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Some California school districts launch transitional kindergarten without state help

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Some California school districts launch transitional kindergarten without state help




In a significant change for very early education and learning, The golden state is broadening its transitional preschool program to at some point consist of all 4-year-olds. While a lot of areas will certainly obtain added bucks for the development, 15% will certainly not — as well as are encountering hard spending plan selections as they adhere to the brand-new loss required.

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Several of those areas — amongst one of the most upscale in The golden state — claim they are extending existing budget plans to develop class, relocating cash around to work with brand-new instructors as well as attempting to find out exactly how to money remodellings that consist of small bathrooms as well as preschool play ground tools.

Others claim they have no strategies to include transitional preschool, regardless of moms and dad appeals, unless they obtain state financing.

Reed Union Institution Area in the Bay Location community of Tiburon is among the areas that won’t be obtaining state cash for transitional preschool. Reed Union hasn’t provided the program in years yet is intending to include it in the loss.

“For areas with no added financing can be found in it is a large economic dedication,” claimed Superintendent Kimberly McGrath. “It is superb for youngsters in our area to have an added year of phenomenal knowing. We are mosting likely to accept it as well as see it as pursuing global preschool.”

Reed Union is among the 15% of areas statewide   called fundamental help areas.

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The majority of The golden state areas are moneyed via a state moneying formula designated on a per-student basis. Yet fundamental help areas offer locations where neighborhood real estate tax create even more cash than the areas would certainly obtain if they took state financing.

In 2014, the state devoted greater than $1 billion in the present spending plan to start phasing in the development of transitional preschool, at some point consisting of all 4-year-olds by 2025-26. None of that cash will certainly most likely to fundamental help areas.

“I can see why fundamental help areas may make a disagreement that the state has actually altered the regulations significantly,” claimed Deborah Stipek, a teacher at the Stanford Grad Institution of Education And Learning. “Yet I don’t recognize exactly how you’d resolve it. They can’t have it both methods.” 

Transitional preschool has actually been readily available to 4-year-olds with birthday celebrations in between September as well as December because 2012. It was produced when preschool was restricted to those that transformed 5 by September. Formerly, 4-year-olds might enlist in preschool in the loss if they transformed 5 by December.

In 2014’s choice to broaden the program to all 4-year-olds suggests 500,000 youngsters will certainly be qualified by the end of the rollout. Beginning this August, youngsters that transform 5 in between Sept. 2 as well as Feb. 2 will certainly have the ability to enlist. Each academic year the registration home window will certainly broaden to consist of even more pupils till 2025-26, when all 4-year-olds will certainly be qualified.

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Some areas don’t provide programs

Standard help areas have a tendency to be smaller sized areas, primarily seaside or country with collections in seaside San Diego Region as well as the Bay Location. In all, there have to do with 150 fundamental help areas amongst The golden state’s about 1,000 areas, according to information from the California Division of Education And Learning. 

A minimum of a loads fundamental help areas have actually not provided transitional preschool in recent times as well as a few of them claim they still won’t include the brand-new quality regardless of the required.

“We do not intend to provide it due to the fact that we are not obtaining any type of financing from the state,” claimed Chris Delehanty, assistant superintendent of organization solutions for Del Mar Grade School Area. “To include it would certainly indicate decreasing or removing something we are currently supplying, boosting course dimension or decreasing heavy steam (scientific research, modern technology, design, arts as well as mathematics) offerings for our pupils or expert knowing for our instructors.”

The area has 8 primary schools as well as offers almost 4,000 pupils. Delehanty claimed if the area registered as lots of 4-year-olds as it does kindergartners yearly, concerning 500, the area would certainly need to include around 25 class as well as work with two times that variety of instructors as well as assistants to satisfy state-required teacher-student proportions, which are normally smaller sized than those for older pupils. The approximated cost: $4 million to turn out the program to all 4-year-olds. 

“We do not intend to provide it due to the fact that we are not obtaining any type of financing from the state.”

