hard things. All of my problems have solutions!” (They also have these sentences on classroom wall signs.)

The children also learn how to interact with their peers. In some schools, there are no assigned desks so the kids can learn how to share the space.

“ They’re able to problem solve. They’re able to use communication to get their needs, regulating their emotions. They do better than students who come in without this experience,” said Cristal Moore, principal at Lucille Smith Elementary.

On the playground, a student named Ava told teacher assistant Lizbeth Orozco that another student pushed her.

“How did that make you feel?” Orozco asked.

“M����!”

Orozco encouraged Ava to express her feelings to her classmate.

“ We give them options of how to solve a problem and then they go in and solve it themselves,” Orozco said. “If they need extra help, they always come back and we can help them.”

Arguing over toys can be a common occurrence in a TK classroom. At Price Elementary in Downey, educators help kids work through a solution. On a recent morning, one 4-year-old used two tongs to pick up paper shapes in a sensory bin, leaving another kid upset.

“What’s the rule about sharing?” asked Alexandria Pellegrino, a teacher who gives extra support for one TK classroom.

The boy handed over a tong to his peer. “Thank you so much for being a good friend,” Pellegrino said.

“[It’s]  about being kind friends and making friends and using our manners. So we do build that foundation at the beginning of the year,” said Samantha Elliot, the classroom’s lead instructor.

At the end of the day in Alvarez’s Lawndale TK class, she counts up the stars next to each student’s name earned throughout the day — earned for positive behavior like being kind, solving problems, trying something challenging, or showing effort in other ways. Ten stars earns a small prize from the treasure chest.

“If we don’t get something today are we going to get mad?” Alvarez asked the class.

“No!” they responded.

“I’m not going to cry!” one boy piped up, followed by his classmate and a “Me too!” from another student.

“That’s [a] positive attitude,” Alvarez said. “Because tomorrow you can get more stars!”

Get exposed to numbers, shapes, letters

In Elliot’s TK class, students use their own little lightsabers to trace letters in the air.

“They’re learning the letter, the sound, and then a little action to go with it. They’re wiggling and moving and they’re also learning those letter sounds and they don’t really realize, so it’s incorporating instruction,” she said.

There’s no mandated curriculum in TK, but instruction is supposed to align with the state’s . “Kindergarten is basically where the state standards go and kick in. There are standards in TK, but it’s a little bit different,” said Tom Kohout, principal at Marguerita Elementary.

Students might put playdough into letter molds, or the teacher might pull out toys from a bag that all start with a letter “E.” Kids will play with little plastic toys that connect — or “manipulatives” — that can help them recognize numbers and patterns.

“It’s play with a purpose,” Ralston said. “They’re just being introduced to the numbers, the colors, writing. But again, we’re not doing worksheets.”

Build fine motor skills

Molding pretend cakes with kinetic sand. Connecting small LEGO bricks. Cutting playdough. It might not seem like much, but children this age are still learning how to use their bodies.

“Tearing paper is really hard and it’s a really amazing fine motor skill for them because the same muscles you use to tear paper are the same muscles that you use to hold a pen or a pencil,” said Lauren Bush, a TK teacher at Lucille Smith Elementary in Lawndale.

“You see kids playing with dinosaurs. I see kids sorting by color, doing visual, you know, eye hand coordination and visual discrimination. I see them using their fine motor skills,” she said.

At lunch, kids learn how to open up a milk carton or open a packaged muffin. At PE, they learn to balance on a block or walk in a straight line — learning spatial awareness.

“They’re learning how to run, stop, things like that and playing because their bodies are so young,” said Principal Kohout.

Learn independence

For some kids, it might be the first time where mom and dad aren’t there to help carry their backpacks or . TK is meant to help focus on their independence, though aides can help.

TK classrooms are also usually set up with play centers, so kids can have the choice to explore on their own.

“ I want them to be independent, to be able to solve their problems, you know, with assistance,” Ralston said.

Samantha Elliot, the TK teacher in Downey, says she encourages kids to talk to their teammates first to figure out an activity before going to a teacher.

“It’s just gaining the confidence and building that independence from basically the start of the school year,” she said.

Parent Crystal Ramirez has already noticed a change in her 4-year-old this year since starting school. “ [He’s] socializing a little bit more, talking a little bit more, trying to express himself as well.”

California took a big step toward overhauling its reading curriculum last week when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill pushing for phonics-based instruction in elementary and middle school classrooms.

The provides training for school principals and reading specialists in the “science of reading,” a method of literacy instruction focused on vocabulary, comprehension and sounding words out rather than learning words by sight. The approach has led to improved reading scores in Mississippi, Louisiana and districts like Los Angeles Unified, which adopted it several years ago.

The law also updates the state’s list of textbooks, flash cards and other classroom reading materials to align with a phonics-based approach.

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The law comes on the heels of a host of other literacy initiatives, including mandatory dyslexia screening and universal transitional kindergarten. Combined, the efforts will dramatically reshape the way children in California learn to read and hopefully lead to higher test scores, experts said.

“California has one of the best literacy policy frameworks in the country right now,” said Marshall Tuck, chief executive of the advocacy group EdVoice and a former candidate for state superintendent of public instruction. “We worked very hard on this and we’re thrilled to get to this point. Now we just have to see it through.”

After years of controversy, little opposition

The new law passed the Legislature unanimously and had little opposition. That’s in stark contrast to , which met steep resistance from English learner advocates and the state’s largest teachers union. English learner groups said that a phonics-based approach only works for children who are fluent in English; the California Teachers Association said teachers need flexibility to pick a reading program that works for their students.

But those groups threw their support behind the current bill after a few changes: Reading materials will be available in languages other than English, and using phonics-based instruction will be optional, not mandatory. Although the to adopt the new approach, some may choose to stay with their existing curriculum, which is permissible under the state’s school governance system that leaves most decisions up to local school boards.

“What does this all mean? It means we’ll see,” said Todd Collins, an organizer of the California Reading Coalition and former Palo Alto Unified school board member. “But I’m hopeful. I think most school districts will get the message that they need to improve early literacy.”

Scores inching up

Collins’ group surveyed 300 California school districts in 2022 and found that 80% were not using a phonics-based approach to reading instruction. That’s changing, with some of the state’s largest districts adopting science-of-reading strategies and seeing good results. Los Angeles Unified, for example, saw its English language arts test scores jump 5.5 percentage points since it adopted a phonics-based curriculum in 2022. San Francisco Unified, Fresno Unified and Long Beach Unified have also seen improvements.

California’s reading scores are about the same as the national average, according to the latest , and have been inching up since the pandemic. Last year, 49% of students met or exceeded the state’s English language arts standards — still below pre-pandemic levels but a from the previous year.

Helping teachers

Among those who’ve pushed for the switch to phonics is Assemblywoman Blanca Rubio, a Democrat from West Covina who co-authored the bill. A former elementary teacher, Rubio hopes the new law will help classroom teachers as much as students and their families.

“It’s hard for teachers to see their kids feel defeated and frustrated,” Rubio said. “Now they’ll be equipped to really help their students succeed.”

She was inspired to author the bill, she said, in part because of her younger brother’s experience in school. He was wrongly placed in special education and never properly learned to read, she said, leading him to disengage from school and drop out in ninth grade. Countless other students have had the same experience, she said.

“I know how much it means to learn to read. It can shape someone’s whole life,” Rubio said. “That’s why we stuck with this.”

Another boost to reading instruction came in June, when Newsom included $200 million in the state budget to train teachers in the science of reading. The money should be enough to train every K-3 teacher in the state, Collins said. Credential programs are already training future teachers in the approach.

Tuck, of EdVoice, said the next step is ensuring the policy rolls out smoothly in schools. The new curriculum is a major shift for most schools, and teachers will need plenty of support.

