Newsom’s letter to California Energy Commission Vice Chair Siva Gunda, dated April 21 and seen by Reuters on Wednesday, came days after Valero Energy said it would permanently shut or restructure its refinery in Benicia, California by the end of April 2026. The Benicia refinery accounts for about 9% of the state’s crude oil refining capacity.

“I write to direct you to redouble the State’s efforts to work closely with refiners on short- and long-term planning, including through high-level, immediate engagement, to help ensure that Californians continue to have access to a safe, affordable, and reliable supply of transportation fuels,” Newsom wrote. He added that although gasoline demand in the state was in a gradual decline, it would exist for years to come.

Newsom Sets Deadline for July 1

The governor set a July 1 deadline for the CEC to recommend changes to the state’s approach to managing fuel supplies during the energy transition and asked the agency to reinforce the state’s belief that refiners can operate profitably.

Refiners have said they face growing regulatory and cost pressures in California, which has among the most aggressive climate change policies of any U.S. state and has a goal to ban new gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035.

Gasoline prices in California are among the highest in the United States due to the state’s reliance on imports from Latin America and the Middle East to offset declining state supplies.

In his letter, Newsom said the Trump administration was to blame for economic instability and market turmoil that was harming oil companies.

A refining trade group said that assertion was false, and instead blamed California.

“Governor Newsom’s letter to the California Energy Commission directing it to ‘redouble’ its efforts to work closely with refiners so ‘they see the value in serving the California market’ is laughable and a blatant effort to cover his backside,” Chet Thompson, CEO of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, said in an emailed statement. “State policies, not the new administration in Washington, are why fuel manufacturers struggle to operate in California and why California drivers face the highest fuel prices in the country.”

—

(Reporting by Nichola Groom/Editing by Marguerita Choy)

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Want to know how students at your child’s school district are performing five or even 10 years down the line?

On Tuesday, California released a new tool that aims to make that question — and many others — much easier to answer. Known as the Cradle to Career Data System, these new “dashboards” consolidate data from roughly 3.5 million high school graduates in California, showing where they enrolled in college, what kinds of degrees they earned, and the wages they made four years after receiving a college diploma or certificate.

For years, parents and researchers alike have complained that accessing education data is unnecessarily hard — with information spread out across various websites, drop-down menus and graphics. A new data system was a key priority for the Newsom administration, though it faced months of delays, in part because of data privacy concerns.

“We have people who’ve been calling for this (data system) for 10 years, for 20 years,” said Mary Ann Bates, executive director of the Cradle to Career Data System. “The effort the state is making now to bring this together is so that students, families, educators and policymakers can have this information at their fingertips.”

Some other states, such as Kentucky, have already pioneered better approaches, creating a single, understandable website that houses data from the state’s K-12, college and workforce providers. In 2019, California allocated more than $24 million so it could catch up.

Limitations of the New Tool

But today’s data tool represents just a fraction of the state’s education and workforce data. It only looks at students who attend one of California’s public colleges and universities and it only looks at students who graduate from a public high school. One tool by the California Department of Education shows that among 2015 California public high school graduates who headed to college, 15% went to a private or out-of-state college or university within 16 months.

Bates said her team will eventually update these public dashboards to include information about students who attend private or out-of-state colleges and who don’t graduate high school.

As part of this data system, the state has also promised to release other data, including information about early childhood education and teachers’ training and retention. Bates’ team initially said the teacher training information would be available by June 2024, but it remains in limbo. She said that tool would be released “soon,” though she did not specify a date.

How Useful Is It?

Although the Cradle to Career Data System is presenting information in new ways, the information itself isn’t new. California has already developed similar tools, but none so widely accessible to the public or incorporating data from so many different schools and state agencies.

The state Education Department already allowed users to download data and sort college-going rates by school or district, although it’s unlikely most parents would spend the time to download the spreadsheet and try to understand all the column names. One strength of the system is its ease of use — the tool displays key data visually and intuitively.