Chris Delehanty, assistant superintendent of organization solutions for Del Mar Grade School Area

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Transitional preschool, like preschool, is optional as well as professionals claim not all youngsters that are qualified will certainly enlist. Family members might select to remain in their subsidized or exclusive preschool or childcare or maintain their youngsters in the house. 

There are 4 various other little seaside areas in San Diego Region that are fundamental help areas as well as additionally do not provide the program, consisting of Solana Coastline, Encinitas Union, Rancho Santa Fe as well as Cardiff institution areas.

“We have actually all been promoting as well as lobbying for this required to be moneyed for all youngsters,” claimed Andrée Grey, superintendent of Encinitas Union Institution Area. “We acknowledge the worth as well as value the intent behind global transitional preschool. Nonetheless, it is essential that community-funded areas have the ability to access the financing that has actually been alloted, as well as there is not presently a system for us to do that.”

Yet Stipek, the Stanford teacher, claimed colleges usually need to reassess costs based upon registration, plans, changing emphasis as well as existing as well as brand-new programs.

“Anytime you need to do something brand-new, you need to do a redistribution of sources,” Stipek claimed. With transitional preschool, called TK, she claimed, “your youngsters are mosting likely to find out more, do far better, create the sort of social abilities that they require. So the advantages of having youngsters in TK will certainly make up for any type of decreases you need to make in various other type of solutions.”

It’s vague what occurs if areas overlook the required. The The Golden State Division of Education and learning declined to claim whether it can apply the required or the number of colleges are not offering transitional preschool.

Rather, it provided the adhering to declaration: “Standard help areas ought to be supplying TK if they provide preschool. In regards to enforcement, the CDE is remaining to deal with fundamental help areas that are not supplying TK on problems” including what areas need to do to obtain or maintain their financing. 

Numerous fundamental help areas in San Mateo as well as Marin areas claimed the required was the driving pressure behind their choice to develop brand-new transitional preschool. Those areas consist of Mill Valley, Reed Union, Hillsborough City Elementary, Menlo Park City Elementary as well as Miller Creek institution areas. They all intend to provide transitional preschool programs in the loss. 

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However, the funding is testing. They require the state to give cash for the rollout in the coming years, a number of superintendents claimed.

Becky Rosales, superintendent of Miller Creek Institution Area, kept in mind in an e-mail  that her area, in San Rafael, obtains simply sufficient in real estate tax to be identified as fundamental help. “I am confident that there will certainly be some factor to consider at the state degree of a treatment to sustain areas like ours.” 

“If funds were given it would certainly have a massive influence.”

Kimberly McGrath, superintendent of Reed Union Institution Area in tiburon

At Reed Union in Tiburon, the area, which has simply 3 colleges, will certainly include 2 transitional preschool class to dish out to 40 youngsters, McGrath claimed.

The cost: around $300,000 for the initial year. 

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“If funds were given it would certainly have a massive influence,” McGrath claimed. “Also if simply some up front give funds due to the fact that while there are some continuous expenses there are a great deal of single expenses – tools product acquisitions, intending time, play ground tools, centers.”

In the middle of Kern Region’s oil areas, where McKittrick Primary school Area provides transitional preschool when it is required, claimed Barry Koerner, that is both superintendent as well as principal. The area has just one institution as well as 86 pupils.

This year the institution had its initial 4-year-old in transitional preschool. Koerner employed an assistant for the nine-student combination transitional preschool as well as preschool class to suit the one youngster.

“If I didn’t have actually sources accumulated we would certainly need to reduce,” he claimed. “We are hardly ever the ones they think about when making these large adjustments. We are doing whatever we can to eliminate to maintain our heads over water.”

Transitional preschool has actually been a column of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s schedule to at some point provide global preschool to all youngsters in The golden state. The relocation is meant to profit youngsters qualified for aids that are waitlisted by completely enrolled-preschools or childcare programs as well as those whose households can’t manage substantial tuition for exclusive very early childhood years programs.

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Lawmakers sustained the strategy, pointing out research studies that claim youngsters do far better in institution if they go to preschool, which prep work can assist shut the success space.

