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California students continued to recover from the pandemic in 2024, with test scores inching upward, graduation rates improving and discipline rates falling. Perhaps most importantly, more students showed up for class. Chronic absenteeism soared in the wake of COVID-19-related school closures, peaking at 30% two years ago. But this year, that number dropped to 19% — still almost twice the pre-pandemic rate, but a vast improvement for schools that had struggled to lure students back to campus.   

Much of the improvements in student performance can be attributed to heavy investments from the state and federal government. California spent billions on tutoring, after-school programs, counselors, summer school and other programs meant to help students rebound academically and emotionally from the pandemic. 

“We’re getting students back to school, getting more of them prepared for college and careers, and graduating them in greater numbers,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education. “But it will be critically important to continue the forward-thinking initiatives and investments made in recent years so that they will continue to pay dividends in the coming years.”

One of the more significant investments was made through Proposition 28, which brings more than $1 billion annually to schools for arts education. After decades of cutbacks, arts education was once again in the spotlight last year, as schools rolled out theater programs, music and dance lessons, visual and media arts and other creative endeavors. 

But that might be one of the only funding sources that’s safe, as budget uncertainty looms. Pandemic relief grants expired in 2024, and schools are likely to see their revenues decline as enrollment shrinks in many parts of California. That could lead to a wave of school closures, especially in urban areas.

Schools got some good news in November when voters passed Proposition 2, a $10 billion bond for much-needed school repairs and upgrades. Although it favors wealthier districts over lower-income and rural districts, the money will be a lifeline for districts plagued with broken air conditioners, asbestos, lead pipes, unsafe electrical wiring and other hazards. 

2025 outlook

California schools will be adapting to political changes at the federal level, including the possible elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. If that happens, schools would likely see changes to special education, data collection, the ban on gender-based discrimination in schools and funding for low-income students. President-elect Donald Trump has also supported vouchers for parents to send their children to private schools, which has been unpopular in California but may surface as a national issue, along with attacks on so-called “woke” curriculum.

The rights of transgender students is also likely to be a flashpoint in 2025, as the Trump administration is expected to crack down on school districts that protect students who identify as a gender other than what they were assigned at birth. And if the federal government moves ahead with mass deportations, California schools could see major disruptions. An estimated 100,000 K-12 students in California are undocumented, and almost half of all students have at least one immigrant parent.

What was the state of higher education this past year? In a word, upheaval.

California’s colleges and universities were home to paroxysms of faculty and student fury over pay, free speech, the war in Gaza and the deep wounds of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

And like the 1960s — another era of campus protest that ended with the narrow victory of a conservative politician riding a wave of cultural resentment — California’s public universities became national poster children for that social upheaval.

But 2024 was also a financially propitious time for California’s nearly 150 public colleges and universities. While lawmakers swung a cost-cutting scythe at the expenses of most public agencies to address a huge budget shortfall, they spared higher ed, growing public funding for those institutions. They also poured more money into student financial aid, though not as much as some advocates and lawmakers wanted. 

Here’s a brief timeline of the major events in California higher education in 2024:

• California State University faculty strikes, January — The faculty union for the first time in its history went on a systemwide strike over wages and benefits. The plan was to strike all week, but the labor walkout ended the day it began after union leaders got most of what they wanted, including wage increases of 10%. 

• Financial aid turmoil, February through April — A major technological glitch in the federal government’s revised financial aid application prevented tens of thousands of California students whose parents don’t have Social Security numbers from submitting their applications. While a federal matter, this forced state lawmakers to push back the deadline for state financial aid, allowing students to apply for as much as $17,000 in annual grants and scholarships two months after the normal date. The fast action and extension led to more students applying for financial aid. 
  
• Encampments, protests, crackdowns — In April protesters who were mostly students and faculty erected overnight encampments at leading California campuses as part of their protest against the war in Gaza. They wanted to pressure their campuses to divest from financial ties to companies or investments that did business with Israel. They also targeted investments in weapons manufacturers. Those encampments often violated campus policies, but the focal point was on UCLA, where a mob of pro-Israel protesters attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment. The next day, police began making arrests as they cleared the encampment. That incident plus others at the UC system sparked a graduate-student strike. The legal fallout or UC’s actions and the labor walkout then played out over several months. Both Cal State and UC leaders reiterated existing policies against encampments before the start of fall term.

2025 outlook

How will Donald Trump’s second go as president affect college funding and student life? With control of Congress, Washington may target Biden-era loan forgiveness programs, affecting many borrowers in California. Trump’s stated desire for mass deportations would be perilous for California students — either those who are themselves undocumented or have parents or relatives who are. Meanwhile,Cal State is eyeing budget shortfalls if lawmakers follow through on their promises to cut spending. That could mean class cuts, fewer new students and less money to improve graduation rates.

Amid a flurry of recent school board policies aimed at the rights of transgender students, California passed a new law in July that prevents schools from requiring staff to notify parents if a student identifies as LGBTQ.

The new law, AB 1955, came in response to a handful of school boards adopting policies that require teachers and other school staff to notify parents if a student identifies as a gender other than what’s on their school records. 

“Teachers can still talk to their parents,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a press conference on Monday in which he touted a new plan to improve career opportunities for adults. “What they can’t do is fire a teacher for not being a snitch. I don’t think teachers should be gender police.”

LGBTQ advocates said that “forced outing” policies, such as those adopted in Chino, Temecula and a dozen other districts, infringe on students’ privacy and could potentially harm students whose parents disapprove of their identity. 

The state sued to stop Chino’s policy, and most districts either scrapped their policies, tweaked the language or put them on hold. 

This act “could not be more timely or necessary, and LGBTQ+ students across California can breathe a sigh of relief,” Tony Hoang, executive director of Equality California, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, wrote. “LGBTQ+ youth can now have these important family conversations when they are ready and in ways that strengthen the relationship between parent and child, not as a result of extremist politicians intruding into the parent-child relationship.”

‘The battle continues’

Opponents of the new law said that parental notification policies actually strengthen ties between students and parents, and schools should not withhold information on such important matters. Even though a parental notification measure that would have applied to all schools failed to qualify for the ballot, opponents vowed to keep fighting. 

“This (law) doesn’t clarify anything. And nothing prevents individual teachers from bringing the issue up with parents,” said Roseville school board member Jonathan Zachreson, an organizer of the failed ballot measure and whose district was among those that passed parental notification policies. “So the battle continues.”

The new law also requires the state Department of Education to update its LGBTQ resources and encourage school districts to offer counseling, support groups, clubs, anti-bullying policies and other measures to support LGBTQ students and their families. Schools would have to pay for those services with their existing funding. 

LGBTQ young people are particularly vulnerable on school campuses. In a recent survey of 18,000 LGBTQ young people nationwide, nearly half said they had been bullied in the past year, and 10% said they had attempted suicide. Those whose schools supported LGBTQ rights were less likely to suffer from mental health challenges.

Even if the new law sparks a backlash in more conservative areas of the state, California was right to move forward with it, especially as some states push ahead with their own parental notification policies, said USC education professor Morgan Polikoff. 

“Will everyone like this law? Certainly not. Will it lead to conflict? There is no doubt,” Polikoff said. “But I am hopeful this will be good for the queer kids in California’s schools and will point the way toward similar efforts in other states.”

CalMatters’ Adam Echelman contributed to this story.

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In stark contrast to the spring when hundreds of students were arrested and suspended for violating campus policies, far fewer participated in protests this fall. Campuses had warned students they would be enforcing these policies much more strictly than they had in the spring when rallies and pro-Palestinian encampments protesting the Israel-Hamas war grew unchecked.

As protests emerged this semester, campus police departments quashed any that broke the rules. In all, at least six students have been arrested and 12 have been suspended at universities around the state.

Throughout October, which marked one year since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, campuses reacted swiftly to violations of protest rules — known on campuses as time, place and manner policies.

