La combinación de las inversiones públicas en el sistema de la Universidad de California y la actitud hospitalaria del estado hacia la inmigración han creado una economía dinámica y dotada de tecnología que es la más grande de todos los estados norteamericanos. Su diverso sistema de educación pública también refleja ese dinamismo, y atiende a más estudiantes que aprenden inglés (o EL, por sus siglas en inglés) que las escuelas de cualquier otro estado. En 2021, California matriculó a más estudiantes EL en grados de Kínder a 12 que todos los alumnos en el estado de Indiana.

Sin embargo, de 1998 a 2016, en medio de una creciente ansiedad por la inmigración a finales de la década de los 90, las escuelas del estado contradijeron su reputación cosmopolita, promulgando una normativa para que se enseñara exclusivamente en inglés a los estudiantes EL. Como era de esperar, la política hizo poco para cambiar la trayectoria demográfica del estado y menos aún para mejorar el aprendizaje de los alumnos.

Por esa razón, en el año 2016, los votantes de California aprobaron la Proposición 58 en un referéndum que volvía a plantear la posibilidad de la educación bilingüe para los EL de California. Los partidarios promovieron la medida como una oportunidad para que el estado ofreciera un sistema escolar multilingüe acorde con su reputación de sociedad plural y diversa que preparara a los estudiantes para prosperar en la economía global.

Este artículo es el primero en una serie de The 74 sobre los esfuerzos de California por construir un sistema educativo bilingüe digno de su reputación de diversidad cultural. 

Ocho años después de la aprobación de la Proposición 58, los avances hacia esa visión han sido desiguales. La eliminación activa de idiomas en las aulas del estado durante casi dos décadas ha dado lugar a innumerables desafíos. Aun así, la adopción del bilingüismo por parte del estado ha acercado la narrativa pública a la opinión general de la investigación sobre los beneficios del aprendizaje de varios idiomas. California lanzó el Sello de Biliteracidad, que ahora se ha extendido a nivel nacional, y que otorga reconocimiento público a los graduados de Kínder hasta el grado 12 que demuestren competencia en más de un idioma. Esfuerzos de este tipo son los que están cambiando el discurso público en California sobre los idiomas y aumentando la demanda de oportunidades de aprendizaje bilingüe.

Reductos bilingües en una era monolingüe

En 1998, cuando California adoptó la Proposición 58 y su política de enseñar únicamente en inglés, algunas encuestas daban a entender que aproximadamente la mitad de los votantes latinos apoyaban el mandato. Las encuestas a pie de urna posteriores sugerían una historia algo más complicada, pero la medida se aprobó igualmente.

El número de estudiantes EL en aulas de educación bilingüe bajó casi un 70 por ciento entre 1998 y 2003. Aunque la nueva política de enseñar sólo en inglés permitía a las comunidades ofrecer educación bilingüe si un número suficiente de padres de estudiantes EL optaban por no participar en una educación exclusivamente en inglés, sólo una pequeña parte de las escuelas pudo alcanzar ese umbral. El español, el coreano, el japonés, el cantonés y otros idiomas que no fueran el inglés desaparecieron de las escuelas.

Pero la decisión del estado no borró el deseo de muchos californianos de que se reconocieran y se trabajaran en la escuela las habilidades bilingües que sus hijos empezaban a demostrar. La persistente demanda de los padres latinos puso en marcha y/o mantuvo programas bilingües y de inmersión en dos idiomas, como el campus en Burlington del Camino Nuevo Charter Academy de Los Ángeles.

La escuela abrió sus puertas en el año 2000; el interés de la comunidad por el bilingüismo empujó a los líderes a dar prioridad al desarrollo de los alumnos tanto en inglés como en español. “Recibíamos niños que venían de programas que estaban por toda la ciudad”, dice la ex directora general de Camino Nuevo, Ana Ponce. “Y los padres querían que sus hijos mantuvieran su lengua materna. No estábamos sujetos a las limitaciones de la Proposición 227 porque éramos una escuela chárter, así que nos embarcamos en la exploración de diferentes modelos de educación bilingüe”.

La escuela optó por un modelo de inmersión en dos idiomas (o DLI, por sus siglas en inglés) que comienza con la mayoría de la enseñanza en español y aumenta paulatinamente la enseñanza en inglés hasta que los dos idiomas están equilibrados en los últimos grados de primaria. Décadas más tarde, el campus del centro de Los Ángeles bulle con conversaciones que cambian del español al inglés. Los alumnos de cuarto grado practican en parejas problemas de división en su clase de matemáticas jugando a Piedra, Papel o Tijeras para decidir quién va primero.

“Ojalá, Dios quiera que no, que no desaparezcan estas escuelas, ¿verdad? Porque les ayuda mucho a nuestros hijos de verdad”, comenta Maribel Martínez, una madre de Camino Nuevo desde hace 13 años. “No hablo mal de las [escuelas] del distrito, sé que también enseñan bien, pero pues el único error es de que pues quitaron el bilingüe… los dos idiomas valen mucho y más”.

Parte de ese valor es de carácter académico. Las investigaciones sugieren que los programas de inmersión en dos idiomas son la mejor manera de apoyar a los jóvenes que no son hablantes nativos de inglés en las escuelas de Estados Unidos. Pero los padres de la escuela Camino dicen que ésta es sólo una de las razones por las que valoran las destrezas emergentes de sus hijos en español e inglés. El primer hijo de Gloribel Reyes empezó en la escuela hace veinte años y el menor está matriculado en cuarto grado. “Es muy importante que los niños pues siempre tengan ese aprendizaje de lo que es el español y el bilingüe”, precisa, “porque si ellos aprenden nada más el inglés, pues se les va olvidando [el español], que es lo que hablamos los papás, porque si unos papás no hablamos[…] inglés, entonces ¿cómo nos podemos comunicar con ellos?”

Martínez está de acuerdo, y señala que el bilingüismo de la escuela facilita a las familias hispanohablantes el contacto con los maestros y el personal. Es decir, el esfuerzo de Burlington por contratar a personal para el programa DLI durante décadas ha dado lugar a una plantilla totalmente bilingüe.

Tras años de servicio como escuela al frente de la educación bilingüe, Camino Nuevo se ha convertido en una cantera bilingüe de la que otras escuelas pueden sacar provecho. Kylie Rector, Directora de Biliteracidad y Estudiantes EL de Camino Nuevo, dice que “el entusiasmo por invertir más en educación bilingüe” ha atraído a la escuela administradores de distintos distritos, desde San Diego hasta el norte de California.

No obstante, aunque se están reanudando programas bilingües y de inmersión en dos idiomas por todo el estado, en ningún lugar están creciendo lo suficientemente rápido como para cumplir con el objetivo del estado para 2030 de construir un sistema de al menos 1.600 programas de DLI para hacer que “la mitad de todos los estudiantes de Kínder a grado 12… participen en programas que lleven a la competencia en dos o más idiomas”. El año pasado, el estado dedicó 10 millones de dólares en nuevas subvenciones para poner en marcha nuevas escuelas de DLI; el estado calcula que con este dinero se crearán 55 programas nuevos.

