The Brief

Whoever is elected this fall as governor and state superintendent of public instruction will face a new reality for California education.

The changing of the guard after the eight-year term limits for Gov. Gavin Newsom and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond will likely coincide with a belt-tightening period for the state budget, forcing tough choices for the next governor.

A consolation prize, however, could be more authority over the California Department of Education. Newsom is proposing to shift control of the department’s operations to a new education commissioner appointed by the next governor — an arrangement common among states. The shift would diminish the power of the state superintendent, who’d be relieved of managing the education bureaucracy while remaining the state’s elected advocate-in-chief of education.

Over the past six years, amid a burst of state revenue, Newsom and the Legislature enacted multibillion-dollar programs that redefined TK-12. They expanded TK-12 with transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds and lengthened the school day through expanded learning. Money for apprenticeships and career pathways created post-high school opportunities, and community schools broadened connections with parents and neighborhood health services.

But the era of large-scale programs will be Newsom’s legacy, not his successor’s. Circumstances beyond the next governor’s control — continuing declines in enrollment and revenues, probably retreating to historical levels, forcing additional school closures, with a recession looming — will temper ambitions of what more can be done for California’s students.

And then there are sounds of frustration, growing louder from the picket line to the school boardroom to the hallways of Sacramento. Districts are complaining that the rollout of ambitious programs, with accompanying reporting requirements and regulations, has diverted their attention and strained their budgets.

David Roth, superintendent of Buckeye Union School District, which serves 4,200 TK-8 students in El Dorado County, was emphatic. “We don’t need new programs,” he said. Adding more, he said, would result in continued labor strife over pay raises that many districts argue they can’t afford, and “an inability to maintain the programs we have.”

Roth’s message, reiterated by others, is that schools should get back to basics, as in base funding — the portion of the state’s funding formula intended to cover general operating expenses. They want the Legislature and the next governor to make raising base funding the number one priority.

Roth established Raise the Base Coalition, a website that lays out the challenge of rising costs. Forty districts have signed up so far; they are primarily suburban districts with fewer-than-average high-needs students, and therefore receive less “supplemental” and “concentration” funding under the state’s Local Control Funding Formula and other programs with similar distributions.

Opposition to equity is not the issue, Roth said. “Even districts with above-median funding are struggling to keep pace with rising costs.” When there is more money to cover basic expenses, he added, all districts benefit.

Last month, school board presidents and members from 10 districts, mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area, made the same point while calling for, among other things, adjustments to the funding formula to reflect regional costs.

“As those entrusted with ensuring the long-term financial viability and educational success of our public schools, we write to sound the alarm about the profound, widespread fiscal challenges districts across the state are facing,” they wrote.

At first glance, their complaints may invoke little sympathy. From 2018-19, the year preceding Covid-19, through 2024-25, funding rose 53% through Proposition 98, the formula that sets the minimum share of state revenue for TK-12 and community colleges. Per student funding from the state will rise to more than $20,000, a record.

But several factors squeezing districts’ spending will likely escalate in the coming years, demanding the next governor’s attention.

Declining enrollment

The California Department of Finance projects the nearly decade-long statewide decline in enrollment to accelerate, with an additional 10% drop by 2033-34, bringing the total to 5.2 million students. Most districts will feel it, with enrollment losses of up to 20% in some Los Angeles County districts.

Districts receive funding based on the average number of students who attend school daily over the course of a year. Adding transitional kindergarten has propped up attendance, but now that TK is fully phased in, the average daily attendance decline will bite harder in many districts.

Special education

The percentage of students with disabilities has risen from 13% in 2018-19 to 15% in 2023-24, even as overall enrollment has declined. Newsom is proposing to add $500 million next year to equalize state special education funding among districts, but the overall trend has not favored districts. The federal share of total special education funding in California, never close to the 40% share that Congress envisioned 50 years ago when passing the federal special education mandate, has fallen steadily over the past decade, as has the state’s share of dedicated funding.

