Time Magazine
Tuesday, Jun. 14, 2011
'Parent Trigger' Laws: Shutting Schools, Raising Controversy
In a barebones basement office in Buffalo, New York, Katie Campos, an education activist, is plotting a revolution. She and her miniscule staff of the education reform advocacy group, Buffalo ReformED, are against incredible odds. In less than a week they are trying to get a controversial law through the New York State Legislature that is known as the Parent Trigger. It's a powerful nickname for game-changing legislation that would enable parents at any persistently failing school who can gather a majority to fire the principal, fire 50% of the teachers, close the school down — or turn the existing school into a charter school.
Campos and her group are working with some 4,000 frustrated parents like Samuel Radford III, who refuses to accept that as African-Americans, his three sons in Buffalo Public Schools only have a 25% chance of graduating. Radford has voiced his concerns for years and seen nothing improve, so rather than waiting for the district to act, he became vice president of the District Parent Coordinating Council and threw his support behind passing trigger legislation in the state. "This is our chance to not just confront the problem, but be part of the solution," Radford said. On June 15, Buffalo ReformED plans to fill a bus of parents like Radford and ride to the state capitol in Albany to host an informal hearing on the bill and speak to the members of both the senate and house education committees. (A look at what makes good teachers.)
When people first hear about the radical-sounding law they are almost always taken aback. But what they might not know is that any school district in the nation can already shut down failing schools under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The Parent Trigger takes the options provided to the school board and hands the power to the parents. Gloria Romero, the now ex-legislator who sponsored the first parent trigger law in California, said it was designed so that if the school district wasn't doing enough to turn a school around the parents would not have to sit idly by and wait for reform that never came. "These are school districts that are chronically underperforming and yet the school officials have done nothing to turn them around," Romero told TIME, referring to California's 1,300-plus persistently failing schools. (See "The Education Crisis No One Is Talking About.")
The idea for the parent trigger was conceived in 2009 by Ben Austin, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles and policy consultant at Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school organization. "The way I saw it, if education was going to change, parents had to have a seat at the table where they could make real decisions about real reforms for their kids," Austin told TIME. Austin decided to start a reform advocacy group called Parent Revolution dedicated to passing the parent trigger legislation. (Green Dot provided the initial funding for Parent Revolution, though as of 2010 they no longer receive funds from the group. They now receive the largest share of their funds from the Wasserman, Walton and Gates Foundations.) By January 2010, Austin and a feisty crop of paid organizers had knocked on some 4,000 doors, mobilized parents, bused them to Sacramento and into state Congressman's offices to tell their stories and managed to get the idea cemented into law.
Now similar versions of California's law have been introduced in 14 other states. A modified version of the law — identical to California's only without the option of turning a school over to a charter school operator — recently passed both houses of the Congress in Texas. Nationally, Rep. George Miller, the ranking Democrat on the House committee on Education and the Workforce, is closely following what is happening in the states. While he has no current plans to introduce federal legislation, he said he has not ruled out the possibility of including the law as part of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (otherwise known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act). "The fact of the matter is, when we look at developing a model for real change and improvement in public education it's pretty hard to do without parents," Miller told TIME. "We've tried for years and it's not working."
But as of yet, no school has been shut down or successfully transformed. After the law passed in California, Parent Revolution targeted McKinley Elementary of the Compton Unified district in south Los Angeles that serves students in kindergarten through 5th grade, and started to organize parents from the ground up.
One of those parents was Theresa Theus, whose five-year-old daughter, Tioni, was in Kindergarten at McKinley at the time. After looking at McKinley's test scores online, Theus didn't want to send her daughter to there, but she had no choice. She couldn't afford a private education and the district told her there was no public alternative. "In sending her there, I felt like I was putting her at a disadvantage," Theus told TIME. "I didn't want her falling behind." (See "Zuckerberg Gives Millions to Newark Public Schools.")
Theus was an easy sell and she in turn recruited other parents. That's how the model works: Once you inspire one parent to act, you have them invite a handful of their friends. On December 7, 2010 — with signatures from 275 of 438 parents, or roughly 61% — Parent Revolution filed the petition, thus pulling the parent trigger at a school for the first time in the nation.
The effort faced immediate opposition and legal challenges from the school board. While a judge upheld the trigger law as constitutional, the petitions may eventually be ruled invalid as the signatures are not dated. The final decision on that will come within weeks. But while they faced their opponents in court, Parent Revolution started to get calls from parents and community organizers across the country, and they now advise other groups such as Buffalo ReformED on how to pass their own trigger legislation.
In California, the most vociferous opposition came from those who opposed the charter school provision. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said she thinks the law is being misused to promote growth of charter schools. "When this legislation is being driven by parents, that's good," she said. "But when it's driven by a group of people whose sole mission is to open a charter school, that's bad." (More cuts to Detroit schools.)
But in Compton, Austin said, a charter school was the only option because of how persistently failing the entire district was. In the future as the movement grows, Austin said he thinks the vast majority of trigger campaigns will not be just about converting to charter schools, but some of the law's other provisions, such as firing the principle. "If the social justice end game is to serve all kids who are trapped in failing schools, you can't get there with just charter schools," Austin told TIME. "We are completely agnostic whether kids are served with charter schools or other district schools — we just want all kids in good schools and we want parents to have a seat at the table."
A seat at the table is exactly what Samuel Radford III, of Buffalo, wants. "When you're powerless, you recognize things that give you power," he said. "This law would give me the right to confront a principal, a teacher, a school board and they don't get to say no. They can't turn me away. This puts the power in my hands to decide the destiny of my child."
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