By Joseph Perkins 

California public schools received their annual report cards last month. On the state’s 10-point grading scale — with 10 being the highest and 1 the lowest — Desert Trails Elementary School earned a 1.

The parents of school children enrolled in Desert Trails almost certainly were not pleased. But they got good news this week when a San Bernardino County Superior Court judge approved their takeover of the failing public school.

Unde rCalifornia’s first-in-the-nation “parent trigger” law, enacted in 2010 over the predictable objections of the state’s teachers’ unions, parents are empowered to take the lead in reforming the worst of the worst state schools.

The Desert Trails Parents Union — gotta love the group’s name which, no doubt, the teachers union finds un-amusing — exercised the trigger earlier this year when a majority of parents with kids in the school signed a petition, as required by the new state law, seeking to convert their children’s elementary school to a charter school.

Officials for the Adelanto School District, which oversees Desert Trails, refused to accept the petition, on the specious grounds that several parents had changed their minds. But Judge Steve Malone rejected the school district’s claim and upheld the parents’ petition.

He ordered the district to immediately solicit proposals from charter school operators to take over operations at Desert Trails.

Now, I will not go so far as to suggest that Judge Malone’s ruling will have as far reaching an effect as, say, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Nor am I persuaded that students mired in California’s worst-performing public schools, like Desert Trails Elementary, will benefit as much from the parent trigger as from school vouchers.

Nevertheless, as school reform goes, California’s parent trigger law is a pretty big deal.

That’s because parents now have a club they can wield when schools, like Desert Trails, fail to properly educate their children. Principals and teachers at under-performing schools are now on notice that, if they don’t get their act together, parents just might pursue a hostile takeover.

Adelanto School Board President Carlos Mendoza said he will urge his board to appeal Judge Malone’s decision. It’s not that he opposes the conversion of Desert Trails Elementary to a charter school, he said. It’s just that he wants school board “input” in the choice of charter operator.

Well, what good is a parent trigger if school boards have de facto veto power over decisions parents make?

If Mendoza and his fellow school board members want to maintain their absolute control over Desert Springs, or other schools within their district, all they have to do is make sure those schools do not sink to a level of academic performance that parents are entitled by state law to invoke the trigger.

This article first appeared in UnionWatch.org.

MARCH 7, 2012

By LARRY SAND

Last month, Education Week published “What Research Says About School Choice,” in which nine scholars analyze the results of various studies concerning “school choice” — the quaint notion that parents should be able to choose where to send their kids to school. The report boasts no ecstatic claims, nothing about lions and lambs, no Hallelujah moments — just a sober look at the 20 year-old movement to end mandatory zip code school assignments. Some of the findings:

Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both. Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time. Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact.

Among voucher programs, these studies consistently find that vouchers are associated with improved test scores in the affected public schools. The size of the effect in these studies varies from modest to large. No study has found a negative impact.

A third area of study has been the fiscal impact of school choice. Even under conservative assumptions about such questions as state and local budget sensitivity to enrollment changes, the net impact of school choice on public finances is usually positive and has never been found to be negative.

Charter Movement

Also last week, the California Charter School Association released its second annual “Portrait of the Movement: How Charters are Transforming California Education.” Not a sales pitch or compilation of cherry-picked data data, the CCSA report is an honest look at California’s 900 plus charter schools which educate about 400,000 students. A few of its many findings:

Charters that serve low-income students exceeded their prediction at high rates relative to the traditional system; students at charters serving low-income populations are five times more likely than their non-charter counterparts to be served by a school in the top 5th percentile.

Charter schools are more likely than non-charters to have both above average academic performance and above average growth. They are less likely than non-charters to perform below both state averages of status and growth.

A small number of low-performing charters were closed after the 2010-11 school year.

Earlier this month, the results of a study about school choice and its effects on crime in North Carolina, conducted by David J. Deming, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, were released. This study examined neither vouchers nor charter schools, but rather a district-wide open enrollment policy whereby any student could apply to any school within the district. If a popular school had more enrollees than seats, a lottery was held. The rather stunning findings:

In general, high-risk students commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning a school choice lottery.  Among male high school students at high risk of criminal activity, winning admission to a first-choice school reduced felony arrests from 77 to 43 per 100 students over the study period (2002-2009).  The attendant social cost of crimes committed decreased by more than 35 percent.  Among high-risk middle school students, admittance by lottery to a preferred school reduced the average social cost of crimes committed by 63 percent (due chiefly to a reduction in violent crime), and reduced the total expected sentence of crimes committed by 31 months (64 percent).

The study finds that the overall reductions in criminal activity are concentrated among the top 20 percent of high-risk students, who are disproportionately African American, eligible for free lunch, with more days of absence and suspensions than the average student.

