Tag Archive for: teachers union

Sonoma County Teachers Strike Over but Underlying Issues Unresolved

On March 7, members of the union representing teachers in the Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified School District voted to strike. It began on March 10 and by March 17 it was over. What happened?

At first, prospects for a resolution to the strike were not encouraging. On March 9 they claimed the district could not possibly afford to issue the raises demanded by the union, particularly if those raises were extended beyond the credentialed teachers to all of the district’s employees in all the bargaining units. Then on March 17 they announced the strike was resolved. The compromise was to grant the cost of living increases in six month increments over the next three years, instead of granting the entire increase at the beginning of each year. This compromise saved enough money for the district to come to an agreement with the union.

But compromise or not, determining whether or not Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified School District could afford the concessions they made is not easy. Deciphering the financial statements of a public agency is nearly a fool’s errand, because they are not required to engage in accrual based double entry bookkeeping. The elegant symmetry of general ledger accounting as practiced in the private sector still allows for creative accounting, but because the balance sheet and the income statement are connected algebraically, any thorough audit of the balance sheet will turn up irregularities.

By contrast, take a look at this unaudited financial statement for Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified School District’s fiscal year ended June 30, 2021. The term “balance sheet,” which doesn’t turn up until page 83 of the report, does not include accrued liabilities. How much liability does the school district carry for earned pension and retirement health care obligations, and why isn’t this amount showing as a liability? What the district represents as an income statement and balance sheet is more of a cash flow statement, a useful tool, but not helpful if one wants to assess the district’s long-term financial health.

According to negotiators representing the district, granting the raises demanded by the union would drive their cash reserves below the required minimum within two years. But apparently the district did not ultimately determine their projection to be alarming enough to continue the fight. And maybe it isn’t. Going in the hole by $2.4 million, two years from now, when the Federal government is going to pump at least $6 million into the district this year and will be tapping the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan funds for the next few years, is probably an acceptable risk.

The more systemic risk, however, lies in how the district copes with a downturn in investment returns that affects CalSTRS, the California State Teachers Retirement System. In the district’s 2021-22 interim budget, they project total salaries of $37 million and total benefits of $22 million. Most of this benefit overhead, equal to 60 percent of salaries, is the employer contribution to CalSTRS, the sick man of California. According to a November 2021 report from the California Office of Legislative Analyst, CalSTRS is only 67 percent funded. Put another way, they are in the hole to the tune of $106 billion.

To appreciate how potentially serious this shortfall can become, consider the fact that there are only around 307,000 K-12 teachers currently employed in California. This is the denominator over which participating school districts have to spread a $106 billion unfunded pension liability. That equates to $344,000 per employee. What if investment returns don’t exceed projections sufficiently to close that prodigious gap? How much more will employers have to pay CalSTRS in the coming years?

This is the elephant in the room that any financially literate school board member will find justifiably intimidating. California’s state and local governments, if you make only somewhat conservative assumptions regarding pension fund performance and take into account the cost that will confront politicians if they ever decide to finally build the required infrastructure that they’ve all but ignored for the past thirty years, is easily in excess of two trillion dollars. Go find that money, if there’s an economic downturn.

This is ultimately what school boards, school district management, and the unions they bargain with, need to focus on. Cost-of-living adjustments have to be increased when the rate of inflation increases. That’s a tail that has to be chased. But in the meantime, some of the underlying causes of higher prices must be corrected. The cost of housing and food are impacted by the quality of the enabling infrastructure. Where are these unions when politicians come forward with proposals to tap the general fund to pay for more water, power, and transportation infrastructure? Where are they when instead of building roads and upgrading aqueducts, the politicians foolishly fund high speed rail? Building a bullet train is a noble aspiration but should not be prioritized over the urgent need for new state subsidized water, power and transportation projects that would lower the cost of housing and food.

