The AI bot, created by Boston-based AllHere Education, was launched March 20. But just three months later, AllHere posted on its website that a majority of its 50 or so employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position.” A spokesperson for the Los Angeles district said company founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin was no longer on the job. AllHere was up for sale, the district said, with several businesses interested in acquiring it.

The news was shocking and certainly bleak for the ed tech industry, but several observers say the partnership bit off more than it could chew, tech-wise — and that the ensuing blowup could hurt future AI investments.

Ed was touted as a powerful, easy-to-use online tool for students and parents to supplement classroom instruction, find assistance with kids’ academic struggles and help families navigate attendance, grades, transportation and other key issues, all in 100 languages and on their mobile phones.

But Amanda Bickerstaff, founder and CEO of AI for Education, a consulting and training firm, said that was an overreach.

“What they were trying to do is really not possible with where the technology is today,” she said. ”It’s a very broad application [with] multiple users — teachers, students, leaders and family members — and it pulled in data from multiple systems.”

She noted that even a mega-corporation like McDonald’s had to trim its AI sails. The fast-food giant recently admitted that a small experiment using a chatbot to power drive-thru windows had resulted in a few fraught customer interactions, such as one in which a woman angrily tried to persuade the bot that she wanted a caramel ice cream as it added multiple stacks of butter to her order.

If McDonald’s, worth an estimated $178.6 billion, can’t get 100 drive-thrus to take lunch orders with generative AI, she said, the tech isn’t “where we need it to be.”

If anything, L.A. and AllHere did not seem worried about the project’s scale, even if industry insiders now say it was bound to under-deliver: Last spring, at a series of high-profile ed tech conferences, Smith-Griffin and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho showed off Ed widely, with Carvalho saying it would revolutionize students’ and parents’ relationships to school, “utilizing the data-rich environment that we have for every kid.”

In an interview with The 74 at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego in April, Carvalho said many students are not connected to school, “therefore they’re lost.” Ed, he promised, would change that, with a “significantly different approach” to communication from the district.

“We are shifting from a system of 540,000 students into 540,000 ‘schools of one,’” with personalization and individualization for each student, he said, and “meaningful connections with parents.”

Better communication with parents, he said, would help improve not just attendance but reading and math proficiency, graduation rates and other outcomes. “The question that needs to be asked is: Why have those resources not meaningfully connected with students and parents, and why have they not resulted in this explosive experience in terms of educational opportunity?”

Carvalho noted Ed’s ability to understand and communicate in about 100 different languages. And, he crowed, it “never goes to sleep” so it can answer questions 24/7. He called it “an entity that learns and relearns all the time and does nothing more, nothing less than adapt itself to you. I think that’s a game changer.” 

But one experienced ed tech insider recalled hearing Carvalho speak about Ed at the conference in April and say it was already solving “all the problems” that big districts face. The insider, who asked not to be identified in order to speak freely about sensitive matters, found the remarks troubling. “The messaging was so wrong that at that point I basically started a stopwatch on how long it would take” for the effort to fail. “And I’m kind of amazed it’s been this long before it all fell apart. I feel badly about it, I really do, but it’s not a surprise.”

‘A high-risk proposition’

In addition to the deal’s dissolution, The 74 reported last week that a former senior director of software engineering at AllHere told district officials, L.A.’s independent inspector general’s office and state education officials that Ed processed student records in ways that likely ran afoul of the district’s own data privacy rules and put sensitive information at risk of being hacked — warnings that he said the agencies ignored. 

AI for Education’s Bickerstaff said developers “have to take caution” when building these systems for schools, especially those like Ed that bring together such large sets of data under one application.

“These tools, we don’t know how they work directly,” she said. “We know they have bias. And we know they’re not reliable. We know they can be leaky. And so we have to be really careful, especially with kids that have protected data.”

Alex Spurrier, an associate partner with the education consulting firm Bellwether Education Partners, said what often happens is that district leaders “try to go really big and move really fast to adopt a new technology,” not fully appreciating that it’s “a really high risk proposition.”

While ed tech is rife with disaster stories of overpromising and disappointing results, Spurrier said, other districts dare to take a different approach, starting small, iterating and scaling up. In those cases, he said, disaster rarely follows.

Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), put it more bluntly: “Whenever a district says, ‘Our strategy around AI is to buy a tool,’ that’s a problem. When the district says, ‘For us, AI is a variety of tools and skills that we are working on together,’ that’s when I feel comfortable that we’re moving in the right direction.”

Culatta suggested that since generative AI is developing and changing so rapidly, districts should use the next few months as “a moment of exploration — it’s a moment to bring in teachers and parents and students to give feedback,” he said. “It is not the moment for ribbon cutting.” 

