Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 3 on Education Finance

Good morning everybody. Welcome to today's Assembly Budget Subcommitee number three on Education Finance. I'm Chair David Alvarez. Welcome to all of you to today's agenda to today's meeting.

Today we're going to be really focused in and I'm excited excited about today's conversation and we are hearing specifically on the January budget items on a key area of unfinished business for our state, the role of state investments in educator recruitment, retention and professional support for the long term success of our state.

The reason refer to it as unfinished business because there were recent billions billions of one time investments, a lot of research, but we still don't have long term ongoing solutions. Short of an ongoing commitment based on evidence based practices. How can we signal to college students and second career adults that California schools are a great place for them to commit their life in their future careers.

So some themes I'd ask our presenters to pick up on at the moment and speak across the hearing today across all panels are the one time funds and ongoing like commitments and the interaction of that how can we build a sustainable stable commitment to the field of teaching with one time money focused state priorities?

How can we stick to clear stable statewide priorities across these programs and are we clear to each other as to what those priorities are? As an example, incentives versus Rewards.

How can educator pipeline programs be reoriented to attract new candidates into the teacher pipeline for state shortage areas and for priority schools rather than rewarding only existing teachers retention? What more can we do to address all the leaks of the pipeline including making sure that we keep our educators, the classroom articulated systems?

How can we how can these programs and proposals stack and braid with coherence to educator candidates and school leaders? And finally, something you hear often as a theme in this Committee is evaluation and accountability. How can we ensure that evaluations for all of these major major investments and ways to keep improving those program outcomes on a going forward basis?

So again I ask the panelists that are going to come before us today to think about those questions long term sustainability, accountability and all of the teacher and pipeline career pipeline leakages that exist as you present your comments and your testimony. With that, I don't know if any of our colleagues like to make any comments on this specific topic today. Seeing none, we will invite our first panel to please come forward.

This is issue one Educator Pipeline and Supports Program Oversight I know that we have several individuals with the Learning Policy Institute, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the Department of Education and the Legislative Analyst Office.

So I'd like to kick it off with The Learning Policy Institut. Please, if you can go first, we like to hear your perspective on this issue and we welcome you. And again, thank you for being here. Welcome. Please proceed.

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for having me. My work focuses on. Can you hear me okay? My work focuses on issues of educator quality, including teacher shortages, both nationally and here in California. At Learning Policy Institute, we've been tracking teacher shortages in California over the last decade.

And in our most recent report, Tackling Teacher Shortages, we examined the latest data on shortages in the state and also take up of the state's major investments in strengthening the educator workforce. Chairs Alvarez, Merzucci, thank you both for your remarks at our recent event. So you'll be familiar with our findings. So I'll be brief.

First, I'd like to set the stage by saying that the research is clear that teacher preparation, certification, experience and stability matter for student achievement. In addition, teacher preparation also matters for retaining teachers. Finally, teacher shortages are a serious equity issue.

As we know, students of color and students from low income families are disproportionately taught by underprepared and inexperienced teachers. Looking at the most recent state data, we see shortages continue to be a series problem. In 2023, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing issued more than 14,000 substandard credentials and permits.

That's triple the number of substandard credentials and permits that were issued last year or in the previous 10 years. In 2013, our schools with the highest concentrations of unduplicated students were nearly three times as likely to fill teaching positions with interns and teachers on emergency style permits or waivers compared to the lowest need schools.

Fortunately, the state has invested in a set of programs designed to strengthen the educator workforce and address teacher shortages, particularly in the schools and subjects where they're most needed. These programs are beginning to make a positive difference. However, the impact of these investments will be fully realized and understood in the coming years as these funding.

As these funded programs continue to be improved implemented. Our analysis shows that the teacher residency grant program has supported a large number of residents and that districts are increasingly demanding residencies. The CTC has awarded nearly 300 residency grants, with most of these being awarded since 2021.

About 5,000 residents graduated between 2021 and 2024, with many of those supported by TRGP. And these teachers rated their preparation as more effective, felt better prepared than those coming through any other pathway, passed the teacher Performance Assessment at higher rates, and reviewed by employers as highly effective. These teachers also had very high teaching retention rates.

When it comes to the Golden State Teacher Grant Program. Those service scholarships of $10,000 this year and $20,000 in previous years have shown several early benefits. You might wonder if these grants are simply subsidizing the cost of preparation for individuals who would have pursued teaching anyway. Our analysis indicates otherwise.

First, we found that the grants attracted candidates into the profession who may not have pursued teaching. One grant recipient noted, loans were not an option for me. Knowing that my tuition was going to be paid made my decision to become a teacher a lot easier. This is not a four to five year commitments for my lifetime.

Even if candidates had already chosen teaching, they may not have decided to teach in a Priority School or may not have to have planned to stay for as long. Second, it covered tuition and other expenses, reducing stress as candidates completed rigorous and demanding preparation programs.

This means candidates were able to complete their preparation even among those who might have considered teaching anyway. They may not have been able to complete their programs and begin their teaching careers without this support. Another grant recipient explained that in the first few months of their teacher preparation program, money was tight.

He says, I was thinking, I only have $5 in my bank account and I need a job. Do I continue this program? I would not have continued my teaching career whatsoever without the Golden State Grant.

It will be some time before the most recent grant recipients complete their programs, enter the workforce, complete their service requirements, and data on how candidates move through each of those stages will be critical to more deeply understand the effectiveness of the Golden State Teacher Grant program.

However, in the meantime, it's important to maintain the consistency of this funding. Grant recipients noted that there was uncertainty about whether the grant would continue to be available, which made them less certain about their ability to complete preparation.

If the state wants the program to be to successfully recruit more teachers for high need positions, the grant program needs to be a well known and reliable source of funding. Finally, the National Board Incentive Program has successfully encouraged more teachers to pursue board certification.

The National National Board Teachers support greater student achievement both for their own students and for the students of beginning teachers they mentor. The number of candidates pursuing certification tripled when the program went into effect in 2022.

Priority schools also saw a jump in National Board candidates, and the number of teachers of color pursuing board certification increased five fold.

The National Board Incentive is a valuable piece of a comprehensive teacher workforce strategy because while the Teacher Residency Grant Program and the Golden State Teacher Grant Program are designed to recruit new, fully prepared teachers into high need positions, it's also important that our students in Priority School have access to highly accomplished, experienced teachers and this incentive program encourages these expert teachers to teach where they're most needed.

The teacher shortage problem in California continues to be at the heart of our state's ability to provide a world class education to each and every child in the state. We've begun to make the investments that are needed to strengthen our teacher workforce.

But these early successes could quickly diminish if we let these programs fall by the wayside as one time funds run out. If the State of California wants sustainable improvements in the teacher workforce, we need reliable, ongoing investments to recruiting and retaining well prepared and diverse teachers.

This is all the more critical as federal teacher workforce funding is put in jeopardy. Further, if these programs build seamlessly upon one another, we may be able to compound their impact. Imagine, for example, that a candidate applies for the Golden State Teacher Grant program or a teacher residency program.

They're able to complete their preparation, begin their service commitment with little to no graduate student debt. Then in their first years of teaching, they're able to receive loan repayment funds to pay down their undergraduate debt.

Once they've met that service requirement, they sign up for the national board subsidy to become certified in one to three years, followed by five years of teaching as a board certified teacher in a priority school school where they contribute as an expert teacher as well as a mentor to novice teachers.

In that time they would have put in 10 years in a high need school, at which point they're more likely to continue to stay in their in their position. California can support this kind of high quality pathway into and through teaching in our highest need schools. Thank you.

Thank you. We just heard a pretty good overview, so I'd ask the other speakers to make sure you don't repeat what's been said, but add to that. We'd appreciate that. Thank you.

Good morning Chair Alvarez and Members. It's a pleasure to be with you. Mary Vixie Sandy. I'm the Executive Director at the Commission on Teacher Credentialing and I've circulated a handout for you that has some data from our soon to be released next edition of the Teacher Supply Report. That's our annual report. We'll publish this on Friday.

So this is the first public airing of these data. And let me start with one of the metrics we look at when we're assessing what kind of shortage do we have and what is the expected hiring need at the local level and in what areas of credential and what areas of the state.

So the first slide here has a five year or six year look at what the estimated hires have Been, it's been growing. In 1920, there were about 20,000 teachers expected to be hired. We moved into Covid and those numbers dipped.

But as we've come out of COVID those numbers have been increasing such that the projected need to hire for the current year that was reported last year was close to 25,000 teachers.

If you go to the next slide, we list by content area what our local education agencies have identified as the the areas where they need to make these hires. So the highest area of need as reported by LEAs is self contained classrooms.

Multiple subject credential holders at 7,000, we're down to 6,800 roughly expected to be hired this year.

Dr. Sandy, I'm going to interrupt you just to be clear. You're talking about. These are not who has been hired. This is the needs.

That's the need, yes. First, the first set of slides are about how many are expected to be hired as reported by local education agencies to the state. All right, so the slide with the purple table on it tells you in what content areas. So multiple subject is a high need area. Special education is, as always, perpetually a high needs area.

English drama is another area. Mathematics and social sciences. These are the top five areas of credential that our employers are telling us they need to be hiring this current year. So these data are updated every year and they're a high level metric.

This is not an exact count, but this is what they're expecting to hire in the coming year. And if you move to the next slide, there's an outline of in what regions of the state are these needs the most dire. So, so of course this should not be unexpected.

But the area of highest need continues to be the south coast, with an expected need to hire 8,500 new teachers this year. San Joaquin, Central Valley, the Sacramento metropolitan Central Valley, North San Joaquin and Inland Empire. These are the areas that are of highest expected need to hire teachers as reported by local education agencies.

So that's high level. What do we need to hire? If you move to the next slide, the Commission does an annual review of assignments, the teachers who are in the schools to determine if there are misassigned teachers.

And this is an important data point that feeds into the Department of Education's data and the Commission's ability to follow year to year. So this is another indicator of potential shortage.

So in the most recent assignment monitoring report, we found that 19% of the courses that were taught were taught by credentialed teachers who were assigned out of their field. So that suggests a need as well. It's not definitive, but it suggests an area of need.

So let's move to the next slide and talk about and take a look at how many teachers are coming through our system. And this is where the 202324 column is, the new data that will be published this Friday.

And if you look at a five year window here, in 1920, the academic year that took us into Covid, we produced almost 18,000 preliminary teaching credentials to fully prepared educators. The next year, in 2021, where we were fully closed, we saw an increase up to almost 20,000 teachers who came through.

We can account for that in part by the fact that many requirements were loosened up because we were in a Covid situation. If tests were needed to get into a preparation program, but you couldn't go into a testing center, the test was postponed. So testing was in a suspended space for that year. For teachers.

If you had to do 600 hours of clinical practice in order to get your credential, which you do, but you couldn't get into a classroom and doing it on zoom, it was an almost impossible situation. That requirement was loosened.

So in the COVID years, we loosened many of our requirements so that we wouldn't just stop the pipeline of teachers coming through. So we've come out of COVID and we actually saw the dip.

And my colleague Desiree Carver Thomas just mentioned the 2223 year saw our lowest number in a number of years of teaching that came through with preliminary fully prepared credentials at 14,000. So the good news is that we're rebounding.

And We've seen an 18% increase in last year's data, which suggests that some things that we're doing could be working, which is an important indicator for us. The next slide gives us another indicator, which is the number of emergency permits, intern documents and waivers that are issued.

And we've seen a 20% increase in the documents that we the credential documents we've issued to individuals who are not fully prepared yet to be in the classroom. So that number is growing. Also, as Dr.

