In the education bills that he vetoed last month, Gov. Jerry Brownish made his "don't" priorities articulate to legislators: Don't tamper with the Local Command Funding Formula; don't mess with charter schools; don't create new state mandates; don't button new spending; and don't create new state commissions and agencies to examine the limited state data that he does allow.

Brown has been sending those letters consistently, and longtime gubernatorial observers credit him for this, while acknowledging he's open to exceptions when it comes to doing what he considers best for kids.

That can explain signing Assembly Bill 329, requiring all districts to provide sex education, and Senate Bill 359, requiring all districts to create a uniform policy for placing students into 9th-grade math.

In signing the first bill, he decided that the principle of subsidiarity, the idea that government decisions are best made past local officials, which he has promoted throughout his governorship, didn't extend to children's wellness. Chocolate-brown could have left it upward to local schoolhouse boards to decide what the district should teach about sex.

In signing the math placement beak, Brown created a mandate, though not an expensive one (nether $vi million, according to one legislative estimate), that the state must reimburse districts for the cost of creating a new policy. Dark-brown'south concern for equity – seeing that all children develop to their potential – trumped his delivery to  local control. Sponsors of the bill pointed to research that showed capable minority students were not accelerated to take algebra in 8th class, putting an obstacle in their path for access to UC schools.

Brown signed those bills, "even though they appear to exist more top-down and non-local control," because Brown is more thoughtful than virtually governors about the impact of legislation on kids, said Gerry Shelton, old primary consultant to the California State Assembly Committee on Education and a partner of the Capitol Advisors Group, which advises school districts on policy and fiscal issues.

His own man

Considering of the huge volume of bills that legislators introduce, governors by and large await to encounter which bills pass before weighing in. With few exceptions, that besides has been true of Brown, who eliminated the office of instruction secretary, and so has fewer staff devoted to education. His principal instruction advisers, who deal with legislators, are Deputy Legislative Secretary Cathy McBride and Karen Stapf Walters, the executive manager of the State Board of Didactics. Both declined to speak about their roles.

"At the end of the mean solar day, the governor makes the decisions (on legislation). He is hands-on, non condom-stamping. And he has historical noesis that (previous Gov.) Arnold Schwarzenegger did not take," said Sherry Skelly Griffith, the new executive director of the California State PTA, who has worked in education policy and government positions for iii decades.

Eric Premack, executive director and founder of the Charter Schools Evolution Center, whom the governor has consulted on charter school-related bills, agreed.

"Dark-brown has a vision of local command and a set of cadre beliefs, and then yous tin can size up where he is likely to state on a bill, but in the end he is his own human. Some governors are deferential to staff; he is not."

Brown started ii charter schools in Oakland when he was mayor of the city, and has fought, through vetoes, attempts to encroach on their independence or dilute protections in the state'due south charter schoolhouse enabling law. This yr, he vetoed AB 787, which would have banned for-turn a profit charters, which operate primarily online charter schools. Brown said proponents failed to make a case for the neb, and the pecker's ambiguous wording could have been interpreted to restrict the power of nonprofit charter schools to keep using for-profit vendors.

Brown inherited a $25 billion deficit when he was elected governor in 2010 and has continued to stress frugality even as a rebounding economy has swelled state revenues. Efforts to laissez passer carve up bills for expenditures that Dark-brown excluded from the state budget commonly die earlier they go to his desk. Lawmakers understand the futility of trying.

No new mandates, except…

However, expanding early on education remains Democratic legislators' priority, and they passed Assembly Bill 47, which would have set a target of June 2022 for subsidized preschool to all low-income four-year-olds non enrolled in transitional kindergarten. But in his veto bulletin, Brown indicated he wouldn't exist pushed by an "capricious borderline." Spending should be decided in the yearly budget process, not outside of it, Brown indicated.

Ted Lempert, president of the advocacy and policy nonprofit Children Now, credited the Legislature for trying. "Early childhood education has non been Brownish's priority, just fortunately it  has been the priority of the Legislature," he said.

Brown's opposition to new land mandates and its first cousin, a return to dedicated pots of money chosen categorical funds, is both philosophical and businesslike. He is the believer-in-chief of transferring decision-making authorization and spending to local districts, through the Local Command Funding Formula that steers extra money to low-income kids, foster children and English learners.

He has reiterated opposition to tinkering with the funding framework until districts have seen how information technology works. This yr, Autonomous leaders pushed Chocolate-brown in budget negotiations to crave districts to track every actress dollar they spend for loftier-needs students, but the governor refused.