‘It’s about exploring’

Smith-Griffin founded AllHere in 2016 at Harvard University’s Innovation Labs. In an April interview with The 74, she said she originally envisioned it as a way to help school systems reduce chronic absenteeism through better communication with parents. Many interventions that schools rely on, such as phone calls, postcards and home visits, “tend to be heavily reliant on the sheer power of educators to solve system-wide issues,” she said.

A former middle-school math teacher, Smith-Griffin recalled, “I was one of those teachers who was doing phone calls, leaving voicemails, visiting my parents’ homes.” 

AllHere pioneered text messaging “nudges,” electronic versions of postcard reminders to families that, in one key study, improved attendance modestly. 

The company’s successful proposal for L.A., Smith-Griffin said, envisioned extending the attendance strategies while applying them to student learning “in the most disciplined way possible.”

“You nudge a parent around absences and they will tell you things ranging from, ‘My kid needs tutoring, my kid is struggling with math’ [to] ‘I struggle with reading,’” she said. AllHere went one step further, she said, bringing together “the full body of resources” that a school system can offer parents.

The district had high hopes for the chatbot, requiring it to focus on “eliminating opportunity gaps, promoting whole-child well-being, building stronger relationships with students and families, and providing accessible information,” according to the proposal.

In April, it was still in early implementation at 100 of the district’s lowest performing “priority” schools, serving about 55,000 students. LAUSD planned to roll out Ed for all families this fall. The district “unplugged” the chatbot on June 14, the Los Angeles Times reported last week, but a district spokesperson said L.A. “will continue making Ed available as a tool to its students and families and is closely monitoring the potential acquisition of AllHere.” The company did not immediately responded to queries about the chatbot or its future.

As for the apparent collapse of AllHere, speculation in the ed tech world is rampant.

In the podcast he co-hosts, education entrepreneur Ben Kornell said late last month, “My spidey sense basically goes to ‘Something’s not adding up here and there’s more to the story.’” He theorized a “critical failure point” that’s yet to emerge “because you don’t see things like this fall apart this quickly, this immediately” for such a small company, especially in the middle of a $6 million contract.

Kornell said the possibilities fall into just a few categories: an accounting or financial misstep, a breakdown among AllHere’s staff, board and funders or “major customer payment issues.” 

The district also may have withheld payment for undelivered products, but he said the sudden collapse of the company seemed unusual. “If you are headed towards a cash crisis, the normal thing to do would be: Go to your board, go to your funders, and get a bridge to get you through that period and land the plane.”

Bellwether’s Spurrier said L.A. deserves a measure of credit “for being willing to lean into AI technology and think about ways that it could work.” But he wonders whether the best use of generative AI at this moment will be found not in “revolutionizing instruction,” as L.A. has pursued, but elsewhere. 

“There’s plenty of opportunities to think about how AI might help on the administrative side of things, or help folks that are kind of outside the classroom walls,” rather than focusing on changing how schools deliver instruction. “I think that’s the wrong place to start.”

ISTE’s Culatta noted that just down the road from Los Angeles, in Santa Ana, California, district officials there responded to the dawn of tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini by creating evening classes for adults. “The parents come in and they talk about what AI is, how they should be thinking about it,” he said. “It’s about exploring. It’s about helping people build their skills.” 

‘How are your financials?’

The fate of AllHere’s attendance work in districts nationwide isn’t clear at the moment. In one large district, the Prince George’s County, Maryland, Public Schools, near Washington, D.C., teachers piloted AllHere with 32 schools as far back as January 2020, spokeswoman Meghan Thornton said. The district added two more schools to the pilot in 2022, but AllHere notified the district on June 18 that, effective immediately, it wouldn’t be able to continue its services due to “unforeseen financial circumstances.” 

District officials are now looking for another messaging system to replace AllHere “should it no longer be available,” Thornton said.

Bickerstaff said the field more broadly suffers from “a major, major overestimation of the capabilities of the technology to date.” L.A., she noted, is the nation’s second-largest school district, so even the pilot stage likely saw “very high” usage, raising its costs. She predicted a fast acquisition of AllHere, noting that they’d been looking for outside investment for several months.

As founder of the startup Magic School AI, which offers teachers tools to streamline their workload, Adeel Khan is no stranger to hustling for funding — and to competitors running out of money. But he said the news about AllHere and Ed was bad for the industry more broadly, leaving districts with questions about whether to partner with newer, untested companies.

“I see it as something that is certainly not great for the startup ecosystem,” he said.

Even before the news about AllHere broke last month, Khan attended ISTE’s big national conference in Denver last month, where he talked to school district officials about prospective partnerships. “More than one time I was asked directly, ‘How are your financials?’” he recalled. 

Usually technology directors ask about features and what a product can do for students, he said. But they’re beginning to realize that a failed product doesn’t just waste time and money. It damages reputations as well. “That is on the mind of buyers,” he said. 

