PAUL PETERSON, HOST:
This is the Education Exchange with Paul Peterson. I am the director of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance. Thank you for joining us. Every California citizen would agree that Texas has lower taxes than California does. Every person living in California would agree that California spends more money on its schools per pupil and pays teachers a higher average salary. But only a few Californians would agree that students learn more in Texas than they do in their home state, the Golden State of California. Yet in 2022, California trailed Texas on the National Assessment of Educational Progress by nine points in fourth-grade math and three points in eighth-grade math. Now, this is the nation’s official report card. And California can’t keep up with Texas, even though it’s spending twice as much money per pupil. Now, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom is attempting to do something about this. At his urging, the legislature just passed a bill shifting control of the state’s education system away from the superintendent of public instruction and placing it under an agency that the government controls. And to find out whether this change is actually going to fix things in California, I have with me Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor at Stanford University, former president of the California Board of Education and a driving force behind this latest education reform. So, Michael, thank you for joining me on the Education Exchange.
MICHAEL KIRST: It’s a pleasure.
PETERSON: Well, Michael, before we discuss the latest reform bill, perhaps you could briefly explain to our listeners California’s compli—… I mean, if you were to tell the whole story, it’d take five hours, so we got to get it down, right? So I’m going to put it simply. Who’s been in charge? The elected governor, the elected superintendent, or the governor-appointed State Board of Education?
KIRST: Well, the answer is easy to that. Nobody’s in charge. And the whole idea here was to get somebody in charge. And the best person to be in charge is the governor of California, who has … It’s a very strong governor’s office in terms of its prerogatives. And that, I think, is where we’re going. A little bit of history. The elected superintendent in California came in with our Constitution in the mid-19th century. And so our basic problem has been we elect a superintendent, but the State Board of Education is selected by the governor. And Jerry Brown and I put the Board of Education in the governor’s office.
PETERSON: So this is a hydra-headed system. It’s got two heads, right?
KIRST: Yeah, it’s not only hydra-headed. Here’s the key. The board was to make policy and the governor was to do funding, but all of the implementation was done by an independently elected state superintendent who was responsible for carrying out policy.
PETERSON: You’re a political scientist, Michael Kirst, and you know that who’s in charge of implementation runs the show.
KIRST: That’s correct, but the running of the show was done by an elected superintendent, and all of them recently have been former members of the legislature, turned out with almost no administrative experience. So, they have focused on political outreach and really botched a job. of implementation. And it became so bad that they couldn’t even get money out the door on time. And the staff was totally eroded. And I think that there was a grassroots feeling that this is just a broken system. Moreover, the election of the superintendent had been heavily controlled by teacher unions who put most of the money up for the superintendent’s races and spent tens of millions of dollars necessary on those races. So there was no way around it other than to try and put the state superintendent under the state board of education. But that also means the governor is in control because the governor supports the state board. And the governor would appoint a commissioner of education who would be a part of his—
PETERSON: So now you’re describing the new reform. Is this the new reform?
KIRST: Yes, that’s the new reform.
PETERSON: So this is something that’s going to happen. This is passed, right?
KIRST: Yes, it will happen in January 2027.
PETERSON: So in 2027, we’re going to have a new system. And in the new system, the governor is going to appoint the Board of Education, what she has done in the past. And then what else changes?
KIRST: The superintendent. has essentially been neutered into a minor official. The Constitution says that California has to elect a superintendent of public instruction, but it doesn’t say what the superintendent does. And so now the superintendent is converted to somebody who sits on boards. It’ll have a super member, be one member of an 11 board of State Board of Education, could be on the State University Board, Community College Board, and may have other duties as assigned. But there’s really, we’ve sidelined the superintendent, if you will.
PETERSON: So then who is going to be reporting to the governor? Who is the person that’s going to have control of the action, so to speak? Because the governor is very busy. He’s got a million things to do. So, who’s going to be in charge if not the superintendent.
KIRST: Yeah, this will be a commissioner of education, which is a position we’ve never had appointed by the governor, part of the governor’s cabinet. Therefore, the governor under the old system, you know, had no control over the department employees, who was hired, whether they came into the office or not. And so the commissioner can be paid over $300,000. The governor’s paid $192,000. And there are 10 to 15 senior officials named who can also be paid on a much higher scale in civil service.
PETERSON: So now, did the superintendent of public instruction go along with this, or did he fight it?
KIRST: No. He fought it tooth and nail, and he ran for governor. His name is Tony Thurman. Almost as soon as he took office four years ago, he decided he would run for governor. He got 0.07, not 7 percent of the vote, but 0.07 percent of the vote for all that campaigning. But he was out on a campaign trail and the department fell apart.
