From a community organizer’s perspective, the brilliance of the parent trigger concept (developed by Steve Barr and his colleagues as a tool for activating parents in support of charter school conversions in the LA school district), is that it overcomes the collective action problem inherent in most other models for organizing parents in support of education reform. The problem is that the potential benefits of education reform are diffuse and uncertain, even for the parents and children most disadvantaged by the status quo, whereas the defenders of the current system know exactly what they stand to lose and are motivated accordingly.

For example, most states have laws that mandate admission to charter schools and other schools of choice through random lottery. So even if a parent puts months of blood, sweat and tears into a campaign to close down their own child’s failing school and replace it with a new high performing charter school, they themselves have no guarantee that their own child will even be admitted in the new school’s lottery.

But the parent trigger turns this calculus on its head. Provided it is pursued in partnership with a high quality new school operator, the parent trigger creates a value proposition that offers an immediate, direct benefit to those who join the campaign--there is no disconnect at all between the effort that a parent puts in to rallying 51% of their fellow parents to the cause and the promise of a new, high performing school for their own child.

The downside of this strategy is that it leaves the door open for an unscrupulous school operator to make promises to parents that they ultimately do not deliver on once the school has been turned over to them—and one would hope that California policymakers implement this measure with safeguards to ensure that only those school operators with a track record of success are eligible to partner with parents in assuming control of a failing school.

In the end, it seems increasingly clear that remaking our public schools in keeping with the tenets of “evidence-based education reform” is a long term proposition—requiring consistency of vision and fidelity of implementation for many years on end. This is one reason why mayoral control has gained increasing traction in cities with some of our most troubled school systems. And of course many of America’s international competitors don’t have to worry about the messy complications of democratic politics—countries like China and Singapore are simply pursuing long-term public education investment strategies by fiat..

This is no solution for America, and for those of us who believe in democratic ideals, now is the time to double down on this bet, and invent some new mechanisms, like the parent trigger, for reinvigorating democratic engagement in our public schools.

After all, school board elections in many American communities, especially those where the schools are most in need of fundamental overhaul, are scarcely a model of the democratic zeal we’ll need to overturn the entrenched interests standing in the way of remaking our public schools. In Hartford Connecticut only 8% of the electorate actually bothered to vote in last November’s school board election. If we truly want to turn things around, one of our best hopes is to realign the framework of policy and politics that surround our schools to create compelling value propositions that bring parents back to the table to demand change with real power. The parent trigger holds real promise on this score.

There are a lot of good comments here already. I'll echo Judith Browne-Dianis's sentiment that an "all or nothing" vote is not a particularly authentic form of parent engagement. Parents should understand the respective etiologies of both school failure and school success, and there's none of that here. I'll also second Andy Rotherham and Greg Richmond's point that this legal structure is sort of like telling a bunch of disgruntled consumers to force Starbucks to be more like Dunkin Donuts, rather than just allowing them to go to Dunkin Donuts in the first place. (NB: I know that this situation isn't a perfect analogue.)

The spirit of this law is right, in that parents should have a stronger voice in the educational process, but there's little to no chance that this law alone will lead to better outcomes. The problem isn't that this is too "punitive" a school improvement strategy ... the problem is that this isn't a school improvement strategy. It merely mandates change without dealing with the requisite human and infrastructural capacity necessary to impact change. Fixing failing schools is an incredibly difficult enterprise; the supply-side of both individuals and organizations that know how to do school turnaround is thin. This law does nothing to increase that capacity.

Here's the oddest part about this law, though. The only real upside here is that the law forces the hand of school administrators to make changes, in that a credible threat to the status quo is introduced. My question, then, is why not just upset the status quo? Are the billions of federal dollars on the table not enough for a state near bankruptcy? This seems like an incredibly redundant form of policy making. Rather than mandate some sort of reform - where reform clearly is necessary - here you have a state allowing parents to mandate reform when they think it's necessary. Hasn't California been down this road of direct democracy before? Officials are elected to make hard choices, not to defer them.

This provision is not without its risks and some initiatives along these lines have led to chaos in the past. The capacity to make it work in a subset of schools is better now, however, especially in LA where a number of high performing charters are flourishing and there is a robust civic and philanthropic network.