“The proof for the advantages of preschool, transitional preschool is solid sufficient since we desire all youngsters to have accessibility to it — which’s not the situation today,” claimed Stipek, that belongs to a state job pressure to assist the Commision on Educator Credentialing develop standards for instructors in very early childhood years. 

There are various other factors fans promote transitional preschool.

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Relocating 4-year-olds right into public colleges earlier opens seats secretive as well as state subsidized preschool programs, childcare facilities as well as family-based childcare houses for more youthful youngsters. It additionally assists boost the general variety of pupils  in public colleges as lots of The golden state areas remain to see an extreme decrease in registration. 

“The proof for the advantages of preschool, transitional preschool is solid sufficient since we desire all youngsters to have accessibility to it — which’s not the situation today.”

Deborah Stipek, teacher at the Stanford Grad Institution of Education And Learning

In San Diego Region, moms and dad Lynette Jaiswal has actually been meticulously tracking the conversation in both Del Mar as well as Solana Coastline, as she has houses in both areas. She resides in Solana Coastline yet would certainly have relocated to her house in Del Mar if the area provided the program.

In 2014, when it was time to locate a transitional preschool program for her boy, she claimed she was informed to relate to an outdoors area. Yet that didn’t exercise for her household due to the fact that it was also far. 

“I’m not the only moms and dad battling to locate a location for my transitional preschool youngster,” she claimed. “I did locate positioning for my youngster yet it’s extremely irritating when you have a college area that can do something yet they decline to.”

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Solana Coastline Institution Area authorities did not return phone calls or e-mails looking for remark.

While lots of fundamental help neighborhoods are thought about upscale, there are additionally households seeking inexpensive childcare as well as preschool, claimed Jaiswal, that is a property representative. She claimed within the area there are numerous low-income real estate systems for households that commonly count on public colleges. Additionally, lots of middle-class households have actually experienced COVID challenges as well as might take advantage of a complimentary public alternative for 4-year-olds.

Standard help institution areas, education and learning companies as well as some state lawmakers are promoting for the state to give specialized financing for fundamental help areas.

Santa Barbara Democratic Sen. Monique Limón, that offered on a college board when transitional preschool was initial produced, composed a letter authorized by 22 various other lawmakers asking the Newsom management to assist the areas.

“We desire TK to be effective,” she claimed. “To be effective you need to have the team, you need to have the class as well as I’m unsure it needs to come with the expenditure of boosting course dimensions for everybody else or reducing co-curricular programs as well as reducing curricular programs.”

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If the state can’t provide financing, after that areas might require even more time to apply the development, she claimed.

Find out more concerning lawmakers discussed in this tale

State Us Senate, Area 19 (Santa Barbara)

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Exactly how she elected 2019-2020

Liberal
Conventional

Area 19 Demographics

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Race/Ethnicity

Latino

51%

White

39%

Eastern

5%

Black

2%

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Multi-race

2%

Citizen Enrollment

Dem

47%

GOP

25%

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No celebration

22%

Various Other

6%

Project Payments

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Sen. Monique Limón has actually taken at the very least
$702,000
from the Labor
industry because she was chosen to the legislature. That stands for
27%
of her overall project payments.

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California

California Democrats talked a big game on reparations. They're off to slow start

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California Democrats talked a big game on reparations. They're off to slow start


Gov. Gavin Newsom and California lawmakers in 2020 touted a law to create a “first in the nation” state task force to study and propose remedies to atone for the legacy of slavery.

Four years later, their work to deliver reparations is more incremental than recording-breaking, stoking frustration among advocates who filled the Capitol as lawmakers cast their final votes of the legislative session on Saturday.

Hamstrung by a state budget deficit and the challenges of supporting a politically volatile issue in an election year, the California Legislature passed a limited slate of reparations bills. The meager progress, though hailed by some lawmakers and advocates, in a state as liberal as California could serve as a warning on the issue to the rest of the nation.

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“I think what it demonstrates is that when the rubber hits the road, Democrats are still unwilling and unable and uninterested in truly supporting these efforts outside of sort of symbolic and less than substantive ways,” said Tatishe Nteta, provost professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the UMass poll.

