Money talks. That’s what Thomas DiNapoli, comptroller of the state of New York, is counting on when it comes to LGBTQ+ protections in the workplace.
In what seem to be the first ever moves of their kind, DiNapoli’s New York State Common Retirement Fund, which manages $260 billion in assets, is pushing for more details about companies’ human capital management strategy work related to LGBTQ+ employees.
In proxy statements published this month, $45 billion Lennar Corp. and $13.5 billion International Paper disclosed matching shareholder proposals from the retirement fund. The proposals are backed by a supporting statement explaining that demographic shifts show that 20.8% of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ+, which is twice that of the 10.5% of millennials who identify that way. Furthermore, a third of people who identify as LGBTQ+ report experiencing harassment or discrimination in recent years and, nearly half, 45.5%, report facing discrimination at some point in their lives.
Lennar and International Paper have recommended that investors vote against both proposals.
Expanding focus
The proposal is a new front in some investors’ quest to get more expansive data on diversity from companies, and similar efforts have been fruitful in obtaining more granularity on policies related to gender, race, and ethnicity. Now, investors are expanding their focus to include LGBTQ+ employees. Investors have used the more detailed reporting in recent years to hold boards and C-suite teams to account for public diversity pledges on investments, promotion among senior executive ranks and recruitment of new employees.
Accordingly, companies should tell investors whether they have equitable employee benefits, non-discrimination policies and employee support groups, the New York fund wrote in the statement. In the proposals at both Lennar and International Paper, New York referred to the companies’ own disclosures about inclusivity in the workforce, respect for diverse backgrounds and their general statements about fostering high-performing workplace cultures via their diversity efforts. New York holds about $15.8 million in International Paper stock and $33 million in Lennar stock, according to the fund’s 2023 asset listing.
Both proposals quoted a 2019 report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Business Success and Growth Through LGBT-Inclusive Culture.“Companies that adopt LGBT-inclusive practices tend to improve their financial standing and do better than companies that do not adopt them. Additionally, employees, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, express greater job satisfaction at companies where these practices are in place.”
Miami-headquartered homebuilder Lennar’s board wrote that the company was “built on a culture of inclusivity” and brings together the best talent to drive the success of the “Lennar family.” The board said its “Everyone’s Included” initiative represents an evolution of that focus, including an advisory council that brings together diverse cross-representation. Its code of ethics and business conduct already specifically prohibit discrimination and harassment on the basis of “color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information or any other legally protected status,” the board said. “Producing the proposed report is unnecessary and inefficient.”
International Paper board members said its annual report discussed diversity and inclusion initiatives, including its long-term goals. “Among the Company’s primary Vision 2030 Goals, the Company aims to promote employee well-being by providing safe, caring, and inclusive workplaces and strengthening the resilience of its communities,” the board said (emphasis in original).
The company also has a global diversity and inclusion council and employee networking groups. “Requiring the Company to produce an additional report limited to a subset of its overall diversity, equity and inclusion efforts would prove unduly burdensome for the Company, divert time and attention of Company management, and give rise to undue expenses, all while providing little to no additional value considering the Company’s robust diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, culture and disclosure practices, including with respect to LGBTQ+ matters,” the IP board said.
The proposals are an escalation from the fund’s efforts last year that involved writing letters to 55 portfolio companies that signed the Human Rights Campaign and Freedom for All American Business Statement on Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation. The campaign prompted new discussions about workplace policies, the state said in an annual report.
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Pictures of Black civil rights leaders pepper the forest green walls of the office on stage. The office bulletin board is haphazardly scattered with various community events. Papers littered over an office desk. Everything is reminiscent of a workplace except the big brown rectangular box that can’t help but call attention to itself. Did somebody die?
In this world premiere production of Stagolee and the Funeral of a Dangerous Word by Thomas Meloncon, it doesn’t take long to discern what the dangerous word is. Is there any other word in American English that conjures up its own meaning without even having to utter it in its entirety. Ask someone what the T-word is. Be prepared for various responses and confused faces. Ask someone what the N-word is. Be prepared for a silence that rings just as loud as the six letter word.
Stagolee (Timothy Eric) and Naomi (LaKeisha Rochelle Randle) speaking about the town’s most recent race riot.
Photo by Pin Lim / Forest Photography.
Directed by Errol Anthony Wilks, Stagolee and the Funeral of a Dangerous Word offers engaging insights into how the dangerous word gains meaning over the course of a lifetime. Beyond the realistic set design (James V. Thomas) marked with the astute detail of the blinds opening up to the street, the crux of this production hinges on the story and its acting.
With any new play, there can be a sense of overwriting. Extraneous details that add unnecessary confusion. A few “two” many frivolous characters. An ending that feels duty-bound to wrap up all loose ends regardless of how rushed it feels.
However, a perfect script has never been a requirement for a thoughtful and worthy production. Stagolee and the Funeral of a Dangerous Word is at its best when it focuses on Stagolee, the son, and the dangerous word. Despite some awkward blocking that obscured sightlines and a confusing choice for the NAACP director to deliver an impassioned speech during a climactic scene from a closed downstage position, the conversations about the dangerous word went beyond “who can say it?” or “what does it mean?” Instead, this play adds a more interesting perspective. When does it become meaningful? How does the meaning of the word change over time on a personal level?
Rodger (Seth Carter Ramsey) arrives at the NAACP office and listens to Sam (Byron Jacquet) give the ground rules.
Photo by Pin Lim / Forest Photography.
Any word that can incite violence is worth these discussions, so when Rodger (Seth Carter Ramsey) uses the dangerous word within earshot of Stagolee (Timothy Eric) while they’re working, a race riot ensues. The head of the local chapter of the NAACP, Sam Kingsley (Byron Jacquet) arranges a deal with the District Attorney’s office so that both avoid the harsh charges for inciting a riot. Both Stagolee and Rodger agree not to ever say the word and that they will talk about the dangerous word at the NAACP office under the guidance of a clinical psychologist, Dr. John Cohen (Ed Muth).
When Stagolee begrudgingly visits the NAACP office ahead of his first meeting with Dr. Cohen, he and Naomi (LaKeisha Rochelle Randle), an old friend and NAACP employee, are at odds. She is frustrated that Stagolee lacked the self discipline to avoid the violence of the race riot while Stagolee is indignant that she is in support of the resolution that he should never say the dangerous word.
Sam (Byron Jacquet) sharing with Stagolee (Timothy Eric) the racial violence that he and his family have had to overcome.
Photo by Pin Lim / Forest Photography.
The dangerous word is his to say. The word has been reclaimed. His father taught him so. Alongside the passion for being allowed to use the dangerous word is his tender fondness for Naomi. Scattered within their heated discussion are Stagolee’s declarations of love and desire that would make most women swoon. Instead, she rebuffs his advances and repeats often that he is not her type.
She’s planning a funeral where they plan to bury artifacts of racial injustice and pledges from children declaring they will no longer say the dangerous word. Stagolee wants no part of it, but with the help of Rev. Moses Kulani (Manning Mpinduzi-Mott), Naomi hopes the procession will calm racial tensions and bring healing to the community.
Rev. Moses Kulani (Manning Mpinduzi-Mott) asking the ancestors for help for the procession.
Photo by Pin Lim / Forest Photography.
When Rodger and Stagolee meet for their meetings with Dr. Cohen, tensions never seem to calm, but both share their unfiltered perspectives about the dangerous word. By the end of their sessions, there’s too much pent-up bitterness. It escalates, and all have to manage the fallout. Eventually, Stagolee is able to understand the NAACP and even decides on attending the procession.
From the moment Timothy Eric swaggers on stage with his Stetson hat, he endows Stagolee with a sincerely overwhelming sense of self. Even as he gloriously rattles off the implausible stories about his father, he delivers the lines in such a manner that it’s clear that he believes those stories. While the others call it folklore, there’s nothing mythological about Stagolee’s father.
His bravado originates from these stories, and his bravado is real — built up over time in a community where there are people who believe he is nothing due to the color of his skin. He looms on stage even when he’s sitting. His stares are just as revelatory as his stories. He leads this production with enough certainty to plaster over any skepticism.
Rodger (Seth Carter Ramsey) trying to get under Stagolee’s (Timothy Eric) skin.
Photo by Pin Lim / Forest Photography.
The crux of this play lives in the sit downs that take place between Stagolee, Rodger, and Dr. Cohen. Ramsey clarifies Rodger’s prejudice by playing the truth of the character rather than only expressing the brute prejudice. The curiosity he conveys about who owns the dangerous word produces constructive tension. His choice to never sit down and his constant walking-back-and-forth contributes to the contentious mood. The more they talk, the more combative they become.
Muth’s more mild-mannered and composed temperament grounds the discussions. When Rodger finds out that the psychologist is Jewish, he does not hesitate to spout out his hatred for Jews. Rather than react to his hostility, Dr. Cohen chooses to be patient. Muth’s meekness allows for focus to remain on what Stagolee and Rodger believe and why they believe it.
LaKeisha Rochelle Randle’s charismatic performance of the Harvard-educated Naomi has a natural charm and magnetic presence. She moves with purpose across the stage, and her expressions clearly convey her wishes and desires. Though the initial scenes predominantly feature her, she disappears and then appears after the intermission in a less prominent capacity.
Her dynamic energy is sorely missed. She and Eric work well off each other, and their character interactions invite engaging insight. What more would be revealed if more of the dangerous word is explored through their relationship?
Stagolee (Timothy Eric) and Naomi (Lakeisha Rochelle Randle).
Photo by Pin Lim / Forest Photography.
This play doesn’t definitively put the dangerous word away. The big takeaway is not “don’t say the n-word.” Instead, it seeks to reveal why people wish to use it, who can use it, and how that word evokes memories and hardships that make some never want to hear or say the word.
By tracing the affects of the dangerous word on a personal level rather than the historical (this play does not ignore the historical), Stagolee and the Funeral of a Dangerous Word is a bracing look on what feeds the power of the dangerous word and what makes it so dangerous.
Performances continue through April 21 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays (no performance on March 31, Easter Sunday) $35-$59.at Main Street Theater’s Rice Village location, 2540 Times Boulevard. For more information, call 713-524-6706 or visit mainstreettheater.com.
“On behalf of the family and his representatives, it is with heavy hearts that we share the news of Chance Perdomo’s untimely passing as a result of a motorcycle accident,” a publicist said in a statement issued Saturday evening.
The statement said no one else was involved in the crash. No details about the crash, including when and where it took place, were immediately released.
Perdomo most recently played Andre Anderson on the first season of “Gen V,” the college-centric spin-off of Amazon Prime’s hit series “The Boys,” set in a universe where superheroes are celebrities — and behave as badly as the most notorious. Perdomo’s character was a student at Godolkin University, founded by the sinisterly omnipresent Vought International corporation, where “supes” train; his power involved the manipulation of metal.
Amazon MGM Studios and Sony Pictures Television, the makers of “Gen V,” said the show’s family was “devastated by the sudden passing.”
“We can’t quite wrap our heads around this. For those of us who knew him and worked with him, Chance was always charming and smiling, an enthusiastic force of nature, an incredibly talented performer, and more than anything else, just a very kind, lovely person,” the producers of “Gen V” said in a statement. “Even writing about him in the past tense doesn’t make sense.”
It wasn’t immediately clear from the statements how Perdomo’s death would affect production on the show, which also featured Jaz Sinclair, Patrick Schwarzenegger and Shelley Conn among its sprawling ensemble cast.
Schwarzenegger posted a series of photos of Perdomo and himself on his Instagram stories Sunday morning, saying he hoped Perdomo was “up in heaven with a cigar.”
One of Perdomo’s most famous roles was as Ambrose Spellman, a lead character on “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” The four-season show was a far cry from the Melissa Joan Hart-fronted “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.” Created by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the Netflix show set its Archie Comics characters a town over from the titular location of Aguirre-Sacasa’s “Riverdale,” and employed a more spooky and salacious tone than its forerunner — although some of the original “Sabrina” actors came calling.
Perdomo’s character was a cousin to Sabrina Spellman and a powerful, pansexual warlock who specialized in necromancy and is initially under house arrest. He often served as a sort of voice of reason on the show, which wrapped in 2020. He starred alongside Kiernan Shipka, Miranda Otto, Tati Gabrielle, Ross Lynch and, again, Sinclair.
Aguirre-Sacasa posted a tribute to Perdomo on Instagram on Saturday, sharing behind-the-scenes photos from “Sabrina.”
“Besides being one of the most talented young actors I’ve ever had the privilege to work with, @chance_perdomo was, truly, a light. A generous, funny, open-hearted, wildly intelligent, and fiercely complex and soulful human being,” he wrote.
“Oh, how I wish Aunt Zelda’s words were true today (and perhaps they are): ‘There is no true death for witches, only transformation,’” he continued. “Rest in peace, Chance. We all loved you so, so much, cousin.”
Perdomo, who was Black and Latino, was born in Los Angeles and raised in England.
“I was always getting into fights until I put my energy into acting. Then my grades picked up, and I became president of the student union. Before that, I was similar to Ambrose being so pent up. He doesn’t know what to do with his energy because he’s trapped,” Perdomo told them.us in 2018.
“At the same time, he’s very open and loving. I identify with that now more than ever, because being away from family for so long really puts things into perspective. No matter the occasion, if I get that FaceTime or phone call from mom or my brothers, I’m picking it up right away. It’s family first for Ambrose, and I’m the same way,” he continued.
Perdomo also acted in several of the “After” movies and is credited in the upcoming “Bad Man” alongside Seann William Scott and Rob Riggle.