Carver Thomas mentioned in her remarks, if we move to the next slide, there's an important data point that we learned about from the California Teacher Education Research Improvement Network did some research, and their finding was that 40% of new teachers hired on permits or waivers are leaving teaching altogether by the end of their third year.

And those who enter as interns also had higher turnover rates than those who come through residency programs and other programs that get them fully prepared before they begin teaching. So what are we doing? The state has Invested how much? $1.6 billion in addressing shortages and trying to be very systematic about that.

A lot of that funding was directed at building infrastructure, building undergraduate pathways for candidates who know when they start college they want to be a teacher. Can they get it done in four years? Yes, they can, because we invested in building those pathways with our teacher preparation and higher ed partners.

The residency program has been our single largest investment. Through the Commission's work to build the infrastructure of teacher residencies. $650 million between 2018 and 2022 funded 196 local education agencies to offer these programs, which require intensive partnership between the LEA that wants to offer this program and the EdPrep program program they're working with.

We had our final round of grants this spring and just issued those final grants. We received 61 applications to build or expand residencies, and we're only able to Fund 21 of them because we're at the tail end of the funding that we have for this. 40 did not.

40 proposals were not funded, totaling about $110 million that would have been necessary to fulfill all of them. Those that were funded will ultimately produce another 1500 residents. Those that were not funded would add another 3000 to that. So we're seeing growing demand for residencies.

As challenging as LEAs may find it to build this pathway once they've got this infrastructure, and it's working as a partnership with their ed prep partners, it is proving to be a program that brings a more diverse workforce into their schools and a workforce that is staying in the schools.

And that's what our early data is showing us as well. So what have we learned since we started doing residencies? We've had this program evaluated by Wested over a number of years, and there have been some changes. I mean, when we know better, we do better. Quoting Maya Angelou here.

So when we began this investment, the amount of funding per resident was 20,000 per resident, with a school district match of 20,000. And what that led to were stipends for the resident of around $10,000. They had their tuition covered, but $10,000 was what they had left to live on.

And it was a barrier for many residents who couldn't afford to do it. So moving to a $40,000 per resident funding formula has made this more accessible to more candidates.

The ability to braid or blend these and for these residents to also obtain a Golden state teacher grant of $20,000 doesn't get them to a living wage yet, and it doesn't get them to what an entry level salary on average is for teachers, which is around $50,000.

But it makes it far more possible for residents to participate in this program and become teachers.

The state is also invested in building a teacher Residency Technical Assistance center that is housed at Santa Clara County office and has four other county offices regionally located around the state that are able to provide a lot of technical assistance on the ground, particularly as they're doing some matchmaking between an LEA that might want to start this program but doesn't really know how to get into the teacher preparation game.

So building and facilitating those partnerships is something the Technical Assistance center is uniquely qualified to do. It's an important investment to support the overall investment in teacher residencies. So some very important things have been coming along as we've seen what's needed and been able to work with the Legislature to get the resources out there that will help.

The Classified School Employee Grant has also been a very popular grant program. This grant program enables an LEA to provide funding for any classified staff Member who already holds an AA degree to complete their BA and a credential program that is at least a three year enterprise.

So it takes a little bit of time to get people from an AA to a BA and credential, but we have seen over 8,000 people enrolled in this program over the multiple funding years and working towards this degree, and 2000 and counting people have earned their credential.

This is another program that recruits locally, recruits and prepares a more diverse workforce than we're seeing in some of our other programs. And people who tend to stay, they are in their community, they're serving their local community, children and students and families.

And this is also a very solid investment if we want to retain the workforce, which is key to addressing the teacher shortage. If we could cut attrition in half, I have it on good authority from the Learning Policy Institute, we wouldn't have a teacher shortage.

So investing in programs that retain the workforce is a good idea if we want to stop the bleeding and the hemorrhaging. It's not the only issue we have to deal with, but it's a key issue.

So the last thing I'd like to just mention is that as we as the state agencies involved in receiving and distributing all of these funding programs have undertaken our work in the last several years, it's been really important.

And about three years ago, we started building a collaborative of state agencies including the Student Aid Commission, the Department of Education, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the systems of higher education that prepare our workforce into a workforce collaborative.

And our first goal was how do we take all of these funds and find pathways that make it accessible and possible for people to draw down what's necessary to get all the way through? We've developed some really good information strategies for prospective teachers that will help them find funding, find programs, et cetera.

And that's work that is nascent but is really critical if we want to recruit the workforce that we need. So that workforce collaborative has been a key kind of outgrowth of need where necessity drives invention. We pulled ourselves together to say, how are we all contributing to this?

And how can we all contribute in ways that will make this a more seamless experience for our candidates? So I'm going to stop there and I appreciate the opportunity to share this data with you.

Thank you. We have the Department of Education next. Is that our next speaker? Oh, CTC. Yes, yes, please.

Good morning Mr. Alvarez, Committee Members. I'm Annamarie Francois. I am the University of California representative on the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and I am longtime teacher educator at UCLA and currently I serve as the Associate Dean for Public Engagement for the School of Education of Information Studies, including our educator preparation program.

A lot of data shared this morning and I just want to take an opportunity to share with you four program strategies that we have found over the years based on the data from the LA Basin Teacher Residency programs and the National Center for Teacher Residency data that have helped us to have been most helpful in getting higher education to begin to increase their teacher education enrollment and graduates in high retention program and what's needed for us to produce more teachers and support teachers at a level that can solve those shortages.

And interestingly enough, these four strategies, both are high leverage strategies that help the shortage and also investing more in them can continue to do that work. So the first program strategy is providing high touch value driven focused program or organized around subject specific cohorts with built in opportunities to engage in cross subject learning.

We need teachers in classrooms with deep content knowledge but also enough content knowledge from other fields to help young people make sense of the interdisciplinary nature of how we live as citizens and how to enact that interdisciplinary learning.

The second strategy is the creation of strategic partners partnerships that create an ecosystem of professional preparation prior to entering the profession and ongoing job embedded professional learning from preparation through retirement. We have heard this over and over again from the Learning Policy Institute for almost a decade.

I don't know if the Learning Policy Institute has been around for A decade. But since the beginning, they continue to tell us that job embedded professional development matters not just for new or aspiring teachers, but veteran teachers.

Teaching is a very difficult profession that is changing the more we learn about how students learn about the pedagogical approaches that matter in classroom. Teachers need to continue developing professionally.

And so when we talk about educator effectiveness, grant funding, we're talking about those teachers who have been in practice and can always come back and learn more about their pedagogical strategy. And we have a lot of good examples of these strategic partnerships.

The CSU has the Center for Closing the Achievement Gap, the California Subject Matter Projects, which I'm sure you're all aware of. The UCCSU Collaborative for General Science Diversity and Learning is doing this kind of work among education systems specialist teachers to meet the students with the greatest need, our special education population.

We have two centers at two of the University of California campuses, Center X, which is a well known K12 professional development and learning center that is grounded in commitments to equity and justice and progressive teaching and Create at the University of San Diego.

I also want to kind of give a shout out to the University of San Diego Center for Embodied Equity in Neurodiversity and Learning. The third strategy is a lot of what Mary was talking about earlier, around multiple pathways. We already know that one size fits all does not fit all.

And so multiple pathways to meet the diverse needs of aspiring teachers, including earn while you learn. Pathways such as internships, teacher residency and teacher apprenticeships matter.

We are at a moment in time, I believe, where we can look very closely at our community college system which is enrolling many of the young people that we want to get into community classroom because we also know those are the teachers that are the most diverse and they stay the longest, particularly if they go to teach in the neighborhoods in which they grew up in.

And so community college pathways are. They've been around for a while, but I think that it's time for us to really lean into the possibilities of community college. And then the fourth strategy, program strategy I'd like to talk about, are intersegmental partnership. Educator preparation programs cannot exist in silos.

Whether you're University based, community based, alternative, you cannot exist in silos. This is a complex problem we're facing. And so it's going to take a lot of us together working in collaboration to solve the problem.

Education teacher education would benefit from the same kinds of communities of practice that have helped K12 teachers and leaders thoughtfully and strategically meet the needs of their programs, students and themselves.

I'm happy to talk a little bit more about what all of this looks like on the ground, having been involved in this work for almost 30 years now. But I will defer to my colleague Cheryl Cotton to continue.

Thank you, Cheryl.

Thank you. Good morning, Chair Members of the Committee, I'm Cheryl Cotton, Deputy Superintendent of Instruction, Measurement and Administration Branch at the California Department of Education. I'm here presenting today on behalf of our State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurman, to advocate for educator pipeline and support systems support programs.

California needs as you've heard multiple times Now, California needs 20 to 25,000 teachers annually. This number is impacted by attrition and new demand. 90% of new demand for California teachers is due to attrition. Again, those retirements and resignations.

New demand is also due to increased need for educators to support hard to fill credential areas impacting or impacts on our student to teacher ratios. To support learning recovery, the implementation of universal TK as well as recently increases in hiring art teachers to support Prop 28.

It's important to focus on workforce proposals that incentivize and assist teacher candidates entering the teaching profession. It's also imperative that we support programs that will assist schools in retaining their talent and reduce teacher turnover, particularly in high need schools.

Along those lines, we also recommend multiple entry points for all teachers working with all of our learners, such as partnerships with accredited credentialing programs, providing support for teachers such as tuition support, academic advising, et cetera.

Bringing coursework to two LEA campuses, so bringing them to the school districts and then elevating our known programs that are working, our apprenticeship programs and our residency programs. I'm joined today with by Monique McGuain and Kristin Cruz Allen from our Professional Learning Support Division. And we are here to answer any questions. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll hear from the Legislative Analyst Office next.

Good morning Mr. Chair Member. My name is Dylan Hawksworth-Lutzow with the LAO. We will be recommending rejecting the three proposals we're hearing today. This is largely due to concerns about limited evidence and their effectiveness. If the Legislature is interested in funding teacher recruitment and retention proposals, we do have some recommendations.

These involve targeting the most significant teacher shortages. We think the Legislature could do this by narrowing the priority school schools definition currently includes about 55% duplicated students share and up in districts or in schools. This does cover about 2/3 of students in the state.

So we think that could be narrowed a bit to target the highest need areas. Additionally, we think the Legislature could target programs by long standing subject area shortages. These would be maths, science, special education and bilingual education.

Lastly, our kind of overall recommendation is given the state's fiscal condition, if the Legislature funds new teacher recruitment and retention programs, we Recommend using Proposition $98 this year. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm going to try to start the questions. First of all, I want to thank all of you who do work in teacher preparation. We appreciate the work that you do and your dedication towards that. I'd like to start just to sort of set the.

Set the table for discussion, numbering and outlining the programs that exist and maybe I'll ask the Lao's office to help us just make sure we stay factual here. I'm looking at page 11 of the agenda, the recent state teacher recruitment and retention spending table, and I see 12345678 different programs.

Are these programs the only programs focus on teacher education and preparation? And if anybody else wants to answer, you can jump in as well. Am I missing, are we missing a program here?

As far as I'm aware, these are all the programs in the most recent years that are specifically targeting teacher recruitment and retention. If you go back more than a decade, you also have older programs like the Governor's Teaching Fellowship or the old APLE program.

Yeah. Okay, so we're on agreement. Okay, just to be clear our of this list, are they all expiring with the budget that's been approved in previous years or are any of these continuous programs?

So the teacher Residency Program, as I said, we have expended the final grant amount that we have this year. But there is a proposal for $66 million in the governor's proposed budget. And these funds, as I understand it, are transferring from the Department of Education over to the Commission, which will enable us to keep it moving forward.

