The Brief

Your children could be some of a growing number of California kids having their writing graded by software instead of a teacher.

California school districts are signing more contracts for artificial intelligence tools, from automated grading in San Diego to chatbots in central California, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

English teachers say AI tools can help them grade papers faster, get students more feedback, and improve their learning experience. But guidelines are vague and adoption by teachers and districts is spotty.

The California Department of Education can’t tell you which schools use AI or how much they pay for it. The state doesn’t track AI use by school districts, said Katherine Goyette, computer science coordinator for the California Department of Education.

While Goyette said chatbots are the most common form of AI she’s encountered in schools, more and more California teachers are using AI tools to help grade student work. That’s consistent with surveys that have found teachers use AI as often if not more than students, news that contrasts sharply with headlines about fears of students cheating with AI.

Teachers use AI to do things like personalize reading material, create lesson plans, and other tasks in order to save time and and reduce burnout. A report issued last fall in response to an AI executive order by Gov. Gavin Newsom mentions opportunities to use AI for tutoring, summarization, and personalized content generation, but also labels education a risky use case. Generative AI tools have been known to create convincing but inaccurate answers to questions, and use toxic language or imagery laden with racism or sexism.

California issued guidance for how educators should use the technology last fall, one of seven states to do so. It encourages critical analysis of text and imagery created by AI models and conversations between teachers and students about what amounts to ethical or appropriate use of AI in the classroom.

But no specific mention is made of how teachers should treat AI that grades assignments. Additionally, the California education code states that guidance from the state is “merely exemplary, and that compliance with the guidelines is not mandatory.”

English teacher Jen Roberts uses Writeable, an AI platform, to grade students’ work at Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024.

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Goyette said she’s waiting to see if the California Legislature passes Senate Bill 1288, which would require state Superintendent Tony Thurmond to create an AI working group to issue further guidance to local school districts on how to safely use AI. Cosponsored by Thurmond, the bill also calls for an assessment of the current state of AI in education and for the identification of forms of AI that can harm students and educators by 2026.

Nobody tracks what AI tools school districts are adopting or the policy they use to enforce standards, said Alix Gallagher, head of strategic partnerships at the Policy Analysis for California Education center at Stanford University. Since the state does not track curriculum that school districts adopt or software in use, it would be highly unusual for them to track AI contracts, she said.

Amid AI hype, Gallagher thinks people can lose sight of the fact that the technology is just a tool and it will only be as good or problematic as the decisions of the humans using that tool, which is why she repeatedly urges investments in helping teachers understand AI tools and how to be thoughtful about their use and making space for communities are given voice about how to best meet their kid’s needs.

“Some people will probably make some pretty bad decisions that are not in the best interests of kids, and some other people might find ways to use maybe even the same tools to enrich student experiences,” she said.

Teachers use AI to grade English papers

Last summer, Jen Roberts, an English teacher at Point Loma High School in San Diego, went to a training session to learn how to use Writable, an AI tool that automates grading writing assignments and gives students feedback powered by OpenAI. For the past school year, Roberts used Writable and other AI tools in the classroom, and she said it’s been the best year yet of nearly three decades of teaching. Roberts said it has made her students better writers, not because AI did the writing for them, but because automated feedback can tell her students faster than she can how to improve, which in turn allows her to hand out more writing assignments.

“At this point last year, a lot of students were still struggling to write a paragraph, let alone an essay with evidence and claims and reasoning and explanation and elaboration and all of that,” Roberts said. “This year, they’re just getting there faster.”

Roberts feels Writable is “very accurate” when grading her students of average aptitude. But, she said, there’s a downside: It sometimes assigns high-performing students lower grades than merited and struggling students higher grades. She said she routinely checks answers when the AI grades assignments, but only checks the feedback it gives students occasionally.

“In actual practicality, I do not look at the feedback it gives every single student,” she said. “That’s just not a great use of my time. But I do a lot of spot checking and I see what’s going on and if I see a student that I’m worried about get feedback, (I’m like) ‘Let me go look at what his feedback is and then go talk to him about that.’”

First: A student uses Magic School, an AI platform, to help generate ideas for a classroom writing prompt. Last: A student reads their writing out loud. Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024.

