Ben Boychuk is a policy advisor for education at The Heartland Institute and a former managing editor of School Reform News. Ben joined the Heartland Institute in 2010 after several years writing on education and other national issues as an editorial writer for Investor's Business Daily and The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif. More recently, Ben was co-moderator of RedBlueAmerica.com and was managing editor of the Claremont Review of Books from 2000 until 2004. He is now editor of the California edition of City Journal.
In addition to his work for Heartland, Ben writes a weekly syndicated column for Scripps-Howard News Service and contributes regularly to The Sacramento Bee. His writing has also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Rocky Mountain News, The Washington Times and the Arizona Republic, National Review Online, and elsewhere.
Ben graduated with a B.A. in political science from the University of California, San Diego. He lives in the Inland Empire of Southern California with his wife Millie, their two children, a cat, a tree frog, and an albino corn snake.
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If you had asked me earlier this week if I thought Indiana’s SB 496, the Parent Trigger Act, would face any difficulty in conference, I would have said, in so many words, “Ain’t nothin’ gonna stop us!” And most observers probably would have replied, “Sure looks that way!”
Famous last words…
State Sen. Dennis Kruse (R-Auburn) inserted language into a conference report late yesterday that effectively neutered the bill.
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The Chicago Tribune today features a strong editorial on the prospects for school reform in Chicago, with parent empowerment as its lynchpin. Noting the recent struggle in Compton, Calif., between parents and a recalcitrant, dysfunctional school district, the Tribune‘s editors write:
[The parents] learning that parents who put their children first are seen as the enemy by the education status quo. Teachers and school officials in Compton have launched a furious effort to block them from using the law to determine their kids’ future.
This is interesting because Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel championed just such a parent-trigger law during the campaign. Under his proposal, a majority of parents in a poorly performing school could shut down the school, bring in new administrators and teachers, and adopt a charter school or other new model.
Is the Compton fight, which is headed to court, reason for Chicagoans to be wary of adopting a Parent Trigger of their own? Not at all!
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The libertarian take on the Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday in the Westboro Baptist/military funerals case may be boiled down to the old nostrum that we may disagree with what the execrable “Reverend” Fred Phelps and his family say, but we should defend to the death their right to say it.
But is that right?
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Rock-Paper-Scissors is a game most any child can grasp. Rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock. California’s landmark Parent Empowerment Act—a.k.a. the Parent Trigger—is a little bit like the child’s game, with a concept so simple even a child could understand it and only an educrat could foul it up.
The point of the Parent Trigger is to empower parents of children at failing schools to surmount local bureaucracies that often stand in the way of meaningful reforms. If half of parents at a failing public school sign a petition, the local district must undertake one of several reforms prescribed by law. (You can read all about it here.)
In short, parents trump bureaucrats.
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Kelley Williams-Bolar is a felon in the state of Ohio. A jury recently found her guilty of fraud and forgery, but prosecutors could not make the case for grand theft. Nevertheless, she will be forced to pay $30,000 in restitution to the government.
The judge in Williams-Bolar’s case said she wanted to make an example of the woman. Whatever you do, do not lie about where you live to get your children into a good public school.
Though she served just one day nine days of a 10-day jail sentence, the state clearly has made an example of this Akron single mother of two, who used her father’s address to send her daughters to a school in a nearby Copley-Fairlawn district school.
The editors of the Akron Beacon-Journal the other day asked whether Williams-Bolar deserved that felony conviction for creating fraudulent documents to place her two daughters in a better school district. The answer is no, but the law is the law. Yet in the course of an extended lament for Williams-Bolar’s plight, the editors offered no real solutions.
Here’s one: Change the law so that parents who happen to live in a ZIP Code with predominantly failing schools aren’t tempted to commit fraud to give their children a decent education.
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Tens of thousands of people in at least 36 states this week will participate in more than 140 events touting the virtues of school choice. It’s the first annual National School Choice Week, a collaboration of more than 150 school reform groups, schools, philanthropic foundations, and businesses. The Heartland Institute is a proud participant in the effort to highlight how empowering parents to choose the best schools for their children is essential reform.
