Gray Davis, California's first Democratic governor in sixteen years, promised during his inaugural address to try to subvert the ban on racial preferences that had been approved by voters two years earlier. As an alternative, Davis proposed the University of California automatically admit the top four percent of students from each public high school, no matter what their test scores, grades, or coursework.

San Francisco's superintendent of schools said he'd rather go to jail than obey Proposition 227, which bans most formalized bilingual education in the state's public schools. Los Angeles school officials attempted to cancel reading lessons for about 100,000 students to avoid teaching them in English. But the Los Angeles Times, which opposed 227, found that where it was being implemented, it was working. "Pupils who could barely speak a word of English when school started are acquiring English at a surprising pace."

And following yet another heated battle, the state Board of Education has mandated a return to phonics-based reading instruction. This ostensibly ends the state's long experiment with whole-language instruction, an approach that favors adult-like visual pattern recognition skills over the traditional approach of sounding out a word's component phonemes. Many blame whole-language instruction for recent findings that the state's fourth-graders test at 60 percent below their grade level—second to last in reading skills nationwide. Still, support for whole-language learning remains strong among many educators, while others have had to resort to subterfuge to use phonics, paying for materials out of their own pockets and ignoring officially approved curricula. Governor Davis supports a return to phonics and wants to institute a summer "boot camp" to retrain teachers who have never been taught the system.

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