by David Bacon

SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA — Alberto Sánchez came to the United States without papers in the 1950s. After working for two decades, he found a home in Lanare, a tiny unincorporated community in the San Joaquin Valley, where he has lived ever since. “All the people living here then were Black, except for one Mexican family,” he remembers.

Lanare is one of the many unincorporated communities in rural California that lack the most basic infrastructure. According to PolicyLink, a foundation promoting economic and social equity, there are thousands of unincorporated communities throughout the U.S., mostly Black and Latino, and frequently poor, excluded from city maps – and services. PolicyLink’s 2013 study “California Unincorporated: Mapping Disadvantaged Communities in the San Joaquin Valley” found that 310,000 people live in these communities scattered across the valley.

They are home to some of the valley’s poorest residents in one of the richest, most productive agricultural areas in the world. Today, their history of being excluded from incorporated cities affects their survival around the most critical issue facing them: access to water.

Lanare: A history of racial exclusion

Lanare has its origin in land theft and racial exclusion, like many similar colonias. The land on which it sits was originally the home of the Tachi band of the Yokut people. It was taken from them and given by Mexican governor Pío Pico of California as a land grant to Manuel Castro, two years before California was seized from Mexico in 1848. Castro’s Rancho Laguna de Tache was then fought over by a succession of owners until an English speculator, L.A. Nares, established a town and gave it his own name. From 1912 to 1925 Lanare had a post office and a station on the Laton and Western Railway.

Lanare drew its water from the Kings River. The larger town up the road even changed its name to Riverdale to advertise its proximity to the watercourse. But big farmers tapped the Kings in the Sierras to irrigate San Joaquin Valley’s vineyards and cotton fields. Instead of flowing past Lanare and Riverdale, in most years it became a dry riverbed. By the 1950s Tulare Lake, the river’s terminus, had disappeared.

With no river, people left. The families who stayed in Lanare, or moved there, were those who couldn’t live elsewhere. Paul Dictos, Fresno County assessor-recorder, has identified thousands of racially restrictive covenants he calls “the mechanism that enabled the people in authority to maintain residential segregation that effectively deprived people of color from achieving home ownership.” One such covenant, written in 1952, said, “This property is sold on condition it is not resold to or occupied by the following races: Armenian, Mexican, Japanese, Korean, Syrian, Negros, Filipinos or Chinese.”

Excluded from Fresno, 30 miles away, as well as from Hanford, 23 miles away, and even from Riverdale, a stone’s throw down the highway, Black families found homes in Lanare. For farm laborers, truck drivers and poor rural working families, living in Lanare was cheaper. By 2000 Lanare had 540 residents. A decade later, 589. Most people moved into trailers and today are farmworkers in the surrounding fields. A third live under the poverty line, with half the men making less than $22,000 per year, and half the women less than $16,000.

With no river, Lanare had to get its water from a well. And in the late 1990s residents discovered that chemicals, especially arsenic, were concentrated in the aquifer below this low-lying area of the San Joaquin Valley. They organized Community United in Lanare and got a $1.3 million federal grant for a plant to remove the arsenic. When the plant failed, the water district they’d formed went into receivership, leaving families paying over $50 a month for water they couldn’t use.

Community United in Lanare banded together with many of those unincorporated settlements suffering the same problem, and began to push the state to take responsibility for supplying water. California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) filed suit on their behalf, saying California’s Safe Drinking Water Act required the state to formulate a Safe Drinking Water Plan. Then former CRLA attorneys set up a new organization, the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, which filed more suits.

“We organized to make the state respond,” says community activist Isabel Solorio. “We got stories in the media and took delegations to Sacramento many times.” State Sen. Bill Monning, who gained firsthand knowledge of California’s rural poverty as a lawyer for the United Farm Workers, wrote a bill to provide funding for towns like Lanare. SB 200, the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER) Act, finally passed in 2019, providing $1.4 billion over a decade to fund drinking water projects, consolidate unsustainable systems and subsidize water delivery in low-income communities.