“His passion for the arts and insatiable appetite for life was felt by all who knew him, and his warmth will carry on in those who he loved dearest,” the statement from Perdomo’s publicist said.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
As of today, we are over 30 percent behind last year in FAFSA filings. If we do not mobilize as a college access community, we are at risk of losing thousands of students from the pipeline to higher education.
The culprit? The difficult revised FAFSA process. Many public school counselors have told me that their students are frustrated and waiting until next year to apply.
News coverage of the disastrous new FAFSA rollout and the Education Department’s unprecedented delays in sending FAFSA data to institutions has detailed everything that went wrong. What hasn’t been covered is the potential impact this could have on the nation, what we can do to mitigate some of the unintended consequences or what we all must do right now to help.
There is no time to waste. We need a national movement to get students in the pipeline to higher education. Every single person reading this article should share this link that details state-by-state workshops, events and tools to help students complete their FAFSA.
Share this resource with places of worship and local community centers, at school board meetings and beyond. If you engage with a high school senior on the bus, on the metro or elsewhere in your local community, ask them, “Have you filled out your FAFSA yet?”
We know students who complete the FAFSA are more likely to continue their education. We need them to complete their FAFSA and matriculate now, before they’re out of reach.
During the height of COVID, we lost over a million students from the pipeline to higher education. This is on top of our already declining high school-age population. Losing more students will mean we’ll have a significant shortfall in the number of young adults with degrees.
This has serious implications for the future workforce, economic mobility for individuals, economic stability for communities and America’s ability to compete on a global stage.
This also has serious implications for institutions of higher education. Many colleges depend on the revenue students bring with them. When the college enrollment population declines, college revenues decline.
FAFSA Fiasco
This op-ed is part of a package of opinion pieces The Hechinger Report is running that focus on solutions to the new FAFSA’s troubled rollout.
A small, rural college president told me recently that the FAFSA debacle has the potential to put their school out of business. If the school loses even just a few students, they won’t make payroll.
We simply can’t afford to lose more students. School counselors can’t do this work alone. We need your help.
We need a coalition of FAFSA champions committed to helping us close the gap in application filings. Better yet, if you are a college access professional, host your own FAFSA workshop and invite students and families from your local community.
And we need to move quickly. The new FAFSA process is creating delays in financial aid offers even for students who have already completed the form, and most schools’ decision deadlines are looming. Many colleges, however, want to help relieve the anxiety students and families are feeling and are willing to extend deadlines. Our National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) directory lists institutions that have moved their enrollment decision deadlines.
Students need as much support and flexibility as possible right now, and shifted deadlines give them some breathing room to weigh their options — this is the largest financial decision of their young lives. While we have several hundred schools on our list, students and families need more schools to extend their deadlines.
Giving students the time and space to make the best decision for themselves is not only the right move ethically, but also a consumer protection issue.
We wouldn’t commit to buying a home without knowing the full price, so we shouldn’t require or expect students to commit to a college without knowing what they will have to pay.
I also know that our school counseling and advising community has been significantly impacted by the FAFSA rollout. Our counselors are exhausted, confused and frustrated.
They feel powerless and want to do everything they can to help their students. Many of them realize that they are going to have to work through the summer to help their students complete the process, but due to the politics of contract negotiations, many of them won’t be able to work into the summer to support their students.
I recently sent a letter to the Secretary of Education calling on him to remind federal grantees of allowable uses of federal funds that support college-going. Our school counselors and advisers cannot be expected to work for free, and we need them now more than ever.
Let’s shine a light on this issue by sharing our support for school counselor contract extensions with our school principals, superintendents, district leaders and boards.
Without the expertise of our counseling community, students could make bad decisions.
Finally, extending grace to each other is one of the most important actions we can take.
I have found that in crisis, our college access community tends to turn on each other. The anger is understandable, but we need to channel that energy toward creative, action-oriented solutions.
If we don’t work together, our students lose. Let’s give grace to colleges whose financial aid awards are late this year, to counselors who may make mistakes as they navigate an unprecedented process and to students who may be delayed in getting their information where it needs to go.
The future of our nation is at risk, so let’s work collaboratively with strategy, intention and grace as we steer our young people toward their best future.
Angel B. Pérez is the CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and represents over 27,000 admission and counseling professionals worldwide committed to postsecondary access and success.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
If you’re wondering how you’re going to reach the starting line for the District’s Cherry Blossom 10 Mile Run in April, there’s an option that will alleviate the stress of needing to park downtown.
If you’re wondering how you’re going to reach the starting line for the Cherry Blossom 10 Mile Run in April, there’s an option that will alleviate the stress of needing to park in downtown D.C.
Metrorail is opening two hours early on Sunday, April 7 so runners can hop on the train to get to the annual race.
Metro will run its normal service beginning at 5 a.m., with the closest station to the start and finish lines being the Smithsonian station on the Blue, Orange and Silver lines. An alternative to that station is the Federal Triangle or L’Enfant Plaza stops.
Metro said that the early service for the race was approved under new guidelines issued last year, which allow Metro to provide additional service for large-scale events expecting 10,000 or more people.
The Cherry Blossom 10 Mile Run attracts more than 17,000 runners from around the world to D.C., according to its website.
In theme with the race and the National Cherry Blossom Festival, Metro launched its three cherry blossom-themed buses and six-car train wrapped in pictures of the trees. The themed buses and railcars can be tracked by clicking on the special events tab on WMATA’s website and following the cherry blossom icon.
Want more details on how to get around town during the Cherry Blossom Festival? Find WTOP’s detailed guide here.
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Evan Kim is not sure what she wants to do when she grows up. She might want to be an elementary school teacher. Or perhaps an Olympic long-distance runner.
She’s working on the running thing.
The 5-foot-tall sixth-grader placed second among all girls and women at the Ventura Marathon in February when she ran the 26.2-mile course in 2 hours 58 minutes, averaging less than 7 minutes per mile. Her goal this year is to run the fastest recorded marathon for a 12-year-old of either gender — she’s only four minutes away. Her trainer (also known as her dad, who goes by MK) says the equation is simple: Just follow the workout plan and the record will be hers.
Evan was in some ways destined for a life of long-distance exercise. Born into a family of athletes in 2012, she was named after Cadel Evans, the cyclist who won the Tour de France the year prior. Her father MK, 49, was a pole vaulter at Duke University and now trains runners. He’s run a 2-hour, 51-minute marathon himself, but his daughter will probably pass him this year when she tries for a 2:48 time at the California International Marathon in December. Her older brother Cole and sister Haven also run marathons.
To be a 12-year-old marathoner, you need a level of grit that many 12-year-olds lack.
Evan Kim, 12, front, runs with family members and a running group to train for marathons on March 10, 2024 in Irvine, California.She ran a 2:58 in the Ventura marathon recently, making her the fastest girl or woman age 1-19 and the second fastest overall.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
For example: When Evan Kim was running the Ventura Marathon and trying to hit her goal of 2:58, she developed a foot cramp around Mile 20 that lasted a few miles. She wanted to give up. She wanted to stop running. But she didn’t.
“Suck it up,” she told herself over and over, repeating the mantra to help her complete the marathon and beat all other under-20-year-old female runners by a full hour.
Evan’s goal is to qualify for the 2028 Olympics. To qualify for the 2024 U.S. Olympic team in the women’s marathon, she’d have to run a 2:37 marathon, and that’s a bridge too far, even for someone whose record is as astonishing as Evan’s. Kenyan runner Peres Jepchirchir took home gold in the women’s marathon at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics with a time of 2:27:20.
How ridiculous are Evan’s times? Consider this: Only 21% of women finish the marathon in under four hours. Just 1% of women finish in under three. The fastest marathon ever run by a 12-year-old of either gender, according to the Assn. of Road Racing Statisticians, was a 2:54 run by German runner Manuela Zipse in a 1986 race.
What separates Evan from her siblings, MK says, is that Evan started at an earlier age. She is not particularly physically gifted. She doesn’t have more lung capacity than other kids. She just has a reservoir of strength built from years of training seven days a week. When MK’s kids were young, they would all go for walks in the morning and the walks eventually became runs. Cole was 11 at the time. Evan was 6. It started with a mile, then two and kept gradually building until Evan asked for what any 10-year-old might ask their father for: permission to run in a marathon.
OK, maybe not just any 10-year-old.
“I wanted to run because my brother was running,” Evan explained. “It’s fun to compete, and I wanted to race like Cole did.”
Evan is competitive with Cole, who beat her by a minute in the Ventura Marathon. “I’m a little bit jealous,” she acknowledged, but said that she expects to “hopefully” beat him soon.
Evan ran her first marathon at a glacial 3:50 pace — glacial for 12-year-old Evan, that is.
Evan won’t be running in the Los Angeles Marathon on Sunday, though her father and sister will, because she’s still recovering from the Ventura Marathon. She’ll eventually start building up her base again before getting in shape for the California International Marathon in December, where she hopes to break the record for 12-year-olds.
MK is fighting for his daughter to break a barrier in a different, more famous race than the L.A. Marathon. He wants the Boston Marathon to allow his daughter to race in April, even though the minimum age is 18.
So far he has received no responses to his entreaties to have his daughter join what he calls the greatest race on Earth.
“We feel discriminated against since Evan has proven to be more than capable of safely competing in the event by completing four marathons and Boston-qualifying in three of them,” MK said. To qualify for the 2025 Boston event, an 18-year-old woman would need a marathon finish time of 3:30 between September 2023 and September 2024.
MK said that the rule barring younger runners is similar to what women faced before the Boston Marathon went coed in 1972.
The Boston Athletic Assn. did not explain why it has its age requirements.
“Athletes must be 18 years of age on race day to enter the Boston Marathon. This age requirement falls in line with age requirements across all B.A.A. mass-participatory races, where athletes must be 14 years old to run the Boston Half Marathon; 12 for the Boston 10K, and 10 for the Boston 5K,” spokesman Chris Lotsbom said in an email.
Pediatricians say there is not enough information to say definitively whether marathons are safe for kids whose bodies are still growing. There are two major concerns for child marathoners. First, is it physically safe for kids to run marathons? Second, can children mentally handle the physical strain of the race?
A study by the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine of the Twin Cities Marathon between 1982 and 2007 found that of 310 minors between ages 7 and 17 who finished the race, only four had “medical encounters,” a lower rate than adult finishers. None of the injuries were serious. MK says that Evan has never had any injury.
Dr. Brian Krabak, a sports medicine physician, said that the risks to a child running marathons depend on many factors, but that it can be OK as long as the child is closely monitored and the running lengths are gradually increased.
One other important factor, he said, is that “it’s the child who is motivated to do this and not just the adults around them. That’s a key component overall.”
Although Evan’s marathon finishes have so far flown under the radar, other instances of children running marathons have gone viral and led to online debate about whether kids should be participating and whether they understand what they are doing.
In 2022, 6-year-old Rainier Crawford finished the Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati. But when his parents posted a documentary about his run on YouTube, his family became the target of intense scrutiny.
Olympic marathoner Kara Goucher chimed in on the issue on X, formerly Twitter, saying, “A six year old does not understand what embracing misery is. A six year [old] who is ‘struggling physically’ does not realize they have the right to stop and should.”
Evan is undaunted.
As the Kim family took a casual seven-mile run Sunday on trails and bike lines in Irvine, cruising along at a relaxed 9 minutes per mile, people recognized the running family and waved as they passed. MK, a single father, has been operating a daily vlog documenting the family’s running for more than a year.
Evan is candid about her competitiveness and the fact that she did not always like running. The sport, however, has taught her that just because something is difficult does not mean it is bad. Just like running, telling the truth can be hard, doing all her homework can be hard, but she still does those things.
“During the race it feels really bad,” she said, “but after you finish it and you cheer everybody else on and meet each other at the end it feels really nice.”
Barring divine intervention or the West Coast falling into the sea, President Biden will handily win California in the November election.
But should he — or presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump — secure a second term in the fall, the future of either’s policy agenda rests heavily on which party controls Congress, where Republicans currently hold a wafer-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
With the Golden State home to some of the most hotly contested swing districts in the country, the House’s fate will almost certainly come down to California.
The battle for the next two years of partisan political control will be waged door-to-door, from California’s beachside suburban cul-de-sacs to the tiny farm towns in the state’s fertile Central Valley.
Those battlefields will look a lot like Bridgecreek Plaza — a sun-bleached shopping center a few hundred yards from a freeway onramp in Orange County’s Huntington Beach. The mall is home to a crystal store, several insurance brokers, a dentist and the local Republican Party headquarters.
It’s also where about two dozen GOP faithful gathered on the morning of election day, bowing their heads for a quick prayer and pledging allegiance to a portable flag before turning their attention to Jessica Millan Patterson, chair of the California Republican Party.
Patterson was in a very good mood.
When she was first elected to lead the party, in 2019, California Republicans were “essentially the third-largest party in the state,” having sunk below the share of voters registering “decline to state” under party preference.
But Patterson had presided over a massive voter registration drive over the last five years, and the party had moved back into second. People across the country liked to dismiss “blue California,” she said, but they were forgetting that California has more registered Republicans than any other state.
“California Republicans are the reasons why we have a House majority,” she added, to raucous cheering.
That majority was what they hoped to hold on to, and the group would spend the morning of the March 5 primary election canvassing for Scott Baugh, a Republican attorney and former state Assembly member vying to push Democratic Rep. Katie Porter’s soon-to-be-open congressional seat back from blue to red.
