The 1st question to ask yourself is, will you be a lifetime employee of the CA education system? That is, will you be able to use the pension plan for 30 years? Formula pensions are great for single employer workers, but the payout is reduced by at least 1/3 if you change that to only 2 employers over your career. If you work more places, then the payout decreases some more. With the 403b, or similar savings plan, the money is portable.
From what I have read, IL and CT pensions are in bad shape, but CA is Ok. CALPERS is in the news a lot because, since it is the largest pension plan, everybody studies it. I took an economics course at Stanford, and we studied it in the class. We used it as the standard to rate other pension plans. My big takeaway was if a pension plan assumes a higher return than treasuries, then there is some risk that it will fail built into the model. That is basically every plan out there.
I worked for 4 companies so far over 30 years, and I had 401k or similar plans for most of the time. I am glad I had them instead of pensions. I can retire now.