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The process is the punishment: Sacramento’s war on Orange County

April 12, 2026

California’s teacher unions aren’t accustomed to losing elections, but they’ve lost control of the Orange County Board of Education, the state’s third largest county board. In just five election cycles, the Orange County board slipped the grip of teachers unions, and is now a 5-0 board of average citizens laser-focused on student achievement and parent rights.

Having failed to persuade voters that the board must be replaced by union-backed candidates, the California Teachers Association has turned to its allies in the state legislature.

In a March 24 capitol hearing, state Senator Tom Umberg, D-Orange County, led the Democratic supermajority in directing the state auditor to investigate the Orange County Board of Education.

A review of available state audits shows there’s been no audit of a county board of education since 1993. And no one, not even Umberg himself, offered evidence or allegations of actual wrongdoing that would require one in Orange County’s case. In its own press release, the state auditor offered only the vaguest mission for this special exercise: it will “review the actions and activities of the OCBE that have been the subject of public attention over the past five years.”

If the new legal threshold for government audits is “public attention” rather than evidence of legal violations or evidence of fraud, corruption or waste, then every government office is in the carnival dunk tank – including the state legislature.

In this case, of course, the “public attention” standard means merely that state and local teacher unions object to a board they don’t control. Consider just three examples that have focused the minds of teacher union activists.

In Orange County, the board passed a nonbinding resolution in support of 2023’s Assembly Bill 1314, a measure that would have required schools to notify parents of attempts by teachers and others to create gender transition plans for their children. That bill so outraged the California Teachers Association that they successfully lobbied to kill it on first contact in the legislature – persuading a Democratic committee chairman to literally cut off the microphone of then-Assemblyman Bill Essayli before the Riverside Republican could begin reading his bill aloud.

The OC Board of Education turned out to have had the right legal instincts. In January, the U.S. Department of Education found that California state officials – including Attorney General Rob Bonta and schools superintendent Tony Thurmond – and teachers violated federal law in a conspiracy to hide gender transition plans from parents. In March, in a separate legal win for the guys, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision of a federal judge in San Diego County that school employees and officials cannot lie to parents about gender-transition plans crafted for schoolchildren.

Similarly, in the early months of the COVID pandemic, the Board of Education held a townhall about the dangers of closing schools. (Full disclosure: I produced an early draft of the board’s report.) State data already showed what would remain true throughout the epidemic: children were unlikely to catch COVID or to require hospitalization for it. Citing an American Academy of Pediatrics report, the board concluded that closing schools would likely produce long-term learning loss, especially among poorer children who lacked the technology and adult guidance necessary to remote learning. Weighing all that, the board offered nonbinding guidance: it was best to reopen the schools with haste. That was outrageous – not merely to the teachers unions who denounced it as racist and uninformed but to their allies in the mainstream media. But the theatrical outrage has passed: ask any teacher union leader today about the state’s poor performance on student achievement tests, and they’ll likely cite racism, lack of funding . . . and COVID-era learning loss.

Perhaps the greatest affront to the tender sensibilities of teacher union activists has been the board’s success in approving charter schools. A charter school is a public school run by a nonprofit that operates outside some of the rules governing traditional public schools – the most significant of which is the almost universal absence of unionized faculty.

Without a union to block reform, charter schools – including those approved by the Orange County Board of Education – can be held to tougher standards. Neither state nor local education officials have closed a failing union-run school in California in the last several decades. By contrast, in the past year alone, the OC Board of Ed closed one charter school and denied the applications of two others for failure to perform.

Union leaders could choose to emulate the best practices of charter schools. Instead, they’ve pushed for this state audit – to punish a board of trustees relentlessly pursuing student achievement.

Though the audit is unlikely to find anything amiss in an audit of the OC Board, the mere announcement of any investigation is the propaganda prize the union really wants. As election season heats up, teacher unions all over Orange County will turn the legislature’s call for an audit into the evidence it needs for a direct-mail campaign. As in almost every other area of California government, the process is the punishment.

Will Swaim is CEO of California Policy Center.

Orange County Register

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The process is the punishment: Sacramento’s war on Orange County

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