Scott Baugh is trying again to flip Orange County’s 47th District back to the red column. The seat is a chief target of state and national Republican efforts to maintain control of the House.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
The latest round of redistricting put more conservative enclaves such as Huntington Beach and Newport Beach into California’s 47th Congressional District, and Baugh lost to Porter only narrowly in 2022 despite being vastly outspent, making the coastal Orange County district one of the most competitive in the nation.
The charismatic Porter will be out of the House picture after a failed Senate run; her seat is one of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s three offensive targets in California and top priorities. And it’s equally prized by Democrats.
In a country where enmity and distrust separate the two major political parties on most issues, California’s utmost importance to any November House strategy is one of the few things on which Republicans and Democrats can agree.
California is home to 10 races rated as competitive by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report — five of them in districts that are represented by Republicans but that President Biden won in 2020. In the months to come, both parties will be investing significant resources in those races, as national attention inevitably turns west.
With an expected Biden-Trump rematch, voter turnout in 2024 is also likely to be supercharged compared with the 2022 midterm election. That could give an edge to Democrats, given the registration advantage that they hold in many of the competitive districts. Republicans gained one California House seat in the 2022 midterms, a nonpresidential election when turnout was substantially lower than when Biden and Trump topped the ballot two years prior.
“At the end of the day, the path to 218 runs through California,” said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Dan Gottlieb, referring to the number of seats needed to garner a House majority.
Dave Min will face Baugh in November’s runoff for the 47th District seat, which Katie Porter is vacating. Min’s bruising primary battle for the crucial seat has already cost Democrats millions.
(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)
Gottlieb was bullish on his party’s chances, citing the high turnout expected for the presidential election, along with strong Democratic candidates and “a bunch of dysfunctional and out-of-touch Republicans enabling the worst of their party’s chaos and dysfunction and extremism.”
But Gottlieb’s GOP counterpart was equally roseate in his outlook, with National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Ben Petersen reveling in the ugly and expensive primary fights that consumed Democrats in several of the state’s most crucial swing districts.
In the O.C. district where GOP volunteers fanned out for Baugh on primary morning, Democrats had sunk millions into a bruising primary battle between state Sen. Dave Min and fellow Democrat Joanna Weiss. Min ultimately emerged victorious, but only after surviving a barrage of negative advertising centered on his 2023 arrest for driving while intoxicated — arguably a gift to Republicans ahead of his fall battle with Baugh.
“Extreme Democrats are stumbling out of their vicious primary fights broke and bested by Republicans, who saw a groundswell of support for a commonsense safety and affordability agenda,” Petersen said, adding that the primary results made clear the GOP was “playing offense in California” in a way that would set the stage for victories in November.
Baugh, though, is not expected to go unscathed. In 2022, Porter’s ad campaign ripped the Republican for his antiabortion stance, as well as his work as a lobbyist and criminal charges he faced over campaign violations, for which he ultimately paid $47,000 in fines.
In the San Joaquin Valley, there were last-minute fears that a bruising primary battle would lock Democrats out of one of the races where they have the best chance of flipping a seat, but those concerns proved overblown.
Rudy Salas, backed by the Democratic establishment, vanquished fellow Democrat Melissa Hurtado to secure a spot in the fall against incumbent Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) in the 22nd Congressional District, but that race also put a dent in Democratic coffers.
The November race will be a rematch of the pair’s 2022 runoff, when Salas lost to Valadao by several thousand votes. And Salas and Valadao won’t be the only rematch on the November ticket.
In a heavily agricultural San Joaquin Valley district that includes all of Merced County and parts of Fresno, Madera, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties, incumbent GOP Rep. John Duarte will once again face off against Democratic challenger Adam Gray. Duarte won the 13th Congressional District in the midterm election by fewer than 600 votes, one of the closest races in the nation.
Several hundred miles southeast, in Southern California, Democratic challenger Will Rollins will again take on GOP incumbent Rep. Ken Calvert, the longest-serving member of the California delegation. The recently redrawn 41st Congressional District stretches from the suburban Inland Empire, where Calvert has long lived, to Palm Springs, where Rollins and his partner make their home.
The district’s new boundaries — which now include one of the largest concentrations of LGBTQ+ voters in the nation and liberal pockets of Californians in the desert — are far more friendly to Democrats. They also set up Rollins, who is gay, as a potent challenger to Calvert, who voted against LGBTQ+ rights in the past, but who says his views have since evolved.
One race that will have some new blood this year, after the same pair of candidates dueled in three previous elections, is California’s 27th Congressional District in northern Los Angeles County.
Once solidly Republican, the district has been reconfigured by redistricting, and has undergone a political transition driven by younger, more diverse transplants from L.A. seeking affordable housing in Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley. The district briefly switched from red to blue with former Rep. Katie Hill’s victory in 2018, but the young Democrat’s very public scandals and ultimate resignation helped hand the seat back to the GOP.
Now-incumbent GOP Rep. Mike Garcia beat Democrat Christy Smith in a 2019 special election to fill the seat, then twice more for full terms in 2020 and 2022. He will face off against George Whitesides, a fresh Democratic challenger, in November.
Ludovic Blain, executive director of the California Donor Table, a progressive group that pools donor funds, said his organization hopes to invest about $10 million in California House races in the fall, working with local nonprofits in key areas to turn out voters of color.
They’ll be focusing on seven key races: the three aforementioned rematches, Porter’s open seat and two other Orange County races, and the Garcia-Whitesides matchup.
One point of concern Blain raised is that Republican Steve Garvey’s place near the top of the ticket, facing off against Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) in the Senate race, might affect Democrats in House races.
Schiff engaged in a controversial strategy in the primary, boosting Garvey to lock out Porter and his other major Democratic challenger, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), whom Blain’s organization supported.
It was a gambit that some in the Democratic establishment said would actually help Democrats in other tight races, since a less-competitive Senate race would siphon away far less money from the party’s coffers.
But others, like Blain, argue that Garvey’s presence could hurt down-ballot Democrats. Plus, having him on the ballot may draw in moderate Republican and independent voters who remain sour on Trump.
“Having Garvey, I think, does spike or further encourage Republican voters to turn out, and more importantly, to vote down the ticket,” Blain said.
Patterson agreed. Unlike Trump, Garvey will likely campaign across the state, providing a lift for other Republicans while he’s at it.
Voters in seven Los Angeles City Council districts went to the polls Tuesday to decide who will win outright and who will go on to a second round in a series of races that could reshape City Hall.
Thirty-one candidates were competing in contests that will help determine the future of the city’s fight against homelessness, its approach to policing and public safety, and its ongoing efforts to make housing more affordable, particularly for the city’s renters.
Six of the seven races feature incumbents who are seeking a four-year term.
On the Eastside, Councilmember Kevin de León was hoping to fend off seven challengers, including State Assemblymembers Miguel Santiago and Wendy Carrillo, both Democrats, and tenant rights attorney Ysabel Jurado.
De León, a former state lawmaker, has been attempting a comeback after being at the center of a scandal over a secretly recorded conversation with former colleagues that featured racist and derogatory remarks. Since then, he has repeatedly apologized for his role in that conversation, which took place in October 2021.
Meanwhile, in the northwest San Fernando Valley, Councilmember John Lee was facing off against nonprofit leader Serena Oberstein. That race, in its final days, has focused heavily on the issue of ethics.
Oberstein spent much of the campaign highlighting an ongoing ethics commission case against Lee, which deals heavily with allegations that Lee violated laws governing the reporting and acceptance of gifts provided to city politicians. Lee, for his part, criticized Oberstein over a 2019 court case that dealt with her eligibility to run for council, which ended when a judge found that she was legally barred from running.
In a district that straddles the Hollywood Hills, Councilmember Nithya Raman was looking to fend off challenges from Deputy City Atty. Ethan Weaver and software engineer Levon “Lev” Baronian. Raman had been running in a race that was sharply different from the one that elected her in 2020.
In South Los Angeles, Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson was heavily favored to win his bid for a third and final four-year term. His rivals in the race are real estate broker Jahan Epps and union leader Cliff Smith.
Meanwhile, in the San Fernando Valley, Councilmember Imelda Padilla was the heavy favorite in her race against real estate broker Ely De La Cruz Ayao and Carmenlina Minasova, a respiratory care practitioner who is also running for state Assembly. Padilla won a special election last summer, replacing former Council President Nury Martinez, and has been seeking her first full four-year term.
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Councilmember Heather Hutt, who has been in office since 2022, was running for her first full four-year term in a Koreatown-to-Crenshaw district.
Four candidates — state Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, attorney Grace Yoo, former city commissioner Aura Vasquez and Pastor Eddie Anderson, a community organizer — were looking to unseat Hutt, who was first appointed to the seat several months after former Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas was charged in a federal corruption case.
The only contest without an incumbent was taking place in the East San Fernando Valley, where seven candidates were seeking to fill the seat being vacated this year by Council President Paul Krekorian, first elected in 2009.
Former state Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian, a former Krekorian aide, was competing against housing advocate Manny Gonez, small business owner Jillian Burgos, commissioner Sam Kbushyan and several others.
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David Zahniser, Dakota Smith, Angie Orellana Hernandez, Caroline Petrow-Cohen
SAN FRANCISCO — It was two days before the start of the school year, and Lauren Koehler shrugged off her backpack and slid out of a maroon hoodie as she approached the blocky, concrete building that houses the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Enrollment Center. Koehler, the center’s 38-year-old executive director, usually focuses on strategy, but on this August day, she wanted to help her team — and the students it serves — get through the crush of office visits and calls that comes every year as families scramble at the last-minute for spots in the city’s schools. So when the center’s main phone line rang in her corner office, she answered.
8:04 AM
Four people waiting in the lobby, 12 callers
“Good morning! Thank you for waiting,” Koehler chirped, her Texas accent audible around the edges. “How can I help you?”
On the line, Kelly Rodriguez explained that she wanted to move her 6-year-old from a private school to a public one for first grade, but only if a seat opened up at Sunset Elementary School, near their house on San Francisco’s predominantly white and Asian west side. Koehler told her the boy was fourth on the waitlist and that last year, three children got in.
“We will keep our fingers crossed,” Rodriguez said, sounding both resigned and hopeful.
Stanford professor Thomas Dee predicted this. Not this specific conversation, of course, but ones like it. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, public school enrollment in the United States had been trending downward, thanks to birth-rate declines and more restrictive immigration policies, but the decreases rarely exceeded half a percentage point. But Dee said, between fall 2019 and fall 2021, enrollment declined by 2.5 percent.
At the leading edge of this national trend is San Francisco. Public school enrollment there fell by 7.6 percent between 2019 and 2022, to 48,785 students. That drop left SFUSD at just over half the size it was in the 1960s, when it was one of the largest districts in the nation.
Declining enrollment can set off a downward spiral. For every student who leaves SFUSD, the district eventually receives approximately $14,650 less, using a conservative estimate of state funds for the 2022–23 school year. When considering all state and federal funds that year, the district stood to lose as much as $21,170 a child. Over time, less money translates to fewer adults to teach classes, clean bathrooms, help manage emotions and otherwise make a district’s schools calm and effective. It also means fewer language programs, robotics labs and other enrichment opportunities that parents increasingly perceive as necessary. That, in turn, can lead to fewer families signing up — and even less money.
It’s why Koehler is trying everything she can to retain and recruit students in the face of myriad complications, from racism to game theory, and why educators and policymakers elsewhere ought to care whether she and her staff of 24 succeed.
Answering calls in August, Koehler had a plan — lots of little plans, really. And she hoped they’d move the needle on the district’s enrollment numbers, to be released later in the year.
Lauren Koehler, executive director of San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Center, invites a family from the waiting room to a counseling session in a sunny conference room two days before the start of the 2023-24 school year. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
Koehler arrived at SFUSD in May 2020, which also happens to be when most believe the story of the district’s hemorrhaging of students began. During Covid, the district’s doors remained closed for more than a year. Sent home in March 2020, the youngest children went back part-time in April 2021; forthe vast majority of middle and high school students, schools didn’t reopen for 17 months, until August 2021. In contrast, most private schools in the city ramped up to full-time, in-person instruction for all grades over the fall of 2020.
It was the latest skirmish in a long-standing market competition in San Francisco — and the public schools lost. The district’s pandemic-era enrollment decline was three times larger than the national one.
“My husband and I are both a product of a public school education, and it’s something we really wanted for our children,” said Rodriguez, the first caller. But her son ended up in private school, she explained, because “we didn’t want him sitting in front of a screen.” It was a conversation that has played out repeatedly for Koehler these past few years. But public schools staying remote for longer is not the whole story, not even close.
Remote schooling accounted for about a quarter of the enrollment decline nationally, Stanford’s Dee estimates. The bigger culprit, especially in San Francisco, is population loss. Even before the pandemic, the city had the fewest 5-to-19-year-olds per capita of any US city, about 10 percent of the population, which is roughly half the national average.
Posters on the wall of the Enrollment Center feature photos of smiling students alongside the names of the SFUSD schools and colleges they attended. It’s part of a larger marketing push to improve the district’s reputation and reverse its enrollment declines. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Then, starting around the time Koehler arrived, fewer new kids came than usual and more residents moved to places like Florida and Texas. A recent Censusestimate found 89,000 K-12 students in San Francisco, down from about 93,000 in 2019. That decline represents more than half of SFUSD’s pandemic-era drop.
