School Choice Week promotes options for kids

Today marks the start of School Choice Week, a time when advocates of educational freedom highlight and promote the value of school choice. As the last two years have taught a lot of parents, it’s better to have options than to be stuck, subject to the wh

The premise of school choice is relatively straightforward.

If your local, traditional public K-12 school is serving the needs for your child, great.

But if it’s not, it best serves the interests of parents, students, teachers and communities as a whole for educational institutions to exist that can help students thrive.

For some, that may be a public charter school that receives scrutiny from local or state school boards but is given more flexibility than traditional public K-12 schools.

For others, it may be a public charter school that specializes in distance learning.

For others still, it may be a private school, secular or religious, independent of the influence of politics by way of public school boards.

Some schools may have specialized programs exposing students to the arts, others the sciences, others careers in computing.

Promoting school choice is fundamentally about promoting the broadest array of options possible, because, as everyone knows, kids are different, with different needs, interests, strengths and weaknesses.

Here in California, students, parents and teachers could use a renewed focus on school choice.

It ought to be recognized for the scandal that it is that California consistently ranks near the very bottom compared to the other 50 states on standardized tests.

It ought to also be recognized that even before the pandemic. barely half of students were meeting the state’s own standards in English language arts and even fewer met them in math.

With prolonged school closures, especially when compared to the rest of the nation, students who didn’t have access to in-person learning have not only missed out on critical socialization, but they certainly experienced learning loss.

That regrettably is in large part thanks to the influence of California’s public teachers unions, which are among the biggest campaign spenders in the state and significantly influence both local school boards and the California Legislature.

“It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables,” said United Teachers Los Angeles leader Cecily Myart-Cruz to Los Angeles magazine last year, giving insight into the grotesque worldview of such unions. “They learned resilience.”

Granted, some parents may be perfectly content sending their children to public schools in districts like the Los Angeles Unified School District dominated by unions like UTLA.

But many others aren’t. The teachers unions know this, which is why for years they’ve worked to crush public charter schools and halt any discussion of vouchers, which majorities of Californians, especially Black and Latino parents, support.

Certainly, we can hear the objections of parents and even teachers unions in districts less deplorable than UTLA’s LAUSD saying their districts are better than that. That’s great, but that’s not the norm, and it’s not good enough for students across the state.

The children of California deserve better than what the status quo is providing them.

There are pending ballot measures promoting school choice. We hope they gain some traction.