Fix California Continues Effort to Advance School Choice with Californians for School Choice

Fix California, the sponsor of Fix California Education, which sponsored a ballot initiative proposing Education Savings Accounts for California students to follow the students’ choice of schools, just announced they are suspending their initiative and will join efforts to advance school choice with Californians for School Choice initiative.

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“With the increasing Covid restrictions from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s emergency orders limiting our freedoms, we felt it was important to not have competing initiatives that share similar goals,” said Ric Grenell, founder of Fix California, and Fix California’s Education Savings Accounts Act of 2022.

“Transformational education reform is a cornerstone of our efforts to Fix California, and we are committed to advocating for school choice for all Californians,” said Lance Christensen, Chief Strategist, Fix California Education. “We believe students should be funded, not systems. Governor Newsom’s continued attacks on our freedoms and his talk of more lockdowns, emergency orders, social distancing and fear mongering has only increased the challenge of collecting 1.5 million signatures for a school choice initiative that competes with a similarly worded initiative – therefore, we will suspend our ballot initiative and encourage all those who want to continue this effort in 2022 to support the initiative from Californians for School Choice. While we initially had some differences in language, their effort presents a good alternative to the failing status quo.  We encourage everyone to read their initiative and consider supporting it: https://www.californiaschoolchoice.org”

California’s public schools were once the envy of the nation. Today, California’s public schools not only rank at the bottom of the entire country, the state spends approximately $22,000 per year for each child in the public school system to accomplish this.

California has approximately 6.6 Million K-12 Students: 6 million attending public schools, 471,000 attending private schools, and 84,000 attending homeschool, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The state has 942 school districts operating 8,600 individual schools and enrolling approximately 5.3 million students.

In California, state and local government and big teacher’s unions are preventing students from receiving a quality education, for many reasons, but especially by forcing children to attend the public school closest to them, even when it is totally failing. There is no school competition for kids who can’t afford to opt-out of the shoddy school they are forced to attend, Fix California explains.

The school choice measure will need to obtain about 1.5 million signatures by April if they are to qualify for the November ballot.

This article has been updated.