While there have been some rallies and protests, no campus has seen the mass demonstrations, or encampments, that swept across California campuses last spring. That’s when, according to a CalMatters analysis, around 560 people, largely students and faculty, faced discipline or arrests. Some student protestors erected tents and other structures that remained on campus for several days or, in some cases, multiple weeks before universities intervened. In light of legal actions and pressure from lawmakers, campus administrators are tightening enforcement.

“I think students are still definitely riled up and ready to have their voice heard,” said Aditi Hariharan, president of the University of California Student Association. “Whenever they take steps to share their voice, I think the administration takes an opposing step and is trying to push them back.”

Meanwhile, some students and faculty are still facing charges related to last academic year’s demonstrations. And now some who were arrested are suing their campuses. 

New year brings emphasis on enforcing protest policies

While many of today’s protest policies were in place prior to last spring, campus administrators showed discretion in the past over when or whether to respond.

Universities’ varied approaches to dealing with the encampments led state lawmakers and system administrators to seek uniform enforcement of policies governing where and how students can protest. Signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September, SB 1287 requires the University of California and California State University systems to update their policies and create training to educate students on “what constitutes violent, harassing, intimidating, or discriminatory conduct that creates a hostile environment on campus.”

“Even when dealing with divisive issues, all student voices have the right to be heard and none should be silenced,” said now former state Sen. Steve Glazer, an Orinda Democrat, speaking in support of the bill in an Assembly judiciary committee hearing. “I believe this legislation will restore an environment of civil discourse on our campuses.”

In response to the new law, the leadership of both the UC and Cal State systems communicated the need for consistent time, place and manner policies for the start of the academic year. Michael Drake, the UC president, wrote a letter to the 10 UC campuses outlining policies on free speech and protests, including a complete ban on camping and erecting encampments, blocking campus facilities, and refusing to identify oneself. The letter largely banned actions already enshrined in laws and campus policies.

At UCLA, university police officers arrested four people Nov. 19 during a protest the campus’ Students for Justice in Palestine organization announced as a “Nationwide Student Strike.” According to acting UCLA Chief of Police Scott Scheffler, the protestors violated time, place and manner policies after they attempted to block access to the campus walkway through Bruin Plaza. This case is still under investigation. 

Scheffler is the second acting chief at UCLA since the former chief John Thomas was reassigned in May, following criticisms of his handling of the spring protests on campus. The UCLA Police Department announced Dec. 10 was Thomas’ last day with the university.

Also at UCLA, one person was arrested Oct. 22 for failing to disperse during a student rally of about 40 people. The campus police department posted on X that the rally violated the school’s protest policies against erecting unauthorized structures on campus. 

At UC Santa Cruz, police arrested one student who was using a megaphone during a demonstration on Oct. 7, according to an eyewitness who spoke to LookOut Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office public arrest reports show one person was arrested on the Santa Cruz campus for obstruction of a public officer and battery without injury that day.

While no arrests were made, Pomona College has suspended 12 students for the remainder of the 2024-25 academic year following an Oct. 7 demonstration in which they entered, damaged and vandalized a restricted building, according to the student newspaper. The college also banned dozens of students from the four other campuses of the Claremont Colleges, a consortium that includes Pomona.

Private colleges have implemented their own policy changes. Pomona College now requires students and faculty to swipe their ID cards to enter academic buildings. Since last semester, students and visitors entering USC are also required to show a school or photo ID.

Some students are still facing charges from last year’s protests

Few charges have been filed after UCLA’s encampment made headlines in April, when counter-protestors led an attack on encampment protesters while law enforcement did not intervene for several hours. The following day, 254 people were arrested on charges related to the protest encampment. In October, two additional people were also arrested for participating in the counter-protester violence.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office is pursuing three felony cases against individuals arrested at UCLA in relation to violence during last spring’s protests.

Meanwhile,  the city attorney’s office is reviewing 93 misdemeanor cases from USC and 210 from UCLA, according to information it provided to CalMatters last month.  

Lilyan Zwirzina, a junior at Cal Poly Humboldt, was among the students arrested in the early morning of April 30 following protesters occupying a campus building and ignoring orders to disperse from the university. Law enforcement took her to Humboldt County Correctional Facility where she faced four misdemeanor charges, including resisting arrest. Zwirzina thought she’d have to cancel her study abroad semester, which conflicted with the court date she was given.

“I was pretty frustrated and kind of freaked out,” Zwirzina said. Authorities dropped the charges against her in July.  

The Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office didn’t pursue charges against 27 of the 39 people arrested, citing insufficient evidence. The 12 remaining cases were referred to the Cal Poly Humboldt Police Department for investigation. Those cases remain under investigation, according to the university. 

For 13 people, including students, arrested at Stanford University in June, the Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen has not pressed charges as of Nov. 20, according to information his office provided CalMatters.

Elsewhere across the state, some district attorneys are pursuing misdemeanor and felony charges against student protesters. Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer is pursuing misdemeanor charges against 50 people, including two UCI professors, a teaching assistant, and 26 students, stemming from a protest at UC Irvine on Oct. 22, 2023. Charges include failure to disperse, resisting arrest and vandalism.

At Pomona College, 19 students were arrested April 5 on charges of trespassing after some protestors entered and refused to leave an administrative building. Students arrested either had their cases dismissed or have accepted community service in lieu of further legal action. James Gutierrez, the attorney representing the arrested students, said he asked that the college drop charges against its students, citing their right to protest the use of paid tuition dollars.

“They are righteously demanding that their colleges, the ones they pay tuition to and housing fees and pour a lot of money into, that that university or college stop investing in companies that are directly supporting this genocide and indirectly supporting it,” he said.

Students fight back against campus protest policies

As administrators face the challenge of applying protest policies more uniformly and swiftly, the truer test of California public higher education institutions’ protest rules will be playing out in court.

In one already resolved case, UC leadership agreed in August to comply with a court order requiring the campus to end programs or events that exclude Jewish students. A federal judge ruled some Jewish students in support of Israel who were blocked from entering the encampment had their religious liberties violated — though some Jewish students did participate in UCLA’s protest encampment.

Now, students have filed at least two lawsuits against their campuses and the UC system for violating their rights while ending student encampments last spring. In September, ACLU NorCal filed suits against the UC and UC Santa Cruz for not providing students due process when they immediately barred arrested students from returning to campus.

“Those students should have gotten a hearing, an opportunity to defend themselves or to explain themselves, and the school would have shown evidence of why they created a risk of disturbance on campus,” Chessie Thacher, senior staff attorney at ACLU of Northern California, said.

UC Santa Cruz spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason said the university “appreciates the court’s careful deliberation” and that the university “is committed to upholding the right to free expression while also protecting the safety of its campus community.”

In October, ACLU SoCal filed lawsuits on behalf of two students and two faculty members against the UC and UCLA alleging the actions the university took to break down the encampment violated their free speech rights.

UCLA spokesperson Ricardo Vazquez told CalMatters via email that the university would respond in court, and that UCLA “fully supports community members expressing their First Amendment rights in ways that do not violate the law, our policies, jeopardize community safety, or disrupt the functioning of the university.”

“The encampment that arose on campus this spring became a focal point for violence, a disruption to campus, and was in violation of the law,” Vazquez said in the email statement. “These conditions necessitated its removal.” 

June Hsu and Lizzy Rager are fellows with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

At some high schools in California, civics is everywhere. It’s part of science and history classes. It’s after school at student council and newspaper meetings. It even happens outside of school, on field trips to the capitol and volunteer projects in the community. And after four years, it’s recognized with a gold seal on students’ diplomas.

But most California high school students don’t have those opportunities. Lower-income students and those in politically mixed – or “purple” – areas where parent pushback is more common often miss out on a comprehensive education on how government works and why it matters. Voter turnout among adults nationwide might reflect that disparity in civic engagement, although there are many factors that influence people’s decision to vote and be civically engaged.

The stakes are high, as misinformation and mistrust in government are on the rise, and the country reflects on a particularly divisive election season.

“At a time when we need civics the most, it’s become harder to deliver for everyone,” said Joseph Kahne, an education professor at UC Riverside who’s extensively studied civics education in California. 

