CA "parent trigger" law. 51% of parents in a school can change it to a charter.

madfloridian

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Sun Dec-19-10 12:22 AM
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CA "parent trigger" law. 51% of parents in a school can change it to a charter.

Or another form of turnaround. That's a pretty drastic law that could have some unwanted effects if parents are misled.

Interesting story of a school in Compton, CA, in which the petition signed by 61% of the school's parents is under scrutiny. The school is looking into legal options, while "a host of politicians-including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Obama administration-have heaped praise on the parents who stepped up, filed the petition, and demanded change for their children."

Some of the parents claim to have been misled into thinking it would help to beautify the campus. Add to that the fact that the group collecting the petitions, the Parent Revolution, is not really a grassroots. It was formed from the Green Dot charter school.

Did Compton Parents Really Want the Trigger Pulled?

Were parents tricked into signing a “parent trigger” petition that sets into motion the takeover of a Compton, California elementary school by a charter school operator? That claim, and a slew of other accusations, are bringing the drama to 497-student McKinley Elementary-and making it ground zero in the national education reform debate.

Takeover opponents claim that almost 60 parents have rescinded their signatures from the petition given to Compton Unified School District officials last week. Karla Garcia, a parent of two McKinley students, told the Los Angeles Times that representatives from the non-profit organization behind the parent trigger movement, Parent Revolution, misled her to get her signature. “They told me the petition was to beautify the school. They are misinforming the parents, so I revoked my signature.”

The number of signatures matter. According to California’s “parent trigger” policy, if 51 percent of parents at a low-performing school sign a petition calling for change on their campus-change which can include conversion to a charter-the district must abdicate control. Although 61 percent of parents at McKinley signed the petition, if the signatures drop below the required percentage, the revolutionary takeover is off the table.

..."Parent Revolution says intimidation tactics are being used to squash the takeover. Some parents at the predominately Latino school have been told they can be deported if they go through with the “parent trigger” move. Others report being told that they’ll have to pay tuition once the school becomes a charter operated by Celerity Education Group.

Here is more about the formation of the Parent Revolution. It's a misleading term. And it's a risky law, letting parents take school change completely into their own hands. Too many factors involved, too many ways things could go wrong.

More about the "Parent Trigger". Not real grassroots and may do real harm.

More on the Parent Trigger law:

If a school's average test scores are low, parents may circulate a petition demanding one of a set of options set out in the law, including closing the school, turning it into a charter school or firing or reorganizing the staff. If 51 percent of the school's families, or 51 percent of a larger group of parents whose children are on track to attend the school, sign the petition, the change takes place unless the school district can persuade the state to choose a different option because the parents' solution is impossible or harmful.

More on the Parent Revolution:

The article points out that this is a corporately paid for movement and describes how the media praises it.

Nowhere better could this sycophantic press be seen than on the MSNBC special that premiered on Sunday, the 20th of September. A two hour special, the program, entitled About Our Children, featured Bill Cosby who outright said at the beginning of the program why he was on the show; “I’m the draw.” And indeed he was, seen on stage and at times filming with kids and asking them if they could spell. Paul Rodriquez, the comedian, was on hand as well, condemning bilingual education. But besides the spectacle of the Opraization of American education through platitudes and self-help handwringing on the part of the upper class for the corporate media, the program also featured Chancellor of Washington D.C. Schools, Michelle Ree as well as Ben Austin.

Austin was on stage representing the Parents Revolution, but nowhere was his affiliation with Green Dot disclosed. Nor were viewers told of his work as the city attorney of Los Angeles . Portrayed as a frustrated parent leading a revolution of angry torch marchers, Austin told the audience that “parents can realize they have power.” The whole spectacle was a lead up to the Gingrich, Sharpton and Duncan show that premiers at the end of September. For as Robert D. Skeels astutely observes:

If Parent Revolution’s Austin or any of his network of rich boys with white savior complex were really childrens’ advocates, then where were they when the community was engaged in struggle against the budget cuts? Green Dot’s Ben Austin was almost certainly lounging at home in his gated Beverly Hills community while we supported the parent campers at John Liechty Middle School and Miguel Contreras Learning Complex. While LAPU’s Ben Austin enjoyed lavish luncheons with ever the opportunist Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, we supported the hunger strikers and parents in front of Cortines office. While Ben Austin was endorsing fat checks from Eli Broad and William Gates, we were raising funds for Aurora Ponce (Robert D. Skeels, September 20, 2009 http://rdsathene.blogspot.com /).

