The Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) convened for its first meeting of the year on Jan. 30 following an orientation day on Jan. 29 to hold elections, set goals for 2025 and receive presentations regarding personal finance curriculum and newly revised Preschool/Transitional Kindergarten Learning Foundations.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, “Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is right to do.”

This is an important distinction for anyone in a position of public trust, especially for school board members. School trustees function as stewards of a community’s most important institution, its public schools, and as guardians of the community’s most valuable resource, its children.

The gravity and visibility of the school board position requires that we avoid even the appearance of impropriety, because rest assured, all eyes are on us. Every year, the Gallup polling company publishes survey results measuring Americans’ perceptions of public education. The latest version, released in February 2025, showed that 73 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with public schools, up from 68 percent last year and from 57 percent in 2001. While there are many reasons for that, any behavior that further shakes public trust in our leadership undermines the mission and effectiveness of public schools. According to a longer 2022 Gallup poll, the top five concerns about public education were: poor or outdated curriculum, poor quality education, failure to teach basic subjects, political agendas and lack of instruction in life skills.

The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results, which were released on Jan. 28 and cover mathematics and reading scores for students in grades 4 and 8, show that while California has made some progress in catching up to the national average, more work remains.

The NAEP, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics housed in the U.S. Department of Education, is the largest and longest-running nationally representative snapshot of how students in grades 4, 8 and 12 are doing in various subjects. It is given to representative samples of students in each state.

CSBA has launched its first Delegate Assembly Governance Review Committee (DGRC) — a significant step in ensuring that the Delegate Assembly (DA) remains a representative and effective body for school board members statewide. This initiative stems from CSBA’s 2017 Governance Study Group and the 2019 Governance Task Force, which identified the need for periodic evaluations of Delegate representation, engagement and communication.

In September 2024, then-CSBA President Albert Gonzalez appointed a 20-member committee, composed of Delegates and members of the Board of Directors. The DGRC’s mandate is to conduct a review of the Delegate Assembly governing structure after every fourth reapportionment cycle (see Standing Rule 52C), i.e., every 12 years. The committee’s standing list of areas to review includes the diversity of representation, regular rebalancing of representation after reapportionment, roles and responsibilities of Delegates, the level of Delegate engagement, and the effectiveness of communication channels between Delegates, Directors and member boards.

The first three months of 2025 have been among the most eventful in education history and, unlike most years, it’s not the Governor’s January Budget Proposal or state legislation changing the landscape for public schools — it’s action at the federal level. Given the flurry of executive orders, memos, pending reports and new legislation coming from the nation’s capital, the CSBA-Association of California School Administrators (ACSA) Coast2Coast Federal Advocacy Trip comes at an opportune moment to advocate for public education.

Due to the early budget actions taken by Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature in April of last year, which helped to offset the state’s ongoing operational budget deficit, the Governor’s January Budget Proposal is largely balanced. In welcome news, the 2025–26 State Budget is projected to have a modest surplus, which is in stark contrast to where the state was just a year ago where a projected $38 billion deficit was announced in January 2024.

In September 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 3216, the Phone-Free Schools Act. This bill requires local educational agencies to develop and implement policies by July 1, 2026, that limit student use of smartphones while on school premises or under the supervision of an LEA employee. Such policies must be developed with significant stakeholder participation to ensure they are responsive to unique community needs and updated every five years.

A Jan. 29 webinar hosted by CSBA’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Taskforce, “Ethical AI in Education: Building transparent frameworks for the future,” offered local educational agency leaders tips on creating an artificial intelligence governance committee, environmental scans and organizational roadmaps, and evaluation metrics for the use of new education technology (edtech).

Moderated by Nick Zurlo, a senior consultant and analyst at Crocus, LLC and a taskforce facilitator, the event also explored how to implement components of ethical AI that fit local needs, among other critical topics.

On Jan. 27, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo that described a pause of certain federal grants and loans, though it is not entirely clear which grants it applies to. The purpose of the pause, as described by the memo was to “provide the Administration time to review agency programs and determine the best uses of the funding for those programs consistent with the law and the President’s priorities.” The release of the memo caused widespread concern and confusion as states, municipalities, civic and community organizations and other recipients of federal funds scrambled to determine if their funding was at risk and what that could mean for their work.

The annual teacher supply report from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing showed a decrease in the number of new credentials issued in the 2022–23 school year, the most recent for which data is available. The decrease was reflected in all areas of credentialing: Multiple Subject, Single Subject and Education Specialist.

A total of 14,309 new credentials were issued, a 10.6 percent decrease from 2021–22, with a steady decrease in new credentials since 2018–19. Of these, 10,663 were prepared at a California institute of higher education (IHE), 645 were prepared in a local educational agency program and 3,328 were prepared out of state or country.

Following the success of its 2024 Cybersecurity Bootcamp Program, the San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE) is expanding this year’s spring break program to open pathways to thriving cybersecurity careers for even more of its underserved students.

The program — supported by InfraGard San Diego (an initiative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation), the US Cyber Initiative and donations from local businesses, cybersecurity insurance companies, Lenovo, HP, Juniper Networks and more — brings professors, college instructor interns and speakers from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the technology sector to provide deep dives into various aspects of cybersecurity.