It’s difficult to pinpoint how many children migrated to private school in response to SFUSD’s doors’ staying closed, since many did, but at the same time, some private school students also moved away. But Dee’s research shows that private schooling increased by about 8 percent nationally. (Homeschooling numbers also grew, although the number of kids involved remains small.)
And these aren’t the only reasons Koehler’s task can seem Sisyphean.
“You guys should be able to find out how many spots are open!” a father sitting outside Koehler’s office said, frustrated after visiting the enrollment center once a week all summer.
Koehler nodded sympathetically and told him his son was sixth on the waitlist for Hoover Middle School and that three times that many got in last year.
Since 2011, families have been able to apply to any of the city’s 72 public elementary schools, submitting a ranked list of choices. The same goes for middle and high school options. When demand exceeds seats, the enrollment center uses “tiebreakers,” mandated by the city’s elected school board, that try to keep siblings together, give students from marginalized communities a leg up, and let preschoolers stay at their school for kindergarten. After that, living near a school often confers priority. A randomized lottery for each school sorts out the rest, which leads to the entire system being referred to locally as “the lottery.”
Sixty percent of applicants got their first choice in the lottery’s “main round” in March 2023. Almost 90 percent were assigned to one of their listed schools. That makes for a lot of happy campers. It also makes for parents like the father with a wait-listed son, holding out for a better option.
Though she responded to him with unwavering calm, Koehler was frustrated too. She knew a seat would be available for his son, but state law prohibited her from letting the boy sit in it until an assigned student told the Enrollment Center they wouldn’t attend or failed to show up in the first week of school.
“I appreciate your patience,” she said, scrawling her cell number on a business card.
Lauren Koehler, executive director of San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Center, counsels a parent hoping to enroll her child in a district school, but only if the charter school she applied to doesn’t extend an offer first. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
To avoid this bind, Koehler and her team have been experimenting with over-assigning kids, the way airlines overbook flights. New, too, is Koehler’s transparency about wait-list standing. In fact, at the beginning of August, every wait-listed family received an e-mail sharing its child’s standing, plus how many kids on the list got in last year. Koehler and her staff hope promising data will encourage parents to hang in there, while a disappointing forecast will open their minds to another school in SFUSD.
Overbooking and transparency represent incremental change. “I annoy some people on my team to no end by being like, ‘Well, I don’t know if we’re ready for this really large step, but let’s take a small step,’” Koehler said. “Let’s put as many irons in the fire as we can.”
Koehler’s next caller said, “The students are not getting their schedules until 24 hours before school starts, which is completely absurd!” Her voice fraying, the mother shared her suspicion that this was true only for kids coming from private middle schools, like her son. Koehler explained that the policy applied to all ninth graders, but still, she said, “I’m sure that’s stressful and annoying.”
Another caller had her heart set on Lincoln High School, down the block from the family’s home. But her son had been assigned to a school lower on the family’s list and an hour-long bus ride away. Koehler suggested several high schools that would have been a short detour on the woman’s way to work south of the city, but the mother began to cry. She had no interest in “Mission High or whatever,” even when Koehler pointed to Mission’s having the highest University of California acceptance rate in SFUSD.
Family and friends are most influential in shaping people’s attitudes about schools, research specific to SFUSD shows. So if they’ve heard bad things, Koehler’s singing a school’s praises often does little to change their minds. Parents also turn toschool-ratings websites, which studies say push families toward schools with relatively few Black and Hispanic students, like Lincoln, which currently scores a 7 on GreatSchools.org’s 1-10 scoring system, while Mission rates a 3.
As the mother on the phone grew increasingly distressed, Koehler responded simply, “I hear you.” And then, “I know this is really hard.”
She learned these lines from her therapist husband. Before they met, Koehler was an AmeriCorps teacher at a preschool serving kids in a high-poverty community. By her own admission, Koehler was “a totally hopeless teacher,” and she couldn’t stop thinking about “all these systems-level issues.” When her pre-K class toured potential kindergartens, she said, “The schools were just so different from each other.” She realized, “Where you are assigning kids — and what their resourcing level is — matters.”
Applications in Chinese, Spanish and English wait for counselors at SFUSD’s Enrollment Center to grab as parents flock to the office two days before the start of the 2023-24 school year. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
After getting a master’s in public policy at Harvard, Koehler took a planning job with Jefferson Parish Public School System in New Orleans and then became a director of strategic projects with the KIPP charter school network in Houston. She moved to the Bay Area in 2018 to work for a different charter network, and that’s when she met the handsome, “uncommonly honest” school counselor. When she joined SFUSD in 2020, her husband struck out into private practice. “I feel like I get training every day,” quipped Koehler of his reassurances at home.
Now, she has her staff role-play parent counseling sessions, practicing skills picked up during trainings on de-escalation, listening so that people feel heard, and other forms of “nonviolent communication.” They try to make families feel understood and give them a sense of autonomy and control.
Often, they succeed. Often, they fail.
9:38 AM
43 people served in the office, 170 calls answered
When phone lines quieted, Koehler began to call parents from the waiting area back to a sunny conference room featuring two massive city maps dotted by district schools.
The first family told her they live in Mission Bay, a rapidly redeveloping area where a new elementary school isn’t scheduled to open until 2025. They were excited about a school one neighborhood over, until they tested the two-bus commute with a preschooler. Then they realized that the city’s recently opened underground transit line goes straight from their home to Gordon J. Lau Elementary. Koehler wasn’t optimistic about there being openings; it’s a popular school.
When the computer revealed one last spot, she squealed à la Margot Robbie’s Barbie, “You are having the luckiest day!”
On August 14, 2023, the Enrollment Center for San Francisco Unified School District welcomed families trying to sort out their children’s school assignments two days before the start of the academic year. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
But the next parent, Kristina Kunz, was not as lucky. “My daughter was at Francisco during the stabbing last year,” she told Koehler. The sixth grader didn’t witness the March 2023 event, but when the school was evacuated, she thought she was about to die in a mass shooting. Once home, she refused to go back. Kunz told Koehler the family would have left the district, but they’d already been paying Catholic school tuition for her brother after he’d felt threatened at another middle school a few years earlier. “That was literally the only option,” Kunz said, “and we absolutely can’t afford it this year.”
Koehler read Kunz the list of middle schools with openings, all in the city’s southeast, which has a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic residents than other parts of the city. “Huh uh,” Kunz said, “none of those.” She’d take her chances waiting for a spot to open at Hoover on the west side.
The next parent, a woman who’d recently sent a vitriolic e-mail to the superintendent, said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools.” When Koehler rattled off the schools in the southeast that still had openings, the mother shrugged, as if those didn’t count.
Koehler closed her eyes and quickly inhaled. What she didn’t get into, but was perpetually on her mind, is what she’d read in“Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools,” by Rand Quinn, a political sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
San Francisco segregated its schools from its earliest days. In 1870, students with Asian ancestry were officially allowed in any school, but often weren’t welcome in them, leaving most Asian American kids to learn in community-run and missionary schools. In 1875, the district declared schools open to Black students too, but nearly a century later, in 1965, 17 schools were more than 90 percent white and nine were more than 90 percent Black. A large system of parochial schools thrived alongside a handful of nonreligious, exclusively white private schools.
Public school desegregation efforts began in earnest in 1969 with the Equality/Quality plan, which, though modest, involved busing some students from predominantly white neighborhoods. An uproar followed, and the district, which had more than 90,000 students at its 1960s zenith, saw its numbers drop by more than 8,000 students between the spring and fall of 1970 as families fled integration. Over the next dozen years, SFUSD’s rolls decreased by more than 35,000, owing to white flight and also to the last of the baby boomers aging out and drastic public school funding cuts in the wake of a 1978 state proposition that largely froze the property tax base.
A family looking for an elementary school two days before the start of the school year has earmarked a page in San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Guide. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
After 1980, enrollment bounced back a little, but then for years it plateaued at roughly 52,000 students. During the 1965–66 school year, more than 45 percent of the district’s students were white. By 1977, just over 14 percent were. Today, that number is just under 14 percent. All of which is to say, when white families left in droves, they never really came back.
There have been about half a dozen similar initiatives since Equality/Quality — with names like Horseshoe and Educational Redesign — and each time, some west-side parents mounted opposition. Quinn quoted a former superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, who said at the outset of one of those “neighborhood schools” campaigns in the early 2000s: “They’ve said racist things I hadn’t heard since the late ’60s…talking about ‘in that neighborhood, my child might be raped!’”
It’s not just white families who object to their kids being educated alongside a significant number of Black children, said longtime Board of Education Commissioner Mark Sanchez. “You see that in the Latinx population and Asian population as well.”
In nearby Marin County, home to some of the nation’s most affluent suburbs, private schools opened one after the other in the 1970s. At least another 10 independent schools popped up in San Francisco proper, stealing market share from both SFUSD and the city’s parochial sector and pushing overall private school enrollmentabove 30 percent for the first time. Today, approximately 25 percent of San Francisco’s school-aged children attend private school, compared to 8 percent in the state of California and similar shares in many large cities. A November San Francisco Chronicleinvestigation found that at least three independent schools have applied for permits to expand or renovate their campuses in order to make room for more students. At one private school, enrollment is projected to more than double.
When Americans think of segregation academies, they think of the South, said Sanchez, but San Francisco has long had its own. In part because the city didn’t offer quality schooling to children of color. “You’ll see a lot of second-, third-, fourth-generation Latinos that will just only put their kids in Catholic school.”
Lauren Koehler, executive director of San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Center, points out district schools that a family has yet to consider in a counseling session two days before the 2023-24 school year begins. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
These personal decisions have a ripple effect beyond decreasing SFUSD’s budget. Research has shown that advantaged, white families’ turning away from public schools sends a signal to others about their quality. Other studies reveal that when private schools are an option, recent movers to gentrifying neighborhoods are more likely to opt out of public schools. And it is well-established that segregated environments breed people who seek comfort in segregated environments.
“It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing,” Sanchez said: Private schools are there in part because of racial fear, and racial fear is perpetuated in part because private schools are there.
In 2015, in the southeast part of the city, SFUSD opened Willie Brown Middle School,a state-of-the-art facility that includes a wellness center, a library, a kitchen, a performing arts space, a computer lab, a maker space, biotech lab, a health center, and a rainwater garden, in addition to light-filled classrooms. With small class sizes, bamboo cabinets, few staff vacancies, and furniture outfitted with wheels, it could easily be a private school.
But Willie Brown remained under-enrolled, year after year, even after the school board passed a policy giving its graduates preference for Lowell High School, known as the “crown jewel” of SFUSD. Last year, enrollment jumped when Koehler’s Enrollment Center overbooked the school in the first round, parents decided to give it a shot, and kids ended up happy. About 20 percent of the student body is now white, yet still, spots remained open two days before the start of school this past fall.
To some observers, Willie Brown is just the latest iteration of a failed “if you build it, they will come” narrative in San Francisco. In the second half of the 1970s, the district created new programs and “alternative schools,” akin to other cities’ magnet schools, to attract back families that had fled. Later, Superintendent Ackerman promised a flood of investment in schools in the southeast, including new language programs. There was a small effect on enrollment, Quinn said, but only on the margins.
So when the parent said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools,” Koehler understood that lots of factors influence which schools work for a family and which don’t. But there was also an echo of 1960s anti-integration parent groups.
“I’m sorry,” she replied, “I know this is really stressful.”
1:07 PM
127 served in the office, 390 calls answered
A 17-year-old newcomer to the US entered the Enrollment Center and sat across the conference room table from Koehler. She asked when he’d arrived in San Francisco.
“Domingo.”
“Ayer?” Koehler asked. (Yesterday?)
“No, domingo pasado.” (Last Sunday.)
In New York City and other large cities, an increase in asylum-seeking familieshas been credited with stopping public school enrollment declines. Migrant childrenhave come to San Francisco too, and Koehler’s team has tried to reduce thepaperwork hurdles they and other families face when trying to enroll.
But Koehler would need to meet many more kids like this one to stave off school closures forever.
A family member sitting in the waiting room of SFUSD’s Enrollment Center has filled out an application two days before the start of the 2023-24 school year and waits to speak with an enrollment counselor. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
She’d also need charter school enrollment to stop increasing.
The next parent, also a recent immigrant, stepped into the conference room with a stack of papers issued by the Peruvian government and the conviction that her son needed to be placed in a different grade than the one specified by his age. She made it clear to Koehler that the family would jump at the first appropriate placement offer: SFUSD’s or at Thomas Edison Charter Academy. Koehler scrambled to get the boy assessed and recategorized.
Charter schools were first authorized in San Francisco in the 1990s. Though their share of the education market is smaller here than in places like New Orleans, charter enrollment hassteadily increased, with new schools often inhabiting the buildings of schools SFUSD had to close. Now, approximately 7,000 students attend charter schools rather than district ones.
On August 30, 2023, SFUSD families received an e-mail from the superintendent saying, “We are going to make some tough decisions in the coming months and all the options are on the table.”
Each time a student leaves the district, SFUSD has less money to operate that student’s old school. But the heating bill does not go down. The teacher must be paid the same amount. A class of 21 first graders — or even a class of eight — is no cheaper than a class of 22.
It stands to reason that closing under-enrolled schools and reassigning their students and the funds that go with them to different schools, as many districts across the country arecurrently poised to do, should produce better educational outcomes for all. But it often doesn’t, as experiences in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans illustrate. Sally A. Nuamah, a professor at Northwestern University, has described school closures as “reactive” and urged policymakers to focus instead on the root causes of declining enrollment, like the lack of affordable housing that drives families out of cities.
