Final (maybe) Trigger regs to a vote
Parent Revolution endorses version
On Wednesday, State Board of Education President Michael Kirst may finally succeed in getting the Parent Trigger off his and the Board’s agenda. But first, he must persuade a majority of the Board to pass the latest version of Parent Trigger regulations that he personally helped revise.
He’ll have an ally in Parent Revolution, the Los Angeles nonprofit that has been packing State Board meetings with dozens of parents month after month. While initially voicing fear that Kirst and other new State Board appointees of Gov. Jerry Brown would sabotage the law, last week Parent Revolution praised the latest “fair, thoughtful, pro-parent draft” of regulations.
The readable, 21-page draft could provide guidance to the dozen states where Parent Trigger legislation has been introduced but not moved forward, in part because of controversy and uncertainty surrounding California’s law. The latest version clarifies and incorporates some of the compromises that Parent Revolution and representatives from the Assn. of California School Administrators and the California School Boards Assn. worked out over months of negotiations. It excludes a contentious option suggested by the California Teachers Association that would have given a majority of teachers at a school subject to a Parent Trigger petition the power to overturn parents’ demand for a conversion to a charter school. Parent Revolution has called for Board member Patricia Rucker, a CTA lobbyist, to recuse herself from Wednesday’s vote.
Learning from Compton experience
Under the Parent Trigger, which the Legislature passed hurriedly in January 2010, a majority of parents in an underperforming school or the feeder schools to that school can demand one of four drastic changes: closing it down, switching to a charter school, firing the principal and half of the staff, or transforming it through after-school programs and other changes. (These are the same four controversial options that the Obama administration requires for failing schools that get federal School Improvement Grant money.)
The law’s vagueness has been a problem for the State Board, which was left with the task of writing implementation regulations. The need for specifics became evident in the nasty fight between activists and teachers at McKinley Elementary in Compton Unified over the only Parent Trigger petition submitted so far. Both sides charged harassment; the parents sued the district over the signature verification process and tactics of intimidation. A Superior Court judge supported the parents on most issues and criticized the district’s tactics but eventually threw out the petitions on a technicality. Faced with a year’s delay, the parents chose to open up a charter school in a nearby church this fall.
The Compton experience informed Kirst and State Board of Education employees as they sought common-sense solutions to points of contention over the signature collection and verification process, deadlines for filing, and disagreements in particular over converting the school to a charter, which will likely be parents’ most frequent preference. Some key changes to in the latest draft:
- The state Department of Education will create a website with sample petitions – a remedy to the technical omission in the Compton case;
- Petition signers, school personnel, parents, and district officials shall be free from threats and intimidation and shall not discourage parents from signing a petition;
- Petitions must identify groups like Parent Revolution that are organizing petition drives; paid signature gatherers must identify themselves, cannot be paid by the signature, and cannot offer incentives and material awards for signing;
- Parents can designate key organizers to whom the district should turn to help reach parents and verify signatures;
- Districts should use standard methods, like emergency forms on file at the school, to verify parents’ signatures; they should not disqualify signatures on technicalities if it’s clear that parents intended to sign a petition;
- Petition organizers get one second chance to fix technical problems with the petition and add signatures if others have been disqualified.
- Districts will have 40 days to verify the signatures and respond the first time a petition is submitted and an additional 25 days for verification a second time after parents fix mistakes and add names;
- If parents request a specific charter group to run the charter, the district will vet the petition like any other charter proposal under the state charter law;
- If parents want a conversion to a charter but don’t suggest a specific operator, they will have the opportunity to recommend one.
Creating the regulations has been prolonged and contentious, because the stakes for parents displeased with their school and teachers who might lose their jobs are high.
Tight timetable
Kirst and drafters were careful to avoid creating new mandates that the state would have to pay for. So reasonable ideas, like requiring informational hearings explaining parents’ options and giving both parent activists and the district a chance to say their piece, have been omitted from the final draft.
Kirst said it’s not possible to anticipate every conflict, but that the regulations deal with many of the issues that have been raised and should cut down on potential lawsuits.
The Board is under a tight timetable. If there are no significant objections to the draft regs, the Board can approve them on Wednesday or, after a 15-day review, take a formal vote in September. But if significant new issues are raised, pushing back a vote on the regulations to October or later, the Board will miss a deadline and have to start the entire process again, which the Board would like to avoid.
Meanwhile, a bill to clarify certain aspects of the Parent Trigger law, AB 203, is moving along surprisingly with no significant opposition. It is sponsored by Julia Brownley, who chairs the Assembly Education Committee.
“Kirst and drafters were careful to avoid creating new mandates that the state would have to pay for. So reasonable ideas, like requiring informational hearings explaining parents’ options and giving both parent activists and the district a chance to say their piece, have been omitted from the final draft.”
I think this is a hideous omission. I do not understand how anyone could have an informed opinion about the proposed change based on a 4 minute conversation with a signature gatherer (paid or unpaid) or from reading the petition.
I understand the practical reason for “no new mandates.” (I’m not all that clear about the cost: can’t it just be at the ‘next scheduled school board meeting’ which would then create no new cost? I think the district would rather pay the employees to be at the meeting in most cases than to not have it. Or, you could make it ‘at the district’s option’ or some such.)
However, it seems to me that in the long run the inevitable litigation and conflict that is going to occur after the petition is presented – when there has been no discussion – is going to cost everyone a lot more money and produce worse outcomes.
