Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 3 on Education Finance

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the assembly budget subcommittee number three on education finance. I am chair Alvarez. I welcome you all to today's hearing, and thank you for being here. Today's hearing is gonna really be focused on the educator teacher pipeline.

There have been tremendous investments over the last few years, to address this, this issue, this situation, this dynamic. It is dynamic as it differs from, region in our regions, in our state, from, one region to another. So I'm looking forward to the discussion on those investments, on where they've paid off dividends, on where perhaps we can be doing better, and certainly on identifying, better ways to, capture the data to help us make the informed decisions on a going forward basis. So that'll be a theme you hear throughout the panels and my questions and comments. So with that, I'd ask issue one panel to please come forward.

This panel will provide an update on the $2,100,000,000 in in recent budget act investments and the outcomes in increasing the educator candidate pipeline and retaining high quality educators. The panelists and public comments may identify policy and investment opportunities outside the January budget to address the ongoing educator shortages. So, with that, I welcome all the panelists. And, again, thank you for being here, and we will start with the legislative analyst office on today's panel. Welcome.

Good morning or good afternoon, mister chair. My name is Dylan Hawksworth-Lutzow with the legislative analyst office. We were asked to provide, some brief overview on the state's recent spending on teacher recruitment and retention. If you look, at the table on pages seven and eight of your agenda, you'll see the state has spent over $2,100,000,000 in on teacher recruitment and retention over the last decade. These programs include a variety of methods, for bolstering and, recruitment and retention.

Some are direct grants to teacher candidates and some are district level supports. Some of these programs, including the two largest, the teacher residency grant program and the Golden State teacher grant program, are currently set to exhaust their current funding in either, 2025, '26, or 202627. Others have funding for the next several years, depending on the demand for the programs. Both the student teacher stipend program and the national board program received significant funding in the 202526 budget. That concludes my comments. I'm happy to answer questions at the appropriate time.

Thank you. We'll get to questions in a minute. We have the commission on teacher credentialing here. Welcome.

Thank you. Chair Alvarez and members of the committee, it's a pleasure to be with you today to on behalf of the commission on teacher credentialing. I'm excited to share with you preliminary data from the upcoming April teacher supply report today. So three broad takeaways. First, teacher supply is rebounding, but is still not likely sufficient to meet elevated demand. Second, more teachers are entering the profession, but too many are leaving.

So shortages and overreliance on substitutes and emergency permits continue. Third, the result is workforce instability, inequitable access to students, for students to qualified teachers, and added risk to a still fragile post COVID student recovery. So while the commission's teacher supply data are a strong positive sign that state investments are helping rebuild the pipeline for teachers into California schools and must be sustained, it is not yet a success story. Until we make more progress on early career retention, schools will remain stuck in a cycle of backfilling the vacancies of teachers that leave rather than building a stable workforce. I've provided you with a handout that has some of the data preliminary data from our 245 year, and I'll be referencing that as we go.

And I'm gonna start with the good news. Teacher supply is rebounding. In 245 the commission issued more new teaching credentials than at any point in the last decade. This includes ten year highs for single subject and multiple subject credential issuance. During the same period, education specialist credential issuance reached its second highest level.

Teacher credentialing production by California institutions also showed a strong rebound from rebound from COVID lows supplemented by growth in LEA based preparation and out of state sources. After steady increases in the issuance of emergency type permits and intern credentials between 2020 and '24 and 2024, we saw a 5% decrease in the issuance of permits in the 245 data and a modest increase in the deployment of interns. While total enrollment in California's teacher preparation programs increased by four and a half percent in 245 enrollment of new candidates increased by almost 14%. So now for the less good news. Despite, this growth that we're seeing in 245 CBEDS data reports reported by the California Department of Education includes reports from counties regarding their estimated need to hire teachers in the coming year.