Still, ideas like this “trigger” wouldn’t be so popular if we had a more rational approach to choice within public education in the first place. If parents had more choices within the public system and there was more dynamism so persistently failing schools didn’t persist year after year because students are trapped in them to protect adult jobs then ideas like this trigger wouldn’t be so alluring to reformers, frustrated politicians, and fed-up parents.

The system is starting to reap what it has sown. Any industry that must be so focused on using public policy to keep its clients from bolting has a problem. Or, put another way, these parents are also voters so is fighting them on this really a good strategy to fix California’s ridiculous school funding problem?

The California Federation of Teachers referred to the parent trigger as the 'lynch mob provision' inciting anger from civil rights groups. See the wording in a recent issue of Inside CFT here

Calling this description of the legislation racially charged and offensive, a handful of groups sent this letter to Randi Weingarten asking her to officially denounce this language.

I have mixed feelings about the California parent-referendum idea. California’s experience with government by referendum has not always served it well, and applying it to decisions as granular as the reform of specific schools seems likely to be more unwieldy and chaotic than constructive.

But here’s what California has right: Of all the major stakeholders in P-12 education, parents, as their children’s chief advocates, have the largest stake and the least influence. And their lack of representation and influence has resulted in a lack of accountability that may be the public schools’ most serious malady. Without greater parent involvement, schools will not be able to realize the full potential of reform.

The lack of parental involvement is most debilitating in systems and schools with substantial representations of low-income students of color. These are the schools where dropout rates are highest and where even those who receive their diplomas do not receive the rigorous academic education they need to go to college or to enter the 21st century work force. These are also the schools in which parents are the hardest-pressed economically, the schools whose parents are often forced to work two or three jobs, making it hard for them to meet with teachers and principals on their children’s behalf. And parents in these schools may feel themselves least equipped to deal with their children’s teachers as peers, and to advocate for their children’s education as effectively as they would like.

The charter school movement is a major step in the right direction, because it gives parents the option with the greatest potential for getting schools’ attention: taking their business elsewhere—moving their student, and their student’s share of school funding, to a more effective school. GreatSchools.net has made an important contribution by providing, at its web site, a tool that parents can use to compare school options in their community.

Schools need to make themselves more accessible to parents. Scheduling of parent-teacher conferences and PTA meetings need to accommodate demanding work schedules. Parents also need reliable and accessible support in managing relationships with their children’s teachers. Some sources already exist, such as FamilyEducation.com’s “Parent-Teacher Conference Kit;” there need to be more such resources and they need to take account of the fact that many low-income families do not have reliable access to the Internet.

Accountability needs to be a two-way street. Schools need to make themselves more accountable, and parents need to step up as their children’s chief advocates. They need to instill in their children from the earliest years that graduating from college is not an option but a necessity. They need to attend conferences and meetings. And as citizens, they need to exercise the accountability that comes with the fact that American public schools are democratically controlled. Whether schools are controlled by boards of education or mayors and city councils, they are accountable in periodic elections.

Parents need to play a stronger role in the education their children receive, not only for the sake of their children but because the schools will not improve—and we won’t have the well-educated workforce that communities and the country need--if parents are not afforded the opportunity to play larger roles.

The most innovative idea to emerge from the slew of state-based education legislation sparked by Race to the Top is the parent trigger (master-minded by the LA-based Parent Revolution). Parents and their children have an unquestionable stake in the quality of available public education. The parent trigger puts power in parents’ hands, enabling them to act decisively and swiftly to improve their local schools.

The parent trigger allows parents to kick-start the reform process and break the logjam of politics that paralyzes so many school districts, but does not pretend that parents alone will know what type of school reform is best for their local school. Choosing between a transformation strategy, a re-start, a charter strategy, or a closure is a complex decision – and the parent trigger gives all of the most important stakeholders (e.g., superintendents, educators, parents) a role.