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Alex Rainey teaches English to fourth graders at Chico Country Day School in northern California. She used GPT-4, a language model made by OpenAI which costs $20 a month, to grade papers and provide feedback. After uploading her grading rubric and examples of her written feedback, she used AI to grade assignments about animal defense mechanisms, allowing GPT-4 to analyze students’ grammar and sentence structure while she focused on assessing creativity.

“I feel like the feedback it gave was very similar to how I grade my kids, like my brain was tapped into it,” she said.

Like Roberts she found that it saves time, transforming work that took hours into less than an hour, but also found that sometimes GPT-4 is a tougher grader than she is. She agrees that quicker feedback and the ability to dole out more writing assignments produces better writers. A teacher can assign more writing before delivering feedback but “then kids have nothing to grow from.”

Rainey said her experience grading with GPT-4 left her in agreement with Roberts, that more feedback and writing more often produces better writers. She feels strongly that teachers still need to oversee grading and feedback by AI, “but I think it’s amazing. I couldn’t go backwards now.”

The cost of using AI in the classroom

Contracts involving artificial intelligence can be lucrative.

To launch a chatbot named Ed, Los Angeles Unified School District signed a $6.2 million contract for two years with the option of renewing for three additional years. Magic School AI is used by educators in Los Angeles and costs $100 per teacher per year.

Despite repeated calls and emails over the span of roughly a month, Writable and the San Diego Unified School District declined to share pricing details with CalMatters. A district spokesperson said teachers got access to Writeable through a contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for English language learners.

QuillBot is an AI-powered writing tool for students in grades 4-12 made by the company Quill. Quill says its tool is currently used at 1,000 schools in California and has more than 13,000 student and educator users in San Diego alone. An annual Quill Premium subscription costs $80 per teacher or $1800 per school.

QuillBot does not generate writing for students like ChatGPT or grade writing assignments, but gives students feedback on their writing. Quill is a nonprofit that’s raised $20 million from groups like Google’s charitable foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation over the past 10 years.

English teacher Jen Roberts explains to her students how she uses Magic School, an AI platform, for classroom exercises and grading at Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024.

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Even if a teacher or district wants to shell out for an AI tool, guidance for safe and responsible use is still getting worked out.

Governments are placing high-risk labels on forms of AI with the power to make critical decisions about whether a person gets a job or rents an apartment or receives government benefits. California Federation of Teachers President Jeff Freitas said he hasn’t considered whether AI for grading is moderate or high risk, but “it definitely is a risk to use for grading.”

The California Federation of Teachers is a union with 120,000 members. Freitas told CalMatters he’s concerned about AI having a number of consequences in the classroom. He’s worried administrators may use it to justify increasing classroom sizes or adding to teacher workloads; he’s worried about climate change and the amount of energy needed to train and deploy AI models’ he’s worried about protecting students’ privacy, and he’s worried about automation bias.

Regulators around the world wrestling with AI praise approaches where it is used to augment human decision-making instead of replacing it. But it’s difficult for laws to account for automation bias and humans becoming placing too much trust in machines.

The American Federation of Teachers created an AI working group in October 2023 to propose guidance on how educators should use the technology or talk about it in collective bargaining contract negotiations. Freitas said those guidelines are due out in the coming weeks.

“We’re trying to provide guidelines for educators to not solely rely on (AI), he said. “It should be used as a tool, and you should not lose your critical analysis of what it’s producing for you.”

State AI guidelines for teachers

Goyette, the computer science coordinator for the education department, helped create state AI guidelines and speaks to county offices of education for in-person training on AI for educators. She also helped create an online AI training series for educators. She said the most popular online course is about workflow and efficiency, which shows teachers how to automate lesson planning and grading.

“Teachers have an incredibly important and tough job, and what’s most important is that they’re building relationships with their students,” she said. “There’s decades of research that speaks to the power of that, so if they can save time on mundane tasks so that they can spend more time with their students, that’s a win.”

English teacher Jen Roberts checks her student’s work at Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024. Roberts uses AI platforms for classroom exercises and grading. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

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Alex Kotran, chief executive of an education nonprofit that’s supported by Google and OpenAI, said they found that it’s hard to design a language model to predictably match how a teacher grades papers.

