Education
California Historical Society to Dissolve and Transfer Collections to Stanford
![California Historical Society to Dissolve and Transfer Collections to Stanford California Historical Society to Dissolve and Transfer Collections to Stanford](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/01/28/multimedia/28California-History-01-btjq/28California-History-01-btjq-facebookJumbo.jpg)
The California Historical Society, facing longstanding financial challenges exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, has decided to dissolve and transfer its collections to Stanford University.
The society, a private nonprofit organization established in 1871 and designated the state’s official historical society in 1979, is one of California’s oldest historical organizations. But unusually among state historical societies, its leadership said, it received no regular state funding, which left if vulnerable to the vagaries of private donations.
Tony Gonzalez, the organization’s board chair, said the decision to dissolve the organization, which is headquartered in San Francisco, was “bittersweet.” But he emphasized that the arrangement with Stanford ensured that the society’s collections, which include more than 600,000 items stretching back a century before the Gold Rush, would remain intact and accessible to the public.
“We think of it as a rebirth,” Gonzalez said. “Stanford will not be a state historical society, but the collection will be in better hands with them than it could be with us.”
The society’s treasures include the Kemble Collections on Western Printing and Publishing, which features books, pamphlets, product labels, trade catalogs and other items produced in the American West between 1802 and 2001. The society also holds the archives of many organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the California Flower Market, Inc., founded by Japanese American flower merchants in 1912.
It is also the official repository for records relating to the People’s Temple, whose members, led by Jim Jones, drank poison in Guyana in 1978, leading to the death of more than 900 people, a third of them children.
Anh Ly, Stanford’s assistant university librarian for external relations, called the historical society’s collection a “huge addition” to its own holdings of more than 15 million items, which would help fill in some gaps, particularly relating to California’s early history.
The board’s decision to dissolve the society and transfer its collection follows a decade of failed attempts at a turnaround.
In 2016, it was tapped by the city of San Francisco as its lead partner for a potential restoration of the Old United States Mint in downtown San Francisco, one of the few structures to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire. But restoration of the building, which had been largely unused for decades, was deemed prohibitively expensive.
In early 2020, the group announced a new strategic plan that involved selling its 20,000-square-foot building near Union Square and using the proceeds to support traveling shows and partnerships with smaller organizations around the state. But that effort was thwarted by the pandemic and downturn in San Francisco’s real estate market, as well as the unexpected death in 2022 of Alicia L. Goehring, the executive director and chief executive who helped formulate the plan.
Gonzalez, a Sacramento lawyer who joined the board in 2012, said that private philanthropic support had become unreliable over the past two decades, as many foundations and donors pivoted away from the humanities toward efforts more directly aimed at solving social problems. And unlike in other states with robust historical societies, he said, California’s legislature had never provided any regular appropriation for operational support.
In 2022, Gonzalez said, the group requested a one-time grant of $12 million to support a partnership with the University of California, Riverside, which would have involved collaborating with Native American tribes to bring historical projects to underserved parts of the state.
The request was rejected. “The legislature gave us the same answer we heard from philanthropic organizations: This sounds like something a university should be doing,” Gonzalez said.
The group took out a $5 million loan against its building, to help cover its budget, which Jen Whitley, the group’s interim executive director, said was about $3.5 million.
But finances remained unworkable, and last summer the board voted to begin the process of dissolution. Four years after it was first listed, its building — a former hardware store painted the same shade of red as the Golden Gate Bridge — was sold for nearly $6.7 million, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.
Under terms of dissolution, which had to be approved by the state attorney general, Stanford will also receive the society’s endowment of roughly $3.2 million. While most of the staff of roughly two dozen have been let go over the past several years, Whitley said, three people will move to Stanford with the collection.
Gonzalez said it was “painful” to see history lose a footprint in San Francisco, at a moment when many of the city’s history and preservation groups are struggling to stay afloat. But Stanford’s stewardship of the collection, he said, would allow the continual discovery of new stories about the past.
He cited the example of Juana Briones, a businesswoman and healer born in 1802 in Santa Cruz who lived in California “under three flags”: Spanish, Mexican and American. In 2011, local preservationists helped save a portion of adobe wall from her home in Palo Alto, which became the centerpiece of a bilingual exhibition at the historical society.
“We all know about the Gold Rush,” Gonzalez said. “But there are also all these unsung heroes.”
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Education
Covid Learning Losses
![Covid Learning Losses Covid Learning Losses](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/11/multimedia/11themorning-nl-lede-02-fbpz/11themorning-nl-lede-02-fbpz-facebookJumbo.jpg)
Schoolchildren in Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania are still about half a year behind typical pre-Covid reading levels. In Florida and Michigan, the gap is about three-quarters of a year. In Maine, Oregon and Vermont, it is close to a full year.