But each data system may use slightly different numbers. For example, the department uses DataQuest, which has a broader definition of what it means to “graduate” high school. The Cradle to Career Data System looks only at traditional graduates and not people who receive a GED, said Ryan Estrellado, the Cradle to Career system’s director of data programs.

The nonprofit Educational Results Partnership operated one of the many predecessors to the Cradle to Career Data System, and president Alex Barrios said he’s skeptical that the state’s new tool is a real improvement.

“If the dashboard doesn’t start the cohort at 9th grade, then the dashboard is useless,” wrote Barrios in a text to CalMatters. Just over 88% of students who started as ninth graders finished high school five years later, according to 2024 state data, but for certain groups, such as African American or Native American students, the graduation rates were lower.

Without information about high school dropouts, the new tool makes it look like students attend college at higher rates than they actually do, he said. It’s called the Cradle to Career Data System, he added, not the “the High School Graduation to College Data System.” In the previous tool that Barrios helped operate, known as Cal-PASS Plus, researchers could look not just at high school graduates but also at all students who enrolled in 9th grade.

Bates said the Cradle to Career Data System is only as powerful as the data that schools and agencies share. This current data uses information from the past 10 years, which is only enough time to measure the long-term college and career outcomes of high school graduates, she said, adding that other data, such as information about the long-term fates of younger students, will be added as it’s available.

Although the data lacks certain features, it may still lead to powerful findings: One of the new data dashboards shows that community college students who receive a certificate earn more than those who receive an associate degree— even though certificate programs typically take much less time to complete.

The Cradle to Career Data System is “a neutral source of information,” said Bates. “Our office is not going to weigh in on specific policies or interpret the why.”

CalMatters higher education reporter Mikhail Zinshteyn contributed to this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s office said Wednesday that lawmakers will vote on a measure to repeal a waiver granted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Biden in December allowing California to mandate at least 80% electric vehicles by 2035. Those rules have been adopted by another 11 states, including New York, Massachusetts and Oregon.

One issue remains whether Congress can revoke the waiver using the Congressional Review Act. In March, the Government Accountability Office said the waiver cannot be repealed under the CRA, which only requires a majority of the U.S. Senate..

US House Plans to Vote on Blocking California Mandate

The U.S. House also plans to vote on a waiver to block California from mandating new pollution standards and a rising number of zero-emission electric commercial trucks.

As a candidate, Trump vowed to rescind waivers granted by the EPA under the Clean Air Act to California to require more EVs and tighter vehicle emissions standards.

California’s rules require 35% of light-duty vehicles in the 2026 model year to be a zero-emission model- a figure automakers say is impossible to meet given current sales – rising to 68% by 2030.

Toyota last month called on Congress “to stop California’s unachievable, unrealistic, and unworkable battery-electric vehicle mandate.”

The state says the rule is crucial to meeting greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and cutting smog-forming pollutants. Some states like Maryland have delayed compliance with those rules past 2026.

California first announced a plan in 2020 to require that by 2035 at least 80% of new cars sold be electric and up to 20% plug-in hybrid models.

The U.S. Transportation Department is separately moving to undo aggressive fuel economy rules adopted by Biden.

—

(Reporting by David Shepardson, Editing by Franklin Paul)

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But now Torres and other California solar customers who bought or leased systems under NEM 1.0 or NEM 2.0 contracts could lose those financial benefits after 10 years instead of 20 under an Assembly bill proposed by Lisa Calderon, a Southern California Democrat who previously worked for Southern California Edison’s parent company.

Assembly Bill 942 would shorten the contract times for homeowners and eliminate the carryover of NEM contracts when homes with solar systems are sold. It also would impact government agencies such as school districts that have invested in solar systems.

Fresno Unified’s solar provider, Forefront, estimates that the district’s energy savings could be slashed by as much as 75% under AB 942, district spokeswoman AJ Kato said.

Although AB 942 would trim the net metering contract from 20 years to 10, the district’s agreement with Forefront would remain fixed for the entire 20 years, Kato said. If PG&E pays the district less for energy generated by Forefront’s solar panels, “utility bills will increase creating a scenario where having solar may cost FUSD more in energy costs than not having solar,” she said.