The unions that secured cost-of-living adjustments for the Rohnert Park teachers did their job. But for the financial security of not only their members, but all working families in California, they may wish to consider supporting practical infrastructure spending that will lower the cost of living for everyone.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

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Let the Children Vote – Prop. 18 Lowers Voting Age

What else do we know about this population 18 to 24? They are stupid. That is why we put them in dormitories. And they have a resident assistant. They make really bad decisions.
– Kamala Harris, excerpt from speech to Ford Foundation, 2014

If only Kamala Harris, and like-minded proponents of California’s Prop. 18, had the courage of these convictions. Kamala Harris may have been sincere, but political objectives often override common sense. Prop. 18, which will permit anyone who turns 18 by the next general election to vote in special elections or primaries prior to that general election, is a nakedly partisan ballot proposition. It is based on the fact that California’s youth are even more likely to lean Democrat than California’s adult voters, and is therefore calculated to pad Democratic voter registration in order to swing what few battleground districts remain in deep blue California.

Statistics are readily available to prove this assertion. For starters, view the results so far of the “pre-registration” campaign targeting 16 and 17 year olds, initiated by Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat. The program, initiated in 2016, started out slowly, with only 90,000 teens pre-registered as of March 2018. But by September 2018 that number was up to 200,000, and a year later, it passed 400,000. In time for the March 2020 primaries, as Padilla’s office triumphantly disclosed in a February 6, 2020 press release, it passed 500,000. The party preferences among these pre-registrants skew sharply Democrat, even for California.

Young Voters Vote for Democrats

As shown on the report issued by California’s Secretary of State “Total Pre-Registrations by Political Party as of 2/3/2020,” Democratic pre-registrants, at 39.1 percent, are nearly four times as numerous as Republican pre-registrants, at 11.7 percent. This compares to statewide registration of eligible voters in 2020 showing Democrats, at 44.6 percent of registrants, not even managing a two-to-one advantage over Republican registrants at 23.7 percent.

This strategy becomes more evident when overlaying the party preferences of pre-registrants by county with battleground congressional districts. The map shown below depicts California’s U.S. Congressional Districts, with eight battlegrounds identified. A few examples should suffice to illustrate the strategic value to Democrats of an expanded youth vote.

Consider the location of District 21, where Democrat TJ Cox upset Republican David Valadao by a mere 862 votes in 2018. This district encompasses portions of Fresno, Kings, Tulare, and Kern counties. The pre-registered young Democrats in those four counties as of February 2020 (which means most of them will be eligible to vote this November) numbered 9,857, whereas the preregistered Republicans numbered barely more than half that many, at 5,349. Not all of these voters reside in the 21st Congressional District, of course, but similar patterns apply in all counties.

For example, Orange County, once considered California’s impregnable bastion of Republican power, is now up for grabs. Two U.S. Congressional Districts – District 45 and District 48 – were long considered safe Republican seats, but in 2018 were won by Democrats. In what promise to be two very close congressional races this November in Orange County, 15,448 young Democrats are pre-registered as of February 2020, compared to only 6,970 young Republicans.

There is abundant evidence that the youth vote disproportionately belongs to Democrats, even in a state where the general electorate is disproportionately registered as Democrats. The Public Policy Institute of California released a study last year summarizing the result of surveys they conducted between Sept. 2018 and July 2019 on California voter preferences. Their findings, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, found that among likely voters, 52 percent of Millennials are registered Democrat, compared to only 43 percent of Generation X and only 44 percent of Baby Boomers. Time, along with demographics, appears to favor Democrats.

Based on this evidence, the partisan political objective behind Prop. 18 is clear. But what about the hard truths? Are people aged 18 to 24 really “stupid,” as Kamala Harris has said?

Is Kamala Harris Right? And If So, Should Children Vote at Age 17?

There’s two aspects to this question. First, what characteristics differentiate the average brain of a 17 year-old from someone, say, 25, and do those differences matter when it comes to voting? Second, what are the primary influences on someone age 17 – for example, the teaching environment in their public school, and do those differences matter when it comes to voting?

To the first question, there is no longer any scientific uncertainty that the human brain continues to develop until age 25. Twenty five. A 2013 report in the journal Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment entitled “Maturation of the adolescent brain” includes the following assertions:

“It is well established that the brain undergoes a “rewiring” process that is not complete until approximately 25 years of age,” and “Neuroimaging studies have revealed that when interacting with others and making decisions, adolescents are more likely than adults to be swayed by their emotions.”

This study examines the biomarkers influencing brain function and ticks through an impressive array of neurobehavioral evidence. Its conclusions are unambiguous.