This morning, a group of academic researchers released their latest report card on pandemic learning loss, and it shows a disappointingly slow recovery in almost every state. School closures during Covid set children back, and most districts have not been able to make up the lost ground.
One reason is a rise in school absences that has continued long after Covid stopped dominating daily life. “The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist and a member of the research team, told me.
In today’s newsletter, I will walk through four points from the report, with charts created by my colleague Ashley Wu. I’ll also tell you the researchers’ recommendations for what schools should do now.
1. State variation
The new report — from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford — compares performance across states, based on math and reading tests that fourth and eighth graders take. (A separate report, on national trends, came out last month.)
Today’s report shows a wide variety of outcomes. In the states that have made up the most ground, fourth and eighth graders were doing nearly as well last spring as their predecessors were doing five years earlier.
But the overall picture is not good. In a typical state, students last spring were still about half a year behind where their predecessors were in 2019. In a few states, the gap approaches a full year.
Here are the changes in reading performance:
2. A blue-red divide
Political leaders in red and blue America made different decisions during the pandemic. Many public schools in heavily Democratic areas stayed closed for almost a year — from the spring of 2020 until the spring of 2021. In some Republican areas, by contrast, schools remained closed for only the spring of 2020.
This pattern helps explains a partisan gap in learning loss: Students in blue states have lost more ground since 2019. The differences are especially large in math. Eight of the 10 states that have lost the most ground since 2019 voted Democratic in recent presidential elections. And eight of the 10 states with the smallest math shortfalls voted Republican.
I know some readers may wonder if blue states had bigger declines simply because they started from a higher point. After all, the states with the best reading and math scores have long been mostly blue. But that doesn’t explain the post-pandemic patterns. For example, New Jersey (a blue state) and Utah (a red state) both had high math scores in 2019, but New Jersey has fared much worse since then.
3. More inequality
Pandemic learning loss has exacerbated class gaps and racial gaps. Lower-income students are even further behind upper-income students than they were five years ago, and Black students and Latino students are even further behind Asian and white students. “Children, especially poor children, are paying the price for the pandemic,” Kane said.
Other research, by Rebecca Jack of the University of Nebraska and Emily Oster of Brown, points to two core reasons. First, schools with a large number of poor students and Black or Latino students were more likely to remain closed for long periods of time. Second, a day of missed school tends to have a larger effect on disadvantaged students than others.
In the years before Covid, the U.S. education system had impressive success in reducing learning inequality, as I explained in a 2022 newsletter. But Covid erased much of that progress. “Educational inequality grew during the pandemic and remains larger now than in 2019,” Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the new report, said.
4. How to recover
The authors of the report note that some school districts, including in poorer areas, have largely recovered from Covid learning loss. Among the standouts are Compton, Calif.; Ector County, Texas, which includes Odessa; Union City, N.J.; and Rapides Parish, La. The authors urge more study of these districts to understand what they’re doing right.
Early evidence suggests that after-school tutoring and summer school, subsidized by federal aid, made a difference. Intensive efforts to reduce absenteeism can also help.
One problem, the authors write, is that many schools have not been honest with parents about learning loss: “Since early in the recovery, the overwhelming majority of parents have been under the false impression that their children were unaffected.”
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Education
How Schools Are Responding to Trump’s D.E.I. Orders
![How Schools Are Responding to Trump’s D.E.I. Orders How Schools Are Responding to Trump’s D.E.I. Orders](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/12/multimedia/12nat-dei-schools-01-pgwl/12nat-dei-schools-01-pgwl-facebookJumbo.jpg)
Students at North Carolina’s public universities can no longer be required to take classes related to diversity, equity and inclusion to graduate.
The University of Akron, citing changing state and federal guidance, will no longer host its “Rethinking Race” forum that it had held annually for more than two decades.
The University of Colorado took down its main D.E.I. webpage, and posted a new page for an Office of Collaboration.
Around the country, dozens of universities and colleges have begun to scrub websites and change programming in response to President Trump’s widening crusade against diversity and inclusion. But much remains unclear about the legality and reach of President Trump’s new orders.
So some schools are simply watching and waiting.
“It’s meant to create chaos in higher education, and in that it’s been successful,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, of the attempts by President Trump to end D.E.I. activity on campuses. “The responses are all over the map.”
The president has signed several executive orders seeking to ban diversity practices across the federal government, educational institutions and private companies. The orders are sweeping in their language and scope. One demands that agencies and schools terminate D.E.I. offices, positions, action plans, grants and contracts. Another bans “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology” and threatens to withhold federal funding from schools that do not promote “patriotic” education.
