California talks endlessly about equity. But there is no equity in sending a Black child through school without teaching that child to read or do math at the standards of proficiency California has adopted for itself.
The numbers from Los Angeles Unified School District should set off alarms throughout California.
In 2015, just 24% of Black LAUSD students met or exceeded California’s standard in reading; only 15% in mathematics. By 2025, those numbers had risen to 36% and 25%, respectively.
Yes, that is improvement. But let’s not sugarcoat what these numbers mean: Nearly two-thirds of Black students still aren’t meeting the state standard in reading. Three out of four aren’t meeting the standard in math.
Now consider the trajectory.
Over a decade, Black reading proficiency in LAUSD increased 11.8 percentage points—about 1.18 points per year. If that decade-long rate continued, it would take approximately 54 more years to reach 100% proficiency.
Math is worse. The improvement was about 9.7 percentage points in ten years, or less than one point annually. At that pace, it would take approximately 78 more years to reach 100%.
These are straight-line extrapolations, not predictions. But that is precisely their value: they illustrate how unacceptable the historical rate of progress has been.
A five-year-old Black child entering kindergarten today cannot wait until roughly age 59 for the system to reach universal reading proficiency—or until age 83 for math.
Children get one childhood.
Parents already have tools California put on the books and then let atrophy. The Parent Empowerment Act I wrote—the Parent Trigger—was designed so a majority of parents at a chronically failing school could force a turnaround, a staff change, or a charter conversion instead of waiting another half-century. Open enrollment was meant to let a child leave a school that cannot teach reading. Those laws should be revived, enforced, and explained to parents, not buried by waivers and union pressure.
This should matter enormously in the race for Lieutenant Governor because education is not peripheral to that office. The Lieutenant Governor is a voting member of the University of California Board of Regents, California State University Board of Trustees, and California Community Colleges Board of Governors.
California cannot credibly promise college opportunity while accepting a K–12 system in which such large percentages of Black children aren’t meeting state standards.
From those boards, I will insist on the same standard I fought for in the Senate: honest assessment, a return to objective measures of college readiness, and an education pipeline that starts in kindergarten—not a public-works system that promotes students who cannot read and then wonders why the university has to remediate them.
And the consequences extend beyond college.
We have heard about the “school-to-prison pipeline” for decades. Education outcomes are not destiny, and academic struggles do not cause someone to commit a crime. But educational failure is one of the conditions policymakers should take seriously when confronting economic exclusion and involvement with the criminal-justice system. I know this because I have visited most prisons in California and worked with former Republican Governor Schwarzenegger in restoring rehabilitation in our correctional system.
Look at California’s prisons.
Black Californians constitute about 6% of the state’s adult population but 27% of its prisoners. Among imprisoned women, 24% are Black; among imprisoned men, 27% are Black.
The numbers for Californians under a death sentence are even more striking. As of September 3, 2026, California prison officials reported 183 Black people among 564 condemned inmates—32.45% of the condemned population.
That is an extraordinary disparity.
If we don’t educate, we risk continuing a pipeline in which too many young people encounter the criminal-justice system rather than a college campus.
I was once a Democrat—but I walked away, primarily over the abdication of responsibility for poor Black kids trapped in failing schools. Democrats then—and continue even now—to be unwilling to take on the powerful teachers’ unions in Sacramento, because that is the hand that butters their bread. Democrat candidates for office, including my opponent, giddily accept their endorsements, remaining silent or opposed to vital education reforms needed, such as school choice, teacher tenure laws, and merit pay linked to student learning outcomes. Merit pay linked to student outcomes is not an attack on teachers. It is the minimum a child in a 25-percent-proficient math classroom is owed.
That relationship deserves scrutiny—not because teachers are the enemy, but because children must be the priority. Yet the party that favored slavery and rode with the KKK fails to disassociate itself from the white robes it still symbolically casts over the educational outcomes of Black kids in California.
California must judge its education system by outcomes, not intentions; by literacy and numeracy, not political relationships; and by whether a child leaving our schools can actually read, calculate, think and compete.
Voters must demand accountability from school districts, administrators, legislators, and elected officials of both parties.
Because 54 years is not an education plan.
Seventy-eight years is not a plan either. It is a sentence passed on to children whose parents keep trusting a party that abandoned those children long ago.
And telling another generation of Black children to wait is not equity.
Teachers unions have long opposed state testing. We shouldn’t be surprised, because test scores, while imperfect, are the most powerful barometer of whether our kids are learning. And they are not.
California faces an education crisis. The test scores are telling us so. The disparities in our prisons remind us how high the stakes can become.
The question is whether the voters of California will be willing to finally treat those numbers with the urgency they deserve. Where is “with all deliberate speed” when it matters for Black children in California?