The estimated number of teacher hires indicates that anticipated teacher demand continues to exceed supply from all sources. However, this figure should be interpreted cautiously as it is an estimate and not a direct measure of actual hires. So while nearly 220,000 new teachers were credentialed in the 245 year, Estimated demand for 2526, projected at just over 23,000. When compared with new teacher credentials by the commission in 2024, there is an estimated surplus of almost 2,600 multiple subject teachers. We provided in other words, we we credentialed 2,600 more teachers in multiple subjects than was the anticipated demand for that year.

An estimated shortfall of almost 900 special education teachers also in the same year. Persistent and estimated demand for single subject teachers in the areas of English, math, social sciences, and physical education, and the science also were reiterated in this particular, pending report. Two thirds of the estimated teacher hires would occur in 10 counties as indicated on page six of your handout with Los Angeles accounting for about 18% of these new hires. So these data suggest that state investments are producing clear gains in teacher supply. At the same time, anticipated demand remains high despite both increased supply and declining student enrollment.

So implications of these, these data findings. This points to a larger challenge for California's educator workforce. State investments are clearly helping to rebuild teacher supply, but demand remains high even as student enrollment declines, which suggest that workforce churn and preretirement attrition continue to put substantial pressure on the system. That pressure shows up in schools through continued reliance on underprepared personnel, emergency type permits, and substitutes to fill persistent vacancies. Teacher assignment monitoring helps illuminate this problem at the state, county, and school site levels by showing where staffing challenges are translating into inequitable access to appropriately assigned teachers, and those conditions are not born evenly.

Low income students, students of color, English learners, and students with disabilities are more likely to experience inconsistent access to fully prepared and appropriately assigned teacher teachers. That instability matters for student learning. It disrupts continuity of instruction. It undermines equitable access to qualified educators and threatens the fragile recovery many students are still working to achieve. Taken together, these data suggest that California's progress in increasing teacher supply is real, but that supply gains alone may not be sufficient to produce a stable and equitable workforce.

They also suggest that understanding the state's staffing challenge requires attention not only to preparation and entry, but also to the workforce conditions associated with continued turnover. So in closing, that we see four or five opportunities that we'd like to just reinforce for you. We believe it is critical to sustain investments in high quality, high retention education pipeline programs and service scholarships, loan forgiveness, and the student teaching stipend. These investments provide access to teacher preparation for a greater and more diverse number of prospective teachers. Secondly, we believe it is critical to target investments to high needs regions and credential areas, particularly special education.

AB 1119 which was authored by assembly member Patel last year, is driving the commission's exploration of streamlined opportunities for earning both general and special education credentials concurrently. Third, several county offices of education, Sacramento, Humboldt, Santa Clara, and Tulare are on the verge of being registered teacher apprenticeship program providers. State support for these counties to deploy pilot teaching apprenticeship programs in hard to staff schools and credential areas could create a template for other counties to follow. Apprenticeship as staffing intervention, if you will. Fourth, school administrators play a central role in creating effective working conditions in schools.

Legislation signed into law last year will enable the commission to strengthen leadership preparation and pathways to support retention. And finally, sustaining proven strategies like early career induction and national board certification are essential for retaining our teachers in the profession for the long term. That concludes my remarks. Thank you.

Thank you very much. I think, we're gonna hear from, the Learning Policy Institute next.

Yes. Thank you so much. Good afternoon. My name is Tara Kinney. I serve as the chief of policy and programs at the Learning Policy Institute, where I've been part of a team studying the educator work force in California for over a decade.

I, want to share our latest research with you today and I do want to thank the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the California Department of Education, and the Student Aid Commission for sharing the data that enabled this research. Teacher preparation, certification, experience, and stability matter for student achievement. A Learning Policy Institute study of positive outlier districts in California found that California districts with more fully credentialed and experienced teachers had higher student achievement. This was particularly true for black and Latino students. Research also indicates that teachers without full preparation leave at two to three times the rate increase over the past decade or so in substandard credentials and permits.