But this is a one time expenditure.

These have been one time expenditures, but they're expenditures over multiple years. So we are into the2030s before we have fully at the local level, expended every $2030s.

What about the Golden State Teacher Grant Program?

My understanding is that that program is. It sets aside money for candidates who. No, sorry. The Golden State Teacher Grant Program. Yeah. Is it? Yeah. That would expire this year.

Yes, that expires this year. Yeah. Okay. The National Board Certified Teacher Program.

That program there is in our estimation station money set aside that would be sufficient to cover the 2526 application cycle.

And CDE administers this program. Is that your belief at the moment?

Yes, we do administer the program. The challenge with that is that the funding may end. But we committed to teachers a five year incentive. And so the concern is what happens to those folks who are, you know were granted this year or next year.

We want to be able to continue that and allow teachers to have confidence in our programs.

Thank you. The classified school employee program. The Commission administers this program.

We do and that that we administer the program when funded and when the funds run out we hold our breath and hope that more will come.

So again, one time expenditure. It's not an ongoing. Are there any that are ongoing before I go through the rest of these? No, none of these. Okay, just just wanted to be like perfectly clear here for everybody. I have a question about the.

The loosening of the requirements and under Covid 2021 and curious and I heard other testimony that maybe answered the question but I want to be be really clear on the answer.

Has there been an evaluation of the teachers that were allowed to come in with those lowered requirements and the effectiveness or the any measurement that we've done as a result of that cohort in particular. I assume by now that cohort is teaching many of them.

Yes, that would be our assumption as. Well for a few years now I would imagine. So if they got their preliminary in 201920 they've been in the classroom for five years. If they stayed in the classroom and that is, you know what happens after we credential them is a best guess at the moment.

We do not have the data system in place yet to be able to really track teacher mobility and attrition.

You can't track given the teacher license whether they're teaching today or not at a.

No, we do not have those data. Well what we do is we do assignment monitoring and that's. And we have data on. And we compare these data with the Department of Education to determine how many teachers hold the appropriate credential for their assignment. But that system is not designed to track mobility, retention, attrition or any of that.

They're cradle to career data system that the state invested in is working toward combining employment data with STRs retirement data with CTC data to see if we can actually create a pathway to look.

Very closely but don't school district needs to submit when teachers hoping to teach. You have to get that cleared by the Commission. Don't you get requests from the local districts as to whether whether this teacher is credentialed or not?

Well, we do on emergency permits and there is a requirement that a local education agency apply for that on behalf of somebody they'd like to employ on an emergency permit. But the emergency permits last for one year each.

And the hope is that in an emergency permit situation, it's enabled the candidate to make progress toward meeting admission requirements, requirements so they can actually get on track to become a teacher.

But what was done in 2021 was not emergency permits. There was. Those were actual.

Right. Yeah.

Okay. So I guess my point being, I don't think we're going to figure it out here.

Knowing exactly what that meant to the teacher workforce would be kind of important because if, if we're seeing that some of those requirements, and I'm by no means suggesting we eliminate requirements, but if we're seeing that some of those are impediments, then pretty clearly in a year when you were supposed to have a lot less activity, you had a lot more.

So there's something there that I'd like to learn more about.

Can I just add one data point to that? I am pretty sure that the testing issues, the basic skills test, the subject matter test, the RIKA test, these three assessments that are required for admission and completion of preparation, all were suspended for people entering during the COVID years and exiting during the COVID years.

And subsequent to that, the Legislature took action to create a new requirement for or a new pathway for someone to meet basic skills, which is to hold a baccalaureate degree. So essentially that will remove the basic skills test from future teachers need because every teacher needs to have a B.A. so this is. We've eliminated that barrier.

They've also taken action to look at the subject matter testing program and create alternatives to it, including transcript review, holding a baccalaureate degree in the area where you're going to teach. So these testing have been barriers. These testing requirements have been barriers.

One of the lessons learned from COVID is that there are other ways for us to make sure a teacher is prepared to do this work. And the testing program has been too full of hurdles to get us to the workforce that we need.

And yet with the elimination of some of those, well, maybe this year we're finally seeing a rebound, but we for a couple years saw a dip right. In teachers that were coming through. So certainly important point that you're making there, the 40% number that you give that.

Well, that teacher education Research network gives of new teachers hired with on permits and waivers are leaving. And then you also mentioned interns have high turnover rates. Of the programs that we listed here are those are the intern programs, the ones with the highest turnover rates.

Are there others that just sort of raise some concern in terms of turnover? And folks who are not staying with the Profession.

I can chime in there. That is a reference to the Sutarin study. The 40% figure refers to teachers entering on the emergency style permits and waivers which are issued to individuals who may not have demonstrated subject matter competency, may not be enrolled in the teacher prep program.

There are also elevated turnover rates among interns, but not at the same level as emergency style permits and waivers.

Okay, I think we probably have done the analysis, but it'd be good to understand what the turnover rate is for all of these to better understand some of the effectiveness. My final question for now so we can turn it over to my colleagues. Well, a comment first, the utilization of community colleges pathways.

I really am true believer now in utilizing our community colleges more as an asset to create the workforce of the future, especially specifically in this case as it relates to teachers. So I'm interested in learning a little bit more about how we can do that more effectively.

I don't know if you have just one General quick comment about that.

So on the chart, the integrated undergraduate teacher Recruitment Pathway is one of the pathways. So starting early for universities to partner with community colleges co construct curriculum together to make the transfer process into a four year University where they would start their teacher education program and finish with their credential in four years.

And how much of those programs exist? Is it? A few. Far between? Is it now standard? Can you give me a little sense of that?

I don't have a number for that program. I don't know if Mary has that information. I will say that one of the challenges with that program, I think that they're much more successful at the CCSU than the UC. We had a program at UCLA.

If I could just talk from personal experience to a similar program with Santa Monica City College at UCLA focused on STEM and depending upon the curriculum at the University it could be very difficult to finish up being a math major or a physics major while taking education courses, then transferring into UCLA and transferring into UCLA's program and finishing up the set of courses that you have to fit in.

This is one of the reasons why to the second part of your question. I think that teacher apprenticeship programs promise a lot of the ability to layer an apprenticeship on top of existing programs and starting them early in community colleges.

We don't have very much experience at all in teacher residencies, but they are being built every single day.

Okay, thank you.

That's very helpful data on the undergraduate pathway. Okay. The Legislature has invested in 2016 and 2022 a total of $30 million to build these pathways in colleges. And universities. We accredit 80 institutions of higher education right now, and we issued 85 grants to develop undergraduate pathways.

So many of our institutions have multiple undergraduate pathways leading to a degree and a credential simultaneously.

80 for partnerships, specific partnerships.

So for an undergraduate program that is integrating subject matter, these are programs that really are compressing completion of your degree in English, let's say, with your teacher preparation program in English.

So you complete most of your content coursework towards the BA you begin some student teaching and field experience, and then these things blend into completing both the degree and your teaching credential at the same time. And at that point you've completed the program.

So there are 85 programs that were built based on the Legislature's investment across 80 institutions.

80 institutions. Thank you. Okay, my last point will be on the chart. And they're not numbered, but the evolution of teacher residencies and when was the teacher residency program combined with the Golden State teacher grant program? And that just sort of triggered my thinking that clearly compensation matters to folks. And I'm not.

Can you talk about the history? I'm sure there's been history about this. Why we don't just. I find it a little bit confusing that I could go, I have a psychology degree. I've never taken a liberal arts, or in my case, that was the liberal studies. Was what was.

If you were going to be a teacher, that's what you would do, or teacher education course. But I could potentially get a teaching emergency teaching credential and go into the classroom with literally no other experience. Yet.

We have people who have been working towards becoming a teacher for multiple years, whether, even if it's just as undergraduates, they may not have a bachelor's degree, but then I would be able to go into the classroom and get paid and compensated to teach that.

Yet an individual who actually is committed to this and is going to make this their life, they have to go and find a grant and work another job. And this just doesn't seem like the right approach. Can you tell me about some of the history about this and why we've done it this way? And why don't we just pay student teachers to teach?

I, you know, I wish I had a good answer to that. I think that every single investment, every dollar of the 1.6 billion that's been invested here has been proposed, legislated, operated out of this building. So the people that sit at this table have an opportunity to make that case. And you have a very good argument.

We make it very hard for people to do the right thing and become fully prepared. We make it, we don't make it as easy as we could, which is why we put this collaborative together. How can we start at the state agency level to collaborate?

So getting a $20,000 residency stipend and getting a $20,000 Golden State teacher Grant. You're still not making the average entry level salary of $50,000. $50,000 is the average in the state entry level teaching salary for someone with a BA and a master's degree and credential, which is another issue altogether. But I think there have been.

This sounds like big money, and on some level it is big money, but it's what it costs to get the workforce that's going to stay to invest in the workforce.

And if Linda Darling Hammond were here, she would talk about Finland and Singapore and the other countries that she's studied with Learning Policy Institute that fully Fund their educators, fully Fund their way to their pathway to a credential because it's an investment in their schools, which is an investment ultimately in their economy.

Education is the profession that prepares every other profession. So I don't have a good, I don't have any answers other than it would be nice if, if someone could apply for financial aid and get a package the way I can on FAFSA.

If I'm applying for student loans for my kids, it'll tell me what it's going to take for me to get 100% of their coverage, how much of that I'm going to have to pay back, and how much of it is Grant within 15 minutes. And my kid doesn't have to go braid those resources and neither do I.

It could be easier. It could be much easier. But we have to make the financial commitment to doing that. And this is a very hard year in which to advocate for that. I understand we're in a budget situation, but taking the long view, 1.6 billion is a significant investment to date.

Yeah. I think we can continue to get creatively complicated with this or we can just simplify this for everybody.

And I'd rather have you and everybody else who works on this topic focus on more teacher pipeline and preparation and all of that, then figuring out how you're going to cobble together a few dollars here and there to get some teachers some help. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Muratsuchi.

Thank you very much. First of all, Mr. Chair, and to your excellent staff here, I want to commend you on another great report. You'll see all my marked up comments here. I want to pick up on your last comment, Mr.

Chair, you know that, you know, we need to look at the whole process and how we prepare our teachers as well as paying our student teachers. I happen to have A Bill, Assembly Bill 1128, Reintroduction of a Bill to pay a pilot program to pay our student teachers. But you know, as you know, Ms. Vixie Sandy indicated, you know, all this takes money.

Let me just, you know, first of all say that I really appreciate this Committee doing a deep dive on this issue because I think we're hearing across the board that, you know, nothing is more important than getting a fully trained, fully credentialed, fully supported teacher in the classroom to impact the quality of education and our students lives.

And you know, especially like I'm putting marks next to all the nuggets of data points in the staff report. But one of the points made in the staff report is that the state's highest need schools were nearly three times as likely to fill teaching positions with interns and teachers on emergency permits or waivers compared to the lowest need schools. And I know that that was reflected in the research that

Dr. Carver shared and the Learning Policy Institute, but I wanted to start there. Dr. Carver, you know, to what extent? Like well, why, first of all, why does that happen? Why do we have more, you know, interns and emergency departments and waivers in our highest need schools compared to our lowest need schools?

And Ms. Carver Thomas is fine. So when districts and schools have trouble finding a fully qualified person to fill a position, they have a few options. They may cut courses, increase class sizes, you know, depending upon sort of the requirements that are allowed. Or they might hire long term substitutes teachers on emergency permits and waivers.

It's largely because there are requirements to have adults in classrooms, particularly in the, in the subjects where they're required. Your multiple subject elementary school classrooms, your math, science and so on. Something that's not reflected here in let's say the shortage areas.