In our democracy, petitions are a starting point for a decision – a request for a discussion and an election. They’re not elections themselves.
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el:
I should have noted that the proposed cleanup bill – AB 203 – in Section 3 does require the school site council of each school eligible for a parent petition to hold a meeting within 90 days (see elaboration below) to explain the parent petition process and the options.
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Okay, here is one simple addition that would enable the community to have meetings if they wished, and that creates no new unfunded mandate:
“10 business days before the first signature is gathered, a notice of intent to petition for conversion must be presented to the school district.”
Simple, affordable, and fair.
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John, regarding the requirement that the SSC hold a meeting to explain the petition process and the options — within 90 days from what event/action?
Also, I’m still curious about the nature of charges filed in the McKinley Elementary Parent Trigger process.
It was reported here, among other places, that the State Board of Ed had directed the state Attorney General’s office to investigate charges of harassment and intimidation allegedly perpetrated by McKinley Elementary teachers and, some have reported, PTA officers (aka parent volunteers). It was also reported that Parent Revolution filed charges with the U.S. Department of Education. I have questions about those charges in both cases:
1. What is the current status?
2. What is the investigative process? Does the USDOE have investigators on staff?
3. After the investigation is concluded, what is the trial process?
4. Are the teachers and PTA officers (aka parent volunteers) defendants? Do they need legal representation? Do they have to pay for their own legal representation?
5. What are the potential penalties?
6. Unless these two parallel situations of filing of charges are just token, with no teeth (which isn’t the way they were treated in news reports), this seems fairly serious. Should all California school employees and PTA officers (aka parent volunteers) be given some kind of thorough training in how to avoid behavior that could lead to such charges in the future?
It has been a lapse on the part of all media covering this situation that they gave prominent play to the reports of these charges’ being filed and never followed up or explained.
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Good question, Caroline. The meeting must be held at the next school site council meeting or within 90 days that the State Dept. of Ed. announces the annual list, which means a petition drive may or may not have started at that point. Those schools on the list are basically those in Year 4 or later of Program Improvement under No Child Left Behind except if the school has an API over 800 and is on the state’s list for a School Improvement Grant (they’d be going through a separate process).
I don’t believe there was a criminal investigation into the McKinley school Parent Trigger accusations, although a Superior Court judge, in a related matter, later reaffirmed the First Amendment right of the parents — a warning to Compton Unified not to trample on parents’ rights under the law. Neither the bill nor the regulations deal with the training issue, because such a requirement would be a mandate that the state would have to pay for. Which is not to say it’s not a good idea.
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But what happened to the complaints and investigation involving the US Dept. of Ed that you reported on? Did the whole thing just get dropped, and if so, on what basis?
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… I gather that Ben Austin and other Parent Revolution insiders read this site, so I was hoping they could respond.
I asked a First Amendment lawyer I know about the issue of prosecuting teachers based on their speech. His response was that teachers’ First Amendment rights are complicated. But what about parent volunteers? As a parent volunteer in schools of many years’ standing, and someone who has held many elected PTA/PTSA positions (and a person who is not shy about voicing opinions), that seemed like a relevant question — can parent volunteers actually be prosecuted for voicing opinions?
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It doesn’t seem to me that this addresses the issue of the petition at all – if I’m reading this right, the 90 days is from the time that the school goes on the eligibility list, which is not at all the same as someone actively working on a petition.
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The importance of having notice of intent to petition and of having (at a minimum) one meeting are suggestions that I recall having been brought up over and over again. Initially, I heard them before the State Board agreed to convene a work group (the second time, not the first time they secretly met with a select folks and then (whoops) decided they were skating on thin legal ice so they stopped) and after the work group had met in earnest. Get this: according to parents who serve on advisory councils here, some low performing schools in LAUSD will not comply with requests to provide them with a copy of or timely access to the school’s Single Plan for Student Achievement. Although a Uniform Complaint may be filed (IF affected parents even know what it is), the more important question is this: How is one meeting at School Site Council in these kinds of schools going to serve the intended purpose?
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Well, that gets into the fact that the entire Parent Trigger process is really logistically unworkable, TransParent. I mean, a hostile takeover of a public school by people who have (presumably) never run a school? It would seem like a totally goofball idea if it hadn’t gotten so much hype, including from the ever-susceptible occupants of Planet Editorial Board.
But since the process is out there: In the one case in which the Parent Trigger was deployed, a looming concern was the fact that Parent Revolution ran a covert signature-gathering operation. School and district officials were utterly unaware, and the parents who signed were not informed about the full process nor about their options — they were just signing a petition calling for the pre-selected charter operator to take over the school. Nor was there any public discussion of the pros and cons.
A requirement for even one public meeting should ensure that the community is not kept in the dark in the future.
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If these regulations are reconsidered, the State Board should investigate electronic signature-gathering of the sort the European Union has just legalized and established (those interested should check out The Economist’s special report “Democracy in California”, April 23rd-29th 2011). Under this proposal, petitions (protected under our First Amendment) could be circulated and signed on the Internet; public officials could be easily informed of the petitions, and could read them and even respond; and signature verification would be done by third parties, like notary publics.
But if the State Board is tired of this issue and just wants to move on, they should approve these regulations, so that families stuck in unresponsive, malfunctioning jurisdictions can add some sense of urgency for those odd creatures, the overseers of public institutions who really don’t care.
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