He spoke with teachers willing to accept a model that’s accurate 80% of the time in order to reap the reward of time saved, but he thinks it’s probably safe to say that a student or parent would want to make sure an AI model used for grading is even more accurate.

Kotran of the AI Education Project thinks it makes sense for school districts to adopt a policy that says teachers should be wary any time they use AI tools that can have disparate effects on student’s lives.

Even with such a policy, teachers can still fall victim to trusting AI without question. And even if the state kept track of AI used by school districts, there’s still the possibility that teachers will purchase technology for use on their personal computers.

When teachers can’t tell if they’re cheating

Kotran said he routinely speaks with educators across the U.S. and is not aware of any systematic studies to verify the effectiveness and consistency of AI for grading English papers.

Roberts, the Point Loma High School teacher, describes herself as pro technology.

She regularly writes and speaks about AI. Her experiences have led her to the opinion that grading with AI is what’s best for her students, but she didn’t arrive at that conclusion easily.

At first she questioned whether using AI for grading and feedback could hurt her understanding of her students. Today she views using AI like the cross-country coach who rides alongside student athletes in a golf cart, like an aid that helps her assist her students better.

A student scrolls through their laptop during class at Point Loma High School in San Diego on May 3, 2024.

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Roberts says the average high school English teacher in her district has roughly 180 students. Grading and feedback can take between five to 10 minutes per assignment she says, so between teaching, meetings, and other duties, it can take two to three weeks to get feedback back into the hands of students unless a teacher decides to give up large chunks of their weekends. With AI, it takes Roberts a day or two.

Ultimately she concluded that “if my students are growing as writers, then I don’t think I’m cheating.” She says AI reduces her fatigue, giving her more time to focus on struggling students and giving them more detailed feedback.

“My job is to make sure you grow, and that you’re a healthy, happy, literate adult by the time you graduate from high school, and I will use any tool that helps me do that, and I’m not going to get hung up on the moral aspects of that,” she said. “My job is not to spend every Saturday reading essays. Way too many English teachers work way too many hours a week because they are grading students the old-fashioned way.”

Roberts also thinks AI might be a less biased grader in some instances than human teachers who can adjust their grading for students sometimes to give them the benefit of the doubt or be punitive if they were particularly annoying in class recently.

She isn’t worried about students cheating with AI, a concern she characterizes as a moral panic. She points to a Stanford University study released last fall which found that students cheated just as much before the advent of ChatGPT as they did a year after the release of the AI.

Goyette said she understands why students question whether some AI use by teachers is like cheating. Education department AI guidelines encourage teachers and students to use the technology more. What’s essential, Goyette said, is that teachers discuss what ethical use of AI looks like in their classroom, and convey that — like using a calculator in math class — using AI is accepted or encouraged for some assignments and not others.

For the last assignment of the year, Robers has one final experiment to run: Edit an essay written entirely by AI. But they must change at least 50% of the text, make it 25% longer, write their own thesis, and add quotes from classroom reading material. The idea, she said, is to prepare them for a future where AI writes the first draft and humans edit the results to fit their needs.

“It used to be you weren’t allowed to bring a calculator into the SATs and now you’re supposed to bring your calculator so things change,” she said. “It’s just moral panic. Things change and people freak out and that’s what’s happening.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill directing the state to coordinate the temporary deployment of thousands of police officers to the Los Angeles region for the 2028 Olympics and Paralympics.

Law enforcement officials are expecting to deploy up to 16,000 officers a day across the region during the mega-event, according to Los Angeles Police Department Commander Mario Mota, who is part of the department’s major events group. Overall, Mota said, they anticipate needing between 24,000 and 30,000 officers. With those numbers, local law enforcement agencies, including LAPD, don’t have the personnel to staff the Games on their own and will need to bring in outside officers.

That’s where the new legislation comes in. The bill, AB 2411, requires the state’s Office of Emergency Services to negotiate agreements with outside law enforcement agencies to temporarily deploy in the L.A. area during the Games. It also directs the state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to create a training program for officers coming from out of state.