High need subject shortage areas are those shortages that we can't see or measure because districts aren't necessarily creating computer science classes or music classes or other kinds of courses because they predict they wouldn't be able to fill those classrooms.

And so schools serving more students of color, students from low income families, which are often struggle with resources and other challenges, just have a harder time filling those positions. And then when they hire those teachers who are not fully credentialed, you get this sort of what has been described as a leaky bucket phenomenon.

Those teachers come in, they leave at the higher rates, they need to be replaced year after year creates instability that impacts student achievement and also the desire for staff to continue to teach in that school.

But I mean, here in California we have the Local Control Funding Formula. We give More dollars to districts at least, if not schools, districts with the highest needs. And so, you know, again, I don't understand why, you know, we're having to issue more emergency permits and waivers and having more interns in our highest need schools.

Yeah, I mean, I think that is a question of not just the sort of equity of the formula, but also the adequacy. When you think about where California falls in relation to other states that have higher per pupil funding.

But that applies to all our districts.

It does. But then when you compound that with the sort of adequacy level and the challenges that we find in schools with our higher unduplicated pupil counts, the sort of equity formula may not necessarily compensate for the needs that are arising.

Yeah, I mean, certainly, yeah, we have that ongoing conversation about whether the progressive nature of the local funding formula is progressive enough to meet the. The greater needs in our low income and schools and districts with higher percentage of English learners and foster kids.

Does a learning policy Institute have any data as to how to what extent this higher percentage of emergency permits and waivers in the highest need schools contribute to the achievement gap?

I don't have a specific sort of number for you, but if you look at one of our previous studies, the positive Outliers study colleagues of mine conducted an analysis of districts across the state to find those that where students across the board, including students of color, achieved at greater rates than their peers elsewhere in the state and found that those districts that had more experienced teachers and more fully credentialed teachers were those districts that had higher achieving students even after controlling for a series of conditions, including sort of socioeconomic conditions in those in those areas.

Okay, Turning to another, you know, reality that we're facing here in the State of California as it relates to our K12 schools. And I mean, we're seeing headlines from throughout the State of school districts, you know, because of declining enrollment, because of expiration of federal Covid dollars, because of higher costs, that they're having to issue the layoff notices to teachers as well as classified staff.

But you know, I heard one speaker at an education conference saying that the declining enrollment and the resulting layoffs of teachers is going to solve the teacher shortage problem. Can you respond to that?

Sure. It isn't sort of maybe surprising that there's this phenomenon where layoffs and shortages can coexist. And that's because shortages don't necessarily happen where layoffs are happening.

And then you also have the issue that layoffs may be happening in certain subject areas, for example, but shortages still persist in other subject areas like special education, math, science, bilingual, and so on. And so there is absolutely the possibility that layoffs are happening.

But shortages continue to be extreme and the teachers who get laid off may not necessarily be able to just sort of move into one of those shortage subjects. So there's still a need to make sure that we are producing the right teachers for the right positions.

Okay, for Ms. Vixie Sandy, is there any historical data that shows, I mean, you know, we, like young people are seeing the headlines and they're getting, you know, the message that becoming a teacher is not only, you know, there's the expense of getting your bachelor's degree.

You don't get paid while you're a student teacher, you know, and then you're going into a profession that is underpaid with a wage gap, only to grow as time goes on. So, you know, I mean, it's no surprise that we don't have a more diverse teacher workforce.

But what I'm concerned about is that these headlines, you know, showing all the teacher layoffs. Is there any data that do suggest that, that, you know, has an impact on, you know, young people being interested in entering into the teaching profession?

I think we could collectively speculate that it does have an impact. If the brand is not attractive, who is coming other than the people who loved their schooling and want to be part of that? And thankfully, we gave credentials to 17,000 of those last year, and that's good.

So I don't know of data that would argue that part of the equation. However, at the turn of the century, into the early 2000s, when we experienced a significant teacher shortage following class size reduction, one of the state investments, one of the Legislature's investments, was into rebranding. We need to talk about the truth about teaching.

It's sure it's hard. If it weren't hard, everyone would do it, right? It's hard. And only the truly called and the best prepared should do it. The messaging and the, that in the larger kind of environment certainly had an impact.

We saw many, many more teachers come in to teaching, individuals coming into teaching, and the messaging is part of it. But the investment in pathways was another key part of it.

So the inability to afford it and the prospect of taking out $55,000, let's say, in student loans so that you can get a $50,000 a year starting job. You know, my 18, 19, 20 year olds weren't that fiscally, you know, intelligent, but it's, but even they could see that's not a good. That's Not a good prospect for me. So making it possible and making it attractive should make a difference.

But I don't have data to support that other than what our last round 20 years ago yielded, which was a high number of people coming in and we got down to like 4% of the credentials we issued were for emergency permits. We almost eradicated the. That during that period of time.

Okay. All right, well, thank you. Last comment. I just want to, you know, make it absolutely clear, Mr. Chair. You know, I believe that our gold, our teacher residency program or Golden State Teacher Grant program are absolutely critical.

One of my highest priorities as far as this budget, you know, to, to address this issue of the, you know, the underprepared teachers being concentrated in our highest need schools, you know, our efforts to diversify our teacher workforce, to have our teacher workforce reflective of our state's, you know, our students diversity.

And so I want to make it absolutely clear that with all due respect to the LAO, I want to. I'm hoping that we can continue to prioritize our teacher residency and our Golden State Teacher Grant as well as our National Board Certification program and our classified teacher credentialing programs, all important programs to make sure that we get the best trained, best supported teachers in the classroom. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Muratsuchi. Now we'll go to Ms. Patel.

Thank you, Chair. And thank you to the presenters today. Certainly Budget challenge years make good times to revisit and rebrand, perhaps rethink about all the collection of programs that we do have going on to create that new vision of what we want education to look like in California.

I think this could be a great time for us to sit together and really think deeply on what does it look like going forward. When you see a list this long, looking at page seven of different programs and grants, it tells you the need is there, but we're doing it with duct tape and chewing gum.

And we need to actually sit down and see if we can find a more efficient, consolidated way to help teachers, to help people enter the teaching profession and support that journey and pathway. I'm very intrigued by the Chair's comments about how and why we got here.

And maybe it's time to take a look at that and make some big changes to how we're looking at public education.

Going specifically to LCFF, echoing some of the comments from my colleague here, we have LCFF and that is supposed to help address some of the biggest challenges with some of our most needy students, most marginalized students, and yet it's still not seeming to be sufficient. Right. It doesn't. It has a sufficiency issue.

Where do you think we can make improvements through LCFF such that we can recruit and retain adequately and yet not harm school districts that are adjacent or neighboring in competing with that same teacher point pool? That's limited. Just to put some context, I come from Poway Unified School District. We are a high performing school district.

I was on the board of education there for eight years. And we struggle with recruitment and retention in competing with our neighboring highly LCFF funded school districts to the south and north of us. And we can't compete for salaries because we don't. We're base funded. I think we have now after Covid, maybe close to 20% unduplicated.

And so we just. We also have teacher shortages. And as we know, special education is a high shortage area. STEM is a high shortage area. And we're struggling with filling those positions as well for all of our school districts across the state. It's not just those that are concentration funded.

So when we look at LCFF going forward as a big budgetary situation, it's been there for 10 years. What can we do to make it more effective? I have some thoughts around this, but wanted to hear from experts here that are with us today for recruitment and retention specifically.

Or is this a bigger conversation for another day?

Yeah. Our study didn't look specifically at LCFF, but I do have a few thoughts that coming to mind. I think first, though, it's important to consider that there's sort of the demand side and thinking about how schools use their funding and. And the teachers that they might demand. And then there's the supply side. Right. So I think.

And the number of teachers who are being produced through our IHEs each year, and I think it will be important to address both.

I don't think that LCFF alone could solve the issues that districts are experiencing, because as you mentioned then we create this sort of poaching dynamic where, you know, one district solving their shortages just exacerbates them somewhere else and likely exacerbates them in a setting that. Where we have more students.

Thank you for framing that so transparently. I appreciate that.

So I think there's probably a lot that districts can do to be more competitive, but in a situation where we want to lift all boats, it's also important that we're creating the supply statewide, where districts can be selective on, you know, their. Their specific needs, their values, their. You know, along many different layers.

They can be selective from a larger pool of candidates, but there are enough candidates to kind of go around. So. I know that doesn't answer the LCFF piece.

No, but it does. It furthers the conversation. And I appreciate that sometimes, you know, coming from the district that I come from, in the community that I'm serving now as an Assembly Member, we have the full range. Right.

And I want to make sure that when we improve or when we bring programs forward, we are lifting all boats and not causing harm to others in the process. I appreciate you in that perspective, and I'm thankful that there are nonprofit organizations like yours out there doing this work. I would love to see the state also work.

We have so much data. We collect so much data, and it's daunting to analyze all of it. And I'm appreciative that there are nonprofit organizations that do that work. I wish the state also had the resources to do all of that internally.

The next question I have, moving on with this, the teacher residency funding programs, specifically the one that was budgeted for $651 million. How many, when we put a budget like that together, do we start off with a notion of, oh, this is going to Fund this many programs, and then we funded those 21 programs, or did we not have an idea of how many we were going to Fund?

To look at Triaging the applications that came in, when I see the number that we funded, 21 or 20 and 41 were left on the table. Did we anticipate that and could we have budgeted that better?

So the 651 million that has been allocated to this is over multiple years. We have had seven or eight rounds of funding. Since the funding first arrived at the Commission, we were doing two rounds of granting every year where proposals were received and evaluated. Okay, thank you, sir.

And so the applications come into the Commission and early on there was sufficient funding to Fund every viable proposal. There are three types of grant proposals that could be submitted. One would be capacity building. And that's where you start building your partnership.

And together you put together a plan to submit an actual grant to receive to start entering, admitting and preparing your residence. And then the expansion grants for those that were really achieving success. Expansion grants have been available. So early on we were able to Fund every viable proposal. But the 651 has diminished. And this was our last.

The last spring where we had funding to award in grants. And so that's how we funded the 21 most viable. And the other 40 were also. We could have, as I understand it from my team, we could have funded all of them if the funding was there. So they were all viable? They were all viable, yes.

I mean, this started as a fairly new concept. Large, you know, in the state, as large as California. So a lot of learning is needed to take place in order for the seedlings to take root. Right. So they are taking root. And I think this is another branding sort of thing.

If you can put together the funding and be successful, then they will come. If you build it, they will come. I heard a story at the LPI event in January about Sonoma State University, who also. Who has received grant. They haven't received grant, but at least one of their LEA partners has.

They've expanded their residency to eight different LEAs that they serve in their region because it's enormously popular and they've figured out how to do it. So it's going to grow, but it grows in relation to the food and water that it gets. Right. And that's the funding piece consistency of.

The food and water also. Yeah. Drawing attention specifically to special education. When we look at the. There are two programs that I see that may be able to help meet our needs there. One is the Classified School Employees Teacher Credentialing Program.

We have a lot of our paraprofessionals and classroom aides that start off maybe as recent graduates not sure whether they want to be in the classroom. And then they see that there's that need, they feel fulfilled and they want to go on to seek a teaching credential after being in the classroom.

What is, I mean, that's the hypothesis, if you will. What is the success rate of that for transitioning classified employees into, say, specifically the special education or dual credentialed educators?

So I don't have that data with me today. That's data I'd be happy to send you. How many of the classified grants have been supporting special education teachers coming through? But you're absolutely right. This is a really critical recruitment pool. And if we can help them get from the AA to the BA to a credential, we've got Special Ed teachers.