The grim reality is that the achievement gap in California is profound. In 2006, 42% of CA’s students scored proficient in English Language Arts, with startling sub-group break-downs: 27.4% proficient – Hispanic, 29% proficient – African American, 60.3% proficient - white, 64.3% proficient Asian. The Education Trust West’s most recent analysis of the achievement gap in California found: “The racial and socioeconomic achievement gap exists across all subjects and remains largely unchanged over the past 7 years.” For the huge numbers of low-income and minority students assigned to consistently failing schools, triggering any of these reforms will be the first possible step towards ensuring they receive a better education and all the increased opportunities we know accompany it.

Now communities long-accustomed to excuses and foot-dragging in the face of schools that continually fail generations of children have an option, a chance to come together and make a permanent change in their local schools. Too often low-income parents feel stuck in under-performing schools, without the options middle- and upper-income parents have to “opt out” of the public school system. Most families are left feeling both disillusioned with their children’s schools and powerless to do anything about it. Now, when schools are failing their children, parents have an out. The parent trigger directly empowers a majority of parents to demand a large-scale change at their school and ensures that the decisions about how their school will be improved will be made carefully and inclusively.

Without Race to the Top, innovative reformers like Parent Revolution Executive Director (and EEP signatory) Ben Austin, and the many courageous parents fighting for their children, we would not have the opportunities for dramatic change the parent trigger represents. And how can we not want to increase opportunities for another generation of students trapped in under-performing schools?

I’ve noticed that many people who support the “Parent Trigger” law see it as a mechanism for improving school choice. But more choices doesn't always mean better choices.

The law seems to encourage a dangerous polarization of an important issue. It implies that parents have only two choices when confronted with a school they don’t like: put up with it or do away with it in its current form. But like so many political ploys, this law presents a classic “false choice” scenario, one that excludes more constructive responses.

The “love it or leave it” simplicity of laws like this is appealing. But as all of us know, the circumstances surrounding a struggling school are far more complicated than a patently bipolar remedy can account for.

We all weighed in weeks ago on the poor results we’ve seen with turnarounds and restarts. It’s easy to predict, then, that parents who trigger the law could easily end up with a worse school as opposed to a better one – plus the confusion and instability of a “lost year” as the voting takes place and the restructuring option is selected.

However, if we think carefully about what the “trigger” really represents, we can find a third-way solution that gives parents a real choice.

Imagine a failing high school with 2000 kids and 3000 parents. Now imagine that 1600 parents come together in support of restructuring and trigger the law’s remedies. We all know about the powerful influence parents have over the education of their children. We also know that in large numbers, parents can have an extraordinary impact on their children’s schools. 1600 parents working together can get a lot of good work done.

So why not vote to “improve” a failing school and then take direct responsibility for contributing to that improvement? With more than 50% of any parent community behind improvement (as opposed to restructuring or closure), a school could make immediate and significant gains on many fronts.

Parents have power, especially when large numbers of them come together in agreement as this law encourages them to do. But when people use their power in a destructive way, they tend to destroy the thing they want so badly to improve. The “Parent Trigger” law may have surface appeal, but it’s really just another deeply divisive, wedge issue tactic of the kind that I’m sure all of us abhor.

The movement to improve school choice should always be about helping parents make better choices for their kids. The “Parent Trigger” law may sound good in theory, but in practice, it is likely to incite parents to make poor choices when better options almost certainly exist.

As Republicans have long recognized and advocated, parents play the leading role in their children’s education. While teachers, administrators, and other education professionals all contribute to a quality learning environment, parents create the foundation. Congress will do well to focus future reform efforts on empowering parents to have greater control over their children’s education.

California should be commended for pushing forward with their own education reforms instead of waiting for action from Washington. Reforms at the local level will produce better results for our nation’s students and schools, and reforms that put parents at the center of decision making will yield the greatest rewards. California has determined this new law is the best way to help students attain a quality education, and it is this type of focus on local decision making Congress should promote as we approach the reauthorization of ESEA. Education Secretary Duncan has stated that he and the Administration also seek innovative, local reforms, but it remains to be seen whether their Race to the Top program will encourage truly innovative reforms and ensure billions of dollars in spending are made accountable to parents and students.

While there will no doubt be disagreement over the details of California’s decision to implement a “parent trigger,” the impetus behind this action is something that should be a wake-up call to education reformers across the country. Parents deserve to have a voice in their child’s education and a means to hold their local schools accountable. I’m hopeful this will be included in successful Race to the Top proposals, and I encourage my colleagues in Congress to watch these reforms and enable local decision makers to find the best ways to empower parents so they can lay the right foundation for their children.