Already, some orders have been challenged in court, and it remains to be seen how broadly the government will pursue institutions that it believes are using “illegal” preferences that “discriminate, exclude, or divide individuals based on race or sex.” An education secretary has not yet been confirmed; Linda McMahon, the nominee, will appear before a Senate committee on Thursday.
Administrators of K-12 institutions — which are more financially insulated — are making their own calculations. But in higher education, hundreds of millions in funding are on the line. University administrators are debating whether to freeze existing programs, stand on principle and resist, or try to fly below the radar while they see if the executive orders hold up in the courts.
At Princeton, for example, the president, Christopher Eisgruber, urged the community to “Keep Calm and Carry On,” until the legal status of the executive orders becomes more clear.
Meanwhile its athletics department posted a modified transgender athlete participation policy to comply with new N.C.A.A. rules, which changed because of President Trump’s order barring transgender athletes from women’s sports. Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania also removed references to transgender inclusion from their athletics websites.
At the University of Akron, administrators said that declining attendance and enthusiasm were additional reasons the school had stopped funding its Rethinking Race forum, which has been held every year since 1997. But programs for Black history month would continue, they said.
The American Association of University Professors is one of several organizations that has sued in federal court in an effort to block two executive orders related to diversity and inclusion.
The lawsuit charges that the executive orders violate the due process clause of the Constitution by failing to define terms like “D.E.I.,” “equity” and “illegal D.E.I.A.” The orders, it argues, also violate free speech and the separation of powers protections.
Still, the ambiguity in what diversity, equity and inclusion means has led some colleges to take a broad view as they seek to comply.
The University of North Carolina’s campus in Asheville, for example, had designated certain courses as “diversity intensive,” which meant they could be used to meet a diversity graduation requirement. On the list of classes that met the requirement were Appalachian Literature, Global Business, Developmental Psychology and Cultural Anthropology. They will still be offered, but will no longer be part of a requirement, said Brian Hart, a spokesman for the university.
Andy Wallace, a spokesman for the North Carolina system, said the system was assessing federal policy changes to ensure it would still receive funding. “This does not affect any course content,” he said. “It suspends any requirements for D.E.I.-focused courses as a condition of graduation.”
Beth Moracco, chair of the faculty at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the university’s actions were worrisome.
“My concern is that these types of directives and memos will have a chilling effect in terms of discussions in the classroom and faculty developing new courses,” she said, “even if there’s not a direct effect of eliminating courses at this time.”
At Michigan State, administrators canceled a Lunar New Year lunch, and then apologized for the overreaction and rescheduled it, according to emails from the school posted online by Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit news source. A university spokeswoman said that its College of Communication Arts and Sciences canceled the event without consulting the broader university; about 70 people showed up for the rescheduled event on Tuesday.
Mr. Trump’s orders follow a yearslong push by state level Republicans to roll back diversity programs. Twelve states, including Texas and Florida, have passed laws targeting D.E.I., and legislation has been considered or introduced in more than a dozen other states.
More than 240 colleges in 36 states have eliminated some aspects of their programming, including diversity offices or race-based affinity groups, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which has been tracking changes in diversity policies since January 2023.
Most of those moves happened before Mr. Trump’s recent order, however, and it remains unclear how the flurry of action during his first weeks in office will affect schools over the long term, especially in K-12 districts.
So far, few public schools seem to be rushing to change their practices. School districts are less reliant on federal funds than universities are, with 90 percent of their funding coming from state and local taxes. And the nation’s 13,000 districts have always had broad autonomy to set their own curriculum and teaching policies.
The Trump administration has launched investigations into at least two K-12 districts — Denver Public Schools and the Ithaca City School District in New York. Denver is under investigation for transforming one girl’s bathroom at a high school into a nonbinary bathroom, according to the Education Department. Ithaca is under investigation for hosting a series of conferences for students of color, some of which may not have been open for white students to attend, according to the Equal Protection Project, an advocacy group that filed a federal civil rights complaint against the school system.
Yet Denver is still directing educators to a detailed “L.G.B.T.Q.+ Tool Kit” that lays out policies for affirming students who are questioning their gender identities, giving those students access to the bathrooms of their choice and helping them change their names in the district’s computer systems.
And in Ithaca, despite scrutiny on the district’s practices around race, the school system’s website continues to feature a page touting an “anti-marginalization” curriculum. It is intended to aid students “in their development of anti-racist understandings and practices” — language that could run afoul of the president’s executive orders.
Ithaca City Schools did not respond to interview requests.