And if you take a look at all of the documents we issued to people to serve in special education last year, two thirds of them are still going to emergency permits waivers and interns, and one third are going to people who are fully prepared to work in that space. So these pathways are critical to addressing that.

So I'm happy to get information specifically about both residency and classified grants and how that's been supporting special education over.

To you, especially as we're considering where we put our budget dollars. I would love to know whether this is an efficient program and whether we can consolidate it into a more effective, complete pathway rather than sort of fits and starts in different spots. Follow up question for dual credentialing.

I do have a Bill out there and I want to know what can we do to streamline these processes? My Bill 1119 specifically asks for looking at streamlining these dual credentialing programs because we do see it go both ways. Right. People who have a credential may want to get a special education credential.

Those in special education, if we want to keep them in the teaching profession, we have to give them a pathway to release the pressure valve on the pressure cooker. Otherwise we lose them because it's a high burnout area. So what are your thoughts around streamlining that credentialing process? Where are our opportunities?

Well, we're excited by your Bill and the chair of our Commission, Markita Grinochire, is hoping that we make it all the way to January 1st with that because she would very much like to be involved in undertaking the study, the kind of analysis to begin to get to your particular question.

So these special education and General education used to be stacked in the 1990s and before, prior to about mid-1990s. And that's very inefficient it was, and. It was inefficient because you'd complete a full gen ed credential program and then you'd have to start over and do a full special ed credential program.

Some institutions found efficiencies and made this a dual possibility and they did team teaching and combined their courses. But that was in the 90s.

And what happened is we separated them and said you can get each one separate from the other, which was an attempt to get more people coming into special ed without the barrier of having to get a prior credential first. And that helped.

We did get more coming for that credential, but what we lost was the incredible efficiency of having the wide spectrum of service you could provide to students.

But with we have of late and the programs themselves, as we've adopted new standards for gen ed that really privilege inclusion in Gen Ed Classrooms and we've adopted new standards for Special Ed and restructured that credential, programs and institutions themselves have been looking at how can we have a core set of courses that all of our gen ed and special ed folk take in common and then how do we branch out into the areas of specialization and make this more efficient?

So it's happening on the natural in a small number of places, but the opportunity to shed light on it and to really get behind how we can at the state level incentivize movement in that direction.

I think part of that is taking a look at the standards they have to meet and looking at how we can consolidate, streamline that and make it more possible. And we are, we are, we are up for that opportunity at the Commission, I can tell you that.

And I think the investment in our education workforce in special ed and dual credentialing will pay dividends many times over in the benefits to society long term. So it's worth, it's worth that investment. And I look forward to working with you going forward. Thank you.

Ms. Patel, may I weigh in for a moment? I've been sitting here thinking about the questions related to why the ongoing shortages in our most high-needs areas. Really good questions about special education.

And we can build, and I think we've been very successful at being responsive, not reactive, but being responsive in building pathways that meet the needs of a variety of young people as well as not so young people who want to enter into the teaching profession.

And we know that the teacher residencies, the classified program, help again recruit diverse teachers and they stay longer. And the one thing that we're not talking about are working Conditions because we can create pipelines that create thousands of teachers and there have no, in my ideal world, enough teachers to fill every classroom with a highly qualified teacher.

And if working conditions do not support those educators on the ground, they are not staying in the profession. And what we're seeing right now in schools is young, well intended young people who went into teaching and three years into once they became got permanent status, they went into school site Administration. And bless their hearts for doing that.

They're not ready for that. They don't have enough experience, they don't have enough professional development. And so our support for school site leaders really matter.

And there are good examples too of communities of practice of school site leaders that help new school site leaders to become better and also gain the wisdom from more experienced school site leaders within those communities of practice, but also help principals and assistant principals. That's a hard job. I've done it. It is a really hard job.

The 21st century California School Leadership Academy is one of those bright spots I would call it on creating a system of support. And I just wanted to bring that up because we often talk about creating pathways into the profession, getting teachers into school.

And if the schools are not welcoming and support and we don't have administrators at those schools that are both operational and instructional leaders, that leaky boat is going to be just continue on. And we're going to have this same conversation when my daughter who's a first year teacher is sitting at the same table.

Thank you for shedding light on that. You know we talk about vertical integration in our instructional side all the time but in our operational side we need to talk about it too. So making sure our young leaders as they advance, they are getting the support they need to then in turn take care of their staff adequately.

And it's a challenging environment right now in public education. If anyone says any different, they'd be wrong. Right. It's a very challenging environment right now. Especially as we push towards more full inclusion and trying to get dual taught classes or team taught co taught classes. We're going to need all the support we can get in those classrooms.

Yeah. Just to add, hearing your question. I love your questions. Thank you. You mentioned in the beginning challenges with LCFF and I think one of those challenges is around one time funding we that and I feel like we sat across last week. Two weeks ago, same conversation.

Those one time funding dollars, while they introduce programs that are powerful and are innovative, they also have kind of that impact of those funds. Sunset they end those programs, end the impact that that has on teachers and our educator community is confidence in our programs.

Do they believe that it's taken a while to get a national board back up and going again because it abruptly stopped and people were left saying, well, was it really worth it? Do I trust this system to be able to encourage and support me as well as follow through on the incentives that they've promised?

I think the confidence piece for educators is huge, and we just need to keep that in mind as well.

Yeah. In those first three years when there's instability, the next generation sees there's instability in the teaching profession and they choose to find a more stable career path, especially with costs being so high. Thank you.

Thank you both. I think the conversation is really significant and worthwhile. So I'm going to ask more questions, if you guys don't mind. Briefly, I know that we allowed retired teachers to return to the classroom, I think, during COVID Can you remind me where we stand with the issue of those who have retired and coming back?

And is there a way to potentially focus on leas with shortages or in the subject matters of shortages, where are we with that issue of retirees returning?

We made changes, legislative changes, to allow retirees to not have to wait out that six months that they could come back. We were coming off of COVID and there was a high need those changes have been made.

And so we have retirees who are able to come back into the classroom in a much Shorter period of time, not having to wait six months before they can return. So that is.

Wasn't there also a limitation on how long they could return for?

It is a funding cap, I believe, not necessarily the time that they could be there, but how they are paid and how much they can earn within a year.

Yeah, okay, it could. Maybe we should follow up, but I.

I think I can get some more.

That might be a. You know, not that we're trying. I think we're trying to get away from the patchwork of fixing this problem. But certainly in my mind, I'm thinking we've got to think of a short term and the long term as it relates to this.

And we've been very somewhat reactionary, I would say, as we see this problem happening, we want to do these programs that help a little bit, but none of them really think through the entire shortage.

Like, for example, over the course of just what was presented to us as data the last six years, we have not produced a number of teachers that are anticipated to be needed to serve all of our students.

We're operating in a deficit, basically, and I'm not sure that the programs we have in place today, whether we keep them or not, actually get us to meeting the needs that are before us over the next five to 10 years.

So has anybody spent the time analyzing the shortage, short term and long term, and how we're actually going to meet that shortage, or are we kind of just doing programs that help a little bit incrementally but not really addressing the issue? What would be your opinion about that? Anyone who wants to chime in?

So I think you've got your finger right on a key issue. I remember when the funding started and, you know, $1.6 billion investment and the tagline was let's end the teacher shortage. Here's another set of data that comes out of our teacher supply report published this Friday.

We have 468,000 roughly active credential holders in the State of California right now, 316,000 working in our public schools right now, leaving 152,000 active credential holders who are not teaching in a classroom. They may be doing other things, obviously with their time, but we have enough credentialed teachers to fill every slot.

But it's not that simple, not by a long shot. In special education, we have 62,000 active credential holders and about 10% of them are not working in a special education assignment right now, which is about 6,000.

And that's about the shortage.

That's about the shortage. That's about the shortage. The projected need for multiple subject teachers in self contained classrooms is about 6,800 for this current year. And last year we produced 7,300 multiple subject credential holders. But again, it's not that simple. It's not a numbers game. It's context. It is working conditions. It is life happening.

You finish your credential program, maybe you defer when you're going to start. Maybe you want to have a family, maybe you get an assignment that is so overwhelming for you that you question your life choices and decide you're going to go do something else altogether. So there are a lot of factors that have to be considered there.

So investment and creating pathways that we know are proven, like residency, like classified, where when we Fund these folks, they come into teaching and they stay. That's what the research nationally shows us. That's what our early research is showing us in California that helps because recruiting and investing in a longer term, intentional workforce is key.

But it doesn't sound to me then that we have an actual plan on how this pipeline is going to work. To actually get the output at the faucet. I mean there's all this leakage happening with people, people for a variety of reasons, working conditions, as was mentioned and others.

I've always been concerned as a observer of education more than anything on the effect of pink slips and people wanting to enter the workforce to begin with, given the threat, which happens every decade or so. And so I think we're seeing that again unfortunately happening.

And so what that means in terms of people who want to enter to begin with. So we've got the, we've got the input problem and then we still have again the leakage problem as we go.

And I think that's what I would hope we'd spend more of our time and I really appreciate the time we spent already today. But thinking about how do we ensure that the entire system works because if it doesn't all work, no matter what we try to do, it's still not going to work. And I think that's.

Those are the points that the are being made by, you know, the lio, which we'll get into the specifics but like on the issue of narrowing to priority schools, I know that LPI, the report talked about, you know, the 49% of in highest need schools, only 49% have a clear or preliminary credential for teaching as opposed to the lowest needs.

Now in your case, you're analyzing, if I'm correct, the lowest 10% and the highest 10%. And so I think that really brings into focus where do the needs really exist? Where I think the LAO is raising a good point is, is 55%, which is the current threshold, the threshold we should be utilizing to focus these efforts.

And I think we still don't have enough concrete data that the investments are happening at the right places in order to achieve the outcomes that we're trying to achieve.

And so while totally agree and appreciate that there's a issue of shortage all around, I think we also should acknowledge that I think at least myself and I think historically the Assembly has been really focused on this highest, highest needs schools. And I think it's something that we should continue to be focused on.

So those are questions to remain in my mind and again really a consistent conversation about a real plan over the course of the five to 10 years, the shortage coming in, but certainly keeping the teachers that are leaving. And one of those questions really I think is an issue of working conditions.

And I know there's our majority leader has a Bill again on the issue of people want to have families, you raise that as an issue people have make a different life choice.

And you know, knowing that you can't have that kind of compensation if you do want to have, if you're young and you want to have a family, that's a life decision that maybe is a barrier for you to pursuing your education career. So I think all of those things are, are still remain as questions.

So I just want to say thank you again. And yeah, if you want to have last comments, certainly welcome to.

Sure. I just wanted to thank you for those remarks. I think it's really important to think about the big picture and I think what the state has been able to do is start to build the infrastructure that should begin to address the needs over time.

If a young person is thinking about teaching should be really easy to make that decision.

It should be easy to say I want to be a teacher and there's, there's a way I can do that affordably knowing that teaching, you know, never going to be a millionaire as a teacher, but I'm going to be able to make ends meet, have my family and so on.

And so I think that there's a balance to be struck between making sure that that infrastructure remains in place, thinking certainly about who is being served, and also that the calculus of how am I going to become a teacher isn't overly onerous, that it becomes, well, do I have to move like to a different county in order to find a school that's going to be eligible where I can do my preparation and meet the service requirement?

So I think that there's, there's some considerations there to be made around that narrowing which could be valuable but also could become another layer of administrative burden for the candidate and also for the agencies that are administering the program.

