Commentary

If you can be bought off by supposedly “free” breakfasts and lunches for your school child, California is the public school system for you. The only price—you may have to sacrifice your child to the woke mob.

And by the way, these new “free” breakfasts and lunches available to all public schoolchildren in California are not “free.” The state government cannot give your kid anything without first taking it from somebody else.

After they fatten up the young-uns, what will the public schools teach them? By law—that is, under curriculum requirements politicians and their union masters have imposed on public schools—children will likely get heavy doses of hard sex, gender identity, racism, class warfare, social justice, anti-capitalism ... well, you get the idea.

What they may not get in any meaningful coherence are courses in language, math, sciences, social studies, computer skills—things that might be useful once a youngster becomes an adult.

California schoolchildren were already lagging compared to the rest of the country—no easy feat—in essential skills. But now, not even half of the state’s kids can read or perform math at grade level. Not even half.

If any state is ripe for alternatives—school choice, vouchers, anything to break this corrupt regime—it’s California.

Besides shoveling bilge into the brains of California schoolchildren, the state is also shoveling cash into the public schools. This is a brazen attempt to use other people’s money (that is, money the state took from taxpayers) to buy parental loyalty to the public school system.

Two recent goodies to come out of Sacramento are a “free” food program and a cash giveaway.

The state spent about $150 million last year to refurbish school kitchens in preparation for this school year, when all kids, regardless of income, are invited to partake of the so-called “free” breakfasts and lunches. This will cost taxpayers only about $650 million a year to operate, and that’s only if the kitchen workers don’t unionize and demand higher pay and the same cushy pensions everybody else working at the school gets. Or if food gets more expensive. Or both.

The state also is spending close to $2 billion to set up accounts through ScholarShare—a college savings plan offered by the state—that will funnel taxpayer dollars to low-income kids and newborns. The tax-free money will be put into a mutual fund operated by ScholarShare. This one will cost taxpayers close to $200 million a year—if the politicians don’t expand it.

Profligate spending by the government is an attempt to stem the decline in public school enrollment. It’s fallen the past couple of years and looks to fall further. Alternatives are attractive—mainly, private schools and home schooling. A California group tried to qualify a ballot measure for this year that would set up educational savings accounts—letting parents decide whether to spend the government allocation for each schoolchild on public school or somewhere else. The ballot measure didn’t get enough signatures this time, but sponsors promise to return in 2024.

All this largesse must make you wonder, where is a state that’s already $144 billion in debt getting that kind of cash? Well, California has a $97.5 billion surplus that Gov. Gavin Newsom has termed “simply without precedent.” Some of that money came from the federal government in “pandemic relief.” Some of it came from you. And some came from the censorious tech oligarchs of California. They are raking in the big bucks and sending some of it to Sacramento.

If you think the state is committing itself to spending this money whether there’s a surplus or not, you'd be 100 percent right. So let’s hope the public schools can at least teach kids how to spell “tax increase.”