As Covid has heightened concerns about the impact of closed schools on children’s long-term development, a grassroots group is now working to put a School Choice ballot initiative before California voters in the November 2022 election.
The movement for the initiative has seen a resurgence amid the pandemic, which resulted in public school students unable to access in-person instruction, in large part due to teacher union demands, Mike Alexander, chair of the California School Choice Initiative, told the Northern California Record.
“You have to recognize the almost complete and total failure of what we call education in California, with schools overall ranked near the bottom nationwide,” Alexander said. “And that means that thousands, and over a generation, millions of young Californians are deprived of the education that they're entitled to.”
A news release from Californians for School Choice states the Education Freedom Act would contain four key components to ensure quality education is equitable, not determined by ZIP code.
School choice is supported by many of the candidates in the recall election, Calmatters reported.
“The mask has been ripped off the teachers’ unions,” Alexander said. “They have revealed themselves to be essentially a political operation, we know that because they refuse to teach, demanded more money, or wanted the same or more money for doing less work and doing it remotely. Parents were very dissatisfied with that particular experiment in remote learning.”
As parents were provided with better understanding of how the public school system functions, it also led to decreasing enrollment, Alexander said.
“It became clear that the teachers and the overall public school system had little or nothing to do with learning and weren’t making much of a contribution,” Alexander said. “And when parents got to see what was happening or not happening, they said enough.”
School choice advocates say the movement is also about providing relief and transparency to taxpayers.
“Overall, the net effect for taxpayers is that with competition, we might actually start to get our money's worth out of the system,” Alexander said.
The school choice initiative, which was submitted to the Attorney General last week, is expected to be approved for placement on the November 2022 ballot sometime this month.