California Spends the 2020s Instituting Reforms From the 1920s.
This column is published and edited by Zócalo Public Square. Image by Joe Mathews using Google Gemini.
Don’t worry, Californians, if you see obvious flaws in your state’s governing system. Our leaders will eventually fix them.
All you have to do is wait a century or so.
California’s economy and culture reliably move ahead at world-class speed, but its government often lags 100 years behind. This is the state that didn’t get around to ratifying the 14th Amendment, added to the U.S. Constitution in 1868, until 1959. While dry Western states started regulating groundwater in the first half of the 20th century, California didn’t follow suit until 2014.
This unofficial 100-year reform rule has become a truism of 2020s California. Our state is devoting this decade to fixing the problems of the 1920s.
In 2024, we finally removed ecosystem-destroying dams that were added to the Klamath River 100 years ago. It wasn’t until after the pandemic that the state updated early-20th-century health codes to meet modern medical standards on infectious diseases. And our string of 2020s housing reform laws are overturning exclusionary zoning, local control, and apartment building bans that date back to the Roaring Twenties.
But the best example of 1920s-inspired policymaking in the 2020s involves a drama playing out this year in the state education system.
On his way out the door, Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing hard for a structural reform to fix a problem that has been obvious since 1920.
That year, a Special Legislative Committee on Education identified the problem: California had two different entities in charge of education across the state.
One was the elected state superintendent of public instructions, which had few specific duties but had been a feature of the early constitution of the state. The other was a governor-appointed State Board of Education, a regulatory body that added specific duties—from ordering textbooks to conducting investigations and setting standards for graduation—as education grew in importance and received federal funds.
The overlapping and uncertain authority of these two bodies threatened to produce political conflict and contradictory guidance for schools and school districts.
“The temptation of a weak State Superintendent to play politics against the State Board of Education, and seek for cheap public notoriety to secure reelection, will be both passible and natural,” the 1920 report said. “Still more, an antagonized or antagonistic Superintendent might at some time raise the constitutional question as to the right of the State Board of Education to do anything whatever.”
The report concluded: “The present California educational organization must be regarded as dangerous for the future, and it should be superseded at the earliest opportunity by a more rational form of state educational organization.”
The 1920 report’s “more rational” solution was to abolish the elected superintendent position and consolidate educational oversight under the State Board. The board could appoint a “commissioner of education” (hired “free from restrictions as to politics, sex, and residence”) to take charge of education policymaking in the state, from the certification, training and retirement of teachers to the conditions of school buildings to the curriculum itself.
Was this simple idea enacted? Of course not. Eliminating the elected superintendent’s position required a constitutional amendment, and ambitious politicians opposed getting rid of a plum elected office. The Legislature still tried, placing an education reform amendment on four different ballots, in 1928, 1934, 1958, and 1968. Each time, voters failed to approve the change.
Over the last 30 years, six studies have urged major changes to California’s education governance model, according to a report by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office. Most of these studies offered versions of the 1920 report’s recommendation, either reducing or eliminating the superintendent’s power.
All criticized the fact that no one person or institution could be held responsible for state education policy failures. They pointed out that the state board, the elected superintendent, and the governor often give different directions to school districts, who are unsure what guidance to follow.
“The problem with California’s K‑12 governance system,” Governor Schwarzenegger’s committee on educational excellence found in 2007, “is that everyone is in charge, and no one is accountable.”
That still hasn’t changed. Indeed, in recent decades, the State Board of Education and the elected school superintendent have given school districts contradictory orders on English as a second language programs, local finance plans, ethnic studies instruction, and charter school rules.
So, this year, Newsom is taking another run at enacting that 1920 idea, via a proposed statute.
The governor’s plan is different in two ways. First, he is not proposing a constitutional amendment that would require voter approval (voters have had a century to fix this, after all). Second, he would shift power over education to the governor’s office. A new, governor-appointed education commissioner would manage the Department of Education. The elected superintendent would become a member of the State Board of Education, which would oversee the new commissioner.
This is more complicated than simply eliminating the superintendent position entirely. But it would put one official clearly in charge of education: the governor, acting through the new education commissioner.
This would also make California more like other states, which typically have a gubernatorial appointee in charge of education policy.
Full disclosure: Your columnist believes in unified educational oversight, but would prefer that someone other than the governor, who already has too much to do, be in charge. But local school boards, school administrators, county officials, and children’s advocates, who believe a governor-led structure would be less confusing, are supporting the Newsom plan.
The legislature’s own analyst agrees.
“Adopting the new governance structure would allow for voters to hold the Governor accountable for change, reduce confusion about who is in charge, and improve oversight of existing programs,” the analyst wrote recently.
So, is this one of those once-in-100-years moments for California change?
Tony Thurmond, the current state superintendent and a gubernatorial candidate, opposes the proposal, as politicians have done for 100 years. There are six prominent candidates for the superintendent’s position in this year’s elections. And the state’s largest teachers’ union, the California Teachers Association, which uses its money and power to get friendly state superintendents elected, is not on board. Its opposition could doom the proposal.
So, don’t hold your breath. This could take another century.
