Parent Trigger II: Desert warfare
Regulations not perfect but an improvement
State regulations written to bring order and rationality to the Parent Trigger petition process are getting a bruising debut in the Mojave Desert town of Adelanto. The recriminations and accusations of misinformation and fraud that undermined the first Parent Trigger effort in Compton and ended up in court last year are echoing in the battle over Desert Trails Elementary School, calling into question the capacity of rule makers to anticipate and deter bad conduct.
On Tuesday, pro bono attorneys for the Desert Trails Parents Union called for a criminal investigation into actions that led 97 parents to revoke their signatures on petitions calling for the conversion of their elementary school into a charter school. Based on the rescissions and other technical flaws they found with other petition signatures, the Adelanto School District trustees last week rejected the second Parent Trigger petition under the parent empowerment law. They ruled that the parents group fell 16 signatures shy of the 333 needed to represent a majority of the children at the school, which was necessary to demand wholesale school reform. The parents group originally submitted signatures representing 70 percent of the students in the low-performing school.
The parents group plans to ask the school board to reverse its decision when it meets tonight and is threatening to go to court if it doesn’t. The parents and their attorney, Mark Holscher, charged that the counter-reform parents group, which was aided by California Teachers Association staffers, engaged in fraud and misled parents to revoke their signatures. The Parents Union presented evidence that in at least two instances, parents signed blank revocation forms with unchecked boxes that someone later altered to list reasons for withdrawing their signatures. These parents have signed affidavits saying they didn’t understand what they were signing.
CTA representatives and parents opposed to reform charged it was the Parents Union, organized by the pro-Parent Trigger group Parent Revolution, that misled parents into signing the charter takeover petition in the first place. What did create potential confusion was that Parents Union asked parents to sign two petitions – one calling for internal reforms, in which parents would hire the principal and have a big say in running the school, and one calling for an independent charter operator. The tactic was to submit the charter petition as leverage to broker school reforms, said Gabe Rose, deputy director of Parent Revolution. Talks, in fact, have been going on, he said.
Silent on revocation
The State Board of Education adopted Parent Trigger regulations last summer after nearly a year of work and multiple revisions. The regulations thoroughly spell out details of the signature gathering process, such as who can vote, how names should be verified, and when the school board must act. But the regulations don’t deal with signature revocation, other than to say there should be no “harassment, threats, and intimidation” related to gathering signatures or revoking them.
Holscher claims signature revocations shouldn’t be permitted at all, and certainly not once the petitions are submitted. He points to another section in the state election code that prohibits revoking signatures for initiatives. The intent is to protect voters, once their signatures are made public, from coercion.
No regulation can anticipate infinite possibilities of bad faith, but the state PTA, the low-income advocacy group Public Advocates, and others called for the Parent Trigger regulations to include one or two public hearings explaining the Parent Trigger process and providing parents “with useful information so that their signatures could be informed,” said Liz Guillen, director of Legislative and Community Affairs at Public Advocates. A hearing might have cut down on charges of misinformation. A requirement for a public hearing made it into the final draft of the state regulations, but the State Board eliminated it out of concern that inclusion would have been interpreted as a state mandate, adding costs and possible rejection by the Office of Administrative Law, which keeps an eye out for mandated expenses. The Board noted that nothing in the law prevents a district from holding an extra hearing on its own. Nonetheless, compared with the costs to districts and parent groups of a protracted court fight over a Parent Trigger petition, the cost to the state of an extra hearing is a deal.
For all its possible flaws, Rose, who was part of a group that crafted the regulations, isn’t grousing about them. “The regulations are vitally important but the district is not following them,” he said. “There are lots of protections here.”
The biggest is a 60-day period, after a school districts rejects a Parent Trigger petition, allowing parents to fix problems with signatures, respond to technical reasons that signatures were rejected and collect new signatures. Rose said that in 17 instances, a parent who signed the revocation notice wasn’t the parent who signed the petition in the first place; and there were two dozen instances in which parent signatures were rejected because a signature wasn’t on file in the district office for comparison. Add them all up, and there is well over 50 percent of parents legally on board, he said.
