San Francisco’s Hillcrest Elementary School, pictured in 2024, is overseen by a state education leadership that is often at odds with itself.

Don’t worry, Californians, about obvious flaws in your state’s governing system. Our leaders will fix them.

All you have to do is wait a century or so.

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California’s economy and culture reliably move at world-class speed, but its government often lags 100 years behind. This is the state that didn’t get around to ratifying the 14th Amendment, added to the U.S. Constitution in 1868, until 1959.

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Call it the 100-year rule. In 2020s California, we are fixing 1920s problems.

In 2024, we removed ecosystem-destroying dams that were added to the Klamath River 100 years ago. After the pandemic, the state updated early-20th-century health codes on infectious diseases. And our string of 2020s housing reform laws is overturning exclusionary zoning, local control and apartment building bans that date back to the Roaring Twenties.

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But the best example of 1920s-inspired policymaking in the 2020s involves a drama playing out this year in the state education system.

On his way out the door, Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing hard for a structural reform to fix a problem that has been obvious since 1920.

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