Districts will continue to be responsible for the shortfall. Districts’ share of special education costs has risen from 51% in 2014 to 63% last year, according to School Services of California, a statewide consulting company, and higher in some small districts.

Placer County Office of Education Superintendent Gayle Garbolino-Mojica said that unexpected special education costs have forced three of her districts onto the state’s financial watch list. Preschoolers are coming to school with serious special needs — autism, multiple disabilities, behavioral problems — “in numbers not seen before,” she said.

Inadequate cost-of-living adjustments

A 3% decline in a district’s attendance may not appear dramatic, but losing 3% of funding will be larger than the 2.41% cost-of-living adjustment that districts are projected to receive in 2026-27. And it’s larger than the 2.30% COLA they got this year and the 1.07% COLA in 2024-25. The state’s COLA is tied to a national formula of a basket of goods that doesn’t reflect the sharp rise in health insurance and the need to raise staff pay to retain teachers.

The state cushions the impact of a steadily declining enrollment by allowing districts to claim attendance over a three-year period. Without it, “we would be toast,” said Roth. But that’s not a long-term answer, he said. “We cannot adjust costs as quickly as we will lose revenue.”

‘Declining enrollment dividend’

Because of Proposition 98’s funding guarantee, TK-12 and community colleges will continue to receive 40% of the state’s general revenue, yet districts collectively will receive fewer dollars as their enrollments drop. The unallotted difference, euphemistically called a “declining enrollment dividend,” could grow to $7.5 billion annually, providing a pot of discretionary funding for the Legislature and governor. How to spend it could prove one of the more contentious decisions in the coming years. Among the options:

• Switching from funding by attendance to funding by annual enrollment, a method favored especially by districts hardest hit by chronic absences.
• Adding a regional cost factor to the Local Control Funding Formula — a much-discussed idea over the years, but never adopted;
• Increasing the state’s share of special education expenses, benefiting all districts;
• Building in a permanent 4% annual COLA;
• Making permanent what has been sporadic among districts: funding professional development, starting with evidence-based instruction in early literacy and the new math framework.

Other issues

Plenty of important decisions won’t require more money. While it’s a fool’s errand to predict what future events will determine, what could crowd its way to the top of the list includes:

Restructuring the California Department of Education 

If the Legislature approves Newsom’s plan as part of the next state budget, the department will fall under the authority of Newsom’s successor. That will be only the first step to untangling the current fractured system of school improvement and accountability. Like it or not, the next governor will take credit or blame for implementing programs the state superintendent of instruction had managed.

Resolving Miliani Rodriguez v. State of California 

That’s the lawsuit the public interest law firm Public Advocates filed on behalf of 14 students, parents, and teachers in six school districts, challenging the first-come, first-served state formula for distributing billions of dollars to repair school facilities. If Newsom doesn’t settle what he has acknowledged favors wealthy districts, then the decision to defend or negotiate an end to an inequitable system falls to his successor.

Taking the lead on artificial intelligence 

AI is a big, amorphous subject, enticing and forbidding, that has been left to districts to decipher and deal with vendors. The next California governor can call for all students to be AI literate, said Chris Agnew, director of Generative AI for Education Hub at Stanford University, and ask fundamental questions like, “What are the core capacities we want to build in California students, and what are the research-backed learning experiences that build these capacities?”

Redesigning high schools

High schools face a challenge. Only 55% of California students report feeling connected to high school. In 2025, the Legislature budgeted $10 million for a Secondary School Redesign Pilot Program to establish 14 networks for high schools and middle schools in 57 districts. Some have been experimenting for years, while others are launching different models with team teaching, small-group learning to strengthen student relationships, and nontraditional scheduling to accommodate apprenticeships.

A seven-period day, driven by college course requirements and seat time regulations, is hard to change. But if, as State Board President Linda Darling-Hammond hopes, the results show “what it takes for students to be engaged and purposeful in a rapidly changing world,” the next governor should scale up the project, she said.

