When Turnout Leads to Turnaround
There's still some pumpkin pie left in the fridge, but the "best and worst" lists of the year already are trickling out.
The first of these I've seen on the education front comes from the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank at Stanford University.
The group's Top 10 education events of 2011 include "the reinvigoration of school choice via opportunity scholarships and vouchers" (good) and the Atlanta cheating scandal (bad).
I think most of us would agree that cheating -- especially when it involves collusion by dozens of teachers, principals and administrators -- is a bad thing. However, some of the other items on the Hoover Institution's list are more open to debate.
On the think tank's "good" list is the California State Board of Education's rule that would force a public school to convert to a charter school (or undergo some other "transformational remedy") if more than half of the school's parents request it.
Frankly, getting that many parents to sign a petition for just about anything should be considered some sort of victory.
Often, a small -- yet vocal -- minority makes the decisions on behalf of parents who are either too busy, or too disengaged, to participate in the process.
A few years ago I wrote about Las Vegas' public schools planning to adopt stricter dress codes -- typically tan or navy skirts and pants, worn with solid colored collared shirts. The Clark County School District called this "standard student attire," which is obviously a lot less scary to parents than "uniform." (The semantics still weren't enough of a red herring to dissuade the ACLU from challenging the policy.)
The Clark County School District's policy required that majority of parents surveyed had to be in favor of the change. But the policy didn't set a minimum requirement for how many surveys actually had to be returned.
At one elementary school with over 800 students, just 24 surveys were returned, with 70 percent in favor of adopting the stricter dress code. A middle school, with over 1,500 students, also switched to the stricter dress code after getting 75 surveys, with the majority in favor of the policy change.
For more on California's "parent trigger" rules, check out a recent editorial from the Los Angeles Times (click here for the link).
According to the reporting, a Compton elementary school was the first test of the policy, and the community was soon embroiled in the "stuff of high educational drama — claims of intimidation from both sides, an intransigent school board that put parents through ridiculous hoops to verify their signatures and, eventually, legal defeat when the petition was found lacking on largely technical grounds."
Even if the Compton test case was messy, the new policy seems to be having a positive effect in unexpected ways. The L.A. Times reports that throughout the state parents are forming advocacy groups aimed at improving their own public schools.
While it might not be as quick as pulling a trigger, that kind of engagement can lead to real reform.
Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email me at erichmond@ewa.org. I'm also on Twitter @EWAEmily.
The first of these I've seen on the education front comes from the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank at Stanford University.
The group's Top 10 education events of 2011 include "the reinvigoration of school choice via opportunity scholarships and vouchers" (good) and the Atlanta cheating scandal (bad).
I think most of us would agree that cheating -- especially when it involves collusion by dozens of teachers, principals and administrators -- is a bad thing. However, some of the other items on the Hoover Institution's list are more open to debate.
On the think tank's "good" list is the California State Board of Education's rule that would force a public school to convert to a charter school (or undergo some other "transformational remedy") if more than half of the school's parents request it.
Frankly, getting that many parents to sign a petition for just about anything should be considered some sort of victory.
Often, a small -- yet vocal -- minority makes the decisions on behalf of parents who are either too busy, or too disengaged, to participate in the process.
A few years ago I wrote about Las Vegas' public schools planning to adopt stricter dress codes -- typically tan or navy skirts and pants, worn with solid colored collared shirts. The Clark County School District called this "standard student attire," which is obviously a lot less scary to parents than "uniform." (The semantics still weren't enough of a red herring to dissuade the ACLU from challenging the policy.)
The Clark County School District's policy required that majority of parents surveyed had to be in favor of the change. But the policy didn't set a minimum requirement for how many surveys actually had to be returned.
At one elementary school with over 800 students, just 24 surveys were returned, with 70 percent in favor of adopting the stricter dress code. A middle school, with over 1,500 students, also switched to the stricter dress code after getting 75 surveys, with the majority in favor of the policy change.
For more on California's "parent trigger" rules, check out a recent editorial from the Los Angeles Times (click here for the link).
According to the reporting, a Compton elementary school was the first test of the policy, and the community was soon embroiled in the "stuff of high educational drama — claims of intimidation from both sides, an intransigent school board that put parents through ridiculous hoops to verify their signatures and, eventually, legal defeat when the petition was found lacking on largely technical grounds."
Even if the Compton test case was messy, the new policy seems to be having a positive effect in unexpected ways. The L.A. Times reports that throughout the state parents are forming advocacy groups aimed at improving their own public schools.
While it might not be as quick as pulling a trigger, that kind of engagement can lead to real reform.
Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email me at erichmond@ewa.org. I'm also on Twitter @EWAEmily.
Labels: California parent trigger, choice, Clark County School District, federal_reform, Hoover Institution, leaders, Los Angeles Times, Stanford, turnaround
posted by Emily Richmond at
3:00 AM
1 Comments:
No, it's more complicated than you make it out to be, Emily.
The LA Times seems determined to keep flacking for Parent Revolution, the billionaire-funded Astroturf organization behind the Parent Trigger, which has now basically abandoned the Parent Trigger after it turned out to be an obvious (and quite predictable) fiasco in Compton. (2010 was really the year of the Parent Trigger -- that's when the law passed and when Parent Revolution used it against a challenged school in Compton. In 2011, the Parent Trigger fell apart. So Hoover's timing is off.)
As you say, Parent Revolution is now dabbling in various school districts claiming to try to organize parents to form advocacy groups to improve their own schools. How is that different from PTAs and PTOs? That's not clear. A few points, though:
-- Parent Revolution has made a practice of attacking teachers, painting them as the enemy, the obstacle to improving education. (Clearly, the LA Times is on that page too.) But is it really feasible to improve education while positioning teachers as the enemy rather than working as partners with them? I hope that's a rhetorical question. Only those who have no experience in or contact with schools could see waging war on teachers as an effective way to reform education.
-- Speaking of those who have no experience in or contact with education, Parent Revolution has no track record -- it has never improved, transformed, reformed or otherwise done anything in a school (or, for that matter, been involved in any way in a school). Parent Revolution's only success has been in absolutely beguiling the gullible press. It would be beneficial if the Education Writers Association encouraged its members to be questioning and skeptical rather than passive and trusting (though I'm not clear whether the EWA's funders agree with me on that).
-- It appears to those of us who have followed Parent Revolution that its primary purpose with its new (albeit vague) strategy is to convince its funders that it's still doing something worth funding. But is it really the role of the press to help it convince its funders of that?
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