Why aren’t gubernatorial candidates talking about education?

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

This comment was originally posted by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

The largest subject in Governor Gavin Newsom’s recently proposed budget — and perhaps most importantly — is the $91 billion (plus $60 billion in local and federal funds) it would spend on educating the state’s nearly 6 million students, from transitional kindergarten through high school.

How well they are educated, prepared for higher education or the job market will be a big factor in whether California’s economy, and by extension its socioeconomic integrity, succeeds or fails.

Not surprisingly, given the amounts spent on education and its importance, it ranks very high in the Capitol’s annual budget. That’s certainly true this year, as Newsom’s latest budget slashes the state constitution’s mandated school allotment by several billion dollars, with a promise to make up for it later, sparking opposition from school officials across the state.

Continuing education ranks very high in surveys of voter priorities. School lobbies, including the very powerful California Teachers Association, will use this as they pressure the Legislature to increase their share of the revenue stream.

With the high stakes of education funding and its place in Californians’ hopes for a prosperous future, one would think that those seeking to succeed Newsom would be happy to volunteer their intentions.

That would be especially helpful given that Newsom, as a parting gesture, wants to eliminate all but the elected position of state superintendent of public instruction and assign almost all oversight of education to the governor’s office.

If this reassignment of duties passes, the next governor will be the virtual king of the nation’s largest public education system.

The silence on this among the leading gubernatorial candidates, however, is deafening. They are more than happy to trade personal insults during debates and in campaign ads, and to stand up for issues like gas prices, housing and homelessness. But they leave a vacuum when it comes to how or if they would change the school system.

Only one candidate, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, repeatedly raised the issue during debates, noting that he is a former teacher. The obfuscation of the other candidates is compounded by debate moderators’ eagerness to question the candidates on other issues while failing to raise the issue of education.

A a new study by Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project examines other data showing that California public schools are falling short of the academic achievement needed for the state’s future.

The study cataloged 2025 reading and math test scores across the country and found that nearly everywhere achievement was lower than it was 10 years ago—reading was down in 83 percent of local school systems and math was down in 70 percent.

Most worryingly, California is not only not immune to the trend, but is also one of the states with the biggest decline. Only eight states and the District of Columbia experienced a bigger decline in reading than California.

The New York Times, in a report on the study, created a website allowing readers to find specific results in individual school systems.

It reveals, for example, that while Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest system, showed partial gains in reading and math, Oakland Unified experienced declines in both, and San Diego fell in reading and gained in math.

After years, even decades, of ignoring its deficiencies in these basic skills, California recently did something it should have done long ago — embracing phonetics in teaching reading. Also the legislation for diagnosis and treatment of mathematics deficits moves to the Capitol.

The next governor must build on these and other efforts to restore California’s public schools to their former glory. People vying for this job should tell us if and how they intend to do the needful.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.