“We can celebrate today, but tomorrow it’s back to work,” he said.

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California is the first state in the country to , aiming to transform how children eat on campus by 2035. 

In the cafeteria of Belvedere Middle School in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a over the next 10 years. The requirements go above and beyond existing state and federal school nutrition standards for things like fat and calorie content in school meals.

California public schools serve nearly 1 billion meals to kids each year.

“Our first priority is to protect kids in California schools, but we also came to realize that there is huge market power here,” said Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, an Encino Democrat. “This bill could have impacts far beyond the classroom and far beyond the borders of our state.”

The legislation builds on recent laws passed in California to and certain additives from all food sold in the state when they are associated with cancer, reproductive harm and behavioral problems in children. Dozens of other states have since replicated those laws. 

The bipartisan measure also comes at a time when U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement has shone a spotlight on issues including chronic disease, childhood obesity and poor diet. 

The term “ultra-processed food” appears more than three dozen times in the released in May. A subsequent report tasks the federal government with defining ultraprocessed food.

California’s new law beats them to the punch, outlining the first statutory definition of what makes a food ultraprocessed.

It identifies ingredients that characterize ultraprocessed foods, including artificial flavors and colors, thickeners and emulsifiers, non-nutritive sweeteners, and high levels of saturated fat, sodium or sugar. Often fast food, candy and premade meals include these ingredients.

Researchers say ultraprocessed foods tend to be high in calories and low in nutritional value. Studies have linked . Today, . 

Ultraprocessed foods are also linked to , .

Studies have found to be particularly harmful, said Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist at the Environmental Work Group, which sponsored the legislation. Kids are particularly susceptible to the effects of ultraprocessed foods, she said.

“Ultraprocessed foods are also marketed heavily to kids with bright colors, artificial flavors, hyperpalatability,” Stoiber said. “The hallmarks of ultraprocessed foods are a way to sell and market more product.”

Gabriel said lawmakers and parents have become “much more aware of how what we feed our kids impacts their physical health, emotional health and overall well-being.” That has helped generate strong bipartisan support for the law, which all but one Republican in the state Legislature supported. 

A coalition of business interests representing farmers, grocers, and food and beverage manufacturers opposed it. They argued the definition of ultraprocessed food was still too broad and ran the risk of stigmatizing harmless processed foods like canned fruits and vegetables that include preservatives. Vegetarian meat substitutes also generally contain things like processed soy protein and binders that may run afoul of the definition.

Gabriel contends that the law bans not foods but rather harmful ingredients. The California Department of Public Health now must identify ultraprocessed ingredients that may be associated with poor health outcomes. Schools will no longer allow those ingredients in meals, and vendors could replace them with healthier options, Gabriel said.

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit  to learn more.

This article was and was republished under the license.

It’ll be a while before Los Angeles can fully assess the damage to its schools from this recent spate of fires, but a few things already seem certain: rebuilding will take a long time, it will be expensive, and it may sap the statewide fund for school repairs.

At least a dozen schools in the Los Angeles area have been damaged in the fires, including at least five that were destroyed completely. Thousands of students and school staff have lost their homes, and countless families are grappling with major disruptions to their day-to-day lives. 

“The pain of being evacuated, losing your home, or having family and friends who have been impacted. … it’s just so devastating,” said Debra Duardo, Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools. “At so many districts in our county, the superintendent themselves has been evacuated, or 50% of the staff has been evacuated. And meanwhile they’re all trying to help their students.”

In Pacific Palisades, fires destroyed two elementary schools and extensively damaged Palisades Charter High School. Fires in Pasadena and Altadena destroyed three elementary schools. Several others in greater Los Angeles remain closed because they’re in evacuation zones or have been damaged.

Students at those schools have been reassigned to other campuses, are learning online or are waiting for conditions to improve so they can return to class.

For many students, it will be a long wait. Even with loosened regulations, rebuilding a school could take years as officials piece together a hodgepodge of funding sources: insurance money, private grants and donations, local bonds, lawsuit settlement money and state and federal funds. Some districts will have plenty of funding options, while others will struggle to find enough revenue.

In the meantime, some will have immediate expenses such as procuring portable classrooms and hiring mental health counselors to help students, staff and families cope with trauma. Large districts such as Los Angeles Unified can reallocate resources quickly, but smaller districts and charter and private schools face more obstacles.

Big demand for Prop. 2 funds

Proposition 2, the $10 billion school construction bond approved by voters in November, will be a big help for schools that need to rebuild or make costly repairs, or even buy portables. 

The state allocates the money to schools with the highest need, and then on a first-come, first-served basis. There’s already a big backlog of schools that have applied for money, and it’s likely that schools gutted by fire will get priority over those with less urgent needs, said Rebekah Kalleen, a legislative advocate for the Coalition for Adequate School Housing. 

That means some schools will miss out. Because California’s fund for school repairs had been empty for a while, there’s a long list of schools with critical repair needs. Throughout the state, students are attending schools with leaky roofs, lead pipes, unsafe electrical systems and broken air conditioning. Schools in low-income and rural areas are most affected, because they have less ability to raise money through local bonds.

Helio Brasil, superintendent of Keyes Union School District south of Modesto, said he has empathy for those dealing with buildings destroyed or damaged by the fires in Los Angeles, but he worries about . The 1,000-student district, which primarily serves low-income students whose parents work in the nearby agricultural fields, desperately needs money to replace the 40-year-old roof, upgrade the electric wiring and make other safety improvements.

“There is a growing concern that Prop. 2 funds will be quickly depleted, leaving smaller districts like Keyes struggling to address our own long-term facility needs,” Brasil wrote in an email. “We understand the moral imperative to support the devastated districts first, but the reality is that districts like ours cannot be left behind in the process.”

Brasil and other superintendents are asking for the state to balance the needs of schools affected by fires with those that aren’t, and provide extra money if possible. Gov. Gavin Newsom last week promised to chip in an extra $1 million from the state’s general fund for schools damaged by fire.  

‘Like a bomb had gone off’

The post-fire experience in Sonoma and Butte counties provides a preview of what lies ahead in Los Angeles. Thousands of homes and numerous schools were destroyed in a spate of fires from 2017-20, leaving residents to resurrect entire communities.

“Those first few weeks were surreal, almost primordial. It was like a bomb had gone off,” said Andrew Bailey, head of Anova Center for Education, a private school in Sonoma County that serves special education students enrolled in public schools. Anova was destroyed in the 2017 Tubbs Fire, leaving its 125 students without a campus.

There was no school at all for three weeks while staff hunted for classroom space at other locations. Eventually they brought in portables and launched an ambitious fundraising campaign to pay for a new school. Last week, the new school finally opened — more than seven years after the fire.

“It was miraculous that we were able to do this,” Bailey said. “It was incredibly hard work, but now the headwinds have dissipated and our kids now have a great new school.”

Attending school at a hardware store

In Paradise, a Butte County town which was nearly entirely destroyed in the 2018 Camp Fire, the school district is still recovering. Four school sites were destroyed and nine were extensively damaged. A big obstacle in rebuilding, school officials said, was not knowing how many students to expect. More than 80% of the town burned down, and it was unclear how many residents planned to move back. Enrollment in Paradise Unified dropped from 3,500 before the fire to 1,500 in 2019. It’s now up to 1,700. 

Although the state was helpful, the paperwork and funding process took time, Superintendent Tom Taylor said. Meanwhile, students attended school any place officials could find space: other school districts, some 20 miles away; warehouses; even a hardware store. (The store was cleared of merchandise. Students ate lunch at the check-out counter.)

The district has so far spent $155 million to rebuild campuses, but needs $150 million more to fix everything that needs fixing, Taylor said. The district is hoping to break ground on Paradise Elementary School, one of the schools that was completely destroyed.

