In a settlement that ends a three-year lawsuit brought by the families of 15 Oakland and Los Angeles students, the state will aim to fund billions of dollars in remaining learning loss to low-income students and others with the greatest learning gaps.
State officials also agreed to pursue legal changes that would require districts and schools to measure and report student progress using proven strategies, such as frequent in-school tutoring, in ways the state has not required in other post-COVID funding. . If the state refuses or Congress fails to do so, the plaintiffs could cancel the deal and return to court for a trial.
Mark Rosenbaum, a plaintiffs' attorney and director of the Opportunity Under Law Project at the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel, said he's optimistic it won't be necessary.
“The state has stepped up to focus on the children who have been hit hardest,” Rosenbaum said. “The urgent vision of this historic agreement is to use strategies that not only recoup academic losses but also close opportunity gaps exacerbated by the pandemic.”
Districts receive state block grants based on their percentage of low-income students, foster children and enrolled English learners, but funds are currently available to all students. The program lists a variety of uses to “support academic recovery and the social and emotional well-being of staff and students,” including more instructional time, academic recovery materials and counseling. The money will be available until 2027-28.
The agreement includes the remainder of the $7.5 billion Learning Recovery Block Grant, which Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature cut to $6.3 billion in the current state budget. Under the final phase of the American Rescue Act, the largest chunk of local relief funding provided by the federal government – $12 billion – expires on September 30.
The agreement calls for strategies supported by evidence that are effective, while limiting funding to the lowest-performing student groups, including black and Hispanic students, and chronically absent students, and narrowing the list of acceptable uses. The district develops a plan for current non-necessary funds and tracks the results of at least one strategy over the next three years.
Newsom based his budget on optimistic revenue forecasts but kept the remainder of the block grant intact in his proposed 2024-25 budget. To protect block grants from future cuts, the agreement will ensure at least $2 billion is protected.
“One of the reasons our settlement took off was because we didn’t want to go to trial and make a decision after the trial and realize the cupboard was empty,” Rosenbaum said.
In a statement on behalf of the Newsom administration, State Board of Education spokesman Alex Traverso said the agreement's use of one-time dollars is “appropriate at this stage as the pandemic is winding down.”
“We look forward to working with the Legislature and stakeholders to advance this proposal and focus recovery funding learnings on serving students with the greatest need,” he wrote.
Has the state failed to fulfill its constitutional obligations?
Public interest attorney and San Francisco law firm Morrison Foerster filed the lawsuit in Cayla J. v. State of California, State Board of Education, California Department of Education, and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond in November 2020, eight months after COVID-19 forced the lawsuit. Closing schools across the state and quickly transitioning to remote learning. The state was slow to provide computers and connections, and Congress, anticipating a recession, initially did not include additional funding for them. Billions of dollars in federal and state funding came later, specifically for learning loss.
The rollout of remote learning and equipment has been uneven across districts. The quality and extent of remote learning also varied widely across districts initially and when school reopened in the fall.
The lawsuit charges that “the provision of education rendered many already underserved students functionally unable to attend school.”
“Furthermore, students are being harmed by schools failing to meet minimum instructional hours that the state has taken no action to enforce.”
The lawsuit included then-8-year-old twins Cayla J. and her younger sister Kai J. They come from low-income families and attended third grade at Oakland Unified. According to the lawsuit, they only held two remote classes from March 2020 until the start of school. For some students in the class, the teacher told her mother she had canceled classes for other students due to a lack of equipment for remote learning.
Oakland and Los Angeles Unified School Districts had the shortest amount of live daily instruction during remote learning and were among the last districts to return to in-person learning in spring 2021. Los Angeles Unified School District students missed 205 days of in-person instruction, while Oakland students missed 204 days. me.
