I saw mention of this quote on both and EIA Online. I was blown away by the arrogance of California Federation of Teachers (CFT) leaders as evidenced by their phony concern.

Race to the Top legislation update
The state Legislature is working frantically to pass two linked bills related to Race to the Top federal funding. If passed, these bills would supposedly help the state qualify for up to $700 million dollars. Two catches: The total in Race to the Top dollars will be about one-twentieth of the amount cut over the past two years from the state education budget and will come into the state over the next four years; and the changes would likely not improve instruction, but rather offer more opportunities to scapegoat teachers for "failing schools." In particular, SBX5 4 provides for two provisions that CFT has opposed: a "parent trigger" and an open enrollment provision. Under the parent trigger (or lynch mob provision) if 50% of the parents at a school or feeder schools of a low performing school sign a petition, the school board must hold a hearing to accept that petition or provide an alternative governance change, which could include closing the school, turning it into a charter school, or reconstituting the school. The open enrollment portion would label the lowest 1,000 API scoring schools every year as "open enrollment schools" (and exempt charters from this provision). Being labeled "open enrollment" requires that the district must allow any student in that school to transfer to another district. Click here to tell your legislators to reject SBX5 4, which is being used by the governor and anti-education legislators to draw attention away from their failure to fund schools properly through fair progressive tax policies.

Really? A "lynch mob"? While I've said for quite a while that I thought what California public education needed was a few more groups of parents with pitchforks and torches standing outside their local school district demanding action, I don't recall reading any media reports of those sort of events. The reality is that the use of the term "lynch mob" is intended as a scare tactic and to belittle those who supported SB5X 4.

The good news is that despite CFT and their wealthy cousin CTA's best efforts, the California legislature showed evidence of a backbone and passed the bill. The Governor, finally acting like the Governator that we all had hoped to see, signed it and it is going to become state law.

Personally, I'm really excited to see whether parents will be empowered by this change and whether school districts will see it as encouragement to act in making real changes in failing public schools. Let's see what parents do with their new found influence over their local public schools.

Update: Another rant about this story comes from Joel Fox at Fox and Hounds can be found here.