Top Takeaways
- The California School Boards Association sought to raise the visibility of closing the achievement gap through the Legislature.
- Its four bills, three of which died in committee, included holding the governor and Legislature accountable for progress.
- Gov. Gavin Newsom may have viewed CSBA’s bills as interfering with his own reforms led by a new education commissioner.
Since last October, the California School Boards Association has pressed the Legislature to take greater responsibility for narrowing California’s immense student achievement gap.
That gap is the disparity — by 30 percentage points or more — in test scores and other measures between low- and high-income students and between Black and Latino students and their Asian and white peers.
CSBA’s SOS for Student Achievement initiative ended unceremoniously Aug. 13 when the Senate Appropriations Committee rejected three of the four bills it had sponsored. The measures were among the hundreds with state or local budget implications that the committee dismissed in a rapid-fire session without publicly explaining its decision.
The annual cattle call of bills is an efficient but opaque exercise during the annual rush toward the Aug. 31 deadline for acting on all bills. The lack of transparency left CSBA speculating on what happened to bills that showed promise.
“We plan to do a serious postmortem on why the three bills that up to that point were passing with flying colors hit a brick wall in Senate Appropriations,” said Troy Flint, CSBA chief of communications. “It is difficult to understand the sudden reversal.”
A commission, a dashboard, an independent review
Earlier this year, CSBA introduced its suite of bills aimed at increasing scrutiny on the state’s role in helping poorly performing schools improve. One bill called for the nonpartisan, independent Legislative Analyst’s Office to annually evaluate the state’s school improvement system, which has often been criticized as incoherent and inefficient.
Just as the California School Dashboard holds schools and districts accountable for performance on test scores, another bill would have created a new dashboard for measuring the governor, the Legislature and the state bureaucracy on their commitment to and effectiveness in closing the gap.
A third bill would have created an 18-member Closing the Achievement Gap Commission, composed primarily of teachers, administrators, at least one parent, a charter school educator and a classified worker. The commission would identify best practices and ways state agencies, like the Collaborative for Educational Excellence, can do better work.
The underlying message was that local control can succeed only if the state is a capable partner for student success.
Flint calls this “reciprocal accountability” — holding the state as responsible as districts. That would include evaluating all new programs passed by the Legislature to ensure they’re not diverting resources and attention from the achievement gap, he said.
Of the four bills, only Assembly Bill 2225, sponsored by Assemblymember Darshana Patel, D-San Diego, who chairs the Assembly Education Committee, still has a chance of at least making it to Gov. Newsom’s desk. The bill would create a six-member working group, led by the state superintendent, to develop a State Education Alignment and Impact Plan that would better coordinate and strengthen efforts by the many agencies involved in improving student outcomes. These include the State Board of Education, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the Department of Education, county offices of education and the state Health and Human Services Agency. The working group would present its findings to the Legislature by 2029 and then annually give updates.
CSBA considered AB 2225 the centerpiece of its legislative effort and expressed disappointment that the full package is no longer moving ahead. CEO and Executive Director Vernon Billy optimistically predicted it was just a matter of time for the others to pass.
“We recognize that our policy approach was the first of its kind in California, and like many other visionary approaches, it takes time for systems to catch up to the vision. We are hopeful that this will be the case here,” he said in a statement.
Publicly support, privately oppose
But long-time Sacramento observer Kevin Gordon wasn’t at all surprised. He said he has seen similar scenarios before: Bills sail through their house of origin — in this case the Assembly for the four CSBA-sponsored bills — with near-unanimous approval, then pass through the policy committee in the second house — in this case the Senate Education Committee — only to be stopped by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Legislators or organizations that oppose a bill but do not want to come out against it publicly can express their reservations privately, and rely on the Appropriations Committee to kill bills, said Gordon, president of the Sacramento consulting firm, Capitol Advisors Group.
“Given the underlying theme of the bill package is to hold the state itself accountable, I was wondering about the likelihood it could be successful when the process allows bills to die without being revealed as to the reason,” Gordon said.
Dozens of school districts, the California State PTA and several county offices of education supported the four bills. Statewide education organizations that are usually allies of CSBA, such as the California Association of School Business Officials, California School Superintendents and the California Association of School Administrators, didn’t register their support or opposition. In fact, no one registered opposition to the bills.
Newsom, like other governors, typically does not take a public position on bills until they reach his desk. But that doesn’t mean they don’t also send private signals.
“Many times over my career I have heard the phrase, ‘Please don’t let that bill reach my desk,’” said Gordon.
Whether that happened with CSBA’s bills is unclear.
As part of the 2026-27 state budget, Newsom pushed through a major realignment of TK-12 governance. His plan resembles recommendations in a December 2025 report from PACE, an independent university-based research center, that captured Newsom’s attention.
As of January 2027, responsibility for managing the California Department of Education will shift from the state superintendent of public instruction to an education commissioner appointed by the governor, similar to the structure used for other cabinet heads. The new commissioner will report to both the governor and to the State Board appointed by the governor.
CSBA was among dozens of education advocates and organizations that supported the legislation. All 58 county superintendents also supported it, said Ed Manansala, El Dorado County superintendent of schools, “because a lack of unified state direction forces schools to absorb the cost of competing priorities, making sustained improvement unlikely.”
Under the new law, the education commissioner will spend the first eight months developing recommendations to clarify and streamline the current system of education oversight and school improvement. The commissioner will present findings and recommendations to the governor and the Legislature before issuing a final report on Oct. 1, 2027.
The restructuring process echoes CSBA’s proposed Alignment and Impact Plan in the reorganization process outlined in the new state law. Flint said CSBA’s approach would have brought into the process the perspectives of school district officials and educators instead of “relying on those who maintained the system we are trying to reform.”
But what CSBA viewed as complementary, the governor’s office may have viewed as redundant or excessive. Flint acknowledged holding several meetings with the governor’s aides about the CSBA’s bills, but the administration isn’t commenting, and Flint declined to reveal what was discussed, other than to state the obvious: Four bills were heading toward passage, and now three are not.
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This story was originally published by EdSource.