Esto se debe, en parte, a que la prohibición durante dieciocho años de la mayoría de los programas bilingües en California prácticamente eliminó el mercado laboral para los maestros bilingües. Es por eso que los sistemas escolares de Kínder a grado 12 produjeron más graduados monolingües, cuyo idioma dominante fue el inglés, y por esta razón también los programas de formación de maestros bilingües del estado cerraron en gran medida.

Esto supone para los dirigentes de California el problema de la gallina y el huevo. No pueden aumentar las aulas bilingües en todo el estado sin más profesores bilingües, pero el sistema estatal de enseñanza primaria y secundaria sigue siendo mayoritariamente sólo en inglés y no está produciendo suficientes graduados bilingües para aumentar rápidamente la diversidad lingüística del profesorado del estado. Como resultado, el cuerpo docente de Kínder a grado 12 de California es mucho más blanco y monolingüe en su lengua materna, el inglés, que la población estudiantil primaria y secundaria de California. Sólo el 27 por ciento de los maestros de California habla una lengua distinta del inglés en casa, en comparación con el 40 por ciento de los alumnos de Kínder a grado 12 de California.

El aumento de la demanda de educadores bilingües también ha hecho que el personal de Camino Nuevo sea muy valioso en el sector de la educación pública de California. Algunos antiguos empleados de Camino Nuevo han acabado fundando sus propias escuelas bilingües, como Sue Park, fundadora de Yu Ming Public Charter School. Otros trabajan en escuelas del Distrito Escolar Unificado de Los Ángeles y otros distritos de California. Y otros trabajan en defensa de la educación en organizaciones sin fines de lucro como Great Public Schools Now, TNTP, Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, NewSchools y la Fundación Cesar Chavez.

La polinización cruzada del bilingüismo en el condado de San Diego

A sólo diez millas en carro del cruce fronterizo de San Ysidro entre Estados Unidos y México, el campus de Chula Vista Learning Community Charter School (CVLCC) es otro hervidero de bilingüismo. La escuela fue fundada por el Distrito Escolar Unificado de Chula Vista en 1998 como una forma de mantener las opciones bilingües una vez que llegó el mandato estatal de enseñar exclusivamente en inglés.

Eddie Caballero se incorporó a CVLCC un año después como profesor de quinto grado. “Fue un comienzo difícil”, asegura, ya que la escuela luchaba por centrar sus enfoques de instrucción académica y lingüística. Pero ya para 2004, la escuela se había unido en torno a una visión: poner énfasis adicional en las habilidades básicas de alfabetización temprana en ambos idiomas simultáneamente.

En 2005, Caballero se trasladó al Distrito Escolar Unificado de San Diego para trabajar en puestos administrativos. En 2008, varias familias de estudiantes EL se estaban organizando para firmar exenciones con el fin de iniciar un programa de educación bilingüe en Sherman Elementary, en la zona este de San Diego. La escuela necesitaba un educador bilingüe con experiencia; Caballero encajaba a la perfección. Estaba ansioso por utilizar lo que había aprendido en CVLCC para replicar la educación bilingüe de alta calidad, pero ahora a nivel de distrito.

Al igual que en CVLCC, “no tuvimos éxito inmediatamente”, dice Caballero. Avisa que cualquier programa de educación bilingüe no tendrá éxito automáticamente por el mero hecho de ser bilingüe. Con demasiada frecuencia, advierte, los responsables de los distritos piensan que pueden “reinventar” sus escuelas lanzando programas de DLI, “pero no, hay que implementarlo con cuidado”. Esto requiere una planeación cuidadosa en torno al plan de estudios, la dotación de personal, los esfuerzos de participación familiar y mucho más. Es por eso que, en 2016, Caballero contrató a Nicole Enriquez, ex maestra de CVLCC, para ser su subdirectora; ella asumió el papel de directora cuando él dejó el Distrito Escolar Unificado de San Diego.

Ahora, en 2024, Caballero está de vuelta como director general de CVLCC, que sigue sirviendo como motor para el ecosistema local de educación bilingüe. Precisa que los maestros bilingües suelen acudir a su escuela desde distritos cercanos con el objetivo de desarrollar su experiencia enseñando en entornos bilingües o de inmersión en dos idiomas. Sin embargo, muchos se van al cabo de cinco años, porque quedarse más tiempo les costaría la antigüedad contractual en los distritos donde empezaron su carrera.

“CVLCC es una escuela bilingüe ejemplar que no sólo tiene un plan de estudios cultural y lingüísticamente sensible, sino que también prepara la conciencia crítica global de los estudiantes a través de enfoques innovadores e impactantes”, precisa Cristina Alfaro. “En sus inicios… la llamábamos la Escuela de los Sueños”.

Reconstrucción

En los 26 años transcurridos desde que los votantes de California inauguraron la era monolingüe en su estado -y ocho años después de que acabaran con ella- está claro que el terreno de la opinión pública ha cambiado. Las encuestas realizadas antes del referéndum de la Proposición 58 de 2016 revelaban que más de dos tercios de los votantes latinos de California apoyaban la restauración de la educación bilingüe. 

Mientras tanto, una encuesta de Abriendo Puertas/Open Doors que tuvo lugar en el 2023 encontró que el 65 por ciento de las familias latinas “inscribirían a sus hijos en un programa bilingüe si estuviera disponible”. En otra encuesta realizada en 2023 entre californianos mayoritariamente hispanohablantes, Keep Learning California descubrió que el 59 por ciento de los encuestados consideraba el “acceso a programas bilingües” una prioridad “esencial” o “alta” para sus familias.

Baluartes bilingües como CVLCC y Camino Nuevo son recursos esenciales para ayudar a que esa esperanza sea realista para más de esas familias. “Soy chicana de segunda generación”, dice la directora Enríquez de la escuela Sherman. “Y esta generación de padres dice cosas como: ‘Yo nunca tuve esta oportunidad cuando era niño. Ojalá pudiera hablar más español. Quiero que mis hijos puedan ser bilingües, que tengan la oportunidad que yo nunca tuve’. ¡Y yo también soy así! Yo traje a mis hijos aquí, a través de Sherman, para que pudieran ser bilingües”.

California is, by almost every measure, one of the United States’ most diverse and vibrant states. The country’s most populous state, it also has no majority racial or ethnic group. 

The combination of public investments in the University of California system and the state’s welcoming approach to immigration have created a dynamic, technology-infused economy that is the largest of any U.S. state. Its diverse public education system also reflects that dynamism, serving more English learners (ELs) than schools in any other state. In 2021, California enrolled more K–12 ELs than Indiana enrolled students. 

And yet, from 1998 to 2016, the state’s schools belied its cosmopolitan reputation, enacting an English-only mandate for ELs amid a late-1990s surge in anxiety about immigration. Unsurprisingly, the policy did little to change the state’s demographic trajectory — and even less to improve student learning. 

That’s why California voters passed Proposition 58 in 2016, a referendum that reopened the possibility of bilingual education for California’s ELs. Supporters sold the measure as an opportunity for the state to deliver a multilingual school system befitting its reputation as a plural and diverse society preparing students to succeed in the global economy. 

This is the first in The 74‘s series on California’s effort to build a bilingual education system worthy of its culturally diverse reputation. 

