At the end of a contentious election year in which the Republican Party won the presidency, the House and the Senate in spite of opposite voting patterns among the majority of California’s electorate, it is easy to get caught up in the dramas of high politics and ignore painful education statistics.
Only 47% of California students meet or exceed English proficiency standards and nearly 65% cannot do math at the grade level, based on the 2024 California Smarter Balanced test results. Public confidence has also dipped with enrollment in the state’s public school system falling by 6% since 2013 and being projected to decline by another 12% over the next decade.
Can California’s education policymakers harness a changing national political landscape for the benefits of our state’s 5.85 million public school students in grades K through 12? Seek and you shall find.
A moral panic about the anticipated dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education under President-elect Trump from many observers on the left misdirects public energy. California parents, taxpayers and voters should be more outraged by the embarrassing fact that we are not sufficiently educating our youngsters, even though the ever-enlarging per pupil expenditure has swollen to $23,878 in the 2024-25 school year, well above the national average.
Administrative bloat, ideological edicts, and a counterproductive pivot towards equity in all things educational have effectively handicapped public education. Between 2002 and 2020, support services spending per student in California grew by 38.3%, from $3,753 to $5,190. In comparison, instruction spending per student in the state only increased by 24.4% to $8,316 from $6,683. For instance, the Los Angeles Unified School District, where the math proficiency rate hit a painful low of 32% in 2024, paid its Chief of Equity and Access $272,241 in salary and benefits in 2022. On average, a school district director makes about $200,000, while a teacher takes home a little over $100,000 in total pay and benefits in the San Francisco Unified School District.
Such bureaucratic waste, not pegged to student achievement or employee performance, reflects a national norm. For 2024, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) requested $90 billion of taxpayer funds in discretionary funding, a 13.6% increase from the previous year. Aside from proliferating grants and programs targeting subgroups, the budget request included $3.5 billion to support departmental management and $4.5 billion to pay 4,453 full-time employees! Assuming that a considerable percentage of the agency’s administrators reside in Washington D.C., the most left-leaning voting district in all recent elections, the DOE is a perfect snapshot of the swamp that deserves some long overdue draining.
Notably, DOE made requests for $178 million to its Office for Civil Rights as additional funding for Title IX amendments’ enforcement and another $38 million for the office to advance equity in 2024. The controversial Title IX policy changes, unveiled under the Biden Administration to extend civil rights protections to transgender students, against scathing criticisms on the proposal’s attacks on free speech, due process and girl sports, ran into mounting legal troubles. 26 states had sued to block the Title IX regulation from taking effect in their local schools, citing infringements on parental rights and local control. The Supreme Court upheld the states’ claims by barring the federal government from temporarily enforcing Title IX amendments in 10 states.
Moreover, additional funding for DOE’s Office for Civil Rights to advance equity has translated into uneven enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, giving preferential treatment to progressive causes and organizations such as the N.A.A.C.P. By sharp contrast, the office quickly dismissed two civil rights complaints I filed against the San Diego Unified School District and the Hayward Unified School District regarding their mandatory antiracism trainings. Perhaps DOE can now rebate huge savings to American taxpayers by ending federal promotion of fringe transgender and racial justice ideologies.
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With determined leadership and matching public actions at the local level, a national model of leaner education bureaucracy may trickle down to willing school districts. After all, education is still by and large a local matter. In this election, a growing number of independent school board candidates fended off offensives that sought to install candidates beholden to highly political, far-left teachers’ unions. Teachers’ unions across the state spent unprecedented amounts of funds in attempts to unseat conservative incumbents with diminished returns. Our analysis in San Diego shows that teachers’ unions poured over $800,000 in 29 school board races but lost nearly half of the races to much less costly grassroots organizing by concerned parents.
The referendum on the institutional hijacking of public education by ideologues, political operatives and out-of-touch union bosses must continue beyond this election season. Staving education from overlording bureaucracies and progressive political mandates is a necessary first step towards reclaiming excellence. The students deserve it.
Wenyuan Wu is is Executive Director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation.