A plan by Gov. Gavin Newsom to increase oversight of all low-performing student groups and focus additional money on the state’s poorest schools has angered a coalition of Black education and civil rights organizations that had pressed him for extra state funding to help Black students.
Lengthy discussions with the governor took a different turn because Newsom’s legal advisers warned that targeting Black students, whose academic performance trails every other racial and ethnic group, could run afoul of Proposition 209. The constitutional amendment, which California voters passed in 1996 and reaffirmed in 2020, bars state action based on race.
Rather than target funds to all Black students, Newsom’s plan would target the lowest-income schools that educate about 5% of all students and only 6% of Black students, an EdSource analysis shows. Black students make up 5.1% of the state’s students.
“It’s almost the opposite of what we were asking for,” said Debra Watkins, the founder and executive director of the California-based A Black Education Network.
Watkins is a member of the coalition that sought to increase funding to the roughly 80,000 Black students who do not already receive supplemental funding from the state. She said the governor’s proposal misses the point.
“We’re livid,” she said.
The divide surfaced last fall when Assemblymember Akilah Weber, D-La Mesa, proposed a bill that dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars in ongoing funding to all Black students statewide. The bill won broad legislative support, but Weber ultimately pulled the bill, AB 2774, after meeting with the governor and members of the California Legislative…
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