Matheny Tract: fighting for water and basic services

For many unincorporated towns, however, funding for water service alone is not a complete solution. A history of exclusion has left them without other services, near the towns and cities that excluded them. One is the Matheny Tract, just outside Tulare city limits. Vance McKinney, a truck driver who grew up there, recalls that his parents, whom he called “black Okies,” couldn’t get a loan for a home when they came up from the South in 1955. They bought a lot from developer Edwin Matheny, who’d subdivided land just outside the city limits and sold lots to Black families.

Four decades ago Tulare County’s General Plan even proposed tearing down the community. Matheny Tract, the plan said, had “little or no authentic future.” After the Matheny Tract Committee organized to pressure the state, in 2011 the city and county of Tulare agreed to connect city water lines with Matheny’s Pratt Mutual Water Company. The city then backpedaled, claiming it had no water during the drought. At the same time, however, it was providing water to its own, higher-income subdivisions and industrial developments.

Finally the state Water Resources Control Board issued an order for the voluntary consolidation of Tulare and Matheny’s water systems. When the city still dragged its feet, the state issued a mandatory order and the systems were connected in 2016.

But Matheny Tract also has no sewage system, and discharges from septic tanks sometimes even bubble up in the yards of families like McKinney’s. Tulare’s wastewater plant is a stone’s throw away, but Matheny residents can’t hook up to it. According to activist Javier Medina, “On some days it smells really bad here. I went to a city council meeting once, and one of their experts said it was probably because they were using the waste to irrigate the pistachio grove next to it.”

Medina says he invited Tulare Supervisor Pete Vander Poel to come to Matheny to experience it. “He said he’d only meet with us in the cafeteria in the Target store in Tulare, because Matheny was very dangerous,” he recalls. For Reinalda Palma, another committee member, the reason for Tulare’s reluctance is simple. “There’s a lot of discrimination against Mexicans,” she charges. “We have to mobilize if we want anything to change.” Finally a threat to sue from the Leadership Counsel got the city to agree to begin planning a sewer consolidation as well.

by Mikhail Zinshteyn

After her first year at Cal State San Francisco was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Marissa Ledesma fled campus and vowed never to return.

It wasn’t just the fast-spreading coronavirus that caused him trouble. Her entire first year was a failure, from an emotional and exhausting saga with her roommate to paying a lot more to live on a campus she called “an unhappy place.”

When classes were kept virtual for the entire 2020-21 school year, Ledesma enrolled in an online community college while she lived at her home in Bakersfield for her, “to remain silent while the world was working out,” she explained. she.

But after a year-long absence, she is a Cal State San Francisco student again this fall, and a success story that the school, and the entire 23-campus California State University system, hope to replicate by Thousands.

San Francisco State is an exemplar of a systemwide plan to bring back as many students as possible who dropped out during the pandemic. Cal State Chancellor Joseph Castro last month named re-enrollment as one of the key pillars to meet the system’s ambitious 2025 graduation goals. He wants campuses starting in the spring to target students who stopped attending classes, with an emphasis on students of color and those who are low-income.

The system has dramatically increased its six-year graduation rates – in the past six years, it has risen from 57 percent to 63 percent, with a goal of 70 percent by 2025. But dropouts from the COVID era could sink those. minute advances.

Another pillar of boosting graduation rates: the review of vital great courses where a higher percentage of low-income students and students of color receive D and F grades. That idea is not without controversy, raising concerns in some sectors of that teachers and lecturers can be pressured to become easier raters.

Finally, the campuses will provide each student with a digital degree planner.

Each addresses the reasons a student might not graduate: dropping out despite having good grades, failing a key class as a freshman or sophomore that affects confidence, or wasting time and money taking the wrong classes. for your titles.

The rector of the largest public university system in the country pointed out that the task is enormous: “Make no mistake,” said Castro, “this job will be one of the most challenging of our careers.”

Early success in recovering students

Beginning in February, Cal State San Francisco launched an outreach campaign to bring back 302 well-educated students who enrolled in 2019 but dropped out during the pandemic.

So far, 60 have returned, a 20 percent rate of return, surpassing the campus’s modest reenrollment goal of 10 percent.

“Honestly, if they had never called me, I probably wouldn’t have come back,” said Ledesma, who is still on track to graduate in four years.

The campus is now applying the lessons she has learned for an even bigger campaign: re-enrolling 15 percent of the 1,500 students who attended classes last spring.

