No issue is more pressing in California than education. In late October, the state released scores for the first post-Covid-shutdown state standardized test, conducted earlier last year. The results were horrendous (https://edsource.org/2022/2022-california-standardized-test-results-wipe-out-years-of-steady-progress/680179). Less than half of all students who took the Smarter Balanced test—47.1 percent—met the state standard in English language arts, down 4 percentage points from 2018–19. One-third of students met the standard in math, down 6.5 percentage points. Only 16 percent of black students and 9.7 percent of English learners met standards in math. Not only did test scores plummet; the state’s chronic absenteeism rate has also skyrocketed. The no-show rate leapt from 14.3 percent in 2020–21 to 30 percent in 2021–22. (California defines chronic absenteeism as students missing 10 percent of the days they were enrolled for any reason.) But amazingly, during the 2021–22 school year, data showed that the state’s four-year high school graduation rate climbed to 87 percent, up from 83.6 percent in 2020–21. Already in 2018–19, about 23,000 students had left the system, but between the 2019–20 and 2020–21 school years, public school enrollment in California dropped by more than seven times that figure, with 175,761 students leaving. And it is likely to get worse. According to the State Department of Finance, in the 2021–22 school year, California experienced its fifth consecutive drop in total public K–12 enrollment, losing 110,000 students. If current trends hold for the next decade, the state will see a further  decline of 524,000 by 2030–31. According to a 2022 PACE/USC Rossier Poll, more than one in four California parents switched their child’s school during the pandemic. Some are now being schooled in other states because their parents moved away, while others are being homeschooled or have been enrolled in private schools.