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Julie Collier: Parents need more school choice

Julie Collier
Orange County Register
January 16th, 2015

Parents should be the final decision-makers when it comes to where their children are educated.

Although California does give parents some choice – on paper, at least – beyond settling for a failing public school, the reality is that exercising those options is much more difficult than it ought to be. A handful of states offer parents a wide range of choices for schooling their children, including publicly funded voucher programs and tax credits. For a variety of reasons – teachers union’ opposition mainly – private school choice has yet to take off in the Golden State.

We do have some public school choice. Open enrollment and inter-district transfer laws provide some families with an escape route from failing schools. But many families continue to miss out, forced to settle for mediocrity when their children deserve excellence.

Charter schools offer a ray of hope. California, in fact, leads the nation with more than 1,100 charter schools serving some 520,000 students statewide. Just over 49,000 new students enrolled in a charter school in 2013-14, according to the California Charter Schools Association. But as robust as the Golden State’s charter school sector may be, CCSA also points out that an estimated 50,000 children languish on waiting lists.

The California Teachers Association and its allies peddle the myth that charter schools are “private” schools that serve only to enrich their operators – not true. Charter schools are public schools. Although they have more autonomy than traditional public schools, they must still abide by the same education policies. And charter schools receive considerably less state funding.

Charter schools are also under constant pressure to deliver high academic performance. Unlike traditional public schools, which can fail students for decades without consequence, charter schools may be shut down if they do not provide a quality education for their students.

Quality education is a rare commodity. California sits near the bottom in every measure of student achievement in America, and has for decades. California’s fourth-graders rank 47th in the country in reading and math, according to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress. Our eighth-graders are slightly better, placing 42nd in reading and 45th in math. The achievement gap between California’s white students and their black and Hispanic peers is also wider than the national average.

Failing our students is an embarrassment and a disgrace that every parent needs to confront. But unless you can afford private or parochial school tuition, practically every child in every ZIP code is at risk for failure in California. Children living in low-income and minority neighborhoods are the most at risk.

State and local education officials often talk up high standards and accountability. But it’s difficult to have accountability when state and local laws make it impossible to evaluate teachers based on student success.

School choice is better than any accountability system devised by state and federal bureaucrats. When parents have the freedom to vote with their feet, schools can step up and improve what they have to offer, or go out of business. Parents and taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for failure year after year and decade after decade.

With the new legislative session now under way in Sacramento, parents need to keep a sharp lookout for bills that are student-focused, not union-focused. We should be actively researching who supports child-centered reforms and who is working to shore up the status quo.

We need legislation that provides more equitable funding for charter schools. We need to guard against union-sponsored legislation that would gut the state’s Open Enrollment Act, which lets parents send their children to a higher-performing school if their neighborhood school happens to be on the list of 1,000 the state identifies as “low-achieving.”

Our children’s education can no longer be a spectator sport. National School Choice Week, which runs Jan. 25-31, is the ideal occasion for California parents to speak up for greater choice for all children.

Take time to celebrate educational choice for your child – then insist on having more. School choice is the ultimate expression of parent empowerment.

Julie Collier is the founder and executive director of Parents Advocate League, a grassroots parent-empowerment organization dedicated to ensuring a quality education for all students.