To Chocolate-brown, additional mandates would wall off funding that districts could employ every bit they choose and slow downward his timetable of 2020-21 for completing the transition to full funding under the Local Control Funding Formula. The administration's projection assumes that temporary tax revenue under Proffer xxx would elapse at the end of 2018.

"He sees it as imperative to get to the full funding requirements in the police force," Griffith said. "If I had created the reform, I would make it a peak priority as well."

Dark-brown vetoed Assembly Bill 141, which would have required those districts choosing to offering the teacher preparation and mentoring plan known as Beginning Teacher Support and Cess (BTSA) to provide it without accuse. The state requires teachers to accept BTSA or a similar training programme, and for years the land funded districts' programs. Only some districts started charging teachers afterwards the state stopped reimbursements in 2009. In his veto message, Brown cited the new $100 1000000 mandate.

Rick Pratt, the chief consultant to the Assembly Educational activity Commission and former lobbyist for the California Schoolhouse Boards Association, disagreed with the logic. "I retrieve there is a place for chiselled programs similar BTSA," which, he said, produces better teachers who tend to stay longer in the profession. Some districts may not run into value in the plan, "merely the state ought to invest in it."

Lee's concluding stand

In another exception to his commitment to promoting more than local decision-making, Brown signed AB 30, making California the offset state to ban "Redskins" as a team name or mascot. Four high schools will have to drop the name, which many people consider a racist slur, by 2017.

Only Brown vetoed another nib that would take forced school districts to remove names of Confederate heroes from schools and other public buildings. Many African-Americans equate naming buildings after figures such as Robert E. Lee with honoring a cause that fought to preserve slavery.

This case, Dark-brown, wrote in a veto message, is "an event quintessentially for local decision makers," a rationale he didn't utilise to the use of  "Redskins."

Information-averse

Legislators and children's advocates didn't attempt to pass bills this year significantly expanding the drove of pupil data. Brownish has made it articulate he'll likely veto them if they exercise. Brown's consistent opposition to compiling more education information, which he views as the precursor to more laws and mandates, has evoked some of his best bombast. In an address to the Legislature two years ago, he railed against "reams of accountability data. All the better if information technology requires quiz-bits of data, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of form, are invoked like talismans."

Four years agone, he rejected federal funding for CALTIDES, a statewide data system that would have compiled information on teacher preparation, placement and effectiveness that many states have adopted. Since the passage of the Local Control Funding Formula, he has extended his commitment to local control to thwart expanding CALPADS, the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System, the main source of student information.

Advocates of more data cite the inability to better track students, from pre-kindergarten through higher, to sympathise factors contributing to underperformance and bookish success. Terminal year, Brown vetoed bills sponsored by California Attorney Full general Kamala Harris that would take fabricated it easier for districts to track students who are chronically absent by including boosted attendance reports in the statewide data arrangement. Harris didn't endeavor again this yr, although, in her annual report on the subject, she again cited the needs.

"The governor confuses data with big government," Lempert said. "Yous need to standardize data to know what is working in education." Even under local control, he added, districts should standardize how they collect and record information, he added.

Brown is too skeptical about creating new statewide policy commissions. He vetoed a bill to create an interagency task force to examine challenges related to boys and men of colour. While the issue is "profoundly important," Brownish wrote in vetoing AB 80, it is "best addressed through concrete actions, non another non-binding commission."

Sometimes inscrutable

On 1 of import law that he helped shape, Brown was mysteriously silent. Information technology was at Brown'due south instigation that the bill suspending the California High Schoolhouse Go out Exam include an amendment that retroactively fabricated all students eligible for a high schoolhouse diploma if they failed the examination but met all other graduation requirements. Through McBride, Brown conveyed his desire for the change tardily in the session, but didn't tell legislators why and hasn't publicly commented, his press office said.

If the past is prologue, legislators won't endeavour to overturn Dark-brown's vetoes. The governor vetoed 133 bills in the current session, with nearly a dozen pertaining to education. The Sacramento Bee calculated that the Legislature passed more than 100 of the vetoed bills past more than than a two-thirds majority. That'due south the threshold for legislators to override a veto,but there hasn't been a successful override since the 1970s, when Brown was governor the first time around, according to the Bee.

That'due south considering legislators generally don't want to take chances alienating or embarrassing a governor by passing a neb he wants killed, said Pratt, the Associates Pedagogy Commission consultant.

Senate President pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, has said there won't exist any override efforts this year either.

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