“This week parents and concerned citizens throughout the state of California will be observing "closing anniversary."

This refers, of course, to the one-year anniversary of the closing of California schools. Despite the governor's assertions to the contrary, California’s 10,000 schools remain closed or only partially open with no real plan to get back to normal. The teachers unions simply won’t permit it. Suffice it to say that the parents are now “on to the con.”

Even though children didn’t learn much this year, parents learned a lot. Here is a short list:

• Despite massive unemployment and economic dislocation among parents, not a single school employee lost his job. Instead teacher unions cynically use the "pandemic" as an excuse not to work, stay home and even lobby for bonuses.
• It soon became apparent that the safest place in California was a K-12 classroom. During the entire pandemic, only a few children under the age of 18 have died from the virus. K-12 children neither contracted nor carried the virus. The teacher unions know this but simply don't care. They don’t care about the kids or about the science.
• Even though politics has no place in the classroom, teachers’ unions imposed purely political demands as a condition of returning to the classroom. We fondly remember the United Teachers Los Angeles refusing to reopen unless privately operated publicly funded charter schools were shut down, police defunded, Medicare-for-All government-run health care passed, a statewide wealth tax implemented, housing for homeless is fully funded, etc.  This is how the teachers unions hold good teachers and the children hostage to a radical political agenda.  Lesson:  It was never, ever about the science or the children
• For decades, teachers unions attacked the very idea of homeschooling. They insisted that schools provided much-needed socialization, without which full personal development was impossible. To hear them tell the tale, homeschooling was a form of child abuse. We haven't heard a word about this for the past year even as doctors warned of rising rates of depression, drug use and suicide among K-12 students. I guess we are all homeschoolers now. Lesson: Teachers unions are hypocrites.
• Parents also learned a lot about school boards, whose members were only too happy to go along and get along with the teachers unions. After all, most of them owed their election to union money and precinct workers. They were not about to be pushed around by parents and taxpayers.
• Parents called, faxed, emailed, Twittered and Facebooked, all to no avail. Some parents used their three minutes of public comment at a school board meeting to vent and rant, again to no effect. School boards usually met these complaints with silence. Occasionally a board member would explain, as if to a very slow student, that their "hands were tied" by state law or the latest royal decree emanating from the governor while dining mask-less at the French Laundry in Napa.
• Parents then took to the streets chanting, protesting and waving signs just like union protesters. Affluent suburban parents soon learned what inner-city parents have known all along: These people don't care and are immovably opposed to changing the system. Lesson learned: Even though voters elect them to their representative positions, their real constituents are the unions and especially the union money that put them in office.
• Having learned that lesson, many parents resorted to the recall process only to discover recalling even one board member is long, arduous and expensive. Worse yet, any result would be months away when relief was needed in weeks. Moreover, they realized that the teachers unions had rigged state law to make sure that no school board could ever make any real changes in how schools were run.
• Parents soon understood that the state legislature itself is a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the public employee unions. There would be no relief there. Like the recall process, electing a new and sympathetic legislature was a very long-term process with no reliable outcome.
• Whatever they once thought about their schools and teachers, these parents now viewed the system very differently. These parents now realize that the system cannot be effectively reformed from the outside. The only solution is to take their children, take their money and go somewhere else. These parents are now part of a statewide, indeed a nationwide, movement to enact real school choice. As a result, parents and concerned citizens are rallying around a proposal being advanced by the California School Choice Foundation to enact the Educational Freedom Act via the initiative process in November 2022.

Conclusion

Parents are not fools. Operating under the same state guidelines, private schools have been open for months. The simple fact is that the school system, the school boards, and especially the teachers unions have broken faith with the parents and taxpayers. Even if the schools somehow reopen in the near term, there is nothing to prevent them from doing it again. The damage is irreversible.

The time to act is now!

All of this energy must now be channeled into concrete, effective political action which, for once and for all, will place PARENTS, NOT POLITICIANS, in charge of the education and moral formation of their own children.

Call to Action

Here is what you can do now:

You can join us in our mission to bring real School Choice to the K-12 students and their parents in California by;

1. Share this document with your friends and organizations by using your email. You can post on you social media by clicking the share button.
2. At the top right of the screen select the Volunteer Button and let us know that you want to help.
3. Sigh our Petition of support and let California know that thousands of Californians support School Choice.
4. All of our staff and supporters are volunteers. However, we still have to keep the lights on, website expenses, rent etc. It all costs money and we need your help. A recuring donation of as little as $5.00 a month means a lot.
5. Select our Interact Pages and select Join. Become active on our website, respond to articles and blogs. Contact us, [email protected] Give us phone call, (626) 792-1772

We are planning on collecting signatures for our people’s initiative beginning in the fourth quarter. We can win with your help and support. Take some time to explore our website and educate yourself on education options. Our final form of the initiative is with the attorneys now.

We are offering you a rare opportunity to really make a difference. Take some time to listen to your inner voice, think, meditate, pray. When you are ready to help save our children, call us and get involved.

Mike Alexander

President

California School Choice Foundation