That refers to the way that Newt Gingrich got to travel with Arne seeing his dream of free market schools fulfilled.

More about the power of parents when funded by corporations and called grassroots. From Perimeter Primate:

Originally conceived in Los Angeles by Steve Barr’s (of Green Dot) Los Angeles Parents Union, and largely funded by the Broad Foundation, the "Parent Trigger" has spread east, and here and here. This is an initiative where if enough parents can be convinced, pressured, and tricked to sign a petition, a school will be closed down and replaced with a charter. On each Form 990 from 2005 to 2008, Steve Barr is listed as the CEO/President of the LAPU board.

Eli Broad contributed nearly 50% of the funding for the launch of the LAPU (formerly the Small Schools Alliance, aka the Parent Revolution). The money he supplied helped pay for the propaganda to make it seem like the movement is being generated by "the people," when in fact it is a carefully planned, targeted marketing campaign designed to wipe out the public schools. The most important thing to know is that this organization is not grassroots; it's astroturf!

Connections between Eli Broad, the Parent Union (aka Parent Revolution, the creators of the "Parent Trigger"), and Green Dot

I just read today that Rahm Emanuel if he becomes Chicago Mayor would like to institute the "parent trigger" into Chicago schools.

Rahm Emanuel wants destructive parent trigger in Chicago

There have been rumblings about bringing the parent trigger concept to Illinois from groups like the ultra-conservative Heartland Institute. I wrote about this program almost a year ago in National Journal.

Now local Bill Gates avatar Rahm Emanuel is pushing this charter school-backed process for manipulating parents into "demanding" more charter schools. Earlier this week at a CPS school, Emanuel said (note the threatening words at the beginning - don't say I haven't been warning you):

But parents have to do their part, as well. If they find their children stuck in a school that simply isn't doing the job, we should empower them to force the needed changes.

I believe we should consider allowing a majority of parents to legally force a failing school's transformation - through administrative changes, bringing in a new operator, or by shutting it down and starting over with a charter, a school of excellence, or any other model that the community chooses. We simply cannot tolerate schools that fail year after year.

That would be a scary option. Of course parents need to have input into schools, no denying that at all. But to give them the power to change a school to a charter school if 51% are not satisfied is risky. There are too many factors involved in schools with problems....and drastic change can be the worst option.

In June of last year, Caroline Grannan of the SF Examiner pointed out that some of the schools being targeted by the Parent Revolution were actually outperforming the schools that were currently Green Dot charters.

But forget my opinion; we want data. So I looked up the most recent Academic Performance Index score for Emerson (Ralph Waldo Emerson Middle School, Los Angeles Unified). (The API is California’s accountability reporting system for school achievement; it ranks schools based on a compilation of standardized test scores into a score on a 200-1000 scale, with 800 and up viewed as excellent.)

The 2008 API for “failing” Emerson is 701 – neither stellar nor disgraceful. SFUSD has some very highly regarded and sought-after schools with APIs well below 701.

I thought I’d see how the schools Green Dot runs – which are hailed far and wide as successful nationwide models – compare. Turns out the API of the 11 Green Dot schools averages 678.64. Hmm.

Four of Green Dot’s 12 schools have APIs far below Emerson’s 701:

Animo Jackie Robinson 597
Animo Justice 569
Animo Ralph Bunche 636
Animo Watts 614

There are some interesting comments after the first article about Compton school.

One of them was by Grannan..it shows that a specific charter school was going to be the recipient of the public school.

The move would put the school into the hands of a specific charter operator, Celerity Educational Group. The entire Parent Trigger move actually came not from within the McKinley community but from the organization Parent Revolution, which was founded not by parents but by a group of charter school operators led by the high-profile Green Dot. As the L.A. Weekly puts it, Parent Revolution “has 10 full-time staff members and a $1 million annual operating budget, is funded by blue-chip philanthropic endeavors, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation .”

A not so grassroots parent group funded by Gates, Broad, Walton, is instigating turning a public school over to a charter operator.

There is so much wrong with that picture.