Empowering parents — to sign petitions or become engines for change?
On Wednesday, the California State Board of Education will vote to approve regulations implementing California’s parent empowerment law. Given the intense scrutiny this law has received, it’s important to remember that it is just a small step on the road toward truly empowering parents.
Nibbling at the edges
Passed by the Legislature in 2009, the “Parent Trigger” statute allows parents to petition their school district boards to adopt one of the turnaround interventions handed down by the feds. But community advocates like us wonder: What if parents don’t want any of these turnaround options?
There are many reasons why they wouldn’t. Though much ballyhooed by some, especially charter advocates, the new law is actually quite modest in scope. First, only 75 of the state’s 9,000 schools can actually implement a trigger. Second, if they succeed, they are essentially limited to using one of the federally prescribed and fairly narrow school turnaround interventions set out under the School Improvement Grant program. The petitioned district must either: (1) close the school, (2) replace it with a charter school or reopen with new management, (3) fire the principal and at least half the staff, or (4) fire the principal and transform the school in line with federal regulations.
Unfortunately, none of the four options was then or is now supported by research indicating that they actually work. Moreover, other strategies that have succeeded are precluded from consideration. The bottom line: Enabling parents in a handful of the state’s schools to force through one of four unproven federal turnaround options may be useful in some instances, but this minor step forward is hardly a revolution.
There’s another way – one in which parents, students, teachers, and community members are active participants in the process of developing and implementing a plan for transforming their schools, not merely signers of a petition.
A blueprint for success
We know it can be done. A report by Communities for Excellent Public Schools (“A Proposal for Sustainable School Transformation,” July 2010), a national coalition of more than 25 community-based education reform organizations, highlights the community-based school reform effort at Greenleaf Elementary in Oakland. After failed attempts to use No Child Left Behind-driven reforms (e.g., firing teachers, charter conversion), Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) supported a design development team composed of students, parents, educators, community members, and district staff to do the hard work of a year-long planning process.
This process included mapping the assets of the school and neighborhood, analyzing student achievement data, visiting high-performing schools serving similar students, and participating in extensive community engagement and partnership. The report describes how the team’s unified vision for the school became a reality:
Greenleaf Elementary, serving low-income Latino and African American students, has become a symbol of pride and hope for a long underserved neighborhood. In addition to a strong standards-based academic curriculum, students enjoy enrichment through music, art, and physical education classes. The school partners with a variety of community-based organizations who provide resources for students and families that include counseling, dental screening, food giveaways, and English and computer classes. Through an active parent leadership team parents are active partners in the life of the school. Teachers are part of a professional learning community, receive support and guidance from coaches, and share parents’ vision and expectations for high achievement for every student.
Despite multiple changes in district leadership, including a state takeover, the school community kept its eye on the prize – higher levels of student achievement – due in large part to the support, engagement, and commitment of Oakland parents, community members, and district and school leaders who had been part of the process from the beginning and were fully invested in its success.
The results speak for themselves. Just three years after the school’s transformation began, the percentage of students proficient in English had risen from 14 to 42 percent, and from 25 to 66 percent in math. Because of similar community-led reform efforts at schools throughout the district, Oakland Unified has been named the most improved urban school district for six years.
Still fighting for change
We, along with other parent and student advocates, will continue pushing to increase the rights and opportunities for low-income parents and communities to partner with their children’s schools. And we will continue to work to improve our state’s parent empowerment laws.
Why? It’s true that the “Parent Trigger” regulations attempt to make a limited and vague statute work. Assemblymember Julia Brownley’s pending AB 203 makes some important improvements to the statute as well, and it deserves to be approved by the Legislature and signed by the governor.
But larger, more powerful parent and community engagement is both possible and desperately needed. Again and again, we and our community-based allies have advocated that sustainable school turnaround efforts must be developed, embraced, and implemented by an entire school community if they are going to be successful. School and district staff alone cannot identify, implement, and sustain a school turnaround.