“ We want to make sure that officers coming from other states have the same trainings that our officers do here in California,” said California Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, who wrote the bill and represents Inglewood and Venice Beach, both Olympic venue locations. “The reason why we did this is because we need more officers.”

LAPD alone estimates it will need 6,703 personnel a day during the busiest period of the Summer Games, according to a May budget memo. According to those estimates, LAPD can only deploy a third of that number from its own ranks, and the rest will need to come from other law enforcement agencies.

It’s unclear how much these agreements could cost the state of California. Security planning for the Olympics and Paralympics in Los Angeles is being overseen by the U.S. Secret Service, and the federal government has allocated $1 billion to security costs. The fiscal analysis for the bill assumes that the federal coffers will cover the cost of bringing in other law enforcement agencies.

But if it doesn’t, the Office of Emergency Services estimates that contracting costs could be more than $1 billion.

WASHINGTON — The federal agency in charge of air traffic control is turning to artificial intelligence to help manage the nation's airspace.

The Federal Aviation Administration officially launched its ambitious $875-million software overhaul on Monday, announcing the rollout would begin at three major airports that serve the Washington, D.C., region.

The new system is known as Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART for short.

"By fundamentally reshaping how we manage our airspace and preventing problems before they happen, SMART will slash those frustrating delays, reduce stress on air traffic controllers, and lower travel prices," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement.

Regulators and airlines hope the AI-enhanced tool will make flying more efficient, though critics warn that it won't solve bigger problems with the air traffic control system.

FAA and DOT leaders emphasize that the new technology is not intended as a replacement for human air traffic controllers. They describe it as a tool that's supposed to make controllers' jobs easier by reducing congestion and conflicts in the air before they happen.

"The way we manage traffic today is chaotic and we can do better," said FAA administrator Bryan Bedford during a Senate hearing earlier this year. "We need to manage that at the FAA, rather than rely on commercial airlines to simply schedule however they want."

FAA leaders say the SMART system will help optimize the nation's airspace by considering all planned airline flights, as well as weather, wind, and other variables, and tweaking those flight schedules to reduce congestion.

It's part of a broader $12.5 billion push to modernize the nation's air traffic control system.

The FAA tapped a relatively small company called Air Space Intelligence to build the system. The company has previously made AI-enhanced software for dispatchers at Alaska Airlines and other carriers, but this project presents a significantly bigger and higher-profile test.

Skeptics question whether the SMART system will be the game-changer FAA leaders have promised.

"It won't replace humans. It'll be another tool in the toolbox," said Dave Riley, a former air traffic controller who retired in 2020 after more than 20 years at the FAA. "But of course, when you call it AI, it gets a lot of attention."

Riley downplayed concerns of the AI tool going rogue because human air traffic controllers will still be in charge of keeping planes safely separated.

"The fears of AI killing us all in the next 10 years, I don't think this platform is going to be about that," he said.

But Riley doubts the tool will do much to solve the bigger problems in the air traffic control system — particularly the staffing shortage. The FAA is still thousands of certified air traffic controllers short of full staffing, forcing many controllers to work mandatory overtime and grueling schedules.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union that represents controllers, distanced itself from the new system.

"NATCA has not been involved in the design, testing, or implementation of SMART and therefore cannot speak to its effect on the air traffic control workforce at this time," the union said in a statement.

Airlines for America, the trade association that represents the major airlines in Washington, praised the FAA's push to modernize the nation's flight management tools.

"Its potential to strengthen safety, increase capacity and improve efficiency will have a direct positive effect on American travelers," the group said in a statement. "We're just in the initial stages, but it's one of the most exciting and bold initiatives taken on by the FAA in decades."

Copyright 2026 NPR

As governments and political leaders increasingly push for regulations to rein in artificial intelligence, neither candidate for California governor has committed to firm policies on AI safety, including two requirements Gov. Gavin Newsom called for Friday.

Both Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton say the new technology warrants more regulations. AI has been in the spotlight since last week when an Anthropic researcher quit, declaring on social media, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

CalMatters asked both candidates about what they would do to address AI risks.

