In this article columnist Daniel Shoer Roth explains how parents at the Desert Trails school in Adelanto, California, were hoodwinked into turning their public school over to a charter operator.
Under the Florida proposal, charters can set their own rules for eligibility, and many students will be excluded from the school that once was their neighborhood school.
Roth writes:
“Some local students will not meet the new strict admission rules. This includes students with learning disabilities and those in ESOL classes, as well as many racial and ethnic minority children. A number of surveys have demonstrated that there is a higher incidence of segregation in charters than in traditional schools. The excluded students will carry to their next school the same unsolved problems that contributed to the failure of the converted school, often related to poverty and a range of health and safety challenges.”
“The chain reaction from these student migrations subjects yet another school to low ranking and can put it on the conversion chopping block, too. It’s a vicious cycle.”
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/10/v-fullstory/3336512/the-dark-side-of-parent-trigger.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One word describes what they are doing here: Eugenics.
I downloaded and have read every word of the 15 page Florida “Parent Trigger” law. How many of you have actually read the law? This is a bad law. There are some good parts such as the accountability of charter schools. I wish that in California we had the legal right to the charter schools internal financial records like the line items, we do not. In Florida this is written into this law. The bad part of this law is the so-called “Teacher Accountability” sections. Outrageous. All in all bad law. I now have all the law and regulations for Florida and California and have read and analyzed both of them.
You would not believe what it took to get the California rules and regulations which are supposed to be easy to find on the California Dept. of Education (CDE) website. Does not work on Google, CDE’s search engine and even worse no one there could get me there. I talked with the division responsible for maintaining this information. The walked me up on their website. I asked why it was not highlighted so I could get the link. I was told they could not sustain a stable link. I called the Calif. superintendents office and they took me to nowhere. Then I called a friend majorly responsible for the legislation and they gave me a name of a chief of staff. I called and they cheerfully took me to the location. This is so twisted to get there that without someone who really knew and cared you would never find it. Now I have all the law and rules and regulation governing the “Parent Trigger” or “Parent Empowerment” as they call it. They do not have their search engine to respond to “Parent Trigger”, do you think that is an accident?
So I will ask again “Are not educators suppose to know what they are talking about? Should they not read before commenting on anything? Do you go into the classroom to educate student and not know what you are talking about as you have never seen or know what is in the material?” By the responses I do not think that even 1% of the people responding have ever read the legislation. How many of you have read every word? By the way I am one of the biggest fighters of corporatization and privatization. I am not a right wing nut. I confront fallacy with facts and knowledge, how many do?
so publish the link
Yes, I couldn’t find the California parent trigger info either. Would you please tell us where it is located and how to get it?
Thanks!
I suppose that the fundamental philosophy behind a parent trigger law is that the majority of parents in the neighborhood get to determine who run the neighborhood school. If all the neighborhood students don’t have guaranteed admission, then there is no philosophical foundation anymore for taking that specific property.
Charter schools could just be given equitable public owned floor space anywhere in a district based on their enrollment.
Seems to me that public school choice including the opportunity to create both distinctive district & charters does not need to be supplemented by parent trigger.
Why is the parent trigger choice for parents wrong but other choices o.k.? Choice is choice, surely?
The parent trigger is not a choice, it is a hoax.
Supreme Court decisions make clear that Americans have some rights, but that they are not unlimited. So, for example, we have lots of freedom of speech, but not complete freedom of speech (ie you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater).
As to what Chiara wrote about the entire community gets a vote…sometimes the entire community gets a vote, such as whether to increase local real estate taxes. Other times the entire community does not get a vote. For example, the community does not get to vote on whether a public school will be open ONLY to students of one race.
The entire community does get a vote on things like whether there will be a statewide standard of what students are expected to know in math, before graduating, or whether the state will spend money to encourage teachers to be National Board certified, or what will be a state minimum wage. Those are examples of decisions made at the State Level.
So Bob, who should get to choose if a charter school should open in a community? Should parents have that choice? Or should charter schools be allowed to start anywhere and the only choice parent have is whether they send their kids to charter or public school?
I’m confused on the school reform industry view of a democratic election. This was a public school. It doesn’t belong to the parents with children who are currently attending school anymore than a public park belongs to the people in the park on any given day.
When the 53% of parents who gave this public school away no longer have children in the school, any future community members have to accept a privatized school?
Who owns the facility now? Were the people who came before these parents and funded the public asset compensated by the private operator?
What a bizzare, short sighted view of “democratic”
I sincerely hope Gates and Company don’t develop an interest in public transportation. One could find they had lost a public transit system because they missed the day the riders took it private.
@ Megan… should the parents of those students currently enrolled in a school be able to make a decision about the future education of an entire community of children? They are only a very small segment of the community in which they live and their children will only be attending the community schools for a short period of time. This is a private power grab being made by those interested in business and profit. Dig a little deeper in your thinking. What does “choice is choice, surely” even mean?
When we make a decision on a public school here, the entire community gets a vote.The same for the senior center or the library.
It’s called “an election.”
I suppose we could go the Wal Mart route and simply pass a petition among the current users of the senior center and see if those 53 people want to privatize, but that hardly seems fair and it’s certainly not “democratic”
Is this the transformational change school reformers had in mind?