Let’s start with the weather – which is extreme heat with 100 percent chance of irony and mostly illiterate public-school grads.

It’s been a rough few days for Californians. First, there was “California does little to ensure all kids read by third grade,” John Fensterwald’s magnificent appraisal of the dismal state of our union-run schools. You’ll want to read the entire piece — unless you’re a graduate of a California school, in which case, please see the picture book below. Here’s a summary of John’s story: 

California fourth graders trail the nation in reading, and half of its third graders, including two-thirds of Black students and 61 percent of Latino students, do not read at grade level. Yet, California is not among the states — including Mississippi, North Carolina, Florida, Connecticut, Colorado, Virginia and New York City — that have adopted comprehensive literacy plans to ensure that all children can read by third grade. And California has not set a timeline or given any indication it intends to create such a plan.

Mississippi?! Florida?! Forty years of union domination of our public schools, and California — once a producer of the world’s best educated — is at the bottom of the class with an “F” for effort, though the governor tells us that’s “F” for “FABULOUS.”

It’s like that terrible dream where you open the door to your classroom and find all the other states are already there and laughing at you — and, yes, there’s a test and you’re not wearing pants. Your Southern California is completely showing. 

Second, while they can’t read, our kids finally have access to the helpful “Genderbread Identity Man” picture books recommended for the state’s junior and high school students. (Please don’t ask how we know the Genderbread Identity Man is a “man.” Mom and dad just know things.) 

California’s kids may not be able to read but they can now point to the place on the Genderbread Man where they’re feeling oddly compelled to act on one of 10 sexual orientations. 

Third, California has also showed up sans-culottes in the nation’s news for this uncomfortable coincidence: state regulators said they’ll ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles beginning in 2035 even as other state regulators begged Californians not to charge the electric vehicles they’ve got now. This headline captures our shame: “Californians asked to keep AC at 78 and nix electric vehicle charges to spare grid.”

“Plan ahead now so you can stay cool and hydrated, especially if you have outdoor plans,” the National Weather Service warned Californians today. In a state with a government-engineered housing shortage, we’ll all soon have outdoor plans. 

Schools that can’t teach. Electric cars that can’t charge. Builders who can’t build. Workers who can’t work. This is what utopia looks like.

Living here is increasingly like living with Stalin’s infamous 5-Year Plans: no matter how emphatic the regulatory commands from the top, no mere mortal — not even a California state lawmaker — can suspend the laws of the marketplace without catastrophe. 

— by Will Swaim, president, California Policy Center
 

Legislative Update

Wednesday, August 31st was the last day for California’s state legislature to act on hundreds of bills before the end of the legislative session. Below you'll find our update on a dozen bills that CPC has been watching closely this year. Those approved by the legislature now head to Gov. Newsom’s desk, where he has until the end of September to sign or veto. 

What makes this year unusually interesting is Newsom’s presidential ambitions. Will his desire to run for the White House tame his enthusiasm for some of the legislature’s most extreme proposals now that he needs to appear — at least temporarily — more moderate to the rest of America? Newsom’s focus-grouped and PR-controlled legislative response is going to out-Hollywood Hollywood in his theatrical end of session signature affair.

Defeated: The following bills did not make their way out of the legislature.

• SB 866: Allowing children to override parents/doctors health decisions. Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) pulled his disastrous bill that would have allowed children to be vaccinated with any vaccine without their parents’ permission. (Weirdly, those same children cannot be trusted to opt out of vaccines without parental consent.) Wiener admitted Wednesday morning that he didn’t have enough votes and blamed “a small but highly vocal and organized minority of anti-vaxxers” for his surrender. But the reality is that parents of all political stripes won this hard-fought victory. Their grassroots campaigns against the bill reminded legislators that the people, not politicians, still hold the ultimate power in Sacramento — making it a huge win for every Californian. 

• SB 830: Incentivizing unions to count school kids who don’t show up. In exchanging average daily attendance for enrollment for K-12 formula spending, SB 830 invites kids to show up on their first week of school and never come back. With the disappearance of over a quarter million students from the public school system during the pandemic — many lost to private or home schools — teachers unions no longer want to compete for excellence in our classrooms, they simply want to be paid to show up to emptying classrooms. Fortunately, SB 830 never made it out of the Assembly Education Committee.

