Recent comments

Thank you for including the crucial information that there have been no successful parent triggers (assuming that privatizing a public school could be characterized as a "success," which many would dispute). Parent Revolution spokespeople falsely told Florida legislators when they were considering a parent trigger bill that there had been successes, implying that there had been many. In Compton, Parent Revolution admits that it orchestrated the entire petition-gathering operation -- planning the professionally run operation and pre-selecting the charter operator to take over the school before even deciding what school to target. In Adelanto, the parents who supported the petitions had a list of demands that included many items fervently backed by teachers and opposed by the "reform" sector that's behind the parent trigger, such as more resources and smaller classes. Parent Revolution somehow persuaded them to circulate two petitions -- one calling for charterizing and the other with the list of demands -- and then only submitted the one calling for charterizing. Many parents recognized they'd been duped. It didn't require the school board to convince them of that. Parent Revolution's legal strategy consists of suing to prevent parents from withdrawing their signatures -- disempowering them, in other words, just in case anyone believed the sham that this fad was intended to empower parents. But all that said, everyone behind this is discovering a large fly in the ointment. Charter operators actually don't want to take over struggling existing schools. They want to start their own new schools where they can pick their students and set their own policies, starting fresh. How embarrassing if Parent Revolution convinces parents to call for a charter operator to take over a school and the entire charter sector says "thanks, but no thanks," which is what appears to be the situation. By the way, Parent Revolution has an interesting dual message going -- most of the time aggressively attacking teachers and especially their unions; occasionally pausing to claim that they're actually pro-union and pro-teacher; then going back to the open warfare. It's not a sustainable message.

It would help the average citizen very much if you interviewed a number of randomly selected small businesses and published their comments on your site. That is the only way we are really going to learn the truth about how small employers feel about the ACA. Thank you.