Eight years after Prop. 58’s passage, progress towards that vision has been uneven. Nearly two decades of actively subtracting languages from the state’s classrooms created myriad challenges. And yet, the state’s embrace of bilingualism has brought public narratives closer to the research consensus on the benefits of learning multiple languages. California launched the now-national Seal of Biliteracy, which provides public recognition for K–12 graduates who demonstrate proficiency in more than one language. Efforts like these are changing California’s public discourse around languages and increasing demand for bilingual learning opportunities. 

Part 1: An 18- year ban on Bilingual Education in California begins

When Proposition 227 made California an English-only state in 1998, some polling suggested that roughly half of Latino voters supported the move. Subsequent exit polls suggested a somewhat more complicated story, but the measure passed all the same. 

The number of ELs in bilingual education classrooms dropped by nearly 70 percent from 1998 to 2003. While the new English-only policy permitted communities to offer bilingual education if enough ELs’ parents “opted out” of English-only education, only a small fraction of schools were able to meet that threshold. Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and other non-English languages vanished from schools. 

But the state’s decision didn’t erase many Californians’ desire to have their children’s emerging bilingual abilities recognized and cultivated at school. Persistent demand from Latino parents launched and/or maintained bilingual and DLI programs, such as Los Angeles’ Camino Nuevo Charter Academy’s Burlington campus. 

The school opened in 2000; community interest in bilingualism pushed leaders to prioritize students’ development in both English and Spanish. “We were getting kids that were coming from programs that were all over the city,” says former Camino Nuevo CEO Ana Ponce. “And parents wanted their kids to keep their native language. We were not bound by Proposition 227’s limitations because we were a charter, so we embarked on exploring different bilingual education models.” 

The school settled on a DLI model that begins with a majority of instruction in Spanish and gradually increases English-language instruction until the languages are evenly balanced in later elementary grades. Decades later, the Central Los Angeles campus effervesces with chatter swinging from Spanish to English. Fourth-graders pair off to practice division problems in math class to decide who goes first by playing Rock, Paper, Scissors or Piedra, Papel, Tijeras. 

“I hope that God keeps these schools from disappearing, because they really help our children,” says 13-year Camino Nuevo parent Maribel Martinez in Spanish. “I don’t want to talk down the district’s schools, they also teach well, but their big mistake was cutting bilingual education…two languages are worth so much.” 

Some of that value is academic. Research suggests that dual language immersion programs are the best way to support young, non-native English speakers in U.S. schools. But Camino parents say that this is only one of the reasons they prize their children’s emerging Spanish and English skills. Gloribel Reyes’ first child started at the school twenty years ago and her youngest is enrolled in fourth grade. “It’s very important that the children learn both Spanish and English,” she says in Spanish, “because if they only learn English, they forget their own language, the language their parents speak. Some of their parents don’t speak English—how can we speak with them?”

Martinez agrees—and notes that the school’s bilingualism makes it easier for Spanish-dominant families to engage with teachers and staff. That is, decades of hiring to staff Burlington’s DLI program have produced a fully bilingual staff. 

After years of serving as a bilingual outpost, Camino Nuevo has become a bilingual quarry for other schools to mine. Kylie Rector, Camino Nuevo’s Director of Biliteracy and English Learners, says that “the buzz to invest more in bilingual education” has brought administrators from districts from San Diego to Northern California to the school. 

Still, while bilingual and dual language immersion (DLI) programs are relaunching across the state, they are not growing anywhere fast enough to meet the state’s 2030 goal of building a system of at least 1,600 DLI programs to have “half of all K–12 students…participate in programs leading to proficiency in two or more languages.” Last year, the state devoted $10 million in new grant support for launching new DLI schools — the state estimates it will produce 55 new programs. 

This is partly because California’s eighteen-year ban on most bilingual programs also flatlined the job market for bilingual teachers. This meant that K–12 school systems produced more monolingual, English-dominant graduates, and it meant that the state’s bilingual teacher training programs largely shuttered. 

This presents California leaders with a chicken-and-egg problem. They cannot grow bilingual classrooms around the state without more bilingual teachers, but the state’s K–12 system remains mostly English-only and is not producing enough bilingual graduates to rapidly grow the linguistic diversity of the state’s teaching force. As a result, California’s K–12 teaching force is much whiter and more native English-speaking monolingual than California’s K–12 student body. Just 27 percent of California teachers speak a non-English language at home, compared to 40 percent of California K–12 students. 

The increased demand for bilingual educators has also made Camino Nuevo staff valuable across California’s public education sector. Some erstwhile Camino Nuevo employees have gone on to launch dual language schools of their own, like Yu Ming Public Charter School founder Sue Park. Others are working in schools across LAUSD and other California districts. Still others are working in education advocacy at non-profit organizations like Great Public Schools Now, TNTP, Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, NewSchools, and the Cesar Chavez Foundation. 

Cross-Pollinating Bilingualism in San Diego County

Just a ten mile drive from the U.S.-Mexico San Ysidro border crossing, Chula Vista Learning Community Charter School’s (CVLCC) campus is another hotbed of bilingualism. The school was founded by the Chula Vista Unified School District in 1998 as a way to maintain bilingual options once the state’s English-only mandate arrived. 

Eddie Caballero joined CVLCC a year later as a 5th grade teacher. “It was a rough start,” he says, as the school struggled to focus its academic and linguistic instructional approaches. But by 2004, the school had coalesced around a vision — putting extra campus emphasis on foundational early literacy skills in both languages simultaneously. 

In 2005, Caballero moved to San Diego Unified School District to work in administrative roles. In 2008, a number of families of ELs were organizing to sign waivers to start a bilingual education program at Sherman Elementary, on San Diego’s east side. The school needed an experienced bilingual educator; Caballero was a natural fit. He was eager to use what he’d learned at CVLCC to replicate high-quality bilingual education — now in a district setting. 

Just as at CVLCC, “We didn’t see success immediately,” Caballero says. He warns that just any bilingual education program won’t automatically succeed just by virtue of being bilingual. Too often, he warns, district leaders think they can “rebrand” their schools by launching DLI programs, “but no, you have to implement it carefully.” This requires careful planning around curriculum, staffing, family engagement efforts, and much more. That’s why, in 2016, Caballero hired former CVLCC teacher Nicole Enriquez to be his assistant principal; she stepped in as principal when he left San Diego Unified. 

Now, in 2024, Caballero is back as CVLCC’s CEO, which continues to serve as a flywheel for the local bilingual education ecosystem. He says that bilingual teachers often come to his school from nearby districts with the goal of developing their expertise teaching in bilingual or DLI settings. However, many leave after five years, because staying longer would cost them contractual seniority back in the districts where they began their careers. 

“CVLCC is an exemplary dual language school that not only has a culturally and linguistically responsive curriculum—but also prepares students’ global critical consciousness through innovative and impactful approaches,” says Cristina Alfaro. “At its inception…we called it the Dream School.”

Building Back

In the 26 years since California voters launched their state’s monolingual era — and eight years since they ended it — it’s clear that the ground of public opinion has shifted. Polling before the 2016 Proposition 58 referendum found that more than two-thirds of California Latino voters supported restoring bilingual education. 

Meanwhile, a 2023 Abriendo Puertas/Open Doors survey found that 65% of Latino families “would enroll their children in a bilingual program if it were available.” In a separate 2023 poll of mostly Spanish-dominant Californians, Keep Learning California found that 59% of respondents listed “access to bilingual programs” as an “essential” or “high” priority for their families. 