The California Legislative Black Caucus announced 14 priority reparations bills in January based on recommendations made last year by the reparations task force. Lawmakers cast the legislation as a first step focused largely on enacting policy changes in education, healthcare and criminal justice, while omitting cash payments in light of the state’s financial troubles.

Lawmakers passed 10 bills in the package before they adjourned Saturday, including marquee legislation requiring a formal apology from the state for “perpetuating the harms African Americans faced by having imbued racial prejudice through segregation, public and private discrimination, and unequal disbursal of state and federal funding and [declaring] that such actions shall not be repeated.”

The Legislature placed a measure on the November ballot that asks voters to delete language in the California Constitution that allows involuntary servitude as a form of punishment for crimes. Another bill would end a work requirement for able-bodied state prisoners and instead develop a voluntary work program if the ballot measure banning involuntary servitude is approved.

Other bills establish a process for the state to review and investigate claims of racially motivated taking of property by governments using the power of eminent domain, seek to increase and track participation in career training education among Black and low-income students, and expand Medi-Cal coverage, pending federal approval, to include benefits for medically supported food and nutrition.

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The legislation now on Newsom’s desk also includes new oversight of book bans in California prisons, a requirement that grocery stores and pharmacies give written notice at least 45 days before closing and the expansion of a state law prohibiting discrimination based on hairstyle to include youth sports.

Bills faltered in the Legislature that sought to restrict solitary confinement in prisons, to prioritize African American descendants of people who were enslaved in the United States for state licenses and to establish grants to fund local efforts to decrease violence in Black communities. A proposal to amend the state constitution to allow funding for programs that increase life expectancy, improve educational outcomes and alleviate poverty among certain racial and ethnic groups of people also failed.

Assemblymember Lori D. Wilson (D-Suisun City), who leads the Legislative Black Caucus, said that work on reparations will continue next year and that the successful bills marked an important first step.

“It was definitely intentional to start laying a foundation,” she said. “We look forward to building on top of that and being able to really engage the community on the work that we’re doing.”

Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), who introduced the bill to begin the process of reversing racially motivated land and property seizures in the reparations package, pushed two additional bills that failed when the Legislature refused to take them up for a final vote: to create a California American Freedmen Affairs Agency and to establish a Fund for Reparations and Reparative Justice to pay for and carry out reparations policies approved by lawmakers. Neither was included on the Black caucus’ priority list.

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As the bills languished in the Assembly on Saturday, reparations advocates gathered in the Capitol Rotunda to lobby lawmakers.

“Bring the bills up!” they shouted every time an Assembly member emerged from the chamber.

Chris Lodgson, wearing a cap embroidered with the words “Cut the check,” said the bills that passed do not represent a meaningful change.

“An apology is not reparations. Extending the Crown Act [to prohibit discrimination against Black hairstyles], that’s not no damn reparations. Passing a bill so that people could read the books that they want to read, that’s not no damn reparations,” he said.

“The only bills to actually let us even do reparations are the bills that they’re scared to bring up.”

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Bradford said the bills’ failure was the biggest disappointment of his 14-year career in the Legislature, which came to an end Saturday.

“I think this was the time to strike. The nation’s watching, and I think we owe it to not only African Americans here in California, but across this nation, to set a fine example,” he said. “I”m saddened by it.”

The legislation put forward by the Black caucus was based on recommendations from California’s reparations task force at the conclusion of a historic two-year process last summer to study the effects of slavery, to prove the ways in which government continues to discriminate against Black people and to suggest policy changes to state lawmakers.

The sweeping wish list of reforms included politically challenging proposals to provide cash payments, abolish the death penalty in California and offer free college tuition to eligible descendants, among dozens of other ideas.

Direct financial compensation has become a particularly fraught issue, one sought by activists but opposed by most of the general public.

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Newsom, who signed the law that set the reparations movement in motion in California, has yet to endorse the notion of the state providing cash payments to descendants of African Americans who were enslaved. The governor, task force members and lawmakers have repeated the idea that reparations are about more than cash.

