ith the 2025 legislative year in the rearview mirror, it is time to release CSBA’s annual Legislative Scorecard. The scorecard is a helpful tool to assess how your state legislators are voting on important measures that impact school districts, county boards of education and public education overall. Last year saw more than 800 bills reach Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, which included a number of high profile education bills. They included legislation to address the growing incidences of antisemitism, efforts to increase nonclassroom-based charter school oversight and helping alleviate the teacher shortage by allowing substitutes to serve longer in a classroom.
Notably, four CSBA-sponsored measures reached the Governor’s desk with just one vetoed and the rest signed into law. The three bills signed by Gov. Newsom will help to expand access to education workforce housing, modernize decades-old school district and county board of education stipends, and reduce administrative workloads. The fourth bill would have provided much-needed relief to school districts and county offices of education by temporarily expanding the time a substitute teacher may teach in a classroom from 30 to 60 days.
Of course, only a fraction of the 800 bills will affect education — and with that in mind, it’s time now for CSBA’s annual look at how local senators and assemblymembers voted on key legislation impacting public schools.
To evaluate each senator and assemblymember’s vote records, CSBA scored their favorable vote percentage on a total of 23 bills. Each of these bills are measures that CSBA sponsored, actively supported or actively opposed in 2025 and that received a full floor vote in both the Senate and the Assembly.
Important notes about the scorecard:
- The favorable vote percentage is relative to how many total opportunities each legislator had to vote on these 23 important public education bills.
- Most of the 23 bills were heard on both the Senate and Assembly floors, giving each legislator at least one opportunity to vote. If they did not get a chance to vote on a bill it was not counted toward their score.
- Education and Appropriations committee members had more opportunities to cast votes than other legislators. Members of those committees are noted in the scorecard for context.
- Instances where a member did not record a vote, either due to an abstention or an absence at the time of the vote, do not count as a favorable or unfavorable vote.
- It should be noted that Assemblymember Natasha Johnson (R–Lake Elsinore) did not receive a score because she did not occupy her seat in the Assembly until she was elected via a special election on Aug. 26 and sworn into office on Sept. 8, 2025.
Among the 23 bills local legislators are scored on, CSBA is recognizing specific votes on four CSBA-sponsored bills and an additional critical measure that could have negatively impacted school board governance authority:
This measure is a follow-up to AB 2295, which CSBA co-sponsored to help streamline the process local educational agencies can follow to plan, fund and develop education workforce housing.
Specifically, it further enhances and expands upon the provisions provided in AB 2295, which include ensuring that small and rural LEAs can pursue its benefits as well as exempting education workforce housing projects from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), as proposed.
This bill modernizes the 40-year-old compensation stipends afforded to school district and county board of education members based upon LEA size.
AB 1390 brings existing stipend rates into alignment with the impacts of inflation and provides that school district and county boards of education retain the authority to determine the amount of the stipend within the cap.
The Senate Environmental Quality Committee removed the extension of the zero-emission school bus purchasing mandate; however, the provision allowing LEAs to transfer combustion engine buses to other LEAs when they have acquired a zero-emission bus remains.
This bill would have expanded the amount of time an authorized substitute teacher could serve in a single general, special or career technical education classroom from 30 days to 60 days.
CSBA co-sponsored AB 1224 with the Association of California School Administrators, the California County Superintendents, and the California Association of School Business Officials.
This bill eliminates the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Part-B Addendum for the Local Control and Accountability Plan and extends by one year the deadline for the California Department of Education to submit a report to the Legislature assessing the number and types of reports that LEAs are required to annually submit and which ones can be consolidated or eliminated.
A re-introduction of vetoed SB 433 from 2023, SB 494 would have undermined school district and county board authority by removing their final decision-making authority to demote, suspend or terminate a classified staff person and place it into the hands of an unelected administrative law judge. In doing so, it would have removed the authority of LEAs and their duly elected governing board to render critical personnel decisions concerning classified staff. Due to CSBA’s opposition, it was later gut-and-amended (where the entirety of the bill is deleted and replaced) into a bill to address charter school issues.
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Member did not abstain or the vote was not taken“Not voting” indicates either member did not vote, or was absent
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republican democrat independent Education Committee member (current or former) Appropriations Committee member (current or former) Member did not abstain or the vote was not taken“Not voting” indicates either member did not vote, or was absent