All high school students in California are required to take a one-semester government course to graduate. But there’s wide variation in how schools teach that class. For example, some of those classes include hands-on projects that show how the Constitution is relevant today, while others adhere to dry textbook material that’s less engaging. 

Many low-income students don’t have access to extracurricular activities, the backbone of civics education outside the classroom. Schools that mostly serve low-income students are less likely to have those activities because they typically require resources like a faculty advisor or money for materials. Nearly 60% of wealthier schools, for example, have a student news outlet, while only 39% of lower-income schools do, RAND found. Eighty-five percent of wealthier schools have a student council, but only 73% of lower-income schools do.

Even at wealthier schools, there’s a disparity in who participates. Lower-income students tend to have after-school jobs or family obligations, so they can’t take advantage of the same opportunities as their wealthier classmates.

“Civics education needs to be woven into the existing school day, in all subjects, so it’s accessible to all students,” said Michelle Herczog, program director of Californians for Civic Learning, which promotes civic education for all grades. “That’s the only way to make it equitable.”

The inequities are reflected in adults’ rates of civic engagement nationwide. Americans from both parties who are financially secure are more likely to vote, volunteer, trust election results and support democracy, according to the Urban Institute. Latinos are especially affected. According to the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at UCLA, Latinos have the lowest voter registration rate of any ethnic group.

“We know that some groups of people are less likely to be civically engaged. It isn’t fair to have your voice not heard,” Kahne said.

Empathy and activism in San Lorenzo

Some schools that serve low-income students have embraced civics education even without a surplus of funding. Students in Judy Smith’s civics classes at San Lorenzo High in the east Bay Area spend their days delving into issues they care about: homelessness, air pollution, police brutality, drug abuse and other topics. 

After spending a few weeks learning the nuts-and-bolts of government and democracy, students pick their research topics and set about their plans for addressing the issues. They grill politicians, survey their classmates, write letters to government officials and present their findings to the community.

On a recent morning, students were busy debating the subtleties of various policies, and poring over survey results. In a week they were scheduled to make their presentations in the school library, and Smith encouraged them to wear professional attire for the occasion.

Armando Espinoza, a senior, said the class has been life-changing. His group was looking into gun violence and its impact on young people, exploring existing laws and legal failures to restrict firearms, especially ghost guns.

“At the beginning of the year, it was like, oh, this is just for a grade,” he said. “But as I started learning more, I got engaged in how this problem affects our community. No teenager should have to live through a shooting. For me, it’s been empowering.”

His classmate Moniba Hussain said she chose the topic because gun violence is what drove her family from Oakland to the quiet, working-class community of San Lorenzo. Talking to politicians and debating laws with her classmates brought the issue into focus. 

“We learn that it could be us someday, affected by a shooting,” Hussain said. “This class has pushed us to be more passionate about issues in our community. We learn how issues affect people. We learn empathy.”

She was so inspired by the class, in fact, she’s decided to become a lawyer.

Meanwhile, another group of students was researching domestic violence against immigrant women, an issue that resonates in a community where more than a third of families are immigrants. Surveying more than 120 classmates, the students learned that 59% had either been a victim of domestic violence or knew someone who was, yet very few knew that there was help available for women who need it.

That told them that outreach needed improvement.

“Women need to know there’s support for them, that they won’t be deported,” said senior Shary Cetino. “But what we learned is that there really needs to be more outreach and awareness. That’s what we’re hoping for.”

Pushback from parents

For students in politically mixed areas of California, the obstacle isn’t money — it’s often parents. Purple areas tend to see more political conflicts, which often play out at schools in the form of parental protests over “woke” curriculum, trans students’ rights or so-called culture war issues. In a 2023 RAND survey, two-thirds of teachers nationwide said they limit discussions of politics and social issues in the classroom for fear of being attacked by parents and not supported by their administrators. 

“Among some parents, on the left and right, there’s a fear that civics education includes indoctrination,” said Keri Doggett, vice president of Teach Democracy, which promotes civic education. “Both Democrats and Republicans support civics education. So it’s important, now maybe more than ever, to provide a balanced point of view with multiple perspectives so students can reach their own conclusions.”

Shawn Healy, senior policy director at the nonprofit iCivics, which provides civics curriculum, said that declining trust in institutions is at the crux of the debate. Why teach about elections, for example, if elections are rigged? But civics education “is not about teaching blind allegiance to these institutions,” he said, “It’s about improving these institutions.” 

“That’s what makes this work difficult,” Healy added. “There’s a sense that there’s a political agenda, that schools are trying to lead students in one direction or another. The reaction has been to pull back.”

Addressing controversial issues in class is a core part of civics education, Healy said. It’s how students learn to articulate their viewpoints about important issues, listen to those they don’t agree with and even occasionally change their minds. Avoiding classroom debates is “educational malpractice,” he said.

Giving students a voice

At Sierra Vista Middle School in Covina in the San Gabriel Valley, social studies teacher Sheila Edwards has been able to minimize pushback from parents by inviting them into the classroom, sharing lesson plans and generally being transparent about what happens in the classroom.

Edwards leads her classes in monthly “civil dialogues,” where students study multiple sides of an issue, such as Supreme Court rulings or the practice of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in school, and then debate their viewpoints. The general rules, created by students, are that speakers should be polite, attack ideas and not people, and not monopolize the discussion. 

“When students create their own guidelines and lead the conversations, I’ve found that they really buy into it,” Edwards said. “When you give them a voice, they will use it.”

As an adviser for the National Constitution Center, a national civics education organization, Edwards has trained hundreds of teachers to lead class discussions of contentious issues. She advises teachers to stick to the facts, whether it’s curriculum standards or primary sources like party platforms or the Declaration of Independence, rather than focus on individuals. If a student says they like a politician, for example, she asks them to talk about specific issues instead of their support for the person generally.

Still, it’s always dicey discussing issues like gun control or LGBTQ rights in classrooms, she said, especially in conservative areas. She often hears from teachers who feel beleaguered because of pushback from parents.

“It’s a hard time to be a teacher, social studies teachers in particular,” said Edwards, who’s been a teacher for three decades. “We are on the hot seat. But I like to think of it as an opportunity.”

Struggles in California

Nationwide, 24 states have strengthened their civics education programs in the past few years, and the federal government has quadrupled its grant money for civics education in the last decade. 

The picture in California is less rosy. 

Five years ago, California adopted a “seal of civic engagement” for high school students as an incentive for schools to beef up their civics programs. Modeled on the state’s popular seal of biliteracy, the civics seal allows students to receive a badge on their diplomas indicating that they understand how government and citizenship works, and have researched and taken action on a problem that affects their community. The seal is meant to make the student more competitive on college and job applications.

But last year, just 2% – or 11,000 – of graduating seniors received a seal. Only 86 districts, out of 1,000, participated. The state paperwork is fairly simple, Herczog said, but money and potential backlash from parents is often a deterrent. Although there are plenty of free and low-cost options available, some hands-on civics projects cost money, whether it’s for teacher training or for hiring a bus to take students to the capitol, and districts are reluctant to commit to new expenses.

“Who wouldn’t love getting a seal on their diploma? Students love it, but sometimes it comes down to district leadership,” Herczog said.

In addition, a number of bills to strengthen civic engagement have failed in recent years. One would have created a new position at the California Department of Education to help school districts build their seal of civic engagement programs. Another would have required schools to offer hands-on civics projects to complement their textbook lessons, beginning in elementary school. Both bills died in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

“California absolutely has a ways to go,” Healy said. 

Change might be tough to come by. While some states teach civics as a year-long course, that’s not likely to happen in California because students’ schedules are so packed with other requirements. Anything that requires money, even if it’s minimal, is likely to face opposition in the current budget climate. 

But advocates need to persist, Herczog said, because there’s a lot at stake.

“The future of our democracy is threatened if civic education is not made a priority,” she said. “But it takes wisdom and bold leadership to make it happen.”