These have more than tripled since 2013 with the greatest increases in the number of emergency style permits. In 2425, there were nearly 8,000 emergency style permits issued. And teachers who were not fully prepared made up about 8% of California's total, educator workforce. The highest need schools were nearly three times as likely to fill teaching positions with interns and emergency, And

that means that more than 85% of new hires in 202324 filled vacancies that were left by departing teachers. And most of those, for teachers leaving for reasons other than retirements. The second driver of demand is greater student needs. Despite the declining enrollment in California, teacher demand has not fallen proportionately, and that's really in part because of the educational and support needs of our students have intensified over time. Pupil teacher ratios in the nation.

The third driver is policy related demand. So the expansion of transitional kindergarten, Prop 28 arts and music funding, and career technical education programs are additional drivers of demand. The good news that we're seeing, as you just heard is that teacher supply is really beginning to turn. We're seeing that uptick in new prelimin preliminary teaching credentials issued to California prepared individuals, which have increased by about 40% in the past two years. So pretty substantial uptick.

And our pipeline is increasingly diverse. Teachers of color comprised about 65% of entering teachers state. You heard from our colleagues at the legislative analyst office. The state's invested over 2,000,000,000 in recruiting, preparing, and retaining teachers with the most substantial investments coming, since 2021. And the data just I just shared suggest that these programs may be having a difference.

We are really leading the nation in teacher residencies, which are partnerships between preparation programs and districts that really strengthen preparation while making it more affordable, diversify their workforce, and retain more effective teachers in the preparation in the profession longer. About 10% of teacher candidates now in the state enter through residencies, and more than seventy percent of those are candidates of color. Studies have found, these are studies in California, that residency graduates feel better prepared than those from any other pathway, pass the teacher performance assessment at higher rates, and they're more likely to teach in high needs schools. I believe we'll hear more about this program on a later panel. Turning to the Golden State Teacher Grant program, since its launch, that program has supported more than 28,000 aspiring teacher and people personnel services candidates.

Our research indicates that the program is doing more than subsidizing candidates who would have pursued teaching anyway. Based on data from the a survey that the Student Aid Commission, put out to all teacher, Golden State Teacher Grant recipients, nearly three quarters of respondents said that the grant influenced their decision to pursue teaching, and two thirds said it influenced their decision to teach in a high needs school. And nearly nine in 10 recipients teach in priority schools are 55% or more unduplicated pupils. Most plan to stay before beyond their service commitment. So far are are not only recruitment programs.

I want to point out they're also retention strategies because candidates commit to serving in California public schools for a particular period of time. I think that's really important. Another element of our retention strategy is the National Board Certified Teacher Incentive Program. Research consistently shows that those board certified teachers support greater student achievement, beginning teachers that they mentor. And I think this program is perhaps a really good example of leveraging one time dollars in an ongoing like way, because that program, as we heard, is funded through at least 2030.

A couple of other investments worth mentioning for which funding has now ended are the integrated teacher, prepper integrated undergraduate teacher preparation program which provided grants to launch or expand undergraduate pathways. Our forthcoming study shows that undergrad candidates are a growing share of California prepared completers. They're now nine percent of completers, up from just six percent a few years ago. So additional policies may be needed to really stimulate more preparation at the undergraduate level. The Classified School employee teacher credentialing program has been particularly important for preparing new ed specialists, and I think we see that in a day.

Challenge, posed by our high cost of living in California to teacher recruitment and retention. Our salaries are high in the state relative to other states, but they're not competitive with other college educated professionals. And we have the highest cost of living. So teachers purchasing power just doesn't go as far here. One third of our teachers carry student loan debt, which further reduces their take home pay.

Our forthcoming study finds that higher teacher turnover is associated with lower district salaries, which I think just points to the importance of compensation and working conditions. So to close, we've made substantial investments in our teacher workforce, but that early impact could diminish, if the, one time funds lapse. So we need reliable investments and and I'm here to answer questions as we move through the day.

Thank you very much. Next, we'll hear from San Francisco State University College of Education. Welcome.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Let me get to the beginning here.

Good afternoon, Chair Alvarez and members of the committee. I'm Cynthia Grutik. I'm the Dean of the Graduate College of Education at San Francisco State. I've been working in educator preparation for thirty years and in the CSU for nineteen of those, first at Cal State Dominguez Hills, then at Long Beach State, and now at San Francisco State. I'm here on behalf of CSU assistant vice chancellor Shereen Pavri representing educator preparation programs in the CSU.