Violating a Guarantee

Before customers either lease or buy solar systems, they are provided a guide prepared by the California Public Utilities Commission that says the 20-year NEM contracts are guaranteed, said Brad Heavner, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association.

“They actually have to sign a piece of paper saying we’ve given them this solar consumer guide before they sign the contract,” he said. “It’s a PUC document, and it says that NEM is guaranteed for 20 years. It uses that word, guaranteed. And so customers are seeing that before they make the final decision to invest in solar or to sign a long-term lease. And for the state government to go back on its guarantee would be immensely unfair.”

Violating that guarantee would be “unprecedented,” Heavner said. “I’m getting calls from all around the country asking if this is real because other states are scratching their heads about California making this change.”

Opponents Plan Protest, Council Considers Resolution

Opposition to the bill has been gearing up statewide. Opponents are planning a “noisy” protest at Calderon’s City of Industry office on Wednesday.

The Fresno City Council will consider a resolution at Thursday’s meeting in opposition to AB 942, noting that it would force residents who “in good faith” signed up for solar system installation under a more favorable compensation arrangement to have to shift to a less favorable arrangement.

AB 942 would impact school districts that have used facilities money to install or lease solar systems, basing their calculations on the NEM 1.0 or NEM 2.0 compensations, said Nancy Chaires Espinoza, executive director of the School Energy Coalition.

If AB 942 becomes law, school districts would need to redirect revenues to cover energy costs instead of devoting dollars into classrooms, which would directly impact students, she said.

Changing the rules also could lead to a loss of public faith in government and in the ability of school districts to invest public funds, Chaires Espinoza said.

Other Energy Bills Pending

AB 942 appears to be the outlier of a number of bills introduced in the current legislative session. The majority appear to be aimed at reining in the skyrocketing cost of electricity for customers of investor-owned utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern Cal Edison.

Senate Bill 322 would link and limit rate increases to the consumer price index and would put restrictions on power shut-offs for customers unable to pay their bills. Assembly Bill 1167 would prevent utility companies from including lobbying, promotional advertising, and similar expenses from being passed along to ratepayers.

Lawmakers are finally recognizing their responsibility to control utility costs, Heavner said.

“I think something meaningful is going to pass to reform utilities and to check their runaway spending,” he said. “Finally, the Legislature is fed up enough about the regulators failing to contain utility spending that they are likely to act on something meaningful this year.”

Bill Would ‘Penalize’ Homeowners

Ramon Torres said he hopes legislators will realize how harmful AB 942 would be to Californians such as himself and reject it.

Torres, 57, lost his job as a finance director at a dealership in December. He’s a veteran and is working on a medical retirement, so his income will be fixed and limited moving forward. And he still has to keep the lights and air-conditioning on at his home, where he lives with his wife and their two teenage sons.

“I don’t think it’s fair for people that have already purchased (solar panels). You’re penalizing them for trying to help protect the environment. Instead of being rewarded, now we’re going to get added charges. … So basically, it’s a punishment for going solar, instead of rewarding us consumers,” he said.

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After more than a decade being exiled from the governor’s office in California, Republicans are eyeing growing voter frustration with the dominant liberal politics of the state as a launching pad for a comeback next year.

Though lacking the statewide profiles of a deluge of Democratic contenders, a pair of GOP hopefuls with devoted conservative followings has jumped into the open 2026 gubernatorial race in recent months, hoping to persuade voters that only a radical shakeup can fix California’s problems.

“I don’t think there’s any other way of describing California today, other than the sick man of America,” said Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host and onetime political adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron who officially announced his candidacy on Monday. “It’s just undeniable that we’re in a terrible, terrible mess in California and we have to change direction.”

Hilton is kicking off his campaign today with an event in Huntington Beach, the city that has remade itself over the past few years into the bulwark of conservative resistance in California. He follows Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a hero of the right for defying state mandates during the COVID pandemic, who entered the race to succeed termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom in February.

Both believe that voters have grown sick of a generation of one-party Democratic rule in Sacramento and are banking on appeals to cut taxes and regulations — which they blame for making California unaffordable — to reach across traditional partisan lines.