Smith, the San Lorenzo High civics teacher, started including hands-on projects in her civics class 15 years ago, but expanded it to include media literacy recently when she noticed the rise of misinformation on social media and in public discourse. She wanted her students to understand how to research issues they care about, and know how to lobby for change.

“I get lots of help, but it’s extra work and I do have high standards for the students. I want them to push themselves,” Smith said. “There are so many skills they need to be effective participants in our democracy. My hope is that this class plants the seeds.” 

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California’s community colleges are experimenting with a radical new model of education, but some professors are pushing back. Faculty at Madera Community College have become the most vocal opposition, though issues with the new education model have popped up across the state.

In the new model, known as competency-based education, students don’t receive grades and they don’t have to attend class. They learn at their own pace and can finish the course whenever they can prove that they’ve mastered the requisite skill or “competency.” Advocates, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have called for more competency-based learning, saying that it’s an opportunity to help employers and get older adults who lack a college degree back to school. Similar models already exist in other states, at Calbright College, the state’s all-online community college, and at many private and for-profit institutions.

Starting these programs isn’t easy. In many cases, it means changing a college’s accreditation, its employee contracts, and its financial aid system. Those changes require faculty input, and some professors say it’s too much, too soon. 

In 2021, California lawmakers approved more than $4 million to expand the competency-based model to eight community colleges, including Madera Community College, by the 2024-25 academic year. 

In a resolution last year, the Madera Community College Academic Senate said it was “deeply concerned” about the new model after pointing out problems with the volume of work it requires and alleging that faculty weren’t part of the decision-making. The program has been on pause ever since, said Madera Community College President Angel Reyna. This spring, the faculty group, which determines academic matters for the campus, said it wants the school to withdraw from the experiment altogether.

These faculty members have stoked the ire of the college’s leadership, members of the town’s business community, the former mayor of Madera, Santos Garcia, and Madera County Supervisor Leticia Gonzalez, who all defended the program at a public meeting. 

Last month, the state approved another influx of cash to each of the colleges participating in the skills-based program, putting the total budget at nearly $9 million. Initially, all eight colleges planned to begin offering new coursework by the 2024-25 academic year, but the state granted an extension until the end of 2027, since only one school, Coastline College in Orange County, is poised to meet that initial deadline.

Speaking broadly of the program, Melissa Villarin, a spokesperson for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, said “there were a couple of delays in meeting our self-imposed deadlines” and pointed to challenges with accreditation and financial aid. Madera Community College is “making progress…albeit at a slower pace,” she said. Madera Community College was the only college not to receive an additional award last month, but Villarin said that it will still be eligible for the money in the future.

A vote of ‘no confidence’

The new program at Madera Community College will focus on one major, business administration, and enroll just a handful of students. Compared to the school’s total enrollment — more than 10,000 this academic year — it’s a drop in the bucket.

But for faculty, it’s an existential threat. They say competency-based education has created an overwhelming amount of work for some faculty — who are largely responsible for designing the new curricula — and they worry the model is so different that it could be hard for certain employers or four-year universities to interpret, according to statements made by members of the Madera Community College Academic Senate.

Last month, the group issued a vote of “no confidence” in the college president, citing the competency-based education program as a key reason why. 

The other seven schools have faced their own roadblocks. “It’s a big challenge,” said Leticia Barajas, the president of the academic senate at East Los Angeles College. “You’re trying to completely change systems in a relatively short period of time.” She said the faculty senate recently decided to move the focus of the college’s program from technology and logistics to biotechnology because the biotechnology department had more staff who were able to assist.

Starting a competency-based program is “quite a bit more daunting” than faculty initially expected, she said, but insisted the program would still continue with her support. “We’re going to keep going. It’s going to take us a while, but we’re still going to get there,” she said.

Reyna said he’s asking for the same approach from faculty in Madera. “The seven other colleges are all moving forward. They hit bumps and they persevered, but for whatever reason, our folks don’t want to,” he said.

Faculty leaders in Madera say the issues extend beyond competency-based education. “It’s a participatory government problem and it’s a leadership problem,” said Lynette Cortes Howden, the president of Madera’s academic senate. In various resolutions, the academic senate has said that the president and other college leaders violated state and college policy by failing to consult with faculty before pushing for new programs or staff. Though the academic senate occasionally points to other examples, competency-based education is the primary source of tension. 

Before Cortes Howden assumed her position, the previous president of the academic senate, Brad Millar, signed a proposal agreeing to launch competency-based education at the college. But Cortes Howen said the proposal was supposed to include a full resolution from the academic senate and a description of all the people who would work on the pilot. Since the proposal lacked those attachments, she said it’s invalid. 

While Merced plows forward, Madera stalls

In a number of tense meetings this fall, Reyna said the faculty are jeopardizing the college’s reputation and its goals. He pointed to an oft-cited statistic — 6.8 million adults in California who graduated high school but lack a college degree — and said this program aligns with the governor’s goal to increase the number of adults with college degrees. “This is our mission.”

In addition to the eight-college pilot, Madera is also part of a federal grant to support the expansion of competency-based education in agriculture. Merced College, which is just under an hour’s drive north of Madera, has already launched its version and enrolled 25 students, according to a blog post on the school’s website. The students must demonstrate 14 different skills, at which point they’ll receive an “Ag Systems” certificate. 

It’s a point of pride for Merced College, which says in the post that the program is a “a boon for students and for the ag industry as a whole.”

But at Madera Community College, the curriculum committee within the academic senate has yet to approve the agriculture program.

In a September meeting with the college’s academic senate, Reyna said that these competency-based initiatives are about educating underserved communities, such as farmworkers. “It’s shameful that we would ignore this student population,” he said. College administrators then accused the academic senate of violating the state’s Brown Act, which requires public access and comment during government meetings, and of using its ability to issue votes of no confidence to target Latino leaders. 

The last word in that meeting came from one faculty member, William Mask II, who disagrees with the college’s academic senate and supports competency-based education. “You shamed this institution today. You shamed it badly,” he said and exited the room. Shortly after, Reyna and other college leaders followed him out. 

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More than 7 million adults in California lack a college degree — and they typically make less money as a result. Today, standing in a welding classroom at Shasta College, a community college in Redding, Gov. Gavin Newsom presented an outline of the state’s Master Plan for Career Education. He said the plan will overhaul the state’s convoluted job training programs and help get adults “the benefit of a life well-lived without some fancy degree.” 

One focus of the new plan is on translating students’ work experience into college credits. It’s already a priority for California’s 116 community colleges, which have a goal to provide at least 250,000 students with college credits for certain kinds of work experience.

In a press release, Newsom said the state would put more money into this goal and that he would roll out a new kind of transcript, known as a “Career Passport,” to help workers showcase both their academic and professional know-how. The new “Career Passports” would also help increase the number of apprentices — a key goal of his administration — according to the press release.

The jobs plan also continues a years-long effort to make state employment more accessible to adults without college degrees. Research shows these adults often have the right skills, even if they lack the right diploma. In an executive order last August, Newsom asked the California Department of Human Resources to move faster — catching up with efforts that other states have already made.

“California’s been a leader in that space and we’re going to continue to lead in that space,” he said in Redding today, after noting the state has already removed education requirements from about 30,000 jobs. He said he plans to remove requirements from more than 30,000 new jobs in the next year.

Still, it’s just a fraction of the state’s total workforce. This year, the Legislature failed to pass a bill by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a San Ramon Democrat, that would have gone much further, making college degree requirements an exception rather than the norm. Camille Travis, a spokesperson for the state’s human resources department, said the bill would have forced the state to re-evaluate the qualifications of roughly 200,000 state jobs. 

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Incoming president Donald Trump has vowed to deport all of the country’s undocumented residents.

For students who are eyeing college, his presidency represents a potentially brutal Sophie’s Choice if they have undocumented parents: Risk exposing them to a possible immigration dragnet by completing the federal Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, or leave thousands of dollars in cash for school on the table. 