Because at the end of the day, people who want to be teachers, there should be a clear path for them that I think will help to make teaching more desirable and start to solve the issues that we're seeing as that infrastructure becomes sort of common knowledge, reliable and dependable.

Thank you. Anyone else want to share closing comments if not, I want to thank you all for your time.

I think we'll ask our staff to certainly continue the conversations with you about this idea, this concept of the short term and the long term and how do we institutionalize, for lack of a better term, I'm sure there's a better one out there, these programs that can be consistent so that we do provide those individuals who want to pursue this as a career a very clear pathway for them and not hear that well, there's programs here and programs there that you can apply to.

That already sounds to me like well I've got to apply might not get it start to question whether this is the right choice and so really institutionalize that.

The investments that we've made looking at what's been successful, making sure that we can do continuous improvement and evaluation of all these programs and build them into our school funding so that these programs can exist and persist beyond just being one time in nature. So we'll ask staff to work with all of you on that.

Thank you all for being here. Appreciate your time on this panel. We will move on to issue number two which you know we conversation for this and the following issues has really been set up by this initial dialogue.

So appreciate again all of the input from everybody but this panel will specifically review the Golden State Teachers Program oversight and the proposal that is before us. This is a teacher grant program which includes funding program for the current year and recent policy changes to the program's impact.

The panel will also hear the January budget proposal to provide an additional $50 million of one time money for the program and not change any of the policy standards. So we will kick this off with the Department of Finance to introduce the proposal.

Good Morning Chair Alvarez and Members. I'm Aman Singh from the Department of Finance and I'll provide a quick summary of the Governor's Budget proposal for the Golden State Teacher Grant Program. The budget includes 50 million in one time General Fund support to the Golden State Teacher Grant Program.

This one time support is intended to keep this popular grant program running for an additional year. There are no proposed policy changes to the program. For background, the 2021 Budget act allocated $500 million to the program to be spent across a five year span.

The $500 million allocation is expected to be fully expended by the end of the current fiscal year which is 24-25. The proposed $50 million in support is new money and will extend the lifesp of the program to a sixth year. Happy to take questions at the appropriate time.

Thank you. We'll hear from the Legislative Analyst Office.

Dylan Hawksworth-Lutzow with LAO we recommend rejecting the Golden State Teacher Grant program proposal. Historically there's been limited evidence that these types of programs are effective on changing teacher decision making. The first CSAC evaluation is in December of this year, so additional funding before that might be premature. And then lastly, this proposal would use Non Proposition $98 which we think there should be a high bar for approving in this year.

Thank you. CSAC.

Good morning, Chair Alvarez and Subcommittee Members. Jake Bremner. I'm the Deputy Director for Policy and Public Affairs with the California Student Aid Commission.

On behalf of the Student Aid Commission, we appreciate Governor Newsom and Department of Finance inclusion of additional funds in the Governor's proposed budget, to continue offering aid to aspiring educators through the Golden State Teacher Grant Program.

As noted in your agenda, there's been strong demand for this program since its creation, and that's actually just grown year over year. As also noted in your agenda, we at the Student Aid Commission have, since 2021, served over 20,000 aspiring educators through this investment, before even considering the additional credential candidates that we're serving in this current year.

Demand has been so strong that, as our colleague at Finance noted, our current projections reflected that we would actually fully encumber or exhaust available funds ahead of schedule. There's been such strong demand from those trying to enter the profession.

The annually increasing participation data from this program also suggests that it does take some time for those aspiring educators to learn about this Program. You can see that also with some of the expansions we've made to eligibility criteria for this program. So, we're really now seeing this program hitting its stride.

To discontinue funding now would undermine that momentum that we've generated thus far, in growing awareness around this opportunity, but also for our credential program providers, in incorporating this into how they structure affordability plans for those credential candidates entering into their programs.

This year alone, the Student Aid Commission, we actually had to temporarily pause applications for this current year. We normally allow for those applications to continue throughout the entire academic year, in real time. We paused applications on November 15th, after we'd received over 9,200 applications for this current year alone. We've since reopened the application.

We are still processing what we've received so far.

There are several components to an application for the Teacher Grant Program, so, we look forward to providing updated data to Department of Finance for the May revise, and can share with the Subcommittee at that time, what we're seeing for the current year.

Due to the depleted funding available for the teacher grants moving forward, that's why we had to limit those awards, so we'd make sure we weren't communicating to an applicant about the availability of funds, if there were really not funds there to provide them the full amount for which they thought they'd receive. We've instead, for this upcoming year, for '25-'26, created an interest form.

So typically, this would be a time period in which applicants, who know they're going to be entering into a program in the fall, could be applying for aid now, much like we see with our undergraduate students who are submitting that FAFSA or California Dream Act application, because we are unsure about the availability of funds for next year, we instead created this interest form, simply as a means for us to keep in touch with those who'd be interested in participating in the program.

This will not be used to prioritize applicants, but we've already heard from over 2,500 aspiring educators, who have enrolled to this interest form and would like to participate.

An additional appropriation, with stable eligibility requirements and service terms, can best enable us at the Student Aid Commission, as well as our credential program providers, to leverage this investment toward increasing and diversifying the pipeline into the teaching profession.

So, as you heard from our colleagues at Legislative Analyst Office, while CSAC is not required to report on outcomes for this program until later this year, when our first mandated report would be due, we are partnering with other agencies, with Commission on Teacher Credentialing, with California Department of Education, to secure additional data that we can use to match with the applicant data we have for the Teacher Grant Program, as preparation for that report.

We're also looking at how we can bring in external research support to help us conduct that evaluation.

But in the meantime, and hopefully in anticipation of your consideration of this and other investments for the May revision, we're looking at collecting survey data from those who have registered for this interest form, so we can understand how this investment factors into their decision making. So, I'll leave my comments there for now.

Happy to share more about the current status of the program, how we're partnering with those other agencies, or ideas for how we can continue to support or refine this critically important resource for our aspiring educators. Thank you.

Thank you. I want to, again, start this item also with some table setting, with some, make sure I understand the facts of the proposal. So, this is a 50 million one-time proposal. How many individuals do we believe will get served as a result of this appropriation?

I can answer that. So, with the current iteration of the Program, students will receive awards in the amount of $10,000. So, just doing the math there, it will be just under 5,000 because there is a 1.5% administrative carve out for CSAC. So, we can say like....

....about 4,800.

About 5,000.

Yeah, 5,000.

Thank you. And that sort of, for me, contrasts to you received nine—CSAC received—9,000 applications only until some month in the school year. That wasn't even the full school year?

That's correct, Chair. That was for this current academic year, for the '25-'26 year. We've already received those 2,500 interested candidates before really promoting any kind of real application for '25-'26.

Right. So, it would not be unreasonable to think you may be around 9,000 again next year?

I, I think that's reasonable, when you look at the projections from prior years. We're still in the process of receiving applications, processing, and making payments for this current year. So, we don't fully know what the change service requirements will mean for demand.

But that's all to say there's been very clear, very strong, demand year over year, even as eligibility terms have shifted.

And so, given that this is a one-time funding for the Program, maybe a question to Finance and then I'll probably follow up with the LAO. So, the individuals will get the, will get the grant, or the grant—in this case, the award, but they should only expect to receive it for this one year?

That's correct. I believe students do have the option of receiving their award up front or having it paid out, you know, semester by semester. So, even if they don't receive it all up front, it will be encumbered in the amount of the award.

And another question. So, those who received it in previous years, they only received it once, they haven't received in follow up years?

We provide numbers to the Committee into Department of Finance that depict how many new recipients are participating in the Program year after year. So, you have something like an unduplicated count, right? We do have a substantial share who are returning credential candidates, who receive payments across multiple academic terms.

So, to the point that our colleague at Finance raised, we do ensure that when we provide that award to an applicant, they have that ability to claim the full amount, the full maximum amount to which they could qualify, which for those new applicants would be up to $10,000, even if they may come back in a second or even third year to utilize the balance of those.

But they could get, in the second and third year, additional 10,000 each year?

It's 10,000 over the entire duration.

Okay, thank you for clarifying that. So, sort of going in the direction of the earlier conversation that we were having, maybe to the LAO more specifically on this, I think you heard some concern—some interest anyway—I would maybe characterize it as that, of consistency. This is one-time funding, which means not necessarily consistency there.

Why, and you pointed out that this is non-98-funded expenditure, first question I guess would be, is, is there a way for this expenditure to be—we're talking about classroom teachers—for this to be a 98 expenditure through re-benching of this into 98? Is that possible?

So, the Legislature does have broad discretion of what is funded using Proposition 98 dollars. I think historically, financial aid for students has not been funded with 98 dollars, but the Legislature does have broad discretion.

This is categorized as financial aid because, at some point, there was a decision made before our time—most of us here—but are there specific limitations as to this is essentially compensation for folks who are in the education world under Prop 98? Are there any specific limitations to that?

Edgar Cabral, with the LAO. I would distinguish between sort of what we think of as constitutionally allowable and what's been the state's historical practice associated with Prop 98. So, we do think that, based on kind of previous court cases and other things related to Prop 98, the Legislature has broad discretion in terms of how to spend those funds.

Traditionally, we think about Prop 98 funding as funding that goes directly to schools and community colleges, but there are other areas where there is funding. For example, in the past, the state has funded subsidized childcare programs, that don't go to schools and community colleges, through Prop 98. The state had the discretion to do so.

So, we do think there is discretion for the state to do so. But historically, the state has not typically provided Prop 98 funding for funds that are administered through a state agency and go directly for something like student support. There is one. There's a, I think it's called the Student Success Completion Grant—am I correct—in the community colleges that essentially serves as financial aid for students who take full-time coursework at the community colleges.

That, so that would be probably the closest equivalent. The one distinction would be that that funding goes to the community college districts. The community college districts administer the program. In this case, CSAC administers the program.

Again, that's sort of the historical practice has been we give the Prop 98 money to a local education agency, but we do think the Legislature has discretion.

I think, you know, the reason why you've been listening to the conversation for the last almost two hours on trying to implement programs for teacher retention at school districts, by compensating, I mean this, this, this essentially could be seen as a form of compensation. Remind us of the requirements of the participants of this Program.

So, in terms of the, the service requirements?

Yes.

So, the service for the new—for the latest cohort—I believe it's two years of spending. Two years over a four-year span, they have to serve in a priority school—or teach in a priority school—for two years.

So, that would be a priority school is defined as a school where at least 55% of the students enrolled are English learners or low-income students.

Yeah, and that's where you raise the issue of maybe focusing on prioritization of schools.

Yeah.

But the point being here is they're not students anymore. These are people who are teaching, who are in the classroom.

Right. I think at the time that they're receiving this, they're completing their preparation, but they will yet. The point of the support here is to provide a supply of teachers in public schools.

If you're not teaching, you're not receiving this award, you're not able to? Correct?

If you do not follow through on your service requirement, you are obligated to repay what you've received.

And the service requirement is teaching in a classroom?

Or serving as a pupil, personal services credential.

And education related.

Correct.

Okay. All right, I will now—anybody want to jump in this one? Mr. Fong.

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair and thank you for the presentation here today on the Golden State Teachers Program. Similar line of questioning, we see that there's a high demand for this Program. Do we have any recommendations in terms of prioritization of the funding? Should we be narrowing the scope of the eligibility?

I'm happy to take the first crack, Assemblymember. We do currently in statute have one means of prioritizing, which is based on the Applicant Student Aid Index, that number that's generated by a financial aid application and is a determinant of that individual student, or their family's financial need.

So, we do have a very equity-driven means of prioritizing the amount of funds that we have available, given the applicant pool.