In a Thursday interview, Hilton said addressing AI risks would be a “very urgent priority” if he were to become governor, and said he’s “very interested” in considering regulations safety advocates are seeking such as requiring AI developers to undergo safety monitoring from external evaluators. But on Friday he followed up to say he does not support Newsom’s call to require AI developers to program a “kill switch” to shut down models during emergencies, calling such a proposal “a gimmick.”

He also stopped short of endorsing other policies such as requiring external monitoring, saying he doesn’t want to rush during the recent panic into “really bad regulation.”

Becerra’s campaign declined to make him available for an interview, instead issuing a statement that said “California cannot accept technology that poses catastrophic risks to public safety.”

“As governor, (Becerra) will set firm guardrails around real harms — including harms that could emerge when AI accelerates dangerous capabilities or operates beyond human oversight — and ensure California's AI safety laws are actively enforced,” his spokesperson Jonathan Underland wrote.

Becerra is leading Hilton by 22 percentage points in the race to replace Newsom in November, according to polling from the Public Policy Institute of California released this week.

Newsom on Friday issued an executive order directing state agencies to develop safety recommendations including external evaluations and kill switches, despite vetoing legislation that would have done that two years ago.

The governor asked for the recommendations by Nov. 16, raising the possibility he could call a special legislative session in his final weeks in office to implement them.

Underland did not respond when CalMatters asked whether Becerra would implement those recommendations. Hilton, while opposing the “kill switch” idea, said he supports Newsom’s move to convene a panel to recommend AI safety policies and would do the same.

Meanwhile, advocates for more regulations on tech companies say it is critical for California to adopt tougher rules since President Donald Trump has dismissed recent warnings about AI risks and said he remains committed to speeding up development in the face of foreign competition.

“The incoming governor has a really grave responsibility to make sure we get this right,” said Scott Wisor, policy director at the national Secure AI Project. “I think it should be the very top priority for them when they come into office.”

Half of all Americans are anxious about AI-driven job losses and community backlash to building data centers is now a bipartisan issue ahead of the November election. But California is one of the few states moving to regulate AI to address the potential of catastrophic harm, such as AI agents creating a bioweapon or bringing down the power grid.

Newsom last year signed Senate Bill 53, which requires transparency from large AI model developers on how they manage catastrophic risks — defined as the potential to contribute to 50 or more deaths, the release of chemical or biological weapons or more than $1 billion in theft or damage. The law forces companies to report safety incidents to the state that cause deaths, injuries of “materialized catastrophic harm.”

But proponents of the technology caution against overregulation. Newsom and lawmakers want to keep the industry in California, where the AI boom is driving San Francisco’s economy and delivering billions of dollars of tax revenue into state coffers.

New politics of artificial intelligence

In 2024, Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 1047, which would have required the monitoring and kill switches he’s now seeking and imposed stricter liability for companies when their agents cause damage.

“At that time, you could not utter a sentence about AI without making sure there was a comma, and before the comma was something about the risks and after the comma was something about curing cancer,” said state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Napa Democrat who chairs the privacy and technology committee. “There is no doubt the conversation has changed.”

Recent incidents in which AI agents went rogue appeared to confirm researchers’ fears that people could lose control of the technology. Most famously, over the summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents broke out of a contained testing environment, gained access to the internet and coordinated with each other to orchestrate a cyberattack on the startup Hugging Face. OpenAI and Anthropic have since disclosed additional similar incidents.

Dreamforce attendees explore the agentic enterprise city at the conference in San Francisco on Sept. 15, 2026.

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Some industry leaders now embrace third-party safety auditing; in their calls for a development slowdown, both Anthropic and OpenAI said they would commit to giving external evaluators employee-level access to their systems.

Seve Christian, director of California policy at Encode AI, which sponsored the law that requires AI companies to disclose how they handle catastrophic risks, also wants the state to enforce minimum safety standards before AI products are released to the public, similar to how the government ensures planes are airworthy or drugs are safe.

Christian said the group is “cautiously optimistic” about Becerra’s general call for stricter regulations. Encode AI is a donor to Becerra’s campaign.

Bahrad Sokhansanj, a senior research scholar at the Institute for Law and AI, said the state should also make sure it has the legal authority to shut down an AI model itself during emergencies — for example, if a model were carrying out a cyberattack on a power plant.