“There were a few years where all staff worked harder than we ever have. Long days, seven days a week, no time off,” Taylor said. “We’re still not done. … But our staff understands that schools are the center of a community, and we want our schools to help lead the return of the town.”

Prioritizing mental health

In some ways, Los Angeles schools will have it a bit easier than those in Sonoma and Butte. The state now has well-established disaster relief protocols, and there are plenty of experts who can advise. Because of COVID-19, most schools already have distance learning systems in place and robust social-emotional support for students. 

Support for mental health – for staff as well as students – is a crucial piece of recovery, school officials in Sonoma and Butte said.

In Sonoma County, schools learned early on how to screen students for anxiety. They also created partnerships with local nonprofits and health clinics, and the County Office of Education trained teachers to lead class discussions and otherwise support students who felt traumatized by the fires.

“In situations like this, you’re never going to have enough money for one-to-one counseling for everyone who needs it,” said Mary Champion, a school psychologist with the Sonoma County Office of Education. “That’s why it’s so important to train educators, to take some of the pressure off clinicians.”

Tyson Dickinson, director of the office’s Department of Behavioral Health and Well-Being, said districts in Los Angeles should expect the recovery process — beyond the replacement of buildings — to take a long time. Sonoma County’s last major fire was in 2020, and it’s still never far from residents’ minds.

“Any time it’s windy, warm and dry, any time there’s smoke, you can see the stress building,” Dickinson said. “From August through January everyone is on edge. It’s just a different world now.”

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Earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom  of California’ transitional kindergarten expansion, saying enrollment in the $2.7 billion program had doubled over the past two years. His comments echoed those of State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who .”

They both pointed to new data showing that enrollment in the free program for 4-year-olds had gone from 75,000 two years ago to 151,000 last year — a significant recovery after steep declines during the pandemic. 

But while the overall numbers are up, the percentage of eligible 4-year-olds enrolled in TK actually fell. As the TK age cut-off widens, the number of eligible children has more than doubled — but the percentage of students who are enrolled dropped between 4 to 7 percentage points between the 2021-22 and 2023-24 school years, depending on how the number of eligible children is calculated.

CalMatters used two approaches to estimate the percent of eligible TK students enrolled: using kindergarten enrollment the same year as a proxy and using general population projections from the Department of Finance. Both approaches show the same trend.

Department of Education spokesperson Elizabeth Sanders said the department uses a method from the Finance Department to calculate the percentage of eligible students in TK but did not provide specifics.

“The trends we see in the percentages of eligible students whose families are enrolling in TK mirror the trends described by (CalMatters’) data set,” she said. “As we expand the number of students and families eligible, we expect the percentage of families who choose to participate to hover around 70% and to increase following full implementation.”

Sanders pointed to the growing number of children attending TK as a hopeful sign for the program, which is intended to boost academic achievement and social skills and prepare students for the rigors of elementary school.

“The fact that we have doubled the number of individual students participating in the program during these implementation years makes us very proud,” Sanders said. 

TK advocates said the increased numbers alone are worth celebrating, and they expect the percentage to inch upward over time.

“This is great, this is what we want to see. It shows that schools are building back trust,” said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge California, which advocates for early childhood education. “TK is a great option for families, but it’s good for kids, too. Kids need to be around other kids.”

Transitional kindergarten was never meant to be an exclusive early childhood service for families; it’s intended to be one option among several the state offers, Lozano said. So any increase in participation is reason for hope.

Transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds

The state  in 2010, but it was limited mostly to larger districts and was open only to children whose birthdays fell between September and December. In 2021, Newsom expanded it so all 4-year-olds could eventually participate. Rolling out gradually, the eligibility window widens by a few months every year. In 2025-26, all 4-year-olds will be eligible and all districts except charters will be required to offer it.

 that TK and preschool have many benefits for children, including higher rates of graduation and employment, less criminal activity later in life and overall better health, while parents benefit economically from an extra year of free care for their children.

Transitional kindergarten is , a low-key environment where children spend most of their day playing and learning social skills. Typically, children learn to take turns and make friends, express themselves and regulate their emotions, count to 10 and recognize simple words, and learn fine motor skills such as holding a pencil. Unlike preschool, TK teachers are required to have credentials and, by 2025-26, extra units in early childhood education.

Michelle Galindo, a parent in Chula Vista Unified south of San Diego, said she was hesitant at first to send her son Roberto to TK. She’d heard reports of crying children and inexperienced teachers, and 4-year-olds seemed too young for school. 

But she happened to know the teacher and trusted her. Her son thrived in the program, gaining independence, making friends and learning.

“He’s so much more confident. He asks a lot of questions, is more responsible,” Galindo said. “When he got to kindergarten last year, he actually thought it was too easy. The teacher said he was a full year ahead. I’m really glad we sent him to TK.”

Wealthier districts slow to open transitional kindergarten

There are a few theories explaining the stagnant percentage of TK enrollment. One is that not all districts are offering it yet. Districts known as “basic aid” districts have been slow to open TK programs, and some aren’t offering it at all. Basic aid districts are typically wealthy districts that opt out of state funding because they collect more money through local property taxes. Because of that, they can’t get state funding to operate TK classes.

Marin County is home to several basic aid districts that have lagged in opening TK programs. Larkspur-Corte Madera School District , saying it can’t afford to without state help. Ross Elementary doesn’t offer TK, either. The result is that Marin has one of the lowest TK enrollment rates in California, even though the county has pockets of low-income families who would benefit from the free service.

“Everyone thinks TK is a good idea, but for basic aid districts, it’s an unfunded mandate,” said Marin County Superintendent of Schools John A. Carroll. “It’s taken a while, but we’re getting there. Most have now gotten on board.” 

San Francisco Unified also has one of the state’s lowest TK enrollments, with more than four times as many kindergartners as TK students. Statewide, there were 2.4 kindergartners for every TK student last year. San Francisco’s low numbers are partly due to the extensive preschool program the district already offers. They’re also due in part to a steady decline in the number of children living in San Francisco, as parents leave for less expensive locales, said district spokeswoman Laura Dudnick. 

Facilities have also been an obstacle for school districts. Districts must find space for new TK classrooms, which in fast-growing parts of the state has been difficult. Proposition 2, a on the November ballot, would provide funding for schools to build and expand TK classrooms.

Preschool vs. transitional kindergarten

Another hurdle to TK enrollment is preschool. In addition to private preschools and federally funded Head Start programs, California offers free preschool to low-income families. Some parents said they prefer to keep their children in preschool because it’s convenient or they like the program.   

Roslyn Broadnax, a parent in South Los Angeles, said she distrusts the state’s push for TK, fearing that TK will siphon resources from state-funded preschools, which in many cases are long-established, trusted parts of communities.

“The existing preschool system has served low-income kids, kids of color very well,” said Broadnax, who works for Cadre-LA, a nonprofit that advocates for parents in South Los Angeles. “If there’s little difference between preschool and TK, why should a parent move their child to TK? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

 from UC Berkeley found that the TK expansion has had a damaging effect on state preschools and Head Start, as parents move their children out of those programs. Although the overall number of 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in early childhood education programs has increased slightly, Head Start centers in California have lost 43,000 preschoolers, while state preschools have lost 9,000 4-year-olds since the TK expansion. The result has been shuttered classrooms, a scarcity of teachers and uncertain futures in what researchers called “pre-K deserts.”

“The real question is, are more families accessing pre-kindergarten overall? We can’t find evidence that they are,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at UC Berkeley and an author of the study. “To say that the TK enrollment has doubled relative to a year in which many preschool classrooms were closed (due to COVID) is disingenuous.”

Another hitch is that during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when most preschools closed, California guaranteed funding for them through 2025. Now, the state is paying for half-empty preschools across California and preschools have no incentive to recruit more families, according to the report.