Whoa, whoa,whoa. These signature revocations are due to the absolutely convoluted, nutty and misguided decision by Parent Revolution advisers to present TWO petitions, one for a charter school, one for their actual desired outcome – reconfiguring the school with parent input over principal and teacher selection.
A hearing or town hall should be a part of the trigger process. But the complex strategy in the Adelanto case may have still confused people even with a public hearing.
Even Gloria Romero in her comments acknowledged that poor strategic choices, not malfeasance, is at the root of this trigger failure. Any analysis of what happened in Adelanto bears more than a passing mention of the two petitions.
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What a waste of time and energy all around. The cost (how much could it be?) of a couple of public meetings looks really good in comparison.
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The big picture is that this fiasco, the second such brouhaha of the two Parent Triggers attempted, confirms the obvious: This process is guaranteed to rip a school community apart. At least, that’s obvious to anyone who is familiar with a school community — which no one involved in Parent Revolution actually is.
To state what’s also obvious, ripping a community apart with explosive controversy is not beneficial to the vulnerable children who are part of that community.
And just for the record, here is Parent Revolution/Parent Trigger’s cumulative record now:
Compton Parent Trigger (McKinley Elementary School): Failure.
The charter school operator pre-selected by Parent Revolution “on behalf of” the McKinley parents who were later asked to sign a petition for it opened a school nearby, and only 1/5 of the McKinley families have transferred their kids there, despite the fact that they were all supposely clamoring for this charter. The community was ripped apart by explosive controversy, meanwhile, and the school district must have incurred all kinds of legal costs due to legal actions against it by Parent Revolution — at the children’s expense in the big picture. Parent Revolution also flamboyantly filed harassment charges against teachers — I have no information on the outcome of those actions or how they impacted the teachers.
Adelanto Parent Trigger (Desert Trails Elementary School): Explosive controversy, so far.
Attempted Sunland-Tujunga Parent Trigger (Mount Gleason Middle School): I only mention this because I believe it’s the only other Parent Trigger attempt that has been publicly reported. The former parent leading this process said (on this very website) that she only wanted to get the principal removed, as there wasn’t support for a charter; that effort appears to have quietly fizzled.
So far that’s a 100% failure rate. No one in Parent Revolution has ever improved a school, transformed a school, or for that matter had ANYTHING to do with a school. They are hired to play-act as education advocates. Sorry; this is not a way to improve education.
Meanwhile — amazingly, in the Information Age — legislators in other states are touting the Parent Trigger as the next big thing and racing to adopt Parent Trigger legislation.
Again, it’s apparent to anyone familiar with a school community that this is not a workable solution. For one thing, Parent Revolution has made a flamboyant spectacle of waging war against teachers, and it’s simply not possible to improve education by treating teachers as the enemy to be attacked and destroyed. Educators need to be partners.
Everyone touting this fad as a solution is going to have to be pretty sheepish in the end. I suggest exercising a little common sense and healthy skepticism (as I always do about these miracle education fads).
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(John’s “warfare” headline pretty much confirms my comment that these fiascos rip communities apart. Time for serious soul-searching by everyone who has endorsed this notion — is “destroy the community in order to save it” a sound policy when it comes to schools that serve vulnerable low-income children?)
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This LA Times editorial does a much better, more balanced job of addressing the need for refining the trigger process.
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“Parents opposed to reform” — what hogwash! How about parents opposed to fake, pocket-lining reform. There was nothing transparent about this process. If the real intention was to encourage reforms at the school, why didn’t they simply submit THAT petition, rather than the charter petition. That in itself is shady, and if I were a parent at that school I’d be wondering about the underhanded, sneaky tactics by the group supposedly acting in my interests.
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It is doubtful that the “other” petition, the one to create a “governing board” of some kind would have been legal. It is the local board who makes the decisions about hiring administrators, teachers etc. I don’t know of any circumstanced where they can delegate those legal responsibilities to another “board.”
My guess is the “legal eagles” working for the Green Dot/Broad/”Parent” group would know that. That would have left the charter petition the only legal and valid document.
Surprise!
The SBE received a number of recommendations on how to bring some transparency and legitimacy to the Trigger regulations. But a rush to judgment was the order of the day.
