Sacks @ 00:58:02Wrong
politicsgovernment
In 2022, California will have a major statewide ballot initiative for school choice that would give parents a ~$13,000-per-pupil state voucher usable at any accredited school; it will be one of the biggest election issues in California (and possibly nationally) that year, with over $100 million spent in total by both sides.
Oh, let me make a prediction in that regard. Next year, there's going to be a ballot initiative in California to for school choice. And the way it's going to work is that I think there's something like $13,000 spent per pupil in California. ... There's going to be there's going to be a ballot initiative that says that any parent who wants to send their kid to an accredited school can get a voucher for $13,000 from the state that's going to be on the ballot, I predict. ... I predict it will be the big, big election in California and maybe the nation next year. And I think more than 100 million will be spent on both sides of that thing.View on YouTube
Explanation
Evidence shows that no such school-choice voucher measure actually made the California statewide ballot in 2022, nor did it become a dominant election issue with $100M+ in spending.
- There were indeed school-choice / ESA initiative proposals in California around that time. The Legislative Analyst’s Office summarized proposed initiatives that would have created Education Savings Accounts funded with about $13,000–$14,000 per student for those attending private schools or homeschool, closely matching the structure Sacks described. (lao.ca.gov) These were proposals submitted for title and summary, not qualified ballot measures.
- Supporters of the leading effort, the Educational Freedom Act backed by Californians for School Choice, failed to gather enough signatures. News coverage in April 2022 reported that school choice "will not be on the ballot in November" after the campaign collected only about 200,000 signatures, roughly 20% of the ~997,000 valid signatures required to qualify an initiative. (localnewsmatters.org) Another analysis likewise notes that the ESA-related PACs raised and spent only hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting petitions, not anything near nine figures. (tultican.com)
- The official list of propositions on the November 8, 2022 California general-election ballot includes Propositions 1, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31. None is a school-choice or voucher initiative; Prop 28, for example, is about arts and music funding in public schools, not portable vouchers. (en.wikipedia.org)
- Because no school-choice voucher measure reached the ballot, it could not be "the big, big election" issue in California or nationally, and there is no evidence of anything close to $100M being spent on such a contest. Total reported fundraising for the main school-choice campaign was only in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. (localnewsmatters.org)
So while Sacks correctly anticipated that activists would try to run a ~$13k-per-pupil school-choice initiative, his core prediction—that it would be on the 2022 statewide ballot and become one of the biggest, $100M+ election fights—did not happen.