The whole early education system in California is overly complex and confusing for parents, Fuller and his team said. They recommend a streamlined, consolidated system that delivers high-quality, play-based programs that are distributed equitably throughout the state. 

Not enough qualified teachers

 since the beginning of TK. While most school districts have been able to hire enough credentialed teachers, they’ve struggled to hire classroom assistants and teachers who have the extra credits in early childhood education that will be required by 2025-26. Schools reported a 12% vacancy rate for TK teaching assistants at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, according to a by the Learning Policy Institute.

Ericka Hill, a parent in Los Angeles, said her son was in a mixed kindergarten-TK classroom, with a substitute teacher for half the year. The substitute had little experience in early childhood education and gave the children worksheets to take home every night.

“I don’t think a 4-year-old should be sitting down at a desk. It needs to be age appropriate,” Hill said. “He was resistant to doing the work. It was difficult for all of us.”

San Diego, Los Angeles, Sonoma, Orange and Ventura counties have some of the highest rates of TK enrollment, thanks in part to extensive outreach to parents. Bus advertisements, billboards, online ads, and flyers at day care centers and preschools all helped bring in new families.

Garden Grove Unified, a mostly low-income district in northern Orange County, expanded its TK program so quickly, in fact, that it incurred hefty fines from the state for allegedly enrolling students who didn’t yet qualify and not meeting student-teacher ratios that the state set later. The district is fighting the penalties, but meanwhile nearly every child who’s eligible for TK is enrolled.

“We knew that our families would want to enroll as soon as possible,” said district spokesperson Abby Broyles. “We launched a marketing campaign to get the word out. … Our families have been thrilled with the high-quality TK they’ve received.”

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Within the next week and change, Democrats who control the Legislature and fellow Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom will need to reconcile their competing budget plans for higher education in California, with huge implications for student financial aid and the short-term fiscal health of the state’s public universities.

At issue is the 2024-25  that begins July 1 and the multibillion-dollar projected deficits California faces. Lawmakers and the governor are in the  of the annual process to craft the state government’s spending plan.

The Legislature fulfilled its constitutional duty last Thursday by passing its budget plan. That started the clock for Newsom and lawmakers to reach a compromise for the final 2024-25 budget by late June. 

And on higher education, they’re far apart in key ways — differences that first emerged in January, when budget season publicly kicked off with  for 2024-25.

“As depressed as I was in January, and as bad as some of the cuts still are that are included in this budget, in education I think we’ve been able to step ahead with this budget,” said John Laird, a senator and Democrat from Santa Cruz who is chair of the budget subcommittee on education, .

How much for Middle Class Scholarship? 

Newsom’s last public spending proposal, released in May,  the Middle Class Scholarship  annually — a serious blow to  of supersizing college financial aid so that no university student . 

The Legislature countered last week with a stark “nope,” instead keeping a past-year’s promise to grow the program  in 2024-25 and the following year. 

The dueling proposals would either slash how much each of the roughly 300,000 student recipients who attend University of California and California State University would receive — or make debt-free college a closer reality.

Under the governor’s plan, average awards would drop from between $2,500 and $2,800 to just over $300. If the Legislature gets its way, average awards would range from $3,100 for UC students to $3,600 for Cal State students.

The cuts would likely mean more college loans for students, an official with the governor’s Department of Finance 

The Legislature’s plan “significantly brings back the Middle Class Scholarship, right at the time that parents and students are making decisions about what colleges to go to and whether they have the financial resources to go to certain public higher education institutions in California,” Laird .

Will Cal Grants help more students?

The Legislature also seeks to partially expand the Cal Grant, the state’s marquee financial aid program, for the 2025-26 budget year. If the plan is approved, another 21,000 students would receive the grant for the first time. About 400,000 students .

Newsom in May  of the Cal Grant, citing California’s colossal fiscal hole. But legislative budget leaders have been adamant about rolling out the Cal Grant to more students despite the state’s difficult finances to make good on years of .

The cost would be $47 million in one-time funding to ensure current students receiving the Cal Grant under the current rules would remain in the program. 

If the plan becomes law, about 11,000 more community college students would get the grant in 2025-26, which would appear as a cash award of about $1,650 and then cover tuition at a UC or Cal State if the student transfers. Cal Grants are valid for four years of full-time enrollment. The number of new recipients would grow with each subsequent year.

This is a lower number of new recipients, and smaller price tag, . That’s because the partial roll-out would keep the current 2.0 GPA requirement for community college student eligibility while the original would have removed it.

Still, under this new proposal, students would be able to re-establish eligibility by taking fewer classes  — 12 units instead of the current 16 — and earning a 2.0 GPA. The number of units a student would need to rehabilitate their GPA would drop to nine units in 2026-27 and six units in 2027-28. The plan calls for no GPA requirement by 2028-29.

These details were confirmed by the office of Asssemblymember , a Chula Vista Democrat who is chairperson of the Assembly’s budget subcommittee on education.

The rule changes would mean 9,000 new recipients at Cal State in 2025-26, according to information the state’s financial aid agency, the California Student Aid Commission, shared with CalMatters.

Also, about 7,300 new students would get extra cash award for those with dependent children. Current recipients get $6,000, but new recipients would receive $3,000 in the first year. The award for new recipients would grow by $1,000 each year until hitting $6,000. 

However, UC would see about 1,300 fewer students receiving the Cal Grant in 2025-26 than current projections show — the result of the . UC’s share of low-income students has declined in the past decade — .

Advocates pushing for Cal Grant expansion, including student associations from UC, Cal State and community colleges,  that they are pleased with the proposal. “We respect that the cost may be too great during this budget cycle, so we agree that a phase-in as you have proposed is the right step,” the letter read.

If approved, these details would appear in a separate “trailer bill” sometime in late June or early July.

What’s the bottom line for UC, CSU?

Newsom’s plan imposes cuts and delays funding for UC and CSU in 2024-25 and then restores funding in 2025-26 — but by much less than what lawmakers and the governor promised last year.

Newsom’s funding plan has numerous moving parts, but would basically see Cal State receive $75 million less in 2024-25, then bounce up by $171 million the next year, and leap by another $265 million by 2026-27. That would increase Cal State’s main state support to $5.35 billion. But Cal State faces numerous budget challenges, including a deficit as. 

The legislative plan would switch the order of fiscal hurt by proposing to grow the UC and CSU budgets in 2024-25 and apply cuts — if the budget deficit still calls for it — in 2025-26. The logic is that another year of additional state aid, even if it’s less than what the systems were promised last year, provides them a year to prepare for the budgetary scythe.

Less funding  and Cal State would mean larger class sizes and more faculty and staff positions that go unfilled. That would limit student services, and, for Cal State, likely result in more academic programs getting the ax. 

Under both plans, though, the UC and Cal State systems would see more funding by the third year. For Cal State, that’s a jump from $4.99 billion in 2023-24 to $5.35 billion in 2026-27. And for UC, that’d mean state support growing from $4.74 billion now to $5.18 billion in 2026-27.

And both plans want to continue the recent trend of paying the systems to enroll more California residents — a note of sweet relief for students in the state eager to enter some of the most selective public universities in the country.

Laird said that “inflation, deferred maintenance, salary contracts, it is a challenge, but this really is an excellent step forward in a tough budget.”

This was originally published in CalMatters.

Pushing back against the surge of misinformation online, California will now require all K-12 students to learn media literacy skills — such as recognizing fake news and thinking critically about what they encounter on the internet. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom last month signed , which requires the state to add media literacy to curriculum frameworks for English language arts, science, math and history-social studies, rolling out gradually beginning next year. Instead of a stand-alone class, the topic will be woven into existing classes and lessons throughout the school year.