“Everything we have now was designed for malware, or the cybersecurity problems of 10 or 15 years ago,” he said.

Hilton ready to ban AI in schools

Asked this week whether Becerra supports mandating kill switches and third-party monitoring, Underland wrote only that he “will ensure California's existing AI safety requirements are actively enforced, he will close the gaps that allow bad actors to evade accountability, and strengthen standards as the technology evolves.”

Underland said Becerra’s campaign has held meetings with AI researchers, economists, advocates and industry leaders, but declined to name them.

Echoing other skeptics, Hilton said he thinks industry warnings of the potential collapse of humanity are “reckless and irresponsible.”

“If they really believed what they were doing, that they’re about to try and raise money to do more of, would end the human race, they would stop working on it immediately,” he said. “It’s just obvious that they don’t really mean it.”

Hilton has focused on what he called “practical action that could and should be taken on AI, that most people would agree with and that are not that complicated.” He said on the first day of his administration he would call for a statewide halt on using AI in schools, as the New York and Los Angeles school districts have done. He has endorsed a bill on Newsom’s desk, Senate Bill 947, that would prohibit employers from solely using automated systems to discipline or fire workers.

That position puts him in surprising alignment with the California Labor Federation and in opposition to the California Chamber of Commerce, both of which endorsed Becerra.

Underland said Becerra supports “clear, proportionate, and workable transparency and human review standards for high-stakes automated decisions that affect a person's livelihood,” but stopped short of supporting that bill.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California college students without legal immigration status still cannot work at public colleges and universities after Gov. Gavin Newsom again vetoed a bill Sunday that would have given them that right.

Assembly Bill 713 would have adopted an untested legal theory that argues that a 1986 federal law barring employers from hiring workers in the country without authorization doesn’t apply to state governments. The logic? That 40-year-old law doesn’t mention state governments as a type of employer that cannot hire workers without proper status.

But for the second time in three years, Newsom decided that adopting that theory for California would expose the state’s higher-education system to the wrath of the federal government.

“The current federal government has shown it is quick to wreak destruction for political spectacle — attacking California's public higher education institutions and terrorizing immigrant communities, including students, with reckless disregard for consequences and a desire for chaos,” Newsom wrote in his veto message.

He added: “But given the gravity of this bill's consequences — including potential criminal and civil liability for state employees — the federal courts must resolve the legality of the novel legal theory behind this legislation before we proceed. Seeking declaratory relief in federal court would provide such clarity.”

Newsom vetoed a nearly identical bill in 2024.

The latest bill by Assemblymember José Luis Solache, a Democrat from Lakewood, was meant to allow the estimated 60,000 students without legal immigration status at California’s community college and public universities to earn paychecks safely on campuses instead of working for cash under the table. Backers of the bill say campus jobs could be tailored to fit the students’ academic schedules or align with the research interests, such as employment in labs.

Campus jobs are a key way these students can afford college given that they are ineligible for federal Pell grants — up to $7,400 annually — and federal student loans that come with more borrower protections than ones offered by private lenders. California provides eligible in-state students tuition waivers regardless of their immigration status, so many of them can at least attend a public institution tuition-free.

“While California has a longstanding commitment to expanding access, affordability, and student success in higher education, our undocumented students continue to face significant financial and structural barriers,” Solache said at a bill hearing in June.

The University of California itself abandoned its review of employing students without legal status in 2024 out of fears that the federal government could punish the system by withholding federal money or prosecuting UC personnel.

That decision gutted a coalition of students who led the campaign to persuade the UC to voluntarily adopt the legal theory allowing them to work.

After Newsom vetoed the 2024 bill, a student and former lecturer at the UC sued the system. A state appellate court ruled that UC’s argument that the federal government might sue the system was an abuse of discretion under the state’s law that bans employment and housing discrimination. The court said UC’s policy of not hiring students without legal status was legally indefensible unless it can show that federal law requires the UC to continue its policy of not hiring undocumented students. The UC appealed, but the state Supreme Court let the appellate ruling stand. Still, the court ruling was silent on the soundness of the legal theory that the state can hire workers without legal status.

Newsom’s veto message indicated that a federal court must weigh in on the legal theory before California can adopt a law such as Solache’s.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.