“The prefrontal cortex offers an individual the capacity to exercise good judgment when presented with difficult life situations. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the frontal lobes lying just behind the forehead, is responsible for cognitive analysis, abstract thought, and the moderation of correct behavior in social situations… The prefrontal cortex is one of the last regions of the brain to reach maturation. There are several executive functions of the human prefrontal cortex that remain under construction during adolescence. The fact that brain development is not complete until near the age of 25 years refers specifically to the development of the prefrontal cortex… The development of the prefrontal cortex is very important for complex behavioral performance, as this region of the brain helps accomplish executive brain functions.”

This 2013 study is not an outlier. As a matter of fact, the idea that members of the 18-24 age cohort are not full fledged adults is now the conventional wisdom. Referencing a Harvard study on this question, and referring to people in their late teens and early twenties, a New York Times article announced in 2016 “You’re an Adult. Your Brain, Not so Much.” You can go back to 2009 for a study summarized in the Journal of the American Psychological Association: “While Adolescents May Reason As Well As Adults, Their Emotional Maturity Lags, Says New Research.”

If you’re between the ages of 18 and 24, you’re stupid. Corroborating material is plentiful. The Wall Street Journal reports in a 2012 article; “Delayed Development: 20-Somethings Blame the Brain.” The BBC, just last year, citing Cambridge University researchers, reported “People don’t become ‘adults’ until their 30s, say scientists.” There’s literally nothing from the scientific community that contradicts Kamala Harris – here are more concurring reports from Scientific American and Psychology Today.

Who Forms the Political Sentiments of California’s Teenagers?

It doesn’t take a scientific study to know that the younger someone is, the less life experience they have. Without the base of knowledge and experiences and relationships built up over years and decades, teenagers are more likely to be heavily influenced by what they’re taught and by what their peers and role models believe. Our scientific knowledge of the adolescent brain merely adds a compounding factor – young people up to the age of 25 have not yet reached their innate potential to perform cognitive analysis and abstract thought, or resist being swayed by their emotions.

Which brings us to the question of California’s public schools, and how the partisan agenda of California’s teachers’ unions affects what students learn and how they form their political opinions.

The most powerful union in California is the California Teachers Association, with an estimated revenue in 2018 (local and state chapters combined) of over 350 million. The CTA, along with the smaller but also powerful California Federation of Teachers, is politically active and highly partisan. A quick scan through the CTA’s official website confirms this, revealing their positions on standardized testing, “alternative discipline,” charter schools (“Kids Not Profits”), immigration, and a host of “social justice” issues.

One powerful local teachers union in California that has been loosely affiliated with both the CTA and the CFT is the United Teachers of Los Angeles, representing teachers in the second largest school district in the United States. The agenda they have put forward to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic provides a representative example of the political mentality of California’s K-12 public school teachers’ unions.

Included in the UTLA’s demands in this time of economic and medical crisis are things that have little to do with those issues, which one would think are broad enough and challenging enough to be addressed without distractions. But UTLA’s laundry list, entitled “Safe and Equitable Conditions for Starting LAUSD in 2020-21,” constitutes a comprehensive political agenda.

At the federal level, the UTLA is calling for federal assistance including an emergency bailout, along with increased Title I funding, increased Individuals With Disabilities Education funding, and “Medicare for All.”

At the state level, UTLA is calling for passage of the proposed property tax increase that is already on the November ballot, along with a “Wealth Tax” of 1 percent a year, and a “Millionaire Tax” of up to 3 percent surtax on high-income Californians.

And at the local level, UTLA wants to “Defund Police,” provide free housing to anyone, ten additional sick days for all private employees, a moratorium on charter schools, and “financial support for undocumented students and families.”

The Teachers Union is Forming the Minds of Young Voters

The indoctrination of K-12 public school students in California and across much of the rest of the United States significantly pre-dates the COVID-19 crisis. An August 2020 Heritage Foundation commentary by Douglas Blair entitled “I’m a Former Teacher. Here’s How Your Children Are Getting Indoctrinated by Leftist Ideology,” offers further examples.

Blair describes how “the left uses a combination of propaganda and suppression to push kids into the ensnaring grip of socialism and anti-patriotism.” This propaganda includes “instilling the idea that the pillars of Western civilization were evil, and their memories deserve to be thrown in the trash.” In practical terms, for example, this means that on one hand Winston Churchill is a racist scumbag, and on the other, nothing relating to Black Lives Matter can be criticized.