Julie Woestehoff, executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education, submitted the following in response to this week's question:

There are other strategies to improve schools that do not use parents as “terminators” of schools and school staff but instead involve parents deeply and respectfully, are pro-active and supportive, and have a proven track record of success.

The best model for this approach is the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Local School Council (LSC). These elected, parent-majority bodies make critical decisions about school programs, budgets, and leadership at most CPS schools. They are the engine for local site management, accountability, and participation.

LSCs were established in Illinois law in 1989. They were making significant progress in improving schools until 1995 when a business- and politician-driven movement handed district control over to Mayor Richard Daley. Several studies of the “first wave” of school reform in Chicago conclude that site-based management under parent-majority LSCs successfully raised academic achievement. (“Empowered Participation,” Archon Fung, 2004; “No Child Left Behind, Chicago Style,” Anthony S. Bryk, 2003.) Further study showed that schools where LSCs were allowed to continue as the main policy-making body for the school after 1995 improved substantially more than schools where the district intervened and usurped LSC control (“The Big Picture,” Designs for Change, 2005).

Our organization, Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE), helped write the original Chicago school reform bill. We fought hard for, and won, the parent majority on the LSC. We felt strongly about this aspect of reform because we know that parents have the most at stake in public education and should have the strongest voice. We are not educators, but we know what our children need. We are also not reliant on the school district for our livelihoods, and, when organized, we can stand up to any bureaucratic or political pressure in order to do what's right for our children. Over the past 20 years, tens of thousands of Chicago parents have experienced working side by side with teachers and community members to plan and fight for high-quality education for their children. We have allocated local funds where we think they will do the most good. We have fired principals that don't do the job, and hired new ones that do.

During his administration at CPS, Education Secretary Arne Duncan moved to reduce the power and effectiveness of LSCs. Fortunately, there are many that continue to operate, strengthening their schools from within.

Interesting discussion. I just saw an article by San Francisco Examiner education reporter Caroline Grannan sharply criticizing the new law. As she raises issues, rooted in some pretty concrete circumstances, that have not been addressed thus far, I thought I'd link readers of this blog to her piece. You can find her whole articlehere (worth a read in full), but here are some key excerpts:

...

The most eye-catching pieces of the California legislation are the part specifying that families have the right to transfer to another school if their school is at a certain low level of performance, and the “parent trigger,” in which the signatures of a certain number of parents can cause a school to be turned over to a charter operator, shut down or be subjected to a complete forcible overhaul of administration, faculty and staff.

I’m not taking either of those provisions terribly seriously, and here’s why:

Under the No Child Left Behind law, parents nationwide already have the right to transfer their kids out of a school at a certain low achievement point, and must be notified of that right. It has been widely reported that very few families have exercised the option. (I haven’t seen figures; I’m looking for them.)

The NCLB language limits parents’ options to other schools within the same district, but the new California law would theoretically allow them to transfer to another district. But to me, the fact that almost nobody has exercised this option under NCLB is fairly definitive. Surveys and anecdotes both tell us often that many people will agree with generalized statements that public schools are failing, but that parents overwhelmingly like their own kids’ schools – even low-performing schools. It’s no wonder that not many parents would want to bail out of a school, a disruptive thing to the child, in favor of an unknown quantity.

And it’s unclear how the mechanism of transferring to a school in another district would work. It seems obvious that schools in high-income (white) suburbs won’t be rolling out the welcome mat to high-need, at-risk students (of color) from disadvantaged locales, and happily taking on all the costs and challenges those students tend to bring with them. Safe bet that Orinda schools aren’t eagerly gearing up to recruit students from Richmond, in other words. If you’re a parent in a Richmond school that meets the criteria and you really do want to send your child to an amply resourced, high-performing suburban school, what path do you follow? That doesn’t seem clear at all. How many parents will want to? That’s not clear either, but based on the NCLB experience, very few anyway.

