Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a budget bill that hands most of the state superintendent's authority to a new governor-appointed Education Commissioner, just months before voters elect the next superintendent.
California's Superintendent of Public Instruction has been an elected office since statehood. Come January 15, 2027, it will barely be one. Newsom signed AB 181 last week, a budget trailer bill that transfers day-to-day control of the California Department of Education to a new Education Commissioner, appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. The elected superintendent keeps a title, a seat on an expanded 13-member state Board of Education, and not much else.
The bill cleared the Senate 21 to 4, the bare minimum for passage in the 40-member chamber, and the Assembly 53 to 5 with 22 members not voting, according to EdSource. It moved as part of budget negotiations rather than as standalone legislation, meaning no standard committee hearings and no real public comment period before Newsom's signature.
Sonja Shaw, the Chino Valley Unified School Board president who won the June primary for state superintendent and is a registered Republican, called the move exactly what it looks like. "To me it's a direct assault by Gavin Newsom and the rest of the legislators that are going along with it," Shaw said. "He's obviously going around the California constitution." Shaw is now exploring legal challenges, arguing the superintendent's duties are enshrined in the state constitution and cannot simply be reassigned by a budget rider.
The timing is hard to separate from the politics. Shaw is one of two candidates on the November ballot for an office that Newsom's own party has held for decades but where Democrats now face a real contest. Strip the job of its power before a conservative can win it, and the office becomes a formality, a vote among thirteen on a board the governor still shapes through his own commissioner appointment.
Newsom's office and legislative allies have framed AB 181 as a governance fix, aimed at streamlining a department that reports to an elected official with limited managerial experience in running a multibillion-dollar bureaucracy. That may be a defensible argument for reform. It is a much weaker argument for doing it through a budget trailer bill with no hearings, timed to land right before an election where the current arrangement might flip to the other party.
Even Newsom's allies balked
Opposition wasn't confined to Republicans. California Teachers Association president David Goldberg criticized Newsom for jamming the measure through budget negotiations instead of letting it go through the ordinary legislative process, according to EdSource and Stocktonia. The CTA's objection wasn't ideological so much as procedural: voters who cast ballots in June for a superintendent candidate did so believing that person would actually run the Department of Education. Now that job goes to someone the public never voted for at all.
That is the part of this story that should worry anyone who cares about accountability in government, regardless of party. California voters have directly elected their schools chief for more than a century. AB 181 doesn't abolish the office. It hollows it out, leaving a figurehead with a vote on an oversized board while the governor's handpicked commissioner runs the Department of Education, administers state and federal funding, and shapes the education budget.
Parents who have spent the last few years fighting for more say over curriculum, school choice and transparency now face a state schools bureaucracy answering more directly to the governor's office than ever before, no matter who California elects in November. Shaw's legal challenge, if she files one, will test whether a constitutionally created elected office can be gutted through a budget maneuver. Until a court rules, the office California voters thought they were choosing this fall will exist mostly on paper.
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