Back here in California, a good example of leftist indoctrination promoted by the teachers unions is the proposed “ethnic studies” course that is closer than ever to being a mandatory requirement for high school graduation. This course might have already become part of California’s mandated curricula except for the fact that in its first version, it didn’t emphasize enough victimized groups. Jewish groups, joined by organizations representing Armenians, Greeks, Hindus and Koreans, were successful in sending the designers of California’s ethnic studies syllabus back to the drawing board, presumably to add them to the victims matrix.

California’s population demographics have reached the point where barely over 10 percent of its public high school students are “non-hispanic white cis-heteronormative males.” Notwithstanding the trauma learning about “The Four ‘I’s’ of Oppression” might cause these privileged scions of pariahs, imagine what instilling this mentality does to the other 90 percent, who are all taught that they are “victims of oppression.”

What California’s public educators are doing, to the extent they are exposing their impressionable students to concepts and narratives that stir envy, resentment, guilt, shame, anger, revenge, along with a whole lot of just plain weird, is akin to cult manipulation. Depersonalize someone. Make them only exist as a member of a group. Invent an entirely new system of language and concepts to guide their thinking. Destroy their faith in outside institutions. Then prescribe the solutions.

And then make sure they vote.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Why Are Public Safety Unions Supporting Teachers Unions?

During the Los Angeles teachers strike earlier this year, an article in the ultra-left publication The Nation offered an excellent glimpse into the mentality of strikers and their supporters. The article begins by describing a scene in front of an LAUSD middle school on day three of the strike. A truck driver has arrived to make a delivery to the school, and the picket line won’t budge. Police have been called.

What happens next? According to The Nation, “The line holds. The police don’t make good on their threats to cite or arrest teachers, and the truck and police cars drive off. One of the officers even gets on his radio before he leaves and says, ‘Don’t let them come between us. We support you!'”

It would take an expert to determine whether this conduct falls within the boundaries of normal police discretion or constitutes a minor act of civil disobedience in solidarity with the strikers, but it doesn’t take an expert to determine whose side this officer was on. “We support you.”

Police, along with the firefighters who on January 19th actually marched by the hundreds through downtown Los Angeles to support the teachers strike, can be applauded for wanting to support teachers and students. They can be applauded for doing what they think is right, especially if they think they are helping the next generation of Americans get a quality public education. But what if everything the teachers union is trying to do is wrong?

For starters, funding for traditional public schools is not undermined by the presence of charter schools. Public schools receive public revenues based on enrollment, and public school classrooms, according to one of the union’s own stated grievances, are bursting. There are more students than the system can handle, so charters siphoning off some of these students cannot possibly be the reason for inadequate operating revenue. What about funds for capital improvements?

In November 2018 California’s voters approved over $15 billion in local school improvement bonds. In November 2016, voters approved over $24 billion in local school improvement bonds; June 2016, $6.2 billion; November 2014, $11 billion. There should be no shortage of funds to upgrade public schools, because the success rate for local school improvement bonds in California is over 90 percent, and tens of billions have been allocated over just the past few years. We should be asking where, if we’ve allocated nearly $60 billion over just the past five years to maintain and upgrade schools in an era of stable enrollment, did all that money go?

With respect to operating revenue, the biggest reason for deficits is the crushing burden of funding retirement benefits. The reason the teachers union opposes charters is because it leaves a smaller pool of LAUSD traditional school students, i.e., less revenue, to pay down their unfunded liability for retirement benefits – nearly $7.0 billion for pensions, and nearly $15 billion for pensions.

At the very least, the teachers union should tell the truth: We want more students so we will have more revenue because we demanded and received retirement benefits that were excessively generous and financially unsustainable. Better yet, they could “negotiate” lower benefit formulas and higher personal contributions through payroll withholding.

Instead, the teachers union wants to kill charter schools, and the police and firefighter unions are helping them. But all these unions ought to recognize that their retirement benefits are not more important than providing quality education. And at least police and fire unions have not destroyed the effectiveness of their organizations. Can the teachers union make that claim?

No. They can’t. The teachers unions in California are the worst thing that’s ever happened to public education. Set aside for a moment their leftist agenda that they use every opportunity to bring into the classroom, or their economic demands that reflect innumeracy and greed in equal measure. Just refer to the 2014 Vergara vs. California case for a defining example of just how much damage these unions are doing to California’s public schools.