The “parent trigger” situation is stranger. Apparently, if 50% of the parents in an elementary school, or 50% of the total parents in a middle or high school and that school’s feeder schools, sign a petition, destruction is wrought on the target school.

(Point of information: The Los Angeles organization Parent Revolution, which is behind this provision, is not an actual parent group. It’s an “Astroturf” (fake grassroots) organization run by a group of charter school operators, with a paid “organizer” in charge.)

This provision raises lots of questions:

• If parents, as described above, tend to like their own kids’ schools, are they likely to sign to begin with, or is this whole notion just likely to fizzle due to non-participation?
• Who exactly decides what parents and what schools qualify as the pool of legit voters? If a situation is close, the likelihood of chicanery, bullying, threats and so forth seems sky-high.
• What happens if this trigger is pulled and there isn’t a charter operator waiting in the wings (that’s the purpose of this provision, of course) to take over the school?
• What kind of ugliness and divisiveness would be unleashed during the campaign to gather signatures? The potential is horrible – for kids most of all.
• Would the ultimate outcome improve the school at all? That seems extremely iffy. One of the primary forces behind this provision, charter operator Green Dot, gets glowing press but actually has a lackluster record running its own schools (making me wonder yet again if these charter operators’ real skill isn’t PR rather than education).
• Would the disruption help or harm the students? That seems pretty iffy too.

In Los Angeles, a variation on this “parent trigger” option has recently been put into place. Parent Revolution has launched campaigns against five public schools and currently tracks the progress on its website, listing two as successful.

As displayed in this video, word is that those organizers are paying for signatures on those petitions. In my opinion, just the fact that those rumors are flying fatally taints this process.

The website shows that Parent Revolution has collected enough signatures to take over Garfield High in East L.A. and Mark Twain Middle School in Venice, in the western part of L.A. As of this Jan. 10 writing, Parent Revolution says it has gathered 119 of 2,537 needed signatures to take over Emerson Middle School in West L.A., 423 of 2,704 needed to take over Peary Middle School in Gardena, and 106 of 1,000 needed to take over Mount Gleason Middle School in Sunland. It remains to be seen where those three campaigns will go, and how often – if ever – more will be launched.
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What other service would survive for more than 5 years when more than half of the customers were dissatisfied? The only problem with the CA parent trigger is that it's not available to all parents. At least parents in 75 persistently failing schools will have the opportunity to review a couple options and have a voice in creating a better option for their children.

Despite a federal mandate to create a 'good school promise' and intervene in low performing schools, there have been 'needs improvement' schools in most states for 6 or 7 years. How long to parents have to wait? The Trigger is a small step in the right direction to give parents options.

On numerous measures, our home state of California lags nearly every other state in the union in terms of public education. Yet we are responsible for educating one out of every eight American students.

The world’s eighth largest economy, we currently face one of the worst budget crises in the country. At the same time, we are plagued by educational bureaucracies with more layers than a thousand-year old Redwood tree, and millions of pages of educational laws and contracts that can be stacked just as high. Frankly, returning control to the best representatives of children’s interests – their parents – by giving them some tools to help them turn around their schools, is a feasible way to jumpstart real education reform.

A parent must have more options than simply keeping his or her child in a failing school. While these bold reforms in the Golden State may not have happened but for President Obama and Secretary Duncan’s strong push toward Race to the Top, Governor Schwarzenegger and State Senator Gloria Romero were right to give parents options and to empower them to fight for real change in their neighborhood schools. Parents and students must always be at the center of education reform efforts. Finally, now in California, they are. (http://gov.ca.gov/speech/14136/)

Should parents dictate school reforms? Well, “dictate” isn’t exactly the word I’d use, but parents should certainly influence reforms – just like other citizens. Alas, the “Parent Trigger” law in California has little to do with this.

As Ms. Krigman points out, “Advocates of the controversial measure hope that it will make the state more competitive for Race to the Top money,….” So who’s doing the influencing here? Secretary Duncan and the federal government; not parents.

