OPINION: Trigger reform

Source: Daily Press, Victorville, Calif.迷你倉Nov. 07--Victor Valley residents are probably as familiar with the "Parent Trigger" law as any other group in the state. The Parent Trigger bill, which was authored by Gloria Romero, then a state senator from Los Angeles, became law in 2010.We suspect one of the reasons it made it to the governor's desk at all was because Romero was -- is -- a Democrat. It was opposed at the time by teachers unions, to no one's surprise, but still became a lever parents across the state could use when a majority of them in a failing school voted to restructure the school. One of those schools was Desert Trails in Adelanto, which has since re-opened as a charter. Desert Trails is one of three California public schools which have essentially fired the administration and brought in new management.Romero, for those unaware of her background, grew up in Barstow and received her associate's degree from Barstow Community College. She managed to push Parent Trigger through the Legislature when she was chairman of the state Senate Education Committee.Now we learn that United Teachers Los Angeles, the union for LAUSD teachers, has begun an attack on Parent Trigger. According to the Orange County Register, the UTLA has "voted to seek out a state lawmaker to sponsor legislation that rewrites" Parent Trigger.Romero told the Register the other day that while Parent Trigger has flaws, the UTLA is proposing reform because it wants to be "the ones calling the shots."In particular, she said, "the implementation of the Parent Trigger law by Parent Revolution has led to calls of self storageeform." Parent Revolution, according to the Register, has received major donations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and others. It has been criticized for wanting, ultimately, to use Parent Trigger to privatize schools. We can't think of a better way -- privatization -- to make public schools more answerable to students' parents and less answerable to teachers unions, whose chief concerns are job security and higher pay and benefits. Only after that agenda is satisfied, in our experience, do the unions address student needs.One of the reasons for UTLA's move to change Parent Trigger is that when Desert Trails parents voted to restructure, union pressure (from outside the valley, by most accounts) caused some of the parents to rescind their votes. But eventually a judge ruled there was no provision in the law that allowed reversing a trigger once it had been pulled.Unions traditionally apply pressure tactics to get their way, and if the Parent Trigger law allowed such post-vote pressure, you can be certain it would be used.Given the legislature's dominance by Democrats -- and Democrats' domination by unions -- we suppose it's inevitable that some changes will be made to Parent Trigger in the foreseeable future. Teachers unions can't, after all, allow such radical concepts as giving parents a way to control the schools they pay for with their taxes to continue, now can they.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the Daily Press (Victorville, Calif.) Visit the Daily Press (Victorville, Calif.) at .vvdailypress.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷利倉