Hence, the ability to choose the school that a child attends not only increases chances of a better education, but also greatly decreases the likelihood that the youth will become a criminal. And not only doesn’t it cost anything, lower crime rates have been shown to be a boon to local economies.

Parent Trigger

Another kind of school choice was recently attempted by parents at Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, a Mojave Desert town in eastern California. Tired of low test scores, some parents organized and got more than 50 percent of the parents at the school to sign a “Parent Trigger” petition, which would give them the right to choose a different type of school governance. Their choices included firing the principal, removing some of the faculty, shutting the school down or turning it in to a charter school. Linda Serrato, Deputy Communication Director of Parent Revolution, explains that this particular petition laid out two options: “…negotiate with the parents to give them the autonomy they need to turn around their school, or they will use the Parent Trigger to take their school away from the district and convert it into a community charter school, run by local parents and educators.”

However, the Wall Street Journal reports that the California Teachers Association, a union that will go to great lengths to maintain the status quo and thus its political power, sent out “representatives” to Adelanto to disseminate “information” to the parents there. (“Union speak” alert: “Representatives” and “information” really mean sending unidentified operatives to petition-signers’ homes and feeding them lies about the petition that they just signed.)

The unionistas’ door-to-door rescission campaign managed to scare enough signers into revoking their signatures, thus nullifying the proposed action. CTA pulled the same stunt in Compton, the first time parents rose up and “pulled the Trigger.”  But after a legal challenge, in which the parents were successfully represented pro bono by the firm of Kirkland and Ellis, the Trigger went forward, and produced the opening of a new charter school. Apparently, Kirkland and Ellis are ready for a second go-round and will represent the parents in Adelanto.

Overdue Idea

School choice is an idea whose time is long overdue. Scholars know it. Charter school attendees know it. Crime free youths in North Carolina know it. Parent activists in the Mojave Desert know it.

The nearsighted, the naysayers, and the beneficiaries of the current failing status quo — moribund educrats, reactionary school boards and power-mad teacher unions — realize they could be in trouble and will desperately fight to extinguish the fires of reform whenever and wherever they can. But as parents and taxpayers become enlightened about the advantages of choice and empowered  to take action, their opponents — with their lame assertions, name calling, sophistry and bullying — will see their hegemony wilt and ultimately will be rendered powerless.

About the author: Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network — a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.

By BRIAN CALLE

It is no big surprise that, in recent years, California has been far from a leader in public policy and good governance reforms.

Every once and awhile there is an exception. Last year’s exception came when former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state legislature passed an education reform — the parent trigger — in the face of union opposition which has good potential for giving parents, rather than unions, more control over the direction of their children’s schools.

The parent trigger law allows parents of children in a failing school to petition for the school to be transformed into a charter school, reformed or closed altogether. But now that it is being utilized in failing districts, unions and bureaucrats are trying to undermine the reform.

Other states are now considering similar laws modeled after the parent trigger, while some within the education establishment in California, including teachers unions, are attempting to subvert the law. Compton, California has become ground zero for the protecting the important reform; so far parents are winning.

Parents of students at McKinley Elementary in Compton won a decisive battle March 21 for school-reform advocates, parents and students alike. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Anthony J. Mohr ruled that the Compton district violated the First Amendment rights of parents who petitioned to reform the school when the district administrators imposed onerous standards for verifying parent petitions. Parents, by a 61 percent majority, invoked the parent trigger petitioning the district to turn McKinley into a charter school.

The Compton Education Association, the teachers union, vigorously opposed the petition, citing recent performance gains and contending that the law was not meant for schools that are improving. But McKinley is one of the worst-performing schools in California, ranking in the bottom 10 percent of all schools.

Regulatory Impositions

Aside from union opposition, parents had to endure draconian procedures imposed by district administrators to verify their signatures on petitions. They forced petitioning parents to present a photo ID and participate in an interview with administrators.

Going further, on Feb. 24, the Compton district’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously to oppose the parent petitions, for a variety of reasons, all without substance: Some of the signatures might not have been valid, dates were missing, birthdates were incorrect, there were typos on the petition, and parents did not provide enough supporting documentation.

In a statement, the School Board said they did so because had the petition taken effect McKinley Elementary School would have been removed from “CUSD oversight” with authority being transferred “to a Los Angeles-based charter school organization designated by ‘parent trigger’ petitioners.” The school district did not want to lose control of McKinley, and surely the union did not want to lose the teaching positions.

Parents, with the help of a local advocacy group, Parent Revolution, sued the district over the petition verification process, calling it unconstitutional. Judge Mohr agreed.

The battle over McKinley Elementary in Compton has statewide and national implications. If the parents are successful in using the parent trigger, they open the door for parents and students in other failing school districts throughout California

And they illustrate to elected officials in other states that reforms geared at giving parents more choice and voice in education are essential.