Koehler can control those things about as readily as she can dig a new train tunnel or decrease school-shooting fear. But she might be able to improve the district’s reputation.
Her team started by modernizing marketing efforts, like going digital with preschool outreach, producing a video about each school, and rebooting the annual Enrollment Fair, a day when principals and PTA presidents sit behind more than 100 folding tables. Parents used to push strollers through the throngs to grab a handout and snippet of conversation; now, schools play videos and offer up QR codes too.
Parents and caregivers, some of whom don’t yet have a school assignment for their child, wait to speak with counselors at SFUSD’s Enrollment Center two days before the 2023-24 school year begins. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
For two years, SFUSD has also worked with digital marketing companies. One “positive impression campaign” included social media posts pushed out by the San Francisco Public Library and the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. Images feature photos of smiling students alongside the names of the SFUSD schools and colleges they attended: For example, “Jazmine – Flynn Elementary School – Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 – O’Connell High School – Stanford University.” In addition to online ads, the district has purchased radio spots and light-pole ads. It’s mailed postcards.
Koehler would like to increase the current outlay of about $10,000 a year, but it’s hard to spend on recruitment when instruction remains underfunded, even if increased enrollment would more than offset the cost. Especially since, at some point, marketing becomes futile. With a finite number of kids in the city, initiatives to increase market share become “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Dee likes to say. (Private school-board members and admissions directors in San Francisco are also expressing alarm at population declines.)
And in San Francisco, any PR campaign contends with two major sources of bad PR: the press and parents. Koehler understands why journalists report on what’s going wrong in SFUSD: It’s their job. But she sees loads of negative headlines and very few accounts of the many things that are going right. Readers are left with the impression that private schools in the city are objectively better at serving students, which just isn’t true.
Some parents have left SFUSD or refused to enroll their kids because of substantive complaints, like with the district’s decision not to offer Algebra I in eighth grade (starting in 2014). There is also some real scarcity in the process, as in Rodriguez’s case: There simply isn’t enough room on Sunset’s small campus for everyone who wants to be there. And individual families have unresolvable logistical constraints, and in very rare cases, truly legitimate safety concerns. But a lot of it has to do with timing — and fear.
3:23 PM
177 served in the office, 540 calls answered
When David, a father of two, rang the Enrollment Center, it was with the air of a man who just wanted to do the right thing.
After touring SFUSD’s George Peabody Elementary, David and his wife decided the school would be a great fit for their incoming kindergartener. There was something special about it, and they wanted her to learn in a diverse setting.
But they also wanted a backup plan, having heard horror stories of the lottery’s vagaries. “We had two number-one choices,” he said: Peabody and a Jewish private school. They applied to both. In March, their daughter was offered a spot at the private school — and one at a different SFUSD school they liked less. “If we got into Peabody in the first round, we would have gone to Peabody,” said David, who asked that his full name be withheld to protect his privacy. Instead, they signed a contract with the private school. “We put our daughter on the waitlist” for Peabody, he said, “and then kind of forgot about it.”
A family speaks with SFUSD Enrollment Center counselor Raquel Miranda two days before the 2023-24 school year begins. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
When the family got an e-mail offering a spot, on the Saturday before school started, they were excited enough to click “accept,” even though they would have lost their private school deposit. Then they learned that Peabody’s after-school program was full. “There was just no way that we could have made it happen without aftercare,” David said. So he called the Enrollment Center to offer the spot to another family.
Hearing David’s story, Koehler sighed. If she had been able to place his child at Peabody in the first round, aftercare would have been available there, but in August the only programs with openings were located offsite. Because that didn’t work for David’s family, Koehler was left with a seat sitting open at a high-demand school.
Private schools can require open houses, interviews, and a tuition deposit to help screen out all but the most interested families and reveal information about their likelihood of accepting an offer. But SFUSD has tried to do away with hurdles like that, since they disadvantage the already disadvantaged. With no way of gauging intention to enroll, Koehler has to hold seats from March until August for thousands of students who ultimately won’t use them. And she can’t just overbook aggressively, because there are always outliers. This year, one of the city’s biggest middle schools saw every single child who was assigned in March, save one, show up in August. Private schools can more easily absorb extra kids if they overdo it with admissions a little, but Koehler risks a massive fiscal error under the district’s union contract. And overbooking risks leaving other SFUSD schools under-enrolled, something single-campus private schools don’t have to worry about.
It leaves SFUSD an unpredictable mess able to enroll fewer families than it otherwise would. And because the process is a mess, more families apply to multiple systems to hedge their bets and end up holding on to multiple seats, making it all more of a mess.
But change is coming. In 2018, the school board passed a resolution to eventually overhaul SFUSD’s school assignment system. Starting in 2026, citywide elementary school choice will be replaced by choice within zones tied to students’ addresses. The task of sorting out the details has fallen to Koehler’s team, along with a group at Stanford co-led by Irene Lo, a professor in the school of engineering who has been trained to design and optimize “matching” markets like this one.
If Lo could start anywhere, she’d centralize the application process so that families would rank their true preferences: public, private, and charter. One algorithm could then assign the vast majority of seats in a single pass, largely eliminating delays like the one David’s family experienced. But private schools stand to lose ground by agreeing to that, and many public school supporters would argue that this condones and uplifts private and charter schools. So instead of centralization, Lo will start with prediction.
She’ll use AI and other modern modeling tools to anticipate what parents will like. Then there’s “strategy-proofing,” a term from game theory. Essentially, it means trying to set up a system that incentivizes parents to be truthful. Over the decades, families have taken advantage of loopholes allowing students to attend a different school than the one designated by their address. And not just a few families. In the late 1990s, it was more than half. To gain an advantage, they’ve also lied about their student’s ethnicity, “race-neutral diversity factors” such as mother’s education level, and their zip code. Any way each system could be gamed, it was gamed.
Lo said the new six or seven zones will be drawn so each comes close to reflecting the district’s average socioeconomic status. Layered on top of that will be “dynamic reserves” at each school, basically set-asides giving lower-income students first dibs on some seats to make sure diverse zones don’t segregate into schools with wealthier students and others with concentrated poverty. City blocks will be used as a proxy for students’ level of disadvantage.
It all sounds great. It also all sounds familiar. In the early 1970s, Horseshoe featured seven zones and assignment to schools so as to create racial balance. Educational Redesign relied on quotas to make sure no ethnic group exceeded 45 percent. The current lottery uses “microneighborhoods” to capture disadvantage.
What makes Koehler and Lo think the outcome could be different this time?
Lo admitted that they’re trying “another way of putting together the same ingredients.” It’s still guesswork, but with her cutting-edge tools it should be more accurate than the guesswork of the past. And while parents still won’t have complete predictability, they’ll have more than before.
“I understand this is really difficult,” Koehler said to the last parent of the day.
4:47 PM
183 served in the office, 590 calls answered
With the waiting room empty and back offices quiet, Koehler approached each member of her staff: “Go home, because I know this is going to be a really long week.”
It’s likely to be a very long year—and decade—for the enrollment center.
San Francisco was 40 percent white as of the last Census, but only 13.8 percent of its public school enrollment was. Even if Lo works the unprecedented miracle of getting schools to reflect the district’s diversity, there is no hope that they will reflect the city’s without a major change in the way parents have behaved for decades. The data is clear: Without a critical mass of white students in a school, a significant number of parents won’t consider it.
Lauren Koehler, the executive director of SFUSD’s Enrollment Center, listens as a man explains in Spanish that he’d like to enroll a 17-year-old in school despite not being listed on the adolescent’s birth certificate or any other record. The student arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor just days before the start of the 2023-24 school year. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
Still, many families are choosing SFUSD, including some of those Koehler talked to in August. Kunz’s daughter got into Hoover off the waiting list. A few months into the school year, her mother said, she is thriving. Her older brother, the one who was pulled out of public middle school, chose SFUSD’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts over a well-regarded Catholic high school.
Rodriguez, the mother who wanted to send her first grader to Sunset, learned a few days after her call with Koehler that everyone assigned had shown up, and her son wouldn’t be offered a spot. But Koehler’s team had another suggestion near the family’s home: Jefferson Elementary School. Rodriguez almost rejected it in favor of private school, but she’s relieved she didn’t.
“The community’s been very, very welcoming,” she said in October. “His teacher’s wonderful; she has almost 20 years of experience. It has a beautiful garden. The principal is really involved.” A few months later things were still going well: “Jefferson is just fantastic,” she said in December: “We’ve been really, really pleased.”
But Rodriguez said she’s still “recovering” from the enrollment process. “I also worry about the future of it, as we hear potential school closures, budget deficits,” she said. The family is considering selling their house, in favor of a place somewhere else in the Bay Area “where there aren’t so many of the issues that SFUSD is running into.”
In October, David said he and his wife wouldn’t necessarily send their second child to the Jewish private school: “I think we probably will look at Peabody again.” And if that happened, he said, they may even move their oldest over to SFUSD. But by December, his outlook was different. David said his family has been very happy with the private school experience.
Koehler knew about each of these outcomes and thousands more like them, and she hoped they would amount to a turned tide, with enrollment starting to creep up rather than down.
This fall, she and her team learned of SFUSD’s preliminary numbers: Enrollment increased from 48,785 to 49,143. That said, hundreds of those kids are 4-year-olds, sitting in “transitional kindergarten” spots newly added to a statewide specialized pre-K program. In essence, enrollment had flatlined.
Koehler felt nonetheless undaunted. The stable numbers mean “that our outreach is working,” she said. “We are not losing people at the rate that we otherwise might.”
And not all of her plans, her incremental tinkering, have come to fruition yet. “One of my random dreams is that we could do aftercare at the same time as we do enrollment,” she said. She also pointed to SFUSD’s efforts to realign program offerings with what parents want most, spread more success stories, better compensate teachers, and get a bond measure on an upcoming ballot. For the 2025–26 application cycle, her team would like to automatically assign families to multiple waiting lists, “which we hope will make at least the process seem less cumbersome and frightening,” she said. Add in Lo’s changes, Koehler said, and “we’ll draw people back who right now are frustrated by our process.”
“I have a sense that the future will be positive.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
SELMA, Ala. – Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to be among those marking the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day Alabama law officers attacked Civil Rights demonstrators on the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
The demonstrators were beaten by officers as they tried to march across Alabama on March 7, 1965, in support of voting rights. A march across the bridge, which is a highlight of the commemoration in Selma every year, is planned for Sunday afternoon.
Sunday’s march is among dozens of events during the annual Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee, which began Thursday and culminates Sunday. The events commemorate Bloody Sunday and the signing of the Voting Rights Act.
“During her speech, the Vice President will honor the legacy of the civil rights movement, address the ongoing work to achieve justice for all, and encourage Americans to continue the fight for fundamental freedoms that are under attack throughout the country,” the White House said in announcing her visit.
Harris joined the march in 2022, calling the site hallowed ground and giving a speech calling on Congress to defend democracy by protecting people’s right to vote. On that anniversary, Harris spoke of marchers whose “peaceful protest was met with crushing violence.”
“They were kneeling when the state troopers charged,” she said then. “They were praying when the billy clubs struck.”
Images of the violence at the bridge stunned Americans, which helped galvanize support for passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law struck down barriers prohibiting Black people from voting.
U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, a Democrat of South Carolina who is leading a pilgrimage to Selma, said he is seeking to “remind people that we are celebrating an event that started this country on a better road toward a more perfect union,” but the right to vote is still not guaranteed.
Clyburn sees Selma as the nexus of the 1960s movement for voting rights, at a time when there currently are efforts to scale back those rights.
“The Voting Rights Act of 1965 became a reality in August of 1965 because of what happened on March 7th of 1965,” Clyburn said.
“We are at an inflection point in this country,” he added. “And hopefully this year’s march will allow people to take stock of where we are.”
Clyburn said he hopes the weekend in Alabama would bring energy and unity to the civil rights movement, as well as benefit the city of Selma.
“We need to do something to develop the waterfront, we need to do something that bring the industry back to Selma,” Clyburn said. “We got to do something to make up for them having lost that military installation down there that provided all the jobs. All that goes away, there’s nothing to keep young people engaged in developing their communities.”
U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland also is expected to attend the event in Selma.
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Associated Press reporters Stephen Groves in Washington, D.C., and Jeff Martin in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
It can be easy to think of school closures, remote learning and masked classrooms as part of the pandemic past.
But educators across the country know better. They see the learning loss that persists, despite their best efforts to provide some measure of consistency amid all the disruption.
While new data suggest students are making a “ ‘surprising’ rebound,” findings also show math and reading levels for elementary and middle school students are nowhere near pre-pandemic levels.
Worse yet, systemic inequality has actually worsened, with students in the poorest communities falling even further behind their more affluent peers.
Recognizing near the start of the pandemic that U.S. public schools required vast support, federal and state government officials appropriated historic levels of help via elementary and secondary school emergency relief funds.
As a recently retired superintendent of schools, I’ve watched, with immense frustration, as state and federal officials followed up their initial funding with blindly conceived appropriations tied to inflexible and short-sighted deadlines.
Now that funding is drying up at precisely the wrong time; districts will be left trying to fund nascent positions and programs on top of their normal operational costs.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, educators have been switching focus from acute short-term challenges to the chronic and stubborn ones poised to become generational pain points. Novel educational impacts of the pandemic are still emerging while others persist.
Classroom teachers and school administrators are seeing more challenging student behaviors and family distress on top of the learning gaps.
That’s why federal funding must not end. We would never ask doctors to treat their patients before they began exhibiting symptoms. So why would we ask our educators to essentially do the same?
