Beyond baking brownies
Parent activism shifts to Sacramento
Cupertino is a fairly affluent city in Silicon Valley, so when the school district sent layoff notices to 107 teachers last year, a group of parents mobilized a massive fundraising effort to save those jobs. They raised more than $2 million in two months. But Hoi Yung Poon, who helped organize the campaign, realized that this type of fundraising wasn’t a long-term solution. “It wasn’t a sustainable plan,” said Poon. “Our focus is targeting and mobilizing parents in Silicon Valley and partnering with parents in other parts of the state.”
A handful of PTA parents in San Francisco public schools organized a town hall meeting on education on Feb. 25, 2010. It featured legislators, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, and KQED Public Radio’s Michael Krasny as moderator. Despite that firepower, the moms expected only about 100 people to turn out. They got more than a thousand and launched a new brand of parent activism with a reach well beyond the usual bake sales and other school volunteerism.
“We want to create a powerful parent lobby,” said Sherman Elementary School PTA member Holly Carver on a Comcast Newsmakers program. ”The line items are protected by powerful lobbies and we want to be that lobby for parents. We want them, when we come down to the hall, to say, ‘Oh, here comes the parent lobby.’”
About the same time, Teri Levy, the president of the PTA at Woodland Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles, felt compelled to take action to protect California schools from $2.5 billion dollars in cuts slated for 2010. She enlisted the help of fellow PTA member and actor Brian Austin Green and his girlfriend, actress Megan Fox. The result is a scathingly funny video, produced by Funny or Die, that went viral overnight.
In the year since those activities, new groups have formed, merged, partnered, and established themselves as legal nonprofits, building a grassroots network of parents in the tens of thousands. Teri Levy’s group, Say No to Cuts, joined with the Sherman Elementary moms and created Educate Our State, which then linked with the Sacramento-based Support California Kids. Hoi Yung Poon’s organization incorporated under the name Parents for Great Education. Their websites contain legislative updates, action plans, and links to detailed information about how California schools are funded.
The Kitchen Cabinet
At 9 o’clock on a recent Tuesday morning, the steering committee of Educate Our State is gathered around Susie Peyton’s sturdy kitchen table with plates of cookies, scones, and cupcakes in front of a window with views of San Francisco Bay. A few more moms, including Teri Levy in Los Angeles, join by phone. Crystal Brown, the main spokesperson, is doing some serious multitasking. Her laptop is open, and as she leads the meeting, she is also putting the finishing touches on a media advisory that needs to be emailed within a few hours to publicize simultaneous press conferences the next morning in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“Can we talk about what our key points are?” asks Linda Shaffer, during a discussion on how best to frame their message. “I think getting the message across that parents are organizing and we’re angry.” Over the phone, Levy adds, “I think the important thing is that it’s a group of parents working together across the state. It’s not like a local thing; it’s a statewide thing where parents have come together because they want a solution, because every single year we go through the same thing. The uncertainty of what’s happening with education is playing games with our children’s lives.”
Their message is already resonating with parents. Three weeks ago, Educate Our State launched a letter-writing campaign called “Let Us Vote,” urging the Legislature to place Governor Jerry Brown’s tax extension on the June ballot. To date, more than 35,000 letters have been sent, reaching every member of the Assembly and Senate.
Making an Impression
Still, it’s too soon to say what kind of impact they’re having. Shelly Masur has been on the Redwood City School Board for six years. Masur is an unofficial advisor to Educate Our State, so she’s not without bias, but she says lawmakers are beginning to feel the ripples of this nascent groundswell. “I met with a legislator on Saturday, and I asked, ‘Have you gotten a lot of letters about the tax extensions?’ And he said that according to his staff, he’s received over 250 letters,” said Masur.
The lawmaker in question is a Democrat, and the primary targets of the letter-writing campaign are the five GOP lawmakers who have not signed Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge, but who have also not committed to supporting the governor’s proposal. But Masur says it’s important for Democrats to hear from their constituents for two reasons: so they have compelling stories to tell during floor debates, and to be confident that they’re doing what their constituents want them to do.
The principal of Dianne Feinstein Elementary School, which hosted one of last week’s press events by the group, said that she’s never before seen any statewide parent movement, let alone one this big.
