Who Should Choose?

In the Wall Street Journal, I read this article about how a school in California was changing.  Basically, it was a really bad school.  Less than half of the students graduate, and only about 3% are elegible to attend California's public universities.  When I looked up, "Compton, CA," the town where this school is located, I saw that the top two related searches were ,"Compton ghettos," and, "Compton gangs."  No wonder the schools are bad.  Notice that the photo is from streetgangs.com.

So since the schools are so bad, the parents decided to petition the district to invite a charter school to take over their failing public school.  Needless to say, the public school administration and teachers and all the people involved are not happy.  This is the first example of "parent trigger" scholl reform.

The school is fighting the democracy of the people as well as it can.  It has urged parents to take back their petitions.  Next they sort of cheated.  They came up with a new petition processing method, which requires each person to show up at the school at certain appointed times and show IDs and stuff in order for the signature to be valid.  Then a judge issued a restraining order on the verification process, because it must have seemed just a bit unconstitutional to him (it certainly does to me!), and then the school disqualified all of the petitions on technicalities.  Just because they weren't all stapled or something.  It seems pretty shady to me.

Shouldn't the people get the right to say how they want their children educated?  And if the public school isn't up to snuff, shouldn't the people get to choose a better education for them?  Or should the government be allowed to say how people are allowed to be educated?  This seems like an abridgement of some rights to me, maybe not civil rights, but definitely some rights.