True parent empowerment requires hard work and support to build the capacity of schools, districts, and communities so that parents can be engaged and informed partners in the school improvement process. That’s real empowerment – and that’s what our policies should be designed to encourage.
Katie Valenzuela, a Policy Advocate for Public Advocates, co-authored this piece. Liz Guillen is Director of Legislative & Community Affairs at Public Advocates, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization that challenges the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination by strengthening community voices in public policy. She works closely with community and grassroots organizations across California to advocate for improved opportunities to learn in the public school system.
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- Engaging Parents In School… - “Empowering parents — to sign petitions or become engines for change?”
Great article, great points.
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Thank you, Liz and Katie for saying what many of us have known from years of experience:
True parent empowerment requires hard work and support to build the capacity of schools, districts, and communities so that parents can be engaged and informed partners in the school improvement process.
The Parent Empowerment law anticipates that a majority of parents who have voiced dissatisfaction with a particular school will have the ability to make an informed choice as to the best plan to be adopted for said school and about the entity to whom responsibility should be given to execute the plan. While parents certainly want what is best for their children, our system does not often trust them to make such decisions. Is it any wonder why?
As has been evidenced in Los Angeles under our LEA’s Public School Choice (PSC) initiative, getting parents and community members to vote for particular plans is fraught with challenges, some foreseen and some not. Initial rounds of LAUSD’s PSC plan required advisory votes be taken by families and community members affected by both operating, academically low performing schools and (then-unoccupied) brand new schools built with funds generated by bonds approved by voters (prior to offering the new schools to third parties to operate them).
The Los Angeles Times in the sub-head of its March 4, 2011 said of the PSC advisory vote process: ” Two rounds of advisory voting by parents and others…have produced low turnout and disappointing results. It’s time to jettison the process” while in their editorial on March 7, 2011, they recognize the need to improve the process of implementing Parent Empowerment”. What is common to LAUSD’s PSC and Parent Empowerment? The need to help families and school community members develop the understanding that leads to an informed decision.
Before families can collaborate with teachers and administrators, we must develop trust among one another and learn to respect one another. That won’t ever happen in a system that marginalizes parents and more often than not treats those of us who want to be actively involved as if we’re pariahs; it isn’t just parents, either – school districts often treat their own employees like interchangeable parts.
The parent trigger will not be successful unless and until there is a process to do more than simply petition for a change of governance. Show me a commitment and a pathway to build the ability of parents to authentically participate in planning, policy and shared decision-making and you will begin to see real improvement. There has been so little authentic interest in having parents involved at schools (beyond bake sales, field trips, yard duty and the like) that it will prove tricky to create reliable outcomes for children under this version of the Parent Empowerment law, particularly inasmuch as there is no existing infrastructure nor resources to train parents in what they need to know to make decisions about how to know what is working at their schools – and lip service to the contrary, the culture that exists in many of our schools has little to no interest in seeing such expertise develop any time soon.
As a founding family member of an independent charter middle school in Los Angeles, I
recognize that as a form of parent empowerment, charter schools hold much promise yet they can go as sideways as Charlie Sheen. In the case of the regulations being considered here, I wonder how many parents have already “pulled the trigger” by choosing to enroll their children in charters, some of which are failing kids miserably?
I fear that this law, in its current incarnation, may be more about getting some organizations a better foothold in public schools without the need to build the expertise among parents in a school community to recognize how to create and maintain conditions for success, recognize what good teaching and learning look like, how to understand, analyze and appropriately use data and school plans, monitor and evaluate progress and continuously improve. If we really want families involved, we ought to be helping them to understand what it means to have a seat at the table, for having a seat without knowing what is being decided upon and how to have an impact on such decisions isn’t advancing the cause of parent empowerment.
