Teachers unions, school administrators, school boards and other interested parties have all too often fought tooth and nail to retain the status quo and resist education reforms.
But, despite their efforts, the demands of parents and students for educational alternatives appear to be higher than ever.
“Participation in voucher and educational savings account programs, which fund private school tuition and other educational expenses, has more than doubled in the past five years,” a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report said.
The first school voucher program started in 1990, the GAO noted, and the first ESA program was not implemented until 2011. As of the fall of 2015, there were 20 voucher programs and five ESA programs, three of which were authorized but not yet operating.
The number of public school options has expanded rapidly as well, particularly in the form of charter schools, which are offered greater flexibility from bureaucratic rules. In addition, roughly 70 percent of California charter schools are not unionized, according to the California Charter Schools Association, offering them greater freedom and from union rules and oftentimes lower costs.
Minnesota passed the first charter school enabling law in 1991, and by school year 2013-14, 42 states and the District of Columbia had enacted charter school legislation, the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics said. In fact, between 2003-04 and 2013-14, the number of charter schools in the nation more than doubled, from approximately 3,000 to 6,500, and total public charter school enrollment more than tripled from 800,000 to 2.5 million, rising from 1.6 percent of all public school students to 5.1 percent.
California is above that national average, with its 513,400 charter school students comprising 8 percent of all public school students in school year 2013-14. Even this is not enough to satiate demand for alternatives to California’s struggling traditional public schools, however. More than 158,000 students are on charter school waiting lists, the CCSA reports.
Even modest reforms to the status quo are routinely swatted away by the California Teachers Association, and teachers unions have declared war on proposed charter schools in places such as Los Angeles where innovative alternatives are needed most.
Assembly Bill 934, offered by Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla of Concord, a Democrat and former high school English teacher — which would have relaxed California’s unusually short two-year tenure rule for teachers and provided an expedited process for getting rid of bad teachers who repeatedly achieve unsatisfactory performance reviews, while also establishing a program to help struggling teachers who want to improve — was killed off this year with the insistence of the CTA and the California Federation of Teachers.
The one-size-fits-all approach to education has proven to be a failure. People have different education goals, interests, methods of learning and capacities for classroom instruction. Greater educational options and competition should be embraced for this will drive innovation, improve the quality and diversity of instruction and place the needs of parents and students above special-interest politics.
