Parent Revolution's Shirley Ford and Ben Austin
In California, a majority of parents at a failing school can now force district officials to make dramatic changes, including staff turnover and closure.
The “parent trigger” was signed into law in January by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as part of a package of changes aimed at boosting the state’s chances in the federal Race to the Top competition.
California didn’t make it to the R2T finals but the trigger idea is building steam, said Ben Austin, executive director of the Los Angeles Parents Union, which fought for the concept in its Parent Revolution campaign.
“I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say it’s the most radical transfer of power to parents in the history of America,” Austin said before speaking to a Denver audience on Thursday.
A group of black and Hispanic lawmakers in Connecticut recently introduced a similar plan in an attempt to close that state’s wide achievement gap between white and minority students.
And British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced plans for England’s own parent trigger.
“The reason we’re winning is because it’s really hard to argue with what we’re doing,” Austin said, “which is giving parents real power to advocate for their own kids.”
Under the California law, if 51 percent of parents living in the neighborhood around a failing school sign a petition, the district must enact one of four school turnaround strategies favored by federal officials.
That includes school closure, replacing the principal and at least half of the staff, bringing in a charter school operator or transforming the school via changes such as a longer instructional day and year.
To be considered failing, a school has to meet criteria such as being among the lowest-performing 5 percent in the state.
“The idea for us is that parents, above and beyond all other stakeholders, are in the best position to make decisions about their kids,” Austin said. “Up until now, parents have not had any real power of any kind.”
The idea for the parent trigger came from the year that Austin and Shirley Ford, a lead organizer for the parents’ union, spent gathering the signatures of teachers at LA’s Locke High School in Watts.
A California law allows teachers to bring in a charter operator to run their school if a majority of the tenured faculty signs a petition.
Austin said most teachers signed the petition to reform Locke, among LA’s worst-performing schools, because they wanted their students to have a shot at a better education.
“With the last ten percent of teachers, the conversation had less to do with kids,” he said. “I remember thinking how different these conversations would be if parents had these rights, as well as teachers.”
Green Dot Public Schools, a charter network, took over Locke, the first traditional LA high school to be run by a private operator. (Green Dot officials spoke in Denver earlier this year.)
Green Dot funds about 80 percent of the work of the Los Angeles Parents Union and its Parent Revolution campaign, sparking concerns that its goal is to “charter-ize” the nation’s second largest school district.
Not true, said Austin, who pointed to other funders include the Service Employees International Union.
“When you’ve got a district where 50 percent of our kids aren’t graduating, 90 percent of our kids aren’t going to college, and we’ve got 800,000 kids,” he said, “you simply can’t serve all kids or even a large percentage of those kids with charter schools.”
But good charter schools give parents’ leverage, Austin said, because parents can threaten to leave their traditional neighborhood schools for charters if things don’t improve.
“What we said to the district leadership is, look, there is no deal to cut, you’ve just got to learn how to run a better school than a high-quality charter school,” he said. “And parents, unlike bureaucrats, have a sense of urgency because you can’t freeze-dry kids, they need a good education now.”
No California school has pulled the parent trigger yet, though parents are organizing around a number of campuses.
Austin said the parents union, which is drawing attention from big foundations interested in reform, such as Gates and Broad, probably could pay signature-gatherers to accelerate triggers across the state.
“But if we did that, all this would be is a trick,” he said. “What we’re going to do is to train parents to do this themselves and to own this process all the way through.”
Meanwhile, Austin said he hopes to work with California teachers’ unions on a “reform-friendly” version of union-district contracts that parents could support if they decide to pull the trigger.
Two of the four trigger options keep a failing school as a district-operated school, rather than closing it or chartering it.
The goal, Austin said, would be to work with a union to create a contract that the teachers’ union and the parents’ union could agree on – and present together to the district housing the failing school.
“The code we’ve got to crack for in-district reform … is to give districts charter-like authority to operate their schools but to do it completely in-district,” he said.
“That’s the only way this is a scalable proposition … if we cannot figure that out, we will have failed.”
Video from the Denver presentation:
Nancy Mitchell can be reached at nmitchell@ednewscolorado.org or 303-478-4573.
This article is problematic on many levels, but for brevity’s sake I will only address the two most glaring errors. When Mr. Austin responds to the Green Dot funding question, he is being totally disingenuous, particularly the SEIU red herring he throws out. LAPU/Parent Revolution was founded by Green Dot Public [sic] Schools and funded by them to the tune of 100% for its first few years [see the "Annenberg Document" bit.ly/8n1w4o]. In recent years that funding has been supplemented primarily by deep pocked voucher advocates and school privatization champions including the Walton Foundation, Broad Foundation, and Gates Foundation [See LAPU/Parent Revolution 990 forms from 2007-2009]. Austin got his start as a school privatization advocate while consulting for Green Dot [See their 990 forms] and then, because of extensive contacts network from his day job as a city employee, was offered the executive position at LAPU/Parent Revolution when Ryan Smith moved over to PLAS. With Green Dot funding his second six figure income [bit.ly/hjX2N] Ben Austin suddenly became a “fierce advocate for parents” — so long as that advocacy benefited his employer’s need to increase market share [bit.ly/9vWXfe]. Several journalists, including Caroline Grannan, Rachel Heller, and myself, have also questioned Austin’s seeming class and ethnic biases in picking the schools he considers “failing.” There are many articles available discussing this darker side of Austin and his organization’s questionable tactics, here are three [bit.ly/auB5U6 bit.ly/5Dndws bit.ly/4e78Sm].
Austin also lies when he discusses a “district where 50 percent of our kids aren’t graduating.” Mr. Austin knows that this figure is way off, [Los Angeles Times bit.ly/6w5dpZ] the real figure is 26.4% — which still clearly needs major improvement — but certainly isn’t 50%. While Austin is pandering fear tactics here, he is also providing cover for CMO corporate charters — which have fairly dismal results themselves. Let’s look at Green Dot, which founded LAPU/Parent Revolution as discussed above. Green Dot sports three schools in the lowest 100 APIs in Los Angeles County. They also feature five schools in the lowest 35 average SAT scores in Los Angeles County [Los Angeles Times bit.ly/cBH5VW]. What’s more, while corporate charters claim high graduation rates and college placement, it turns out they are passing students who aren’t ready. For example let’s look at Animo Venice Charter High School. Of the Green Dot students admitted to the CSU system in 2008 67% WERE NOT PROFICIENT IN MATHEMATICS. [CSU database bit.ly/b2WrvP] This is compared to just 49% of the much maligned LAUSD students. Moreover, only 33% of the children graduating the Green Dot corporate factory school were proficient, while children attending public schools comprised a much more respectable 51%. Suddenly all the smoke, mirrors, and snake oil voucher -charter advocates like Ben Austin are peddling are exposed for what they are.
Austin and his organization have never organized or worked for any reform in Los Angeles that wasn’t directly related to increasing corporate charter school market share. When he speaks about “pay[ed] signature-gatherers” that’s precisely what they did around Locke, and that’s what they will do elsewhere. LAPU/Parent Revolution is an astro-turf [bit.ly/9KolVk] group through and through with no board for actual parents to drive organization policy, little to no parent fundraising, and the embarrassing fact that most of their “parent members” are involved because Green Dot counts parent participation in their LAPU/PR front group as part of their “community service” requirement. Claims that the wealthy politician Ben Austin and his organization are anything but a vehicle for the voucher-charter billionaire/DLC/DFER school privatization agenda are specious at best. The only thing Austin was truthful about in the entire piece is where he says “all this would be is a trick.”