SB 14 by Sen. Larry Taylor—the so called “parent trigger bill”–is a part of a package of bills that would pave the way for privatizing public schools, said Texas AFT President Louis Malfaro, commenting on today’s hearing on the bill in the Texas Senate Education Committee.
“This bill offers a false sense of empowerment for parents, because it actually would open the door for private charter chains and management entities to take over neighborhood schools with little or no accountability to these parents,” Malfaro said. “The only thing triggered here is the flow of money into private hands. We’ve offered a better way to empower parents, with the Community School model as a proven tool for school improvement, especially at struggling campuses.”
Malfaro said that services provided at Community Schools reflect the specific needs identified by parents, teachers, and community stakeholders and may include: academic programs like tutoring, enrichment activities, early college start programs; medical services like vision, dental, nutrition and mental health; and programs for parents like adult education, ESL classes, housing assistance and job training.
Under SB 14 private operators with no connection to the community would be able to hire political consultants and canvassers to collect signatures of parents on a “petition to improve your school.” The beginning and end of parental empowerment under this concept is the parent’s signature on a petition for charter takeover. After that, the charter entity gains total control of the school. The locally elected school board and, by extension, the citizens, parents, and taxpayers who elected the school board and paid to build the school cease to have a say in how the school is run.
Once in the hands of a charter operator, the children attending the school no longer have the benefit of important state quality safeguards, including class-size limits, teacher certification standards, and fair standards of student conduct and discipline that protect the rights of all students. Ironically, once the “parent trigger” has been pulled, even parental rights under the state education code would go by the wayside as the public neighborhood school is converted through this process to a charter operation.
Malfaro noted that there’s already a good “parent/teacher” trigger in state law, in the form of a joint petition for a campus charter by a majority of parents and teachers at a campus. (Under this law, Section 12.052 of the Education Code, the local school board may not “arbitrarily deny” the petition.) This mechanism has been used in more than a dozen campuses in San Antonio and quite recently also in an Austin ISD school. In each case, the process of developing a campus charter helped build the collaborative structures needed to support school innovation and improvement.
…so it’s back to the same old Republican thing where everything is for sale and everything should be defined by its’ price tag…and some people believe this…they cannot get it through their skulls that some things (like the education of a people) are too precious to be bought and sold like so much dead meat…but this is what we get when we decide to let somebody else elect our public officials…I am sure that if everybody voted, the clowns who want to privatize everything would not be elected…however; everybody says they want democracy but very few want to do what it takes to make it work…like vote.
preach anonymous preach….sadly i suspect it is only to the choir. the rest of the members are at home watching Empire, Scandal, RHOA, Mary Jane or the latest flavor of the week. Meanwhile opportunities and rights are being quietly stolen. Sometimes the thieves get so bold, they don’t even feel like they have to do it quietly…