How three bills aimed at closing California’s student achievement gap failed Clio

Since last October, the California School Boards Association has pressed the Legislature to take greater responsibility for closing California’s immense student achievement gap.

This gap corresponds to the disparity – of 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 came to an unceremonious end on August 13 when the Senate Appropriations Committee rejected three of the four bills it had sponsored. The measures are among hundreds of measures with state or local budget implications that the committee rejected in a quick session without publicly explaining its decision.

The annual call for bills is an efficient but opaque exercise during the annual rush to the August 31 deadline to act on all bills. The lack of transparency has led the CSBA to speculate about what happened to promising bills.

“We plan to do a serious analysis of why the three bills that so far passed with flying colors ran into a brick wall in the Senate appropriations,” said Troy Flint, CSBA communications chief. “It is difficult to understand this sudden change of heart.”

A commission, a dashboard, an independent review

Earlier this year, CSBA introduced a series of bills aimed at increasing oversight of the state’s role in helping low-performing schools improve. A bill called for the nonpartisan, independent Office of the Legislative Analyst, charged with annually evaluating the state’s school improvement system, which has often been criticized as inconsistent and ineffective. 

Just as the California School Dashboard holds schools and districts accountable for their test scores, another invoice would have created a new dashboard to measure the governor, legislature and state bureaucracy on their commitment and effectiveness in closing the gap.

A third invoice would have created an 18-member Closing the Achievement Gap Commission, made up 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 a better job.

The underlying message was that local control can only succeed if the state is a capable partner in student success.

Flint calls it “mutual accountability”: holding the state as accountable as the districts. That would involve evaluating any new programs passed by the Legislature to ensure they don’t divert resources and attention away from the achievement gap, he said.

Of the four bills, only Assembly Bill 2225sponsored by Assemblymember Darshana Patel, D-San Diego, who chairs the Assembly Education Committee, still has a chance of reaching at least Gov. Newsom’s desk. The bill would create a six-member task force, led by the state superintendent, to develop a state education alignment and impact plan that would better coordinate and strengthen the efforts of the many agencies involved in improving student outcomes. These include the State Board of Education, Commission on Teacher Accreditation, Department of Education, county offices of education, and the State Health and Human Services Agency. The task force would present its findings to the Legislature by 2029 and then provide annual updates.

The CSBA considered AB 2225 the centerpiece of its legislative effort and expressed disappointment that the entire package was no longer moving forward. CEO and executive director Vernon Billy optimistically predicted that it was only a matter of time until the others disappeared.

“We recognize that our policy approach was the first of its kind in California and, like many other visionary approaches, it takes time for the systems to catch up with the vision. We hope that will be the case here,” he said in a statement.

Support publicly, oppose privately

But longtime Sacramento watcher Kevin Gordon wasn’t surprised at all. He said he’s seen similar scenarios before: Bills pass through their original house — in this case, the Assembly for the four CSBA-sponsored bills — with near-unanimous approval, then pass through the second chamber’s policy committee — in this case, the Senate Education Committee — to be taken up by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Lawmakers or organizations that oppose a bill but don’t want to oppose it publicly can express their reservations privately and count on the Appropriations Committee to kill bills, said Gordon, president of the Sacramento consulting firm Capitol Advisors Group.

“Given that the underlying theme of the bill is to hold the state itself accountable, I questioned the likelihood of it being successful if the process allowed bills to die without the reason being revealed,” Gordon said.

Dozens of school districts, the California State PTA and several county offices of education supported all four bills. State education organizations that are generally allies of the CSBA, such as the California Association of School Business Officials, the California School Superintendents and the California Association of School Administrators, have not registered their support or opposition. In fact, no one opposed the bills.

Newsom, like other governors, generally does not take a public position on bills before they reach his desk. But that doesn’t mean they don’t also send private signals.

“Many times throughout my career I have heard the phrase, ‘Please don’t let this bill reach my desk,’” Gordon said.

It is unclear whether this happened with the CSBA invoices.

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 academic research center, that got Newsom’s attention.

Beginning in January 2027, responsibility for managing the California Department of Education will shift from the state’s superintendent of public instruction to an education commissioner appointed by the governor, similar to the structure used for other chiefs of staff. The new commissioner will report to both the governor and the governor-appointed Council of State.

CSBA was among dozens of education advocates and organizations that supported the legislation. The county’s 58 superintendents also supported it, said El Dorado County Schools Superintendent Ed Manansala, “because the state’s lack of unified leadership forces schools to absorb the cost of competing priorities, making lasting 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 his findings and recommendations to the governor and the Legislature before issuing a final report on October 1, 2027.

The restructuring process echoes the alignment and impact plan proposed by CSBA in the reorganization process outlined in the new state law. Flint said the CSBA’s approach would have incorporated the perspectives of school district officials and educators into the process instead of “relying on those who have maintained the system we are trying to reform.”

But what the CSBA considered complementary, the governor’s office may have considered redundant or excessive. Flint acknowledged holding several meetings with the governor’s aides about the CSBA bills, but the administration is not commenting and Flint has refused to reveal what was discussed, other than stating the obvious: Four bills were close to passing, and now three are not.

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This story was originally published by EdSource.