While researchers and advocates have yet to hear anything concrete from Trump representatives about using financial aid data to target undocumented residents, they know families are afraid.

“Front line staff that work directly with students are reporting that students and parents are asking them if the FAFSA is safe” given Trump’s campaign promises of mass deportation, said Marcos Montes, policy director for Southern California College Attainment Network, a coalition of nonprofits that help students apply for college admission and financial aid.

The National College Attainment Network said those fears are justified. It “cannot assure mixed-status students and families that data submitted to the US Department of Education, as part of the FAFSA process, will continue to be protected,” a message on its website read late last month.

That fear is exacerbated by Trump’s claims Sunday to NBC News that the only way to deport undocumented parents whose children are citizens is to have the whole family leave. “I don’t want to be breaking up families,” Trump said. “So the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.” How Trump can force out citizens, including those with parents not born in the U.S., is unclear; experts say ending birthright citizenship would violate the U.S Constitution.

An estimated 3.3 million Californians live in mixed-status households, including 1 in 5 children under 18, according to data from Equity Research Institute, a USC research group.

A California workaround

Experts say California students eligible for financial aid can minimize the possible harm to their undocumented parents. Unlike the FAFSA, the state aid application is not shared with federal agencies. That policy is among the various protections in place under California’s so-called “sanctuary” laws that limit the use of state resources to help federal immigration enforcement. Several legal experts told CalMatters the Trump administration would have to clear a high legal bar to gain access to those state records and that court cases have put restrictions on how wide a net immigration enforcement agencies can cast in their search for data. 

Because the deadline for state financial aid is in March — though there are plans to move it to April — and the federal deadline is much later, Californians attending college here should complete the state application first, said Montes. Then they should wait to see if the Trump administration will break precedent and begin using the federal financial aid data for immigration enforcement purposes.

That strategy is also endorsed by Madeleine Villanueva, the interim higher education director at Immigrants Rising, a California-based advocacy and research group focused on undocumented residents. She stressed that there’s a bevy of analysts and immigrant rights advocates who’ll be watching for updates from the Trump administration.

“Unfortunately, we can’t say what’s going to happen federally,” she said. But the California state aid application, known as the California Dream Act Application, is an “extra layer of safety when it comes to applying for financial aid.”

The California Student Aid Commission, an agency with the sole goal of getting students more money, suggests students may need to forgo federal aid given the risks to their families. The agency, which runs the state’s financial aid programs, wrote in a memo last month that completing just the state aid application is a “viable option” for students in mixed-status homes who have “fears of adverse action by federal immigration enforcement.”

However, taking a wait-and-see approach with federal aid means California campuses won’t have a full picture of how much aid a student is likely to get when they send out financial aid estimates to admitted students in the spring. The University of California’s central office worries that students may not complete the FAFSA and lose out on aid. Both UC and the California State University indicated to CalMatters they’ll process either form students submit and will work with students who file their federal applications later.

About 400,000 Californians receive the Cal Grant, which waives tuition at the public universities and partially at private colleges. That grant plus the state’s Middle Class Scholarship can add up to more than $17,000 in aid in one year. The state aid application ensures students fearful of the federal application can still receive the state support for which they’re eligible.

The University of California’s undergraduate student government is also on edge about FAFSA. The lack of a firm firewall “could put certain students at risk,” said Saanvi Arora, external vice president for UC Berkeley’s student government and a board member for the systemwide student government. 

Understanding the FAFSA risk

Students who are citizens and permanent residents are eligible for up to $7,400 in Pell grants and access to federal loans that come with repayment protections that are often stronger than what the private sector offers. To receive this aid, students who live with their parents need them to fill out portions of the federal aid application. More recently, parents without Social Security numbers have been asked to indicate they lack one and then must answer a set of questions about their identity.

The U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security, which also oversees the country’s immigration enforcement, have a regularly renewed agreement limiting the use of a student’s personal information. Because students need to be citizens or permanent residents to get financial aid, a signed agreement between the two departments states that students’ information they submit for FAFSA will be matched against an eligible immigration list called SAVE. It’s one that hundreds of state, local and federal agencies use to determine whether an individual is eligible for federal benefits. Neither SAVE nor the agency that operates it, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, are used for immigration enforcement purposes. 

Conceptually, it’s not hard to use that federal financial aid data for enforcement purposes, according to experts who spoke with CalMatters. However, doing so would be a major break from current protocol. 

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Education “has not provided and will not provide information gathered through FAFSA to any federal immigration-related agency for law enforcement activities,” wrote in an email James Kvaal, who holds the number two spot at the U.S. Department of Education and is the top higher education officer in the federal government. However, he wrote, “students and their families should make the decisions that are right for them.”

That does not “sound like a robust encouragement to go ahead and fill out the FAFSA,” said Bob Shireman, who was a senior higher education official in the education department during the Obama administration.

The agreement between the departments “is not much of a firewall, it is more like a picket fence,” Shireman said in an interview. The agreement can be changed in a matter of months, he said, “so if the next administration wants to use education department records to identify people who may have an immigration status that could subject them to deportation, I don’t see anything preventing that from happening.”

Federal laws limit the data sharing that can occur between the U.S. Department of Education and law enforcement agencies, said Shelveen Ratnam, a spokesperson for the California Student Aid Commission. Ratnam said that current law “strictly prohibits” agencies in possession of personally identifiable information, like parental data, from releasing that information, with few exceptions. Some other laws and policies also apply and the gist is that an agency can only use the personal information of others in ways that support the mission of that federal agency.

But if the U.S. Department of Education gets subpoenaed for information, the department’s “responses and likelihood of challenging the demand for information are unknown,” according to Ratnam.

Even analysts who say using parental FAFSA information is an inefficient way to find possible undocumented parents urge caution. They say it’s not out of the question that a Trump administration could try to make use of that data for immigration enforcement purposes.

While “it’s sort of methodologically flawed as a way to identify individuals,” said Corinne Kentor, an immigration and higher education researcher, “that doesn’t mean that it won’t be attempted. But I think it is probably harder and more work than other avenues.”

California Dream Act Application is safer

The California Dream Act Application has more protections than the federal application. Though originally designed to allow undocumented students who are California residents to apply for state college benefits, the application in 2024 was modified to permit any student who ran into problems with the federal application to at least apply for state grants. The change stemmed from colossal data issues with the federal application this year that prevented students with parents without Social Security numbers from completing the FAFSA.

According to a 1988 federal appeals court decision, “the government can’t enforce a subpoena that is just ‘fishing’ for data about undocumented people,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a scholar on immigration law at UCLA. That’s in contrast to “trying to gather information on a particular individual that the government has reason to suspect is here in violation of the immigration laws.”

Arulanantham also said that a federal agency asking California’s financial aid agency to search databases for undocumented students could run afoul of the 10th Amendment.

Finally, the state’s financial aid agency could challenge a judicial order or subpoena that seeks student records on the grounds that it’s not specific enough and violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure, Ratnam said. 

Now what does all this mean for students with undocumented parents who already submitted FAFSA information last year? Their information is already in government systems. Should they continue to file their FAFSA? Experts had few answers. They said that’s a decision that only families can decide together given the varying protections available.

Arora, the UC student government member, is sympathetic to those households. It’s “absolutely a tough question,” she said. That’s one reason she wants UC officials to bolster existing immigration legal aid services, such as bringing in more lawyers. 

It’s one answer she has to her own question: “How do we mitigate retribution that’s likely to happen against those students?”

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In 1953, Bárbara Flores entered kindergarten at Washington Elementary School in Madera, California, a small city in the Central Valley surrounded by farm fields. Her mother and grandmother had talked it up: You’re going to learn a lot. You’re going to like it. She believed them. A little girl who would one day become a teacher, Flores was excited.

But only until she got there.

“I walked out,” Flores recalled recently. She got to her grandmother’s house a few blocks away, furious. “Son mentirosas,” she said. “No entiendo nada. Y jamas voy a regresar.” You’re liars. I don’t understand anything. And I’m never going back.

