Parent trigger law invoked in California

1. It is important to note the New York State already has the functional equivalent of a parent trigger law,; therefore, new legislation is unjustified.

   When the NY State legislature enabled Charter Schools in the late 1990s, they included a provision for Conversion Charters. Any school in any district could apply to their “host” School Board for conversion to Charter School status. Like the California trigger law, a majority of the parents of the currently enrolled students had to demonstrate their support by signing a petition. No trigger event, such as academic failure, is needed to initiate application for Charter School status: only the commitment of individuals to form the necessary organization and prepare a proposal that meets the requirements.

   Buffalo alraedy has already tried and tested the conversion charter process, and has one of the only conversion charters in the state., so one does have to wonder why the Parent Trigger Law movement started in Buffalo. Perhaps they don’t know their own history.

   One reason I would not expect genuine parent movement toward seeking a conversion charter school, or any other Charter School in the event of successful passage of Parent Trigger legislation, can be found in the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) laws. If a parent is enrolled in a school that fails to make “adequate yearly progress” has the right under NCLB, to voluntarily transfer to a successful school elsewhere in the district, or to receive Supplimental Academic Setvices (SAS) in their current school. More often than not, parents chose another school. (Nevermind that doing so might mean their child will not receive the extra support they might need to catch up with his/her peers once he/she is transferred.). Why would a parent go to the trouble of organizing with his/her fellow parent, when NCLB offers a much lower-effort alternative?

   What I did expect, but never happened, was to see that schools that had special programs, such as SOTA, Wilson IB, or World of Inquiry to spin off, rather than face the possibility of sharing the pain of budget cuts that would be inevitable in the face of the State’s broken promises regarding Contract for Excellence funding. I guess it has always been easier to lobby a few School Board members and create pressure for more funding under the argument that the District needs a handful of “showcase” schools to prove that we aren’t universally incapable of producing successful students.

   Respectfully Submitted,

   Willa Powell
   Member, Rochester City School Board

2. Commissioner Powell-

   I wanted to respond to your post.

   The Buffalo parents are incredibly savvy and I assure you, “know their own history!” The Parent Trigger bill is actually different from the Charter School Act in a number of important ways:

   1) It only applies to schools that are persistently lowest achieving (PLA)

   2) For parents in PLA schools, it would grant a wider range of options than just charter conversions. PT would give parents collective bargaining power to make any number of changes the school has been unwilling to make (replacing staff, lengthening the school day, etc.) The “transformation” or “turnaround” options t would essentially give parents the muscle to make gridlocked and dysfunctional school-based planning teams act in the best interest of the students.

   3) The charter conversion option in the PT bill is actually a “restart” and as such, the union contract does not follow the conversion like it does in the Charter Act. The potential loss of union members (and dues) is the real reason why the union is fighting PT, the union didn’t object to the conversion option of the Charter Act because they got to keep their members.

   Regarding your point about NCLB:
   Section 1116 gives parents the right to transfer their student from a failing school to one that is not. Schools in improvement status or those deemed persistently dangerous, cannot be receiving schools. Bottom line: the district has more students with the right to transfer from their failing school than seats in “good schools”. This same provision allows districts to establish cooperative agreements with neighboring LEAs to educate these students when there aren’t enough seats in the home district. So the board actually has within its power, a lever to dilute the concentration of poverty it often points to as the reason so many of its schools are failing. Unless I’m mistaken, none of the board has used their bully pulpit to broker this conversation with surrounding districts. For metro school activists, this could be a concrete first step toward more sweeping change. Food for thought.

   Carrie Remis
   Executive Director
   Parent Power Project
   http://www.parentpowerproject.org

3. Carrie,

   Thank you for posting. Your closing note about provisions in NCLB Section 1116 are very interesting, and I assure you that it is not lack of interest in this option that prevents Boards like RCSD from using it: it is lack of information. We are not hearing recommendations from our Superintendent, nor has his administration offered reasons why we should not be pursuing “cooperative agreements” with our suburban neighbors to support students in failed/failing schools. I suspect there is a down-side that has not yet been disclosed, but the RCSD Board of Ed is very interested in regional schools, where our children can learn side-by-side with children from better economic circumstances (suburban students), so I assure you we will look into it.

   Regarding your other comments, they are an admission that the Parent Trigger concept is really an end-run around unions. That isn’t a parent priority, especially considering many of our parents are union members themselves, or wish they were. Union busting is a corporate agenda, and this is a blunt-instrument designed to kill or disable unions. If poor quality teachers is this issue, then the NY legislature should be looking at more legislation along the lines of 3020a reform, that will make the process (and cost) of removing downright harmful teachers from the teaching ranks. A small effort in that direction went into affect last year, and in theory, the new APPR process will identify the weakest teachers. Whether APPR has the regulatory teeth to get ride of ineffective teachers remains to be seen. Since we don’t know what the effect will be of changes already enacted, it is prudent to adopt a “wait and see” posture rather than charging full-bore into more radical action.

   As for you comments about dysfunctional School Based Planning Teams (SBPTs), I acknowledge that there are some of those. But the answer isn’t to do an end-run around them, any more than the answer is to do an end-run around unions. The answer is to work with SBPTs to help them overcome their obstacles. Nobody builds community, education communities or any other type of community, by fiat. If a parent community is looking to a Parent Trigger law to circumvent SBPTs, then they are overlooking many obvious and less drastic intermediate steps. SBPTs have a parent component. Are parents being adequately represented, or are they just rubberstamps for the administration. If the parent representatives are witnessing dysfunctional behavior on the part of other constituent groups, they need to bring this to the attention of their School Board Liaison, the Parent Advisory Council, and the Superintendent.

   Generally, though, reform efforts aren’t failing because of dysfunctional SBPTs. They are failing because there are some genuinely bad reform ideas out there being tried, and there are some genuinely good ideas that are woefully under-resourced. What this district could do with another $100 million a year, as Contract for Excellence promised, I can’t begin to tell you!

   Respectfully Submitted,

   Willa Powell
   School Board Member

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