Monday marked the start of School Choice Week, a time when advocates of educational freedom highlight and promote the value of school choice. As the last few years have taught a lot of parents, it's better to have options than to be stuck, subject to the whims of any single institution.
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 must 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 also experienced learning loss.
Big-spending teachers unions, and politicians desperate for their dollars, are to blame for this disaster. School choice is the cure for what ails our education system. That's why the teachers unions want to crush it.
A version of this editorial was published in 2022
—The Editorial Board, Southern California News Group
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