Rick Scott’s Parent Trigger Law
Is it going to be called a Parent’s Union bill? From Fort Myers News-Press reporter Chris Umpierre:
Gov. Rick Scott’s draft legislative agenda includes a bill that would allow parents to close struggling schools and replace them with a charter school. The so-called parent trigger bill, which has yet to be filed in the Florida Legislature, creates a parents union that advocates say will provide powerful and needed counterweight to teachers unions and district bureaucracies. If 51 percent of parents in a persistently failing school sign a petition, they could force the school to change into a charter, close or replace the principal and teachers.
Similar legislation has passed in California, Texas, Ohio and Connecticut and is being considered in almost a dozen more states. Bill opponents argue that parents lack the expertise to make important policy decisions better left to career educators.
Parent trigger shifts the debate from esoteric food fights over charter schools or teachers unions to