“I’ve seen the impact that misinformation has had in the real world — how it affects the way people vote, whether they accept the outcomes of elections, try to overthrow our democracy,” said the bill’s sponsor, Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Democrat from Menlo Park. “This is about making sure our young people have the skills they need to navigate this landscape.”

The new law comes amid rising public distrust in the media, especially among young people. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that adults under age 30 are  on social media as they are from national news outlets. Overall, only 7% of adults have , according to a Gallup poll conducted last year.

Media literacy can help change that, advocates believe, by teaching students how to recognize reliable news sources and the crucial role that media plays in a democracy. 

“The increase in Holocaust denial, climate change denial, conspiracy theories getting a foothold, and now AI … all this shows how important media literacy is for our democracy right now,” said Jennifer Ormsby, library services manager for the Los Angeles County Office of Education. “The 2016 election was a real eye-opener for everyone on the potential harms and dangers of fake news.”

AB 873 passed nearly unanimously in the Legislature, underscoring the nonpartisan nature of the topic. Nationwide, Texas, New Jersey and Delaware have also passed strong media literacy laws, and more than a dozen other states are moving in that direction, , a nonprofit research organization that advocates for media literacy in K-12 schools.

Still, California’s law falls short of Media Literacy Now’s recommendations. California’s approach doesn’t include funding to train teachers, an advisory committee, input from librarians, surveys or a way to monitor the law’s effectiveness.

Keeping the bill simple, though, was a way to help ensure its passage, Berman said. Those features can be implemented later, and he felt it was urgent to pass the law quickly so students can start receiving media literacy education as soon as possible. The law goes into effect Jan. 1, 2024, as the state begins updating its curriculum frameworks, although teachers are encouraged to teach media literacy now.

Berman’s law builds on a  to bring media literacy to K-12 classrooms. In 2018, Senate Bill 830 required the California Department of Education to provide media literacy resources — lesson plans, project ideas, background — to the state’s K-12 teachers. But it didn’t make media literacy mandatory.

The new law also overlaps somewhat with . The state hopes to expand computer science, which can include aspects of media literacy, to all students, possibly even requiring it to graduate from high school. Newsom recently signed , which creates a commission to look at ways to recruit more computer science teachers to California classrooms. Berman is also sponsoring , which would require high schools to offer computer science classes. That bill is currently stalled in the Senate.

Understanding media, and creating it

Teachers don’t need a state law to show students how to be smart media consumers, and some have been doing it for years. Merek Chang, a high school science teacher at Hacienda La Puente Unified in the City of Industry east of Los Angeles, said the pandemic was a wake-up call for him.

During remote learning, he gave students two articles on the origins of the coronavirus. One was an opinion piece from the New York Post, a tabloid, and the other was from a scientific journal. He asked students which they thought was accurate. More than 90% chose the Post piece.

“It made me realize that we need to focus on the skills to understand content, as much as we focus on the content itself,” Chang said.

He now incorporates media literacy in all aspects of his lesson plans. He relies on the , which offers free media literacy resources for teachers, and took part in a KQED media literacy program for teachers. 

In addition to teaching students how to evaluate online information, he shows them how to create their own media. Homework assignments include making TikTok-style videos on protein synthesis for mRNA vaccines, for example. Students then present their projects at home or at lunchtime events for families and the community.

“The biggest impact, I’ve noticed, is that students feel like their voice matters,” Chang said. “The work isn’t just for a grade. They feel like they’re making a difference.”

Ormsby, the Los Angeles County librarian, has also been promoting media literacy for years. Librarians generally have been on the forefront of media literacy education, and California’s new law refers to the  for media literacy guidelines. 

Ormsby teaches concepts like “lateral reading” (comparing an online article with other sources to check for accuracy) and reverse imaging (searching online to trace a photo to its original source or checking if it’s been altered). She also provides lesson plans, resources and book recommendations such as “True or False: A CIA analyst’s guide to spotting fake news” and, for elementary students, “Killer Underwear Invasion! How to spot fake news, disinformation & conspiracy theories.”

She’s happy that the law passed, but would like to see librarians included in the rollout and the curriculum implemented immediately, not waiting until the frameworks are updated.

The gradual implementation of the law was deliberate, since schools are already grappling with so many other state mandates, said Alvin Lee, executive director of Generation Up, a student-led advocacy group that was among the bill’s sponsors. He’s hoping that local school boards decide to prioritize the issue on their own by funding training for teachers and moving immediately to get media literacy into classrooms.

“Disinformation contributes to polarization, which we’re seeing happen all over the world,” said Lee, a junior at Stanford who said it’s a top issue among his classmates. “Media literacy can address that.”

In San Francisco Unified, Ricardo Elizalde is a teacher on special assignment who trains elementary teachers in media literacy. His staff gave out 50 copies of “Killer Underwear!” for teachers to build activities around, and encourages students to make their own media, as well.

Elementary school is the perfect time to introduce the topic, he said.

“We get all these media thrown at us from a young age, we have to learn to defend ourselves,” Elizalde said. “Media literacy is a basic part of being literate. If we’re just teaching kids how to read, and not think critically about what they’re reading, we’re doing them a disservice.” 

Incumbent Superintendent Tony Thurmond might have avoided campaigning entirely, in fact, if he’d picked up just a few extra points of support in the June primary. Instead, he settled for 46 percent of the vote — just a few points shy of the majority threshold to avoid a runoff — and the mantle of clear favorite heading into the fall. Thurmond’s opponent in the nonpartisan election, education advocate Lance Christensen, finished 34 points and more than two million votes behind him in the last round.

In terms of competitiveness, the contest is a shadow of previous campaigns. In both 2014 and 2018, the state’s competing education factions spent tens of millions of dollars trying to win the superintendency and influence state policy on school choice and accountability. The spirited electioneering came in spite of the fact that the office’s formal functions are quite limited, and authority over K-12 schools is split with the governor, state assembly, and the California State Board of Education. 

Those were intra-Democratic elections fought between philanthropy-backed education reformers and an organized labor movement headlined by the powerful California Teachers Association, featuring serious clashes on issues like the expansion of charter schools. This cycle pits Thurmond, the slight victor over the reformers’ favored candidate in 2018, against Christensen, an obscure former Republican staffer in the state assembly the teachers’ union and to bring private school choice to the deep-blue state. And while the next superintendent will confront significant educational challenges, from pandemic-related learning loss to curricular reforms around math and English, the debate over the future of education policy has largely remained quiet.

Instead, with the reform movement (and money) appearing to sit on the sidelines, and that has similarly proven incapable of generating voter interest, Thurmond’s progressive message is widely expected to carry the day. Tom Loveless, a veteran education policy analyst who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, called Thurmond a “Teflon candidate” who, though criticized for his leadership style and the state’s lengthy school closures during COVID, is likely to sail to a second term.

“He’s had all kinds of controversy in his office, and yet no serious opposition arose in terms of the election,” Loveless said. “It just doesn’t seem to be affecting his electoral prospects.”

Prolonged school closures

Thurmond’s tenure has been marked by the usual degree of criticism directed at a high-profile policymaker in the nation’s largest state. Complaints of low morale and hostile management in the California Department of Education, the 2,700-employee agency that the superintendent leads, . The office also for hiring a personal friend of Thurmond’s to serve as superintendent of equity, despite the fact that he lived and held a job in Philadelphia at the time.

Representatives of the state education department declined to comment on this article.

Those spats, while damaging, were inevitably overshadowed by the emergence of COVID-19 and its massive disruptions to schooling in 2020 and 2021. 

Beginning in March 2020, thousands of schools in California remained closed for in-person instruction for over a year. The approach reflected Gov. Newsom’s toward suppressing the spread of the virus, which also saw lockdowns of small businesses throughout the state. But as in other areas, it alienated a vocal segment of the public who worried that the long months of virtual learning were adversely affecting kids. 