Flores only spoke Spanish. As the grandchild of Mexican immigrants, she didn’t find her language or culture welcome in the school. But little Bárbara didn’t get her way. And, after depositing her daughter back in the classroom, Flores’ mother asked the teacher a question: Aren’t you paying attention? My daughter walked out. The answer felt like a slap and became a part of family lore. All these little Mexican girls look alike. I didn’t notice.

Flores returned to her old school this fall; the building she walked out of still stands, but almost everything else has changed. Now students speak Spanish because their teachers require them to. Little Mexican girls see their culture celebrated on the walls of every classroom.

Washington students will graduate knowing how to speak, read and write in both Spanish and English, joining a growing number of “dual-language immersion” schools in California. Flores’ eyes open wide as she describes the about-face her alma mater has taken.

“We were punished for speaking Spanish,” she said. “We were hit with rulers, pinched, our braids were pulled. Now the whole school is dual-language.”

The path has not been linear. When Flores was a child, California still had an English-only law on the books from the 1800s. As governor, Ronald Reagan signed a bill eliminating it. Then the Civil Rights Movement ushered in a new era of bilingual education, and the California Legislature went further, requiring the model for students still learning English from 1976 until the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1990s. Voters banned it again in 1998, only reversing the latest prohibition in 2016.

Researchers have found bilingual education helps students learn English faster and can boost their standardized test scores, increase graduation rates, better prepare them for college and much more. California has removed the official barriers to offering this type of instruction since 2016, and the state now champions bilingualism and biliteracy, encouraging all students to strive for both. But eight years after repeal, California schools have yet to recover. A decades-long enrollment slump in bilingual-teacher prep programs has led to a decimated teacher pipeline. And underinvestment by the Legislature, paired with a hamstrung state Education Department, has limited the pace of bilingual education’s comeback. 

The result? A rare case in which Californians can say Texas is inspiring. Both states enroll more than 1 million students still learning English — but last year, the Lone Star State put 40% of them in bilingual classrooms. California managed that for just 10%.

In 1987, Flores didn’t think state policy would go this way. At the time, both states required bilingual education. She was a professor, helping build a bilingual-education teacher prep program at Cal State San Bernardino. Her home state could have kept pace with Texas.

But it didn’t.

The English-only years: 1998 to 2016

By 1998, the bilingual-teacher prep program was flourishing. Flores helped aspiring teachers understand how students learn to read and write in two languages, sending them off into classrooms with binders full of instructional tips. Her daughter, then 10, was learning both English and Spanish through bilingual classes in the San Bernardino City Unified School District. Flores was on a parent committee organizing broader support for such programs in the face of a statewide campaign to get rid of them, bankrolled by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz.

Proposition 227, which passed with 61% of the vote, required schools to teach only in English with students who were still learning the language, something that may sound like a good idea but often ends up unnecessarily putting students’ grade-level learning of other subjects on pause while they master English. Flores saw the impact immediately. Faculty on campus called for the elimination of her program, an effort that ultimately failed but showed, she said, “the intensity of the discrimination and language racism that was prevalent.” Enrollment in bilingual-teacher prep programs across the state plummeted.

Flores also watched local school districts respond. “I was shocked at superintendents in the area,” she said. “They just made everybody throw away their Spanish books. It was horrendous.” As she recalls, every single school district in the Inland Empire got rid of its bilingual programs except San Bernardino City Unified, where parent activism helped ensure the district took advantage of an exception to the new law.

At the time, student achievement data from San Bernardino City Unified had shown that bilingual programs were helping kids succeed. And over the next two decades, researchers studying programs across the United States released a steady stream of evidence about the benefits of bilingual education, especially a version called “dual language.” Traditional bilingual education essentially lets students use their first language while they learn English. Once students become fluent, their schools shift entirely to English instruction, which was the goal all along. Dual-language programs, by contrast, set bilingualism as the goal. Students continue to take courses in Spanish or another language for about half of the school day until they leave the program.

While dual-language programs often stop after elementary school, the “bilingual advantage” stretches through students’ K-12 years and into their working lives. Dual-language students have been found to score higher than their peers on both math and English language arts exams by middle school. They also get higher scores on the ACT in high school, setting them up to be more competitive in college admissions. And importantly, a team at Stanford found that native Spanish speakers were more likely to test out of English-learner services if they took bilingual classes, a coveted goal because of how well “former English learners” do. University of Chicago researchers just released data showing that Chicago high schoolers in this group had higher-than-average GPAs and SAT scores, high school graduation rates, and community college enrollment and persistence rates.

Patricia Gándara co-directs the UCLA Civil Rights Project, which has published similar findings, and has spent decades of her career cataloging the bilingual advantage. She laments the narrow value placed on bilingual education in the U.S., where it has historically been pursued as a way to help kids who don’t speak English learn the language more quickly and then succeed in English-only classes.

“That’s a very shortsighted view,” Gándara said, “particularly from the research that we’ve done that shows kids who get a strong bilingual education are more likely to go to college, they’re more likely to complete college, they’re more likely to have better jobs and better opportunities.”

Yet while policymakers didn’t catch on right away, well-off and well-educated white parents did, seeing the economic benefits of bilingualism for their children very clearly.

Glendale Unified School District launched its first Spanish-English dual-language program in 2003, going on to add programs in six other languages while official state policy was to ban them. Last year, 85% of the students enrolled were fluent English speakers, according to program director Nancy Hong.

Immigrant families, weighed down by the pressure to speak English and make sure their children do too, have been hard to recruit. Hong said immigrant parents have long been concerned that letting their children spend half the school day or more hearing their home language will get in the way of learning English, even though research has shown it can make the whole process go faster. “The goal is to dismantle those myths and misperceptions,” she said. But even though about 20% of students districtwide are English learners, only about 10% of them are in dual-language programs.

Many immigrant families, however, have become strong advocates for the programs. José Sanjas, a Mexican-born father in Madera Unified School District, takes his 6-year-old daughter past her neighborhood school every day en route to one of the district’s dual-language programs. He and his wife want to preserve their native language as their daughter grows up here, but the draw isn’t only personal; Sanjas also sees how bilingualism will benefit his daughter in the workplace.

“She can help more people in the future,” Sanjas said. “Professionally, she’ll be able to serve everyone.”

The ping-pong history of bilingual education in California

1967 Allowed

1976 Required

1872 Bilingual education

banned in California

1998 Banned

2016 Allowed

Graphic: Erica Yee, CalMatters

In the life of Bárbara Flores

In state policy

Flores punished for speaking Spanish in kindergarten

Enrollment plummets in Flores’ program

Flores helps launch a bilingual-teacher prep program

Flores’ old kindergarten becomes dual-language

1967 Allowed

1976 Required

1872 Bilingual education

banned in California

1998 Banned

2016 Allowed

Graphic: Erica Yee, CalMatters

In the life of Bárbara Flores

In state policy

The ping-pong history of bilingual education in California

Flores punished for speaking Spanish in kindergarten

Enrollment plummets in Flores’ program

Flores helps launch a bilingual-teacher prep program

Flores’ old kindergarten becomes dual-language

Graphic: Erica Yee, CalMatters

1967 Allowed

1976 Required

1872 Bilingual education

banned in California

1998 Banned

2016 Allowed

Enrollment plummets in Flores’ program

Flores helps launch a bilingual-teacher prep program

Flores’ old kindergarten becomes dual-language

Flores punished for speaking Spanish in kindergarten

In the life of Bárbara Flores

In state policy

The ping-pong history of bilingual education in California

Spurred on by support like his, a diverse coalition of school leaders in Madera Unified had, by 2016, come to see dual-language education as key to turning around the district’s chronically low performance, especially among the children of immigrants. Flores had helped make the case, inviting school board members to the annual conference of the California Association for Bilingual Education. And in Flores’ hometown, U.S.-born, white families were among those speaking up in support of the programs, knowing even if the immigrant students’ test scores had the most room to grow, their children could benefit too.

