Sacramento Moves to Make State Superintendent Powerless, Weeks After a Conservative Placed First in the Primary

For years, the smart people had a two-part answer for worried parents. The state superintendent of public instruction? Mostly a figurehead, a bully pulpit, nothing to lose sleep over. Your local school board? Local noise, beneath the notice of anyone who actually runs things.

Both of those are about to look ridiculous, because California just spent a frantic weekend proving it does not believe a word of either one.

The reason for that frantic weekend is Sonja Shaw, a conservative Chino school board president whose board California's attorney general had already taken to court over its parental notification policy. This month she finished first in the June 2 primary to become California's next schools chief. Within weeks, Sacramento moved to make sure the office she might win would no longer run the schools. If it is so powerless, somebody forgot to tell the people racing to strip its power away.

The line they sold you#

Here is the pitch parents have heard for a decade. The superintendent does not really control much. The State Board sets policy, the districts do the work, the superintendent gives speeches and cuts ribbons. And a single board member out in a town like Chino? Please. One vote, one dais, one district out of a thousand.

It is a soothing story. It also has a tell. You do not draft emergency legislation to pull the teeth of an office that cannot bite.

What they did, and how fast they did it#

What they did is Assembly Bill 181. Until late last week it was an empty shell, a placeholder bill with no real text. Then it was gutted, refilled with a sweeping reorganization of who runs California's schools, and pushed through budget negotiations. The Senate passed it 21 to 4 on June 29, the Assembly concurred the same day, and it was on Gavin Newsom's desk by 5:30 that evening.

The substance, as EdSource reported: starting in January, the elected superintendent no longer manages the state Department of Education. That job moves to an education commissioner appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. Voters still elect a superintendent. They just no longer get to elect anyone who runs the schools.

The bill is candid about what is left over. It keeps the superintendent on as "the independently elected nonpartisan voice for the public interest in the governance of the state's educational system." Read that twice. A voice. Independently elected, nonpartisan, and stripped of its hands. They did not bury it in the fine print. They put it in the bill's own title.

A reform that waited a century, suddenly urgent#

In fairness, this is not a brand new idea, and that matters. Researchers have argued for decades that splitting authority between an elected superintendent and a governor's appointees is clumsy. A Stanford based group, Policy Analysis for California Education, made the case again in December. Newsom calls it modernization, unifying the board that sets policy with the department that carries it out. Reasonable people have wanted some version of this for a long time.

Which is exactly what gives it away. A reform that has been recommended, in Newsom's own telling, regularly for a century can survive one more November. So ask the plain question. Why now? Why a no text placeholder bill jammed through budget talks in seventy-two hours, instead of a real bill with hearings next session?

When even the California Teachers Association, Newsom's most dependable ally, complains that he rammed it through budget negotiations to skip the normal process of hearings and public comment, that is not good government finally arriving. That is a clock running out.

Follow the power, not the slogan#

Here is the part that settles it. Newsom is termed out, so the new commissioner will not be his pick. The power to make that appointment passes to the next governor. They did not move the steering wheel into their own hands. They moved it out of the one elected seat a parents' candidate might win and into the governor's office, the seat they are sure they keep.

Efficiency was the cover story. The real problem was a seat they could not count on. The appointment is not the only new lever, either: the same bill grows the State Board of Education from eleven members to thirteen, and hands the two new seats to the Senate leader and the Assembly speaker. Every fresh lever in this "reform" lands with someone the building already controls.

The parent who spooked a statehouse#

So who is the woman who set off the scramble? Sonja Shaw is president of the Chino Valley Unified School District board, in San Bernardino County east of Los Angeles. Under her, the board passed a policy requiring schools to tell parents when their child asked to change gender identity at school.

Newsom's attorney general, Rob Bonta, sued to block the policy. The district narrowed it, kept fighting, and won. A court upheld its authority to tell parents about changes to their child's school records, and Bonta let the appeal deadline pass. That case is closed. A mother with a board seat beat the state of California.

Then she did the thing a conservative is not supposed to be able to do in California. She finished first. In the June 2 primary Shaw took 22.6 percent against a crowded field that included a former Assembly speaker and a sitting state senator, and advanced to a November runoff. Close to a quarter of the vote, top of the ticket, in deep blue California.

Shaw read the move for exactly what it is. She called AB 181 "an unprecedented, unconstitutional power grab" that "tells parents their votes no longer matter." Or, as she put it more bluntly: "When conservatives threaten to win public office, make the office meaningless."