As deadlines for the expenditure of federal dollars loom and intersect with next year’s budget development, school districts once again face the uncertainty of not having sufficient resources for challenges that they do not yet fully understand.
Short-term funding will not be sufficient for navigating out of a once-in-a-century global public health problem that fundamentally changed the way the U.S. educates our youth.
We need a more logical, reasonable and, most importantly, sustainable approach to combat pandemic-induced learning loss, in whatever form it appears. Although federal and state funding is typically allocated yearly, future funding should be targeted and guaranteed for multiple years.
Without taking a different funding approach, we will only guarantee that the impacts linger or worsen. Right now, well-intentioned federal funding may actually be widening the achievement gap. We are seeing economically disadvantaged communities starting to lag in their rate of learning as measured by standardized testing.
Leaders holding the power of the purse will need to recognize that the new playing field is still unequal, and that economic disparities among communities will continue to yield different learning outcomes. Leveling the playing field means better distribution of funds.
The federal funding that is set to expire in 2024 cannot wipe away the adverse learning impacts of the pandemic. While it can be tempting and politically expedient to declare the pandemic over, turning the page prematurely leaves students and teachers behind and potentially exacerbates existing challenges.
We can and must do better.
Hamlet Michael Hernandez is an assistant teaching professor of education and director of the Educational Leadership program at Quinnipiac University.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Since the Supreme Court abolished affirmative action last June, selective colleges and universities have had to dismantle their most effective tools for pursuing racially and ethnically diverse student bodies.
Some institutions have even preemptively eliminated race-based scholarships and special academic programs for historically marginalized groups, fearing litigation.
It’s no surprise that advocates of equity feel profoundly pessimistic. Yet if we broaden our focus, there are myriad more impactful ways to promote educational equity than adjusting the admissions practices of elite colleges.
Just a small subset of the 4,000 degree-granting institutions in the United States have ever practiced race-conscious admissions, and only a tiny fraction of all Black, Latino and Native American students attend those schools.
Widespread improvements in educational equity and economic mobility will happen only when minority-serving and broad-access institutions receive our respect and support.
Here are some ways we can help:
1. Invest in the schools doing the bulk of equity work. Far greater numbers of Black, Latino and Native American students are enrolled at public and private schools with moderately selective to open admission practices than at elite colleges. These more accessible institutions have higher economic mobility ratings than their Ivy peers due to the larger number of students from low-income backgrounds that they serve. Initiatives that increase affordability and make big publics feel more like small privates directly contribute to their positive outcomes.
2. Redirect philanthropic dollars from prestige-school endowments to minority-serving institutions. Chronic underfunding and inadequate endowments limit the opportunities that minority-serving institutions can provide. Historically Black colleges and universities and community colleges, in particular, have been neglected by philanthropy for decades.
These institutions are being asked to carry the responsibility of changing lives and creating regional workforces but are not reliably given the fiscal means to do so. Redirecting even a small percentage of philanthropic dollars to these schools would be transformative. The recent $100 million gift to Spelman College, three-quarters of which will go to scholarships, embodies this mandate.
3.Address the needs of the fast-growing community of “some college, no credential”—an estimated 40.4 million former students as of 2021. Black, Latino and Native American students comprise greater proportions of this demographic than they do of total undergraduates.
This large number is unsurprising when you consider the actual cost of college attendance. In New York, a student enrolled at a public four-year university who qualifies for full federal and state aid will still face a gap of $15,000 to $20,000 to cover total educational expenses. (This gap increases if the student is among the more than one in five undergraduates who is a parent and if child care costs are considered.)
Nationwide, Black students have the greatest unmet need; many take on debt to graduate, while others drop out.
Several states have launched efforts to reenroll potential-completers, including some of the 2.9 million former students who have at least two years’ worth of credits. Other programs, like ASAP and ACE, have helped to significantly improve degree completion at associate and baccalaureate colleges.
Supporting and expanding these initiatives through advocacy and philanthropy would directly benefit the completion rates of historically marginalized students.
4. Elite graduate schools, firms and training programs need to expand the circle of schools from which they recruit. If they do not, the Supreme Court ruling risks impeding the pipeline of underrepresented groups into prestigious career tracks and leadership positions, many of which rely on a specific recruiting network and academic pedigree.
For example, internships enhance a college student’s ability to secure a job after graduation, but a recent survey found that “male students, white students, students who are not first generation, and students who are not Pell Grant recipients were more likely to participate in internships than other groups of students.” A study of CUNY, a minority-serving system, reported that only 10 percent of students participated in paid internships during college.
There are remedies to this problem. For more than a dozen years, the philanthropy I work for in New York City has supported paid internships for women with financial need. The students choose internships that best serve their career interests, and we provide a stipend and cover transportation expenses.
On the national level, organizations like Braven partner with schools to supplement campus career services with mentoring, internship and job application assistance and a career development curriculum. There are many other opportunities and innovations; what is needed is investment to pilot and scale these programs and appropriate funding to help less selective schools prepare students for them.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, feelings of distress are warranted. But the bigger question, asked recently by Jonathan Koppell, president of Montclair State University, a Hispanic-serving institution, is, “How do we create more opportunities for more people, regardless of their race or ethnicity, so that it doesn’t feel like the stakes of getting into one of these tiny, tiny institutions is so life-altering?”
The answer: shift our attention and dollars to the colleges, universities and student success organizations pursuing a vision of abundant opportunity.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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“Everybody’s waiting to write my obituary.”
This is never a good thing for a candidate to be saying on Election Day.
But Nikki Haley, the candidate, was trying—pleading—to make a larger point to CNN’s Dana Bash as they sat on raised chairs in the middle of Chez Vachon, the landmark coffee shop and makeshift TV studio on the west side of Manchester, New Hampshire.
“We had 14 candidates,” Haley said, referring to the number of people who were seeking the Republican nomination a few months ago. “It’s now down to two”—Haley and Donald Trump. “That’s not an obituary; that’s somebody who’s a fighter.”
Fair enough. Haley was indeed still here and showing up, which is something to be proud of. She is the last woman standing between the former president and an unimpeded romp to the Republican nomination. This was Haley’s “closing argument” as she made her final rounds in New Hampshire yesterday, greeting volunteers at polling places, doing interviews, and hitting the tables at Chez Vachon. She would keep fighting and continue to flout the naysayers who have trailed her for her entire career. Underestimate me is the message printed on one of Haley’s favorite T-shirts. That’ll be fun.
Almost immediately after the polls closed, a few hours later, networks declared Trump the New Hampshire winner. His margin of victory over Haley, however, looked smaller than expected. “THIS RACE IS OVER,” Trump insisted in a text blasted out to his supporter list just after 8 p.m. Nope, Haley told her Election Night revelers in Concord, vowing to persist as the campaign moved to her home state of South Carolina. “New Hampshire is first in the nation. It’s not last in the nation,” she said in her speech. “This race is far from over.”
I spent much of December and early January watching Haley campaign for the job she quite clearly has been aspiring to for years. She proved to be disciplined and polished, good enough to outlast the battalion of male challengers arrayed alongside her—“the fellas,” as she has lately taken to calling her rivals, many of whom endorsed Trump as they fell away. She has claimed repeatedly to be part of a “two-person race” against Trump, despite finishing third in Iowa behind him and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
This felt like wishful thinking at times, but it is unquestionably true now and will present Haley with what’s been a recurring dilemma of her candidacy: How hard will she be willing to campaign against Trump? Will she be as noxious and ornery as the former president surely will be against her? Will she be willing to attack Trump and seize the ample vulnerabilities he provides, even if it risks his unrestrained ire?
Haley was hesitant to go after him when the field was more crowded. She offered only the mildest of critiques—that “chaos follows” Trump “rightly or wrongly” and that he was not “the right president” for these times (as he was before). But it was hardly a sure thing that Haley would deploy her best material against Trump—about his odd behavior and mental capacity and legal problems.
The final days of the New Hampshire campaign offered clues that she might now be willing to do so. She mentioned Trump’s age throughout the day yesterday (inflating it by three years, to 80) and brought up the perplexing sequence from Trump’s Friday-night rally, in which he seemed to suggest that Haley had been in charge of security at the Capitol on January 6 (he apparently had mistaken her for Nancy Pelosi).
Perhaps more notably, Haley conveyed that she was willing to draw out the race for as long as necessary. “Joe Biden isn’t going to get any younger or any better,” she said in her speech in Concord. “We’ll have all the time we need to beat Joe Biden.” This carried a sly message directed at Trump: He wasn’t getting any younger or better, either. And the longer the race continued, the more his court cases would advance, new facts would be revealed, and his behavior could spiral. Haley pointed out that voters in 20 states would be casting ballots in the next two months. There would be many more contests to enjoy, or stay alive for.
If nothing else, Haley would live to see another Election Day, in another state.
Primary days can give off an oddly freewheeling and punch-drunk vibe. Candidates, staffers, and volunteers have all done their work. Most of them are exhausted and often battling colds, hangovers, or other ailments. There is no more practice and preparation left to do.
“The hay is in the barn,” as old political hacks like to say. Or, at least one political hack said this—to me—but I forget who it was. I’ve also seen the maxim attributed to stir-crazy football coaches (before the big game) and distance runners (before a race). The basic idea is the same: There’s not much left to do, except find a way to pass hours and burn nervous energy.
Everything that remains tends to be improvisational and hardly strategic. Candidates rush around, trying to get supporters out to vote and, in Haley’s case, to convince them that the race is not over, despite all the polls showing Trump with a big lead.
“I don’t even want to talk about numbers, and I don’t think y’all should either,” Haley admonished Bash at Chez Vachon.
She then mentioned one number in particular: six.
That reflects the sum of votes that Haley received in Dixville Notch, the tiny village in the northern tip of the state that is known for tallying its votes just after midnight on the morning of the primary. “There were more than 10 journalists for every voter,” The New YorkTimes said in its report on the wee-hours scene, which it called “as much a press spectacle as it is a serious exercise in democracy.” (The same could be said about the New Hampshire primary in general, an exercise that features a relatively tiny number of voters whose views are comically amplified by media swarms.)
“All six came to us,” Haley reported of the Dixville Notch vote. “Not part, not one—all six.”
Haley was joined at Chez Vachon by New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, her biggest supporter and frequent traveling companion across the state in recent weeks. At one point, I asked Sununu, who was standing next to the kitchen door—nearly getting run over by waitresses carrying plates loaded with pancakes, bacon, and poutine drowned in brown gravy—whether he was worried that this might be the last New Hampshire primary as we know it. Some have predicted as much, given that the Democrats are no longer holding their first contest here. Was he feeling wistful at all, nostalgic maybe?
“Nah, we’re always in this. It never leaves us,” Sununu said. He added that the Democrats had “learned their lesson”—that they never should have messed with New Hampshire and tried to take away its rightful spot at the front of the primary parade.
Sununu has shown himself willing to question Trump’s age and mental fitness more directly than Haley had been until the past few days. “If he’s off the teleprompter, he can barely keep a cogent thought,” Sununu said of Trump in an interview with Fox News yesterday. “This guy is nearly 80 years old.”
“He’s 77,” the Fox host corrected him.
“That’s nearly 80,” Sununu maintained. “We’ll do math later.”
He has an obvious point about Trump, one that’s worth making. But this is a pet peeve of mine. Sununu and Haley often say that a Donald Trump–Joe Biden rematch would feature “two 80-year-olds.” Haley recently said that if Trump were convicted, and she were elected, she would likely pardon the former president. Why? Because it’s not in the country’s interest to have “an 80-year-old man sitting in jail,” she said.
It sounds like a minor thing, but if Haley is going to attack Trump (correctly) for lying, if she’s going to try to claim some moral high ground in this race, she herself should not be fudging the facts. There’s no need to anyway; at 52, she’s clearly younger than both him and Biden.
Since I figured the encounter at Chez Vachon might be the last time that I’d be so close to Haley—maybe ever—I decided to be one of those nuisance reporters and follow her out of the restaurant.
“How old is President Trump?” I asked her as she crossed Kelley Street. Haley ignored me.
“How old is President Trump?” I tried again. She kept walking. Someone else shouted a question that I didn’t hear.
“There’s a lot of energy, that’s what we’re seeing today,” Haley said in a rote tone, disappearing into a town car and motoring off to her next stop, and then more stops after that.
I cried the day I gained acceptance to Wesleyan University in 2018. My tears signified relief, joy and excitement. I viewed my acceptance into this elite private institution as a dooropening, a new opportunity for young Black students like me.
As a Sierra Leonean American, I had felt constrained by my public education in the United States. I had to fight against low expectations and conditions that devalued my potential, including “accidentally” being placed into English as a Second Language in elementary school, even though English is my first language. I then had to fight for a spot in upper-level classes when I got into high school.
I was fortunate to become a part of TeenSHARP, a college access program for marginalized students that exposed me to schools like Wesleyan and taught me how to advocate for myself while paving the way for others.
Little did I know that my acceptance to Wesleyan was opening a portal to an academic and corporate world in which I would see even fewer people who looked like me. While many college students experience their first semester as an exhilarating time filled with joining student groups, I spent a lot of my time grappling with what it meant to be the only Black woman in predominantly white classes. With the end of affirmative action, more students will experience what I felt: being the only or one of a few Black students.
I remember exploring Wesleyan for the first time. The halls were filled with pictures of alumni, mostly white men, that sent me on a trip down the institution’s memory lane where, as a Black woman, I didn’t exist.