“We are being led down a path of complete government control and socialism,” Bianco said in an interview. “This is no longer Democrat versus Republican. We’re at a point where it’s sane versus insane.”

But conservative candidates face a steep climb in a state that has not elected a Republican to statewide office since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won a second term in 2006.

California Democratic Party Chairperson Rusty Hicks said the gubernatorial race is about more than just who can deliver for Californians. Voters know the governor has a powerful platform to stand up to the Trump administration and they won’t want a Republican in a role that is also critical to the future of the rest of the country and the whole world, he said.

“I certainly applaud them for continuing to try,” Hicks said. “But time and time again, we see California voters see their policies for what they are, which is not in line with the values of Californians.”

Slashing Taxes and Regulations

More than 20 people have already filed a statement of intention to run for governor in the 2026 primary as Republicans — though few will be serious candidates and some may never qualify for the ballot at all, which requires paying a filing fee or submitting thousands of signatures from registered voters.

Only two, including Bianco, have reported raising any money for their campaigns so far. While the first fundraising report of 2025 is not due until the end of July, major donations are filed with the state on a rolling basis.

Leo Zacky, a poultry farm heir and perennial candidate who received 1.3% of the vote in the 2022 gubernatorial primary and 0.1% in the 2021 recall election, seeded his campaign last month with $50,000 of his own money.

Meanwhile, since launching his campaign in February, Bianco has reported more than $380,000 in major contributions — enough to solidify himself as an early frontrunner for conservative voters, but a far cry from the millions that some Democratic contenders have already raised.

That leaves an opening for Hilton, 55, a native of the United Kingdom who moved to California in 2012 with his wife, a public relations executive for tech companies. Hilton has a built-in audience from hosting the weekly commentary program “The Next Revolution” on Fox News from 2017 to 2023, and Silicon Valley connections that could provide the money he needs to spread his message more broadly.

Hilton said his campaign will focus on practical solutions to rebuild a “ladder of opportunity,” so that every Californian can have a great job and a great home — though many of them are ideas that the Democratic supermajority in the Legislature is unlikely to ever support.

He would eliminate the state income tax for Californians below an unspecified income level. He wants to boost housing development by simplifying building codes, ending lawsuits under the infamous California Environmental Quality Act, and promoting construction of single-family homes. He believes the state needs mandatory phonics education and more accountability for teachers based on test scores to improve student achievement.

Though he has had a long career in politics, Hilton has never held elected office himself, which he argues is an asset.

“I would ask people, how good are the machine politicians in Sacramento who are involved in this one-party rule? How is that working?” Hilton said.

Bianco, 57, was a longtime sheriff’s deputy in Riverside County who ran for sheriff in 2018 out of frustration with what he called a “pro-criminal” approach to public safety in California. During his two terms as chief law enforcement officer of Riverside County, he has been a controversial but locally popular figure, refusing to enforce Newsom’s COVID lockdown orders or apologize for his brief affiliation with the far-right Oath Keepers militia.

He said he’s now running for governor because, like many Californians, he is tired of how the government has failed a state that people otherwise love. Many of his priorities align with Hilton’s: Bianco would like to completely abolish the state income tax, get rid of laws that he said are driving farmers and ranchers out of business, and leave environmental regulation to the federal government.

And echoing the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, Bianco said he wants to eliminate wasteful spending such as the high-speed rail project and multibillion-dollar programs that have not reduced homelessness.

“The number one job of government is public safety,” Bianco said. “All the rest of it is fluff.”

The Anti-Trump Bump

California Republicans have been jubilant since the November election, when they flipped three seats in the state Legislature as President Donald Trump increased his vote share in nearly every county. At a party convention in Sacramento last month, they strategized over how to build on the momentum by leaning into issues such as affordability and crime that appear to be helping them gain ground, particularly among Latino voters.

“That tells us that Californians, on the local level and when it comes to the laws that are being passed in Sacramento, they’re looking to Republicans,” Corrine Rankin, the newly elected chairperson of the California Republican Party, said in an interview. “They’re rejecting the failures that are coming out of the Capitol by the Democrats.”

