By Brody Goucher Posted December 12, 2012
Can parents really do a better job running schools than trained administrators and teachers? A trigger law is a state law that allows parents to completely overturn a school’s administration and teaching staff when a school is not performing.
Parents could not do a better job than our administrators and teachers because they are not trained officials put in place to do the job. If a school is below national standards for a long period of time, the school’s administration should be carefully looked at as well as the teachers, but not replaced as a whole. Parents should not get to make the final decision as to who is fired.
A study from Stanford University found that 83 percent of charter schools and parents have taken over a school or have done worse or no better than their public school counterparts in making any gains after the trigger law was enacted. Another problem with trigger laws is some of the charter schools that replace the public schools will not accept a child that is many grades behind their classmates and below where they are supposed to be academically.
According to “The Las Vegas Sun”, Nevada is considering passing a parent trigger law that was proposed to Senator Michael Roberson of Las Vegas. The trigger law has not been passed, but many parents and private schools are trying to push it through Nevada’s legislative system. The facts are this law is not even needed because we already have a federal law that states that if a school is underperforming for over three years the entire staff and administration will be fired.
While parents’ opinions should be taken into consideration, the entire staff should not be removed from the school, because there is no way that every teacher in that school and every member of the staff can be doing a bad job. Teachers whose students are not performing well should be given some time and then, if after a period nothing changes, the teacher should be replaced.
Parents should have an active role in schools and their kids’ lives, but saying they could do a better job than people who have been trained for years to do the job is rash, to say the least. The people who are heavily backing this movement are charter schools because charter schools know they can make a profit off of schools that they take over if they get enough parents to support trigger laws.
Many people think that trigger laws give more power to parents, but do they really? The trigger laws do nothing but give more power to private schools as well as charter schools that think that they can make money from parents.
