Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent State of the State speech was nearly miraculous: at 18 minutes it was remarkably short — and still about 17 minutes too long.

Newsom’s monologue was remarkable for its soaring dishonesty, prevarication that reached a peak when he declared that he has sparked a “real transformation of our public education system … by creating choices — real choices — for parents and unprecedented support for their kids.”

In fact, no California governor has done more than Newsom to limit parent choice.

Wealthy parents already have school choice. If they don’t like their neighborhood public school, they can move into a better school district or send their offspring to a private school. Poorer parents, trapped in lousy districts with failing union-run schools, have typically had just one choice: publicly funded but independently managed charter schools.

Charter schools routinely outperform union-run schools. The reason: unleashed from inflexible education unions, charter school principals can hire and promote effective teachers.

That’s an existential threat to teachers unions, and that explains why, soon after moving into the Governor’s Mansion in January 2019, Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1505, a union-backed measure to kill charter schools.

“The state’s biggest teachers union spent more than $1 million a month since April to influence lawmakers as it pushed bills aimed at cracking down on charter schools,” the Sacramento Bee reported in August 2019. CalMatters reported “unions representing teachers and classified school employees celebrated [the passage of AB 1505], touting it as ‘significant progress on behalf of our students.’”

When COVID-19 hit a few months later, Newsom sided with the teachers unions again, shutting down California schools and sending 6 million K-12 kids online. He did so despite the fact that, from the earliest days of the pandemic, the science was clear: older people and people with severe underlying health conditions were the most vulnerable to serious illness. School kids, by contrast, were the least likely to catch, transmit or die from COVID. Even today, children under 18 account for 0.059% of all COVID deaths in California.

Newsom’s maximalist shutdown came with predictably high costs. Mountains of research showed shutting down schools harmed students and their families, that child abuse and child mental distress spiked. Additional research predicts each student in this generation will lose tens of thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings because of school closures.

Even as recently as a few weeks ago, while other blue states reopened their classrooms and abandoned mask and vaccine mandates, Newsom was taking his counsel from California’s teachers unions. The governor wanted “to eliminate mask requirements in schools, as his counterparts in New Jersey, Oregon and Connecticut did this week,” Politico reported. “But Newsom cannot go where teachers unions aren’t ready.”

Locked out of their classrooms, California kids went to school on Zoom. What their parents saw next appalled them — from highly political or mature content to the sheer lousiness of the “learning experience.” Many of those parents pulled their kids out of union-run schools — opting instead for charter schools, home schooling or learning pods. Private school enrollment swelled. Catholic schools reported their first rise in enrollment in 20 years.

But then something weird happened. As attendance dropped at union-run schools, they should have lost the government funding associated with each student. But thanks to Newsom, they didn’t lose a dime. The governor used his emergency authority to maintain school funding at pre-pandemic levels, insulating union-run schools from the impact of their own bad behavior.

Witnessing all this, parents flocked to school board meetings. They demanded — often forcefully — that officials reopen and fix their schools. In a rare show of bipartisanship, parent groups representing liberal, conservative and otherwise nonpolitical parents blossomed. Recall campaigns launched.

The California School Boards Association — whose members are most often politicians bankrolled by teachers union dollars — responded to simmering parent rage by asking Gavin Newsom to target parents for criminal investigation. California Policy Center used the state’s Public Records Act to demand the governor’s documents on the matter. Newsom’s office admitted the governor discussed investigating parents, but refused to release any documents of those conversations.

We know something from this refusal — and from the governor’s silence when the Biden Administration, prompted by a strikingly similar National School Boards Association complaint, deployed the FBI to investigate unruly parents. Included in the NSBA complaint: California parents who had spoken at school board meetings.

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But Newsom was suddenly absent. The governor who found time to sue the Trump Administration more than 100 times has been silent where parents’ First Amendment rights of speech and assembly are under attack.

Newsom got one thing right about his role in public education: in delivering for the unions, he has indeed been “transformational” — in severely limiting parent choice. But by putting California’s powerful teachers unions ahead of parents and kids, Newsom is on the wrong side of history. In November, enraged by official contempt for the parents of school-age kids, Virginia voters swept conservatives into Richmond. Now eyeballing a run for the White House, Newsom would do well to keep in mind that all parents — regardless of political party — are quick to anger when their kids are cornered.

Lance Christensen is vice president for education policy and government affairs at the California Policy Center. He is a candidate for state Superintendent of Public Instruction.