The “Trigger” is a classic example of a bad idea whose time has come. Parents have the right to leverage change in school conditions through their PTA (please note which side of the issue PTA is on) and the right to absolutely change district management through elections of school board members.
In fact, both the PTA and school board election process are subject to the democratic process. It is notable that the “trigger” advocates never opt for the democratic alternative. It is always a “petition process” whose workings fail the transparency (as well as smell) test.
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Parent Revolution is now in full shriek, yelling about “recission-gate” and accusing everyone in Adelanto, the school district, the teachers’ union and anyone else they can come up with of fraud. This is, of course, their standard tactic by now — they did it in the McKinley fiasco too, and they went completely berserk when a teachers’ union in the east publicly posted an advocacy strategy for lobbying against a parent trigger law in Connecticut.
After a while all this shrieking is going to lose its effect, though they do have much of the press going now.
It’s all about convincing Parent Revolution’s funders to keep sending the checks in the face of failure after failure, needless to say.
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@Caroline, I follow Parent Revolution on Twitter. The tone of their tweets the past several days has been quite unprofessional. I’m not sure what they think they’re accomplishing with that behavior, but it comes off as juvenile and not appropriate for the stakes involved. Most certainly not positive modeling for students.
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Modeling for students is not on their radar; students are not on their radar. It’s all about the almighty funders.
You’d think they could pull that off once (all the shrieking about fraud and wrongdoing), but the second time, plus the phony outrage about that teachers’ union PowerPoint?
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Interesting how there is evidence lining up to demonstrate CTA may have doctored documents and intimidated parents into reversing their signatures yet everyone is focused on the regulations or demonizing a group of parents who want to turn a terrible school into a decent one.
Where is this passionate rage against the status-quo policies that put our schools in such a mess that parents are left with no option but to appeal to a rare law to radically change the governance of their school?
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capitolreader, if local parents were starting these efforts of their own initiative, I think there would be a very different reaction to them.
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@capitolreader, I and I believe others are passionately enraged against a force that wants to dismantle schools and rip apart vulnerable communities while pretending that their goal is to “turn a terrible school into a decent one.”
Actually, Parent Revolution’s goal is to keep their jobs funded, as these are not actual education advocates, just folks hired to play-act the role. Also, they have no basis for believing that they have the capacity to “turn a terrible school into a decent one,” as none of them has ever done any such thing. Again, they are simply paid (with ample funds from the usual list of billionaires and foundations) to pretend they believe they have that capacity, and convince others.
@John: I’ve made this request before and it’s really relevant now. Could you please do the legwork to find out and update us on the status of the charges that Parent Revolution filed against teachers in the Compton Parent Trigger situation? As reported here, Parent Revolution filed harassment charges against McKinley Elementary teachers with the California state Board of Education, and filed civil rights charges against McKinley teachers with the U.S. Department of Education. What is the status and outcome of those charges, and how are the accused teachers impacted? (I think it should be a basic obligation of the press to follow up on what they report, by the way. I thought so when I was working press, and for that matter my colleagues did too, so I’m not just being a cranky news consumer.)
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I should correct myself — I don’t strictly believe that Parent Revolution WANTS to dismantle schools and rip apart vulnerable communities. I believe those are the byproducts of their efforts, and they are unconcerned because their impact is not important to them. They just want to keep their jobs.
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@CarolineSF – Your extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
They are trying to change their failing school into a charter. It appears there has been legal misconduct and the CTA may be involved. The facts will eventually surface and we will see.
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Those are my observations based on following Parent Revolution’s activities as closely as possible from the beginning (originally because they claimed they were targeting one or more schools here in San Francisco, though I haven’t seen further evidence of that).
I note again that they have complained about supposed fraud and supposed legal misconduct in the previous Parent Trigger effort too, while the actual situation appeared to be general chaos, controversy and confusion, or “warfare,” as John put it. They also complained vigorously about the Connecticut teachers’ union PowerPoint laying out a lobbying strategy, which Parent Revolution portrayed as wrongdoing.
And, again, they filed charges against teachers in at least two different ways in the Compton Parent Trigger controversy.
Sooner or later the fact that they do this every time should discredit them in the eyes of anyone with common sense.
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