We see governors all over the country suddenly developing an interest in the most minute and controversial details of their state education systems. For example, here’s an excerpt from an NYT article featuring New York’s Governor Paterson, ersatz ed reformer:

“The State Legislature has just days to pass the bill [which lifts the state charter cap and ties test scores to teachers] — the application for the first round of federal grants [for RttT] is due on Jan. 19, and the governor has said that the law would have to be passed five days earlier in order to be signed into law. ‘Our children, our schools and the economy of the State of New York cannot afford to wait for the Legislature to implement these changes,’ Mr. Paterson said in a statement.”

(And I thought the whole idea of having different branches of government, a bicameral legislature, and all that checks and balances stuff was really neat. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted “Schoolhouse Rock” and The Federalist Papers.)

Prior to RttT, you couldn’t have gotten Gov. Schwarzenneger or Gov. Paterson to give five seconds to issues like these – let alone to blaze a politically treacherous trail into the deep dark woods of reform. But all of a sudden, leaders like Gov. Paterson “cannot wait for the Legislature to implement these changes.” And Gov. Schwarzenegger reprises his role as “Kindergarten Cop”.

If California’s “Parent Trigger” law was such a dandy idea, I’m sure it would have been floated and voted on years ago. The fact that it pops up now, and that Mr. Schwarzenegger is doing it to curry favor with the Secretary, makes the law seem dubious indeed.

First of all, is the law needed? I assume this law is targeted at California’s lowest-performing schools. Aren’t these the schools likely to be in Corrective Action or Restructuring under NCLB anyway? So the first thing we can say about this law is that it duplicates an existing law. The law’s remedies are virtually identical to NCLB’s as well.

Second, does the law establish strange or unpredictable precedents? Could laws be written that allowed dissatisfied citizens to vote to restructure their police or fire departments? How about local utilities or the parks department? What if people didn’t like the way their garbage was collected or pain-in-the-neck rules like alternate side of the street parking? Will instantaneous majority votes become the norm? Will we trade the relative sanity of representative democracy and our long-established and deliberative legislative processes for the chaos of direct democracy and the threat of mob rule?

Third, will the law work in practice? How will a vote to restructure a school be called? How often can such a vote be called? How will the vote be carried out and who will pay for it? May votes be cast by mail? Or must people show up in person? Is there a recount procedure? (Anyone up for a butterfly ballot or a hanging chad?) How will the total number of parents in a school be determined? If the school is “defeated”, who decides on the restructuring model? (Or do we need another vote?) Once a restructuring model is decided upon, who executes it? If the parents don’t like the new model, can they vote the school down again? And so on. This is an approach to reform that only Rube Goldberg or The Keystone Cops could love.

Fourth, does it put power in its proper place? What makes parents qualified to judge when and how a school should be restructured? I thought that was the state’s job. In theory, the state has people, presumably experts in education, who already have the responsibility, license, and knowledge to do this. Is this law simply a way for the state to pawn off it’s duties on an unqualified public? Or is it a Governor’s end run around his own state education agency?

Fifth, is the law based on any research? Laws don’t have to be research-based, of course, but NCLB established the principle of research-based policies and practices in education. It seems only logical to pass laws that encourage actions based on solid research. In this case, I don’t think Governor Schwarzenegger has much to go on.

Sixth,… Seventh,… Eighth…, Etc. The “Parent Trigger” law is such a poorly considered notion that it’s hardly worth the volume of criticism it invites.

When it comes to school, parents are the best judges of the quality of their children’s education. But because of the biologically-inspired loyalty they have to their own progeny, parents tend to show poor judgment when it comes to determining what’s best for everyone else’s children. There’s a reason we don’t let parents run schools. It’s called “conflict of interest.”

The “Parent Trigger” is really the “Parent Trap”. Any effort to vote a school into restructuring would naturally be led by the most aggrieved parents. As such, any result would tend to reflect the sentiments of those on the fringe. Add the silent endorsement of a hungry CMO into the mix and you might even have a recipe for hijacking schools into charterism. The “Parent Trigger” law is a mechanism for the radical few to assert themselves over the rational majority and thereby hold hostage any school that offends any group of adults who can turn out the vote.

When it comes to school choice, parents are direct consumers of education and, as such, they should have appropriate options when deciding which schools their children will attend and how those schools meet their children’s needs. But they already do. That’s what school board meetings, site councils, and PTA groups are for. In the schools where I’ve worked, parents have had extraordinary amounts of power because the principal and all the teachers were afraid of them. I’ve also noted that the more power any single parent or group of parents has, the less equitable a school becomes in its efforts to serve the needs of all children.