Statewide, public opinion had swung in the other direction; that November, about 74% of California voters said yes to Proposition 58, officially allowing bilingual education back in California classrooms.

“It was a relief we [could] finally move forward for our children,” Flores said. “We lost a whole generation of kids — quite a few generations, really — because of English-only.” 

The next generation, however, is still waiting.

A limping recovery: 2016 to 2024

Flores spent 40 years training future teachers before retiring in 2019. Across three institutions and 32 years at Cal State San Bernardino, she likely taught 10,000 students, many of whom remain sprinkled throughout the state’s bilingual-education system. But if anything defines the legacy of Prop. 227, it is the shattered teacher pipeline it left in its wake.

Gándara, of the UCLA Civil Rights Project, said the current state of affairs is “one of those stories of ‘I told you so.’ … I could see what the problem was going to be: that when people came back to their senses and realized what a mistake this was, the big fallout was going to be that we didn’t have the teachers.” 

California colleges are not producing nearly enough teachers to meet the state’s bilingual-education goals. During the 2022-23 school year, the state commission on teacher credentialing only authorized 1,011 new bilingual teachers — across all languages. Only seven went to teachers who speak Vietnamese, the second-most-common language in California schools that year. And it actually gave out fewer credentials to Spanish-speaking teachers that year than in the three years prior.

The Legislature has not ignored this problem entirely. In 2017, it funded six grants, totaling $20 million, to help districts coach up bilingual staffers and prepare them to lead bilingual classrooms. But Edgar Lampkin, CEO of the California Association for Bilingual Education, said seeding such “grow your own” programs falls far short of addressing the statewide need. “That’s not systemic,” he said.

In 2022, the National Resource Center for Asian Languages, based at Cal State Fullerton, got state money to train 200 teachers over five years. They’re on track, and the center’s director, Natalie Tran, is proud that their programs are not only increasing the number of teachers certified to teach in Asian languages, but also diversifying the languages they speak. She expects to certify teachers who speak Tagalog, Hmong and Khmer this school year. Still, she said, the state needs to do more to train additional teachers of Asian languages, including the less common ones. “We’re going to need help from policymakers to make this happen,” Tran said.

She isn’t the only one calling on lawmakers to be part of the solution. Anya Hurwitz is executive director of SEAL, a nonprofit that got its start as an initiative of the Sobrato Family Foundation to address achievement gaps between immigrant and native-born children in Silicon Valley. She says the state underfunds education, which gets in the way of doing what’s best for kids who don’t speak English.

In 2022, the last year for which federal census data is available, New York spent almost $30,000 per student. California spent about $17,000. And besides its support for teacher training, the Legislature has only given districts $10 million extra to start or expand dual-language programs. In Massachusetts, home to about one-tenth the number of kids still learning English, the Legislature disbursed $11.8 million for the same work, kicking off its own recovery from an English-only law.

“Funding is not the solution to everything in and of itself,” Hurwitz said, “but at the same time, we can’t build capacity without funding and resources.”

Back in Flores’ hometown, Madera administrators have been able to use state and federal money earmarked for their sizable number of immigrant families and those living in poverty to achieve their dual-language goals. But startup costs for dual-language programs are expensive. Teacher preparation programs, Superintendent Todd Lile said, are not producing graduates who are ready to do this work, leaving districts like his with steep professional development costs.

A residency program with Cal State Fresno has given Madera a solid pipeline of teachers, but the recent grads have to clear all the usual hurdles of being new to the profession while also adapting to using Spanish in the classroom. While these new hires at Washington Elementary School grew up bilingual, they went to school through the Prop. 227 years, meaning most of them didn’t develop an academic vocabulary in Spanish.

Viviana Valerio, a kindergarten teacher, said that history made bilingual education an intimidating proposition. “I commonly speak Spanish at home, but then when I was thinking about teaching, I was thinking, ‘OK, academic terms, I don’t know how to translate that,’ or ‘Parents ask me a question and I can’t think of it, I’m going to want to transition into English,’” she said. “For me, that was the scary part.”

Texas, too, lacks bilingual-education teachers, echoing a shortage present in much of the country, but the state is far ahead of California; many districts are able to recruit their own alumni because their programs have been around so long. Texas also continues to invest in bilingual education, helping districts comply with state mandates to offer it. Like California, Texas gives districts more per-pupil funding for every student still learning English; unlike California, Texas offers an additional premium for each of them enrolled in a dual-language program.

As an extra incentive to start and maintain these programs, Texas has started bumping up funding for the native English speakers enrolled too. Research shows the programs work better when classes are evenly split between native English speakers and speakers of the program’s second language. Then, not only are students learning their second language from the teacher but from their peers as well. Conveniently, this also makes for more integrated classrooms, something Gándara said California needs.

“We haven’t been able to take advantage of that, in large part because people don’t pay attention to that as a major issue and also because we don’t have the teachers to pull it off,” Gándara said.

Indeed, districts across the state cite staffing as a major barrier to starting or expanding their programs. Some have gone abroad to recruit. Others have been forced to scrap their plans entirely. Newark Unified School District, in the Bay Area, got rid of its dual-language program this year because it couldn’t find teachers to staff it. “We tried everything,” said Karen Allard, assistant superintendent of education services.

For more than a decade now, the state’s Education Department has tried to champion bilingual programs. Students who can prove their fluency in two languages before graduation get a special seal on their diplomas. The department also implores schools to help the children of immigrants maintain their home language while learning English, building that recommendation into its 2017 English Learner Roadmap. By 2030, it wants half of California students on a path to becoming bilingual.

Yet all of this largely amounts to cheerleading. The department is minimally funded and staffed, a result of the state’s commitment to sending almost all K-12 funding directly to school districts, and its support for bilingual education has not come with any firm demands.

Conor Williams, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C., recently found himself — a self-described “professional lefty” — in the surprising position of celebrating Texas’ policy over California’s. Besides following Texas’ lead on funding, he said, California should rethink teacher licensing. The state requires college graduates to pass a suite of tests to become teachers, but Williams points out the tests don’t lead to better instruction and can keep good teachers from classrooms. Getting rid of the requirement could bring more bilingual adults into the profession and expand the teacher pipeline.

Hard to overcome, however, is California’s shift toward more local control over schooling. Williams doesn’t always agree with what the Texas education department does with its power, but the state’s centralized approach means it has “enough power and muscle and will to set rules and hold districts to them,” he said. California’s Local Control Funding Formula is widely popular and has ensured districts get more state money to serve students still learning English as well as those in foster care and low-income households. But, Williams points out, local control has its limits.

“You don’t win civil rights battles by leaving it up to local school boards,” he said.

Still, districts like Madera are moving ahead on their own. In 2020, Flores’ alma mater, Washington Elementary, became Madera Unified’s second dual-language school, welcoming its first class of kindergartners who are expected to leave proficient in both English and Spanish.

Mateo Diaz Zanjas was one of them. He’s now a fourth-grader and speaks in easy Spanish about the school and his long-term dream of going to Harvard. Upon hearing that he and his peers speak very good Spanish, he eagerly replies: “We also speak good English.” And he proves it, going on to answer questions in English about his favorite subjects and the languages he speaks with certain friends.

Administrators, however, are still waiting for the data to show that their bet on bilingual education will pay off in student achievement gains. The pandemic interrupted their early years and set them back, and the oldest students aren’t doing as well as district leaders would have hoped. Commitment to the programs, however, has not waivered. Students’ overall test scores remain low, but their growth scores — or how much they learn over the course of the year — are high.

The district is helping students learn English more quickly, too, meaning they are becoming “former English learners” faster with the newer supports and joining the district’s highest-performing student group.

In the meantime, Madera teachers are using bilingual education to give Spanish speakers grade-level material, knowing that once they sharpen their English skills, all that information will transfer.

“Kids can learn math in Spanish; it’s still math,” Lile said. “They can learn social studies in Spanish; it’s still history and geography. These subject matters don’t exist only in English.” 

