This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.
California’s Proposition 3, an ongoing tax on top income earners to help fund the state’s massive public education system, faces virtually no organized opposition. A September survey found that it enjoyed 58% support among likely voters. It doesn’t create a new levy, either; it simply takes a tax that has been on the books since 2012 and makes it permanent.
So why are the measure’s supporters so nervous?
For the answer, look no further than a sample ballot for California’s Nov. 3 election. It’s bulging with 14 statewide propositions, five of them involving tax questions of some kind.
That list includes Prop. 40, the so-called Billionaire Tax, by far the largest and most controversial of the lot, along with two propositions that are expressly written to derail Prop. 40 if it is approved. And all of those measures were leading in the September survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, even though two of them are diametrically opposed to the third.
That’s a pretty solid sign that voters are baffled by the array of choices facing them. And for the teachers’ unions who say Prop. 3’s tax money is essential to the state’s education funding and some of their own members’ jobs, that is a worrisome place to be.
“While there’s no actual campaign against Prop. 3, I think a lot of people are confusing the ads against Prop. 40 and carrying that over to Prop. 3,” said Jeff Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers, which represents 120,000 education workers in the state. Freitas added that the CFT’s own polling numbers have come in lower than the robust showing in the September survey.
For those and other reasons, the CFT and the 310,000 strong California Teachers Association are rallying their members and using their money to help get out the vote in favor of Prop 3. (Disclosure: Both unions are financial supporters of Capital & Main.)
Their concern is understandable. At stake is $10 billion or more in education funding and essential services each year, a significant chunk of the state’s annual allocation for public schools from pre-K through community college.
“It’s a priority situation that we’re dealing with,” Freitas said.
* * *
California voters first passed a tax on high earners to safeguard education funding in 2012, when the state was facing heavy revenue losses following the Great Recession. Four years later, voters chose to extend the tax through 2030. Prop. 3 would remove the expiration date altogether.
The tax itself is straightforward: a slightly higher rate on the state’s top 2% of earners. In fiscal year 2025, that meant it applied only to individuals earning more than about $371,000, or $743,000 for married couples filing jointly, according to research by the California Budget & Policy Center.
Prop. 3 is also a tax on income only, not overall wealth. That’s an important distinction from the proposed Billionaire Tax, whose aim is to generate $100 billion in revenue over five years (primarily for health care funding) by placing a 5% one-time levy on the total net worth of the state’s roughly 250 billionaires.
But while proponents of the Billionaire Tax are only estimating what the state might receive from that measure, those pushing Prop. 3 have a clear idea about what the education tax revenues are worth. While the amount collected will vary, Freitas said the tax has been reliably worth $8 billion to $12 billion in annual public education funding in recent years.
That is upward of 10% of the state’s annual education budget. It has been a major boost. But that’s also what makes the prospect of Prop. 3 failing so concerning to the unions who represent hundreds of thousands of school teachers and support staff — and it’s the reason they’re not willing to take any chances.
* * *
The California Teachers Association has spent more than $33 million to qualify Prop. 3 for the ballot and rally support for it, and the California Federation of Teachers has added nearly $2 million more. Both unions are mobilizing their members to walk precincts and work phone banks as the vote draws closer.
In September, the CTA organized more than 1,000 of its members up and down the state to canvass neighborhoods and knock on doors. The goal was not only to talk up Prop. 3’s benefits, but to help voters distinguish it from the other tax measures on the November ballot.
The CTA includes on its website a tool that estimates how much funding would be lost in each of California’s school districts if the tax extension fails. (Los Angeles Unified School District alone would be in line for a hit of more than $838 million per year.) The CTA estimates that one in six educators’ jobs would be at risk if the funding goes away.
There’s no ad campaign opposing Prop. 3. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which believes in strictly limiting government taxation, has weighed in against it, arguing that the education tax was created as a temporary measure in 2012 and touted again as temporary when it was renewed in 2016.
“The real lesson here is that whatever is represented to voters about a ballot measure seeking new programs or higher taxes should not be taken at face value,” Jon Coupal, president of the Jarvis association, wrote in a column published on the organization’s website. Prop. 40, Coupal argued, should be viewed warily partly because of Prop. 3’s history.
It’s that conflation of tax measures — arguing against Prop. 40 and Prop. 3 at the same time, for example — that most concerns union leaders about the education tax’s chances of passage. And as the voters’ muddled response to the Public Policy Institute of California’s September survey demonstrated, there already appears to be plenty of mixed messaging out there.
“We’re getting school boards to pass resolutions [of support] for Prop. 3, we’re providing materials to our members, and we are definitely getting out there,” said CFT’s Freitas. It may take all that and more to ensure that the education tax doesn’t get lost in the shuffle come November.
Capital & Main is an award-winning nonprofit publication that reports from California on the most pressing economic, environmental and social issues of our time, including economic inequality, climate change, health care, threats to democracy, hate and extremism and immigration.
Copyright 2026 Capital & Main