If you wanted to further target based on other state needs that LAO and others have been speaking to today, you could consider, of course, going back to some of the high needs field subject areas, thinking about prioritizing based on the school site at which service would be completed.

What I would encourage policymakers to consider is how we balance that targeting with also the simplicity of the messaging to those prospective educators. For example, we have other forms of student financial aid, where we consider multiple different factors at once, to prioritize candidates and what's intended to be very equity driven.

But for the student, it actually is quite complicated to understand if they might qualify.

So, for example, if you wanted to prioritize certain types of credentials or fields of study, you might consider just defining which you want to be eligible, rather than asking the Student Aid Commission to prioritize based on—because we already have a means for prioritizing based on Student Aid Index eligibility.

So, that might be one consideration you could hold in mind as you were to consider how to target funds.

Thank you for that context. Anyone else like to add? No? Okay. Thank you. Appreciate that context.

And then secondly, I know there's an evaluation and process that will be provided, probably at the end of the year, but is there any information you can share at this time, any insights or anything that you can share at this time on the evaluation?

Only that it is a very high priority for us at the Student Aid Commission. We know that we're not required to report until later this year.

But you are weighing how to make these really important investments with limited or more limited resources than we might like, which is why we're working with external researchers, including Learning Policy Institute, to understand what we can gain through survey data, as well as partnering with those other state agencies to collect the data that we don't receive at the Student Aid Commission, to understand the impact of this program.

Thank you so much. But there's no top line information that we can share at this time in terms of the effectiveness of this program?

Because of the duration of the service period that those individuals have, that eight years to complete, four years of teaching at a priority school.

We have some numbers from the early cohorts, however, for our largest cohort of grant recipients, which was for the '23-'24 academic year, they've not yet completed one year, since they may have completed their educational program at the end of that '23-'24 academic year.

So, I think going into the summer and fall, we'll be collecting data from those recipients to understand where they are, in terms of their credential attainment, but also their service at a priority school. And that will be a really significant data point for us.

Thank you. Really look forward to reading that report and really look at the effectiveness and the evaluation of the program. So, thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. Mr. Muratsuchi.

Thank you. Again, I want to restate my strong support for the Golden State Teachers Grant Program.

And you know, I mean, again, similar to. Mr. Well, what Mr. Fong just talked about, I think the data clearly shows that there's a high demand for this Program, and we're awaiting the report for the effectiveness, in terms of getting more teachers in the workforce.

But I mean, similar to the earlier panel, I think we—the bottom line is we need to invest in our teacher workforce, and we need to make it easier, rather than harder, to become teachers, especially in these high needs areas.

And so, to the issue of, you know, if we're dealing with less funds to work with, it would make sense to me that, not only do we focus on the students with the highest financial needs, but that we return to the—focusing on our highest needs, in terms of our teacher workforce.

I wanted to ask the Department of Finance, I know that the removal—the high need field was removed from the Golden State Teacher Grant Program in the '22-'23 budget.

Given that we're working with lower dollars, and we have higher needs in areas like Special Education or STEM, why wouldn't we want to prioritize those limited dollars in the areas where we have the greatest needs?

Sure, that's definitely a conversation that we can have with our education partners, at that point in time, as you pointed out, there were limited resources, and the award amount was reduced from $20,000 to $10,000 and the service requirement was also reduced, from four years to two years.

But if we would like to revisit that, that's certainly a conversation we can have.

Okay. And from CSAC's perspective, you talked about how that might complicate the messaging, but I mean, I hope that we can still basically tell all of our teacher candidates that, you know, there's money out there to help and make it easier for you to support teachers.

And then when they follow up on the details, they say, okay, you know, it's priority for like Special Ed, STEM fields. But, you know, can we still have that message that the State of California is trying to support all of our aspiring teachers?

Certainly, Assemblymember.

And I think, to your point that you're raising around the focus on high-need fields, being able to communicate to someone entering a STEM subject area, or Special Education, that these resources are here for you, rather than developing some kind of ranked order of these are the most high priority credentials, but we can still serve other types of subject areas that may not be as highly prioritized.

That's what creates a little more challenge, not only for us in administering and considering the type of field of study with financial need, but also really, most importantly, in that clear message that we want to send to those trying to enter the profession. So, that's where my earlier comments were coming from.

Okay. All right, thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Muratsuchi. Appreciate those, those questions. I think one of the, maybe, is the LPI representative still in the room? Can you come forward?

Maybe you can provide, given that we don't have an assessment yet on the Program, the changes and, and others who want to chime in on why the changes that Mr. Muratsuchi was getting at, of going from four to two years and then the targeting, if you will, or expansion, that occurred a couple years ago. Have you done any initial analysis on that? And are we seeing any impacts to that?

Are we—I'm concerned that now, we may have individuals who are teaching two years at high need schools and then they're leaving and they're going somewhere else. I know we won't have any real data probably until December, but are we seeing any of those trends? Should we be concerned about that?

Unfortunately, I don't think we have enough information, just yet, in order to identify such a trend. However, I will say that during our interviews, we interviewed both people who were—who had—completed their programs and had begun teaching, and also people who were in the midst of their programs.

Those people, who were in the midst of their programs, were subject to some of the changes that had occurred. So, received a $10,000 grant instead of a $20,000 grant, and also, in some cases, received only a portion of their $10,000 grant and were awaiting the remainder for the next year of their service or—sorry—of their preparation.

And in talking with those individuals, it was clear that there was uncertainty about whether or not they would be able to complete their preparation, because they didn't know if the remainder of the funding they were eligible for was going to come through.

They were—had been—told kind of sit tight and kind of wait and see what's going to happen with the funding, and that created a level of anxiety about whether or not they would be able to continue on for the next year.

Yeah. Again, another reason why more consistent funding, I think, makes sense. Even though these programs seem to be strong in terms of reasons for people to get interested in the field, I think the commitment needs to, to be—I think longer term is really the underlying message here.

Doing this one time here and there is not sufficient if we actually want to address this issue. It's my belief, so.

Yes, please.

Can I?

Can I add on one more thing about the previous question around, sort of, high-need subjects?

Yes.

I think it will be important to consider, not just statewide, high-need subjects, because when you think about identifying those statewide, you're likely to skew to the larger schools, larger school districts—what are the needs there—which may not necessarily be representative of the needs in districts across the state.

So, I think it's incredibly possible that every single district has a math, Special Education teacher shortage, but it's also possible that there are districts in the state that have needs that vary a little bit.

And also, consider that, you know, if a district has—is—trying to solve their math teacher shortages, that's really focusing on secondary, secondary students.

But we also need to make sure that our primary students are building the foundations of knowledge so that when they get to those secondary math teachers who are fully credentialed, there's that foundation to build upon. So, I would just encourage some, some thought around addressing those, those high need—identifying those—high-need subjects.

I appreciate that. I was going to ask about identifying those, those types of priorities. So, appreciate that feedback. Thank you all.

We will hold this issue open, and I do request the LAO and CSAC to work with staff to identify minimum funding necessary to fully fund the program, beyond this budget year, but into the future, based on the priorities of shortage areas, as was just discussed, high priority schools, as was also discussed, and also, the candidates that have the high need, and not potentially just teachers who may already be on the pathway.

But this is supposed to be an attraction of new teachers, and so, how do we ensure that that's what's actually, in effect, happening? So, with that, we'll hold the issue open.

Thank you all for being here, on this item. We will move on to Issue Number 3, which is the Loan Repayment for Teachers Program. We will consider the January budget proposal for a brand-new program. It's a $150 million loan repayment program for teachers.

So, we will kick this off with the Department of Finance, followed by the Legislative Analyst Office, Department of Education, and CSAC. Welcome and please proceed.

Good morning, Chair and Members, Jodi Lieberman with the Department of Finance. I'll be providing an overview of the new Loan Repayment for Teachers program included in the Governor's Budget.

The budget includes 150 million Proposition 98, in fiscal year '25-'26, for the new Loan Repayment for Teachers in Priority Schools Program, which will support the recruitment and retention of credentialed educators to serve in priority Schools in California State Preschool Programs, administered by LEAs, or Local Educational Agencies.

The Program provides incentives to teachers, in addition to school counselors, nurses, psychologists, and social workers, in the form of up to $20,000 in loan payment towards educational loans. These funds will be disbursed on an annual basis of $5,000, for up to four years.

To be eligible for loan repayment, an educator must hold a Preliminary or Clear Teaching Credential, or Pupil Services Credential, serve in a priority school, or CSPP, administered by an LEA, and have educational debt. Service before July 1st of 2025 does not count towards loan repayment.

Loan repayment will be prioritized on a first come, first serve basis, and then based on unmet need from the prior year, and loan repayment may be paused and resumed under certain circumstances.

The Superintendent, with the approval of the Executive Director of the State Board of Education, will select a County Office of Education, or a consortium of county offices, to run the program, which includes creating an outline—an online process—for processing loan repayments, conducting program outreach, and submitting a program effectiveness report by December 1st of 2026, and then biannually.

This proposal is based on existing research indicating that the average teachers owe from student loans is over $20,000, and that loan forgiveness is an effective strategy in the recruitment and retention of talented teachers in high-need locations.

The focus on priority schools is in recognition that schools serving a majority of the high-need students have the most difficulty attracting and retaining fully credentialed teachers. That concludes my remarks and I'm happy to take questions at the appropriate time.

Thank you.

Dylan Hawksworth-Lutzow, with the LAO. We recommend rejecting the Loan Repayment Program proposal. We don't have major comments beyond our general concerns about the limited evidence for similar programs, other than to note that there are some existing federal loan relief programs.

There are concerns with some of those programs being onerous or difficult to navigate for teacher candidates or teachers, but they do exist. Thank you.

Thank you. Department?

Yes, good morning again. I'm presenting on behalf of our State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond. California, like many other states, is experiencing teacher shortage. We've been talking about that all morning. This shortage is due to the challenge in both recruiting and retaining educators.

Learning Policy Institute reports that research shows that college students choose careers, in part, because of the debt load they will face, in relation to the salaries they can earn in a given line of work. We know that while teacher salaries remain low, the cost of college—of a college degree—has increased.

This is clearly impacting candidates of color as well. Rising tuition costs and the high cost of student loans can dissuade candidates of color from pursuing careers in education. Besides the cost of an undergraduate degree, teachers must also pay for a credential program, which may require them to perform unpaid student teaching.

Additionally, there are several exams and assessments that teachers must complete, for both the Preliminary and Clear Credential. Given the high cost of becoming credentialed, the Loan Repayment Program will be an excellent recruitment and retention strategy for California. These funds have the potential to recruit new teachers, as well as retain existing teachers, in our system.

Joined with CDE staff, and we are here to answer any questions.

Thank you. CSAC.

Good morning again. Jake Bremner with the Student Aid Commission. We appreciate the Governor's proposed investment to help us further address the student loan debt that our educators hold.

We're very grateful that we administer a very generous state financial aid program, or suite of programs, that help address affordability for those who are in undergraduate education or with the Teacher Grant Program, moving into earning that credential, but we know that so many educators are still leaving those credentials with significant debt.

You've heard at our prior Subcommittee hearings the role that we at the Student Aid Commission play in administering those state financial aid programs, including application, not only for things like the Golden State Teacher Grant Program, the California Dream Act application, but also a smaller program we've not had an opportunity to discuss before, but a loan repayment program, the Public Interest Attorney Loan Repayment Program.

So, while we don't have a formal role in the proposal as it's been put forward, we were invited by Committee Staff to join the panel today, in case you might have any questions about administrative options for how to implement this investment, if it were included in the budget.

