Freedom Line Blog

In today’s hyper-competitive and ever-changing telecommunications sector, private enterprises must remain empowered to fluidly navigate and combine for greater market scale without gratuitous government regulatory interference.  How private companies choose to navigate today’s competitive environment isn’t particularly any of our business or concern, but the recent merger proposal between Charter Communications and Cox Communications does merit attention as it relates to something that the federal bureaucrats should not do:  intrusively overregulate.

It bears emphasis because for four years we at CFIF highlighted the egregious excess of the Biden Administration when it came to needlessly micromanaging private companies’ decisions on such matters.  The new Trump Administration has returned a more market-based economic approach that emphasizes lower taxes and less regulation, and the payoffs have already been obvious.

Let’s hope that current regulators – whether at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Department of Justice (DOJ) or Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – recognize the peril of the last administration’s discredited hyper-regulatory opposition to mergers of all sorts, and that they instead let the free market work itself out without needless bureaucratic interference.  As was the case in the first Trump Administration, the winners of that less-regulatory approach will be American consumers, our economy and private innovation.

The Daily Caller spotlights a landmark decision in the Los Angeles Unified School District this week:

The Los Angeles Board of Education signed off on a parent-led plan to turn a failing public school over to a private charter company this week — the city’s first use of the controversial “parent trigger” law.

The 5-1 vote granted parents in downtown Los Angeles final approval to convert 24th Street Elementary School into a charter school. The new school will be better equipped to handle demographic changes to the area, parents said.

Unsurprisingly, and despite the fact that the parents pushing for the change met for over a year to put together a charter proposal, the United Teachers of Los Angeles, affiliated with the deplorable California Teachers Association, has been opposing the parents’ move by essentially calling the group insane.

In relevant part, the union’s statement declares:

We believe parents do not want a private charger corporation to take over 24^th Street Elementary, which is exactly what is happening at Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto as a result of the Parent Trigger.

So, parents who have deliberated for over a year about converting their public school into a charter school, used the state’s parent trigger law to do it, have now been approved for the change, and will get a privately run charter school don’t, in fact, want any of this to happen?

It’s hard to know which is more offensive – saying that adults who navigate a rigorous legal process don’t understand the consequences of their actions, or that the union who released this statement is in a superior position to judge what’s best for students in a failing school.

Thanks to the parent trigger, California parents of kids in failing public schools now have a mechanism for saving their child’s education – and their future.

Conservatives looking for ways to grow the movement’s electoral base should pay close attention to this development.  If championed, it could become a key reason why traditionally liberal voters start supporting more conservative candidates.

Christian Schneider  writing in City Journal shows the vivid cost/benefit contrast between members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and their public charter school counterparts.  CTU members average $76,000 in annual salary before benefits, while public charter school teachers make $49,000.

Charter school teachers are a bargain.  A study by the Illinois Policy Institute cited by Schneider indicates that nine of Chicago’s top ten performing schools are open-enrollment, non-selective charter high schools.

Faced with this kind of competition, CTU members did what any self-respecting public employee union would do when offered a sixteen percent pay raise in exchange for linking employment to student test results – they went on strike.

Change is coming to all levels of the education industry.  Groups like CTU need to adapt to the new reality of pay-for-performance or risk expulsion from the system.