In subsequent court filings as the case dragged on, the California Department of Education pointed to massive state and federal COVID aid for school districts, minimum daily instructional hours set by Congress, and numerous webcasts and guidance provided by the Department of Education. Distance learning and learning recovery strategies. It cited school districts' authority to make decisions under local control and transparency requirements to report spending through local control and accountability plans.
Rosenbaum told EdSource that the state is avoiding its constitutional duty to prevent educational inequities. “The state cannot write a big check and then say, ‘We don’t care what happens here,’” he said. “The buck stops with the state. The state’s duty is to ensure that children have the basic needs. “It’s about ensuring educational equality and preventing the gap between the haves and have-nots from widening.”
Lucrecia Santibañez, a professor in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies who provided expert testimony for the plaintiffs, wrote: “California’s decentralized school system and minimal guidance received from the state has left many districts to their own devices.”
“Data collection was minimal or non-existent, and monitoring of learning and continuity plans was superficial at best,” she wrote.
Disputes over test scores
Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism has soared, reaching a new record in 2022-23, and test scores have plummeted. In 2022-23, 34.6% of students met or exceeded standards on the Smarter Balanced math test, 5.2 percentage points lower than in 2018-19, before the pandemic. Only 16.9% of black students, 22.7% of Latino students, and 9.9% of English language learners were on grade level.
A similar decline was seen in English language arts scores in 2022-23. 46.7% of all students met or exceeded the standards. Only 29.9% of black students and 36.1% of Latino students were on grade level, compared with 60.7% of white students and 74% of Asian students.
The key issue in the case was not whether a pandemic effect existed but whether it was disproportionate. State officials acknowledged the impact of the pandemic but insisted the declines were similar across all groups, within 1 to 2 percentage points. In his rebuttal, Andrew Ho, a nationally known psychologist and professor of education at Harvard University, accused the state of intentionally using “biased calculations of achievement gaps” to achieve its desired results.
The state used a method shown on the California Schools Dashboard to compare the percentage of groups of students who met a single goal (score at or above meeting the benchmark from one year to the next) before and after the pandemic. Ho wrote that individual students' losses and gains should have been compared on scale scores, a more sophisticated measure used by other states.
Using this methodology, Ho said, “California test scores show an increase in racial inequality in nearly every subject and grade level. “Economic inequality has also increased,” he said. EdSource's independent analysis of state testing data corroborated these findings.
Advocates for a more accurate system of measuring student growth with test scores have also called for the use of scaled scores. In a move that could accelerate this adoption in California, the agreement calls for the use of scaled scores to determine which groups of students are eligible for block grant funding.
Last August, in a decision that sparked negotiations to resolve the case, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman denied the state's request to dismiss the case and ordered the parties to go to trial. He concluded that the state had failed to demonstrate that it had made adequate and reasonable efforts to respond to the impacts of the pandemic and that Ho's findings of increasing learning gaps were reliable. Under the settlement, the state will pay $2.5 million to the plaintiffs' attorneys.
Credit to local non-profits
In the summer of 2020, Cayla J. and her sister turned to nonprofits for help the district was not providing. The lawsuit calls Oakland REACH a “lifeline” for the two girls and says it “enhanced online summer courses while providing a safe space for learning and community advocacy.” The family liaison said it helped keep Cayla J. and Kai J. from falling further behind.
Community Coalition, Oakland REACH's counterpart in Los Angeles, has provided similar services. Both signed as manuscripts.
Oakland REACH's efforts have evolved into a new early literacy and early math instruction partnership with Oakland Unified, hiring skilled community members and parents. In a nod to the good work of both nonprofits, the agreement revises education regulations to encourage districts to contract or partner with community-based organizations “with a track record of success” for services covered by block grants. I ask you to do it.
Michael Jacobs, a partner at Morrison Foerster who is participating pro bono in the case, said the clause was an important and groundbreaking element of the contract.
“We have seen community-based organizations meet critical needs throughout the pandemic,” he said. “There is now evidence that the service makes a significant difference in educational attainment,” he said, pointing to Oakland REACH.