As often happens in negotiations, school boards sacrifice parent interests to teacher union interests. As a result, parents are relegated to fundraising or helping teachers. As the purported representative of children's best interests, the PTA has failed. With continued talk about parent representation on site-based management councils, parents need reliable, accurate information about how to review school budgets, curricula, contract provisions, personnel evaluations, and other data. Taxpayer and small business groups, which already have expertise in these areas, could expand their watchdog activities and provide training to parents interested in challenging the status quo.
Lawmakers can eliminate legislation which micromanages education and school boards.
Instead, they should provide a framework within which real competition takes place, thereby permitting and encouraging subcontracting with private providers for delivery of services, for-profit schools, charter schools with liberal waivers and flexibility, universal vouchers, or any combination of the above to offer superior educational opportunities to children and efficiency and choice to their parents. What these schools do have are effective, engaged parents in independent PTOs, and enthusiastic teachers unleashed from contract restrictions. Were such coalitions armed with more knowledge about the workings of the teacher unions and the weaknesses of the PTA, imagine what they could accomplish.