PETERSON: Well, how about the California Teachers Association? They are regarded as a power in California. Did they support this change?
KIRST: No, they started out neutral with concern, but then they ended up in a full court press to defeat it. And they peeled off a lot of Democrats and it passed by one vote in the California Senate. They became very, very aggressive.
PETERSON: So, this is not something that just sort of sailed through as a consensus reform. This was a battle all the way, and the governor must have put a lot of muscle into it.
KIRST: Yes, the governor gets a lot of credit. He decided this was a priority and made this part of his budget proposal, something like the One Beautiful Bill that Trump passed and therefore fought for it and made other trades with the legislature to get it.
PETERSON: Well, so that all sounds fascinating, but who was backing it? I mean, if you’ve got the major teachers organization in California opposed to it, you’ve got the guy holding the office that’s going to be affected by the change fighting it, where did the governor get his support for this?
KIRST: Yeah, and I think that’s the most interesting part of that, of this. And something that you and I as political scientists have looked at education for years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. We mobilized 950 organizations behind this, and there were three large organizations opposed, the CTA-NEA, the AFT branch, and one of the California classified employees. And the backing of this came from a group of advocacy group that’s been around a long time called Children Now. It takes all children’s policies and not just education, but everything that affects children’s well-being. And they created the Children’s Movement. Now, this was also in place largely before this. And so, they pointed out that education is so dispersed and different and not centralized like the retirement group, teachers’ organizations, chambers of commerce, and so on. You know, think about children. They mobilized all health agencies, child care agencies, foster care agencies, general health organizations that were out there, direct service groups that serve children, early childhood, civil rights organizations, businesses, and just there are 93,000—I was astounded to read this—children’s nonprofits; 93,000 kids nonprofits in California. And they operate by, here’s something we want you to support, you can opt into this, and 950 opted in. So the governor featured that I’ve got 950 organizations behind me, and there’s essentially the teachers fighting.
PETERSON: Well, that’s quite a coup for the governor. But, you know, power in education is really at the local level, the local school district. There are 13,000 around in the country. How many are there in California, how many school districts?
KIRST: There are a thousand and they were all there. They supported it. The boards of education supported it. And all the administrator groups supported it. But yes, there are a lot of—
PETERSON: Yes, so why did the local school districts and the local school boards support this. I would have thought they’d been part of the old system.
KIRST: No, they are totally fed up with the Department of Education and its ineffectiveness. And they realize that they are hindered in implementing policy by the current governance arrangement. And they were just vociferous. But I don’t know, Paul, here’s a key bottom line. I don’t know that if you just mobilized the usual suspects in education, whether we could have won this. I think this outpouring of people that are concerned about children, every foster care agency in the state, for example, was part of this. So, health organizations, there’s an enormous amount of children’s health organizations, providers, mental health. So, I think it took to get over the finish line more than just a fight and the interest groups in education that you and I have analyzed for years.
PETERSON: Well, so tell me this, was this a policy issue or was this just a governance issue? Were people fed up on all the mistakes and errors and slowness and nothing ever gets done, and it takes forever to do anything? Was that the thing that really drove the issue, or were there some policy questions as to how we should spend more for this or that? Yeah.
KIRST: There’s a policy question. You mentioned math. Actually, California is ahead of Texas in reading. But—
PETERSON: Right. I mentioned math because people say that schools are really responsible for educating kids in math. Parents read to their kids, but they’re no longer really able to help kids with math. And so it’s really up to the s—… If you don’t learn math at school, you’re not going to learn math. Whereas reading, you can learn in a ton of different ways. So that’s why I think the math is so interesting.
KIRST: Yeah. Well, let me answer the math question. There is a realization that, and if you look at states like Mississippi and reading, that you need a strong State Department to provide professional development of the teachers, mobilize the coaches, get the materials out there, shrink the number of materials. And so we have a nice reading bill, and we’re going to pass, hopefully, but again, this is being fought out, a math bill, similar to the literacy bills you’ve seen spread around the country. It comes down to you lose in the last mile in the classroom. And the department was running webinars. It was their strategy rather than pushing and helping to really build a scale, a movement that would help the classroom improvement.
PETERSON: So, I know that in Mississippi and in other states, the state gets really active in trying to make sure their policies get implemented at the school district level. But isn’t California just too big a state to do that?