In a February survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, only 48% of likely voters said the state is going in the right direction, compared to 51% who said it’s going in the wrong direction — underwater, albeit the highest approval in two years.

To win the governorship next year, Rankin said the state GOP would eventually unite behind a candidate who can help Californians understand how that dissatisfaction is driven by what Democrats in charge of the state are doing.

“We need change here in California. Californians expect change and we’re positioned to deliver,” she said.

But the modest advances of the last election belie a GOP that is still far from competitive in California. Trump only received about 38% of the vote, losing to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by more than 20 percentage points, and Republicans lost three U.S. House seats.

The 2026 midterms, in which Democratic anger at the Trump administration could produce an even more liberal electorate, will be a difficult political environment for the California GOP to snap a statewide shutout that dates back to 2010. In 2022, no Republican candidate for statewide office came within 10 percentage points of victory, and most lost by about twice that margin.

Andrew Acosta, a Democratic political consultant who is not working on the governor’s race, said there are substantive problems in California for serious conservatives to campaign on. “The Republicans have a lot of fodder if they did it the right way,” he said.

But candidates so closely tied to Trump are unlikely to overcome the deep anti-Trump sentiment in the electorate and win the governorship next year, Acosta added. “There’s zero chance of these Republicans.”

Both Hilton and Bianco are vocal Trump supporters. Hilton’s campaign even references the MAGA movement with a “make California golden again” slogan, and he rolled out an endorsement on the first day from Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the architects of Trump’s DOGE initiative.

Though some Democratic candidates are already tapping into the fury at Trump to fuel their campaigns, Hilton said the focus is misplaced.

“None of that helps a single person in California,” he said. “These are real issues. So if Democrat candidates want to deflect from that and become national political commentators, then good luck with that.”

Bianco said Democrats have done “outstanding psychological warfare” for decades convincing people that Republicans cannot win in California, which has suppressed conservative participation in elections. But things have finally gotten so bad, he said, that those frustrated voters will turn out next year and elect a Republican governor.

“We can’t blame Donald Trump. Donald Trump doesn’t have anything to do with California and the laws that have been passed in the past 20 years,” he said. “I believe that the majority of people, of hard-working Californians, have conservative leanings.”

This article was originally published by CalMatters under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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Lobbying groups spent more than half a billion dollars to influence the state government in 2024, the most ever, according to a CalMatters analysis of data recently filed with the secretary of state. Lobbying by Google, oil companies and utilities in the third quarter appeared to drive the sharp spike in spending.

Companies and organizations reported roughly $540 million in lobbying expenses to push their point of view to California officials, including legislators, on hundreds of bills between January and December of last year — and that’s up by more than 10% from $485 million in 2023.

Perhaps that isn’t so surprising in a state with a full-time Legislature and one of the largest economies in the world, said Francesco Trebbi, an economics professor at UC Berkeley who studies political influence and lobbying.

“Half a billion is kind of normal,” he said. “If California is about 14% of U.S. GDP and federal lobbying is about $4 billion, $500 million is about 13% of that. So it would be in line with the size of the California economy.”

Thomas Holyoke, a professor of political science at Fresno State University, said that the spending increase might reflect not only corporations’ desire for more influence but also the growing influence of California policy itself.

As long as California maintains its prominence, “more and more interest groups and lobbyists are going to take what Sacramento does very, very seriously,” he said.

Major Players Driving the Lobbying Boom

The Western States Petroleum Association reported more than $17.3 million dollars in advocacy costs over the year, more than $10 million of which was spent last summer, and more than double the total bill of the previous year.

The organization took public positions on 18 bills last session and got its desired outcome two-thirds of the time, according to a CalMatters analysis of data from Digital Democracy, our platform to track state lawmakers and legislation.

In part, the trade group’s spending more than doubled because of increased proposed regulations on oil and gas, including a special session focused on gas prices.

The largest non-oil spender was PacifiCorp, which reported spending more than $13.4 million to influence California officials last year, 30 times the yearly average for the company over the last two decades. The investor-owned utility lobbied for a rate hike but didn’t take a public position on any bills in 2024.

Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the largest utilities in the state, reported nearly $3.6 million on lobbying last year. Over the two-year legislative session, the company took a public position on 45 bills and also got its way on roughly two-thirds of them, or 31 bills.

Google doesn’t usually spend much on state-level lobbying efforts but spent more in 2024 than the last 20 years combined.

The company reported one of the largest totals for state advocacy last year, driven primarily by a spending spree in the third quarter of the year when the tech giant was fighting a media bill and AI regulations. The company got its way in both cases.

Much of its advocacy went through the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which reported spending nearly $7.4 million, $7 million of which came from the Mountain View behemoth.

Only two labor groups spent more than $1 million on lobbying last year: the Service Employees International Union and the California Teachers Association.

SEIU reported spending nearly $3.4 million and the California Teachers Association, another powerful union in the state, spent more than $3.1 million. Both unions took public positions on hundreds of bills and got their way nearly 70% of the time.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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Any Californian can purchase naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal medication, directly from the state at a discounted price, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced Monday.

The medication is available online for $24 for a two-pack of the nasal spray, roughly half the market price of the drug. Previously, the discount was available only to government organizations and businesses.

“Life-saving medications shouldn’t come with a life-altering price tag. CalRx is about making essential drugs like naloxone affordable and accessible for all — not the privileged few,” Newsom said in a statement. CalRx is a Newsom initiative to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.

Opioids Killed 8,900 Californians Last Year

California has spent more than $1 billion fighting the opioid epidemic, which killed more than 8,900 people last year, according to preliminary data from the state health department. That represents a 13% increase in deaths from 2023.

The Naloxone Distribution Project and Access Initiative is part of the strategy to stop overdoses, which began spiking in 2019 as fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid, infused the market. The rate of fentanyl-related overdose deaths began declining last year, according to state data.

More than 6 million naloxone kits have been distributed to local governments and organizations since 2018, according to state data. About 355,000 overdoses have been reversed.

In 2024, Newsom’s office announced a new supplier for the state initiative, Amneal Pharmaceuticals, which agreed to sell the steeply discounted drug to California. Days prior, Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a $273-million multistate settlement with the New Jersey-based company over its alleged failure to report suspicious opioid orders that contributed to the country’s epidemic.

“By getting this lower price, we are making the financial savings and able to use our dollars to buy more product, which of course is ultimately very much about saving lives,” said Elizabeth Landsberg, director of the Department of Health Care Access and Information, last year.

Related Story: Fresno County’s First Fentanyl Murder Trial Ends in Guilty Verdict

Naloxone is one of two current efforts by the state to make generic drugs more affordable under Newsom’s effort to lower the costs of pharmaceuticals. California has a $50-million contract to manufacture generic insulins for CalRx. That project is more than a year behind schedule.

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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Alberto Carvalho, the district’s superintendent, spoke about Ed in bold terms. In an April speech promoting the software, he promised it would “democratize” and “transform education.” In response to skeptics of AI, he asked, “Why not allow this edutainment approach to capture and captivate their attention, be the motivator?”

One seventh-grade girl who tested the chatbot — personified by a smiling, animated sun — had reported, “I think Ed likes me,” Carvalho said.

Related Story: LA’s Schools Chief Knows What It’s Like to Be Undocumented

A Bold Vision for Ed

Los Angeles agreed to pay a startup company, AllHere, up to $6 million to develop Ed, a small part of the district’s $18 billion annual budget. But just two months after Carvalho’s April presentation at a glittery tech conference, AllHere’s founder and CEO left her role, and the company furloughed most of its staff. AllHere posted on its website that the furloughs were because of “our current financial position.”

AI companies are heavily marketing themselves to schools, which spend tens of billions of dollars annually on technology. But AllHere’s sudden breakdown illustrates some of the risks of investing taxpayer dollars in artificial intelligence, a technology with enormous potential but little track record, especially when it comes to children. There are many complicated issues at play, including privacy of student data and the accuracy of any information offered via chatbots. And AI may also run counter to another growing interest for education leaders and parents — reducing children’s screen time.

