The next state superintendent of public instruction won’t be managing the California Department of Education anymore.

The department’s control will shift in January to a new director of education, who will report to the governor, under a deal announced Friday as part of budget negotiations between legislative leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The Legislature is expected to approve the plan, along with the 2026-27 state budget bills, on Monday or Tuesday. The details of the realignment are in a new bill, Assembly Bill 181, which combines Newsom’s plan and legislation proposed by two San Diego Democratic Assembly members, Darshana Patel and David Alvarez.

Newsom made the realignment of the TK-12 bureaucracy a priority in his last state of the state address and initial budget proposal for the 2026-27 budget in January. He acted on recommendations in an extensive analysis issued in December by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a nonprofit research institute based at Stanford University.

Under the current system, governors and the State Board of Education members that they appoint create programs but lack the authority to implement and monitor them; that has been the responsibility of the state superintendent. The result, PACE said, contributes to inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

“This represents one of the most significant education governance reforms in California’s history,” said Lupita Cortez Alcalá, PACE executive director. “This law recognizes that improving education requires more than bold investments — it requires clear leadership, rigorous evaluation and a commitment to continuous learning.”

Widespread Support for Change

Dozens of education organizations and advocacy groups endorsed the reform concept in hopes that the restructuring would make the state’s education system run better, reducing confusion and complaints from schools and parents about the rollout of programs like transitional kindergarten and efforts to improve underperforming schools.

“California can no longer postpone reforms that have been recommended regularly for a century. So we are going to modernize the governance system by unifying the policy-making State Board with the Department of Education that implements those policies,” Newsom said in a statement.

Ted Lempert, president of the advocacy organization Children Now, who gathered support for the reforms, said, “Newsom deserves a lot of credit. This is clearly an issue that needed strong leadership after all of these decades calling for change.”

Currently, only a dozen states, including California, split the authority of the state’s education system between an elected state superintendent and the governor. In most states, either the governor or the state board of education appoints the top education official.

The last four California superintendents have been legislators without experience managing a large education system. The two candidates running in the November election for state superintendent, Sonja Shaw and Richard Barrera, are school board members of the Chino Valley Unified and San Diego Unified school districts, respectively. They, along with the other candidates for state superintendent, opposed reducing the job’s authority.

CTA Criticizes the Deal Cut by Newsom

The California Teachers Association also criticized the reform plan, pointing out that voters only recently voted for candidates assuming they would run the Department of Education.

On Friday, hours after the release of AB 181, Barrera told EdSource, “While I need to take some time to work through the details of the agreement, my focus as SPI will remain the same: I will work to pull students, parents, educators and all stakeholders together around a vision of fully funded schools where young people thrive.”

Shaw issued a press release calling the bill “an unprecedented, unconstitutional power grab by Newsom,” and called on legislators to defeat it.

“This bill is a direct assault by Gavin Newsom on the California Constitution and the will of the voters,” Shaw said. “Voters elect their State Superintendent to serve as an independent voice for California education, not as a figurehead. This bill strips that office of its core duties and hands them to a political appointee. It removes critical checks and balances, and tells parents their votes no longer matter.”

AB 181 Takes Effect on Jan. 15

Under AB 181, which takes effect Jan. 15, the next governor will appoint, and the state Senate will confirm, the new director of education, who will assume all the responsibilities and duties of the Department of Education.

But that would be only the first stage of a larger restructuring. By June 30, 2027, the education director will develop recommendations for clarifying and streamlining the current system of education oversight and school improvement, hindered by overlapping responsibilities. They include county offices of education, the state education department and a small agency, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence.

Then, the director will discuss the findings and recommendations with the governor and the Legislature before issuing a final report on Oct. 1, 2027.

“The 58 county superintendents back this proposal because lack of unified state direction forces schools to absorb the cost of competing priorities, making sustained improvement unlikely,” said Ed Manansala, El Dorado County superintendent of schools.

The next state superintendent, no longer running the state’s Department of Education, would gain different responsibilities while retaining the role “as the independently elected nonpartisan voice for the public interest in the governance of the state’s educational system,” the bill said.  The superintendent would become a voting member of the State Board of Education and the 19th member of the Community College System Board of Governors, in addition to serving in existing roles as a Cal State University trustee and University of California regent.

The bill envisions the state superintendent’s role evolving into an independent evaluator of education programs for the Legislature, and an unofficial ombudsman on the public’s behalf, leveraging the position’s independence to oversee the state’s education system.

The education director will submit a plan by June 30, 2027, for the resources and funding for the state superintendent to handle these new responsibilities.

State Ed Board Expands to 13 Members

In exchange for concentrating more control over the TK-12 system to the governor, the Senate president pro tem and the Assembly speaker will each appoint a new member to the State Board of Education, expanding the board from 11 to 13 members.

The Senate and Assembly are expected to hold a hearing on the bill on Monday and then vote on it, in conjunction with a budget package that will take effect July 1.

CTA President David Goldberg criticized Newsom for jamming the legislation through budget negotiations rather than allowing it to go through the standard legislative process with hearings and public comment.

Lempert said he expects AB 181 to pass, as Newsom negotiated with legislative leaders after blending the governor’s proposal with ideas contained in AB 2117, the bill that Patel, who chairs the Assembly Education Committee, and Alvarez, who chairs the Assembly Budget Committee subcommittee on education, authored.

Michael Kirst, who chaired the state board for 16 years, during Gov. Jerry Brown’s four terms in office, in the 1970s and then from 2010 to 2018, said the new law would represent “the culmination of longstanding recommendations to modernize a governance structure that has remained largely unchanged while California’s education system has grown dramatically in size, complexity and responsibility.”

“It marks an important milestone in aligning California’s education governance with the needs of today’s students, educators and schools,” he said.