Parents in an affluent section of Nashville are exploring the possibility of using the state’s “parent trigger” law to leave the school district and form their own charter. The councilwoman for the area is leading discussions.
This appears to signal the next phase of the charter movement. For years, as the charter movement grew, advocates utilized rhetoric about “saving” poor black and Hispanic children from their “failing” schools.
In this Nashville area, the children are not poor, not black and Hispanic, and their schools are high-performing.
The rhetoric now switches to “choice” and consumer values as desirable goals. The result, as this new phase unfolds, will be the dissolution of public education and of any sense of community responsibility that reaches beyond “people like us.”
This neighborhood, if it secedes, will have a publicly-funded private school. Don’t expect opposition from the Governor or the state commissioner, whose hearts belong to the private sector.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charters re-segregate.
SACRAMENTO, CA – StudentsFirst, a bipartisan grassroots education reform movement, announced the hiring of veteran Democratic political strategist Sky Gallegos as Director of National Electoral Initiatives. In her new role, Gallegos will oversee StudentsFirst’s candidate and initiative electoral strategy, identifying and supporting the election of strong, reform-minded candidates to public office.
Most recently, Gallegos served as Director of the Tennessee STEM Innovation Network (Battelle), a coalition of STEM stakeholders from K-12 districts, post-secondary institutions and business and community organizations formed through Tennessee’s Race to the Top program. Gallegos previously served in the Clinton Administration as Associate Director of Policy in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and in the Obama Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental and External Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy.
It will be elite
It will be white
It will be poverty and special Ed free
You will soon see “charters for the gifted”
Public education will be for the children left behind who will work on computers while a scowling aide monitors their behavior.
Charters will soon open in your town. They will offer advanced physics and Mandarin. You will lose your top students. Your town will lose public education.
This has already happened in Santa Cruz, CA with Pacific Collegiate, a charter founded by Netlix CEO Reed Hastings that serves only white children of affluent well educated parents in a diverse community. And with Bullis Charter School in Los Altos, where the millionaire heirs of the Moore (Intel) family demand of the courts that a high performing neighborhood school be closed and turned over to the charter.
Anecdote: the principal of Pacific Collegiate was recruited from the private academy of Montgomery, Alabama founded when their public schools were forced to end segregation. His school fought desegregation all the way to the Supreme Court. Perfect training for leading the most affluent, segregated charter school in California.
I hope they understand that they can only pull the parent trigger once. I don’t think they get to do it again of they dislike the result.
once you pull the trigger, the bullet goes only in one direction.
the parent trigger laws have no provision for charter parents to seize control of their school and return it to the public sector
typically the charter corporation picks the board, not the parents.
Reblogged this on My Principal is a Douchebag and commented:
Here we go.
Wasn’t this kind of thing already struck down by the Supreme Court in the 60s and 70s when white parents and communities tried to form publicly funded private and parochial schools to avoid having their children go to integrated schools?
yes.
But think of it. A school segregated by class, not race.
And I’m sure they’ll fall all over themselves to recruit just enough “good” blacks so that they can’t be accused of racism. After all, every school needs a basketball team, right?
I just noticed the first sentence says “parent-controlled” charter school. There’s no such thing, is there? Charter schools are controlled by their boards, right? And there’s no requirement that the board need contain any parents, right?
Charter schools are controlled by the corporation that creates them.
There might be parent-controlled charters, but typically a company –an educational management organization–comes in, gets a charter, picks its board. Parents have no role