News & Commentary

Nine years ago, as part of the landmark Williams settlement, the state promised school districts $800 million to fund the Emergency Repair Program (ERP), established to help schools address facility conditions that pose urgent threats to students’ health and safety.

Brooks Allen has championed the rights of children for the past nine years, most recently as the ACLU of Southern California’s director of education advocacy. Today, he steps into a new role as deputy policy director and assistant legal counsel to the State Board of Education.

A quarter of California’s public school students are English learners who are entitled by state and federal law to receive instructional support to become English proficient. This educational opportunity, however, has been denied to more than 20,000 of the English learner students who attend our state’s schools.

More than 40% of all suspensions and about 10% of expulsions in California’s public schools are due to an offense known as “willful defiance.” But what is willful defiance?

California’s adoption of a new funding system for our schools places us on the cusp of the biggest change to public school financing in a generation. This funding system, called the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), promises that the most vulnerable students in California will finally get a more equal chance at a good education.

Carlos walked into my classroom on the first day of school and in a clearly practiced manner said, “Hello, Miss, my name is Carlos. It is nice to meet you.” He then took his assigned seat and for the rest of the period remained quiet and attentive, nodding to me when I spoke to him and bidding me a kind “Goodbye!” at the end of the period.

Between 2010 and 2011, 251 school districts across California openly reported to the state that they denied more than 20,000 students the English language instruction to which they are legally entitled. This failure comes with grave consequences, as children without basic language support services in the classroom are more likely to perform poorly on reading and math tests, and drop out before graduation.

Today, the US Supreme Court reaffirmed that university admissions policies may take race into account as part of an individualized and holistic admissions process if “necessary” to create a diverse student body.