When school districts invest in new tech, he said, they’re not just committing to funding it for months or even years, but also to training teachers and others, so they want responsible growth.

“There’s a lot of disruption to K-12 when a product goes out of business,” Khan said. “So people remember this. They remember, ‘Hey, we committed to this product. We discovered it at ISTE two years ago and we loved it. It was great — and it’s not here anymore. And we don’t want to go through that again.’ ”

Boston-based AllHere Education, founded in 2016 by Harvard grad and former teacher Joanna Smith-Griffin, figured heavily in LAUSD’s March 20 launch of Ed, an AI-powered online tool for students and parents designed to supplement classroom instruction and help families navigate. 

But on June 14, AllHere furloughed the majority of its employees due to its “current financial position,” according to a statement posted on its website. A statement from LAUSD sent to The 74 said AllHere now is up for sale.  

But even before the surprise announcement, AllHere was already having trouble fulfilling its contract with LAUSD, according to one former high-ranking company executive. 

The company was unable to push back against the district’s timeline, he said, and couldn’t produce a “proper product.”

An LAUSD spokesperson said the district is aware of Smith-Griffin’s departure and that “several educational technology companies are interested in acquiring AllHere.” 

“The educational technology field is a dynamic space where acquisitions are not uncommon,” the spokesperson said via email. “We will ensure that whichever entity acquires AllHere will continue to provide this first-of-its-kind resource to our students and families.”

Smith-Griffin and AllHere did not respond to requests for comment. The former CEO has taken down her LinkedIn profile. Portions of the AllHere website have also disappeared, including the company’s “About Us” page. 

James Wiley, a vice president at the education market research firm ListEdTech, said turmoil at AllHere could be a red flag for LAUSD’s AI program if the district hasn’t taken steps to protect itself from changes at the company.   

“It could be a problem,” said Wiley. “It depends on how much of the program the district has been able to bring in-house, as opposed to leaving with the vendor.”

Wiley also expressed surprise that LAUSD contracted with a relatively small and untested firm such as AllHere for its Ed rollout, as opposed to enlisting a major AI company for the job, or a larger ed tech firm.   

“You have bigger players out there who could have done this thing,” said Wiley.

Outside of Los Angeles, the company has offered districts a text messaging system that allows schools to inform families about weather events and other announcements. 

According to GovSpend, which tracks government contracts with companies, AllHere has already been paid more than $2 million by LAUSD. The company has had much smaller contracts with other districts, according to GovSpend, including a $49,390 payment from Brownsville Independent School District in Texas and a similar-sized payment from Broward County Public Schools in Florida. 

But AllHere’s star had been ascendant. 

With backing from the Harvard Innovation Lab, Smith-Griffin raised more than $12 million to start the new company. AllHere in April was named one of the world’s top ed tech companies by TIME. 

The LAUSD school board last June approved a competitively bid $6.2 million contract for AllHere to plan, design and develop the district’s new AI tool, Ed. The deal began with a two-year agreement ending in July 2025, with options for three subsequent one-year renewals.  

Smith-Griffin appeared with LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho in April to discuss the project, which was described by the district’s leader as a game-changer for LAUSD that represented the first time a school district systematically leveraged AI. 

The former AllHere executive, who was recently laid off, said in an interview that the company’s work with LAUSD was far more involved than that of its other customer school districts. 

The small company was being asked to create a far more sophisticated tool than its prior text messaging system and bit off more than it could chew in its contract with the nation’s second-largest district. 

At the same time, he said, AllHere employees operated more as consultants than as a company building its own product and were unable to “to say no or to slow things down” with the district.

“So I think because of that, they were unable or unwilling to build a proper product,” he said. 

LA parents and students, we want to hear from you. Tell us about your experience using AllHere’s Ed:

With reporting and contributions from Mark Keierleber and Greg Toppo

“They’re now graduated and in college…they came back [for] summer break. I had a couple of slices of coffee cake for them, and they were like, ‘Oh my gosh!’… because, you know it’s a famous thing,” said Heinz, a staff member at Marina Del Rey Middle School.

Stories like Heinz’s are not unique. LAUSD’s coffee cake is one of the most popular items on the district’s menu. Every year LA Unified serves up 800,000 slices of the coffee cake a year across 700 cafeterias, according to an LAIST report.

The coffee cake recipe dates back to 1954 and has undergone several changes due to federal USDA regulations. Evelen Guirguis, who has been with the district for 30 years and is now the cafeteria manager at Marina del Rey Middle School, said shortening, an ingredient “high in calories and offers no nutritional benefits,” has since been cut out.

