The parents whose children attend McKinley Elementary School in Compton, Calif., dropped a bomb on their school district’s central office on December 7. More than 61 percent of them signed a petition demanding that the school — one of the worst in the state — be handed over to Celerity Education Group, which already operates four charter schools in the L.A. area.
It’s fitting that the primarily Latino and black parents in this poor city, located in southern Los Angeles County, would be the first to use California’s landmark “parent trigger” law to convert their failing campus into a charter school — on Pearl Harbor Day, no less. The year-old law exists precisely to aid parents like those at McKinley, who’ve grown frustrated with a school administration that does a better job excusing adult failure than educating kids.
Under the law, if more than 50 percent of qualified parents at a failing school submit a valid petition, the district must undertake one of several remedies: fire half the staff, overhaul the curriculum, convert to a charter, or close the school altogether.
In other states, including New Jersey, Indiana, and West Virginia, parent-trigger bills have been drafted or introduced, and some bills include private-school vouchers (as opposed to charter schools) as a fix. Several other states — including Georgia, North Dakota, Michigan, and North Carolina — may soon follow suit.
The Compton school is ripe for a radical transformation. Stuck in one of the worst districts in California, McKinley Elementary, which serves 438 children in kindergarten through fifth grade, ranks in the bottom 5 percent of all schools in the state. Who wouldn’t want to change that situation?
The teachers’ unions, of course — along with their allies on the school boards and the ill-named Parent-Teacher Association. Predictably, establishment groups including the California School Boards Association and the powerful California Teachers Association are lobbying hard to place a lock on the parent trigger. They complain that McKinley’s parents, aided by the Los Angeles Parent Revolution, operated “under the radar” and never held a public meeting to discuss the petition drive or reached out to district officials. California’s attorney general has opened an investigation into allegations that parents on both sides engaged in threats and intimidation.
Whatever the outcome of the attorney general’s probe, the trigger law is simple and needs to stay that way. The state board of education is drafting permanent regulations that specify who qualifies to sign, clarify how petitions must be written and printed, and lay out timelines for parents to submit petitions and for districts to certify signatures. That’s all to the good.
But the law’s opponents would like to make the trigger more difficult for parents to squeeze by making it easier for districts to undermine organizers and by diluting the law’s remedies. Rewriting the rules to let a school district or the state board of education choose the charter, as some (including the editors of the Los Angeles Times) suggest, would shift the balance of power away from parents and undermine both the letter and the spirit of the law.
Relegating parents to a consulting role is unacceptable. If anything, the Compton effort reveals the need for rules that further level the playing field for parent groups.
Grassroots organizing is amazingly difficult. Parents cannot simply pick up a roster of names and addresses from the district office to make signature gathering easy. Los Angeles Parent Revolution, which aided the Compton group in canvassing neighborhoods, is in the business of political organization — and has thus gotten the effort accused of being “astroturf” (that is, fake grassroots). But the truth is, without the help of such an organization, amateur parents wouldn’t stand a chance in the face of the unions, which spend millions of dollars every election year on politics.
But if parents must file notice that they are engaged in a petition drive to convert, reform, or close a school, they deserve access to the data and resources a district or its union surrogates might use to oppose them. This need not damage parental privacy. It would merely require a mandate that any district communication regarding a parent-trigger petition drive contain information from both sides.
A compromise might be to require a district-wide vote on whether to convert a school to a charter. By setting an attainable standard for signatures and compelling the local board to place a referendum on the ballot once that standard is met, lawmakers could involve the entire community in the process of converting “district infrastructure” into a true neighborhood school.
A referendum would have two advantages. First, the secret ballot guards against the social coercion that could take place in a petition drive. Second, districts would be unable to override parents’ or citizens’ votes.
In any event, if we’re to have regulations, they should favor parents, not protect the education establishment from true accountability. At its best, the parent trigger could be another weapon in a growing arsenal of choice. Because parental choice increases parental involvement, it should be expanded, not restricted.
— Ben Boychuk is managing editor of the Heartland Institute’s School Reform News. Bruno Behrend is an attorney and director of the Heartland Institute’s Center for School Reform.