Getting serious about the achievement gap

Newsom’s big bets on improving students’ well-being and academic progress may bear fruit long term. But the California School Boards Association is demanding full attention now to narrowing persistent disparities in achievement between low-income and well-off students, and among racial and ethnic groups.

CSBA is pushing bills that would hold state agencies accountable for providing the annual metrics that they use to track how they are closing the achievement gap. A separate commission would weed out regulations and duplicate programs, and give a thumbs-down on new programs that would divert resources and energy from addressing the achievement gap.

The bills may not pass, at least as written, but the message is clear: A governor with a different agenda may be out of sync with the times.

Topline:

Key topics: The candidates each had about 45 minutes to individually answer questions from Erin Stone, an LAist senior reporter focused on climate and environment.

Here are some of the topics they covered:

• Extreme heat
• Emergency preparedness and recovery
• Protecting communities from pollution
• Water
• Public transit

About the organizers: The event is organized by a coalition of local environmental and environmental justice groups including: Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters, SCOPE-LA, Sierra Club, Clean and Healthy California, Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance and Communities for a Better Environment

LAist will have more coverage and analysis of the conversations Friday morning.

The Trump administration is taking steps to advance a mysterious and unprecedented project to compile state-by-state lists of people it has decided are eligible citizens over the age of 18 who can vote in the upcoming midterm election. But it will no longer meet its own deadline to publish that information on a portal on Friday, which is 60 days before Election Day.

Department of Justice attorneys told opposing counsel in two separate lawsuits that instead of meeting the Sept. 4 deadline, they would give 48-hours notice to plaintiffs' counsel before the state citizenship portal was launched, according to recent court filings.

The U.S. has never attempted to create a comprehensive list of American citizens before this administration. Maintaining voter lists is the responsibility of states, not the federal government, as the Constitution dictates that states control elections. But President Trump has repeatedly taken steps to try to exert executive control over elections.

The basis for the federal government creating state citizenship lists is an executive order Trump signed on March 31. A lower court had blocked implementation of key parts of that executive order in 23 states and Washington, D.C., but the Supreme Court stayed that injunction late last month, opening the door for the plan to be implemented after all.

The March 31 executive order directs U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration to create "State Citizenship Lists" of individuals the agencies believe are citizens in each state, and send those lists to state officials "no fewer than 60 days before each regularly scheduled Federal election."

The next section of the executive order says the U.S. attorney general will prioritize investigating and prosecuting state and local officials who issue federal ballots to anyone not eligible to vote.

"States here have a strong incentive to actually use these lists to try to avoid federal investigation," said Jules Torti, counsel at the nonprofit Protect Democracy, in an interview with NPR. "But we know that these lists are going to be based on really inaccurate data. So the risk of disenfranchisement here is really, really palpable."

The privacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, along with individual voters, filed a motion Thursday asking a federal judge in Maryland to block the administration from creating the citizenship lists and publishing them on a portal. Specifically, they seek to block a June 8 implementation memo authored by USCIS director Joseph Edlow that outlines the plan.

The motion, which was brought by Protect Democracy, along with another nonprofit legal group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, argues the administration's plans to share Americans' personal data between agencies and then disseminate the data to states violates multiple federal laws, including the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. Under the Privacy Act, federal agencies must give the public 30 days notice and the opportunity to comment before they collect and disseminate Americans' personal data for a new purpose.

The EPIC lawsuit also argues the government does not have access to accurate, up-to-date information on American citizens, especially those who move frequently, have changed their names, or are foreign-born. For example, Social Security's citizenship data often isn't updated when people naturalize, and the SAVE data system, operated by USCIS, frequently doesn't include records for people who became citizens as minors when their parents naturalized.

Torti said it is "deeply concerning" that the administration is still planning to go ahead with the creation of citizenship lists but is no longer going to meet the deadline, since that means the lists will be completed even closer to Election Day.

