Part of the recently approved , the move responds to teachers and parents who protested Carvalho’s plan to revamp the program, known as Primary Promise. 

Primary Promise used small group instruction to help struggling K-3 students master basic reading and math skills. But Carvalho said it was unsustainable, relying on non-recurring pandemic relief funds. 

This month Carvalho unveiled a new math and reading program that would have required many schools to shoulder the cost of those teachers, known as interventionists. 

With the new funds, that’s no longer the case — at least for next year.

In contrast to Primary Promise, Carvalho’s Literacy and Numeracy Intervention model relies less on dedicated interventionists and more on training regular classroom teachers to deliver different levels of instruction. It also extends support to students in middle and high school.

Supporters of Carvalho’s plan say its expanded reach is more equitable, targeting struggling readers at all grade levels. Primary Promise advocates say there’s no better time to address future academic success than the earliest grades, and that the district should be able to both preserve Primary Promise and pay for the new program.

With the recent budget approval, the new plan will take effect this fall. A number of factors suggest the district has its work cut out for it. 

Research that programs that put too much onus on classroom teachers are difficult to pull off. Board members, teachers, parents, and advocates are demanding accountability, asking the district to clarify how the new program will be assessed and regularly update parents on its progress. And they want to see a continued commitment to early literacy despite the planned phaseout of Primary Promise. 

“I worry about this cycle of remediation that we often get, I believe, in this school district, and not setting a strong enough foundation, districtwide, for students to be proficient readers,” said board member Kelly Gonez at a June 6 meeting during which district officials presented the new program. 

While all agree that investment in early literacy will pay off down the road, supporters of the Carvalho plan call extra attention to the present — to poor reading and math achievement at all grade levels.

“We are hearing from parents, their desperation,” said former LAUSD board member Yolie Flores, now president and CEO of the LA-based Families in Schools, one of 24 organizations that signed a letter supporting the new plan.

“And I think they started to see a glimmer, a glimpse of what was happening — that their kids couldn’t read — during the pandemic, ‘cause they were home,” she said.

Only 35% of LAUSD , 39% of , and 46% of met or exceeded state reading standards in the 2021-22 school year. For math, respectively, the figures are 37%, 21%, and 18%. 

Flores added the district should “do a deep-dive in informing parents.” 

“[Parents] need support in knowing what good instruction looks like, because they can be the best monitors,” she said. “I’d like at least a quarterly, ‘here’s what’s happening, here’s how many children we are reaching.’”

LAUSD’s board members also see communication as a key challenge going forward. Board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin said that she first heard about the cuts to Primary Promise through the advocacy of upset teachers who’d been notified of potential job reassignment.

“I do think we often have an opportunity to learn about how we communicate, to staff in particular, when shifts are impacting their jobs, whether that’s the scope of the work or the location of their work,” she said. 

Primary Promise cost the district $134 million this year and would have cost $192 million had it been expanded to all elementary schools. Those interventionist positions were centrally funded, with individual schools footing none of the cost.

Before last week’s announcement about the extra funding, the new model would have shifted more of the burden to schools, lowering the district’s financial responsibility.

But the district identified $40 million of unused federal funding earmarked for the district’s high-poverty schools. That brings the total 2023-24 cost of the new intervention program to $122 million, according to a district spokesperson. 

While that money will allow some schools to retain their Primary Promise interventionists, many teachers have already moved on. 

Another major difference between Primary Promise and the Carvalho plan is the latter will invest more in teacher training — and depend more heavily on those who receive it. 

Teachers at all grade levels will receive training in math and reading intervention, with the goal they could then break students into smaller groups, delivering different levels of instruction. Some will have dedicated interventionists to aid them, but many won’t.

George Farkas, a distinguished professor emeritus of education and sociology at the University of California, Irvine, says it’s not easy for a teacher to simultaneously serve students at grade level and those below it without instructional aides to assist them. 

“I don’t think it’s possible for a teacher with a full class to do that,” Farkas said. “In addition, you know, these extra training programs don’t have a very good record in my reading of the literature.” 

At Cohasset St. Elementary School in Van Nuys, former Primary Promise teacher Dana Sapper will continue to work in a similar interventionist role, though with the possibility of taking on students in more grades. 

“I’m happy because I’m going to be able to spread it into the upper grades. I think that that’s a lovely thing,” Sapper said. But still, she worries about the limits of her effectiveness. 

“There’s only so far you can spread yourself,” she said.

But Yolie Flores says the fact that some form of intervention will be reaching more students under the new model makes it extremely promising. 

“It’s not just a few that need intervention services. It’s, like, almost everybody,” she said. “Going from a pull-out [for] a few students to serving more students who need support in literacy is a good thing.” 

Primary Promise was introduced in 2020 by then supt. Austin Beutner with the goal of tackling LAUSD’s persistently low reading scores at the earliest level. 

By the 2022-23 school year, the program was running in 283 elementary schools. Teachers with specialized training would work with three to five struggling readers at a time, every day, on basic literacy skills like phonemic awareness and decoding. 

Parents, teachers, and have pointed to evidence that reading skills greatly improved under the program — which the district doesn’t dispute.

“Of course it works,” Carvalho said at the June 6 board meeting. The problem, he said, had to do with Primary Promise’s reliance on pandemic aid set to expire in September 2024.

The one-year extension of the program using the anti-poverty funds will help schools transition into the new model, Carvalho said at last week’s board meeting. 