Federal data collected during the middle of the pandemic indicated that California was with the highest percentages of shuttered schools. And while reopening policies varied by district, by the end of the 2020-21 school year, that roughly half of the state’s nearly six million public school students were still learning from home. Public frustrations with the slow pace of reopening — along with pandemic-related mobility that forced some to flee the state — has led to a sizable drop in the number of children enrolled in California schools. 

It also contributed to an unexpected recall campaign launched against the governor last fall. That vote ended with a strong Newsom win, proving that the backlash against the state’s COVID policies was limited in its political impact. And indeed, that majorities of both adults and K-12 parents generally approve of how Newsom handled the K-12 school system. But the same polling also finds that faith in K-12 schools has dropped around the state. Paired with the trend toward disenrollment, those responses suggest growing dissatisfaction with the course of public education in California.

Megan Bacigalupi is an Oakland mother and the executive director of CA Parent Power, an activist group. A Democrat-turned-independent, she has criticized Thurmond for not militating more energetically in favor of earlier school reopenings and greater resources for struggling students. Still, she added, the role of superintendent is principally advisory, and Gov. Newsom held more power to influence policy over the last few years.

“Tony Thurmond had a bully pulpit and should have used it during school closures to advocate for students and families,” Bacigalupi said. “But the person who was most responsible for our schools being closed was Gavin Newsom, not Tony Thurmond. Gavin Newsom has, and had, a lot more power than Tony Thurmond does.”

‘Moving the goalposts’

With just weeks before Election Day, the academic effects of the pandemic reentered the spotlight with the release of both California’s state test results and those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal measure sometimes called “the Nation’s Report Card”). 

Both exams showed significant losses in student performance on math and reading, but the NAEP scores surprised some — particularly those who worried about the state’s prolonged closures — by indicating modest drops compared with other parts of the country. In , the governor’s office trumpeted the findings as showing that California “performed better than most other states” at mitigating learning loss during the pandemic. 

Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford, objected to that framing, arguing that analysis of California’s pandemic performance had to be mindful of the ways in which COVID reshaped K-12 enrollment across the state. Hundreds of thousands of disproportionately disadvantaged students, if not more, may have left the state in the last few years, potentially biasing the results upward, he remarked.

“You’d expect that test score declines would be attenuated simply because some of the most educationally vulnerable students are no longer in those schools,” Dee said. “So there’s something I find kind of unseemly about celebrating that. When you move the goalposts, maybe you shouldn’t be doing an end-zone dance.”

More controversially, the release of state standardized test results, which revealed similarly disheartening achievement losses, were until after the election — a break with the traditional release calendar. Thurmond’s office backtracked after sustaining public criticism, but ultimately opted to release the scores on the same day that the more sanguine NAEP scores came out. 

The cloud of pandemic learning loss hangs over the larger question of where California schools are headed. With his docket mostly overtaken by educational crises the last two years, much of the Thurmond education agenda has been shunted to the side. Notably, however, the superintendent for $200 million in state funding this year to hire graduate students pursuing careers as school social workers and mental health clinicians.

Thurmond’s preferred policy strategy has been to  on key K-12 issues, from the digital divide to the achievement gap, which have generated proposals for action in the coming years. Some members of those bodies have praised Thurmond for adopting a collaborative approach to surfacing new ideas. But Bacigalupi, who has been particularly critical of California’s efforts to improve reading, said that multiple years of “government by task force” had managed to earn some good press while failing to do much of significance. For example, a touted reading panel declined to recommend the adoption of research-based approaches to instruction (focusing heavily on phonics and sometimes referred to as “the science of reading”), instead opting to deliver books to children’s homes.

“To me, school closures were awful — they harmed kids — but I’m now actually more concerned about what’s not happening on issues like early literacy,” said Bacigalupi, who has not endorsed a candidate in the race.

The next four years will be critical — not just in terms of an academic turnaround from COVID, but also to render a near-term verdict on whether a systemic jump in school quality can be accomplished in California. Thurmond has for his second term, including $250 million in proposed spending on new literacy strategies (roughly $42 for each K-12 student in the state), new investments in universal school meals and free preschool, and additional mental health supports. During a virtual event hosted Wednesday by the California Reading Coalition, he announced that he would hire a statewide literacy director “steeped in best practices for how to help our children learn.” 

Christensen, who spent years as a Republican staffer in Sacramento before helping to lead education initiatives for the conservative California Policy Center, has launched of inaction against the department, vowing to shake up the state’s education governance by devolving more power to local districts. He even helped draft a longshot proposal to create education savings accounts, which would offer parents thousands of dollars to pay for schooling costs outside traditional public schools. The proposal, already adopted by conservative activists in more right-leaning states, never stood a serious chance of enactment in solidly blue California.

In the end, Loveless noted, the conservative challenger likely had too much ground to make up before Election Day. What’s more, he added, the complicated structure of education responsibility in state government — in which the governor calls the shots, usually in consultation with an education advisor and the legislature, while the state superintendent occupies something like a cheerleader position — did not signal much possibility of meaningful policy changes coming from the department. 

“The division of labor has never really been made clear to the public, in terms of if you’re unhappy with schools, whose feet do you hold to the fire? The answer is, it’s a centipede.”

����Ӱ��’s senior writer Linda Jacobson contributed to this report.

“We keep cohorts together during lunch, so if you’re in a mask-required classroom, you’re eating as a group — socially distanced,” said Superintendent Mark Hansen. “We’re keeping those bubbles pretty tight.”

Until now, elementary schoolers couldn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine. No longer. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Tuesday endorsed the unanimous vote of a CDC vaccine advisory panel recommending Pfizer-BioNTech’s pediatric coronavirus vaccine for use in children ages 5 to 11. That means as many as 28 million children can begin receiving shots this week. 

But just as parents split on masks, they’re also divided on vaccines: Nearly half say they may pass on vaccinating their children for now, mostly because they aren’t especially worried their children will get seriously sick from coronavirus — even as doctors warn the virus will become endemic and virtually unavoidable in coming years, much like the annual flu.

That could set up a tense confrontation in coming months between schools and parents as public health officials push to make the shots part of mandatory school vaccine regimens. And as with the divide over masking, social distancing, and other practices, it could also change how schools operate, as pro-vaccine parents insist on keeping their kids apart from unvaccinated classmates.

Even requiring the vaccine for enrollment might not settle the dispute: An Oct. 23 poll found that 46 percent of parents simply wouldn’t send their child to school if COVID vaccinations are required.

In southern California’s ABC Unified School District near Los Angeles, Superintendent Mary Sieu said many cautious families are already hesitant to send their children back to school — about 700 have remained in remote instruction programs this fall. Overall, she said, the district has lost more than 1,400 students over the past two years, forcing her to consider closing one of her schools next year.

“I just feel that a lot of people are afraid of coming back to school,” she said.

While suggests that children remain at a lower risk than most adults of contracting serious illness due to the virus, outbreaks happen. In , conducted in early October, nearly one in three parents said their child’s schooling had been disrupted by COVID-19.

“Look at your ZIP code and see what your vaccination rates are, and your infection rates are,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “That’s going to tell you the quality of education that those kids are getting in those schools. If a child isn’t in school consistently, they’re not going to be getting the quality education that they need. That’s the bottom line.”

Domenech, a former superintendent in Fairfax County, Va., said he fears that the vaccination gap taking shape between districts could replicate the existing achievement gap. Recent research in has found, for instance, that communities with high poverty rates had COVID-19 infection rates in 2020 that were two to three times as high as those in wealthier areas.

“What we’ve seen is that the areas that are suffering the most in terms of lack of a vaccine and high infection rates are exactly [high-poverty] areas, where families of color are afraid to get their kids vaccinated and are afraid to send their kids to school,” Domenech said. 

