This site has highlighted Ben Austin’s and the Parent Revolution’s fight to install a “parent’s trigger” – the ability for the parents of California school children to demand improvement in their local schools. Now the movement, just taking root in Los Angeles and California, is about to go national.
Under the parent’s trigger law, if 51% of the parents of a failing school sign a petition they can redirect the operation of the school by turning to charter school operators or forcing administrative and staff changes at the school. As Austin wrote here last year, “The concept recognized a truth that school officials often discount: Parents are in the best position to make decisions about what’s right for their kids.”
With the parent trigger now California law, the Wall Street Journal’s David Feith reported recently that state legislatures in five states are considering following California’s example. In fact, Feith reported that, “incoming House Education Committee Chair John Kline (R., Minn.) says that he supports parent trigger, and that Congress "can make sure federal policy does not stand in their way."”
Austin says that one group of Los Angeles parents are about to announce they have gathered enough signatures to pull the trigger.
This will not end the fight as the education establishment is stubbornly against the parent trigger concept. The head of the California Federation of Teachers called the parent trigger a “lynch mob provision.”
Still, as Feith points out, about 13% of California’s 10,000 schools qualify as schools “eligible for triggering if they have failed to make "adequate yearly progress," according to state standards, for four consecutive years.”
Something has to be done to stir up school improvements and the parent trigger just may be the ticket. The concept will soon be tested.
As with other California experiments, apparently the parent trigger idea is about to effect policy beyond California’s borders.