And I think my comments will take us into some of the, insights from implementation of some of these programs, specifically the student teacher stipend program as we know it so far. So as you heard, the California State University, well, as you heard some of the data already, I wanna add to that by saying that the California State University prepares about half of the teachers in California. Of the 13,128 credentials from colleges and universities issued in 202320 '46,400 of those or about 48% were from the CSU. So I really appreciate the opportunity to represent our sector here today. The student teacher stipend program is so important.

It's refreshing, and it represents a major shift in centering student teacher candidates and what it takes for them to become teachers, much the way that the residency program does as well. At this point, we only know what's been outlined in the authoring legislation and what was being clarified on the CTC website, which has been a helpful starting point. Universities like mine are in the process of contacting our districts where we place student teachers to line up our collaboration in preparation for applying for funding on behalf of our student teachers, and also to find out which districts will be willing and prepared to apply. Last week, I met with seven of the districts, we work with just to share what we know, and we've been having conversations among the CSU deans about this program. So today, I wanna outline five ideas that have surfaced through these initial conversations to be considered in strengthening the program and moving it forward successfully.

First, we must acknowledge and attend to the complexity and issues around capacity. Not to say they're in not surmountable, but they're really important. This program's an opportunity to make student teaching placement process robust, visible, and accountable across systems in a way that currently it is not. This requires all of us to level up in how we track student teacher placements, And maybe the first time that numbers of student teachers can be tracked annually. We do track completers.

We track credential, recipients. But we haven't tracked student teachers. We have two systems that really need each other. Districts need our university programs for their teacher recruitment, and we need them too for fulfilling the requirements of our programs. It's a multilayered and interdependent but loosely organized ecosystem.

Not every district and university partnership is coherent or well staffed, even if there is an MOU in place. At the university level, making and tracking student teacher placements has been a challenge for a long time. Sometimes it's systematic. Sometimes it's pretty ad hoc. And as I've observed over the years, the capacity demands on the district side can be enormous, especially when there's not a separate position set aside to handle student teaching.

So these are things that we're all thinking about and attending to as we move forward together, because we really don't want to be in a situation where there might be one student teaching seminar where some of the students have a have a grant and some do not because of the capacity of districts and of us to work together. The second point is the necessity of consistent and widespread messaging, especially in the early months of the program. It would be really great for districts to receive information directly from the Department of Education, rather than relying on universities to contact them, which could result in inconsistent messaging and missed submission opportunities. There are things I learned that there are things districts wanna know that I just don't know how to tell them about how to get the money directly to students, how the taxes work. Programs.

Sometimes those student teachers are employed, and so they're paid. That's how they get their stipend, and sometimes they get it a different way. But it's it's different. My third point is that the cadence of the program doesn't yet align with the cadence of student teacher placements. The startup is this July 1, which seems to give us time to prepare for the fall semester, but placement conversations have already started in most universities and districts.

And in July, most university faculty are off contract and many district staff are too. So we'll be scrambling to get that up and running and we'll do it, but I just think it's important to note that eventually it'd be good for the cadence of the program to align with more like a March. My fourth point is, just wondering whether there's enough funding set aside in this first year out of the total 300,000,000 to ensure that every every teaching could every student teacher gets the stipend if they're applied and eligible. So as we as the data show that there are about 9,900 traditional credentials issued statewide in 2023 by universities. That's probably a good proxy for student teachers.

So with a 100,000,000 set aside for the first year, will that be enough to make sure everybody gets a stipend? There's a first come first serve note in the legislate in the in the statute

that sets up kind of a competitive climate that's not what we want. We kind of already heard it from districts like, should I be the first one to submit the names? Let's hurry and get this in. So we make sure, you know, I think what the the idea is to make sure student teachers get a stipend. So maybe it's possible to enlarge to increase the first year amount just while we see how it rolls out, and then kind of adjust as we go.

