Sacramento Reorganized The State Education Bureaucracy. Students, Parents Will Barely Notice.
California’s new Education Commissioner now runs the inner workings of the state’s education bureaucracy. It doesn’t matter.
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🕒 6-minute read
The Headlines Sounded Bigger Than The Story
If you read last week’s headlines, you could be forgiven for thinking California had finally enacted a sweeping reform of public education. It didn’t.
What the Legislature actually did was move who runs California’s education bureaucracy from one office to another. That’s worth a headline inside Sacramento. It’s not worth much more than that inside California’s classrooms.
The Legislature passed, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed, a bill that strips many powers long held by California’s elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction and hands them to a newly created Education Commissioner appointed by the governor. On paper, that’s a real transfer of authority — an elected office loses its executive teeth, a governor-appointed one gains them. But the lever moving from an elected hand to an appointed one doesn’t tell you much about who was actually pulling it. Then and now, the substance of education policy gets shaped by the Legislature, the school boards, and the interest groups that work with them both — none of which this bill touches. Truth be told, the Superintendent’s role was not a huge one to begin with.
One of the easiest mistakes to make in politics is assuming that changing who runs a bureaucracy is the same as changing the results it produces. Sacramento loves structural reforms — they produce headlines and the appearance of progress, and they’re easier than confronting the policies that have produced mediocre educational outcomes for years.
What Real Reform Would Have Looked Like
California educates nearly six million students. Changing one officeholder in Sacramento was never going to be what finally moved the needle on outcomes like these. If Sacramento had instead enacted reforms to help more children read proficiently by third grade, strengthen math instruction, improve classroom discipline, expand educational options for parents, or create real accountability for failing schools, I’d be celebrating right alongside them. But that’s not what happened. Sacramento spent months debating who should manage the bureaucracy, while leaving largely untouched the policies and incentives that have produced years of disappointing outcomes — outcomes with real numbers behind them: on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, just 29 percent of California fourth-graders and 28 percent of eighth-graders scored proficient in reading; math proficiency stood at 35 percent and 25 percent, respectively.
You’ve reached the part of our afternoon content where the free preview stops — the paywall. But you don’t want to miss out on so much more. Not just the rest of this column, but most days there’s more here for paid subscribers. It’s not much, and you’ll be supporting our work while you’re at it. So, what’s below this paywall?
What AB 181 actually changes — and how much smaller that is than the headlines suggested.
The surprising truth about how little the Superintendent’s office ever really controlled.
What the research says actually drives student outcomes — and why none of it made it into this bill.
The one organization that owns both sides of the bargaining table, and why this reform doesn’t touch its grip.
The one reform Sacramento still refuses to have, and why it matters more than any org chart.
Our final verdict on whether any of this actually helps California’s kids.
(You know you want the analysis that goes with this image below!)