This is painfully true in the otherwise-idyllic community where I live, so I see how it works on a regular basis. We have the so-called “best district in the state”, but we also have one of the highest achievement gaps I’ve ever seen in the entire country. We have a nationally-ranked high school. We send a high percentage of middle and upper middle class kids on to elite colleges but relatively few poor kids achieve the same high levels success. Addressing this long-standing state of affairs has been very difficult in part because we have a strong and influential set of “power parents” who, understandably, seek to preserve the structures that have served their families so well for so long.

Giving parents the ability to restructure schools by direct majority vote is unnecessary and unwise. It also isn’t a role parents seek. If they did, school board members all over the country would have pushed for legislation like this long ago simply to get themselves elected.

Gov. Scwhwarzenegger’s “Parent Triger” law isn’t reform, it’s political posturing. The reason for the law is not to improve schools but to improve his state’s RttT application. But I don’t even see how it does that because it doesn’t affect the charter cap or the ability to tie test scores to teachers. Arnold is merely pumping his famous pectorals here in the hope of catching Secretary Duncan's eye.

If we want to give parents more power, and help ALL families make better school choices, (and I think we do!), we should focus on laws that increase transparency:

1. TRANSPARENCY IN TESTING. It would be easy to provide parents with better information about what tests measure and how their kids measure up to them. For example, by including both norm-referenced and criterion-referenced data, along with raw scores (instead of just scale scores) and perhaps even some external measure like a Lexile score, parents would have a clearer sense of how their children were doing and how their school was doing, too. Indexing elementary and middle schools to the NAEP, and high schools to the SAT and ACT, would help parents understand how their kids and their schools stack up nationally.

2. TRANSPARENCY IN TEACHING. Schools and districts should be required to explain the what, why, and how of their teaching – and how they know that what they’re doing is good for kids by tying curricular and instructional choices to results. With this, parents would be able to compare programs and methods and, over time, develop a better sense of what works best for their children. Parents should also have access to aggregated anonymous teacher evaluation data – for their school, all schools in their district, and all schools in their state.

3. TRANSPARENCY IN TRAINING. Schools should be required to detail the training their staff has acquired and the training initiatives in which they are currently involved. Parents should be able to equate the training of their children’s teachers with results and track the results of the training teachers receive on the job as part of any school or district initiative. Parents should also have easy access to their school’s official “improvement plan.”

I realize that it’s unlikely parents will ever be given access to any of this information. As stewards of the system, the last thing politicians want to do is give parents any real power – especially the power to scrutinize the laws and policies created by politicians. But it would certainly make a difference to them. I think it would improve the “School Choice” movement as well.

Some of the parents with whom I’ve shared these ideas about transparenecy think of this as a kind of “Consumer Reports” for schools. We all appreciate the information we get from sources like “Consumer Reports”. So if parents want this data when they’re trying to get a good washing machine, why shouldn’t they have it when they’re trying to get a good education for their kids?

Parents should be at the table in school reform efforts but California’s “parent trigger” is a faulty mechanism for parental involvement. For ten years, Advancement Project has worked with parent and student groups in communities throughout the country. We have witnessed first hand how effective these stakeholders can be in improving educational opportunities in public. However, California’s knee-jerk “trigger” will not produce the long-term systemic change that is needed. Instead, it may produce quick, potentially superficial decisions made by frustrated parents. It may not produce better results. Pull the trigger, and then what? There are no guarantees that the charter or the new administrators will lead to improvement for the impacted children.

Parent and student involvement can be the most effective tool for the change our public schools need. For example, in Denver, CO, the organized parents and students of Padres & Jovenes Unidos have conducted extensive research and informed and organized their community around a number of issues. Their successful campaigns include the removal of a principal who mistreated Mexicano children, a comprehensive school reform plan for a high school and sweeping reforms in school discipline that is stopping the school-to-prison pipeline in Denver. Similarly, Tenants and Workers United in Virginia conducted research and found a dearth of students of color in advanced placement classes. As a result, they successfully pushed the district to implement individualized student plans to ensure educational success for all students.

