The Buffalo-Rochester Parent Trigger Coalition, a group of community organizations and education activists, is renewing a push for a parent trigger law for the school systems in both cities.
Parent trigger laws, first initiated in California, give parents a tool to transform persistently failing schools. Parents can petition the school’s board to enact one or more reform options, such as converting the school into a charter school, firing the principal, or making sweeping changes to the school’s staff.
Allen Williams, president of the New York Center for Educational Justice and a former Rochester school board member, is leading the effort to get New York lawmakers to take up legislation drafted last year by Senator Mark Grisanti and Assembly member Crystal Peoples-Stokes.
Also, the coalition is critical of a recent proposal by Rochester school board vice-president Van White. Part of White’s proposal supports trigger laws, but also recommends instituting parent report cards in Rochester’s schools.
White recommends that parents undergo a self-evaluation of their involvement in their child’s education. The results would be compiled into a grade for the school, based on factors like the school’s attendance rate, parent participation in School-based Planning Teams, percentage of parents who sign and return report cards, and the percentage of parents who regularly use the district’s Parent Connect system to check on their child’s attendance and test scores.
The coalition says White’s proposal amounts to “cherry picking” parents who can petition the board for trigger reforms.
Seven states have passed trigger law legislation, and efforts to get trigger legislation passed are under way in about half-dozen more. Supporters of trigger laws got a boost of encouragement earlier this month when the parents of a school in Southern California successfully converted a failing elementary school into a charter school. It marked the first time the law has been invoked.
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2013.
“The coalition says that White’s proposal amounts to “cherry picking” parents who can petition the board for trigger reforms.”
The problem with most reporting, even the lengthier, more detailed reporting found at City Newspaper, is demonstrated in this excerpt. I know Commissioner White’s proposal very well, yet I can’t see how anyone – with or without that knowledge – can come to the above conclusion. Unless the coalition articulated a string of hypotheticals too long to be included in this report, I can only respond by calling it (the coalition’s response) utter nonsense. Is there more than meets the eye here?
Furthermore, this coalition does support parent report cards, according to the article above. But they disparage Commisioner White’s articulation of parent report cards in the form of self-assessments. If folks have better ideas how to meaningfully measure parent involvement, this Board of Education is anxious to hear those ideas. White’s proposal is very much “a work n progress”. We all benefit from the dialogue these ideas engender, and the proposal morphs and grows with the dialogue. If you ask me, the only “cherry picking” going on is that the Board is picking the most fruitful ideas from the public dialogue!
Willa Powell
Rochester City School Board member
Commissioner Powell-
This report was woefully incomplete. The Coalition’s objection to the White proposal referred to the section of “Responsible/Involved” Parent Trigger that proposes that only parents with a “track record” of involvement are eligible to pull the trigger. Here is a link to the White proposal: http://www.scribd.com/doc/120871170/VanWhi…
Also, you are incorrect on your point on the parent report card. The Coalition has no position on whether the district should report on key parent engagement data.
My personal opinion is that you should be doing this anyway, by virtue of ESEA parent involvement requirements and your local parent involvement policy that promises the public an annual report on parent engagement metrics (but that is never delivered). I’d remind you , all of your federal titled funding (close to $50M) is conditioned on your involving parents in a meaningful way. Hard to claim you are complying when –by your the board’s own admission–you aren’t even yet collecting the data on their involvement.
Carrie Remis
http://www.parentpowerproject.org
So, if I am reading your response correctly, you, Carrie Remis, unequivocally support Parent Report Cards. Are you speaking for the coalition, or only for yourself?
If you read the link that you posted, you will see that Van’s proposal links trigger laws to parent report cards that aggregate the parent involvement of the school. It does not rate individual parents, and therefore, is not “cherry picking” parents to determine whether individual parents have the right to participate in a petition drive.
Van’s proposal prevents outside groups, supported by corporate and/or quasi-philanthropic money, to swoop into a community and convince the requisite number of parents to sign a petition that they may or may not have been given the opportunity to read and understand before signing.
Supposing for a moment, though, that we COULD “cherry pick” parent eligibility to sign a trigger petition. Most schools that have poor outcomes also have poor attendance rates. Taking into account normal childhood illness, much of that absenteeism is the result of parents not placing a premium on getting their kids to school everyday. Does it make sense to put the decision to totally revamp a school into the hands of parents who haven’t lived up to a minimum parental obligation (under the law), and whose child’s absence helped create the problem? (Kids can’t learn if they aren’t in school.).
Doesn’t it make more sense to (further) empower parents who have already done everything in their power to support the success of their children, by getting their kids to school everyday, and by using the existing systems of parent input into the school improvement plans (SIPs) at the School Based Planning Team table? To do otherwise really is like putting a loaded gun into the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to use it.
Willa Powell
Willa-
As I said, the parent trigger coalition has no position on parent report cards. The Parent Power Project is only one member of the coalition; our endorsement of the idea would depend on the details.
Assuming White’s proposal isn’t just an election year stunt, creating a parent report card would require a change of the parent involvement policy. Federal statute says that parents and the community have a right to participate in this process and we would take full advantage of the opportunity. It’s worth noting that the district is terribly out of compliance with the federal requirements that give parents power to shape the parent involvement policy and programming, a point glossed over every year in the district’s consolidated application for federal funding.
In a nut shell, PPP’s support of a parent report card would hinge on three things: 1) they are supported by the district parent council 2) they are used as a measure of effectiveness in the evaluation of principals, parent liaisons, superintendent and any other staff with explicit parent involvement duties and 3) the school-based planning policy is updated to mandate that each school improvement plan include the parent report card and a specific action plan for increasing parent involvement and removing barriers that includes a reporting of Title I funds spent on school-level parent activities.
Carrie Remis
Executive director of Parent Power Project
http://www.parentpowerproject.org
It is unfortunate and regrettable that some have suggested that this proposal (for a parent report card) may be an “election year stunt”. Instead of attacking and discrediting ideas with such simplistic statements, we would all do well to keep an open mind when discussing proposals which might make our District better.
Van-I agree, the goal should be improving the district and I believe I added concrete ideas to do so. If your “parent report card” idea is to be anything more than rhetoric, then it must be institutionalized in policy. By law, parents have a right to participate in that policy amendment process, it cannot be bypassed. Have you set a date for the parent involvement policy review hearing?
District officials only seem able to see “parent engagement” in terms of what parents are not doing. The district is blind to the barriers the system erects to this engagement and blind to its lack of accountability to the public on how it spends tax dollars earmarked for parent engagement programming. When was the last time the district did the annual evaluation of their parent program that the law requires? Never. Has the board ever bothered to monitor what school improvement plans say about engaging parents? If you did, you’d see that the SIPs are almost comical for their lack of evaluation and metrics. How many times has the board disregarded parent concerns about being excluded from SBPTs during the the bi-ennial review of shared-decisionmaking required by state regs? Every time.
If you want the public to believe this is anything more than an election year stunt, then link your report card to APPR, align it with regulatory requirements for involving parents in school improvement planning and evaluation. And by all means, involve parents in the process of putting it into policy. Use the report cards to correct long-standing problems with the way the district works with parents, send the signal that the district will (finally) be accountable for its parent engagement program.
And here’s another idea for your plan… After you institute the parent report card and are faced with the bald facts that the district is incapable of engaging parents in any meaningful way, put the parent engagement program out to bid. The district already does this for teacher professional development, why not parent development? There are at least 5 human services agencies with authentic relationships with Rochester parents and proven track records of working with adult learners.