Baking more now that you are staying home? Remember the legendary LAUSD Old Fashioned Coffee Cake? Here is the original recipe from 1954. Photo credit: Danielle Chiriguaya. pic.twitter.com/xpzN48JeXZ

— Los Angeles Unified (@LASchools) April 7, 2020

“Before, the (ingredients) came from the government. Now we buy everything ourselves.” said Guirguis. “We have our own vendor now…[which] means we get the best [products] and everything is fresh,”

The current coffee cake recipe is expected to be updated again in the fall — because of a new set of federal regulations — cutting down on sugar. 

Meanwhile the iconic cake remains in high demand. 

“Even though the fat content has declined, it’s still a very moist cake…a big part of nutrition is what you enjoy,” said Manish Singh, director of LAUSD food services.

The district even tweeted out the recipe during the pandemic, encouraging people to make it while they were home. 

Singh said earlier this month the district ordered 3,500 pieces of coffee cake as part of a staff appreciation day and “it was all gone in no time,”  he said.  “We did a similar thing last year. The first time, they ordered 1,000 pieces and were worried there would be leftovers. It was gone in 20 minutes.”

The cake is so popular, it has even inspired businesses like Runaway Sweet Treats in Los Angeles to offer Old School “LAUSD” Coffee Cake on its menu items using the original recipe. It’s also a big crowd pleaser on back-to-school night, with parents waiting in long lines to get a slice.  

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho is also a big fan, requesting it for monthly principals’ meetings.

When a student reporter with several boxes of coffee cake returned to the University of Southern California campus, a security guard recognized the packaging and asked for a  piece.

The recipe is not the only thing that has changed. With the decrease in cafeteria-produced food, some schools have contracted the production process to a third-party vendor. The cake is still made from scratch in 25-30 school kitchens, Singh said. 

“Where we have the capacity, and where the staff is able to make it from scratch, we still encourage them to make it from scratch,” Singh said. 

Guirguis is one of the many passionate individuals behind the creation of the legendary cake. Once a week, she and her staff bake nearly 600 coffee cakes before breakfast at 7:45 AM for the students at Marina del Rey Middle School and seven other LAUSD campuses.

From start to finish, it only takes her 30 minutes to bake two trays of fresh coffee cake. Baking the cake, she said, is her favorite part of her job.

When asked why the coffee cake is so popular, Guirguis said, “It’s because we make it with love.”

Learn how to make the legendary treat below:

@the74_

Los Angeles Unified School District’s coffee cake is one of the most popular items on the district’s menu. Learn more about the 70 year old tradition, and see the full recipe, at The74million.org

♬ Piano Jazz for Cooking(1403641) – earbrojp

Last week, I set out to write a quick news hit on the FCC’s new cybersecurity grants for schools and libraries — a pilot program that will pump $200 million toward next-gen firewalls and other tools.

But that’s when things got weird. 

I came upon a new listing on a notorious dark web forum — the Amazon for stolen data, if you will — that offered millions of files purportedly stolen from the Los Angeles Unified School District for a thousand bucks.

LAUSD officials said they’re investigating the anonymous threat actor’s claims and a threat intelligence executive told me the district must carry out a full incident response to verify if the files are real.

Or new. 

It isn’t déjà vu: America’s second-largest school district fell victim to a massive ransomware attack in 2022. Thousands of students’ mental health records and other sensitive files found their way to the dark web. It’s possible that the LAUSD data got a facelift of its own, with the same data repackaged to make a quick buck. 

Read more about the latest LAUSD incident — and about the FCC’s new effort to thwart similar attacks nationally — here. 

In the news

Today in Florida, workers are set to demolish the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School building where a gunman killed 17 people in a 2018 rampage. | The Associated Press

Relatives of 17 children killed during the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, have sued state law enforcement officers who waited 77 minutes before confronting the gunman at Robb Elementary School. | The Texas Tribune

Special report: Through an unprecedented trove of dispatch call data for 852 California school addresses, reporters offer a rare look at “the vast presence of police in schools.” A third of calls “were about serious incidents that reasonably required a police presence.” | EdSource

New York lawmakers approved landmark rules that ban social media companies from using “addictive” algorithms to customize children’s feeds. Here’s a strong rundown on how the rules work. | Democrat & Chronicle

SWATted down: A Washington man has been sentenced to three years in prison for calling in hoax police reports in more than 20 states, including inciting false school shooting panic, leading to frantic lockdowns and massive police responses. | The News Tribune

First they came for the books. Next they came for the books about book bans. | The Washington Post

A new program in Illinois to help low-income families pay for the funeral costs of children killed by guns was designed to ease grief and financial burdens. After a year, just two families have been compensated. | The Trace

Prioritizing ‘profit over the wellbeing and safety of children’: Residential treatment companies that provide behavioral health services have put children at risk of sexual abuse and dangerous physical restraints, a new Senate committee report argues. | NBC News

First comes marriage, then comes homeroom: Missouri lawmakers failed to pass legislation that sought to prevent anyone under 18 years old from getting married, keeping in place the state’s minimum age of 16. | The Kansas City Star

