#parent trigger

Parent Trigger: Empowering Parents for Good

Tennessee could be the next state to join an education revolution. The revolution will be realized when their politicians stand up to teachers’ unions and take action.

A bill that’s known as a “parent trigger” bill recently stalled in the Tennessee state legislature. This is unfortunate, because this would have been a much-needed reform for the state.

Parent trigger laws are known as such because…

ADELANTO • A documentary film that campaigns for more school options for students and their parents nationwide will highlight California’s controversial Parent Trigger law and its execution at the former Desert Trails Elementary School.

“The Ticket”…

We the Parents, the new documentary about California’s cutting-edge Parent Trigger law, premiered in Beverly Hills last night, with an expert panel discussing the ups and downs of Parent Trigger laws.

Continue reading: The Informer

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Even in the short history of California’s parent-trigger law, what Watts parents did was novel: Instead of trying to force sweeping changes at Weigand Avenue Elementary School, they just wanted one change: Principal Irma Cobian gone.

Continue reading: News

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Nick O'Malley, The Age, April 27, 2013 Doreen Diaz says the worst thing about the Desert Trails elementary school in Adelanto, California, a desert city 150 kilometres or so from Los Angeles, was not that it failed to teach her children, but that its teachers did not even believe her children could learn.

Desert Trails, says Diaz, in her quiet, nuanced second-language English, was not just a failed school, but one without even the will to succeed. Teachers taught only subjects that were to be covered in upcoming public tests and abandoned them immediately after the exams. The school churned out children who were given no classes in physical education, art or music, children who could not read and who were destined to replicate the poverty of many of their parents.

So in 2011 Diaz and a group of parents took radical action and suddenly found themselves at the centre of one of America's new culture-war battlegrounds, the conflict over the rise of charter schools--schools that are largely publicly funded but operated by private companies.

Diaz and her friends began to use a controversial new Californian law, known as the parent trigger, that allows groups of parents to sack their school district, take over its administration and select a private operator to run their school as a charter.

The law has appealed so directly to conservatives--and to some liberals--across the country that it has spread fast, especially in the South, where distrust of government institutions is ingrained. It is estimated that since California passed the law it has become so widespread 25 per cent of American parents live in areas covered by parent trigger laws.

Driving the spread and use of the laws is a non-profit organisation called Parent Revolution. Parent Revolution helped Diaz and her friends pull the trigger at Desert Trails and is now in contact with parents from another two dozen schools, according to its founder, Ben Austin.

Hollywood's version of education is moving and inspirational.  It's sweet.  I just hope people don't bring these ideas into the voting booth or schools without doing their homework.

Here are some generalizations that supporters of this movie make which are untrue:

Anti-reform = Pro-union

Poor neighborhoods = bad schools (and bad schools are solely the result of bad teachers)

Yes, teachers really do regularly sit at their desks reading the newspaper amidst chaos i in the classroom.

Low academic performance is the result of a disservice to children that could only be due to local policies and can be saved only through national policies

It makes me scared to know how many people skim over articles supporting studentsfirst.org, ideas like Parent Trigger, and movies (MOVIES!) about education without understanding the affect these have on education.  Not the negative affect on teachers, not on unions, not on neighborhoods, but on the quality of education.