It starts here:
Last week Assemblyman Troy Singleton (D-Camden) released a bill that updates New Jersey’s 20-year-old charter school law. The draft of the bill invests local school boards with the power to control 30 percent of an aspiring charter’s application score…
What’s wrong with delegating charter approval to democratically-elected school board members? After all, local districts pay tuition and transportation for charter school students. Shouldn’t community representatives have power to deter perceived threats to traditional district dominance?
Here’s what’s wrong: delegating charter school authorization to school boards permits majority rule to trample the rights of the minority group of residents who want to send their children to charter schools. This permutation of democracy is commonly referred to as “tyranny of the majority,” a phrase first used by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835.
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