The Chancellor's Parent Advisory Council has had a beef with the New York City Department of Education going back several years about the role of parents in school governance. This will certainly be an important issue in the years leading up to the reauthorization of NYC's mayoral control legislation, and no one is better poised to represent the city's PTA-types on this issue than CPAC.

But to say that CPAC's recent (and widely publicized) split with Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein on the issue of charter schools means that average city parents are opposed to the introduction of more quality public school options (including charter schools) borders on being downright offensive.

Remember that these PTA-types usually represent the "haves" in the school system. (When is the last time you saw the PTA president's kid get stuck in the class with the worst teacher in the grade?) PTA's, as part of the built-in culture of their schools, are great at raising money and rubber-stamping school policies for their principals and union reps. They typically have more to do with keeping things the way they are than in creating a climate for radical change. (They are most useful, in fact, as foot-soldiers in the battles for more cash for the system.)

These uber-parent-leaders usually don't speak for:

-- The tens of thousands of public school parents who fret each year about supply and demand problems when it comes time to apply for middle schools and high schools in the city.

-- The tens of thousands of parents whose kids are stuck in awful city schools, but can't transfer because we keep telling them we don't have enough good schools to accommodate them.

-- The thousands of city parents who will apply to charter school lotteries this fall (including the charters run by the UFT, which is paying for the CPAC buses to Albany) who simply want their kids to have a chance to learn something.

-- The parents of the 12,000 kids currently enrolled in the city's 47 public charter schools (or the 14,000 kids who will attend the city's 59 charter schools in the fall.)

-- The thousands of parents whose kids are on waiting lists for city charter schools.

It is important to remember that charter schools have traditionally been about providing more choices for the "have nots," not the people who are already happy with where their children are being educated. Today, these PTA-types are actually lobbying against the rights of frustrated city parents to have greater control of their children's destinies.

The Daily News editorial weighs in on this here; the NY Sun does so here.

Good stuff from the Sun editorial:

The question is why city parents should even need representatives to board a bus toward Albany to lobby for them. The real genius of charter schools and other education reforms like vouchers is that they give each parent a choice in their children's education. As lawmakers observe the teachers and parents at the UFT's lobbying day tomorrow, they can consider that charter schools and vouchers make every day a day of free choice for every parent.

CPAC seems to think that having power on school governance committees is more important for parents than having some control over where their kids go to school.

Many of those who are involved in CPAC are extemely committed to their schools and often bring a valuable perspective to the table about how school policies impact parents. But this isn't one of those times.