By Steve Hilton
Two out of every three Black students in California are not meeting the state’s English standards. In 2025, only 33 percent did, compared with 50 percent of students statewide. That statewide number is bad enough. The result for Black children is a disgrace.
Think about what that means. Hundreds of thousands of children are being moved from grade to grade without the one skill every other subject depends on. By the end of third grade, children have to use reading to learn everything else. An Annie E. Casey Foundation study found that children who were not reading proficiently by then were four times more likely not to graduate high school on time. This is not just a disappointing test score. It is a child’s future being narrowed before he or she is ten.
I take this personally. My parents escaped communist Hungary and arrived in England with very little. My mother worked in a shop, my father in construction, and after he died while I was young, nothing felt secure. I had no family connections or carefully mapped-out path. But I learned to read, worked hard and made it to Oxford. Without that foundation, my life would have gone in a very different direction.
The people running California always have an excuse: poverty, language barriers, COVID, not enough money. Those things can make teaching harder. They do not make failure inevitable.
Mississippi proved it. In 2013, it ranked 49th in the country for fourth-grade reading. By 2024, it ranked ninth, after making early literacy and phonics a priority. California’s political class loves looking down on Mississippi. On reading, Mississippi should be looking down on us. We are richer, we spend more and we get worse results.
California finally passed AB 1454 last year, requiring newly adopted K–8 reading materials to include explicit, systematic phonics. Good. It should have happened years ago. But the deadlines for new materials and training standards stretch into 2027 and 2028. That is no comfort to a second-grader who cannot read today.
Under my education plan, we would act immediately. Through executive action and appointments to the State Board of Education, we would require phonics in every K–3 classroom. Not a vague nod to the “science of reading,” and not another optional framework districts can ignore. Children would be taught systematically how letters and sounds fit together. It is basic, it works and it should never have become controversial.
Parents also deserve the truth. Every public school would receive a clear A-to-F grade based on student proficiency, beginning with third-grade results. The point is not to shame anyone. It is to make failure impossible to hide. Schools that kept failing would go into state-directed special measures, with new leadership or a new strategy.
If a school received a D for two years running, parents could use an expanded Parent Trigger to demand administrative changes, a curriculum overhaul or conversion to a charter school. Parents should not have to become education-policy experts, hire a lawyer or spend years fighting the bureaucracy just to get a decent school for their child.
The best teachers are often the people most frustrated by the present system. We should reward them. We should also stop granting tenure before we know someone can do the job. Under my plan, tenure would come only after at least five years of demonstrated performance, and schools could remove persistently poor performers faster. Protecting adults from accountability cannot come before teaching children to read.
If the system still will not fix a failing school, families must be free to leave it. We would start Education Savings Accounts with low-income families and students with special needs, and open enrollment across district lines. A child’s future should not depend on a ZIP code or whether the parents can afford to move.
The answer from California’s political establishment to every failure is more money. California already spends roughly $22,700 per student, nearly $4,000 more than the rest of the country, while our national reading scores remain below average. This plan requires no new spending. It requires the state to use the authority and money it already has, and to stop pretending another grant program will cure a failure of leadership.
Black parents do not need another speech about equity from politicians who presided over these results. They need schools that teach their children to read, and the power to act when those schools do not. We know what works. The people in charge have simply refused to do it. That ends when I am governor.