No matter how much I told myself that I belonged, the insidious history of Wesleyan, from its pictures to its architecture to its racial makeup, was a haunting reminder that while I may have gained entry into this world, Black people generally do not.
I would have loved to go to a historically Black college or university, but the lack of funding for HBCUs means they can’t be as generous with financial aid,leaving me, and many other Black students, with the options of taking on unsustainable debt or trying to get in somewhere else.
My acceptance to Wesleyan came at a time when race could still be considered in college admissions, before the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, effectively ending an avenue of hope for Black and Latino groups.
However, the gap between the numbers of Black and white college graduates was growing even before the court ruled on affirmative action.
Affirmative action was a meager attempt at leveling the playing field. The Supreme Court’s decision to get rid of it will only continue the caste system in which people with marginalized identities are barred from reaching self-determination because we simply can’t get into spaces that will allow us to thrive.
Ending affirmative action is not only an attack on the benefits of diversity in education, but a direct way to end the mobility of students like me by closing the door to opportunities that were already hard to access.
Historically, race has been a social determinant. Race determined which jobs you could get and which schools you could attend. To ignore race in college admissions will not erase the race problem that plagues our nation. It will only exasperate it.
As long as America refuses to look in the mirror and face the social barriers that necessitated the creation of affirmative action in the first place, brilliant students of color will be overlooked in the admissions process.
As I build my career, I often find myself in situations similar to those I experienced as an undergraduate: One of just a handful ofBlack people, or even the only one, in professional settings.
The Supreme Court’s decision has now set a precedent such that initiatives like the Fearless Fund, a nonprofit that provides funding for Black women entrepreneurs, are under attack. And many companies have halted diversity, equity and inclusion programs due to fear of being sued.
Now is the time not to be complacent but to educate ourselves, stay informed and mobilize. The court’s decision is a reminder that the rights and opportunities we have fought for are not a given, and only stay firm when we are.
Alphina Kamara is a development associate at The World Justice Project and a previous Fulbright fellow.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Pleasantville is a mostly Black and Hispanic community located between two major freeways, the I-10 and the 610, in Houston, Texas. This placement is no accident, saidBridgette Murray, a retired nurse and local community leader: “The highway plan in the 1950s was used to divide communities of color.” Today, an estimated 300,000 vehicles stream by on a daily basis, she said. The neighborhood is also close to the Houston Ship Channel, exposing it to heavy industrial pollution.
But state air monitoring stations aren’t placed to capture all the hazards concentrated in that small area. So Murray’s group, ACTS (Achieving Community Tasks Successfully), has been partnering for almost a decade with urban planning expert Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University, to do their own air quality monitoring. ACTS just won a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to expand the program.
Bullard has been called the father of the environmental justice movement. His 1990 book “Dumping in Dixie” documented the systemic placement of polluting facilities and waste disposal in communities of color, as well as those communities fighting back. He said scientists and communities need each other.
“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people,” he said. “We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”
“It’s a mutual respect,” Murray said of the relationship between her group and the Texas Southern researchers. “You have to have a partner that respects the ideas you are bringing to the table and also allows you to grow.”
Bullard is co-founder, with Beverly Wright, of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium, which brings together historically black universities and community-based organizations in what Wright has termed the “communiversity” model. There are partnerships like the one in Houston all over the South: Dillard and Xavier Universities, in New Orleans, working on wetlands restoration and equitable recovery from storms; Jackson State is working in Gulfport, Mississippi, on legacy pollution; and Florida A&M in Pensacola on the issue of landfills and borrow pits (holes dug to extract sand and clay that are then used as landfill).
Bullard said it’s no accident that so many HBCUs are involved in this work. “Black colleges and universities historically combined the idea of using education for advancement and liberation, with the struggle for civil rights.”
When these partnerships go smoothly, Bullard said, universities provide community-based organizations with access to data and help advocating for themselves; students and scholars get opportunities to do applied research with a clear social mission.
“We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”
Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University
A lot of growth is happening in environmental justice right now. ACTS’ $500,000 EPA grant is part of what the White House touts as “the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by the Federal Government.” Notably, President Biden’s Justice40 initiative decrees that 40 percent of all federal dollars allocated to climate change, clean energy, and related policy goals flow to communities like Pleasantville: marginalized, underserved, and systematically overburdened by pollution.
Expanding on this model, the EPA has allocated $177 million to 16 “Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers” — a mix of nonprofits and universities that will help groups like ACTS get federal grants to achieve their goals.
But, warned Bullard, all the new funding might cause a gold rush, raising the danger of attracting bad actors. Sometimes, he said, universities act like “grant-writing mills,” exploiting communities without sharing the benefits. “You parachute in, you mine the data, you leave and the community doesn’t know what hit them. That is not authentic partnership.”
Murray, at ACTS, has seen that kind of behavior herself. “A one-sided relationship where they came in to take information,” she recalled. “The paper was written, the accolades [for researchers] happen, and the community is just like it was, with no ability to address anything.”
“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people.”
Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University
It takes sensitivity and hard work to overcome what can be a long history of town-gown tensions between universities and local communities. “You have to earn trust,” said Bullard. “Trust is not given by a memorandum of understanding.” One way to break down barriers is to make sure that all participants — whether they have a GED or a PhD — share the air equitably at meetings between researchers and community leaders. And those meetings might be held in the evenings or on weekends, because community groups are often run by volunteers.
Denae King, a PhD toxicologist, works with Bullard as an associate director at the Bullard Center. She said she’s always looking for a chance to give space to community partners like ACTS, and reduce or equalize any power dynamic.
“I just ended a meeting where someone was asking me to put together a proposal to showcase environmental justice at a conference,” she said. “Before I would be willing to do that, I want to make sure it’s OK to showcase community leaders in this space. I might split my time in half and we co-present. Or it may look like me helping the community leader to prepare their presentation. I might be in the room and say nothing, but my presence says, I’m here to support you.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s resignation ends the shortest tenure in the university’s history — six months. It’s not a coincidence that the record is set by the school’s first Black woman president. We were headed for this moment since she started in July.
Some pundits are blaming antisemitism and plagiarism, ignoring the white supremacist politics at the center of her ouster: the same politics shaping higher education at schools like Harvard since the creation of higher education in the United States.
Less than a month before Gay’s resignation, these politics were on display as Ivy League early admissions decisions sparked the annual accusations of reverse racism, with non-Black students and parents blaming Black students for stealing their spots in the class of 2028.
Such accusations are perpetual fallacies in a long narrative about Black people that claims we undeservedly get jobs, opportunities and admittance to the country’s most selective colleges and universities that “should” go to white people.
Gay’s appointment was both applauded as a sign of Harvard’s racial progress and derided as a “diversity hire.”
However, in December, Gay’s controversial testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s hearing on antisemitism on college campuses and, in particular, her repeated defense of free speech on campus, opened the door to calls for her removal. Widely reported accusations of plagiarism against her led to additional scrutiny which facilitated her resignation. On closer inspection, that alleged plagiarism amounted to a relatively small number of “citation errors” in her 1997 dissertation and a few other academic papers. Similar comments on free speech also felled University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill, yet she managed to resign without the racialized questioning of her entire professional career that Gay has had to face.
After her resignation, Gay noted that she was a victim of a campaign against Black faculty, one that “recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament.”
It is not a coincidence that Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT were targeted for those House Committee hearing. They are representative of the cultural zeitgeist at many prestigious institutions — and a political battleground for those seeking control over American ideology.
Harvard, in particular, has been at the center of these battleground narratives — one about “unqualified” Black leadership and the other by students who believe below-average Blacks have taken their spots.
Established in 1636, Harvard is an institution that prides itself on its lack of access. Initially, Harvard, and schools fashioned after it, were institutions for upper-class white men only; it has always existed at the nexus of white supremacy in the United States.
The goalposts for Black people to display merit keep changing; seemingly no matter our credentials, we are perceived as gaming entrance where we don’t belong.
Harvard’s mission has facilitated the creation of a constant supply of wealthy white politicians and businessmen from the so-called right families and with the “right” education to lead this country. It would be over 300 years until Black people were regularly admitted — and another 70 years before a Black woman would be appointed president of the university.
This was by design. As discussed in my book, “Black Women, Ivory Tower,” Ivy League schools are meant to be exclusionary. Attending Harvard has always been a dream to strive for, a way to perpetuate race and class-based hierarchies — to effectively define who belongs at the “top” of society and who doesn’t.
As a symbol of a well-working meritocracy, though, Harvard fails. Instead, the goalposts for Black people to display merit keep changing; seemingly, no matter our credentials, we are perceived as gaming entrance where we don’t belong.
Gay’s resignation signals the embeddedness of racism at these prestigious schools. She had to go because she didn’t belong. And the political pressure that was used to get her to resign without just cause provides another opportunity to show Black people they don’t belong, regardless of their professional achievements, and to keep schools like Harvard white. The Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban effectively ensures that they will stay that way.
All of this tells us that the presence of any Black people in prestigious institutions is still a problem for many people. Even when affirmative action was in place, Black students made up less than 7 percent of Harvard’s overall campus population. Harvard accepts less than 4 percent of all applicants.
With those numbers, it is empirically impossible to claim that Black people are inundating Harvard and schools like it; yet there’s still this clear illogic focused squarely on us to explain Harvard’s elusiveness to white people more broadly.
Without Black people to blame, the more than 96 percent of applicants who are not admitted must face the reality of higher ed in America — that schools like Harvard were never likely to admit them, because these schools are meant to perpetuate not only whiteness but also wealth and power.
Admissions offices at Harvard, Princeton and Yale were created in response to concerns about high percentages of Jewish students starting in the 1910s. New admissions policies set quotas on Jewish students in a given class and created checklists of desirable characteristics, including racial and ethnic identities, to more specifically shape the makeup of the student body.
Admissions policies became even more important in the 1940s when the potential for Black student applicants returning from war to use the GI bill to cover tuition again threatened the white wealth culture these schools had established.
Hierarchical ranking systems and the introduction of the “Ivy League” in 1954 further stratified schools by race and class.
Affirmative action policies that came later only slightly increased the percentage of Black students at these schools in any given year.
A similar fate to Gay’s will likely befall the next Black woman Harvard president, should it ever appoint another, just as every year, nameless, faceless Black students are erroneously accused of taking the spot of “more deserving” white students to assuage those white students’ feelings of failure.
Ivy League schools, the most important gatekeepers of higher education, are institutionally racist. And Harvard is the blueprint.
Black people will never belong there because we weren’t meant to — not then, not now, not ever.
Jasmine Harris, is the author of “Black Women, Ivory Tower,” and an associate professor of African American Studies and coordinator of the African American Studies program at the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
My forthcoming symposium article, “Empowering Hispanics to Vote With Their Feet” is now available on SSRN. It is part of the University of Houston’s annual Frankel Lecture symposium, which this year focuses on the role of Hispanics in our democratic system.
This symposium contribution outlines the significance of foot voting for America’s Hispanic population and highlights ways in which we can better empower them to “vote with their feet.” People vote with their feet when they make individually decisive choices about the government policies they wish to live under, as opposed to ballot box voting, where each voter usually has an only an infinitesimally small chance of determining electoral outcomes or otherwise affecting policy. There are three major foot voting mechanisms: through international migration, by moving between jurisdictions in a federal system, and by making choices in the private sector.
Part II summarizes the advantages of foot voting over conventional ballot box voting as a mechanism of political choice. Foot voters have more meaningful opportunities to make decisive choices with a real impact on their lives, and better incentives to become well-informed. Part III outlines ways in which Hispanics often benefit from foot voting opportunities even more than most other groups in American society. This applies to both international migration and domestic foot voting. Part IV describes ways in which we can enhance both international and domestic foot voting opportunities for Hispanics. Much can be accomplished by increasing access to legal migration, legalizing the status of current undocumented migrants within the United States, and breaking down barriers to domestic interjurisdictional foot voting.
Expanding Hispanic foot voting is not merely a benefit for this group alone. Empowering them to “move to opportunity” also benefits other groups, including native-born Americans of all races. The liberty and prosperity of America’s largest minority group is of obvious significance to the nation as a whole.
The piece also includes a brief explanation of why I use “Hispanic” instead of the more academically fashionable “Latinx” (a term rejected by most actual members of the group in question).
The principal Frankel Lecture was that of Prof. Rachel Moran (Texas A&M), entitled “The Perennial Eclipse: Race, Immigration, and How Latinx Count in American Politics.” There is also a commentary by Prof. Joseph Fishkin (UCLA). I will post links to them when they become available online.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Higher Education newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Thursday with trends and top stories about higher education.
Dear Reader,
Saying it’s been a wild year in higher education news seems like the understatement of the century. (I think even non-education nerds would agree!) Thank you for sticking with The Hechinger Report as we tried to make sense of it all.
The court ultimately ruled against student loan forgiveness and against the consideration of race in college admissions.
Shortly thereafter, led by Jon Marcus and Fazil Khan, our team began working on The College Welcome Guide, a tool that helps students and families go beyond the rankings and understand what their life might be like on any four-year college campus in America. Jon’s reporting made it clear that the culture wars are beginning to affect where students go to college, and we wanted to help ensure people had the many types of information they needed to make the best choice, regardless of who they are or what their political orientation is.
In 2024, we will continue to cover equity and innovation in higher education with nuance, care and a critical eye. Is there a story you think we should cover? Reply to this email to let us know.
For now, we hope you have a warm and restful break. See you in the new year.
Olivia
P.S. As a nonprofit news outlet, The Hechinger Report relies on readers like you to support our journalism. If you want to ensure our coverage in 2024 is as extensive and deeply reported as possible, please consider donating.
