• RSS Feed

• Tweet
• Share
• Email
• Print

 (Note: this column appears in Community Newspapers.)

By Charles Sykes

Memo to parents: bug out.

 

The state teachers union won a brave victory last week that may kill of a successful public school. It’s fatal sin? Too much parental involvement.

 

The Wisconsin Virtual Academy is one of education’s innovative success stories. The school’s website describes its mission: “a rigorous and comprehensive curriculum based on the Core Knowledge sequence, the flexibility of learning anytime and anywhere, the partnership with qualified professional educators, the credibility of being a public charter school in the state of Wisconsin , and an individualized and self-paced learning program that adapts to your child's unique needs.”

 

But the school also requires active parental involvement. And the union has a problem with that. Under state law, the union insists, only certified teachers are allowed to teach in a public school. As the appeals court ruled last week: “a WIVA parent performs activities that are undeniably teaching: leading the student through a lesson plan, answering questions and assessing student progress.”

 

The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) argued that made the school illegal; and the court agreed. The results could be sweeping.

 

The Virtual Academy ’s lawyers argued that if the court bought the union argument, then all public schools are violating the law, because they use teacher aides, parent volunteers, and guest speakers, to perform some of the same “teaching” functions in the public schools that parents do in WIVA. As the court noted, [the school] “proposes that there is no reasonable distinction between WIVA and a more traditional public school in which unlicensed individuals play a role in the teaching of students.”

 

And then the kicker:

 

“We acknowledge that the statute, as it is written, is capable of being read to produce this absurd result.”

 

 

As a result, Marquette University Law Professor Rick Esenberg notes: “On the court's analysis, any school with robust parental involvement and assistance in delivering instruction would be in violation of the statute.”

 

 

So why would the union, with the support of the educational bureaucracy, take this extreme step?

 

 

           

For the educational establishment, the nature of threat is obvious: WIVA offers a high quality education that costs dramatically less than traditional brick and mortar schools. Because it uses cutting-edge technology, it also means that fewer teachers able to teach more students over a larger area. WIVA’s traditional-oriented core curriculum also defies the fashionable educationist fads that reign over much of public education.

 

So this case was not about "great schools”; it wasn’t even about the teachers – who are, after all, public school teachers and members of the union. And it certainly wasn’t about the kids, who may be about to lose their school. This was about the money. And WEAC proved last week that it was willing to kill a school to keep it.