"It means additional chaos, additional confusion for the state election officials and just for voters," Torti said. "And I think that's the point. The point here is to create chaos in advance of the election."

Neither the Department of Justice, nor the Department of Homeland Security, which is tasked with compiling the citizenship lists, responded to NPR's request for comment.

The June 8 implementation memo stated that the portal for state election officials would be available around June 30 and a second portal where citizens could check their information would be available at a later date – but that deadline passed without further updates.

The federal government has secured a domain for the state citizenship lists portal. While the portal is not currently online, it was briefly live in recent days with a landing page that said "Coming Soon," according to court filings.

Lawyers representing Democratic party groups that had challenged the March 31 executive order in a separate lawsuit filed in April, accused the administration in a recent filing of failing to notify the court or the parties about its plans to move forward with the state citizenship portal. They asked the judge to require the federal government to give immediate updates about their plans to implement the executive order.

This latest legal battle over the administration's plans to compile state citizenship lists comes as the Department of Homeland Security is ramping up its efforts to analyze state voter rolls with the goal of identifying potential noncitizens who are registered to vote. Previous audits have found instances of noncitizens casting ballots to be incredibly rare. 

Additionally, last week, ICE published a request for information on a federal procurement site seeking vendors who can compile public voter rolls and voter history files from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories, "to support Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) fraud detection and data segmentation activities."

NPR's Hansi Lo Wang contributed reporting to this story. 
Copyright 2026 NPR

A group of California lawmakers called on federal officials to halt and reject a proposed land exchange in Yosemite National Park that would allow a private developer to take control of a strip of land in the park for an access road to the park’s main attractions.

The letter to Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Wednesday was signed by a bipartisan group of 61 state legislators led by Assemblymember Greg Wallis, a Republican who represents Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

“Republicans and Democrats from both houses of the Legislature are standing together because some things are bigger than politics,” Wallis said in a statement. “Yosemite is not a subdivision. It is not a bargaining chip. And it is not for sale. Secretary Burgum and the administration should put an end to this proposal.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum (center) visited the Tunnel Tops in San Francisco in 2025 after he and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi toured Alcatraz ahead of their announcement to reopen the former federal prison.

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Katie DeBenedetti

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KQED

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The group argued that the proposed land exchange is counter to the mission of the National Park Service and the founding of Yosemite in 1864, which set aside the start of the park for public use and protection for the first time in the history of the federal government.

“What is being proposed now runs directly against that founding principle, more than a century and a half later,” the letter states.

It continues later: “Our national parks belong equally to every American. They are not the Department’s to trade away, and they are not for sale.”

The proposal was first reported by news outlet NOTUS, which published a story last week alleging that members of the Trump administration were meeting with representatives of Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a private equity group that owns an 83-acre parcel next to the park. In an email to KQED, Kingsbarn’s lawyer Lanny J. Davis confirmed the group is pursuing the land exchange to build a new access road from its property to the park.

Previous owners have pushed for the same deal since the early 2000s and failed in court.

State Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park), who signed on to the letter, called the proposal “indefensible,” and said he’s looking at state laws to ensure a similar proposal could never slip through.

“If the Trump administration can’t defend this publicly in broad daylight, then they shouldn’t be doing it,” he said.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Marin) told KQED’s Forum on Wednesday that he’s worried there isn’t enough opposition among his Republican colleagues in Congress to stop the Trump administration’s efforts.

“I have not seen a single Republican colleague willing to stand up to Donald Trump when he decides that he’s just going to do something,” Huffman said. “So that is my concern, that he just plows ahead with this — even if it has dubious legal authority, or even if it’s an open violation of the law. He’s doing stuff like that anyway. And in this Congress, there’s no one here to stop him.”

In a statement to KQED, state Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil (R-Modesto), whose district includes parts of Yosemite, said she will “keep pressing the Department [of the Interior] for a clear answer that this exchange will not proceed.”