KIRST: No, I think we can do it. I think it’s much harder. Well, you know, with the South, you know, you and I have studied political culture. The South always had much more centralized districts and they used county units. And so Maryland has 21 districts and Mississippi has much fewer. In 1900, California had 3,500 districts. Now we’re down to a thousand. So, the political culture of local control is much different here. You’re right. The challenge is huge. But I think we can do it, and we haven’t even attempted to do it.
PETERSON: Well, so what do you think will change now? Is the president of the school … who is the school board president now?
KIRST: Well, it’s an eminent educator who lives on the Stanford campus. I had the eight years with Jerry Brown before that, but Linda Darling-Hammond lives three blocks from me, and she will have served eight years with Newsom. So, but the new governor coming—
PETERSON: Is she part of this reform effort?
KIRST: Yes. Yes, she’s very, the board was … and she helped design it and was there all the way. The new governor is very interesting in that he was opposed by CTA. They first went for Swalwell, who pulled out, and then they endorsed Tom Steyer. So Xavier Becerra, who will be elected, he’s leading by 23 points, he doesn’t owe the teachers anything. And so this will be very interesting and is a real sea change from the past.
PETERSON: Did he take a position on this issue?
KIRST: No, he did not take a position on the issue, and he really didn’t have much of an education program. So, he’s really sort of a blank slate.
PETERSON: But I guess whoever he appoints as the president of the board is that the key position or is it more the new commissioner that’s going to be appointed that’s going to be the key?
KIRST: I think the new commissioner will be much more important. And so I was president. I’m the longest serving president. I went back to Jerry Brown’s term starting in 1975 and then did it again in 2011. You know, I think that we tried to do some administration and implementation but really couldn’t get it done. So, I think that the commissioner … you know, my view, if I were president, is let him do or her job and I’ll get into it if I see problems.
PETERSON: Well, now you were president of the board for a long time under Jerry Brown. And I was just going to turn to that topic when you mentioned it. So what would you feel was your greatest accomplishment during the time that you were … because it must have been frustrating because you were in this old structure where power was divided between an elected superintendent and an elected governor. And you were sort of caught in the middle there. But were you able to do anything, nonetheless?
KIRST: Yes, we’ve totally reformed our school finance system. We went from one that was highly inequitable to we’re now rated second in the nation in distribution of money that follows children that are poor and not doing well. And so the legislature had governed by putting little categorical programs. We had 41 of them. We tied the school business people up in knots because they had very little flexible money. Forty percent of their money was earmarked to little programs. The state in California provides 83 percent of the money here. And so, it’s virtually full state assumption. And the federalist is 10, so there’s very little local money.
PETERSON: So if the state comes up with 83 percent of the money, they should be able to tell those local districts what they want.
KIRST: Well, yeah, but there’s a strong political culture of local control. Remember, you descended from 3,500 local institutions. We still have 500 that are very small. San Jose has 20 districts in its city boundaries, three of which have one school. This is a city of about a million people. So—
PETERSON: You know, but I’m still sort of curious about this Texas comparison because Texas, too, has, you know, I don’t know how many thousands of little school districts they have, but I know they’re very much like California in that respect and very different from other states in the South because Texas grew up as a… as the Republic of Texas, and then it joined the Union, and it was never part of the Old South. So, it does join the South in the Civil War, but its historical evolution is very distinctive. And so this very decentralized system in Texas seems to, with less money, to do as well or better than California in educating kids. What do you think is … I mean, how do you account for that?
KIRST: I don’t know. And I don’t, I’m curious about it too, because Texas has a lot of school districts and it’s huge geographically as we are.
PETERSON: And it’s got plenty of minority students and disadvantaged students and low-income students, probably more than California.
KIRST: Yeah, it’s very close. And, you know, we’re 25 percent white. I don’t know what their what their percentage is, but it’s high. So, it evolved in a different way. The state board of education there seems to have a great deal more power and it is elected. And I know I worked with Ross Perot, and he got it appointed for a while, but then they changed to elected. So that would be a separate study on its own.
PETERSON: But then, really, my question should be more focused on California. California, compared to the other big wealthy states like New York or Connecticut or Massachusetts or Minnesota, California should be in that league. Given the resources it has, given Silicon Valley, I mean, given Stanford University and the higher educational system in California, California’s been an education state. So why is it that it can’t … What’s gone wrong?
KIRST: Well, you have a very challenging population in the sense that—
PETERSON: But so does Texas.
KIRST: Yeah, yeah. And I’m saying, Paul, that we’re very close to Texas. You know, three percentage points, that’s within the error of the NAEP there, the error rate of it. And so—
PETERSON: No, it’s actually 9 percent in math.