“Honestly, if they had never called me, I probably wouldn’t have come back”,Marissa Ledesma, Cal State San Francisco student.

Nationally, the percentage of freshmen who return for their second year of college declined by an “unprecedented” level during the pandemic, according to a July 2021 report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center that tracks national enrollment trends. While in the past few years around 75 pervent of students returned, just 73 pervent of students came back in 2020 — the steepest drop in a decade — the center found.

Other Cal State universities see a similar trend. “We’re seeing slight declines across the board in first and second year retention,” said Jeff Gold, assistant vice chancellor in the Cal State Chancellor’s office. Official data for students that began in the fall of 2019 won’t come out for a few weeks.

Cal State San Francisco retention actually increased slightly during the pandemic, but the school wants to bring back as many students as possible in hopes of reaching its graduation goal by 2025, said Katie Lynch, vice president who manages enrollment at the state of San Francisco.

Why did two students come back

Students received emails, phone calls, and text messages from an academic advisor or someone from the admissions or financial aid offices. Because 15 students had financial withholdings on their accounts, ranging from $ 700 to $ 7,600 in tuition and fee debt, the financial aid staff called them to work out a payment plan. That included monthly payments, a grant search, or, for five students, helping them get federal loans to cover what they owed.

In other cases, students who were gone for two semesters had to re-apply for admissions — a campus rule that affected Ledesma — so admissions officers reached out promising to waive application fees, allow for late admissions and clear other hurdles.

The emails and calls made Ledesma feel wanted, “like, hey, I’m not just another person on a mass spam send-out email,” she said.

That personal touch also drew ​​Amanda Cangelosi back to San Francisco State.

Though she earned straight As in her first year at the university, the shift to online and her parents’ home took an emotional toll on Cangelosi her sophomore year. She thrives on validation from her classmates and professors to stay motivated. Online, though, she got little human interaction as most students kept their cameras off during classes and much of her instruction was pre-recorded.

Worse, her hometown friends near Los Angeles were in other states where they were allowed to live on campus while taking classes online. Feeling alone, anxious and depressed, she dropped-out spring term and took a job as a barista at a Barnes  percent Noble bookstore because she was starved for human interaction.

“I got used to the anxiety hole that I created for myself,” she said, “I became comfortable in it.”

“I got used to the anxiety hole that I created for myself. I became comfortable in it.”

​​Amanda Cangelosi, San Francisco State student

When San Francisco State representatives called and emailed her with promises of early registration to snag the hard-to-get classes for this fall, she was sold.

She’s now living on campus, taking a full course load and is on pace to graduate in 2024 — too late to boost San Francisco State’s four-year graduation rate but within the window to prop up its six-year graduation rate.

Fewer Ds and Fs

One tell-tale sign that students may drop out is if they earn a D or F in two or more early classes, said Gold of Cal State. Analysts at the university system found that to be especially true for low-income students and students of color.

Cal State last fall had 686 courses, each with at least 100 students, in which more than 20 pervent earned a D, F or withdrew, according to EdSource.

To turn things around at San Francisco State, more than 80 pervent of faculty since 2019 has been trained in redesigning their courses to boost student grades. The topics ranged from developing students’ study skills to avoiding prejudiced or racist assignments or student interactions.

Professors, especially those who teach writing-intensive and math courses required for all students, are encouraged to take the training and receive up to $1,250 each, stipends funded by federal COVID relief dollars.

San Francisco State is still crunching numbers to see whether students earn higher grades in classes taught by professors who went through the training, said Maggie Beers, a vice president for teaching and learning at the campus. Still, a March survey showed that 82 pervent of professors feel confident that what they’ve learned is making a difference.

Some Cal States are seeing the rate of Ds and Fs drop by offering more tutoring, tweaking the curriculum or changing grading policies to accommodate students, including those who have packed schedules as parents or full-time workers. Others use early signs of struggle to refer students to academic advising.

At Cal State Dominguez Hills, the rate of students earning a D or F at an introductory course in chemistry declined from 51 pervent to 25 pervent in two years. The class, Chemistry 108, is a requirement for many science majors.