Another question came up from my special education department. And as we've heard, special education is a high need area. Eligibility for the funding comes through LEAs, which are districts, county offices, and charter schools. However, a good number of student teachers in special ed are placed in regional centers, non public schools, especially in early childhood education. And so, there's a question about whether the eligibility could be expanded to some of these sites that serve our student teachers too.

So through our agreements and our our standards. And then finally, I want to circle back to the CSU. I want to reiterate that half of the educator preparation is located in the CSU in our colleges of education. There's no differential funding set aside in the CSU for educator preparation. We get the same allocations as other programs and all the other colleges.

So in my university, there's six colleges. Mine is one. We all get funded out of the same bucket, And we know that the state funding for the CSU has not kept up with need, and educator preparation is a critical need. It's important to recognize that CSU funding directly impacts our ability to hire the faculty who prepare future teachers, and thus impacts our capacity to prepare teachers. So when I joined San Francisco State in 2018, for example, it was typical for the campus to hire 40 or 50 new faculty every year.

Yet for the last two years, our campus has not hired more than three faculty for the whole campus each year. Our special education program at SF State is probably the largest in the state. We have 235 candidates enrolled across five programs. But since I've arrived, our faculty team has shrunk from 12 to just six. And we have large application numbers, but we worry about turning people away because we just don't have capacity.

So when I think about the consequential ways to increase enrollment in educator preparation programs, I always come back to the need for a fully funded CSU system. So to sum up, the student teacher stipend program meets a long standing and quite urgent need to recognize and support what it takes for students to become teachers. Strengthen it, and we are grateful for the opportunity to represent the CSU's perspective and participation here. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Next, we'll hear from Twin Rivers Unified School District, representative from CTA. Welcome.

Hi. Thank you. Good afternoon, mister chair and committee members. My name is Anna Aguilar. I'm a sixth grade teacher at Babcock Elementary in the Twin Rivers Unified School District.

I'm also an executive board member of the Twin Rivers United Educators, and here representing, very proudly CTA. CTA believes that recruiting, retaining, and training qualified educators and staff is essential in advancing educational equity and ensuring all students thrive. The state has made a number of investments in recruitment including removing the financial barriers of entry into the profession, such as test fees, cost of induction, the Golden State teacher grant, and most recently, the student teacher stipends program, which provides $10,000 for a student teacher while they're doing their 500 hours. All of these investments would benefit by substantial funding over time. Places they are not supported.

Students with behavioral challenges, complex learning challenges, and a diverse language make up, a diverse language make up, compounded with high class sizes makes for a Sisyphean task for educators. In my district, Twin Rivers United Educators, right now, are fighting for more prep time in elementary grades, class size caps in middle school and high school classrooms. And in addition, asking the district to take into consideration students with complex needs while looking at caseloads in special education classrooms for speech and language pathologists, counselors, and the need for school nurses at every school. Twin Rivers Unified started the 2526 school year with 83 vacancies being filled by long term steps. That's approximately 2,000 students without a regular credentialed teacher.

Many in special ed classes where students IEPs might not be fully met without the fully credentialed and stably placed educators and paraprofessionals to perform those services. Even veteran teachers are retiring early or as soon as they can, barely crossing the finish line. Again, because of the Sisyphean tasks that's placed on educators. More tasks are placed on us without anything being taken off. From combo classes to many students in general ed classes on IEPs and 50 fours and high stakes state testing, educators are tasked with doing more with less.

Health care costs are skyrocketing. Salaries are not keeping up with inflation, and yet, we are the ones who are guilted into doing it for the kids. Of course, we want what's best for our students. But on the backs of teachers' unpaid labor and mental health, absolutely not. California continues to face a severe educator shortage with nearly 407,000 teaching positions statewide either unfilled or filled by underqualified, underprepared instructors.

In CTA's state of California's public education survey released this January, over 73% report a serious educator shortage at their school. Over half no coworkers who left careers in education because of financial strain. Forty percent are considering leaving education in the next few years. Retention is also an employment issue. What are the conditions at a school site that makes a teacher want to teach there? As many of you know, the Twin Rivers United Educators have been on strike for ten days.