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Great points; we at Parents Across America agree completely. See our position paper on the Parent Trigger here: http://bit.ly/emAYXC
and recent commentary by bill Ring here: http://bit.ly/pxioh4
Parents need and deserve to be involved from the ground up in devising solutions that work to improve their children’s schools, not simply be asked about whether they want one of the limited — and often damaging — prescriptions that the US DOE or other top-down authorities want implemented in our public schools.
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Having already taken on LAUSD in a monumental struggle for control (of funding, decision-making, staffing, etc.) I feel I have a lot to add to this discussion.
Until LAUSD stops spending money on “Parent Outreach” (under which an odd person comes to our schools and “tells” us how and what we are allowed to say in order to “participate” in the governance of our school) and begins really seeing the PARTNERSHIP that is available to them, we will get nowhere with this behemoth bureaucracy.
I agree with Bill (above) that parents need to be empowered to make good choices, but I would argue that many of us who are willing and able to lead the charge are dismissed at every level. We need to be given the opportunity to see what works and make the appropriate choices for our students at our schools (not everything is cookie-cutter, and not every choice works for every school or every student). And then, we need the admin/board at LAUSD to GET OUT OF THE WAY.
LAUSD gathers its funding directly by our students showing up for school. Until all LAUSD employees (from the top down) realize that they work for us – the Taxpayers – and NOT the other way around, we will continue to struggle to have parents’ voices heard. It’s time for the bureaucrats to WAKE UP and see that there is an army of volunteers who are willing to do the work to make our schools better for each and every student – but not if we are dismissed and if all the decisions are made for us – whether we agree with them or not. Try talking TO us, not AT us… it’s just like good parenting.
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Ms. Guillen is absolutely correct; when an intense effort is made by school personnel, local government agencies, community organizations, and parents the result will likely be an enriched learning environment for students. This occurs in many schools under numerous “turn around” / “reform” models. The one, underlying ingredient, is an intense focus by a large number of those involved.
The truth is, there is no one single plan / reform / model that will bear fruit across counties, communities or school districts – what is important is a cultural buy-in by those involved in educating our children and an intense effort to encourage success. This is one reason why the “parent trigger” is an important tool for reform. If a community of parents representing over half of the children in a school can agree that change is necessary, you have the roots of a cultural change at the school – it will only work if the “turn around” model results in school personnel that buy into the change, and help to sustain it. With parents and school personnel committed to success, there is a greater likelihood of coordinated community support and increased chance of success for the students.
It is not rocket science; if it were, we could adopt a single plan that would work every time. It is a social science, and it is messy, and it works differently in every community. The parent trigger is, as Ms. Guillen aptly points out, a very small step toward empowering parents. But, it is an important step because it allows parents some control over the quality of the school their child attends.
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I am not clear how a petition really gains these parents any control over the end result. Indeed, in the case in Compton, it seemed like parents would end up with less actual control than they had going in.
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@Kelly Kane: I would like to hear more about LAUSD’s Parent Outreach program, its shortcomings, and what you wanted that you didn’t get from it. Did the principal participate in this or was it some random person from the district office?
LAUSD is so enormous that it seems that governance and parent interaction there is on a different scale than in some other cases.
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I don’t feel comfortable speaking for Kelly but I can tell you she was key in the design and development of LAUSD’s Innovation Division (born as i-Design) which began as a partnership among the District, Loyola Marymount University (LMU) and the schools and families of the Westchester community. Among other disingenuous actions, autonomies promised were not respected and the fragile trust that began to develop became roadkill.
In LAUSD, as elsewhere, with budget cuts, work rules and concerns about unfunded obligations to employees including benefits, school district personnel, school leaders and teachers are often treated like interchangeable parts – to say nothing of how we treat our families. These actions ignore the truth that it is the people in an organization that make it or break it. With such inconsistency at play, ownership of ideas is abandoned one month in favor of other models which may be adopted by a new Board of Education, Superintendent or third party the next and that is part of the story of why there is such fear and mistrust in L.A.