KIRST: Yeah, but in reading, we recovered from the pandemic, I think, quicker than them.
PETERSON: All right, so you’re going to brag about California being as good as Texas. Is that what?
KIRST: Yeah, I’m saying it’s, if you look at it over time, and I will send you stuff, they used to be very different and much better. They have fallen off significantly in the last decade or two. In fact, you know, there’s a lot of discussion about what’s going on. You may have read some of that. So it’s… And the New York population is different in that regard. So we’re 54 percent Hispanic. We’re only 5 percent Black, but we’re 13 percent Asian and 25 percent white.
PETERSON: And of course, the Asian thing is to the enormous advantage of California. The Asians are just… hitting one home run after another. They started out 50 years ago behind the white population. They’re now ahead of it. So that should be pulling California all the way up.
KIRST: Yeah, but it’s 13 percent. And it’s doing very well. I would agree with you fully. I mean, they’re just as a group running away from the rest.
PETERSON: Maybe the really important thing is the home and the family and not the school at all. Do you think that’s sometimes… I wonder off in that direction and thinking, you know, we’re spending a lot of time thinking about schools, but it’s really the family that’s the most important thing.
KIRST: Yeah, I think that’s important. We’re 22 percent English learner when they enter school. And I don’t think New York is close to that, or Minnesota. You know, Minnesota is like, you know, another world to me compared to California and Texas. And I think that’s interesting.
PETERSON: Okay, so I’m going to put it this way. This sounds to me like a great reform. I think it’s… I think you’ve done a fantastic job, Michael. I think pulling this group together and whatever role you played, I think you’re not telling me all the things that you did to make this thing work because you know California in the way very few people do in the educational system there. And so I actually think this is a remarkable accomplishment that you’ve made. And I don’t want to be critical of it in any way. I think this is … putting it in the hands of the governor is just exactly where the issue should land. But will it really make any difference? That’s the question.
KIRST: Yeah, well, that time will tell. And Children Now have really pulled this together, the organization of all these supporters of it. But we’re really focused now, Paul, on not just California, less on finance and governance, and this is a governance change, and much more on improving instruction in the classroom. And so the answer to that question is what we discussed, whether the state can play a more aggressive and intelligent and well- or better-organized role in equipping teachers and principals with the ability to teach more challenging and curriculum.
PETERSON: Well, I just talked with Superintendent Miles at the Houston School District in Texas. And the Texas state took over the Houston school system. That’s one of the kinds of things that California could do. You know, it took over the local school district. And then they put the school board on ice and then appointed Miles as superintendent. And he’s changed everything. He’s saying that the teachers have to follow a very definite script every single day. They have to keep the kids taught at grade level. They can’t teach to the level of the kids. They have to bring the kids up to the level of the standards that have been set in Texas. Is this the kind of thing that we can expect in California under the new system?
KIRST: I know I’ve been in sessions where the superintendent in Houston has presented, and I think it’s extremely interesting. Potentially yes. We certainly have to deal with the problem of when districts are failing and there’s no hope of turnaround, you know, what state takeover can be. And, you know, I think this is something that will be carefully thought through. In the old days, state takeover, I studied that in the 80s and the 90s and into 2000. They could clean up the fiscal situation with the state taking it over, but not the educational problems. That’s what’s different in Houston. And so there, I think Texas has a model in terms of the state role being much more focused on instruction. So, I hope so is the answer, but I can’t guarantee it.
PETERSON: But you’re sort of saying that in your opinion, the key question going forward is to try to come up with instructional designs that are more effective than what we have been following in the past.
KIRST: That’s correct. And the state has to play a stronger role in doing it. What we have learned is the locals aren’t going to do it on their own. And so the balance of control between state and local under this instruction movement, I think, is shifting into more state aggression. And of course, the federal government is retreating. So the actions … And so we just couldn’t even have a chance with the old organization. Now we have a chance, would be the way I’d sum it up.
PETERSON: Well, this is a fascinating development in California, and it could be extremely promising. And I’m really fascinated that you joined this governance reform to curricular reform and instructional reform, because then it could make a difference in the classroom. So, thank you very much, Michael, for joining me on the Education Exchange.
KIRST: All right. Thank you for having me.
PETERSON: I’ve been speaking with Michael Kirst. He’s an emeritus professor at Stanford University, former president of the California Board of Education, and one of the leaders of the governance reform movement that has brought about a new piece of legislation concentrating authority in the hands of an appointee of the governor. I am Paul Peterson. This is Education Exchange. Please join me for a new podcast released on the Education Next website every Monday at noon Eastern time.