This is the type of parental involvement we need to improve our schools over the long haul. Signing a petition to close a school does not engage parents in a dialogue, visioning or powerful decision-making. Reducing deliberation and ownership over a school system to a bare majority signature campaign impoverishes parental power and dilutes real and valuable parent energy. It’s short-sighted and underestimates the power of communities to make systemic change. Additionally, it runs a serious chance of abuse and racial polarization where intentions behind the petition may not be just about academics. California’s “parent trigger” is nothing more than a misfire.

I have the utmost respect for parents of school children, as they are the most important stakeholders in education. It is, after all, their children whose lives are affected by what happens in the schools. And they, even more than teachers, can affect how well their children work and behave in school.

That said, however, I think the so-called parent trigger is a ridiculous idea. The public schools do not belong to the people whose children are in them at this very moment, but to the public and to the generations of children yet to appear at their doors. The parent trigger is akin to the practice of allowing college students to rate their professors; this makes the professor subservient to her or his students, putting pressure on the professor not to assign too much reading, nor to give low grades, and to take care to pander to student wants and preferences.

If the principal and staff are working solely to please the parents, they might take care not to give too much homework, not to set high demands, not to give low grades, not to take a stand against parents who are not meeting their responsibilities to their children.

This is not only a ridiculous idea, it is a very bad idea that will undermine the authority of teachers and principals.

The most powerful and educationally effective "parent trigger" is choice.

Every educator knows that different children have different learning styles and interests. Yet we have a public education system that still assigns most children to a school based on their address, not on their educational needs. Our public policies should be empowering parents to enroll their children in a school that best meets each child's unique learning styles.

Giving parents the power to organize to leverage change at a neighborhood school is fine, but those efforts will be difficult, protracted and somtimes unsuccessful. Most parents don't have the time to mount such campaigns - and children don't have time to wait. Giving parents the power to choose the best school for their children empowers them to act directly and immediately to improve their child's education.

The Parent Trigger is a fabulous idea!

Not because it will – by itself – turn around many low-performing California schools. But because how it will change the conversation among parents, community activists and school boards across California.

Some years ago, I attended the national conference of the Public Education Network. Darv Winick, then chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, said something to the attendees that surprised me, given his position. He said something to the effect that – at the end of the day, after all the laws are written and the regulations are promulgated – the schools in a community are about as good as the community wants them to be.

Now, we all know that it’s more complicated than that. State and Federal policy certainly have a major impact on school quality.

But what makes the Parent Trigger such a great idea is that it provides a meaningful framework for parents to be involved in struggle to bring quality education to their community. If a school really stinks, local organizers – think parent activists or community-based organizations or clergy – can rally the parent community to consider the facts and consider “pulling the trigger.”

The potential value of Race to the Top is that it gets everyone thinking and working together on priorities that are at the center of education improvement. The potential value of the Parent Trigger is that it gets parents and community activists thinking about key questions like: How good is our school? What is good enough? If our school is not good enough, what are we going to do about it?

The Parent Trigger provides a mechanism for parents and communities to have a larger ownership of education improvement. The way things stand now, “education reform” is almost completely “owned” by elected officials, business leaders and a certain class or education reform activists. As Checker Finn describes in his recent National Affairs piece, the gulf between the professional education reformers and parents is a major impediment to further progress.

When parents get involved, we can expect them to be concerned about more than the standardized test scores that drive practically every aspect of accountability systems today. Among other things, they are going to be concerned about student safety, community values, the responsiveness of teachers and administrators, whether their children are engaged in school and the availability of after-school care. These things are important too. And it’s up to parent and community leaders to make sure that “how much our children are learning” remains a major component of the conversation.

Part of the value of the Parent Trigger is the potential to transform up to 75 low-performing California schools. (The California Legislature capped the number of schools that can be impacted by this program at 75.) But a great deal of the value will be in the thousands of conversations that the trigger inspires among parents and community activists and the new leverage that the trigger gives to parents when they are dealing with administrators and school boards.

Of course, for this value to be realized, parent leaders and community activist have to respond to this invitation to get involved. I hope they do!