A Tennessee school district where officials failed to prevent rampant racist bullying against a Black student will overhaul its anti-harassment procedures after reaching a settlement agreement with the Justice Department. Federal investigators found the student’s classmates passed around a drawing of a Ku Klux Klansmen, added him to a bigoted group chat and sold him to white peers in a mock “slave auction.” | The Washington Post

New York City school bathrooms could soon have “vape sensors” following a court settlement with tobacco company Juul that’ll direct $27 million to the city’s schools to combat youth vaping. | Chalkbeat

Research & advocacy

‘New Jim Code’: Federal officials have failed to deter the civil rights harms that artificial intelligence in schools poses to students of color, a new report argues. | The Center for Law and Social Policy

DACA recipients are more likely than migrants without deportation safeguards to ask the police for help, suggesting the program increases engagement with police and reduces fear among crime victims. | Journal of Urban Economics

DACA recipients are more likely than migrants without deportation safeguards to ask the police for help, suggesting the program increases engagement with police and reduces fear among crime victims. | Journal of Urban Economics

ICYMI @The74

• Report: Higher Rates of Depression, Anxiety for LGBTQ Teens Forcibly Outed
  
• LA Schools Chief Carvalho Warns Student Homelessness Across City Worse Than Data Shows
  
• Psychologist Peter Gray Sounds the Alarm About Excessive Adult Oversight & What It’s Doing to Kids’ Mental Health

Emotional support

I promised you a new pup. I bring you a new pup. 

Sinead, editor Kathy Moore’s new emotional support companion, surveys her domain. 

For more school safety news, subscribe to Mark’s School (in)Security newsletter below.

“I stopped maybe a couple of weeks ago,” Juarez said last month. “I see the stuff that’s happening. I do see the news and I see what happens on the bus and then around here as well. So I don’t feel it’s safe for them to go by themselves, walking or on the bus.”

Before the increasing reports of violence and drug abuse on LAUSD campuses, she would allow her two older children in 9th and 10th grade to regularly ride the bus to and from the 32nd Street School near University Park in East Los Angeles.

Juarez’s concerns were not out of the ordinary. In February, three separate shootings occurred overnight near a LA school campus, resulting in the deaths of two teenagers. Last month two teenagers were arrested for bringing guns to school.

An LA Unified spokesperson declined to be interviewed, instead referring a reporter to recordings from the recent school board meeting where the issue was discussed during the Safe School Task Force annual update.

The presentation, delivered by Andres Chait, LAUSD Chief of School Operations, outlined 14 recommendations, including installing vape and weapons detection systems, developing and implementing peer counseling, and installing gates and security cameras in all schools. 

The increasing violence around the district has made some parents question whether LA Unified schools are safe — and if the school board made the right decision to cut the School police budgets by 35% after the murder of George Floyd. 

“They cut it without really thinking through who it was going to impact and without inclusion of the parent voice,” said Evelyn Aleman, Founder of “Our Voice” a parents group.” They had activists, because activists are able to mobilize and come to the school board meetings and ways that Latino and indigenous immigrant parents cannot…that’s a significant voice, which is 74% of the student population was left out of that conversation.” 

The funding was reallocated towards programs in schools with the highest number of Black students, including the hiring of more social workers, and counselors, targeting schools with high rates of suspension, chronic absenteeism and low academic student achievement.  The 74 previously did a story on the impact of the programs.

Pedro Noguera, Dean of the USC Rossier School of Educations said while police presence can deter some incidents, more cops are not a long term solution. 

“Campus Police are most effective at deterring individuals who don’t belong on campus from coming on campus. If that’s an issue…, they should consider deploying police to schools,” said Noguera. “But if the issue is preventing fights, they need trusted adults who kids will talk to…  you just have to be really careful because once you bring the police into the picture you significantly increase the likelihood of arrest.”  

LAUSD school police carry guns and handcuffs and have the authority to make arrests, a district spokesman said.

LAUSD district 7 board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an advocate for restorative measures, believes the best way to keep students safe starts by  teaching young children social-emotional skills to navigate conflict and  de-escalating potentially violent situations.

“I know that… (there is a) sort of myth or misconception that we swing from punitive to permissive.” Franklin said. “I’m not going to let kids run all over the place…we still have to keep our hands to ourselves, we still have to be safe and use our words. But I’m going to show you how to do that, teach you and give you a second chance.”

For Aleman and other parents the progress is too slow. According to an LAUSD report published in September 2023, incidents of fighting and physical aggression increased by over 40% between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. More  than  600 fights and other physical aggression incidents were reported just 30 days into the 2023-24 school year. 

“I think it’s wishful thinking, and it doesn’t address the urgency of the situation, which is safety,” Aleman said in response to the district’s restorative plan to ensure safe schools. “This requires an immediate response, and it’s not just the school police…—But from LAUSD, everybody has to step up…. This is unacceptable. Children should not be dying outside the school. That shouldn’t be happening.”