A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll in 2023, co-sponsored by The Times, found that 59% of California voters oppose cash payments compared with 28% who support the idea. More than 4 in 10 voters “strongly” opposed cash payments.

A national UMass poll conducted in January found opposition to the federal government providing cash payments at 67%, compared with 34% who said it definitely or probably should pay descendants. Among those against the idea, 29% said their reason was because descendants do not deserve the money.

Nteta said California’s work to investigate and show evidence of the systemic ways in which racial identification has affected the Black community exceeds the federal government’s efforts to detail and trace the impact of slavery. But there’s an inherent tension between advocates who want to apply pressure to enact change now and legislators who recognize that pushing the unpopular idea too hard and failing could be “the death knell for reparations as a policy.”

The nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris, a Black woman and a Californian, as the Democratic presidential candidate adds another level of complexity to the politics of reparations.

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Nteta said Republicans mobilize white voters, either directly or implicitly, by suggesting Democratic candidates will improve life for Black Americans and people of color in a way that adversely affects white people.

“When Harris starts to talk about reparations and define herself, there’s a high likelihood that will then be used as a means by which to run ads to demonstrate that she is going to, if elected, disproportionately support the African American community,” Nteta said. “So, her racial identity and her partisan identity intertwining is actually bad news for the notion of a potential president speaking about reparations, or even doing anything on reparations. There’s a lot of political backlash that is going to happen if this is something that she articulates an opinion on.”

Democrats, including those who support reparations, are also unlikely to push her to talk about a controversial subject if it could hurt her chances of beating former President Trump, he said. Harris supported the idea of studying the generational effect of discrimination and institutional racism in order to consider potential interventions before the Democratic primary in her failed bid for the presidency in the 2020 election.

Any action taken in the Golden State could also be pinned on Harris. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, criticize her as a “left-leaning progressive Californian from San Francisco” to suggest she’s out of touch with America, Nteta said.

“The California Legislature passing a reparations bill would be just like manna from heaven for the Republican Party and for Donald Trump to demonstrate and make the case that this is what the future would look like under a president from California that cut her teeth in a state and has those overarching ideals,” Nteta said. “So it makes sense that there would be very few sort of revolutionary or extremely progressive policies that come out before the fall election.”

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Some artificial dyes could be banned from California schools

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Some artificial dyes could be banned from California schools


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California public schools could soon be banned from serving certain artificial dyes in food over concerns about developmental harm in children.

Dubbed a “first-in-the-nation” measure, state lawmakers this week passed Assembly Bill 2316 to prohibit six additives that are permitted by federal regulators to make food more colorful. California’s AB 2316, known as the California School Food Safety Act, is now on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.

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The bill says state research suggests such synthetic dyes can result in hyperactivity and other behavioral problems. Similar previous research prompted the European Union to restrict food coloring. Nearly all of the products that the California bill would ban in schools require warning labels in E.U. products.

The bill would ban commercial dyes of Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6, in public schools in the nation’s largest state.

“California has a responsibility to protect our students from chemicals that harm children and interfere with their ability to learn,” state Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat who authored the bill, said in a statement. He said that he struggled with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, and he is now a parent.

On Saturday, a spokesperson said Newsom’s office didn’t comment on pending legislation. The deadline for Newsom to sign or veto legislation is Sept. 30, the spokesperson said.

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The nonprofit Environmental Working Group and the California Medical Association, which represents doctors, supported the bill.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals for the dyes banned under AB 2316 date back decades, the environmental nonprofit said. Those approvals were based on old studies not designed to detect behavioral effects in children, the medical association had said in its support of AB 2316.

The Consumer Brands Association, a dye industry representative, opposed the bill because it overrode existing food safety rules, and the group disputed findings about adverse health effects. John Hewlitt, the association’s senior vice president of packaging, sustainability and state affairs, said the bill was “advancing a political agenda.”

“The passage of this bill could cost schools and families money, limit choice and access, and create consumer confusion,” he said in a statement provided to USA TODAY. “The approach taken by California politicians flies in the face of our science and risk-based process and is not the precedent we should be setting when it comes to feeding our families.”

