Parent-trigger showdowns loom nationwide
Proponents of the controversial
education laws target Tennessee, Texas
Lawmakers around the country are
gearing up for showdowns against teachers unions and school administrators who
are seeking to squash a new round of education bills that would create and
strengthen so-called “parent trigger” laws.
The bills are modeled after
California’s Parent Empowerment Act of 2010, which enables parents to force one
of five types of major reforms on a low-performing public school if a simple
majority of parents sign a petition seeking the change. Those reform options
range from firing the principal and half the staff to ceding control of the
neighborhood school to a charter operator.
Undeterred by defeats in more than
two dozen legislatures in recent years, parent-trigger proponents are lobbying
again this year in places they view as friendly to school choice – states in
which leadership favors expanding charter schools, funding voucher programs and
establishing education savings accounts.
Parent-trigger
bills exist in some form in seven states, and have been rejected in more than
two dozen others.
Tennessee and Texas are their
primary targets in 2015.
Supporters of the legislation
celebrated a small victory this week. On Wednesday, the Tennessee Senate
Education Committee advanced a parent-trigger bill on a 5-0 vote.
Texas lawmakers debated a similar
bill Thursday during an education committee meeting that lasted several hours.
Led by the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, the
hearing drew passionate testimony from parents, educators and lobbyists,
including advocates from California.
Five years after California enacted
the nation’s first parent empowerment law — and the first to be dubbed a
“parent trigger” — the policy debate rages on over whether the controversial
mechanism is an effective way to improve schools. Teachers unions and some
school officials are becoming increasingly vocal about their opposition to a
type of law they insist does more harm than good. Critics see the law as a tool
for corporate-backed privatization of public education under the guise of
grassroots parent empowerment.
“If the union wants to jump up and down and
scream, let them,” said former California State Sen. Gloria Romero, a Democrat
who authored California’s parent-trigger law and last year formed the
California Center for Parent Empowerment, a Los Angeles-based advocacy group that
helps parents organize trigger campaigns. “They have a right to, but it doesn’t
mean that the law is bad.”
Advocates say giving parents more
control is critical. “Folks need to realize that you’ve got to empower the
parents as part of the process,” said Tennessee State Rep. John DeBerry,
D-Memphis, who introduced his parent-trigger bill for the third consecutive
year. Giving parents power “doesn’t spell Armageddon for the public school
system,” he said.
But opponents of trigger laws say
the process is too divisive and disruptive. “A petition drive is a poor way to
make drastic changes within a school setting,” said Kristen Fisher, president
of the Anaheim Elementary Education Association, a union representing more than
800 teachers in California’s Anaheim City School District. “It doesn’t require
or allow for dialogue, and it doesn’t ensure positive change.”
Various forms of parent-trigger laws
exist in seven states. Parent Revolution, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit formed
in 2009 to help pass California’s law, dismisses the versions on the books in
Tennessee and Texas as too weak.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who
tried unsuccessfully to pass a similar bill as a state senator, supports
strengthening his state’s law by shortening how long parents must wait to invoke
it. He said the aggressive overhaul tool should be available to the parents of
148,000 students “trapped” at 297 school campuses that failed to meet
performance targets for two consecutive years.
“Taxpayers
have a process to trigger change and it’s called an election.”
Ryan Owens, Cooperative Council for
Oklahoma School Administration
The new Texas bill by Taylor,
Patrick’s appointee, would reduce from five to two years the time period
parents must wait before filing a petition to close or convert an underperforming
school. It has the backing of Parent Revolution and Texans for Education
Reform.
Bonnie Lesley, a former school
administrator and teacher who co-founded the anti-charter school expansion
group Texas Kids Can’t Wait, said she is concerned about out-of-state groups
fueling the “maniacal focus on assessment and accountability” and “constant
disparagement of educators.” She’s hopeful the parent-trigger bill will fail in
the Texas General Assembly this year, despite Patrick’s pleas to pass it.
“The lieutenant governor in Texas is
very powerful in the Senate, but he doesn’t run the House,” Lesley said. “From
what we’re seeing, the House is not as apt to go along with these schemes.”
In Tennessee, a pair of identical
bills by DeBerry and State Sen. Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown, would lower the
parent signature requirement from a minimum of 60 percent to 51 percent. The
legislation requires that parents who sign a petition also pledge to
participate actively in their child’s education and support the school once
it’s restructured.