Bilingual strongholds like CVLCC and Camino Nuevo are essential resources for helping make that hope realistic for more of those families. “I’m second-generation Chicana,” says Sherman principal Enriquez. “And this generation of parents says things like, ‘I never got this opportunity as a kid. I wish that I could speak more Spanish. I want my kids to be able to be bilingual, to get the opportunity that I never had.’ And I’m that parent too! I brought my kids here, through Sherman, so they could be bilingual.”

Getting students hooked on classic games is one way Principal Sham Bevel has tried to soothe their separation anxiety after the district banned cellphones two years ago. At Bayside, students must keep the devices in their lockers during school hours.

But convincing kids there’s something better than posting TikTok videos or browsing friends’ Instagram posts is an ongoing struggle.

“Cellphones are to children what the blanket was to Linus,” Bevel quipped.

Cellphone bans during school hours have gained momentum in recent months, with states like Virginia, Ohio and  South Carolina taking action and the Los Angeles and New York districts moving in that direction.

But schools may find that deciding to remove phones is the easy part. The real test is finding a way to secure and store them that both staff and families find acceptable. Complete bans leave some parents nervous, but partial restrictions often put teachers in the uncomfortable position of policing the rules during valuable class time. 

“All of these have pluses and minuses,” said Todd Reid, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education. The agency is gathering public comments on how best to implement Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s July 9 executive order to have phone restrictions in place by Jan 1. Officials will release guidance in mid-September. “All of them really come down to how the policies are implemented.”

One approach to banning phones, storing them in students’ lockers, can be hard to enforce, said Kim Whitman, a co-founder of the Phone-Free Schools Movement.

“Teachers say that students ask to go to the bathroom and then go get their phones,” she said. “It still allows negative activities to happen between classes — cyberbullying, planning fights and others videoing them.” 

Sheila Kelly, a board member for Arlington Parents for Education, a Virginia advocacy group, raised another practical issue: Not all schools have lockers. What’s most important to her is that schools restrict phone use not just in class, but during breaks.

“It’s during those in-between times … that students can experience the mental health advantages of phone-free interactions, allowing them to grow socially and emotionally,” she said.

‘Loopholes’ 

A growing number of schools say Yondr pouches, which cost about $25 per student, accomplish that goal. 

The neoprene sleeves, often used at live music and comedy events, lock with a magnetic closure and can be reopened with a device usually mounted near a school exit. Districts among the company’s top customers include Cincinnati and Nashville, according to GovSpend, a data company. 

In June, Delaware Gov. John Carney signed a budget that includes $250,000 for a Yondr pilot program in middle and high schools this fall. Last year, the company earned $3 million in government contracts — doubling its business from 2022, GovSpend shows.

In New York City, where Chancellor David Banks is currently hammering out the details of a ban expected next year, some teachers prefer Yondr because it takes them out of the enforcement business: Students lock up their phones in a pouch when they come to school in the morning and can’t remove them until they leave in the afternoon.

Vinny Corletta, a Bronx English teacher, used to work in a school where teachers employed incentives to discourage phone use. Kids could rack up points for prizes — from pencils to  sneakers. But frequent reminders still took time away from instruction.

“I’m a teacher; I don’t want to hold 30 cellphones for students all day,.” he said. 

Now he teaches at Middle School 137, where students put their phones in a Yondr pouch when they arrive and then store them in their backpacks. He thinks that even if they can’t access their phones, students prefer having them close by rather than in a locker or classroom storage container.

But no method is foolproof. Students have been known to disable Yondr locks or even surrender a dead older phone while stowing their current model in a backpack. 

“Kids are so smart — sometimes more than adults — and always find loopholes,” said Elmer Roldan, executive director of Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, a nonprofit that provides support services to students in low-income schools. 

He’s worried about students being “policied, patrolled and punished” for violations, recalling the Los Angeles district’s failed iPad rollout in 2013. Students easily broke through the security firewall and used the iPads to play online games like Subway Surfers and Temple Run. The district stopped allowing students to take them home.

“I thought the district should’ve hired those kids … to teach district staff about technology security,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if schools exhaust their energy trying to implement this ban.”

Los Angeles officials have until October to specify how they’ll enforce a ban the board approved in June. 

But some L.A. students think adults have blown the issue out of proportion. Alejandro Casillas, who will enter 11th grade at Hamilton High School in Los Angeles this fall, said teachers already confiscate phones if they see them more than once during class or offer extra credit to limit use. He gave up his phone once to get the additional points. 

“I think this image of phones being a distraction is over-exaggerated,” he said. “If the district were to take away cellphones, I think some students would still be distracted.”

Students might think they’re good at multitasking, but experts say that allowing them access to phones in class prevents them from focusing deeply on their lessons. Research also points to increases in test scores following phone bans.

Israel Beltran, a rising sophomore at Mendez High School, said he doesn’t use his phone in class except when teachers allow it during breaks. At that point, he often turns to funny videos on YouTube. But the idea of a total ban makes him feel like he’s back in elementary school. 

“When we had a toy or something we shouldn’t bring to school, they usually would take it away from us and give it back at the end of the day,” he said. 

‘A lifeline’

Parents have been among the most divided over districts’ efforts to ban students’ phones. The Phone-Free Schools Movement has a team of 80 ambassadors across the country, mostly parents who track district policies and promote cellphone bans for students in their communities. 

But a recent national survey from the National Parents Union showed that while parents support “reasonable limits” on use, a majority — 56% — think students should occasionally have access during school hours.

That’s especially true for parents whose children have disabilities or health issues.

In Los Angeles, Ariel Harman-Holmes doesn’t want an across-the-board ban. She was afraid her son, who will enter sixth grade at the Science Academy STEM Magnet this fall, would lose a phone. So she gave him an Apple Watch, with its own number and data plan. With ADHD and a condition called face blindness, he sometimes can’t recognize people or even familiar places — a limitation that was especially stressful when people wore masks during the pandemic. 

“He couldn’t even tell who was an adult and who was a child. He didn’t know who to trust,” she said. One day he used his watch to call his parents, who helped him get reoriented. Now she plans to have use of the watch written into his special education plan as an accommodation. “I feel like kids with certain disorders or disabilities, like autism, anxiety, possibly depression, need a lifeline to their parents.”

Regardless of which method districts adopt, parents have found that enforcement can be inconsistent. 

Victoria Gordon, whose son Malik attends Republic High School, a Nashville charter, supports leaders’ efforts to minimize use during class. The school’s official policy prohibits students from accessing social media during school hours. But visiting one day last year, she saw her son using his phone in class.  Sometimes, she glimpses photos he posts during school hours.

“Why is my child on Instagram at 10 o’clock in the morning?” she asked. “They’re not implementing what they’re saying.”

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At the time, principals with Boston Impact Initiative were finalizing the firm’s annual impact assessment of AllHere, a 2016 startup that offered a tech-driven solution to chronic student absences. Officials with the equity-focused investment firm were left with an impression that was, it turns out, far from reality. 

“There were conversations with the company and it was doing really well,” CEO Betty Francisco told The 74 in a brief telephone conversation earlier this month.  

AllHere was actually on the verge of collapse and now, Francisco is questioning whether her firm may have been played. 

