Proposition 38, the school voucher initiative, will give parents a real choice. It will provide children with a real opportunity to escape from the clutches of ineffective and counterproductive schools. It will force bad schools to shape up, or else lose out to alternate private schools that actually educate rather than merely warehouse students. It will reward good teachers and penalize lousy or indifferent teachers who cannot be fired under the status quo. It will replace monopoly with competition, and inject merit considerations into educational decisions that are now decided by political muscle.
Wealthy parents can already escape the public school system.
A disproportionately large percentage of politicians and public school teachers already send their own offspring to superior private schools. Proposition 38 will give all Californians that same opportunity by allowing parents to redirect their tax dollars toward schools that genuinely serve the educational needs of their children. Year after year, decade after decade, promises are broken and the education crisis continues unabated. That's the definition of public education in California. Let's break this cycle of insanity by passing Proposition 38.