Thank you. I'll share my initial comments. Another new program, in a patchwork of programs of trying to attract teachers—which is what we just discussed—program probably is not necessarily the best approach at solving your teacher shortage issue.

You know, rather than helping people pay back loans, if we compensate student teachers, they might not be in debt to begin with, and that might be an alternative that we may want to think about pursuing, in light of this proposal. So, my initial, very raw, thoughts to all of you about adding another program, that may be a good thing, but maybe there's a better approach, for consistency's sake, for those who want to get into the profession.

So, that'd be my first, just—comment, generally. Is this being thought of as a 0% loan, or what kind of loan are we talking about?

I don't know that we would say that it's a 0% loan, because we're not offering a loan. This is for candidates who have educational debt and therefore would have loans with interest associated with whatever loans they already took out. So, this would be relieving current debt.

So you would assume their loans. Is that what you would do?

The County Office of Education would pay $5,000 for each year that a teacher teaches in a priority school, up to $20,000.

But, so, it's not an assumption of loans. It's essentially—they're calling it a loan repayment, but it's, it's another grant program.

It's not going directly to the teacher. So, I don't know that we would categorize it as a grant program. We call it a loan repayment program.

You would, you would be the entity paying the current loan, regardless of the loan, if it's a private loan, a parent loan, a student loan, any kind of loan?

Yeah. The intention of this Program is to pay off educator debt for California teachers.

Okay.

I will allow, or ask, if anybody else has questions on this issue. Yes, Ms. Hadwick?

I just, I, I'm not seeing, I guess how this is, this is like a reward for the teachers we already have. How is this going to help us with recruitment of new teachers?

My husband and I both came out of college with debt, still paying one thing off, but we did not qualify for any of this stuff. We were at low priority schools. We had combined one of our loans. We had a parent loan. Like, there's a lot of things that make this difficult for a teacher to navigate.

And I agree, I think the one-time funds is not the way to go about this. But I also want to support teachers and have more teachers, because it's the hardest job in the world. So, but I just, I guess I'm not getting how we're recruiting more teachers.

Did you want me to respond to that?

Yes.

From the Administration's perspective, this is not only a retainment tool, but it's also a recruitment tool, because we are lowering the loans that teachers, incoming teachers to the field would have. You said that you thought, you said that this is for existing teacher, we also view it as for new teachers.

So, it's serving our existing teacher workforce, but also our incoming teacher workforce. And we would expect that all new teachers who enter the field would be able to benefit from this as well.

But it's a one time thing right?

At this time. It's proposed to be one time in 25-26. But we're certainly open to having conversations regarding future appropriations.

Mr. Muratsuchi.

Thank you. Following on the Chair's questions about a new program, why not just take the $150 million proposed here and just, you know, have a multi-year Golden State Teacher Grant Program?

Because the funds are Proposition 98, we wouldn't be able to have a state agency administer the programs unless an LEA were to apply for the program on behalf of their teachers, which would significantly increase the administrative burden of the program.

So there's going to. I'm not sure I follow you. I mean, it seems like starting a new program would be more expensive than funding an existing program.

I think this comes down to. Oh, sorry, Liz Mai, Department of Finance. This comes down to Golden State Teacher Grant Program is funded with Non Proposition 98 general funds. So the flow of the funding can go from a state agency to directly to those teacher candidates, whereas this program is with Proposition 98 General Fund. So. Right. The flow of the funding kind of restricts. It can't go from a state agency to directly to a teacher candidate or a teacher. It would need to go flow through an LEA.

Which seems to tie in, Mr. Chair, with your comments about how do we have sustainable funding for programs. For example, if we had Golden State Teacher Grants coming out of Proposition 98 on an ongoing basis, that that might solve this problem of not creating a new program.

If I may, Ms. Carver, I wanted to, with the Chair's permission, ask is there data indicating how a loan forgiveness program matches compared to a scholarship program in terms of the effectiveness in attracting diverse teacher candidates?

So there is a study conducted by colleagues of mine. I believe the title is Does Loan Forgiveness Work? Something like that. That discusses the effectiveness of loan forgiveness and service scholarships. My colleagues used studies on both types of programs and found that those types of programs are most effective when they cover a substantial portion of the cost of preparation.

I don't recall off the top of my head if there are any significant differences found between loan forgiveness versus service scholarship programs, but they did identify a threshold, I believe of about $20,000 as a substantial amount.

Does CSAC or the Department of Education have any information, further information on this question?

I wanted to come back to an earlier question that you raised, if I may, Assembly member, regarding use of $98 and those dollars coming to a state agency. I would just note that this public interest attorney loan repayment program that I cited earlier, we actually utilize funds that aren't General Fund, they're interest fees that are collected on deposits with attorneys. They come back to the state. We at the Student Aid Commission serve as a centralized place where individuals can apply for the support.

We then have an agreement to receive those funds and award them to those candidates who are selected for participation in the program. We also do receive some funds through from the Department of Education that are federal funds that go to Department of Education for purposes of awarding Golden State Teacher grants.

So we have an MOU to make that financial arrangement work. So I defer to our colleagues at LAO and elsewhere on questions of Proposition 98 usage, but just wanted to note that there are some instances where we're utilizing dollars that aren't General Fund Dollars to make those awards to students, whether that's as grant aids through teacher grants, or as this loan repayment benefit for those public interest attorneys.

Okay.

In terms of data on loan forgiveness versus scholarship programs, not sure wanted to address that. This, this really focuses on a retention. This is a retention effort for teachers who have not had access to these other programs but have gone into debt to enter into the profession, wanting them to stay, wanting them to figure out how to come out of that debt and not have that load on them.

And then also in response to the patchwork conversation, pathwork or pathway. And I feel like there are multiple ways and we've created multiple ways for people to enter into the profession, I came through a regular credentialing program, student teaching and all of that.

Has there been any clarification specifically as to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program as to whether the Trump Administration plans to continue to Fund it?

But at this point, there are so many different ways that people are coming in and we are trying to attract variety of. We're not simply attracting undergraduates. And so I think it's important to have as many different pathways as possible to support our incoming educators.

All right, thank you. In terms of recognizing the uncertainty of federal funds and who's going to be administering the federal funds, given President Trump's proposal to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, who administers the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, does CSAC, do you know?

That's administered at U.S. Department of Education? And to your point, that is something that's been proposed to move, I believe, actually to the Small Business Administration for future student loans.

We are eagerly awaiting further detail about the future of Administration on that and other financial aid programs, but there's not much else to go off of at this time.

All right, thank you.

Thank you. The last comments would be, I think aligning again to identifying where the needs exist, whether it's high priority schools. Again, it seems like the impact of the lack of individuals with the preparation required seems to be concentrated more in the lower, I'll just say 10% as the data that's presented versus those with higher percentage of English learners.

And so I'd like to know more going further in this proposal. Why not targeting more in those ways, or again maybe even targeting to subject areas that we identify as perhaps the ones that have the most number of, if this is about retention where are we losing teachers? Are we losing them at highest priority schools? Are we losing them in certain subject areas?

Is it special education as opposed to just a General availability which seems to be the case in this program proposal at the moment. So with that we'll leave the issue open and look to further conversations between our staff and all of you. Thank you very much.

We will move on to issue number four, which is the National Board for Professional Teaching Standard Certification Program. You will hear the budget proposal to augment the program's resources and we have the Department of Finance here to present the proposal. Legislative Analyst Office and the Department of Education. Welcome.

Hello again. Jodi Lieberman with the Department of Finance. I'll be providing an overview of the investment to the National Board Certification Program. The Governor's Budget includes 1001,000,001 time Proposition 98 General Fund in fiscal year 25-26 to extend the life of the existing National Board Certification Program.

The National Board Program supports candidates who work in high priority schools to pursue National Board Certification by providing a $25,000 incentive to candidates who have earned their certification. The program also provides 2,500 to candidates to pursue their national board certification and 495 to candidates to maintain their National Board Certification.

Teachers who are National Board Certified have been shown to have lower turnover than teachers who are not certified. And students of Board certified teachers learn more than their peers without Board Certified teachers.

This positive impact of a Board certified teacher which is backed by more than a decade of research, is even greater for BIPOC and low income students. Thanks to the state's current investment, California currently ranks number three in the country for new National Board Certified teachers.

By continuing to invest in this evidence based professional development paired with financial incentives, the Administration is supporting a stable and highly qualified workforce and ensuring the longevity of an effective program so that new and prospective teachers will be able to access this transformative certification for years to come.

By securing this funding in this budget, we are moving towards making this program a staple in the educator workforce support system. That concludes my remarks and I'm happy to take questions at the appropriate time.

Dylan Hawkes with LITSO with the lio, we recommend rejecting the National Board Certification Program proposal. The main comments we have here are that the program currently has funds remaining we think will be sufficient through the 25-26 application period and then data is still being collected on the first cohorts going through this program.

If the Legislature were to reconsider program effectiveness or funding the program in 27-28, they'd have two cohorts, two completed cohorts of data to assess how effective the program has been. Thank you.

Thank you. Good morning again. We believe professional learning and support has never been more imperative for California educators. A high quality professional learning system does more than help educators master discrete content and instructional strategies.

As we've discussed today, it contributes to a broader process of transforming practice and has a positive impact on recruitment and retention, school culture and climate, labor management dynamics, educator equity, and student and educator outcomes.

Encouraging and supporting California teachers to pursue National Board Certification has the potential to help retain highly effective teachers in the schools with students that need them the most.

Teachers who engage with National Board Standards report making specific changes to their instructional practice, including adjusting lesson plans to meet the needs of individual students, gaining a deeper knowledge of their content areas, and using data in new ways to assess student progress.

Many teachers say that it's about a powerful experience whether they achieve National Board Certification or not. I'm pleased to announce that the number of teachers in California pursuing National Board Certification in high priority schools has increased from 415 in 2020, 2021 before the subsidy program began to over 4,000 teachers over the last four years.

Perhaps the most exciting data about this five year funding program is that since the inception of the program, a total of 807 teachers receiving the subsidy are now nationally board certified. 369 of those teachers are actively participating in the incentive program, with an additional 407 teachers, I'm sorry, eligible teachers receiving the incentive this fiscal year.

The additional budget allocation will provide potential National Board subsidy and incentive participants with the confidence that the program will continue allowing up to five additional cohorts of educators. Currently, the program is only funded through 2026 with expenditures through 2028.

Therefore, new candidates in the incentive program may only be promised up to four years of the incentive funding instead of the full five. When the original National Board incentive program was abruptly canceled during the Great Recession, candidates that were participating in the program did not receive their full incentive payments.

This made recruiting for the current program difficult as CDE staff received concerns from the original candidates that this program may be canceled abruptly as well. The additional funding and allotted time to encumber and spend those funds will hopefully quell those fears and enable staff to continue to recruit additional cohorts.

Alternatively, CDE would like the Legislature to consider ongoing funding for this program. The CDE also recommends that the Legislature expands eligibility funding uses to allow candidates to use National Board funds to participate in a district or University led support program.

Current statute does not allow us to use the National Board Incentive funds to support candidates. Candidate Support Programs Support programs assist candidates throughout their candidacy to pass each of the comp of the components.

Our educators deserve high quality professional learning opportunities that support them to support our students with particular emphasis on the structures and content we know lead to positive outcomes and meeting the pressing needs of this exceptional time in public education. I'm here with staff and we are happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you. I have some questions about the the program impacts from any previous research that was done. Curious how many nationally board certified teachers make a significant level of density, if you will, at a school site to be impactful to reach their colleagues to make that impact?