The plaintiffs in this case sued to modify three work rules, (1) a longer period before granting tenure, (2) changing layoff criteria from seniority to merit, and (3) streamlined dismissal policies for incompetent teachers. These plaintiffs argued the existing work rules had a disproportionately negative impact on minority communities, and proved it – view the closing arguments by the plaintiff’s attorney in this case to see for yourself. But a California State Appellate Court reversed the lower court’s ruling, and the California Supreme Court refused to take the case. To put it mildly, California’s public schools continue to suffer.

Instead of embracing reforms such as proposed in the Vergara case, the teachers union is trying to unionize charter schools. And instead of agreeing to retirement benefits reform, the LAUSD teachers union went on strike. Post strike, the financial challenges facing LAUSD are worse than ever.

To cope? More money, of course. The LAUSD school board has called for a new parcel tax in Los Angeles, Measure EE, to address their budget deficits. As reported by Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the board is calling for a special election with “the intention to keep voter turnout very low.” Needless to say, in low turnout elections, the union’s ballot harvesting machine virtually assures that this new tax will pass.

Blaming charter schools for financial challenges facing traditional public schools is a huge deception, and it’s working. According to polling conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, while California’s voters support, by a narrow margin, charter schools, a majority of them have “concerns about the fiscal impacts [of charters] on traditional public schools.” Spreading this deception allows the teachers union to deflect growing evidence that charters – at least the non-unionized ones – are doing a better job at educating at-risk youth. Thankfully, not everyone is listening to these unions.

Three branches of the NAACP in California have now filed resolutions with their state board opposing a moratorium on charter schools. They have correctly observed that the academic performance of African American students is significantly better in charter schools. Hopefully the momentum of this grassroots support for charters from members of the African American community will be an eye opener. As it is, union controlled school districts from Los Angeles to Oakland are declaring a moratorium on new charter schools, and some are pushing for a statewide ban.

Anyone wanting more insight into the mentality and strategy of the teachers union in California should carefully read the pro-union article in The Nation. Consider this quote from the UTLA president: “the union can’t just have a small bargaining team that meets with the district when a contract is up. It has to be in constant contact with membership, through an ongoing process of identifying and developing leaders. Teachers are elected as leaders at the school or chapter level; then those chapters are grouped into clusters that have their own leaders, all of them in regular contact with the union leadership.”

Get it? Union commissars in every school. Not one per school. Many. If you want to know what sort of coercive group-think culture this breeds, read “Standing Up to Goliath,” by veteran public school teacher Rebecca Friedrichs.

How about this, from a LAUSD history teacher: “She sees the union’s focus on racial justice not merely as a feel-good sound bite but as a reflection of the reality faced by so many of their students: undocumented students, students who are harassed by police in their neighborhoods only to run into school police (LAUSD has its own police force) in the schools, and students being gentrified out of their homes. She organizes with Students Deserve, a grassroots group that has been inspired by Black Lives Matter’s divest/invest framework and is part of what she says is a different way of thinking about a labor-community alliance.”

“Focus on ‘racial justice’.” “Harassed by police.” “Inspired by Black Lives Matter.” What sort of history might one expect these impressionable young students to be studying in her classroom? Do you support this sort of biased education?

Police, and their unions, ought to ask themselves: Who is more likely to help them improve their relationship with disadvantaged communities? Is it history teachers who are inspired by Black Lives Matter, the teachers union, the far-left wing of the NAACP, or journalists at media outlets like The Nation?

Or is it the rebellious branches of the NAACP who have looked at the data, and support charter schools? At the least, police and firefighter unions might stay neutral on these conflicts. The LAPPL might use their resources to fight for things affecting their ability to do their jobs. Litigate and overturn Jones vs. the City of Los Angeles, or launch a ballot initiative to reverse Prop. 47.

The teachers unions are not your friends.

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Resistance is NOT Futile

The union assault on charter schools in California has intensified, but resistance is not futile. Parents, students, conscientious teachers, lawmakers and concerned citizens are stepping up. There are many ways to fight for charter schools, which represent one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal performance by California’s K-12 system of public education.

