Sign Up For Our Newsletter

"Parental" opposition to LAUSD takeover

According to this, parents are rising up against Villaraigosa’s proposal:

Some L.A. Unified parents rallied outside Bob Hope Airport in Burbank Monday morning to urge Villaraigosa not to involve the state legislature.

Tenth-district PTA leader Scott Folsom said he doesn’t want decisions to be made in "the back rooms of Sacramento."

At first this story piqued our interest.  But wait a minute…the PTA? 

Today the PTA supports all of the (NEA’s) positions, including increased federal funding for education and opposition to independent charter schools, to vouchers and to tuition tax credits for private and religious schools. This "parent" group lobbies for teachers to spend less time in the classroom and to have fewer supervisory responsibilities like lunchroom duty. Moreover, they want a pay scale for teachers that is based on seniority, not merit. In November, the PTA even helped to defeat California’s Proposition 74, which called for limiting teacher tenure by extending the probation period for new teachers from two to five years, a proposal designed to give administrators more time to weed out bad instructors.

With polls indicating that the union label is a liability with the public, an arrangement has developed whereby the NEA provides needed financial support for the PTA, which in turn bolsters union positions at the grass-roots level. As one union official put it: "[T]he PTA has credibility . . . we always use the PTA as a front."

Not only does the PTA support the NEA on issues that protect the public-school teachers’ monopoly, the parent group also speaks up in favor of the NEA’s more radical curriculum ideas, like sex-education programs that replace "don’t" with "how to" and that propose the inclusion of a gay/lesbian unit starting as early as kindergarten.

In that case, color us skeptical.