California Gov. Gavin Newsom is fashioning himself as the Democratic counterweight to Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who has staked his presidential campaign on his war on “wokeness” and railed against what he and other conservatives describe as left-wing indoctrination in public schools. The back-and-forth was a show of political muscle from the governor of America’s largest state. But it—as well as laws in conservative states that have restricted the teaching of so-called “divisive topics,” such as sexuality, gender identity, and race—was also a challenge to a long-standing tradition across the country of leaving curriculum decisions to local school boards. “In California, we’ve made a big investment in [the] Local Control Funding Formula [and] gave a lot of control over how funds are spent to local school boards, so there’s a real deep value of local control,” said Julie Marsh, an education policy professor at the University of Southern California, referring to California’s school funding model that allocates funding to school districts based on the percentage of high-needs students, such as English learners, students in poverty, and students in foster care. “But the question is, what’s the proper role of the state? And when is it an overreach?” Local control has long been the tradition in American public education. While states set standards, decisions about how schools spend money and align their curriculum with state standards are largely left up to school boards. ut it’s a situation with implications for the future of local control, Marsh said. And the same applies to laws restricting curriculum in Republican-led states like Florida. At the same time, some level of state intervention is needed, especially when students’ rights or societal goals are in question, she said. “For me, it’s almost a philosophical question of, at what point is there too much local control?” Marsh said. “If it’s taking away rights from students, for example, that’s often when you say, ‘OK, someone needs to step in because local control has to be for everyone.’ ”