In an April 2019 report in the respected website CalMatters entitled “Charter-mageddon: Lawmakers advance a raft of union-backed charter school curbs,” the ongoing battle between charter school advocates and their foes is updated as follows: “While the two sides have battled for decades—typically to a draw—the political momentum has shifted in favor of organized labor this session.”

This is an understatement. On April 4th, three charter-killer bills cleared the State Assembly’s Education Committee, and all of them have a good chance of moving on to the Governor’s desk, where Gavin Newsom is considered far more likely to sign them than former Gov. Brown would have been. These bills, as reported in CalMatters, “would give local school districts the sole power to authorize charter schools [AB 1505], create state and local caps on the number of charters allowed to operate [AB 1506], and put strict limits on charter school locations [AB 1507].”

A March 2019 report, written by Larry Sand and published by the California Policy Center, entitled “Chartercide in California,” not only discusses how the teachers unions are attacking charters, but also relates how charter schools are delivering dramatically better educational results in some of the most disadvantaged communities in California. He writes:

“According to a 2017 report from the California Charter School Association, Oakland charters, home to 30 percent of the city’s students, performed on average in the 45th percentile on the state administered standardized tests, while Oakland traditional public schools (TPS) performed at the 25th percentile. In Los Angeles, where 26 percent of all students are charter-educated, a 2014 study showed that the city’s charter school students receive the equivalent of about 50 more days of learning in reading and 79 days of math than students in the city’s TPS.”

The war on charter schools has raged for over twenty years in California. The teachers unions have contended that because public school revenue is allocated based on attendance, charter schools take away badly needed funds. But these same unions typically complain that classrooms are overcrowded, which means charter school enrollments has nothing to do with the financial challenges facing traditional public schools.

Rather than face the true challenges – out of control pension and retirement healthcare costs, and out of control hiring of administrative and support personnel that never see the inside of a classroom – the powerful teachers unions are out to kill charter schools. For years, the unions fought a low intensity war against charters, based on the assumption that their relentless push to unionize the charter schools would allow conquest from within. But then the U.S. Supreme Court made the unionization push more difficult.

The urgency of the union campaign to kill charter schools has been elevated by the recent Janus vs AFSCME decision, which permits individual teachers to opt out of paying union dues, or even union “agency fees.” And it’s not going to end there. Additional cases are working their way through the courts, such as Uradnik vs IFO, which would take away a public sector union’s right to exclusive representation, or Few vs UTLA, which would nullify many steps the unions have taken to thwart the Janus ruling.

Resistance is NOT futile – pressure state legislators

Despite the incredible power of the teachers unions – the three major ones combined, CTA, CFT, and CSEA, collected over a half-billion in revenue last year– it is not a sure thing that these bills will pass into law. And despite the mega-majority of Democrats – who now occupy more than 75 percent of the seats in both chambers of California’s state legislature – these bills can be stopped. Because supporting charter schools is a bipartisan issue. Democratic politicians fear losing union money, but they also want to do the right thing. Allowing charter schools to continue to offer educational alternatives, especially considering the dismal performance of California’s public schools, is the right thing to do.

An example of what can be done to help prevent passage of charter-killer legislation is a resolution opposing anti-charter legislation, available on the CPC’s “CLEO” website, where practical information on nonpartisan government reforms are compiled to serve as a resource for local elected officials in California. This model resolution, provided by the California Charter Schools Association, has been adopted by the Orange County Board of Education, the Sacramento County Board of Education, and the Riverside County Board of Education. It addresses AB 1505, which would deny the ability of charter school applicants rejected by school district boards to appeal to the county or state boards of education.

Resistance is NOT futile – join the parents union

Another way to demand changes is to join the growing “Parent Union,” an organization of “parents uniting with community members to ensure that all students receive an outstanding public education regardless of their zip code of residence. We strongly believe that it is every parents’ right to choose the best quality public education for their child whether it’s District Schools, Public Charter Schools, Home School, Magnet Schools, Independent Studies or Online Learning. We believe that there is power in the Collective voice of Parents.”

With a motto “When Parents Unite, Students Win!” the parents union has already attracted over 1,000 members in Orange County. As this powerful movement spreads across California – and it will, because traditional public schools are failing, and everyone knows it – state and local legislators will come to view meaningful education reform as necessary to their political survival. That day cannot come soon enough.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

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