Pickler begins by saying, “Imagine a state outsourcing the education of its disadvantaged children to dozens of private entities, asking for only minimal updates on the students’ learning and their financial management of taxpayers’ dollars.”

Pickler goes on to say that the Louisiana bill was designed to be a template for bills in other states.    Indeed, it is being considered in other states even though it has now been declared unconstitutional by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Read the whole article.

Out-of-state foundations, lobby groups, and investors are encouraging the passage of a collection of bills that can lead to a community losing control of its neighborhood school.  The new laws would create circumstances where the local school can be handed over to a for-profit company, eliminating any input or participation by the local parents, the local school board, the local school administration, the local voters who built the school, or the local taxpayers who support the school.

Worst of all, these bills are sometimes called “parent empowerment” when, in fact, they are the opposite.  Read more about the so-called “parent trigger” bill (SB1263) here.   Another of the bills (SB1718) creates a statewide “achievement school district.”

America’s Best High Schools | Newsweek

SB2, under consideration by the Texas Legislature, would ban nepotism in charter schools, but charter school operators are lobbying that existing charter schools be grandfathered from the proposed law.

Current laws prohibit nepotism in traditional public schools.

1. Parent Trigger—This idea is promoted as “parent empowerment,” but the bottom line is that after parents petition for a low-performing school to be put under different management, the state takes over and hands the school off to a charter school or a school management organization. The local community and the elected school board would no longer have a say about the governance or management of the school.
2. Achievement School District (ASD)—With an ASD the state would remove a low-performing school from local decision-making by placing it in a state school district without an elected governing board.  Bureaucrats in Austin would take over the school, hire new staff members, and leave taxpayers  and the local community out of the process.

 Chapter 11.151 of the Education Code assigns exclusive power to the elected school boards to govern and oversee the management of the public schools in the district. Both of these ‘reform’ ideas violate state law regarding how public schools are governed.

 See the whole article.