A Los Angeles Unified School District spokesperson confirmed they’re investigating a listing on a notorious dark web marketplace, posted Thursday by a user named “The Satanic Cloud,” which seeks $1,000 in exchange for what they claim is a trove of more than 24 million records. The development comes nearly two years after the district fell victim to a ransomware attack that led to a widespread leak of sensitive student records, some dating back years. 

Simultaneously, federal officials were citing that earlier ransomware attack in L.A. and subsequent breaches, with FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel noting that they’ve become a growing scourge for districts of all sizes.

“School districts as large as Los Angeles Unified in California and as small as St. Landry Parish in Louisiana were the target of cyberattacks,” Rosenworcel said, adding that these events lead to real-world learning disruptions and sometimes millions in district recovery costs. “This situation is complex, but the vulnerabilities in the networks that we use in our nation’s schools and libraries are real and growing.”

“So today, we’re going to do something about it,” she said.

The five-person FCC voted 3-2 to approve the pilot, which will provide firewalls and other cybersecurity services to eligible school districts and libraries over a three-year period. While the pilot aims to study how federal funds can be deployed to bolster the defenses of these vulnerable targets, some have criticized the initiative for being too little, too late. When Rosenworcel first outlined the proposal in July, education stakeholders demanded a more urgent and substantive federal response.

Districts selected to participate in the newly approved pilot will receive a minimum of $15,000 for approved services and the commission aims to “provide funding to as many schools and school districts as possible,” it notes in a fact sheet. While the funding “will not, by itself, be sufficient to fund all of the school’s cybersecurity needs,” the fact sheet notes, the commission seeks to ensure that “each participating school will receive funding to prioritize implementation of solutions within one major technological category.”

The Satanic Cloud, which posted the most recent batch of LAUSD data, told The 74 it’s entirely separate from what was stolen in the September 2022 ransomware attack on the nation’s second-largest school district. An executive at a leading threat intelligence company said his team suspects the data did originate from the earlier event.

The Los Angeles district is aware of the threat actor’s claims, a spokesperson told The 74 in an email Thursday, and “is investigating the claim and engaging with law enforcement to investigate and respond to the incident.”

‘It’s definitely sensitive data’

In an investigation last year, The 74 found that thousands of L.A. students’ psychological evaluations had been leaked online after cybercriminals levied a ransomware attack on the system. The district had categorically denied that the mental health records had been compromised, but within hours of the story, acknowledged that they had. 

Just last month, a joint investigation by The 74 and The Acadiana Advocate revealed that officials at the 12,000-student St. Landry Parish School Board, located some 63 miles west of Baton Rouge, waited five months after a ransomware attack to inform data breach victims that their sensitive information had been compromised. The notice came after an earlier investigation by the news outlets uncovered that personally identifiable student, employee and business records had been exposed, despite the district’s assertion otherwise, and that St. Landry had likely violated the state’s breath notification law. Within hours of the first story publishing, the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office issued a notification warning to the district. 

The latest Los Angeles files were listed Thursday on the dark web marketplace BreachForums, an online outpost that was taken offline briefly last month after it came under the control of federal law enforcement officials. The Federal Bureau of Investigation first targeted BreachForums in March 2023 when it arrested the site’s owner, 20-year-old Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, at his home in Peekskill, New York. At the time, BreachForums was among the largest hacker forums and claimed more than 340,000 users. 

A sample file included in the L. A. listing is a spreadsheet with the names, student identification numbers and other demographic information of more than 1,000 students and their parents. Data disclose students who receive special education services, their addresses and their home telephone numbers. A list of file names suggest the records include similar information about teachers. 

Reached for comment through the encrypted messaging app Telegram, the BreachForums user who listed the Los Angeles data told The 74 “there is no connections” to the previous ransomware attack. The breach, the threat actor said, originated via the Amazon Relational Database Service, which allows businesses to create cloud-based databases. The service has been the subject of previous hacks that led to the public disclosure of troves of sensitive information. 

Kaustubh Medhe, the vice president of research and threat intelligence at the threat intelligence company Cyble, said the latest threat actor has a history of engaging in discussions about cryptocurrency scams on Telegram but this is the first time they’ve sought to sell stolen data. Cyble’s research team, he told The 74, sees “a high likelihood” that the data was sourced from files exposed in the earlier ransomware attack. 

“Historically, we have seen this kind of activity where old data leaks are recirculated on dark web forums by different actors,” Medhe said. Either way, Medhe said it’s incumbent on district officials to take urgent action. The files, he said, could be useful for “some kind of profiling or some kind of targeted phishing activity.