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A 2021 state Environmental Protection Agency assessment found American youth diagnosed with ADHD increased in the last 20 years, which prompted the state to look at food dyes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has similarly tracked increases in ADHD diagnoses in children in recent years.

Focusing on seven food dyes, including those that would be banned under AB 2316, state researchers reviewed prior studies on the effects of these dyes in humans and laboratory animals. Findings indicated they were linked to adverse neurobehavioral outcomes in children, and children varied in sensitivity.

On Friday, an FDA spokesperson told NBC News they had reviewed literature cited in California’s legislation. While saying most children have no “adverse effects” when they eat foods with color additives, the spokesperson reportedly said some evidence suggests certain children may be sensitive.

If signed into law, California’s ban would take effect in schools beginning in 2027.

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California’s governor has the chance to make AI history

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California’s governor has the chance to make AI history


Advocates say it is a modest law setting “clear, predictable, common-sense safety standards” for artificial intelligence. Opponents say it is a dangerous and arrogant step that will “stifle innovation.”

In any event, SB 1047 — California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s proposal to regulate advanced AI models offered by companies doing business in the state — has now passed the California State Assembly by a margin of 48 to 16. Back in May, it passed the Senate by 32 to 1. Once the Senate agrees to the assembly’s changes to the bill, which it is expected to do shortly, the measure goes to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.

The bill, which would hold AI companies liable for catastrophic harms their “frontier” models may cause, is backed by a wide array of AI safety groups, as well as luminaries in the field like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell, who have warned of the technology’s potential to pose massive, even existential dangers to humankind. It got a surprise last-minute endorsement from Elon Musk, who among his other ventures runs the AI firm xAI.

Lined up against SB 1047 is nearly all of the tech industry, including OpenAI, Facebook, the powerful investors Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz, and some academic researchers who fear it threatens open source AI models. Anthropic, another AI heavyweight, lobbied to water down the bill. After many of its proposed amendments were adopted in August, the company said the bill’s “benefits likely outweigh its costs.”

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Despite the industry backlash, the bill seems to be popular with Californians, though all surveys on it have been funded by interested parties. A recent poll by the pro-bill AI Policy Institute found 70 percent of residents in favor, with even higher approval ratings among Californians working in tech. The California Chamber of Commerce commissioned a bill finding a plurality of Californians opposed, but the poll’s wording was slanted, to say the least, describing the bill as requiring developers to “pay tens of millions of dollars in fines if they don’t implement orders from state bureaucrats.” The AI Policy Institute’s poll presented pro and con arguments, but the California Chamber of Commerce only bothered with a “con” argument.

The wide, bipartisan margins by which the bill passed the Assembly and Senate, and the public’s general support (when not asked in a biased way), might suggest that Gov. Newsom is likely to sign. But it’s not so simple. Andreessen Horowitz, the $43 billion venture capital giant, has hired Newsom’s close friend and Democratic operative Jason Kinney to lobby against the bill, and a number of powerful Democrats, including eight members of the US House from California and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have urged a veto, echoing talking points from the tech industry.

So there’s a strong chance that Newsom will veto the bill, keeping California — the center of the AI industry — from becoming the first state with robust AI liability rules. At stake is not just AI safety in California, but also in the US and potentially the world.

To have attracted all of this intense lobbying, one might think that SB 1047 is an aggressive, heavy-handed bill — but, especially after several rounds of revisions in the State Assembly, the actual law does fairly little.

It would offer whistleblower protections to tech workers, along with a process for people who have confidential information about risky behavior at an AI lab to take their complaint to the state Attorney General without fear of prosecution. It also requires AI companies that spend more than $100 million to train an AI model to develop safety plans. (The extraordinarily high ceiling for this requirement to kick in is meant to protect California’s startup industry, which objected that the compliance burden would be too high for small companies.)

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So what about this bill would possibly prompt months of hysteria, intense lobbying from the California business community, and unprecedented intervention by California’s federal representatives? Part of the answer is that the bill used to be stronger. The initial version of the law set the threshold for compliance at $100 million for the use of a certain amount of computing power, meaning that over time, more companies would have become subject to the law as computers continue to get cheaper. It would also have established a state agency called the “Frontier Models Division” to review safety plans; the industry objected to the perceived power grab.