In a written statement, a spokesman for Denver’s public schools said that before making any “final decisions” about policy changes, the district was awaiting further federal guidance. He added that the district “remains committed to our values including providing a safe and inclusive learning environment to all students.”
Some Democratic education leaders have bluntly stated that they did not intend to change their practices in response to Mr. Trump. When it comes to issues of gender and sexual orientation, “California law is unaffected by recent changes to federal policy,” said Tony Thurmond, the state schools superintendent.
In New York, the state education department released a statement calling Mr. Trump’s actions “ineffective” and “antithetical” to the history of federal education policy, which has traditionally sought to protect racial minorities, sexual minorities, students with disabilities and other groups.
“We denounce the intolerant rhetoric of these orders,” the state agency said. “Our children cannot thrive in an environment of chaos; they need steady and stable leadership that we will endeavor to provide.”
Perhaps the biggest impact in education has occurred in the schools that the federal government controls more directly: those for children who live on military bases and the military’s officer academies.
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has declared that official celebrations of events like Black History Month are no longer welcome. The defense department’s K-12 schools have ended some clubs, options for children to use the bathrooms that align with their gender identities and are combing shelves for books with themes related to diversity, according to reporting by Stars and Stripes.
The United States Military Academy at West Point disbanded 12 student affinity groups while investigating whether they complied with the administration’s D.E.I. directives.
Paulette Granberry Russell, president and chief executive of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, which is also suing the Trump administration to overturn the D.E.I. orders, said the new policies would most likely have a broad chilling effect, despite their ambiguity.
“And that chilling effect is, I think, extending whether you are in a red state, a blue state, in anything in between,” she said. “No institution wants to become a target.”
Education
Philadelphia Closes Schools for Eagles’ Super Bowl Parade
![Philadelphia Closes Schools for Eagles’ Super Bowl Parade Philadelphia Closes Schools for Eagles’ Super Bowl Parade](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/12/multimedia/12xp-philly-zpkt/12xp-philly-zpkt-facebookJumbo.jpg)
It was a dream come true for Philadelphia children when the Eagles soared to a Super Bowl victory Sunday against the Kansas City Chiefs. Now they’re getting a second wish granted: a day off school to celebrate with the champions at the city’s Super Bowl parade.
The School District of Philadelphia said on Tuesday that it would close all of its schools on Friday, freeing up nearly 200,000 students to join what is expected to be a million-strong crowd flooding the city’s streets. Nearly 20,000 school staff members will also get the day off.
“We look forward to joyfully celebrating the Eagles’ victory as a community,” the district announced, in what might be a formal way of saying, “Go Birds!”
The parade will travel through Center City, starting at 11 a.m. at Lincoln Financial Field, heading north past City Hall and ending by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, according to the city’s map of the route.
Parents face the decision of whether to bring their children to a parade that could involve, in some sections, standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers in temperatures expecting to hover in the 30s. Others might opt to take an impromptu vacation, as Philadelphia schools will also be closed on Monday for Presidents’ Day, giving students a four-day weekend.
Social media was buzzing with opinions and recommendations about the parade, ranging from optimists booking Airbnbs near the stadium to cautious parents advising others to leave their children at home with a sitter.
Philadelphia’s public safety officials issued some precautions for parents who planned to bring children to the parade: make sure they are wearing bright colors; snap a photo of them before leaving; and write their phone number on a bracelet, on their wrist or on a piece of paper in their pocket, in case child and parent get separated.
Other educational institutions around Philadelphia jumped on the bandwagon: Temple University and nearby school districts like Gloucester City School District, in South Jersey, and Ridley School District, in Delaware County, all canceled classes. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia Schools, which oversees Catholic schools in the city and its suburbs, also announced that its high schools, parish and regional elementary schools would be closed.
Transit officials said that there would be limited train service starting from early morning and congestion in the roads because of the street closures. City officials also said that government offices, city daytime centers and courts would also be shut.
The timing of the parade, falling on Valentine’s Day, drew some grumbling from restaurant and flower shop owners in the city, some of whom complained the parade would affect their dinner service and deliveries. Mayor Cherelle Parker of Philadelphia sought to calm those concerns at a news conference on Tuesday.
“To all in our restaurant community, we want you to know that we will be prepared,” she told reporters. “Nothing will interfere with our restaurant reservations on that evening. We will be done well before you are to appear for dinner. So don’t you dare touch any of those reservations.”
Philadelphia’s school district also closed in 2018 for the celebration of the Eagles’ first Super Bowl victory, against the New England Patriots.
Schools were closed during last year’s Super Bowl parade, in Kansas City, Mo., after Kansas City won against the San Francisco 49ers. A shooting at that parade left one person dead and about two dozen others wounded, including nine children.
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