The Tennessee Education Association
vehemently opposes that legislation but backs a sort of “reverse parent
trigger,” a proposal that would allow parents to use a petition process —
similar to that in the parent-trigger laws — to stop a charter school from
taking over a neighborhood school, or to close a low-performing charter school.
Parent Revolution has not yet weighed in on the Tennessee reverse trigger
proposal, though it did support similar legislation in Louisiana that in 2013
enabled parents to return schools placed in the state-run achievement district
back to local school boards.
In Oklahoma, the battle to pass the
state’s first parent-trigger law is less about party lines and more about
geography — urban Republicans and Democrats are more likely to support a
parent-trigger bill than their rural counterparts, said State Sen. David
Holt, R-Oklahoma City.
“If you’re doing what is best for
the kids, the choice seems obvious: Give them more options,” Holt said. “If
you’re doing what’s best for the adults, it would make sense to protect the
status quo.”
Holt’s parent-trigger bill died in
committee last month. He intends to bring it back next year, and focus this
year instead on other pro-choice education bills, including one to establish an
education savings account and another to create more charter schools in urban
areas.
“Taxpayers have a process to trigger
change and it’s called an election,” said Ryan Owens, general counsel for the
Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration and executive director
of United Suburban Schools Association, an advocacy group for more than 50
school districts outside Tulsa and Oklahoma City. He does not want to see the
parent-trigger bill resurrected.
“We don’t try to operate without
parent input, and I don’t accept the notion that there are unfair bureaucrats
who are silencing parents’ voices,” said Owens. “I think that’s a myth that’s
perpetuated by outside interest groups that have a specific agenda.”
In New York, a bill by Assemblywoman
Crystal Peoples-Stokes, D-Buffalo, would create a parent-trigger pilot program
available to the Rochester City School District and cities with populations
between 250,000 to 300,000. In Ohio, a similar pilot parent-trigger option made
available to nearly two dozen Columbus schools has not been used since enacted
by lawmakers in 2011.
No parents have launched a
full-fledged parent-trigger campaign outside Southern California, the
headquarters for the two advocacy groups devoted to helping parents organize
around petition campaigns.
And even in California, only a
handful of parent groups have invoked the law. Some parents used it as leverage
to negotiate minor changes with existing school leaders. Just one school —
Desert Trails Elementary in the tiny high-desert town of Adelanto — has been
converted into a nonprofit charter school through a parent-trigger campaign.
The Desert Trails effort took nearly two years and a lengthy court battle. It
pitted parents against teachers and parents against parents in a bitter fight
during which each side accused the other of intimidation and harassment.
“Folks need to realize that you’ve got to
empower the parents as part of the process, and that doing so doesn’t spell
Armageddon for the public school system.”
Tennessee State Rep. John DeBerry, D-Memphis
The friction between the two sides
is sometimes needed to spur meaningful changes, said Kara Kerwin, president of
The Center for Education Reform, a Washington advocacy group that supports
charters and parent-trigger laws.
“When it comes down to it, we really do have to clean house sometimes with the
staff to really bring about change.”
Data on student performance at the
overhauled Desert Trails Preparatory is limited, particularly because the
California Legislature last year put a two-year hiatus on statewide reading and
math rankings for all schools. Desert Trails Preparatory’s new principal, Mandy
Plantz, and the charter school’s director, Debra Tarver, are already preparing
their submission to their district for a renewal of the three-year charter,
using internal testing data to track improvement.
“Even if we didn’t have a trigger,
we’d have to work harder than the other district schools because we have to
produce,” Tarver said. “If we don’t produce, we get closed down.”
In the most recent trigger attempt,
parents in California’s Orange County filed a petition in January to force a
charter conversion on Palm Lane Elementary School. At a Feb. 19 meeting, the
school board rejected the petition for falling short by 133 signatures as well
as for technical violations regarding the petition’s wording. The parents’
organization behind the petition has a chance to correct the errors and
re-submit the signatures by late April.
Former State Sen. Romero takes
offense at the question of whether the trigger law is inherently divisive.
“This is the law: Parents don’t have to live in a failing school,” Romero said.
“This could all be very easy if the unions didn’t fight the parents’ right
under the law.”
Natasha Lindstrom is a Pittsburgh-based journalist who has
covered the parent-trigger movement since its California origins in 2010.
This story was produced by The
Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news
organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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