Gov. Gavin Newsom is receiving an award for California’s education system. No one, and no state, deserves it less.
California was named the winner of the 2022 Frank Newman Award for State Innovation by the Education Commission of the States. This is due, in part, to the “historic financial investments to ensure education equity.” The Democratic governor will accept the award on the state’s behalf.
California’s record on education should net the Golden State only condemnations, not praise. According to a WalletHub study released in 2019, California ranked 44th in math test scores and 38th in reading test scores among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. California was 34th in dropout rate and dead last in student-teacher ratio. California has ranked near the bottom in math and reading scores for years.
Then came the pandemic, exposing the worst problems in California’s education system and Newsom’s own COVID failures. California kept its students out of in-person instruction more than any other state. As a result, the state lost more than 270,000 public school students over the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years. In April 2021, nearly 70% of California parents preferred charter or private schools to California’s public school system.
California’s insistence on preventing students from returning to the classroom won’t help its abysmal test scores, but it also undermines the “education equity” the state is being praised for. School closures predictably widened the education gap between white students and black and Hispanic students. States such as Texas and Florida, which kept schools open, did not see those gaps widen.
But hey, California paid a six-figure salary to a man who never lived in California to serve from Philadelphia as the state’s first “superintendent of equity,” and the state has spent the past few years implying that minority students are too dumb to understand math. California’s investments to “ensure education equity” are paying unnecessary bureaucrats who live on the opposite side of the country and eliminating advanced programs so no student can succeed more than another. “Innovation” indeed.
No state has done more to set its students back than California, and Newsom’s lockdowns have only made the problem worse. While the Golden State and its Democratic golden boy get the glory from agencies like the Education Commission of States, California’s students are getting left behind.