“We are trying to also understand what happened,” she said of the news that the company, the recipient of some $12 million in investor capital and much praise for being an AI education innovator, was in serious straits. Last month, a majority of its staff were furloughed, AllHere announced on its website; the ambitious AI chatbot that it built for the Los Angeles Unified School District was unplugged and its founder and chief executive officer, Joanna Smith-Griffin, was out of a job. 

Francisco said her firm was a minor player in AllHere’s venture capital fundraising and that the larger, institutional investors were now working with the company “to figure out the plan.” 

What that plan might be — and what necessitated it in the first place — remains a mystery. In the month since The 74 first reported on the company’s downfall, key figures in AllHere’s rise have gone underground. The 74 sought comments from more than a dozen company officials, including its founder, investors at prominent venture capital firms and members of its board of directors. None, aside from Francisco, would speak publicly about the company. 

It’s a major shift for AllHere’s backers, many of whom work at impact investment firms that fund startups through a social justice lens. These figures were once outspoken about AllHere and their shared place in the race to inject AI into schools. Among those who have gone silent is Andrew Parker of the firm Spero Ventures, whose fundraising efforts landed him a seat on AllHere’s board of directors. In a 2021 blog post, he described AllHere’s AI-powered answer to chronic absenteeism, one of the pandemic’s most lasting impacts, as a profound innovation in the way schools communicate with parents. The company, he boasted, was a smart bet. 

“Being this primary conduit of communication is a terrific business opportunity, and it’s how AllHere will thrive in the years to come,” wrote Parker, who declined to comment for this story.

AllHere’s latest financial woes aren’t the first time that Smith-Griffin felt the pressure of a company mission gone wrong. Shortly after Boston-based AllHere emerged from a startup incubator at Harvard University, where Smith-Griffin was enrolled, its technological approach to bolster student attendance fell flat. 

“The first iteration of AllHere failed spectacularly,” Smith-Griffin, a former Boston charter school teacher and family engagement director, said in a 2017 interview on a Harvard Innovation Labs podcast. “And it was one of the best things that could have happened to us.” 

In response to those early startup woes, Smith-Griffin changed course. She ditched her initial idea of using data to create lists for teachers of the students most likely to become chronically absent — a service that educators told her wasn’t much help — and pivoted to an automated text messaging service that sent personally tailored “nudges” to parents in the guise of a friendly chatbot. 

The $6 million chatbot that it would eventually build for L.A. schools — an animated sun named “Ed” meant to interact individually with and accelerate the learning of some 540,000 students — was in a different class entirely. AllHere, according to a former employee-turned-whistleblower, put students’ personal information at risk by taking shortcuts to meet the school district’s ambitious demands.

Meanwhile, AllHere’s investors publicly touted that it was the infusion of cash and leadership from altruistically inclined impact firms that transformed the company from one with an under-baked product to an AI innovator in the K-12 space. An examination of these firms’ outsized role suggests that AllHere’s venture-influenced embrace of artificial intelligence may have led it to fail once again — this time on a much grander scale. 

‘Disturbed by the allegations’ 

Reached by phone, four members of the company’s board of directors — including several with extensive and well-known education policy credentials — declined to comment for this story. In fact, much of the information about AllHere’s unraveling has been filtered through an unusual channel: The school district it left in a lurch. 

It was an L.A. Unified district spokesperson who first told news outlets that Smith-Griffin was no longer with AllHere and that the company was up for sale. Smith-Griffin, who records show lives in North Carolina, couldn’t be reached for comment. 

Investigators with the district’s independent inspector general’s office have launched an inquiry into the former AllHere executive’s claims that the company misused L.A. students’ personal data and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho last week proposed a task force to find out what went wrong. The inquiry, Carvalho said, will dig into the district’s procurement process and claims the chatbot handled students’ personal information in ways that violated district policy and basic data privacy principles. 

“I’m disturbed by the allegations,” Carvalho said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times while speaking simultaneously on AllHere’s behalf. 

“We’ve had — our team has had — conversations with the company about those allegations,” Carvalho said. “The company has denied those allegations.” 

The task force, an LAUSD spokesperson said in a statement, will create a framework for the district to “continue leveraging technology responsibly.” AllHere, which has been paid about $3 million so far, won the five-year contract after a competitive bidding process, the spokesperson said, and was selected “because it was most aligned” with the district’s vision for the chatbot and “was an established educational technology company focused on personalized and interactive AI solutions to improve student attendance.” 

‘A truly amazing board’

After the pandemic shuttered in-person learning nationally and student absences surged to unprecedented highs, Rethink Education, an ed tech-focused impact investment firm that provided early capital to AllHere, saw an opening. A case study by Impact Capital Managers says that Rethink provided the company with more than cash flow; it oversaw a “strategic transition,” specifically “a pivot towards an AI chatbot” that observers would later say was outside the scope of AllHere’s capabilities.

Rethink Education partner Ebony Brown offered AllHere critical connections to influential education players and helped it build “a truly amazing board” of directors, according to a 2021 blog post by Matt Greenfield, Rethink’s managing partner. She successfully recruited Jeff Livingston, a former senior vice president at McGraw-Hill Education and a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation consultant, and Janice Jackson, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. 

“Ebony got introductions to several former superintendents of large districts, secured a meeting with Janice, and delivered an impassioned and ultimately successful pitch,” Greenfield wrote. The addition of Livingston and Jackson to the AllHere board was strategic, according to the case study, noting that they “have been instrumental in securing deals with major school districts and in developing a customer acquisition playbook to expand the company’s nationwide presence.” 

The extent to which board members’ helped AllHere land the LAUSD contract is unclear. Livingston and Jackson both declined to provide comment for this story. Greenfield and Brown didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Brown, who also gained a seat on AllHere’s board, then sought to improve the company’s visibility, helping Smith-Griffin “secure a spot as the featured entrepreneur” on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for education leaders in 2021. A year later, Smith-Griffin served as a Forbes 30 Under 30 judge alongside Purdue University president and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and Deborah Quazzo, a managing partner at the investment company GSV Ventures. 

GSV is heavily involved in education technology companies. In April, Smith-Griffin and Carvalho unveiled the district’s buzzed-about chatbot at the high-profile annual conference in San Diego co-hosted by the venture firm and Arizona State University.

“The Forbes profile,” Greenfield’s post notes, “in turn led to inbound interest from venture capitalists, multiple term sheets [documents outlining the terms under which VCs fund startups] and a round” of investments totaling more than $8 million. 

On June 12, just two days before AllHere announced that it had furloughed most of its staff, the company got bad news from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Officials rejected AllHere’s patent application for a chatbot that addressed student absenteeism, finding that the tool didn’t present eligible technological advancements. 

The office wrote: “No inventive concept exists sufficient to transform the abstract idea of ‘student monitoring’ into a patent-eligible application of that idea.” 

LAUSD last month shut down the chatbot after the firm hired to build it lost its CEO and furloughed workers. District officials said they would try to salvage the $6 million project.

Undeterred, the Los Angeles Unified school board a few days later on June 18 passed a resolution to build another AI-powered web portal, one where parents can access data on school budgets and student achievement.

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But educators and families said the district should focus on academics and social services before taking on any new tech projects — and address lingering issues around the botched rollout as well as ongoing concerns over data security.

Evelyn Aleman, founder of Our Voice, a parents’ group which advocates for LA Unified’s low-income and Spanish-speaking families, said the district would do better to address a literacy crisis and epidemic of homeless students, rather than rush to adopt new technology.

“You have the administration rolling out the latest technology, but the parents that I’m working with have no clue what that’s all about,” said Aleman.

Many families don’t even have internet service to access the new AI-powered tools, Aleman said. “Parents are advocating for very fundamental issues like literacy, school safety, and mental health resources,” she said.

LA Unified in March distinguished itself by announcing the ambitious rollout of its new, AI-powered chatbot, an animated sun named “Ed,” becoming the first school district in the nation to deploy artificial intelligence technology at scale for families.

Superintendent Aberto Carvalho hailed the high-profile effort as a “game changer” that would allow families unprecedented access to student data and school information, and could eventually lead to the automated development of individualized lessons and aid instruction.

But just three months later, AllHere announced that its CEO had left and it had furloughed most of its workers due to financial problems. LAUSD immediately pulled the signature Ed chatbot offline, district officials said, because there was no AllHere staff available to supervise it.

LAUSD officials said the district had already paid the company about $3 million on a five-year, $6 million contract at the time of Ed’s shutdown. The district is trying to bring the pricey chatbot back to life, the officials said, but they would not say when it might be ready.

LAUSD’s inspector general’s office is investigating claims that AllHere violated data privacy rules.

Lester Garcia, an advisor for government relations at Service Employees International Union Local 99, which represents teachers’ assistants and other LAUSD school staff, said school employees and union officials are concerned private data may have been compromised.

“I think there are a lot more questions than there are answers around why LAUSD fast-tracked this AI system to begin with,” Garcia said.

Dan Chang, a math teacher at James Madison Middle School and candidate in LA Unified’s upcoming school board race this fall, said the Ed chatbot was never very useful for schools and students, even when it was up and running.

Chang, whose son attends another LAUSD middle school, said that the Ed chatbot mostly provided parents with generalized information that could be found elsewhere on the district’s web site.

“As a teacher, the use case for what it was initially scoped to do just seemed very marginal,” said Chang.

A better use of AI, Chang said, would be to harness the technology so teachers can use it.

Chang said AI could be used to analyze student assessment data, providing teachers with unprecedented insights into academic progress. The information could be used to inform lessons and be shared with parents at teacher conferences, he said.

But Chang said the spectacular failure of the Ed program could discourage schools from taking on such innovations. “It’s going to create a chilling effect for educators who want to try new technologies,” he said. “And these are things that could really help students.”

Despite problems with LAUSD’s adoption of AI technology for its Ed program, the district will continue to look for ways to use AI, LA Unified officials said.

LA Unified school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin said the district is already working on an AI-powered budgeting tool that will track income and spending at schools and PTA organizations, and connect spending patterns to student outcomes.

Along with board member Nick Melvoin, Ortiz Franklin last month introduced and passed a resolution for the district to construct the AI-powered budgeting tool for use next year, and to make the budget information assembled by the tool publicly available on a district web page.

Ortiz Franklin said the district’s troubled partnership with AllHere on the Ed chatbot presents a learning opportunity for future AI projects. “We can apply lessons learned from our current interactions with AI vendors to ensure we’re making the best decisions for students,” she said.

University of Southern California education professor Stephen Aguilar, who studies schools’ use of AI at USC’s Center for Generative AI and Society, said that, despite the difficult rollout of Ed, Los Angeles – and other districts across the country – will eventually embrace AI.

“Districts are a little bit too quick to want to incorporate AI into the classroom without even knowing what it can do yet,” said Aguilar “There’s this rush to be innovative that comes with risks, and one of those risks is trying out untested technologies.”

The Improving Special Education Resolution, aimed at making services better for special needs children, was proposed by members of the Community Advisory Committee, a panel of about 20 parents, teachers, and community members. Members called for an increase in information available to parents and a wider range of services for students. 

When CAC members proposed the resolution a year ago, the district attempted to remove members advocating for special education, parents charge. Although the attempt did not succeed, parents said the move calls into question the district’s priorities and willingness to work with them.  

“I think that especially under superintendent (Alberto) Carvalho, they are cracking down on attempts to empower families to ask for what they want,” said Ariel Harman-Holmes, CAC chair and parent of a special needs child. “We used to have, as a committee, excellent open communication with…[the district]…now all we get is canned commentary where it’s clear they have a very small number of talking points.”

Carl Petersen, a father and CAC member said he has struggled to to get his daughters the help they need in LAUSD’s special education programs. 

Petersen’s wife visited their daughter’s classroom while preparing for a lawsuit against the school and was disturbed by what she found. 

“Basically, the teacher just put the special ed kids in the back and said, ‘Here, play,’ and taught the class without them. It’s not inclusion just because they were sitting in the same classroom.”

Members of the CAC charge that such challenges have been an ongoing issue and have only gotten worse after the proposed resolution. 

An LAUSD spokesperson declined to comment on the parents’ allegations, referring a reporter to the Office of ADA compliance and the district’s special education plan. 

The charges come just three years after a lawsuit was brought against LAUSD by parents for neglecting students with disabilities during online learning. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Education found that over 66,000 students were affected.

LAUSD rolled out a compensatory plan the following year to provide students with extra services. However, parents are still dissatisfied, with many claiming services promised to their students had yet to be received.

Advocates say resources in the wake of these two events have been increasingly limited, even requiring parents to file Public Records Act requests for basic information, said Harman-Holmes.

Lisa Mosko, a former LAUSD parent, and founder of Speducational, an organization encouraging parents to speak up for their children, said that at a recent meeting she attended a student was denied access to a program she ultimately qualified for. 

After the parents pushed back and hired a lawyer, Mosko said, the child was admitted to the program. 

“There’s a lot of misinformation literally given at IEP’s (Individualized Education Program),” said Mosko. “That parent (had to) now go through due process for her child’s accessibility. It comes down to cost saving…because they know only a certain number of parents will go to due process.” 

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

But for many families at 112th St. S.T.E.A.M. Academy in Watts, a pair of clean pants and a shirt is such a struggle that it has become one of the main contributors to chronic absenteeism, which is when students miss 15 or more days or classes. 

“Children can be brutally honest sometimes,” said principal Jose Hernandez. “…When kids come with dirty or smelly clothes, the other kids will definitely point it out to them,” making them targets of bullying.

For years, Hernandez and his staff have been helping families work through this issue. Hernandez once helped a family without a working washer by providing clothing for their child. He has also given families money for their needs, including for laundry expenses. 

In May, the school was one 20 that received a new washing machine and dryer from the Rams NFL football team and the Think Watts Foundation; along with $2 million in clothing to schools serving low income students. Earlier this year, LAUSD also announced a mobile laundry service for homeless students as part of the district’s attempt to combat chronic absenteeism. 

Hernandez hopes the machines will ease the pressure on parents and make it easier for students to return to school. 

In an interview with LA School Report, Hernandez talked about his challenging upbringing and how it shapes his commitment to his students; and why small things, like a washing machine, can create a big impact.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

LA School Report: What’s your relationship with 112th St. S.T.E.A.M. Academy? 