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Great commentary, Liz and Katie. The fatal flaw in the Parent Trigger is that it empowers parents only to bring about models that are not only unproven but destructive. (And sorry to repeat myself, but it needs to be pointed out every time this comes up that the Parent Trigger is designed not to empower parents but to empower charter school operators.)
Thank you for stepping up on behalf of children, families and schools to help debunk the hype and propose effective solutions instead.
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Why is it so hard for the status-quo types to relinquish to parents even an inch of control over their child’s education? The author said it herself, this is a modest program. So why are you in such hysteria about parents at 75 of the over 9,000 schools in our California organizing and making some changes in their school? Public Advocates and unions just can’t stand parents having some kind of say in what education their child gets.
Their response to this is that we need more parent “engagement” and we “teachers and parents need to work together” which is code for “we want to keep things the way they are because that serves my interests (ie less accountability).” Parent engagement means zero if the school bureaucracy is telling parents what’s good for them. Parents (consumers of education) need to have some say in the quality of their kid’s education – parent empowerment is one way to do that.
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CapitolReader (CR) is absolutely correct… but, be careful CR, or captain status quo will have to scream again that the charter school boogeyman is coming. Oh my!
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The “trigger law” is misnamed. When it is invoked, it is nothing else but firing a loaded gun at a public school and essentially killing it. The law permits this to be done to 75 “failing” schools in California every year. The “failure” label is applied when the school is below the magical API of 800, a number that was, as far as I can tell by scrutinizing minutes of the State Board of Education, pulled out of the air without backing from any research into what it means to be below 800. How many failing schools are there? I hear various numbers, but I know for a fact that out of 52 (or so) high schools in LAUSD, only three are above 800. Are they all truly failing?
If there are so many failing schools, why hasn’t the trigger been pulled in more than one school? That effort, the attempt by Parent Revolution to take over McKinley Elementary in Compton and turn it over to Celerity Charters, has, for all intents and purposes, failed. Why hasn’t this happened elsewhere if there are so many failing schools and parents are truly this fed up? And why did it take an AstroTurf® organization to pull this stunt?
The reality, in my opinion, is that going against any school district is both a herculean and sisyphean task. No school district, regardless of size, is run by people who want to relinquish power to parents. Any attempt by parents to participate in school governance is usually fought by the principal all the way to the local superintendent. Why? Because they all get paid to run schools and feel that if they are responsible, then they are not going to cede any decision making to non-employees. (In fact, this is one reason why teacher peer review is not implemented: principals are loath to relinquish their supervisory authority.) That’s why any parent that shows up at a school (or Board) meetings with ideas is usually ignored, shown the door, or, worse, treated as a “useful idiot”. (It’s true. This just happened recently at two of LAUSD’s high profile high schools where the recommendations of the principal’s hiring committees were olympically ignored by the new Superintendent because he “personally will need to be comfortable with every single principal in this district.” So much for local governance.)
So, yeah, this law is more or less toothless for the average parent and is only there because a certain former state senator was carrying the water for her political patrons. She bullied her colleagues and the State Board of Education into passing it as an “emergency” because children couldn’t wait to be rescued. Given that it has only been pulled once and not even by parents, was it truly an emergency? Have the state’s schools collapsed? Have the state high school graduates stopped entering UC and CSUs? Has the sky fallen?
This whole thing is nothing else but an exercise in avoiding the real issue: there is a need for a mechanism for parents, other than throwing out the current board of education, to get better response from their school system. We are supposed to have a representative democracy and so far it isn’t working. Why do we, parents, have to take over public schools in order to make them work? Why can’t the educational administrators remember that they work for us not the other way around? They are getting paid the big bucks, aren’t they? (And, no, it isn’t the “unions” that are in the way here. It is the administrators so far.)