Another part of the answer is that a lot of people were falsely told the bill does more. One prominent critic inaccurately claimed that AI developers could be guilty of a felony, regardless of whether they were involved in a harmful incident, when the bill only had provisions for criminal liability in the event that the developer knowingly lied under oath. (Those provisions were subsequently removed anyway). Congressional representative Zoe Lofgren of the science, space, and technology committee wrote a letter in opposition falsely claiming that the bill requires adherence to guidance that doesn’t exist yet.

But the standards do exist (you can read them in full here), and the bill does not require firms to adhere to them. It says only that “a developer shall consider industry best practices and applicable guidance” from the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute, National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Government Operations Agency, and other reputable organizations.

A lot of the discussion of SB 1047 unfortunately centered around straightforwardly incorrect claims like these, in many cases propounded by people who should have known better.

SB 1047 is premised on the idea that near-future AI systems might be extraordinarily powerful, that they accordingly might be dangerous, and that some oversight is required. That core proposition is extraordinarily controversial among AI researchers. Nothing exemplifies the split more than the three men frequently called the “godfathers of machine learning,” Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun. Bengio — a Future Perfect 2023 honoree — and Hinton have both in the last few years become convinced that the technology they created may kill us all and argued for regulation and oversight. Hinton stepped down from Google in 2023 to speak openly about his fears.

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LeCun, who is chief AI scientist at Meta, has taken the opposite tack, declaring that such worries are nonsensical science fiction and that any regulation would strangle innovation. Where Bengio and Hinton find themselves supporting the bill, LeCun opposes it, especially the idea that AI companies should face liability if AI is used in a mass casualty event.

In this sense, SB 1047 is the center of a symbolic tug-of-war: Does government take AI safety concerns seriously, or not? The actual text of the bill may be limited, but to the extent that it suggests government is listening to the half of experts that think that AI might be extraordinarily dangerous, the implications are big.

It’s that sentiment that has likely driven some of the fiercest lobbying against the bill by venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose firm a16z has been working relentlessly to kill the bill, and some of the highly unusual outreach to federal legislators to demand they oppose a state bill. More mundane politics likely plays a role, too: Politico reported that Pelosi opposed the bill because she’s trying to court tech VCs for her daughter, who is likely to run against Scott Wiener for a House of Representatives seat.)

Why SB 1047 is so important

It might seem strange that legislation in just one US state has so many people wringing their hands. But remember: California is not just any state. It’s where several of the world’s leading AI companies are based.

And what happens there is especially important because, at the federal level, lawmakers have been dragging out the process of regulating AI. Between Washington’s hesitation and the looming election, it’s falling to states to pass new laws. The California bill, if Newsom gives it the green light, would be one big piece of that puzzle, setting the direction for the US more broadly.

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The rest of the world is watching, too. “Countries around the world are looking at these drafts for ideas that can influence their decisions on AI laws,” Victoria Espinel, the chief executive of the Business Software Alliance, a lobbying group representing major software companies, told the New York Times in June.

Even China — often invoked as the boogeyman in American conversations about AI development (because “we don’t want to lose an arms race with China”) — is showing signs of caring about safety, not just wanting to run ahead. Bills like SB 1047 could telegraph to others that Americans also care about safety.

Frankly, it’s refreshing to see legislators wise up to the tech world’s favorite gambit: claiming that it can regulate itself. That claim may have held sway in the era of social media, but it’s become increasingly untenable. We need to regulate Big Tech. That means not just carrots, but sticks, too.

Newsom has the opportunity to do something historic. And if he doesn’t? Well, he’ll face some sticks of his own. The AI Policy Institute’s poll shows that 60 percent of voters are prepared to blame him for future AI-related incidents if he vetoes SB 1047. In fact, they’d punish him at the ballot box if he runs for higher office: 40 percent of California voters say they would be less likely to vote for Newsom in a future presidential primary election if he vetoes the bill.



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