Natalie Milman, professor of educational technology at George Washington University, said she often advises schools to take a “wait and see” approach to purchasing new technology. While AI is worthy of use and testing, she said, she warned about schools “talking nebulously about this glorified tool. It has limitations, and we need to ensure we are being critical of what it can do, and its potential for harm and misinformation.”

Related Story: ACLU Sues Defense Department Schools Over Book Bans

Risks and Expert Warnings

AllHere did not respond to interview requests or written questions.

In a statement, Britt Vaughan, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles school district, drew a distinction between distracted students being “consumed by phones during the school day” and students using laptops or tablets to interact with the Ed platform, which he said was “intended to provide individualized educational pathways to address student learning.”

Anthony Aguilar, chief of special education for the district, said that despite the collapse of AllHere, a truncated version of Ed remained accessible to families in the district’s 100 “priority” schools, whose students struggle with academics and attendance.

But that software is not a sophisticated, interactive chatbot. It is a website that gathers information from across many other apps the district uses to track assignments, grades and support services. Students using the site can also complete some learning activities on the platform, such as math problems.

The Ed chatbot promoted by Carvalho was tested with students 14 and older, but it was taken offline to refine how it answers user questions, Aguilar said. The goal is for the chatbot to be available in September, a challenge given that AllHere was supposed to provide ongoing technical support and training to school staff, according to its contract with the district. The district said it hoped AllHere would be acquired and that the new owner would continue services.

Related Story: Money, Not Instruction Time, Is at Heart of Designated Schools Negotiations

Startup Struggles and Shifting Missions

Aguilar said the idea for the software had originated with the district, as part of Carvalho’s plan to help students recover from the academic and emotional effects of the pandemic.

AllHere had won a competitive bidding process to build it, Aguilar said.

But the project represented a vast and unwieldy challenge for the startup, which was best known as a provider of automated text messages from schools to families.

AllHere had attracted $12 million in venture capital funding, according to Crunchbase. Its founder and CEO, Joanna Smith-Griffin, now 33, was featured in Forbes, CBS and other media outlets telling a compelling story. As a former educator whose own students were often absent, she said, she founded AllHere in 2016 to help solve the problem.

Automated text messaging seemed to meet the moment when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and chronic absenteeism became a national crisis. In the spring of 2020, AllHere acquired technology developed by Peter Bergman, an economist and education technology expert. It enabled schools to send “nudges” to parents via text messages about attendance, missing assignments, grades and other issues.

Smith-Griffin often spoke about founding AllHere at the Harvard Innovation Labs, a university program to support student entrepreneurs. According to Matt Segneri, the labs’ executive director, Smith-Griffin’s affiliation with the program occurred while she was an undergraduate and then graduate student at the Harvard Extension School.

Like many small startups, the company shifted its mission over time. Last year, AllHere began talking more about an “AI-powered intuitive chatbot.” AllHere would provide artificial intelligence to schools while also keeping a “human in the loop,” the company said, meaning human moderators would oversee the AI to ensure safety and security — a potentially expensive, labor-intensive proposition.

Stephen Aguilar, a professor of education at the University of Southern California — who is not related to Anthony Aguilar — said it was “a fairly common problem” for ambitious school tech efforts to fail. He formerly worked as a developer of educational software, including some projects that could not be delivered as promised.

“Districts have a lot of complex needs and a lot of safety concerns,” he said. “But they often lack the technical expertise to really vet what they are buying.”

The foray into AI is not the first time Los Angeles has made a big bet on education technology, with questionable returns. Beginning in 2013, under a previous superintendent, the district spent tens of millions of dollars buying iPads preloaded with curriculum materials, but the effort was marred by security concerns and technical mishaps.

In Carvalho’s April speech, at a conference hosted by Arizona State University and GSV Ventures, a venture capital firm, he said the Ed chatbot would have access to student data on test scores, mental health, physical health and family socioeconomic status.

Smith-Griffin joined him onstage to explain that student data would live in “a walled garden” accessible only within “the Ed ecosystem.”

