Parents form Educacy, set goal for 2012
Setting their sights on as-yet undefined statewide initiative in 2012, a parent group in Silicon Valley is organizing to increase education funding. As Educacy, the name of their non-profit group indicates, the focus will be advocacy on behalf of parents.
“Parents have been the missing link” in school reform and in discussions about the need for more money for schools, said Kay Louie of Redwood City, one of three lead figures behind the organization.
Educacy is an outgrowth of a whirlwind campaign that raised $2.2 million in Cupertino in eight weeks last spring to fill in the gap – and spare 100 teaching jobs – caused by massive budget cuts in the elementary district. Though the home of Apple, Cupertino is not as wealthy as some of it Silicon Valley neighbors (it ranks 78th in per capita income in California). The organizers, Hoi-Yung Poon among them, did grassroots, face-to-face mobilizing, got businesses to make matching pledges as well, and used the Web to raise money and communicate effectively.
Parent leaders in other Silicon Valley districts took notice. They contacted Poon and others for advice on their own campaigns. A regional meeting evolved into Educacy.
Poon is certainly open to sharing advice for district campaigns, but the goal of Educacy is to make the fund-raising campaigns unnecessary. They cannot be sustained year after year, and, in many communities, they won’t be done as successfully.
Poon and co-leaders Kay Louie, a parent leader in Redwood City School District, and Steffanee Taylor, a parent leader in Evergreen in East San Jose, don’t know yet what form of new revenue Eduacy will campaign for. It could be an initiative to have commercial properties pay a fairer share of the property. Phil Ting, San Francisco’s assessor and founder of Close the Loophole, calling for reform of Proposition 13, spoke to an organizing meeting of Educacy this week. Or it could be another initiative.
For now, the three women are charging ahead full-time. Taylor and Poon left their jobs, the former in corporate marketing, the latter as a consultant and campaign strategist. For the next year, they’ll concentrate on finding district leaders in the Bay Area, organizing campaign forums and voter registration drives, and connecting with other parent groups and education non-profits that have sprung up in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Orange County. Educacy’s official launch, with a web site – educacy.org – will be after Labor Day.
Another organization, of course, already serves parents and has made additional money for schools its legislative priority. The California Parent-Teacher Association, which claims a million members, is a plaintiff in Robles-Wong v State of California, the lawsuit challenging the state’s funding system.
Educacy doesn’t see itself as competing with or duplicative of PTA, whose decentralized efforts are concentrated on raising money for individual schools. Educacy is activist, and, as a startup, entrepreneurial.
The test will come when it tries to replicate its success in Cupertino on a regional and statewide basis.
That’s not an accurate account of PTA’s mission, though it’s certainly true that PTA has largely become a fundraising organization. PTA is an advocacy organization with volunteer lobbyists in every state capital and D.C. PTA’s official guideline urges school-level PTAs to limit their fundraising events — the guideline is a limit of one out of three events. But PTA is highly activist. While liberal parents in the Bay Area think of it as stodgy — yes, there are tubby church ladies with helmet hair and pantsuits from conservative rural areas in the organization; that’s the nature of a big tent — people in less enlightened parts of the country think of it as radical.
It will be interesting to see if the focus becomes trying to get more local control of school funding or increasing funding for schools statewide. Particularly if it’s the latter, I hope they read or have read “Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses….” by Hanushek and Lindseth. This offers the most direct treatment of school finance issues in book form that I know of.
Just curious, why is yet another organization necessary? Couldn’t these folks have joined up with SVEF? Or their regional PTA? There’s a danger in diluting our voices by forming new organizations.
I so very much support your efforts to keep teachers in the classroom. Please keep me posted on your efforts.
Here is my take on the matter. My daughter is an elementary school teacher in a great school with some challenging demographics. She has 34 children packed into her classroom and no teaching assistant. The kids are an eclectic bunch with high/low readers, ESL students, kids with special needs and some with learning difficulties including ADD. In other words … your typical CA classroom. She is a great teacher and the school climate is supportive of their teachers and creates a positive learning environment for the students.
This past school year more than half of the teachers at this school received lay-off notices.
In contrast the State Department of Education (SDE) and the County Offices of Education (COE’s) always seem to have enough operating capital. These monuments to educational excess often house a vast reservoir of educational paraphernalia, departments, and personnel whose value to California students, teachers or schools is of questionable merit. The “economy of scale savings” argument may have been a factor decades ago but in this technological age school administrators and teachers are just as capable of finding bargains, setting their own priorities and managing their own budgets. COE’s have become employment centers for adults and self-perpetuating bureaucracies. Take a walk through a COE. You will see that they are very large operations. i.e. Assistant Superintendents, Directors (I, II, III…), certificated managers, classified managers, assistant managers, executive secretaries, secretaries… the list goes on and on and the COE’s keep growing… on into the thousands of employees. The COE’s have created a powerful political niche for themselves that is of dubious value to education here in California.
Every school and every school child pays dearly for this COE bureaucracy. My take on this is that the classroom should be the last place to take the financial hit, not the first.
I am looking to connect with other folks who are comfortable examining the possibility of a future without COE’s.
I would like to be part of your organization. Please let me know how I can participate!
Thanks,
Rebecca Robinson
Los Gatos, CA
Hi,
How do I get involded?
Thanks for asking. I meant to include the e-mail address: info@educacy.org.
I am a mother of a three year old turning 4, I as well as my daughter are so excited she will be starting kindergarten next year! we talk about it constantly and we are both looking forward to it! I heard that the board might change the cut off dates from december to september, I hope NOT, I strongly disagree with changing the dates! Parents who believe their child is not ready they hold them back! What about the children who are ready! Its not fair! i also disagree to make this sudden change, the board should change it for kids that are born after a certain year so parents are aware so they can plan ahead! Please pass this message to the board!