“With that said,” he added, “we’re going to be very clear and honest that there’s no guarantee that beyond next year we’re going to be able to use the same strategy.”

Gonez, who raised $500,000 and major endorsements including the United Teachers Los Angeles,  last month, garnering 51.27% of the vote. Marvin Rodríguez, an LAUSD teacher of 17 years with no previous political experience or major endorsements, raised just over $11,000 and trailed closely behind with 48.73%. In a message to his supporters, he  last week.

LAUSD parents, politically active Angelenos and education policy experts have suggested several reasons why Gonez’s Board District 6 win was so narrow, including her support from charter advocates and dissatisfaction with mask mandates, lengthy school lockdowns while Gonez served as school board president. 

Many of the reasons trace back to a shared theme — that her clear advantages may not have worked fully to her benefit. It’s the money that supported her and her experience on the school board that turned off some voters.

“The most interesting thing is, this is a situation where she’s getting fire from both her left and her right,” said Rob Quan, an activist and founder of Unrig LA. 

On the left, Quan said, there are those who are more inclined to support public schools and had concerns about Gonez’s position on charter schools. On the right, he said there have been two primary concerns — her  and  to scale back police presence in LAUSD schools. 

The anonymous founder of LA Parent’s Union (@UTLAUncensored), a parent advocacy group with nearly 5,000 followers on Twitter, said the group endorsed Rodríguez because “he’s an outsider, right?” 

“So many people in L.A. are feeling like a career politician and the establishment is really just looking out for their own next seat and to keep their group in power,” the founder said.

They also said that for many parents in Board District 6, support for Gonez dropped when she voted to reduce school police. Many parents saw it as a threat to their childrens’ safety — a type of “political grandstanding” they also saw in her leadership through one of the longest Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates in the nation, UTLAUncensored said. 

Wavering faith in Gonez’s alliance with the people stemmed from her hefty funding, too. 

Billionaires Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, and businessman Bill Bloomfield,  of both Kelly Gonez and Nick Melvoin (who was re-elected to represent Board District 4) through the PAC Kids First. 

“I do think voters are paying attention more and more to who is supported financially by the people and who is financially empowered by the very rich,” said Kris Rehl, who voted for Rodríguez. “I believe that Marvin Rodríguez wants to be on the LAUSD board because he wants to make the lives of students and teachers better. I can’t say that I think Kelly Gonez is only running for this position for those same reasons.”

Gonez’s support from pro-charter advocates, like Hastings, as well as her support from the California Charter School Association in 2017, when she was initially elected to the seat, has some skeptical about her resolve in holding charter schools accountable. 

Although Gonez, a former charter school teacher, has attempted to distance herself from the stance of her pro-charter donors in interviews, apprehension remains. Rehl said the primary reason he voted for Rodríguez was his strong anti-charter stance. 

“I really feel like LAUSD needs bold leadership that doesn’t cave into special interests like the charter school association, and I’m a strong supporter of UTLA, so I was really disappointed to see UTLA endorse Kelly Gonez, who in the past has been pretty friendly to the charters,” said Arturo Gomez, a tenant defense attorney.

The Board District 6 race was not the only LAUSD election where the politics of public school versus charter schools came to a head. In the Board District 2 race, candidates Rocío Rivas and Maria Brenes, who ran on similar platforms, vied to represent parts of central and east L.A.

Rivas, who was backed by UTLA and has been more outspoken in her anti-charter stance, won with 52.49% of the votes. Brenes, backed by SEIU Local 99 — LAUSD’s second biggest union — as well as Bloomfield and Hastings’ PAC, had 47.51% of the votes. 

Gomez said he voted for Rivas because of her stance on charter schools: “I wasn’t a big fan of Brenes who seemed to have backing from a lot of charter adjacent organizations,” he said. 

On Nov. 23, Rivas took to Twitter to declare her victory, tweeting that “people power wins over billionaire money.” 

“Her message was certainly tapping into a bit of the charter school narrative, that this was charter school money trying to defeat her and that public schools won,” said USC Rossier professor Marsh. “This has happened in the past in LA Unified, that when outside money comes in, or money that’s perceived to be on one side or the other, sometimes it actually does the opposite and motivates some voters to say ‘we’re not going to let this money influence how we vote.’”

Marsh added that both the District 2 and District 6 elections show a continuation of elections “being a proxy war” for teachers unions and charter interests. She also pointed to another takeaway that stood out to her from the November election. 

“Just because you have the funding doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna win the votes,” she said. “That stands out to me in both of these races.”

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Brenes, leading with a 50.80% voter approval, is against education researcher Rocío Rivas to represent school district 2 – in the Eastside neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Gonez, leading with a 50.28% voter approval, is against long-time teacher Marvin Rodríguez to represent school district 6 – covering the East San Fernando Valley.

All four candidates have similar views, particularly around pandemic setbacks and achievement gaps for Black and Latino students.

But, if outcomes hold, pro-charter advocates Brenes and Gonez will alter the priorities of the governing board for the nation’s second largest school district.

Brenes, executive director for Boyle Heights-based advocacy group , could bring increased pressure to shift more funding to schools with the largest percentage of high-need students – compared to Rivas who supports stopping charter school growth and increased oversight to those that exist.

Gonez, a heavy favorite among pro-charter groups and United Teachers LA, had major endorsements and a fundraising advantage compared to Rodríguez — who also opposes charter school growth — despite a slim voter approval margin.