Charter schools in California should have known a tough time was ahead when charter advocates spent around $62 million backing the wrong candidates in 2018.
Education reformer Marshall Tuck lost to the union-backed Tony Thurmond for superintendent of public instruction and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa did not become governor. Instead, it was Gavin Newsom who rode a wave of union money into the Governor’s Mansion.
Newsom is a stark contrast to his predecessor, Jerry Brown, who generally supported charter schools. In fact, Brown opened two charter s while mayor of Oakland, “so it wasn’t much of a surprise that Brown maintained his faith in charters as governor, using the veto threat to blunt the worst impulses of the California Teachers Association,” said Will Swaim, president of the California Policy Center.
But as the legislative session started last year, the marionette strings of the deep-pocketed and powerful CTA became clear for all to see as a package of anti-choice bills were proposed that would have gutted charter schools.
It’s not that teachers unions are inherently bad; it’s that they are disproportionately powerful and resist change even when it’s obviously needed.
Some of the bills were beat back, perhaps only temporarily, and others were molded into a compromise that had leaders from both CTA and the California Charter Schools Association at a signing ceremony. But while the bills seemed to lock in charter schools’ right to exist in California, school choice remains under threat. Unions and school districts always had significant power to thwart school choice and now they have more.
School choice is popular in California. In 2019, the Public Policy Institute of California showed that 59 percent of public-school parents supported charter schools, while a 2017 poll by BerkeleyIGS/EdSource showed a majority supported vouchers or tax credits for low-income families to send their kids to a private or religious school of their choosing.
For National School Choice Week, we would like to remind Californians school choice is a good thing and can help students achieve their dreams. But there are powerful forces standing in the way.
