Would school choice options cripple local CA’n public schools?

Michael Alexander—the California School Choice Foundation president and Californians for School Choice chairman—explains to Opp Now why empowering parents with choice in their children’s education would not weaken our public education system, as is frequently claimed by anti-choice activists.

Opportunity Now: President Biden has long opposed school choice programs. In a 2020 tweet, he stated: “When we divert public funds to private schools, we undermine the entire public education system. We've got to prioritize investing in our public schools, so every kid in America gets a fair shot. That's why I oppose vouchers.” Does school choice weaken public education?

Michael Alexander: This argument President Biden has made is a common talking point that we’ve been hearing on replay for thirty years.

As our slogan says, “It’s our kids, it’s our money, and it’s our choice.” It’s not an issue of taking public government money and putting it into private schools to take away from public schools; this is because it’s not government’s money but citizens’ money taken through taxation. The government takes money away from parents at the very time they need it in the form of taxes, and then they have no choice but to go to government schools. However, it’s still their money and their kids. Thus, choosing an education option should be the parents’ choice.

If school choice “takes” money, it’s from the bankrupt, failed enterprise called “public education.” There’s this assumption that if we give government schools more money, they’ll suddenly be able to do their job. And we’ve found that over the last decade, California has spent over twice as much per student (adjusted for inflation) as we were in the ‘90s—when our schools were much higher ranked in the country. So, it’s clearly a problem of poor, inefficient management but not a money problem.

We don’t believe that we can actually fix the government school system from the outside; it can only fix itself. The only way we can fix the state of things is by exposing government schools to competition, which should be near and dear to Silicon Valley leadership.

The real question should be: How can anti-school choice advocates defend collecting parents’ money and putting the burden on them to prove their children should be allowed to go to a school of their choice?

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This is part of an exclusive Opp Now series. Opp Now spoke with the CA School Choice Foundation president about the following education-centered topics:

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