Indiana Parent Trigger Bill Blindsided by Eleventh-Hour Rewrite

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Ben Boychuk

Ben Boychuk is a project manager for education reform 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.

Latest posts by Ben Boychuk (see all)

• Indiana Parent Trigger Bill Blindsided by Eleventh-Hour Rewrite - April 29, 2011
• Rahm Emanuel: Parent Trigger Warrior - March 3, 2011
• H.L. Mencken on Snyder v. Phelps - March 3, 2011

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.

The original draft, which was modeled after California’s law and which the Indiana House passed just last week, would have allowed 51 percent of parents at a failing school to compel their local school district to undertake one of several reforms, such as closing the school, converting it to an independent charter, or allowing parents to have a voucher to send their kids to a better performing private or public school.

Kruse’s amendment would have required the local district to approve the petition, and granted bureaucrats and the teachers union far too much leeway to reject parents’ reforms. In short, it would have been a parent trigger with a school district lock.

Naturally, House Republicans (and not a few of Kruse’s colleagues in the senate) were chagrined. And since Indiana’s legislative session ends today, and lawmakers still have a budget and several other bills to approve, there was little hope or expectation of a late rally. Barring a last minute miracle (after a wreck like that?), at this hour the Indiana Parent Trigger is dead for the year. It’s a bittersweet end to an otherwise magnificent session for school reform.