During Flores’ recent visit to Madera Unified, she heard Lile describe his long-term goals for the district, including higher graduation rates and better college readiness for the children of immigrants. She looked on proudly, sure her hometown district was finally getting it right.

An uncertain future: 2024 and beyond

A few years ago, Flores introduced Lile to Margarita Machado-Casas, a professor at San Diego State’s Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education, which has long been a top producer of the state’s bilingual teachers. Machado-Casas is helping the district figure out what concrete steps teachers and administrators should take to follow the high-level recommendations of the state’s English Learner Roadmap. They started out with “Principle 1,” which asks school and district staffers to see immigrant students’ language and culture as assets rather than seeing their lack of English proficiency as a deficit. Pointing to Madera’s long and painful history of discriminating against immigrant students, including Flores, Machado-Casas said this principle unexpectedly took the entire first year, requiring “courageous conversations” — including asking staffers to think deeply about whether they believed in the work enough to stay in the district.

Machado-Casas is helping educators in Madera understand both how to help immigrant students tackle grade-level material and convince them that the students can handle it.

Flores hopes the work ends up being a playbook for the entire state — which could soon need one. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill this year requiring the Education Department to come up with a statewide plan for helping districts adopt the road map’s guidelines and report on their progress.

This planning process guarantees California will be over a decade into its recovery from the English-only years before the state even considers holding schools accountable for changing their practices. When New York passed a blueprint for how to serve English learners in 2014, it followed it up with new state regulations that same year, creating stricter policies for serving students who were still learning English, including a broader mandate for bilingual education, which had already been required for decades.

Alesha Moreno-Ramirez leads the California Education Department’s multilingual support division. She said state budget limitations have gotten in the way of implementing the English Learner Roadmap and said any call to require bilingual education like Texas or New York would have to come from the Legislature, not the department. “That said, we would enthusiastically support the movement toward requiring bilingual education,” she added.

Advocates caution such a mandate would have to come with enough funding to help districts create high-quality programs, but many agree it would be a win for California students. Children from immigrant families speak 108 different languages, according to the Education Department, but 93% of them speak one of 10. To require bilingual programs, the Legislature would likely tweak the current law, which says if the parents of 30 or more students in a single school request a language acquisition program, the school has to offer it “to the extent possible.” Texas, Illinois and New York have similar laws, but instead of requiring bilingual programs in response to parent advocacy, they do so based solely on enrollment.

Flores thinks the state is at least moving in the right direction. And Madera Unified gives her hope. During her recent visit, she was flooded with memories: She saw the tree she and her friends used to circle while playing “Ring Around the Rosie.” She visited the classroom she walked out of as a 5-year-old, where the walls are now decorated with vocabulary in Spanish as well as English. She suffered in that room 70 years ago. Now, little Mexican girls do not.

“We don’t stop,” she said. “We keep plugging away. That’s our tenacity. That’s our grit. And our motivation, of course, is for our children.”

Lea esta historia en Español

California first demanded public education be conducted exclusively in English in 1872, a policy that stayed on the books until Ronald Reagan, as governor, signed a law to get rid of it in 1967. About a decade later, the state started to require bilingual education for kids who couldn’t understand English, taking up a Civil Rights-era argument that the children of immigrants deserved an education in their native language to be able to get the full benefits of public schooling. Other immigrant-heavy states passed the same requirements, including Texas, Illinois, and New York. But California made a radical break with its peers in 1998 when voters approved another English-only law. For nearly two decades, bilingual education became increasingly popular among native English speakers and celebrated as a best-practice for educating the children of immigrants, but the nation’s most linguistically diverse state continued to ban it. 

We investigated the fallout of that ban and the state’s limping recovery since voters repealed it in 2016, conducting nearly three dozen interviews with researchers, policymakers, state education officials, advocates, bilingual educators, school leaders, teachers, parents, and students in California as well as education leaders in Texas, Illinois, and Colorado, where bilingual education has been a priority in state education policy for decades, and in Massachusetts, which is recovering from a 15-year-long ban of its own. 

Three key findings: 

1. The Education Department is underfunded and understaffed, so its support for bilingual education hasn’t translated into widespread enrollment in these programs. Last year in California, 10% of students still learning English got a bilingual education. In Texas, 40% did — and schools got extra state money for each child enrolled in a long-term bilingual education program called dual-language immersion.
   
   
2. A decades-long slump in bilingual-teacher prep programs has led to a decimated teacher pipeline, meaning there aren’t enough people to lead bilingual classrooms in K-12 schools or professors to train them. Even districts that want to start new bilingual programs haven’t been able to because they can’t find the staff.
   
   
3. Unlike in the 1970s, the California Legislature has not stepped up to require bilingual education or fund a systemic recovery from the English-only years. Since Massachusetts ended an English-only law of its own, the state has awarded $11.8 million to help schools start or expand dual-language programs. California, home to 10 times the number of kids who don’t speak English, has given districts just $10 million for that work. 
   

The Background: Why people advocate for bilingual education

Bilingual education lets kids use their native language while they learn English. Kids who already know how to read and write in one language just have to transfer those skills to a second language rather than learning the processes from scratch. Taking classes in their native language while they’re learning English also lets kids tackle more complex topics in their first language rather than having to put that off until they master English.

Dual-language programs set all students up for the “bilingual advantage.” Traditional bilingual education creates a pathway to English-only classes as quickly as possible. Succeeding in English-language classes is the goal. Increasingly popular dual-language programs, by contrast, have kids splitting the school day between two languages for their entire schooling, preparing them to reap the benefits of bilingualism in their lives and work long-term.

Dual language programs boost student outcomes. Districts with strong dual-language programs report significantly higher standardized test scores for students in those programs compared to students in general education programs. The leaps in student achievement show up by middle school. Researchers have found these programs lead to higher college entrance exam scores, high school graduation rates, and college-going rates. For kids who enter the programs not speaking English, they lead to faster English proficiency. 

Dual-language programs create more integrated schools. Because dual-language programs have become so popular among English-speaking families, they represent a way to integrate classrooms with recent immigrants and those whose families came to this country generations ago. 

What the Education Department has done, and what it’s up against

The state has taken steps to champion bilingual education. In 2017, the Education Department released an English Learner Roadmap, urging schools to help students who don’t speak English maintain their native languages while mastering English. In 2019, the Global California 2030 initiative named concrete goals for how soon the state’s schools should foster widespread bilingualism: By 2030, half of California students should be on a path to becoming bilingual and 1,600 schools should be running dual-language programs (more than double the number doing so in 2018).

But the state’s aspirations for bilingual education are running up against a severe teacher shortage. During the 2022-23 school year, the state commission on teacher credentialing only authorized 1,011 new bilingual teachers — across all languages. Only seven went to teachers who speak Vietnamese, the second-most-common language in California schools that year. It gave out fewer credentials to Spanish-speaking teachers that year than in the three years prior.

Patricia Gándara, a longtime bilingual education researcher and co-director of the UCLA Civil Rights Project, called the decimated teacher pipeline “one of those stories of ‘I told you so.’ … I could see what the problem was going to be: that when people came back to their senses and realized what a mistake this was, the big fallout was going to be that we didn’t have the teachers.”

Bilingual education advocates say the Legislature needs to do more.The Legislature has put $20 million toward helping districts coach up bilingual teachers and prepare them to lead bilingual classrooms and another $10 million to help districts start or expand dual-language programs. Advocates say it’s not enough. 

What’s next

Statewide accountability may be coming. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill this year requiring the Education Department to come up with a statewide plan for helping districts adopt the English Learner Roadmap’s guidelines and report on districts’ progress. 

Supporters of bilingual education find inspiration in Texas, which never stopped requiring these programs and more recently created financial incentives for districts to start and expand dual-language programs as an even better model. Alesha Moreno-Ramirez, director of the Education Department’s Multilingual Support Division, said the Legislature would need to make the call to require bilingual education in California or create financial incentives for it. 

“That said, we would enthusiastically support the movement toward requiring bilingual education,” she added.