For more than a century, California has governed its public schools through a structure that functioned less like an organization chart than like a group project. There is a state superintendent of public instruction, who is elected by voters. There is a State Board of Education. There is the governor’s office, the Legislature, local school boards, and a dozen other entities, all with a hand on some part of the wheel. The result, as CalMatters reports, was a system so diffuse — in the words of the think tank Policy Analysis for California Education — that policies were rarely implemented evenly and everyone could blame someone else when things went wrong.
“We used to ask, who’s in charge here? It was everybody and nobody,” Michael Kirst, former head of the State Board of Education, told CalMatters. “Now we know. It’s the governor. That’s a total sea change – I never thought I’d live to see it.”
The mechanism of the change is Assembly Bill 181. In January, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed realigning the whole structure; the bill passed overwhelmingly in July. It creates a new education commissioner, appointed by the governor, who will oversee the California Department of Education and make sure that policies set in Sacramento are actually enacted in classrooms. The state superintendent — the job the voters still get to vote on — is stripped of most duties, and the position will soon have few responsibilities besides championing various education policies.
If you think of the old arrangement as a company where the shareholders elect a CEO who doesn’t actually control the operating division, the new one is more conventional: the governor picks the person running the department, the board sets policy, and the elected official becomes something closer to an ombudsman with a press office. Whether that’s better is debatable; it is at least easier to diagram.
Newsom signed the bill on July 10, according to his office; it was carried by Assemblymembers David Alvarez and Darshana Patel, and it puts the new commissioner under the State Board while consolidating policy-making and implementation under one roof. The change has been recommended for years by people who study this stuff, which may be why it reads so much like a management-consulting deliverable.
Not everyone is applauding. The Sacramento Bee has reported that the overhaul drew criticism from the incumbent superintendent, Tony Thurmond, and from candidates running to succeed him — people who are, reasonably enough, attached to the idea that the office they’re seeking should continue to exist in a meaningful form. An elected statewide official being reclassified as a champion of things is the sort of thing that officeholders tend to notice.
The catch, and it is a large one, is that none of this is quite self-executing: whether the changes actually happen or fade into irrelevance will come down to one person, the next governor, who will inherit both the appointment power and the choice of whether to use it the way the architects intended. California has reorganized its education bureaucracy on paper many times. The paper is usually not the hard part.
Kirst, who has watched more of these reorganizations than most, sounded genuinely surprised to see this one land. But there’s a quiet joke embedded in the design: California will keep holding statewide elections for a superintendent of public instruction whose job, going forward, is mostly to have opinions. The voters’ role in running the schools is now to elect the person who watches the person the governor picked. Democracy, with one extra step.