Editorial: Rearranging the deck chairs on California’s sinking K-12 ship
As part of his budget proposal, Gov. Gavin Newsom last week announced a new educational plan that sounds reasonable, as it streamlines regulatory authority and places more oversight in the governor’s office. Per Newsom’s statement, “California’s K-12 education system as being governed by a fragmented set of entities with overlapping roles that sometimes operate in conflict with one another, to the detriment of educational services offered to students.”
The buck should stop with the governor, but let’s be realistic. The state’s enduring educational problems will not be fixed by rearranging the bureaucratic deck chairs and centralizing authority or even by boosting funding, but by decentralizing decision-making and placing more of it in the hands of parents. Top-down models rarely work in any endeavor, especially education given that students all have their own individual needs.
The plan echoes recommendations the Legislature made 24 years ago, but were never implemented. A report last month from PACE (Policy Analysis for California Education) revisited similar ideas, and pointed to “overlapping roles and unclear lines of accountability.”
Specifically, as CalMatters explains, the proposal gives the state Board of Education appointed by the governor control of the California Department of Education and provides the elected superintendent of public instruction with the authority to “foster coordination and alignment of state education policies.” It’s unclear exactly what that means, although it’s clear that it leaves that post with fewer responsibilities. The current superintendent, Tony Thurmond, said that he was blindsided by the governor’s proposal.
Rather than getting deep into the political debates, Californians should look at K-12 education in terms of academic success. The latest statewide test scores, released in October, showed some noticeable improvement, with 1.8% improvements in math and English year over year. That’s good news, but EdSource reported that most scores failed to match pre-pandemic levels: “Despite the improvement at all grade levels, the number of students who were advanced or proficient in English language arts last year only increased to 48.8%, 37.3% in math, and 32.7% in science.”
Those numbers are abysmal, and are far worse for minority and low-income students. Recent boosts failed to close these gaps. A report from UC San Diego in November revealed shocking data about the lack of preparedness of incoming freshmen: “Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort.” So let’s not get too excited about slight improvements.
Meanwhile, as EdSource reported in July, charter schools have seen increasing enrollment and comparatively strong test scores. The vast majority of those schools had high enough scores to merit their charter renewal, with 16% scoring at the highest levels. It’s no secret charter schools were far more adept at handling the COVID-19 disruptions. Instead of building on that success and applying those lessons to traditional public schools, the governor and Legislature have since the pandemic limited charter-school expansion and focused on imposing new oversight measures on them.
So while we have no real problem with Newsom’s streamlining proposal, we’d urge him to promote an agenda that empowers parents and promotes competition — rather than one that advances the teachers’ unions’ failed agenda.