Related articles
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Bakersfield Republican Assemblymember Vince Fong can run in a Central Valley congressional race to replace former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), a Sacramento County judge ruled Thursday.
The decision by Judge Shelleyanne W.L. Chang overrules the office of the Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, which in mid-December denied Fong’s bid to appear on the March 5 primary ballot. Fong sued Weber shortly after her office’s ruling.
“Today’s ruling is a victory for the voters of the 20th Congressional District, who will now have the opportunity to select the candidate of their choice in the March 5th election,” Fong said in a statement.
Weber’s office had said Fong could not run for two offices at the same time. Before Fong filed to run in McCarthy’s district, he had submitted paperwork for his reelection bid for his current Assembly seat.
In her ruling, Chang wrote that allowing Fong to run for both offices “somewhat defies common sense” and might also confuse voters.
State law says no person may run for “more than one office at the same election,” but Chang said that does not disqualify Fong.
Fong argued that the law has not been applicable since 2010, when California voters changed the state’s primary system, scrapping party nominations for a setup that lets the top two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of their party affiliation.
Chang agreed with Fong, saying the state law applies only to someone going through California’s old primary system of party nominations.
Chang’s ruling is understandable, said Jessica Levinson, an election law professor at Loyola Law School. Given how the state law was written and not updated, she said, the judge may have been “left without any choice.”
“Typically judges prefer the route that allows a candidate to stay on the ballot,” Levinson said, noting criticism that kicking someone off could interfere with the democratic process.
Chang’s ruling is another twist to the election to replace McCarthy, who will leave Congress on Dec. 31, months after he was ousted from House Speaker position. Gov. Gavin Newsom will call a separate special election after McCarthy’s official resignation to temporarily fill the 20th District seat until January 2025.
Fong, McCarthy’s former staff member, has been considered the front-runner in the race. Fong quickly secured McCarthy’s endorsement after he entered the race.
Other candidates include Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux; David Giglio, a self-described “America First” candidate who has been critical of McCarthy; Matt Stoll, a former fighter pilot who operates a landscaping business and has run for Congress twice before; and Kyle Kirkland, the owner of Fresno’s only card room.
The most prominent Democrat in the race is Bakersfield teacher Marisa Wood, who raised more than $1 million in her unsuccessful run against McCarthy in 2022.
California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson in a statement said the ruling puts “an end to Democrats’ political games.”
“The Sacramento Democrat machine tried and failed to interfere in a district that heavily favors Republicans,” she said in the statement.
Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles) in a statement called the ruling “a gross interpretation of the law,” saying her office plans to introduce a bill “that will clear up this mess.”
“There is too much at stake and there is no time for GOP shenanigans,” she said in the statement.
Weber’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment as to whether it plans to appeal the ruling.
Times staff reporter Laura J. Nelson contributed to this report.
WILMINGTON, Del. – A wall of the Rodriguez family home celebrates three seminal events with these words: “A moment in time, changed forever.”
Beneath the inscription, a clock marks the time and dates when three swaddled newborns depicted in large photos entered the world: Ashley, now 19, Emily, 17, and Brianna, 11.
Another“moment in time” occurred last June, one that could change the paths of Emily and Brianna. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its landmark case on affirmative action, barring colleges from taking race into consideration as a factor in admission decisions.
The ruling struck down more than 50 years of legal precedent, creating newfound uncertainty for the first class of college applicants to be shaped by the decision – especially for Black and Hispanic students hoping to get into highly competitive colleges that once sought them out.
The Rodriguez family at their home in Wilmington, Delaware, left to right: Mom Margarita, middle daughter Emily, youngest Brianna, father Rafael, with their college adviser, Atnre Alleyne. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report
It also places the Rodriguez sisters on opposite sides of history: Ashley applied to college when schools in many states could still consider race, while Emily can expect no such advantage.
Their parents, Margarita Lopez, 38, and Rafael Rodriguez, 42, are immigrants from Mexico who moved to the United States as teenagers.
Ashley is the first in her family to attend college, a freshman studying child psychology on a full scholarship to prestigious Oxford College of Emory University, where annual estimated costs approached $80,000 this year.
Affirmative Action ends
While affirmative action made strides in increasing diversity on college campuses, it fell far short of meeting its intended goals. And now that it’s been struck down, CBS Reports teamed up with independent journalist Soledad O’Brien and The Hechinger Report to examine the fog of uncertainty for students and administrators who say the decision threatens to unravel decades of progress.
Emily is the middle daughter, a senior and mostly straight-A student at Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington who wants to become a veterinarian, and who spent most of this fall anxiously awaiting word from her first-choice college, Cornell University.
The impact of the court’s decision on enrollment at hundreds of selective colleges and universities won’t start to become clear until colleges send out offers this spring and release final acceptance figures.
“We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”
TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne
But many students, counselors and families view this admission cycle as the first test of whether colleges will become less diverse going forward, while cautioning it may take years before a clear pattern emerges. The Hechinger Report contacted more than 40 selective colleges and universities asking for the racial breakdown of those who applied for early decision and were accepted this year.
About half the institutions responded and none provided the requested information. Several said that they would not have such data available even internally until after the admissions cycle wraps up next year. Some have cited advice from legal counsel in declining to release the racial and ethnic composition for the class of 2028.
For the Rodriguez family, higher education has already become a symbol of upward mobility, a life-altering path to meaningful careers and the sort of financial stability that Margarita and Rafael have never known.
College wasn’t a part of their culture, and before last year Rafael and Margarita had no idea how complicated and competitive the landscape would be for their bright, hardworking daughters. Of all U.S. racial or ethnic groups, Hispanic Americans are the least likely to hold a college degree.
“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid,” Margarita said recently. She wouldn’t have looked beyond the local community college and state universities for her daughters if she hadn’t learned about TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares high-performing students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education.
She immediately signed up Ashley, and later, Emily.
TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne, with his wife, Tatiana Poladko, and team of advisers, guided Ashley and Emily through their high school course selection and college essays, while pointing out leadership opportunities and colleges with good track records of offering scholarships.
Emory is one. The school admitted no Black students until 1963, but has aggressively recruited students from underrepresented backgrounds in recent years. Hispanic enrollment had been growing before the Supreme Court’s decision, from 7.5 percent in 2017 to 9.2 percent in 2021. Ashley’s class at Oxford is 15 percent Hispanic.
“I felt like I was right at home here,” Ashley said, shortly after arriving in August. The entire Rodriguez family dropped her off and stayed for a few days until she was settled. “It felt very homey to me,” she said. “Everybody is so welcoming.”
The entire Rodriguez family dropped Ashley Rodriguez off for her freshman year at Emory University’s Oxford College this fall. Credit: Image provided by Emily Rodriguez
Still, Ashley worried about her grades as she adjusted to her new workload. She fielded constant texts and calls from her family, who were adjusting to having her away from home for the first time.
Emily missed her sister terribly – together they’d started their high school’s club for first-generation scholars, helping others navigate college choices. “She has the brain and I like to talk,” Emily joked.
This fall, Emily set her sights on some of the most selective colleges in the country, many of which had terrible track records on diversity even before the Supreme Court’s decision. She approached her search knowing that she was unlikely to get any boost based on her ethnicity.
That makes her angry.
“We have so much history behind us as people of color,” Emily said. “So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”
Emily also knew she would need a hefty scholarship to attend one of her dream schools; her family can’t afford the tuition, and they’ve been loath to saddle their daughters with loans.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action.”
Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University
Elite schools like those on Ashley and Emily’s lists are more likely to be filled with wealthy students: Families from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in as other applicants with the same test scores. But such schools also offer the most generous scholarship and aid packages, and Emily and Ashley believed they presented the best shot at a different life from their parents’.
“Ever since I was little, I knew that college was the ticket to break this cycle our family has been in for generations and generations, of not knowing, of not being educated,” Emily said. “And because of that, having to work with their backs instead of their brains.”
That the Rodriguez sisters could even consider top-tier colleges is a credit to their mother.
“I want them to have the opportunity I never had,” Margarita said. “I know that life after education will be easier for them. I don’t want them to be working 12, 14 hours like their dad did.”
Rafael Rodriguez has always worked: first, with livestock as a child in central Mexico and later, in Florida, on an orange farm until the age of 15, with a residential permit. His earnings went toward helping the rest of the family come to the United States and settle in West Grove, Pennsylvania.
Rafael didn’t attend high school because he had to help support his parents and sisters. He now owns a trucking company.
Margarita desperately wanted to go to college, but said her mother did not believe in taking out loans for higher education and refused to sign her financial aid forms.
Instead, she married Rafael a few days after graduating from high school and had Ashley a year later. Emily was born 17 months later. Margarita was thinking of enrolling in community college until Brianna came along six years later. She now helps Rafael with his trucking business while working as a translator.
Ashley Rodriguez fields calls, Facetime requests and texts from her family while settling in as a freshman at Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia. Credit: Image provided by Emily Rodriguez
Both sisters are keenly aware of the gulf between their lives and their mom’s. In her college essay, Ashley described being “a daughter of two immigrant parents who undertook a dangerous journey from their native Guanajuato, Mexico, to America.”
Emily wrote about how Margarita had violated “every norm of our Mexican community, allowing me to sacrifice my time with family on weekends and in the summer” to attend Saturday leadership trainings with TeenSHARP, as well as college-level courses in epidemiology and health sciences at Brown, Cornell and the University of Delaware.
The pressure Emily feels is both formidable and familiar to the immigrant experience, magnified by the divisive court decision.
Hamza Parker, a senior at Smyrna High School in Delaware, feels it as well. He was at first unsure of whether or not to write about race in his essay, a debate many students have been having.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority decision that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, leaving it up to students to decide if they would use their essays to discuss their race.
Meanwhile, conservative activist Edward Blum, who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits and said he would challenge essays “used to ascertain or provide a benefit based on the applicant’s race.”
“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid.”
Margarita Rodriguez, mother
Hamza wavered at first, then rewrote his essay to describe his family’s move to the United States from Saudi Arabia in sixth grade and the racism he subsequently experienced. He applied early decision to Union College in upstate New York; earlier this month, he learned via email that he did not get in.
Neither Hamza nor his father, Timothy Parker, an engineer, know why, or what role affirmative action played in Union’s decision: Rejections never come with explanations.
Parker hopes his son will now consider an HBCU like the one he attended, Hampton University, in Virginia. He worries that if Hamza ends up at a school where he is clearly in the minority, he could be made to feel as though he doesn’t belong.
“I’m letting it be his choice,” Parker said, noting that Hamza might also feel more comfortable at an HBCU given the nation’s divisive political climate. With the end of affirmative action, he added, “It feels like we are going backwards not forward.”
HBCUs are becoming more competitive after the court’s decision. Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, said Black high schoolers may be choosing HBCUs because they fear further assaults on diversity and inclusion and believe they’ll feel more comfortable on predominantly Black campuses.
Parker is now finishing his applications to Denison University, the University of Maryland, the University of Delaware, and Carleton College. He’s not sure if Hampton will be on his list.
Alleyne, Hamza’s adviser, said that while they will never know if the court’s decision had any impact on Hamza’s rejection from Union, he’s concerned about what it portends for other TeenSHARP seniors.
“We have so much history behind us as people of color. So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”
Emily Rodriguez, high school senior
“There are so many factors at play with every application,” Alleyne said. “We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”
Alleyne is also concerned that scholarships once available for students like Parker are disappearing. Some of the race-based scholarships his students applied for in past years are no longer listed on college websites, he said.
At the same time, there are plenty who believe that the court’s decision was a much-needed correction, including Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University who testified in the case. He argues that the ban will lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students for all races.
Kahlenberg is in favor of using affirmative action based on class instead of race. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action,” Kahlenberg said.
For the Rodriguez family, Cornell’s early decision announcement was long anticipated, to be marked on the magnetic calendar attached to their refrigerator as soon as they knew it. Ashley would be home from Emory for winter break and would hear the news alongside her sister.
For weeks, the family had prepared themselves for bad news: Cornell had announced it was limiting the number of students it would accept early decision, in what the university said was “an effort to increase equity in the admissions process.”
Still, Emily had spent a summer studying at Cornell and gotten to know some faculty and advisers there. She had fallen in love with the animal science program, and the lively upstate New York college town of Ithaca, set amid stunning gorges and waterfalls.
Rafael Rodriguez, affectionately known as “Papa Bear,” keeps a close eye on the jam-packed family calendar. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Rafael said as they huddled together in front of Emily’s laptop. Emily wore a white t-shirt with “Cornell” emblazoned in bold red letters on the front, for good luck. She wavered, then clicked.
“Congratulations, you have been admitted to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: College major: Animal Science at Cornell University for the fall of 2024. Welcome to the Cornell community!” said the email on her screen, adorned with red confetti.Annual estimated costs for next year would be $92,682 – but Cornell pledged to meet all of it.
Emily screamed, and the room erupted in cheers. Every member of the family began sobbing. Cinnamon, the family’s three-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, barked wildly.
Emily jumped up and down. “Ivy League!” she shouted. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I did it.”
Brianna, a sixth grader who will work with TeenSHARP once she’s in high school, hugged both of her sisters.
It will be her turn next.
Additional reporting was contributed by Sarah Butrymowicz.
This story about the end of affirmative action is the second in a series of articles accompanying a documentary produced by The Hechinger Reportin partnership with Soledad O’Brien Productions, about the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on race-based affirmative action.Hechinger is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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