Groups like Educate Our State and Parents for Great Schools do rely on standard-bearers, like teachers’ unions and the PTA, for help, but have the benefit of working outside the structures and bureaucracies of those groups. It makes them more nimble and more bold. Hoi Yung Poon says her group can put together a call for action and email it to thousands of parents around the state within hours. There are no committees to go through and, says Poon, with a slightly mischievous tone, “no one can tell us what to say.”
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SVEF is the education foundation advocating for the needs of school districts across Silicon Valley. SVEF seeks to improve public education through establishing partnerships with the private sector and the education community ..
I have heard countless people talk against the cuts and how they are wrong but I have yet to hear anyone talk about any long-term viable solutions as to how our educational budget shortfalls can be fixed or even minimized. Let’s start talking about potential solutions and not just the protests.
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Clay,
Good suggestion. This comment area could be a good place for people to start offering ideas.
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It is very difficult to come up with suggestions that fit all schools state wide. I would like to see more reductions in management, so that there can be more teachers in classrooms. Schools have become a testing nightmare; lost are the activitites and projects that demonstrate a students understanding and application of what we teach. Additionally, testing every 3 to 6 weeks is expensive and exhaustive. Can’t we find a way to integrate some assessments with products to evaluate the learning/teaching going on in classrooms? My students made the greatest gains on summative tests when they were given projects which required them to use critical thinking, application and transfer of skills they had been taught, and were enjoyable.
Now, like every other teacher in my district, we must all be on page 53 on Tuesday whether the students “get it” or not!
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Almost 40% of our funding statewide goes to district-level expenses. Some of these expenses support classroom instruction, but many have only a tenuous relationship to student achievement. Our geographically defined school district monopolies are a product of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, and we need to ask how much value they add today – or more specifically, how much inefficiency they maintain in the system. Entire countries operate their educational systems without this kind of district-level bureaucracy. In the Netherlands, for example, the school-age population is over 2.5 million, and is quite diverse, with a large immigrant student population of non-native language learners. Yet over 70% of the country’s students attend independent parochial or charter-type schools (at taxpayer expense, since the country has a 100% voucher system). Even the “municipal” schools operate with lower administrative overhead. Yet the country educates its students at lower cost per pupil, with higher test scores, than we do in the U.S.
Many schools can – and do — function independently without as much overhead as traditional district schools, allowing a higher proportion of revenue to go directly into the classroom. (Consider that the students in a 30-student CA classroom account for approximately $210,000 in revenue from the state, at $7k per pupil. We know that much of that is not going for the teacher’s compensation or classroom materials!)
New technology can allow students to access online curriculum content at a much lower per-pupil cost than the textbook-based system that we now have. (Ask your child’s teacher how much he or she uses the designated text for that class.) Schools can also use technology to outsource non-academic functions, just as many companies use web-based tools and vendors to handle non-core functions, rather than trying to do everything in-house. Many charter schools in CA are using these kinds of technologies to operating well within state funding allotments, even though charters usually receive less than the per-pupil allotments for students in traditional district schools. Some charters are also using new “blended” or “flex” models of instruction to allow students to take advantage of online curriculum that is self-paced and more individualized to the student’s needs. In addition to broadening the course offerings that a school can provide (at almost no incremental expense), this technology can more easily incorporate ongoing formative assessments that track student progress and identify needs far faster than our standardized state assessments (as suggested by Maria’s post above). These kinds of technologies can free up the teacher’s time from whole class lectures, quiz creation, and grading, as well as other administrative tasks, allowing more time for one-on-one and small-group instruction that is more tailored to student needs (and more fulfilling for most teachers). Unfortunately, many districts (like my own) have been slow to embrace these technologies, due to inflexible work rules, concerns over funding based on the ”instructional minutes” model, and general lack of awareness, motivation, and imagination.
As parents lobby for more School Choice, I think we will see more and more creative approaches to addressing the poor funding levels in California. No one approach is a panacea, and the absolute level of public funding is still too low and too subject to the whims of Sacramento, but improving School Choice and providing alternatives to our traditional school district monopolies will have to be part of the solution. This is really a national challenge. Many states have increased per pupil funding well beyond the rate of inflation over the past 20 years, with little to show for it in terms of student achievement. We have to look at changes in the classroom “delivery model”, but we will also have to highlight the overall role that school district administrations have played in the rising costs and the lack of School Choice that are holding our students back.
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