“It’s definitely sensitive data, for sure,” he said, adding that district officials should analyze the sample data set available online and confirm if the records align with their internal databases and, perhaps, those stolen in 2022. “They would need to do a thorough incident response and investigation to rule out the possibility of a new breach.” 

‘An important step forward’

During Thursday’s FCC meeting, Commissioner Anna Gomez said the pilot program was an issue of educational equity. She cited a federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency report, which noted that as ransomware attacks and data breaches at K-12 districts have surged in the last decade, districts with limited cybersecurity capabilities and vast resource constraints have been left most vulnerable. Connectivity, she said, is “essential for education in the 21st century.”

“Technology and high-speed internet access opens doors and unbounded opportunity for those who have it,” Gomez said. “Unfortunately, our increasingly digital world also creates opportunities for malicious actors.” 

Faced with a growing number of cyberattacks, educators have for years called on the FCC to provide cybersecurity resources with money from the federal E-rate program, which offers funding to most public schools and libraries nationwide to make broadband services more affordable. It’s a move that more than 1,100 school districts endorsed in a joint 2022 letter — but one the commission declined to adopt. In a press release, the commission said the pilot was kept separate “to ensure gains in enhanced cybersecurity do not undermine E-rate’s success in connecting schools and libraries and promoting digital equity.” The pilot will be allocated through the Universal Service Fund, which was created to subsidize telephone services for low-income households. 

In a letter to the commission last month, the American Library Association, Common Sense Media, the Consortium for School Networking and other groups said the selection process for eligible schools and libraries was unclear and could confuse applicants. On Thursday, the library association nonetheless expressed its support. 

“The FCC’s decision today to create a cybersecurity pilot is an important step forward for our nation’s libraries and library workers, too many of whom face escalating costs to secure their institution’s systems and data,” President Emily Drabinski said in a statement. “We remain steadfast in our call for a long-term funding mechanism that will ensure libraries can continue to offer the access and information their communities rely on.”

Among the pilot program’s critics is school cybersecurity expert Doug Levin, who told The 74 that many school districts lack sufficient cybersecurity expertise and, as a result, the advanced tools that the pilot seeks to provide may not be “a good fit for school systems with scarce capacity.”

“There’s no argument that schools need support,” said Levin, the co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange. But the FCC’s “techno-solutions point of view to the problem,” he said, is far too small to make a meaningful impact and could instead prompt a vendor marketing surge that “may end up convincing some [schools] to buy solutions that, frankly, they don’t need.” 

Kamryn, 18, who graduates next month from Hamilton High School in Culver City and will attend college in the fall, is one of about 15,000 homeless students enrolled in Los Angeles Unified schools — a figure that has continued to increase in the last three years after a lull during the pandemic.  

“I tell myself it’s just temporary, even though it’s been going on for a while,” said Kamryn of living in the car. “When I’m at school, I do my best to try to not think about it.”

Homelessness is a worsening problem for Los Angeles students, like other urban school districts around the country, superintendent Alberto Carvalho said, which the district is struggling to address — and the official tally of declared homeless kids in the district, “is but the tip of the iceberg.”   

To address the worsening crisis, Carvalho said the school system needs more help from other city agencies and nonprofits. 

“The solutions for students experiencing homelessness cannot be solely the responsibility of the school district,” said Carvalho at a ceremony last week to honor graduating seniors who are homeless. 

“It needs to be a community-based approach,” he said, with a “greater level of collaboration between local social agencies, city and county government alongside the school district.”  

The number of homeless kids in LA schools is growing, Carvalho said. In the 2022-23 school year, LAUSD reported 9,140 homeless students, a nine percent increase from the previous academic year. 

It’s the district’s first increase in homeless students since 2019, when the total increased from 18,000 to 19,000; and then fell to 7,910 in 2021 with the implementation of citywide eviction protections during the pandemic. Those protections expired in February.

The true number of homeless students is much higher than the official figure, he said, because often students do not identify themselves as homeless. 

“There’s often shame,” said Carvalho, who experienced homelessness as a teen growing up in Miami. “You’re in a condition that you never thought you’d be in.”

The district is struggling with the surge, he said, because identifying homeless kids is difficult, and because city agencies don’t always collaborate on services for those kids.    

Homeless teens are among the city’s most fragile students. They’re less likely to graduate on time, and more likely to suffer from trauma and mental illness. 

Kamryn and her mother slid into homelessness this year after being evicted from their apartment in December, the girl said. 

The pair stayed with Kamryn’s brother for a few weeks, but since January have been sleeping in their car, parking the vehicle each night beneath a tree at a city park, putting up visors against the windows for privacy. 

Also participating in last week’s graduation ceremony was Janai Johnson, who in June will graduate from James Monroe High School. Janai has been homeless for most of her life and is currently living in a shelter with her mother. 

“I wasn’t always sure where our next school would be,” said Janai. Stress from constantly moving made it hard to study and get enough sleep before class, she said. 

