"tricker" laws

Let's be clear what the so-called parent trigger means. If 51 percent of the parents in a public school sign a petition, they can take control of the school, fire the staff, and hand the school over to a private corporation run by themselves or someone else.

Parent trigger laws are an invitation, as economist Bruce Baker put it, to mob rule.

I wonder how the mayors would react to a similar proposal to allow citizens to seize control of the public housing projects they live in or their local firehouse or police station, if they are dissatisfied with them. Perhaps they should also be permitted to take control of the sanitation trucks and give the jobs to one another.

It is frankly bizarre to pass a law allowing 51 percent of the present users of a public facility or public service to seize control and hand it off to a private corporation. The public paid for it, why should the people who use it this year claim the power to give it away? What about the rights of those who plan to attend the school in years to come? Supposing next year half of those who signed the petition are no longer parents in the school that they privatized? To me, this is akin to saying that those riding on a public bus should have the power to "seize control" and give it to a private bus company.

The national parent organization Parents Across America opposes the parent trigger as a stealth way to privatize public schools. When Florida considered parent trigger legislation this past spring, the law failed because of opposition from every Florida parent organization.

I wonder why parent trigger laws never include the right of charter school parents to "seize control" of their school and give it back to the public system.

 -- Ravitch