 100 Berkeley County teachers turned out teachers say they don't feel safe heading back to the class. His teachers protest took the form of an in-car parade. I'm terrified to go in my class. If he wants to open schools, how about he provide teachers with hazard pain and drop my dead body right here. Los Angeles was the first major city to announce that its public schools wouldn't be reopening for in-person instruction in the fall. 83% of LAUSD teachers agree with the union's recommendation that teachers and students not physically return to schools in August. How do you do six feet social distancing? How do you do that in passing periods? And districts all across the country have followed suit. A coalition of parents in California are suing the state on the grounds that poor and special needs children in particular have received inadequate instruction during the shutdown. This is a disgrace. It is a failure. It is going to cause huge economic problems and emotional problems and learning problems. School districts around the country are weighing the needs of students against the danger that in-person instruction could cause COVID-19 to spread within their communities. And teachers' unions are understandably concerned about protecting the health of their members. But in Los Angeles, the teachers' union is exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to prevent competition from charter schools. The United Teachers Los Angeles co-signed a document with nine other unions and the Democratic Socialists of America calling for a moratorium on all new charter schools and private voucher programs. It's about protecting a monopoly from losing any students and the funding that goes along with those students. Corey DeAngelis is the director of school choice at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason TV. He says that entrenched interests are trying to stop families from exercising choice. If you really care about students and their safety, you should want more options for more students to be able to spread out in different locations. And this doesn't do that. But what it does do is it allows the teachers' unions to block students from switching to their competition. Families are flocking to charters in part because they were poorly served by district schools in the spring. The United Teachers Los Angeles, which declined our interview request, successfully pressured the district to limit their members to four-hour work days and to give them the choice of opting out of live video instruction. In Chicago, nearly half of district school elementary school teachers logged into the virtual learning system less than three days a week. One recent survey found that private or charter schools were more than twice as likely to meet with students daily than teachers at district-run schools and 20% more likely to introduce new content. But in addition to the charter school moratorium, United Teachers Los Angeles has demanded that before reopening can move forward, the district needs an additional $250 million in overall funding, a federal bailout, Medicare for All, a new wealth tax, a new millionaire's tax, and defunding of the police. Normal wasn't working for us before the union asserts, and we can't go back. Oregon and Pennsylvania have also cut off additional funding for charter schools. DeAngelis points to comments from the president of the state's association of administrators in Pennsylvania who stated his intention to handicap virtual charter schools. We don't even have to guess about why this is happening. We're seeing special interest groups explicitly lobbying to protect a monopoly. It's putting the system in front of the needs of families in the worst time possible. In July, California froze school budgets in place at the best of the state's largest lobbyist, the California Teachers Association, meaning that schools experiencing searches in enrollment won't get additional funding and schools hemorrhaging enrollment won't lose money. That's limiting the extent to which the California Charter Network A-plus schools can scale up. It's already increased enrollment by $5,000 for 2021 but has had to wait list an additional 24,000 students because the state won't increase its funding. We've believed all along in the mission and vision to provide a more tailored, flexible, and adaptable education delivery system to the needs of students, recognizing that every individual human being is different. Jeff Rice, who is the president of A-plus schools, attributes surging demand to the network's experience with virtual instruction. We're seeing a significant increase in parents who under normal circumstances may not choose our school but they're turning to us because they want to put their children in a school that has proven track record of providing successful learning in those settings. At South Sutter Charter School, we believe that when parents choose, students succeed. The budget freeze is also impacting South Sutter Charter School in Sacramento where Shauna Anderson works as an education specialist. That benefits these brick and mortar schools that where the kids are just leaving in droves because that's not what they want and it really penalizes schools like ours because we have all of these students that want to enroll but we're not going to be able to get funding for them. Anderson, who also runs a homeschooling resource network called unschool.school, says that the traditional schooling model is increasingly outdated and particularly ill-suited to virtual learning. Education really needs to change. This model of education where kids can choose what they want to learn and how they learn best in a truly personalized plan is really the wave of the future and if we could do it in a public setting great but if not people are going to do it privately. And DeAngelis has reported on a new phenomenon called pandemic pods in which groups of parents are pooling their resources to hire their own teachers. Essentially the idea of the one-room school house that we did a long time ago in America and throughout the rest of the world that you essentially outsource the process of homeschooling. He says the rise of the pods or microschools could permanently change the way Americans think about schooling. Although it's mostly upper middle-class families with the resources to fund these arrangements, which has been the subject of criticism in the Washington Post and New York Times, DeAngelis says that the solution to this problem is to change the structure of education finance so that the money follows the child even outside of traditional government-certified schools. It's true that more advanced families are more likely to be able to exercise these pandemic pod options but we should fund families directly so others can participate as well and so that we can have more equity in the school system. If schools do not reopen, the funding should go to parents to send their child to public private charter religious or homeschool of their choice, the keyword being choice. President Trump has called for more choice as a response to shuttered schools, and Senators Tim Scott and Lamar Alexander introduced the School Choices Now Act, which would earmark COVID stimulus dollars for parents to spend directly on education. Senator Rand Paul introduced a bill that would require states to give parents direct access to federal education dollars to spend on tuition or homeschool materials. States like Oklahoma and South Carolina have already begun to redirect money earmarked for schools in the Emergency Care Act directly to parents to cover private school tuition, and Colorado legislators are proposing putting the money right into the hands of parents. But in California, the political power of the union will likely prevent that, but DeAngelis says that the current moment could be a turning point for school choice regardless. People are really re-envisioning how school funding should look, and I think they're waking up to this idea and this reality that there's no good reason to fund the system instead of the students directly. Parents are the best educators. They know their kids best, and maybe they don't want to do it. So yes, be able to use that money to send them to a private school or to pay a private tutor. If there's ever a time to do it, it's right now. Like, this is like we're riding the wave and something has to change.