For fans of dark comedy, California politics is as good as any entertainment – shot through with grim irony, corrupt politicians, and laughable hypocrisy. Consider Attorney General Rob Bonta’s legal campaign to crush the practice of seven school districts to notify parents before gender-transitioning their children. Parent notification, as it’s called, “places transgender and gender...
Parents, where do you draw the line? The state legislature is aggressively shepherding anti-parent bills through its chambers that erode parental authority in ways that would seem unimaginable only a few years ago. Under the banner of “affirming transgender children,” legislators are pushing bills that upend parental rights in frightening ways and pose serious risks...
RE: Assembly Constitutional Amendment 9 – OPPOSE, UNLESS AMENDED Dear Assemblyman McCarty, I write in respectful opposition to Assembly Constitutional Amendment 9 (ACA 9) as it is presently constituted. Full disclosure – I was the runner-up candidate for the constitutional office of Superintendent of Public Instruction on the November 2022 general election ballot. While considering the following comments...
It did not take long after I announced a statewide education reform tour as a former candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction and in my role as California Policy Center’s Vice President of Education Policy and Government Affairs to receive an overwhelming and positive response. Parents, educators, school board members, and other concerned community members...
You can add Arkansas to the list of states that have enacted universal school choice legislation this year. In just three months, Republican governors in Iowa and Utah, and now newly-elected Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, have signed laws creating statewide Education Savings Account (ESA) programs that empower parents to use state education dollars to...
California’s primary and secondary education system is broken. I don’t need to list the parade of horribles — we all know them. We are failing the next generation. With your input, I would like to find a better way. You’re skeptical that any reform of value can be achieved in California. I get it. I...
The number of children in the classroom has no effect on educational achievement. The perennial, “We have a teacher shortage!” canard has a younger and equally bogus sibling known as, “Children do better in a small class setting!” In fact, lower class size is very often on the list of demands when teachers go out...
In January, a Gallup poll found that Americans’ belief in grade-school teachers’ honesty and ethics had dropped to 64%, an all-time low. Then in July, another Gallup poll showed that just 28 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools – the second-lowest this figure has been...
This article originally appeared on frontpagemag.com Spurred by the Covid panic, schools have been the recipient of ungodly sums of money. And it’s not as if the beast was starving before. To put things into perspective, the U.S. spends about $800 billion on national defense, more than China, Russia, India, the U.K., France, Saudi...
It’s no secret that education in America has been in bad shape for some time, and now, low student proficiency has been exacerbated by the hysterical response to the Covid outbreak. Most recently, the results of a Harvard University study, which investigated the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by...
Prepared by Golden Together, a Movement to Restore the California Dream Edward Ring, California Policy Center Steve Hilton, Founder of Golden Together Published March 20, 2025