Since the news of the deal broke late last week, it has sparked condemnation from a number of Democratic state leaders, including Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, as well as Attorney General Rob Bonta and Bonta’s predecessor, Xavier Becerra, who leads the race for California governor.

“The secretive backroom land-exchange scheme has gotten everyone’s attention,” said Neal Desai, senior Pacific regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association. “I can’t recall another issue — and I’ve been working in the conservation space for over a couple of decades — where the response has been this sharp and so one-sided that this is a terrible idea that should not happen.”

The backlash comes at a turbulent time for National Park Service employees, who have faced layoffs, staffing cuts and fear of retaliation for speaking up against Trump administration policies since the start of the second Trump administration.

Some former employees have also raised concerns about a potential reorganization of the National Park Service, according to a separate letter sent to Burgum’s office Wednesday. According to an email seen by KQED, park superintendents have been asked to attend in-person regional meetings in September — with no clear agenda beyond discussing “agency priorities, our FY 2026 outlook, and other matters important to the work ahead.”

The letter to Burgam, signed by 20 retired parks superintendents warns: “An ill-advised and hastily planned reorganization could dismantle that structure, putting our parks — and those who visit them — at great risk.”

Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, which organized the letter, said the email about regional meetings “raises some alarm bells.”

“The Park Service is already operating from a difficult place, from a place of crisis,” she said. “And any additional cuts, any movements or actions that would further jeopardize the capacity of the folks that are left, that’s concerning. It’s worrying, and it’ll have a devastating impact on the Park Service.”

Among the letter’s signatories is Don Neubacher, retired Yosemite superintendent, who has been a vocal advocate for parks amid the Trump administration’s changes.

Thompson said she’s worried parks leaders will be stretched even further than they already are, and local decision-making over parks could be in jeopardy.

“Morale is low,” Thompson said. “It’s a hard time to be a federal employee. Anything that … contributes to this culture of fear, it’s just not acceptable.”

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Long Beach is offering up to $1,500 for local business owners and landlords to equip their storefronts with safety measures like cameras, floodlights, alarms and point-of-sale systems.

The grant program is accepting online applications now. You can apply here.

Businesses with storefronts of 1,500 square feet or less may receive grants of up to $750, while businesses between 1,500 and 5,000 square feet are eligible for up to $1,500.

Nonprofit organizations are eligible as well, and landlords can apply on behalf of commercial storefronts that are vacant or occupied. Franchises can also receive the grant.

To qualify, a business must:

• Have an active business license for a storefront within the city
• Be independently owned and operated (franchises are eligible)
• Be currently open and active for business
• Earn no more than $5 million in annual gross revenue
• Hold “active” status with the California Secretary of State for corporations, limited liability companies and limited partnerships

The funds will be provided as a reimbursement after eligible security improvements are installed. Grants will be given out until funds are exhausted.

It’s a great idea, according to Edwin Jara, who manages a pet store in Belmont Heights and was on the receiving end of a break-in earlier this year.

His store had security measures already in place — two cameras and an alarm system — but even that wasn’t enough to deter a masked burglar who grabbed $1,000 cash and a handful of dog treats.

Despite having footage of the burglar, Jara said police haven’t been able to catch the person and that a detective never responded after he filed a police report.

The grant program is being paid for with $350,000 from the city’s Redvelopment Agency along with $50,000 from Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn’s office.

“Our local small businesses are part of the fabric of our neighborhoods, and when business owners feel unsafe, the whole community feels it,” Hahn said in a statement.

In a statement, Mayor Rex Richardson said the program is a “direct investment in the hardworking business owners who make our commercial corridors vibrant and welcoming.”

Jara said he would consider applying for a grant if the city could send someone to help him and the store’s owner fill out the application.

He was offered a separate grant to replace a glass door the burglar smashed, but the store’s owner opted not to fill out the application.

“There was a lot of stuff that we needed to do, and I don’t have a lot of that information,” Jara said.