The Palm Lane Elementary School parents and their attorneys squared off against the Anaheim City School District and Anaheim City Board of Education on June 15th in Courtroom C11 in the battle to determine whether the parents will succeed in their efforts to restart the academically troubled school as an independent charter school. The parents are...

If the parent activists at Palm Lane Elementary School are successful in their battle to invoke SB54, the Parent Trigger Law, they would be well advised to study the network of high-performing charter schools in New York City founded by former teacher and City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz as the template for the school it must...

Palm Lane Elementary School in Anaheim, a failing school for at least the past decade, has become a battleground in the war against union power and its unconstrained efforts to retain absolute control over public education. At stake may be America’s future itself. Palm Lane parents, disheartened by the school’s abysmal academic record and the...

Labor union indoctrination is seeping into our schools before our very eyes. Teacher union intrusion into the lives of children is not new. Via anti-child work rules like tenure and seniority, unions have been making their influence felt for years. Additionally, as labor expert Kevin Dayton points out, they have been angling to promote their...

It was only a matter of time before the Los Angeles school chief was run out of town. John Deasy is the latest to exit the fast-moving revolving door known as Los Angeles School Superintendent. The job – really an impossible one – saw Roy Romer replace Ray Cortines in 2001. Romer in turn was...

The names Doreen Diaz and Bartola Del Villar appear nowhere in the text of the Parent Empowerment Act, also known as the Parent Trigger, that I wrote in 2010. The law empowers parents to bypass the political paralysis of our education bureaucracy that is responsible for perpetuating the status quo failure of our schools. Today,...

The ongoing battle between parents and the union-dominated education blob heats up in California. California state senator Gloria Romero’s Parent Trigger law has been around for over three years now, and its progress has been slow but steady. The law stipulates that if 50 percent +1 of the parents of children in a failing school...

CTA sponsors a resolution demonizing what it perceives to be faux Democrats. At last week’s California Democratic Party convention in Sacramento, the California Teachers Association went into attack mode, sponsoring a resolution suggesting that two organizations run by prominent Democrats are backed by dastardly corporate Republican types. WHEREAS, the so-called “reform” initiatives of Students First,...

Thoughts on my recent encounter with the president of the California Teachers Association. I was quite surprised when California Teachers Association president Dean Vogel agreed to join a panel that consisted of Gloria Romero, Terry Moe and me a couple of weeks ago at an event sponsored by The Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley. Gloria...

Union political power is only as strong as its members’ willingness to give. Last week, the American Federation of Teacher’s latest union financials (LM-2s) were released. Courtesy of Dropout Nation’s RiShawn Biddle, we learn that in 2011-2012, AFT spent $27 million to “preserve its influence.” Teachers unions spend money in a variety of ways, but...