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Interesting, I read the Greenleaf case study from the CEPS report. Although the NCLB “solution(s)” did not result in immediate improvement one has to wonder how they aided the eventual turnaround. According to the reports parent led efforts to change the school had started as early as 1997. But these early efforts did not result in any movement within the school system. Given that NCLB became law in January of 2003 I’m guessing the earliest NCLB remedy was applied in 2005. So probably a year later after the mandated remedies failed it seems the school district was finally ready to get serious about involving parents. So on the surface this would seem like a story of public school system intransigence that was broken by a parent trigger type of law. I have to say seems because the report chose to be vague on the dates, so I’d love to see my guessed dates corrected if appropriate.
So hurray for the results and that everything eventually turned out for the better! And I’m sure we can learn a lot from this turnaround. But it sure seems to me a case of using the best of two solutions. And the report seems to suggest as much “Dramatic action is not enough; we need to get it right”.
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I find the article and discussion both heartening and disheartening at the same time. Heartening because of the near universal agreement that school authorities virtually everywhere are like Dilbert’s “Prince of Insufficient Lighting” doing whatever they can to impede education and avoid change. This is heartening because when so many people get so frustrated for so long eventually things change. It is all so DIS-heartening because the defense of the status quo is so intransigent that it will require a major political realignment to get change and a lot of babies will get thrown out with the bathwater.
As for:
“This process included mapping the assets of the school and neighborhood, analyzing student achievement data, visiting high-performing schools serving similar students, and participating in extensive community engagement and partnership.”
from the article above – the big question in my mind is why isn’t that being done all the time at every school in the entire country??
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Thank you Liz and Katie for your advocacy and ensuring that parents have a voice in the decision making process. If parents really understood their rights under NCLB, they would realize that they have the power to make change. Parent Empowerment is not a new concept, parents have extensive rights when it comes to the education of their children. I appreciate Assemblymember Brownley’s methodology to look at the statute and make some correction that convulted the process, and I appreciate the opportunity to listen to authentic parent voices. It critical for parent leaders to fully listen to the voices of parents and ensure that legislation such as the Reautho of NCLB or ESEA maintains a strong pathway and voice for parents to make decision in the complex education system. I am looking forward to the work of Liz and Katie with Public Advocates, Assembly Member Brownley, TransParent, Parents Across America and other strong parent networks to ensure that the parent voice is used in its authenticity and not for political showmanship.
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Just in case the dig about “defense of status quo” is thrown in my direction (yes, I am a bit paranoid), let me state very clearly that I believe (key word there, folks) that universal public education is what has kept this country stable and prosperous when compared to the rest of the world. To embrace its privatization is folly as it will lead to the US emulating third world countries where the elite get educated and the rest are kept in their place. If that’s what YOU want, then go for it.
The proof is in the pudding: the trigger law has been used exactly once and by a third party, not parents. This was a manufactured crisis, nothing else, nothing more.
Are our schools broken? Well, we seem to be creating enough high school seniors to occupy the seats we are willing to half-heartedly fund at UC, CSU, and community colleges, so why are people complaining? Look at it this way: if every one got A-G with a B average, there would not be enough space for them in the 13-16 system. Are YOU willing to tax yourself in order to have almost universal college availability? So why are YOU insisting that everyone has to be “college-ready” and able to compete with the elites in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, etc.?
Right, I did not think so. It’s a smoke screen, folks. Follow the money (at all levels!) and ask yourselves why suddenly we want to have what nobody on Earth has. Tin-foil hat is certainly not required and, no, you don’t have to be an expert.
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@CapitolReader, if you read the story of the Compton situation, there was a petition circulated requiring a preselected charter operator to take over the local school. There was no notice, no discussion, no opportunity for parents to discuss whether this was a good idea, and no discussion or opportunity for parents to even select the charter operator. The people who created and circulated the petition weren’t Compton residents.
There’s no empowerment in that.
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@Moravec: why should the non-tenure faculty (i.e. , the researchers) have to take a pay cut? They already earn far less than the ladder faculty and are not even paid by the state to boot! They are all extramurally funded and these days they’re lucky if they get full funding.