Jose Hernandez: I grew up very near Watts, just two miles from where I’m teaching now. Many of the children here are going through situations similar to what I experienced as a child. I grew up in a sometimes dysfunctional household. My father was an alcoholic, while my mom, bless her soul, always worked really hard to make sure we had a roof over our heads and proper clothing for school. My dad was in and out of the picture because of his alcoholism. However, when I was 13, he stopped drinking, got a stable job, and improved his ways, which helped me have a somewhat normal upbringing during my teenage years.

When I see my students coming to school, I see myself and my sisters in all of these kids. So when someone tells me, “Mr. Hernandez, this kid has a problem and will not learn,” they’re talking about me. I don’t want to hear that at 112, and I’ll be unapologetic about it. I’ll tell them, “Don’t ever say that one kid at my school cannot learn or cannot behave. The problem is with us. We need to fix it so that he can learn and behave.” Because if you’re talking about him, you’re talking about me. At 112, that’s my relationship with these kids. I say it again and again: At 112, we are here to serve.

Tell us about your school demographic.  

My school community’s demographics are approximately 69% Latino students and about 31% African American students. Over 95% of my students come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. The school is also fed by the Nickerson Gardens housing projects, the second-largest housing project west of the Mississippi River. Many of my kids live in the projects often for generations, and they come with a lot of baggage. They’ve seen things that many of us can only imagine and more.

At 112, we constantly battle chronic absenteeism and strive to foster empathy among our students, ensuring they support and are not mean to one another. This is a daily effort. We build their empathetic side at school, but they return to the community and hear other influences, making it an uphill battle, like fighting against the current.

Despite the challenges, we have wonderful families here who value education. They want their children to use education as a stepping stone to move to more affluent neighborhoods. Many see education as a means of moving out of the projects.

How does not having clean clothes contribute to chronic absenteeism?

Students and children can be brutally honest sometimes, and when kids come with dirty or smelly clothes, the other kids will definitely point it out to them. They’re not going to sugarcoat it. They’ll definitely just say, “Why do your clothes smell so bad?” or “Why are your clothes always dirty?” This definitely impacts students’ self-confidence, making it an environment where kids don’t want to be. Why would you want to be in a place where people make you feel bad about yourself? This is definitely a contributing factor to kids not wanting to be in school.

Especially as kids move up the grades, this becomes more significant. At our school, we have classes from Transitional Kindergarten all the way up to fifth grade. First graders when they are told they’re stinky or something like that, but they usually just blow it off and keep playing. But a fourth grader or a fifth grader who hears that they’re clothes are stinky or soiled is going to think twice about it. At that age, they hold what their peers say in very high regard.

Could you provide an example to help better understand the problem these families face?

I had a situation where a particular family in my community had no washer. I gave the kid clothing because I didn’t want him to be bullied or made to feel bad by his classmates. I talked to the mom, and she shared with me that her washer wasn’t running, so I offered to try to get it fixed for her.

I got a technician and paid him personally for it to get it fixed. 

The technician went into the house to check the unit, and later he called me and said, “Mr. Hernandez, I checked the unit, but to fix it, I need to order a specific part that costs over $350. However, I must be honest with you, even if I change that part, there’s no guarantee it will run for a long period because the unit is full of roaches. When I opened it up, there were a lot of roaches, and I don’t know if they were eating at the connections or what. I don’t want to take your money and provide a temporary fix because, two or three months from now, you’ll be in the same situation due to the roach problem.”

That’s very difficult to hear. It’s hard. So, we’ve been working with that particular family to try to schedule them to use our new washer and dryer when it is installed. In the meantime, we’ve working on getting her to a laundromat.  

How did the school handle these issues before the LA Rams and the Think Watts Foundation donated the washing machine set?

That’s a two-part answer. First, we try to ensure that the children have adequate clothing for school to build up their confidence. Second, we talk to the kids who are around them or who might be making them feel uncomfortable, encouraging them to be more empathetic towards their classmates to prevent them from hurting others’ feelings. Maybe they don’t mean to, but it’s important that they don’t continue to hurt these kids’ feelings.

We have some donated items here at the school, and we often make sure to change them out for the clothing they are wearing. They take both the clean clothes we’ve given them and their old clothes back home. Additionally, we reach out to the parents to find out the actual issue, such as why “little Jose” is coming to school in soiled clothing. We try to get to the root of the problem. Sometimes we hear stories like, “We don’t have a washer and dryer right now,” or “We’re not getting the check, so finances are tight and we don’t have money for the laundromat,” or “Someone is sick and can’t get out of bed or the wheelchair to go to the laundromat around the corner to clean the clothes.” Sometimes I’ll visit a family and donate $20 or $30 so they can get at least a few loads of laundry done and dried, alleviating the problem for that week. 

What is this going to look like when it opens? 

Access is going to be limited because we can’t have everybody come in and use it. With wear and tear, things will eventually break down. However, we will have a system in place. I’ve been discussing it with my team, though nothing is set in stone yet. It will be appointment-only and managed through our Parent Center, which serves as our community liaison center. 

An employee will oversee the process to ensure proper use of the machines. This oversight is crucial for maintaining their functionality. Access won’t be open to everyone; there needs to be a structured system. I will also incorporate teacher input since they know the students best and work closely with them daily.

Is it going to be free? 

Currently, it’s completely free. We have enough detergent for several months and are conducting a recycling program at the school site. The funds generated from recycling will be used to purchase more detergent and support the Wellness Center’s resources for the washer and dryer.

Luis’s mother said the boy stopped socializing after his fourth grade class at his Los Angeles Unified school in Southeast L.A. shut down. She asked that the family not be identified in order to protect her son. 

He began having behavioral issues. He fell way behind in his academics — all after not receiving his mandated services of behavior, speech, and occupational therapies or his one-on-one aid over Zoom. 

Now back in school, Luis needs two years of missed services to catch up, said his mother.

“He needs these services again as soon as possible,” said Luis’s mother.  “I have no other options.” 

Hopefully, Luis will soon get the services he needs. 

LAUSD agreed to provide these services to Luis and more than 66,000 district students with disabilities in a May resolution with the federal Office of Civil Rights after an investigation revealed students were not provided federally-mandated services during the pandemic.

The broadly-worded nine page agreement calls for the district to create a plan providing students the compensatory services, staff training and ongoing communication with parents on the plan’s status. 

Concerned about how the district’s Special Education Division will implement the services, disability rights lawyers, advocates and parents offered ideas on what LAUSD needs to provide to the students — including mental health services, more special education teachers, more staff training, better transportation to services and a bigger special education budget.

“I’m concerned [the resolution] is a way for the district to look compliant without fixing root issues,” said Jill Rowland, Education Program Director at the Alliance for Children’s Rights, which advocates for the rights of foster care youth in schools in California.  

“We need transportation support to get kids to the providers at centers outside of their schools,” she said. “We need translation services to help students and families who don’t speak fluent English. There’s also already such a shortage of staff, especially for students with disabilities.”

The agreement also calls for L.A. Unified to provide ‘compensatory services’ to students with disabilities, which means the district has acknowledged claims they denied a free and appropriate public education to some students during the pandemic. 

L.A. special education lawyer Chris Eisenberg said the resolution is another tool for lawyers, advocates, and parents to use in holding LAUSD accountable to provide students’ services. 

“I’m hoping that this admission from LAUSD will push them in a better direction,” said Eisenberg “With people breathing down their necks, now they will have to be held accountable to the students.” 