Smith-Griffin did not respond to requests for an interview. Vaughan of Los Angeles schools said the district would protect data privacy and security on the platform “regardless of what happens to AllHere as a company.”

In April, AllHere said it was serving “9,100 schools across 36 states.” According to reporting from The74, an education news site, some of AllHere’s other school district contracts, in the five-figure range, were tiny compared with its deal with Los Angeles, which had already netted the company over $2 million.

Some customers beyond Los Angeles have been told that the company’s services are essentially defunct.

Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland learned from AllHere on June 18 that “effective immediately” the startup would no longer be able to provide its text messaging service, a district spokesperson said, because of “unforeseen financial circumstances.”

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Dana Goldstein
c. 2024 The New York Times Company

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Lee issued a statement Saturday as mayor-elect, saying that her chief opponent, Loren Taylor, had called to concede the April 15 race.

“While I believe strongly in respecting the democratic voting process and ballots will continue to be counted … the results are clear that the people of Oakland have elected me as your next Mayor,” she said. “Thank you, Oakland!”

Lee, 78, is a Black female trailblazer who represented the city in Congress for over two decades before retiring last year after running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate.

A Call for Unity

“Oakland is a deeply divided City,” she said, adding that she “answered the call to run” so the community could work together to solve its problems.

Lee was endorsed by former Gov. Jerry Brown and other previous Oakland mayors who said she was the seasoned, uniting presence the city needed after a divisive recall of former Mayor Sheng Thao in November. Thao was indicted on federal bribery, fraud and conspiracy charges in January.

Oakland has about 400,000 residents and is deeply liberal and multicultural, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party and claimed by former Vice President Kamala Harris as her hometown.

Oakland’s Challenges

But Oakland also is reeling from homeless tents, public drug use, illegal sideshows, gun violence and brazen robberies that prompted In-N-Out Burger to close its first location ever last year.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has sent California Highway Patrol officers to help combat what he called an alarming and unacceptable rise in crime. And the city doesn’t have enough money to pay for public services.

Despite her high name recognition, the race was surprisingly heated with Taylor, 47, a former Oakland city council member who pledged to bolster police, reduce crime and revitalize the city’s economy.

Campaign Priorities

Taylor said in a statement that “while the outcome was not what we worked for and hoped for,” he was proud of the campaign and the bold ideas he introduced.

On the campaign trail, Lee emphasized the need for more community services as well as more police. Economic development, job creation and ensuring core city services like fire hydrants work properly are among her priorities.

She will finish out the remainder of Thao’s term and would be up for reelection in November 2026.

Lee was first elected to the U.S. House in 1998 and became best known nationally as the only lawmaker to vote against the 2001 authorization for the use of military force in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The post Progressive Icon and Ex-US Rep. Barbara Lee Wins Race for Mayor of Oakland appeared first on GV Wire.

Led by the nonprofit Bring Back the Kern, the project would return a flowing river to the heart of California’s ninth‑largest city. Long‑time resident Bill Cooper says Bakersfield still fights the label of a “crappy town.”

The Kern River starts in the southern Sierra Nevada but usually runs dry by the time it reaches Bakersfield because most of its flow is diverted for farms and municipal use. What remains is a dry, weed‑lined channel winding through downtown—far from the green public space supporters envision.

Agricultural Interests Warn of Potential Impact

Agricultural interests warn that leaving more water in the river would hurt crops and jobs. Third‑generation grower Edwin Camp argues, “To just say ag is using all the water and we need to change that, you’re ignoring decades of history.”

Bring Back the Kern and several environmental groups contend in court that draining the river violates California’s public‑trust doctrine. The case is scheduled for trial this December, and water agencies statewide are watching closely.

Optimism Persists Despite Legal Setbacks

Although a recent appeals‑court ruling overturned an order that briefly kept water flowing, organizer Kelly Damian remains optimistic: “When you have, at the literal center of your community, this devastated, dried‑out empty space, that really sends a message of what you’re worth. And we’re worth a lot more than that.”

The outcome could reshape water policy far beyond Bakersfield.

Read more at San Francisco Chronicle

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