After years of reports detailing how California’s public schools badly lagged those in poor Southern states in teaching kids how to read — especially Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation — the Legislature finally embraced phonics in 2025. In a state in which the myth that school quality is a function of school spending is the starting point for most education policy debates, the law enacted in October was a rare triumph for genuine reform.
Now state Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson, D-La Mesa, hopes to reform math education. She is the primary author of Senate Bill 1067, which would require districts to screen students in early grades to evaluate their math skills. “We know the achievement gap in math is evident as early as kindergarten,” Weber Pierson, a physician, told EdSource. “We also know that students who miss foundational math skills in grades K through two rarely catch up.”
Being a Democratic lawmaker willing to take on the Golden State’s education establishment is a family tradition. In a 2016 meeting with the San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board, Weber Pierson’s mother — then-Assemblymember Shirley Weber, now California’s secretary of state and once the chair of the city school board — scoffed at San Diego Unified’s claim to have a 91% graduation rate.
While in the Assembly, Weber for years fought a losing battle to ensure supplemental funds given to districts with a higher percentage of low-income, English learner, homeless and foster youth students actually were used to directly help those students — as promised by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2013 in winning passage of the Local Control Funding Formula program. Instead, in urban district after urban district, they often were used for teacher raises.
It’s hard not to wonder if Shirley Weber’s futile fight against the California Teachers Association and its allies led to the modesty of the math reforms sought by her daughter. That’s because while SB 1067 is a very worthwhile idea, it doesn’t go remotely far enough. This is illustrated by the November report issued by UC San Diego’s Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions that found that from 2020 to 2025, the number of incoming freshmen with math skills “below middle school level increased nearly 30-fold, reaching roughly one in 12 members of the entering cohort.”
The report amounted to a searing exposé of the meaninglessness of high school grades in California. Incredibly, the students admitted in 2024 who were found to be most in need of remedial support had average high school math GPAs of better than 3.6. In other words, the same students who the report found struggled to figure out the answer to this equation — 7 + 2 = blank + 6 — were able to maintain A- averages in high school in completing the six semesters of “college-preparatory” mathematics courses required to attend a UC campus.
So while Weber Pierson’s reform has great potential and absolutely deserves to be enacted, it doesn’t even address the largest problem — the same one her mom grappled with in questioning the honesty of graduation claims. That is the fact that producing well-educated kids has never been the top priority of the California education establishment. Instead, it’s trying to satisfy schools’ adult employees and shield them from criticism.
If that means students who can’t do third-grade math get As and Bs in high school “college-prep” math classes, that’s not the establishment’s problem. It’s UC’s and CSU’s problem. It’s society’s problem. But most of all, it’s the kids’ problem — for the rest of their lives.