The tectonic
plates of the nation's educational debate
shifted dramatically in California last week
when its supposedly dysfunctional,
lopsidedly Democratic legislature passed the
most far reaching educational reform program
in the nation, and California's
"post-partisan" Republican Governor happily
signed it. Going beyond other states'
efforts to respond to President Obama's
"Race to the Top" competitive grant process,
the state pulled the "Parent
Trigger" in its legislation. This allows
a majority of parents whose kids are
attending a "demonstrably failing school"
to, in effect, take over that school and
change its governance, administration and
teaching staff. In so doing, California
placed itself in the vanguard of the
transformation of America's K-12 education
system that will put parents, not teachers
or administrators, in the driver's seat in
determining the kind of education that their
special Millennial children will receive.
Just as we
predicted in our book,
Millennial
Makeover: "Social networks, 'mommy
blogs', and other forms of peer-to-peer
communications" were the vehicle by which
this parent led, bottom-up revolt overturned
the power of some of California's most
powerful unions to pass what Sacramento
insiders considered a hopeless cause. Every
time labor and its allies attempted to water
down the impact of the Parent Trigger, the
opposition melted in the face of thousands
of parents asking a simple question, with
only one good answer: "Why shouldn't parents
get to decide what kind of school their kids
go to?" A final compromise limited the
number of schools that parents can pull the
trigger on to just 75 initially. However,
the future of this idea is just as bright as
the state's Charter School movement, which
started with similar limitations yet today
is the governance model for more than 160
schools in Los Angeles alone and with
enrollments
rising almost 20% in the last year.
The
organization behind the Parent Trigger
concept,
Parent Revolution, gives full credit to
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the
Obama administration for creating the
incentives that forced the state to consider
this reform. Tucked inside the so-called
stimulus bill passed last February, was over
$4 billion for states and school districts
to
transform the performance of their
schools. States that prohibit linking data
on student achievement to principal and
teacher evaluations, as California did
before it passed this latest round of
educational reform laws, were disqualified
from even applying for these grants. In
addition, those states that capped charter
schools or limited alternative certification
processes for teachers lose points in the
competitive rankings for receipt of the
grants. Most importantly, the program
established a January, 2010 deadline for
state laws to meet four conditions or
"assurances" in order to be considered for
the largest amount of reform incentive
dollars in the last three decades:
-
Adoption
of common, internationally benchmarked,
standards based on rigorous state
assessments.
-
Establishment of systems to track
achievement and growth in student
learning that identify effective
instructional practices.
-
Implementation of a process that rewards
and retains top teachers and improves or
replaces bad ones.
-
Adoption
of a policy on how to replace staff and
change the culture of a demonstrably
failing school (one whose test scores
show no improvement over three years).
The need for
money as well as the fourth and final
assurance were the drivers behind the
legislature's consideration of the idea of a
Parent Trigger, but it was the grass roots
organization that pushed the legislature
into turning back pleas from their usual
union allies and enacting this
earth-shattering reform. Beginning in Los
Angeles, whose "unified school district" (LAUSD)
has been a poster child for bureaucratic
stubbornness and urban educational woes, the
Parents Revolution won the right to fire the
principal and half the teachers of a failing
school, or, in the alternative, to establish
a charter school of their design for their
children to attend. Recognizing that each
child has $7,000 of potential state funding
in their backpack, LAUSD was the first to
agree to these demands by parents at both a
mostly Latino high school and a more
upscale, suburban area middle school. With
those successes in their pocket, the group
was able to rally parents of all types, from
every part of the state, to lobby for the
same rights in their district.
Ben Austin,
the executive director of Parent Revolution
and a long-time political activist on behalf
of children, believes it will not be long
before the same rights are given to every
parent in the country, possibly as part of
Congress's reauthorization of the No Child
Left Behind legislation next year. As he
points out, "the old coalitions don't apply
here, it's a cause that unites parents from
upper middle class and working class
backgrounds-white, black and Latino alike."
Or, as we said in Millennial
Makeover, parents will learn
about and demand:
"Models
that produce superior results at lower
costs and provide the aggregating
mechanism for a new, decentralized,
parent-controlled, educational
decision-making system. Armed with new
information on graduation and college
acceptance rates of America's high
schools, parents will choose the type of
education they want for their child,
with the money following the child to
the school they have selected, not to
the school district they live in...The
result will be a system of public
education that mirrors the egalitarian
and community orientation of a
Millennial civic era."
For the
parents of students attending one of the
5000 lowest performing schools in the
country, the changes can't come too soon.
With an administration ready to play a
critical role in providing the incentives to
reform our schools, students, parents,
administrators and teachers throughout the
nation will soon be feeling the aftershocks
of California's educational earthquake.