• SB 1273: Encourage more school shootings? Ever since the passage of SB 419 in 2019, willful defiance issues in the classroom have dramatically increased. SB 1273 would have only made the problem worse by continuing to erode teachers' ability to control the discipline in their classrooms and alert law enforcement of disruptive behavior, especially as it may apply or be a preamble for other more serious events like school shootings. Local school districts should be given wide deference on discipline issues, but the state and federal government leverage funding to ill-conceived anti-discipline policies that undermine local control. The Assembly Education Committee asserted a rare amount of clarity by not letting SB 1273 out of committee.

• SB 924: Furthering the work of Transparent California at the school district level. After CPC helped create the most comprehensive database of payroll and benefits of state employees in the nation, school districts balked at providing details about teachers’ salary and benefits. SB 924 would have required the State Controller to annually publish “information on annual compensation of employees of each school district, county office of education, charter school, and entity managing a charter school” on its website. The bill would have given parents and taxpayers the chance to see how much their teachers are paid compared to other districts. Unfortunately, the Assembly Appropriations killed one of the few good bills of the session.

Passed and on their way to the Governor’s desk. The bills below — passed by the legislature — are disastrous for liberty in California across many fronts. From forcing fast-food businesses to submit to a state-run union and trampling on parents’ rights to silencing physicians and political speech, there’s a lot to unpack here. But will Newsom sign this laundry list of unconstitutional government overreach?

• AB 257: Government takeover of fast-food franchises. AB 257 will allow the state of California to put 13 non-elected political appointees in charge of “negotiating” on behalf of workers at all California fast-food franchises with more than 30 stores nationwide. The union-backed bill will drive franchises out of the Golden State, destroying jobs and raising food prices in the low-income communities where fast-food employment opportunities have, until now, offered employees a career path from service counter to management and some of the highest wages in the nation. If Newsom wants to make it to the Oval Office, he’d be wise to jettison this job-killing albatross. 

• AB 2098: Silencing physicians' right to free speech. The legislature passed AB 2098 on Wednesday. The proposed law seeks to silence doctors and surgeons by designating the dissemination or promotion of "misinformation" or "disinformation" related to COVID-19 as unprofessional conduct subject to disciplinary action by California medical boards. And who would define what is “misinformation”? California’s ideologically-driven health bureaucrats, of course! This bill is a dangerous infringement on the rights of doctors and patients to communicate freely.
  
   

• SB 1479: Perpetual COVID testing in public schools. California’s K-12 students suffered immeasurable learning loss and a statewide mental health crisis because of California’s insistence on forcing the nation’s most restrictive COVID rules on kids. You’d think that would give state legislators pause, but they passed SB 1479 anyway. The bill would continue indefinitely COVID-19 testing in California schools for no reason whatsoever except that some bureaucrats don’t want the government’s power to control our lives, under the banner of the pandemic, to ever end. 

• SB 107 & SB 923: California to seize children from parents and rubber-stamp “gender-affirming care.” Under the guise of providing “gender affirming care” in two bills, SB 107 and SB 923, parents will lose control over the most basic aspect of their children’s lives — their identity. If parents refuse to go along with the contrary advice of social activists to provide puberty blockers, sterilize their children or permanently mutilate their children’s bodies, California will now assume responsibility for their children. And for those split households where a parent doesn’t consent to radical medical procedures or where children run away from their homes in other “non-woke” states to become wards of California, SB 107 essentially legalizes interstate kidnapping of these children.

• AB 2584: Making it harder to qualify recalls for the ballot. After a slew of recalls across the state, the legislature is getting nervous about their staying power. AB 2584 would increase the number of signatures required to initiate a recall. Newsom may be pondering his own failed recall as he considers whether to sign the bill, but he shouldn't forget that liberal San Francisco thought it necessary to yank three school board members and their District Attorney because of the harm they were doing to the city. Making it harder for the people to pull bad actors isn’t a great look for any aspiring president. 

• SB 955: Further politicizing our middle and high school students. It used to be that civics teachers would inspire their students to get involved in the political sphere in a non-partisan fashion by encouraging them to study hot topics, write letters to lawmakers, and even intern on a campaign. Some students would get extra credit for these kinds of extracurricular activities. Now a former union-boss-turned-legislator wants to make overt political activism an excused absence. Do we want to further politicize our schools?

• SB 834: Threatening the tax-exempt status of non-profits for ideologies conflicting with the government narrative. In an effort to control political activism of sincere free speech advocates, Senator Wiener is at it again. SB 834 would provide the Attorney General's office with powers to go after its political foes and remove their tax exempt status — functionally eliminating their ability to operate — under the guise of said non-profit inciting insurrection. We’ll see if the Governor wants to chill political speech. 
   

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