Since last October, the California School Boards Association has pressed the Legislature to take greater responsibility for narrowing California’s immense student achievement gap.    That gap is the disparity — by 30 percentage points or more — in test scores and other measures between low- and high-income students and between Black and Latino students and their Asian and white peers.  CSBA’s SOS for Student Achievement initiative ended unceremoniously Aug. 13 when the Senate Appropriations Committee rejected three of the four bills it had sponsored. The measures were among the hundreds with state or local budget implications that the committee dismissed in a rapid-fire session without publicly explaining its decision.    The annual cattle call of bills is an efficient but opaque exercise during the annual rush toward the Aug. 31 deadline for acting on all bills. The lack of transparency left CSBA speculating on what happened to bills that showed promise. As part of the 2026-27 state budget, Newsom pushed through a major realignment of TK-12 governance. His plan resembles recommendations in a December 2025 report from PACE, an independent university-based research center, that captured Newsom’s attention.