LAUSD’s severe teacher shortage is particularly acute among special education teachers. The number of students with disabilities in California has been increasing since 2015 and the special education teacher shortage has gotten worse each year. As of 2021, students with disabilities make up 13% of the district’s population.

Special education services are also one of the biggest costs for the district. In 2016, the cost to educate students with disabilities was over $8,000 more per student than that of a general education student. 

“The district has always been concerned with spending too much on special education,” said Valerie Vanaman, a special education attorney who has been critical of the district’s treatment of these students during the pandemic. 

Advocates and parents say they want more funds allocated to special education services from the influx of money that the district received for pandemic relief.

Luis’ mom, who said she’s been disappointed with the quality of the services provided to her son, wants aids, therapists, teachers, and tutors that understand her son’s particular issues.

“He deserves better services and a better life than what they’re offering,” said the mom. “I’ve lost faith in them.”

Lisa Barros Mosko, a parent who was director of Speak Up, an L.A. special education advocacy group when the nonprofit produced a survey showing many parents said their children weren’t getting services during the pandemic, said there had been an ongoing problem with services for years. 

“The pandemic really shed light on the inequities and lack of services for kids with disabilities in the district.”

Advocates and parents also said they were concerned about which officials from L.A. Unified will supervise the district’s work on the resolution. They are concerned that it will be the same leadership that denied their children services during the pandemic. 

“How can we trust the same people who neglected our children’s needs in the first place?” Mosko said. “I think we need completely new leadership in order to rebuild trust.”

A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson said in a statement the district has agreed to “critical components” such as staff training and ongoing outreach to special education parents and advocates. 

“L.A. Unified remains dedicated to helping all students, including students with disabilities, recover from the pandemic and achieve their educational goals,” the spokesperson said.

Investigators with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s inspector general’s office conducted a video interview with Chris Whiteley, the former senior director of software engineering at AllHere, after he told The 74 his former employer’s student data security practices violated both industry standards and the district’s own policies. 

Whiteley told The 74 he had alerted the school district, the IG’s office and state education officials earlier to the data privacy problems with Ed but got no response. His meeting with investigators occurred July 2, one day after The 74 published its story outlining Whiteley’s allegations, including that the chatbot put students’ personally identifiable information at risk of getting hacked by including it in all chatbot prompts, even in those where the data weren’t relevant; sharing it with other third-party companies unnecessarily and processing prompts on offshore servers in violation of district student privacy rules. 

In an interview with The 74 this week, Whiteley said the officials from the district’s inspector general’s office “were definitely interested in what I had to say,” as speculation swirls about the future of Ed, its ed tech creator AllHere and broader education investments in artificial intelligence. 

“It felt like they were after the truth,” Whiteley said, adding, “I’m certain that they were surprised about how bad [students’ personal information] was being handled.”

To generate responses to even mundane prompts, Whiteley said, the chatbot processed the personal information for all students in a household. If a mother with 10 children asked the chatbot a question about her youngest son’s class schedule, for example, the tool processed data about all of her children to generate a response. 

“It’s just sad and crazy,” he said.

The inspector general’s office directed The 74’s request for comment to a district spokesperson, who declined to comment or respond to questions involving the inquiry.

While the conversation centered primarily on technical aspects related to the company’s data security protocols, Whiteley said investigators probed him on his personal experiences with AllHere, which he described as being abusive, and its finances.

Whiteley was laid off from AllHere in April. Two months later, a notice posted to the company’s website said a majority of its 50 or so employees had been furloughed due to its “current financial position” and the LAUSD spokesperson said company co-founder and CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin had left. The former Boston teacher and Harvard graduate was successful in raising $12 million in venture capital for AllHere and appeared with L.A. schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho at ed tech conferences and other events throughout the spring touting the heavily publicized AI tool they partnered to create.

Just weeks ago, Carvalho spoke publicly about how the project had put L.A. out in front as school districts and ed tech companies nationally race to follow the lead of generative artificial intelligence pioneers like ChatGPT. But the school chief’s superlative language around what Ed could do on an individualized basis with 540,000 students had some industry observers and AI experts speculating it was destined to fail.

The chatbot was supposed to serve as a “friendly, concise customer support agent” that replied “using simple language a third grader could understand” to help students and parents supplement classroom instruction, find assistance with kids’ academic struggles and navigate attendance, grades, transportation and other key issues. What they were given, Whiteley charges, was a student privacy nightmare. 

Smith-Griffin recently deactivated her LinkedIn page and has not surfaced since her company went into apparent free fall. Attempts to reach AllHere for comment were unsuccessful and parts of the company website have gone dark. LAUSD said earlier that AllHere is for sale and that several companies are interested in acquiring it.

The district has already paid AllHere $3 million to build the chatbot and “a fully-integrated portal” that gave students and parents access to information and resources in a single location, the district spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday, and “was surprised by the financial disruption to AllHere.” 

AllHere’s collapse represents a stunning fall from grace for a company that was named among the world’s top education technology companies by Time Magazine just months earlier. Scrutiny of AllHere intensified when Whiteley became a whistleblower. He said he turned to the press because his concerns, which he shared first with AllHere executives and the school district, had been ignored.

Whitely shared source code with The 74 which showed that students’ information had been processed on offshore servers. Seven out of eight Ed chatbot requests, he said, were sent to places like Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Australia and Canada. 

‘How are smaller districts going to do this?’

What district leaders failed to do as they heralded their new tool, Whiteley said, is conduct sufficient audits. As L.A. — and school systems nationwide — contract with a laundry list of tech vendors, he said it’s imperative that they understand how third-party companies use students’ information. 

“If the second-biggest district can’t audit their [personally identifiable information] on new or interesting products and can’t do security audits on external sources, how are smaller districts going to do this?” he asked.

Over the last several weeks, the district’s official position on Ed has appeared to shift. In late June when the district spokesperson said that several companies were “interested in acquiring Allhere,” they also said its predecessor would “continue to provide this first-of-its-kind resource to our students and families.” In its initial response to Whiteley’s allegations published July 1, the spokesperson said that education officials would “take any steps necessary to ensure that appropriate privacy and security protections are in place in the Ed platform.” 

In a story two days later in the Los Angeles Times, a district spokesperson said the chatbot had been unplugged on June 14. The 74 asked the spokesperson to provide documentation showing the tool was disabled last month but didn’t get a response. 

Even after June 14, Carvalho continued to boast publicly about LAUSD’s foray into generative AI and what he described as its stringent data privacy requirements with third-party vendors. 

On Tuesday, the district spokesperson told The 74 that the online portal — even without a chatty, animated sun — “will continue regardless of the outcome with AllHere.” In fact, the project could become a source of district revenue. Under the contract between AllHere and LAUSD, which was obtained by The 74, the chatbot is the property of the school district, which was set to receive 2% in royalty payments from AllHere “should other school districts seek to use the tool to benefit their families and students.” 

In the statement Tuesday, the district spokesperson said that officials chose to “temporarily disable the chatbot” amid AllHere’s uncertainty and that it would “only be restored when the human-in-the-loop aspect is re-established.” 

Whiteley agreed that the district could maintain the student information dashboard without the chatbot and, similarly, that another firm could buy what remains of AllHere. He was skeptical, however, that Ed the chatbot would live another day because “it’s broken”

“The name AllHere,” he said, “I think is dead.”

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.