By Kevin Villani
August 28, 2026
California's political leaders often celebrate the state as a global engine of innovation, diversity, and progressive governance. Yet its public schools-despite record spending and one of the most liberal electorates in the nation-remain among America's worst. The contrast with Massachusetts is instructive. Boston Latin School, a public institution founded in 1635, still produces some of the strongest academic outcomes in the country. Massachusetts consistently ranks first in K-12 performance. California, by contrast, now sends entering freshmen to the University of California system who require math remediation at the level of third grade competency. UC San Diego has reported incoming students unable to perform basic arithmetic.
This is not a failure of universities. It is a failure of the primary school system-and the political structure that governs it.
The central obstacle is the political power of public sector teachers' unions. For decades, these unions have used their constitutional right to unlimited independent political spending to shape California's education policy. Under campaign finance jurisprudence, labor unions may spend voluntary funds on political advocacy without restriction. In practice, this allows public sector unions to convert tax funded salaries into political capital, directing millions toward the election of school board members, legislators, and governors who negotiate their contracts. They effectively sit on both sides of the bargaining table.
This arrangement has inverted the original promise of the Civil Rights movement. The reforms of the 1960s sought to secure equal opportunity under a colorblind constitutional framework. But the consolidation of public sector union power has produced a bureaucratic caste system that disproportionately harms lower income minority students. The mechanism is straightforward: unions protect adult job security at the expense of student performance.
In the private sector, market discipline acts as a natural check on union power. If a union demands inefficient work rules, the firm loses competitiveness and jobs disappear. In the public sector, this check does not exist. Government holds a permanent monopoly on K-12 education. Families cannot take their tax dollars elsewhere when their assigned school fails. And because unions help elect the officials who negotiate with them, the incentives of public management become misaligned. As economists like Thomas Sowell have noted, this creates a profound principal agent problem: elected officials prioritize the interests of the union over the interests of the children they are supposed to serve.
California's funding architecture magnifies this distortion. Under the Local Control Funding Formula, local property taxes are swept to Sacramento and redistributed through a labyrinth dominated by union lobbyists. Local school boards lose fiscal autonomy and must repeatedly petition the state to release constitutionally protected revenues. Compliance is rewarded; performance is not. San Diego Unified's recent battles to unlock withheld Proposition 98 funds illustrate the dynamic. The system funds bureaucracy, not outcomes.
The consequences are visible in every measure of student achievement. California's union monopoly enforces rigid "step and lane" salary schedules that reward seniority rather than effectiveness. Extreme tenure protections make removing chronically ineffective teachers nearly impossible.
Most damaging, unions use their political capital to block the School Choice movement-even though the families trapped in failing schools overwhelmingly support it. Polling consistently shows that lower income Black and Latino parents favor charter schools, vouchers, and open enrollment because these reforms offer the only realistic exit from dysfunctional, zip coded schools. Wealthy families already exercise school choice through private tuition or residential mobility. Working class families want the same agency. Teachers' unions work tirelessly to prevent it.
Universities cannot compensate for this upstream failure. When students arrive at UC San Diego performing math at a third grade level, the problem is not the university. It is the political structure that governs K-12 education. California's public sector unions have built a system that protects adult job security while suppressing minority upward mobility. The state's universities are left to remediate deficits that should never have existed.
True reform must begin where the damage begins: in the primary school classroom. California must dismantle the legal monopolies of public sector collective bargaining and establish universal school choice. Until families-especially minority families-have the ability to choose effective schools, the state will continue to produce university entrants who cannot perform basic arithmetic.
Kevin Villani graduated from Boston College High School, a competitor to Boston Latin.