‘Ripe for a contentious situation’

Though they typically get a raft of vaccinations just to attend school, children’s COVID-19 vaccination rates have already shown evidence of parental hesitation. In September, the CDC said just of children ages 12 to 17 had gotten at least one shot and 32 percent had completed the two-shot dose by July 31. That’s more than two months after the FDA granted it emergency use authorization — and more than seven months after it first approved the vaccine for adolescents aged 16 to 17. 

In Marshalltown Community School District, northeast of Des Moines, Iowa, as many as 90 percent of school employees are vaccinated, said Superintendent Theron Schutte. But just 40 to 50 percent of eligible students have been vaccinated so far. For the youngest eligible students, ages 12 to 13, the vaccination rate is closer to 40 percent. “My guess is that a lesser percentage of the younger kids’ parents will probably get them vaccinated,” he said. “I’m hoping that more of them do.”

Dr. William Raszka, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, said the risk-benefit analysis for vaccination “is just so overwhelming. I have trouble understanding why someone wouldn’t get vaccinated at this point in time.”

So far, he said, life-threatening illnesses associated with the vaccines “are awfully rare.” One of the most common reactions to Pfizer’s vaccine — the only one approved for emergency use in children — is “a sore arm,” he said.

From the beginning of the pandemic, said Schutte, “We operated on the premise that we know COVID’s going to come into the school. There’s no way we can know whether it is or isn’t coming in – but what we can control is its opportunity to spread.”

He couldn’t immediately predict how his school board would respond to the recent FDA approval of childhood COVID vaccines. “They’re a reflection of our community. So if our community is split on whether we should or shouldn’t require vaccinations, I think it’s always going to be ripe for a contentious situation.”

Mandates are years off

Once COVID vaccines earn full FDA approval, states could move quickly to mandate them for school attendance — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has he plans to add it to the list of vaccinations required to attend school in-person for middle and high school grades, as with vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, and the like. “We want our kids back in school without episodic closures,” on Oct. 27.

Speaking after he received a COVID booster shot in Oakland, Newsom said children already receive 10 other vaccinations in order to attend school. “The politics around this are disturbing to me. Lives are quite literally at risk.”

Leaders in four of the state’s — Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and Oakland — have already said students must get a first shot of the vaccine or attend school virtually from home in January.

But former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb in October predicted that any COVID vaccination mandate for school attendance would be “a couple of years away, perhaps a little longer,” for children ages 12 to 17, and even further for children ages 5 to 11. Appearing on CBS’s , Gottlieb said CDC has typically taken several years to add most childhood vaccines to their immunization schedule. 

That will leave the decision for now to parents like Debra Garrett, a mother of four children, all of them under 12, in Troy, N.Y. 

Garrett said she’s vaccinated, but added, “I’m not really sure about my kids getting it done right now.” Parents need more information about how the vaccines affect children, she said. “It’s all brand new. We don’t know how anybody’s going to respond to it.”

That sensitivity is heightened, Garrett said, because she grew up Black in a country with a history of mistreating Black research subjects in the name of medicine. “I just don’t want my child to be looked at as ‘the tester,’” she said.

Garrett’s four children all attend , part of the Uncommon Schools network of charter schools in six Northeastern cities. She said the school has given parents of students 12 and up the choice to vaccinate. 

But if Uncommon makes vaccination mandatory, “that’s when it’s going to be tricky — and it’s going to get tough for the school, and for parents. I just feel like there is going to be some kind of push and pull on both ends. I can’t say whether one is right or wrong, but what I do know for certain is that we have to educate people in order for them to be able to fully get it and fully feel like, ‘They’re not just pricking my kid.’”

Many parents will likely find themselves agreeing with Garrett. In a June survey , as the more-contagious Delta variant began to take hold in the U.S., the parents of just 51 percent of students under age 18 said they’d “probably” or “definitely” have their child vaccinated, with vaccine hesitancy much higher for parents of younger children. They’re far less likely to say they’ll vaccinate their kids compared to parents of high schoolers — 46 percent vs. 59 percent. 

Political party affiliation also plays a role: Republican-identifying parents of 35 percent of children say they’ll vaccinate their kids, while that figure is much higher for Democrats at 66 percent.

A September Gallup poll suggests that of parents of children under 12 would get them an available vaccine. Parents’ own vaccination status strongly predicted their attitude toward their kids: 82 percent of parents who were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 said they’d vaccinate their child, while just 1 percent who don’t plan to get vaccinated themselves planned to vaccinate their kids. 

Dr. Benjamin Lee, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and associate professor at the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital, said the findings are cause for concern.

“It’s discouraging to me to see how many parents have already sort of expressed that they don’t want to get their children vaccinated as soon as vaccines are available,” he said.

While it’s natural for parents to hold out a high threshold for vaccine safety, he said, no vaccine carries zero risk. “And that includes all of the vaccines that we use routinely” for both children and adults. “In all scenarios, the data are so overwhelming that risks from vaccination are far lower than the risks of natural infection.”

Schutte, the Iowa superintendent, said it’s true that children are less likely than adults to get seriously ill due to COVID, but he urged parents to see the bigger picture: Even if kids don’t get sick, they could take the virus home. “We have a lot of multi-generation (families) living under the same roof in our community,” he said. “So it’s not only the parents, but the grandparents, and maybe in some cases, the great-grandparents.” 

The longer it takes to get most people vaccinated, he said, “the longer the situation is going to stretch out.”

In reality, said Lee, the Vermont pediatrician, SARS-CoV-2 “is going to be with us from now on. Any chance to completely eradicate this virus is long gone. And this will become an endemic virus,” like the annual flu, sticking around for years. Because it’s so contagious, he said, “what we should recognize is that all of us are going to get this virus. And the question is: Under what conditions or terms do we want to catch it?”

So far, the only statistically significant side effect of the vaccine is a mild case of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, in adolescent males. But it’s enough to prompt physicians in a few countries to give young people of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, offering at least partial protection from the virus without this side effect. 

“We should acknowledge that that is a known risk of vaccination,” Lee said. “However, when you look at the risk of myocarditis from vaccine versus the risk of myocarditis from COVID-19, the risks are far higher of catching myocarditis if you catch COVID-19 than from the vaccine itself.” 

Also, he noted, “almost without exception” the myocarditis associated with the vaccine is “a very, very mild illness that completely resolves.” COVID-19, by contrast, carries a higher risk of severe outcomes. 

Lee also warned against taking to heart the many unsupported claims about the vaccines’ quick development and emergency approval, claims that might turn parents, like Garrett, off to vaccination. “When all is said and done, these will end up being the most heavily scrutinized vaccines in terms of safety perhaps ever, compared to any vaccine that we’ve ever used.”

As more Americans receive Covid-19 vaccines and schools move to reopen widely, leaders are doing their best to make sure everyone gets the memo: School is happening in-person this fall.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently , “We must prepare now for full in-person instruction come next school year.”

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said in March he is “” schools across the state to return in-person in the fall, no exceptions. “We are expecting Monday through Friday, in-person, every school, every district,” he said.

Good luck with that.

Even as vaccination rates soar and the government authorizes access for adolescents, school districts nationwide are grappling with sometimes widespread suspicion and dissatisfaction over how they handled the pandemic, especially in communities of color. That’s forcing them to offer families an option that might have been unthinkable a year ago — and one that has a terrible track record: enrolling their children online this fall and continuing learning from home.

Dawn Williams, whose daughter will start first grade in August in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, said she’s seriously considering an online program. “Most of my friends that have children, their kids are still virtual,” she said.

So far it’s happening in just a fraction of the nation’s 13,500 districts. But those include a wide mix of rural and suburban districts, as well as large urban school systems like Albuquerque, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Indianapolis, Nashville, Omaha, Richmond, and the District of Columbia, according to the University of Washington’s Center for the Reinvention of Public Education (CRPE).