I’d rather see fully open access to the financial records of UC as well as how much teaching of undergraduates the faculty actually does. The salaries are already published every year by the Sacramento Bee, but it does not identify the source (e.g., state funds, research grants/contracts, patient fees, etc.) and it should. There should also be access to the “business enterprises” in each campus.
OK, that’s enough because this is off-topic…
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Thanks for all the comments and interesting discussion.
@CapitolReader: As anyone who knows Public Advocates’ work will attest, we are hardly defenders of the status quo. We quite clearly say that the Parent Trigger is a useful, if modest, step forward. But, as others have reiterated, real empowerment to alter the status quo will take a great deal more support for parental engagement.
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@Manuel:
“Are our schools broken? Well, we seem to be creating enough high school seniors to occupy the seats we are willing to half-heartedly fund at UC, CSU, and community colleges, so why are people complaining? Look at it this way: if every one got A-G with a B average, there would not be enough space for them in the 13-16 system. ”
Wickedly well said. But damn, that’s a depressing thought.
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@CapitolReader says “Parent engagement means zero if the school bureaucracy is telling parents what’s good for them.” Yet the Parent Trigger offers absolutely zero voice to parents once one of the four options is implemented. It is a transfer of power, not empowerment.
I find it troubling and a bit astonishing that none of the passionate discussions or contentious reporting about the trigger points to putting parents in a real position of power: becoming trustees of their district school boards. Do you want real empowerment? Engage in educating parents about not only having a voice in the policy that directly affects their children, but having a vote.
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I’ve discussed this in previous TopEd topics, but in some school neighborhoods we’d need to define a new type of vote to make a difference. Parent Trigger is a step in that direction. I believe even SF was not able to create a new type of school board vote. I’m sure that Caroline can fill us all in on more of the details.
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@Paul … I think you’re going to have to add more to that comment for it to be useful. What do you mean, “a new type of school board vote”?
One simple thing that could be added to these parent triggers would be some sort of elected board for that school, overseeing the charter operator. As far as I can tell, the charter operator under the current rules has no accountability to parents except to a very limited extent on the 5 year timeframe for renewal.
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San Francisco attempted to give non-citizens the right to vote in school board elections.
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Yes, this was a ballot measure, specifically covering non-citizens with students in SFUSD schools.
Proponents pointed out that it wasn’t unprecedented and that other municipalities have given non-citizens the right to vote in local elections. The measure lost in any case.
The issue of actually empowering people to run for school board is a tough one. Here in SFUSD, BOE members get a stipend of $500 a month. It’s not a full-time job, but it takes a lot of time and is extremely demanding and stressful. All SFUSD school board meetings are full of people angry about something or other. Longtime BOE member Jill Wynns told me that at one meeting full of angry people, the enraged woman at the microphone during public comment suddenly reached into her purse, and Jill had to make a split-second decision whether to dive under the board table. She didn’t, and the woman turned out to be reaching for a pen, but the fact that Jill had to consider that tells you something.
The press beats up on school board members constantly — the SFUSD BOE took a mass bashing from the INTERNATIONAL press when it was coping with the problems posed by a troubled charter school run by now-fizzled, once-hailed for-profit Edison Schools 10 years ago — the Wall Street Journal bashed Jill Wynns by name in an editorial) — and note how scathingly billionaire-funded forces like Parent Revolution treat school board members.
Who would want to let him- or herself in for that?
Meanwhile, it usually costs about $30,000-$50,000 to run a viable campaign for school board here in SF. Clearly, low-income people and other historically disenfranchised people are not likely to feel empowered to go through all this.
SFUSD has a Parent Advisory Council to the school board — each BOE member gets 2-3 appointees, with diversity strongly emphasized — so that’s an option for giving parents a voice. I served for 8 years on the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee and currently serve on the Public Education Enrichment Fund Citizens Advisory Committee, and there are others like that. But it’s a perennial challenge.
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