I attended a kick-off event sponsored by KRLA 870 AM and Americans for Prosperity last Thursday at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, where about 800 people packed into a scale replica of the White House East Room to hear Dick Morris and radio talkshow host Hugh Hewitt discuss why 2011 may well be the year everything changes in school reform.
Why this year? Because, as Morris explained, 2011 will be the year states reckon with their yawning state budget deficits.
State governors and legislatures across the United States this year are facing up to a grim financial reality: More than $100 billion in federal education stimulus money is gone. Another bailout isn’t forthcoming, and voters have no great appetite for higher taxes. After years of pumping up school spending, real cuts are overdue.
Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Indiana are among the states considering bills either to establish or expand opportunity scholarship programs currently aimed at offering low-income parents or parents with disabled children the means to attend the school of their choice.
And 2011 could also be the year of reform because, as it turns out, school choice isn’t just the right thing to do for parents. It’s also one of the fiscally sanest things legislators and policymakers can do to save their states from financial ruin. How long before fiscal basket cases such as California and Illinois follow suit?
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As you may have read, parents at McKinley Elementary in Compton, California, on Tuesday submitted petitions to convert the failing school into a charter school under California’s “parent trigger” law.
Turns out, the date — December 7 — was serendipitous. Organizers, who pulled together a magnificent campaign in just a few months with the help of the savvy progressives at L.A.’s Parent Revolution, planned their precedent-establishing petition drive as kind of sneak attack on the education establishment.
It appears to have succeeded marvelously: [click to continue…]
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“Drop that brownie, young lady! You’re in violation of Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.”
A bit of rhetorical hyperbole? Actually, that might not be too much of an exaggeration of what’s in store under the new child nutrition law Congress passed Thursday. The bill, which gives the USDA power to regulate fat and sugar in schools, squeaked through the House thanks to heavy lobbying from sundry “public health” and child welfare groups. First Lady Michelle Obama’s support probably didn’t hurt, either.
The feds will also be empowered to regulate fundraisers where food is sold — i.e., bake sales. And that has PTAs and varsity cheerleading squads across the country seriously freaking out. According to the Associated Press:
The legislation would apply to all foods sold in schools during regular class hours, including in the cafeteria line, vending machines and at fundraisers….
Public health groups pushed for the language on fundraisers, which encourages the secretary of Agriculture to allow them only if they are infrequent. The language is broad enough that a president’s administration could even ban bake sales, but Secretary Tom Vilsack signaled in a letter to House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., this week that he does not intend to do that. The USDA has a year to write rules that decide how frequent is infrequent.
Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest says the bill is aimed at curbing daily or weekly bake sales or pizza fundraisers that become a regular part of kids’ lunchtime routines. She says selling junk food can easily be substituted with nonfood fundraisers.
Vilsack and Miller, who is on his way out as chairman of the education committee, don’t “intend” for the federal government to ban bake sales in your community school. But the law says it can. Maybe not next week. But maybe next year. Or maybe sometime in the future, when a true believer like Margo Wootan is Secretary of Agriculture. And in any event, states and officious localities are already headed in that direction.
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Several school districts in Oklahoma are flatly refusing to comply with a new state law offering school vouchers to parents of children with disabilities.
The Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarships for Students with Disabilities Act makes available to thousands of disabled students with an individualized education program a scholarship of up to $7,500 to attend any public or private school that meets state accreditation standards. Oklahoma’s legislature passed House Bill 3393 in May, and Gov. Brad Henry (D) signed the bill into law on June 8. Reformers hailed the law as a victory not just for school choice but for kids with special needs who are often poorly served by their local public schools.
But at least four districts decided the law is unconstitutional and they’re simply not going to follow it. Besides, all of those extra special education dollars are nothing to sneeze at.
Brandon Dutcher, proprietor of Oklahoma’s Choice Remarks blog, says the bureaucrats just don’t get it. And so he’s made a video that puts their intransigence in its proper context:
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From the creative geniuses behind “The Tiger Woods Story“ and “The Passion of Mel Gibson” comes what might be translated most accurately as “Gun-Toting Adrian Fenty Versus Teachers Union Zombie Clowns”:
With all due respect to Davis Guggenheim, I think I like this version a little bit better.
(Hat tip: Jay P. Greene.)
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