In Colorado’s Jefferson County, the school district, responding to “high demand” from families, an online option in the fall. District spokesperson Cameron Bell said more than 700 students have enrolled so far, with at least 1,000 expected by August.

In Montgomery County, the largest school district in Maryland, officials are developing a virtual academy “to address both the students who may want to remain virtual for health reasons but also those who have thrived in virtual learning,” said spokesperson Gboyinde Onijala.

What’s going on here?

Much of this can be chalked up to simple consumer demand. One recent found that nearly 30 percent of parents would rely on virtual learning “indefinitely” going forward. That suggests a potential market of more than 15 million students.

Districts are listening. When RAND researchers surveyed about 320 public school leaders last October, they found that were either considering or actually planning to keep “one or more virtual schools” operating after the pandemic ends, said RAND’s Heather Schwartz.

“I expect that to hold, or even to increase somewhat based on early anecdotal indications that a sizable minority of students and parents prefer remote learning,” Schwartz said via email.

More recently, in early April, researchers at CRPE surveyed officials in 100 large urban school districts and found nearly identical results: 23, or just over one in five, plan to offer a remote option next fall.

District leaders told Schwartz and other researchers that their main motivation was “to be responsive to parent and student preferences” — and in no small part to improve sagging enrollments. of 33 states by The Associated Press and the education news site Chalkbeat found that public K-12 enrollment in 2020 dropped by more than half a million students, or 2 percent.

“You keep hearing this word: ‘thriving’”

As he talks these days to school leaders nationwide, education consultant John Bailey said he hears many of them say they plan to make online learning “a more permanent part of their offering to kids going forward.” A one-time U.S. Department of Education official who now advises the Walton Family Foundation, Bailey has supported the idea that reopening schools is safe. He said that while many educators acknowledge millions of students lost ground via distance learning, “for some kids, it’s working really well. So why not offer that going forward?”

Nationwide, families of color are keeping their children home at especially high rates. In Chicago, the district’s chief of school management told school board members late last month that most students are “learning virtually.” But about one in four Black high school students was absent from both in-person and remote learning in late April. Overall, only about two-thirds of high school students attended in-person classes on days they were expected in school, the Chicago Sun-Times .

At the same time, Asian fourth-graders attend school remotely at the of any group — 95 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Eighth-graders attend at an even higher rate: 96 percent. Asian families have expressed fears about their children experiencing anti-Asian discrimination or even violence in the wake of the pandemic.

While state and local restrictions can play a part in attendance statistics like these, many families are simply voting with their feet, said Bree Dusseault, a practitioner in residence at CRPE.

“There’s still a really sizable population of students who, even when given the option to be in-person, aren’t taking it,” she said.

“You keep hearing this word: ‘thriving’ — particularly in families of color,” said Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools in Baltimore. “Districts have never had to wrestle with ‘How do we provide education in multiple formats?’ They thought this was a stopgap. Now what I think they’re finding is that there are many parents that were just fine with virtual learning.”

Anderson, a Black educator who is also a mother of three teens, said the past year has taught parents “that they have a voice at the table – and they are not being shy and retiring about letting people know what they want in terms of how they want their children to learn.”

Recent survey data suggest that Black, Hispanic and Asian parents are more likely than their white peers to say they prefer online learning. For instance, the journal recently noted data from early April that showed 60 percent of white parents have a preference for in-person learning, compared to just 25 percent of Black and Hispanic parents.

At the same time, Dusseault said, many parents of color see how badly education systems have served their kids in the past, with substandard instruction and .

When Anderson surveyed her three children recently, none wanted to go back to their Baltimore school this fall. They like learning from home and have been successful.

“I think my kids sometimes miss their friends,” she said. “But aside from that, I don’t have any of my three children saying right now, ‘Mom, I want to go back to school today or tomorrow.’ They have adapted to this.”

Anderson was quick to add that her kids “have every kind of technology possible,” as well as space at home to use it. All three have their own rooms, plus their home has a backyard. But whatever their situations, she said, “There are a lot of kids who are at home and they’re thriving. You can’t negate the success of those students and the opportunity that they have had to be separated from their peers and still do well academically.”

Williams, mother of the Maryland first-grader, said her daughter is already doing advanced work — and she’d like to keep it that way. Giving her child a chance to work virtually and independently is key.

“Students that are more advanced — and parents that have the choice — we’re going to keep our kids home,” she said. “Those kids are going to accelerate. They’re going to soar and they’re going to keep advancing.”

“School hesitancy” and safety

Vladimir Kogan, an Ohio State University political scientist who studies politics and public policy, said “school hesitancy” may in part be a function of the messages families hear — especially in places where teachers’ unions loudly demonstrated last year, enacting and the like to warn of the dangers of reopening schools.

“I think that messaging has definitely filtered down to the parents,” he said.

But has shown that when prevention strategies are in place in schools, transmission of the virus is typically lower than, or similar to, levels of community transmission, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As a result, public opinion is shifting. A February Pew found that 61 percent of Americans said K-12 schools that weren’t open for in-person instruction “should give a lot of consideration to the possibility that students will fall behind academically.” That’s up from 48 percent last July. And fewer Americans said schools should give a lot of consideration to the risk to teachers or students.

“I think the number of parents who are hesitant is going to go down pretty substantially,” Kogan said. “But I don’t think it’s going to go down to zero.”

Bailey, who recently summarizing research on safe school re-openings amid Covid fears, predicted that there will be a group of parents “who will probably never feel that it’s safe until there’s a vaccine for kids.”

The prognosis on vaccines seems promising: This week, both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved expanded use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children 12 to 15 years old. Pfizer also said it’ll ask the FDA for emergency authorization in September to administer its vaccine to children as young as 2 years old.

Both Johnson & Johnson and Moderna are conducting trials in children.The U.S. vaccine developer Novavax is also on children — its vaccine has a reported 96 percent efficacy rate in adults and is awaiting emergency use authorization in the U.S.

A “really terrible” track record for virtual schools

Kogan, the political scientist, worries that by relying on virtual schools, districts are embracing a well-studied — and failed — reform.

In a 2019 , researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center found that graduation rates at virtual and blended-learning schools were far lower than the national average for public schools. The review followed years of from researchers nationwide.

In 2016, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, along with other groups, issued “A Call to Action” to , saying far too many virtual schools “have experienced notable problems.”

At the student level, most of the dilemma lies in what’s required for students to be successful in virtual settings: huge amounts of self-control, motivation and discipline, said Kogan, who last January that found worse declines in reading achievement among Ohio third-graders in districts that used fully remote instruction.

The track record of these programs “was terrible before Covid,” Kogan said. “And I think it’s certainly the case that there are kids who do fine. But the districts are not saying, ‘We’re going to limit it only to kids who do fine.’”

To be fair, many educators get it. In its announcement of a “modified digital learning option,” the , district last month offered an official warning: “Digital learning is not optimal for every student. Some students did not do as well academically, socially, or emotionally in the digital learning environment.”

In the long term, Kogan said, his larger worry is that this could open the door to a two-tier education system: a bigger, functional one for students whose parents are comfortable sending them to school, and a smaller, inferior one “for kids whose parents are too scared and keep them home.”

The long-term damage, he said, “is going to be so devastating. It’s going to exacerbate all the inequalities that we already have.”

Anderson, the Baltimore educator and mother, acknowledged the dilemma, but emphasized it was nothing new: Millions of kids weren’t being served well before the pandemic. Here’s a chance for something better, especially for students of color who are already staying away in large numbers.

While leaders may insist that everyone attend in-person on the first day of school this fall, Anderson said, “I’m not hearing what is going to significantly shift over the summer that is going to make sure that these large numbers of families of color are going to suddenly show up in September.”