Janai said homelessness “beats you down. But it’s not the things you go through – it’s how you react to those things.”  

Janai said a counselor at her school helped her succeed by connecting her with a therapist and getting her school supplies. She will attend Cal State Channel Islands next year, and major in child development.   

But kids like Kamryn and Janai are outliers. Homeless kids are far more likely to be chronically absent from school, and more likely to struggle academically and emotionally, Carvalho said.   

To support those students, Carvalho said, LAUSD has an Homeless Education Office that provides training for school staff and direct support to students, such as access to social workers. 

The district has also expanded its community school programs that offer added counseling and tutoring services to students, as well as access to campus-based food pantries and laundry services. 

And in March, LAUSD opened a 26-unit housing complex for homeless families in the San Fernando Valley. The development, created through a partnership between the district, Many Mansions and Housing Works, took five years to complete. 

Carvalho said the district hopes to create more housing for homeless families in the future, and that such projects shouldn’t take so long to complete. “I’m very concerned,” said Carvalho of homeless students. “They’re really facing extreme conditions.” 

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

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

LAUSD lags in reading scores behind other districts in California, a state with one of the lowest literacy rates in the country.  

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

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

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

Dozens of states have taken up such laws and policies, including Mississippi, Ohio, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. 

The push for a unified, evidence-based approach to literacy instruction faces obstacles in Los Angeles Unified, where only about a quarter of students met reading standards on the most recent assessments. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A recent study conducted by researchers at Stanford University found that test scores at 66 of California’s lowest-performing schools jumped after educators adopted approaches in line with the science of reading.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LAUSD’s new colocation rules were approved by the district’s school board in February. The CCSA’s suit seeks to prevent the district from enforcing the new policy.

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

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

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

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

Representatives for LAUSD declined to comment on the litigation. In presenting the policy to the district’s school board in January, LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho said he believes the new regulation is legal. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t always this way. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

California’s ‘most vulnerable’

The money came at a critical moment. Since the pandemic, homelessness has continued to rise, with rates hitting a new record last year. Among families with children, there was a 16% increase over 2022, federal data shows.

The needs are particularly great in California, which has the highest per capita homelessness rate next to Washington, D.C. Last year, the state spent over $7 billion on roughly 30 different programs focused on reducing homelessness, but most of those efforts didn’t reach students. 

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

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

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

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

Sneakers and backpacks 

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

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

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

Like a ‘widget maker’ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carvalho said the new regulations are within the bounds of a 2000 state law compelling California districts to provide classroom space for charter schools. There are currently 50 charter schools co-located in 52 LAUSD school campuses, serving roughly 11,000 students. Thirteen additional charters have requested space for the upcoming school year. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 74’s Greg Toppo caught up with Herold earlier this month.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: You note at the outset that you’re a suburban kid, raised in Penn Hills. Things for you went as they were supposed to. Yet you report that your dad ended up selling your childhood home in 2014 for one-fourth of what it was worth, to a guy he met on Craigslist. Is this the inevitable fate of inner-ring suburbs like yours? What’s at play here? Why don’t suburbs work anymore, and how do public schools play a part in this failure?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, Carvalho said, rising housing costs have forced many families to leave Los Angeles. The average price of a single-family home there is now nearly $1 million, according to Zillow, up by more than a third from five years ago. Local incomes have not kept up with rising costs.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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

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

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

In Los Angeles County alone, there are more than 51,000 homeless students. Another 7,000 of the county’s children are in foster care. The vast majority of these young people, like Daniella, face challenges that would disrupt the lives of even the most well-resourced adults. The result is that many attend school intermittently, if at all, and are invisible to the traditional school system, which rarely meets their complex needs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch this video to learn more about Da Vinci RISE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclosure: The XQ Institute is a financial supporter of The 74.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all about money, experts said.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: What are the main issues you are focusing on in your campaign?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What sets you apart from other candidates? 

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

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

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

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

Last year, Morales’s children averaged 64 absences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The annual Smarter Balanced scores, released today, showed that English language arts scores dropped slightly and math scores inched upwards a bit from 2022, although both scores lagged behind pre-pandemic numbers. Science scores were also up slightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A sense of complacency’

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

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

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

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

Billions in school investments

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, the state also unveiled a new math framework, intended to boost math scores, and invested millions in a statewide literacy plan. Proposition 28, which passed last year, will bring up to $1 billion annually for schools to expand their arts programs.

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

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

Big improvements for some districts

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

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

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

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

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

The most recent California School Climate survey results were released in December, showing improvements in some categories but still high rates of mental health struggles, lack of motivation and other challenges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new bus tracking feature was unveiled as part of a slew of updates with the latest version of the LAUSD 3.0 app, available in English or Spanish, including viewing the school menu, and reporting criminal or suspicious activity anonymously. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Detrimental to families’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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