Much of the improvement is due to increased tutoring, said chemistry department chair Kenneth Rodriguez. The college began hiring students who previously did well in chemistry to tutor current students and guide group sessions. Now upper-division chem classes are using the same strategy. A faculty member also keeps a weekly hour open for students to ask questions or seek help.

There were curriculum tweaks as well, Rodriguez noted, such as removing lessons on gasses that they’d learn in the next course to focus more on algebraic concepts and chemical nomenclature — parts of the curriculum that faculty found tripped students up in more advanced courses.

The economics department at San Francisco State tried something similar, with positive results for its introductory economics courses that 1,000 students take each semester.

Before spring of 2020, about 20 pervent of students earned a D, F or withdrew from those courses. Since the overhaul, that dropped to 15 pervent.

The changes gave students more opportunities to prove what they know, said Veronica Sovero, an assistant professor of economics at San Francisco State who teaches intro courses. For one, professors of those two economics courses issued more frequent assignments that each counted less toward a student’s grade instead of relying on a few exams.

Professors also were more lenient: Students could turn in missed homework assignments and ask for extensions. Some professors dropped a student’s lowest grade from their course average.

Last spring, San Francisco State overhauled 64 other courses that enroll 16,000 students, and is now analyzing whether that led to a drop in D and F grades.

So did the rigor of the courses slip? Rodriguez and Sovero insist the answer is no. Nor did faculty oppose the reforms, Rodriguez said. Sovero added that she uses the same homework assignments she’d issued in past classes and said her tests are largely unchanged compared to previous years.

Lecturers, who teach a large share of Cal State courses, in particular feel pressure to give students higher grades than they may deserve, said Meghan O’Donnell, a lecturer at Cal State Monterey Bay and a representative for lecturers in the statewide faculty union.

Though she hasn’t experienced it, she said other lecturers have expressed “a sense of some pressure to move students forward to support the Graduation Initiative,” especially in classes where the rate of Ds and Fs are high. Because they lack the job security of tenured faculty, lecturers may fear negative student evaluations if they grade too harshly — evaluations that may determine whether they’re rehired or not. 

Grade inflation is a national reality; the A grade has been the most popular grade assigned for more than two decades.

But students who get Ds and Fs are typically those who don’t turn in their work or show up to class, said Rey Hernández-Julián, a finance professor of Metropolitan State University of Denver who has studied grade inflation. “If a student doesn’t turn in the work, you can’t inflate that.” And if students are getting more tutoring and sympathy on missed assignments, that may have the appearance of grade inflation even though it’s not, he said.

“The work of improving student learning outcomes challenges us to reimagine how we teach and support our students without compromising academic rigor,” said Gold, the vice chancellor. “Research has shown that implementing project-based activities, collaborative learning, and enhanced student support such as supplemental instruction are ways to do just that. This work is happening in academic departments across the CSU.”

In Sovero’s view, being mindful of students’ busy lives as full-time workers or parents can ultimately help them.

During her first semester at San Francisco State, Sovero scheduled office hours on days when class wasn’t in session. No one showed up. So she began holding office hours on days when classes were taught. “These are commuter students and I didn’t realize that they …. only come to campus on the day they have classes, so they need to schedule their office hours the same day,” she said.

Keeping students on track

Cal State San Marcos began rolling out an online visual tool known as a degree planner in 2014 and today about 95 pervent of its undergraduate students use the tool, said Regina Eisenbach, dean of academic advising.

It warns students that a course they plan to drop will delay their graduation because it’s a requirement for several other courses but is only offered once a year. The degree planner can also visualize for students the packed semester that lies ahead if they plan to take a lighter load first — and warn them that it will delay graduation.

San Francisco State is newer to the idea; about two-thirds of undergraduate students have used it this term, said campus registrar Margo Landy.

The tool clears the way for meaningful conversations with the often hard-to-schedule academic advisor.

“The less that students need to work through the nuts and bolts … of earning their degree, the more they can talk with advisors about their academic interests, possibly their career interests,” Landy said.

It’s another way to make sure students are persisting and getting the degrees they need for the life they want.

For the record: This story has been corrected to note that San Francisco State overhauled 64 other courses last spring in an attempt to reduce the number of students receiving D and F grades.