Education Week - January 15, 2014 - 6

New Crop of Advocacy Groups Sets Sights on Parents
Recruits promoting
charters, choice
By Katie Ash
Jose A. Herrera, the father of two
school-age children in New York
City, said he used to be completely
disengaged from politics-he didn't
even vote.
But that all changed after he successfully
teamed up with other parents
to push to move his elder son's
charter school from a community
center into a real school building,
where students would have access
to a cafeteria, a library, and a gym.
That victory inspired Mr. Herrera
to begin volunteering for Families for
Excellent Schools, a New York Citybased
education advocacy organization
that trains parents to lobby for
the expansion and support of charter
schools in New York City and Connecticut.
Now, he's an organizer for
the group, working with parents
much like himself.
In urban districts across the coun-
try, a new crop of education advocacy
organizations promoting ideas like
school choice and free-market practices
for K-12 public education has
begun tapping into parents like Mr.
Herrera to press for changes to the
public school system at the state and
local levels.
While the groups-such as Stu-
dentsFirst, Stand for Children, and
Parent Revolution-insist they are
helping solidify and sustain grassroots
movements that are already
bubbling up from local communities,
others criticize them for strategically
mobilizing parents for what they say
is a national agenda fueled by outside
groups and funding streams.
"I feel like what's emerged [with
these new groups] is a strategic response
on the part of certain organizations
that are extremely wellfunded
by outside organizations,
which is something different from
traditional education organizations,"
said John S. Rogers, an associate
professor in the graduate school of
education and information studies
at the University of California, Los
Angeles, who studies grassroots
community organizing in education.
Debate Over Role
These new groups tend to share an
opposition to teachers' unions, said
Mr. Rogers, and a general ideological
uniformity that favors free-market
changes and school choice that set
them apart from other political and
civic efforts from parent-focused education
groups.
The organizations targeting par-
ents have emerged as a broader set
of groups tries to exert influence over
education policy through state-level
lobbying and local activism. (See Education
Week, May 16, 2012.)
But Beth Doctor, the California
state outreach director for the Sacramento,
Calif.-based StudentsFirst,
sees it differently.
While the nationwide organiza-
tion, which was founded by Michelle
A. Rhee, a former chancellor of the
District of Columbia school system,
does actively seek out communities
to lobby for certain changes-such
as implementing teacher merit pay,
eliminating teacher tenure, and
expanding school choice options-
many of the parent cohorts that Ms.
Doctor works with formed on their
own and later connected with StudentsFirst,
she said.
Ms. Doctor describes her work as
providing a "bridge" to bring parents
into the political process. "We want
to break the complications down and
make the process as seamless as possible,"
she said.
Kellen N. Arno, the vice president
of membership for StudentsFirst,
agreed that the organization focuses
on hiring organizers with strong
local ties and partnering with local
community leaders who are already
working for change.
But, time is always a challenge
when working with parents, who are
already stretched between work and
his experience, authentically engaging
time-strapped parents is a real challenge,
in part because change does not
happen overnight.
"Sometimes there's no immediate
benefit from the work that we do," he
said. "You're fighting for something
you might not see."
Educating for Advocacy
That is exactly what some organizations,
like Stand for Children, an
education-policy advocacy organization
based in Boston and Portland,
Ore., are aiming to do.
Stand for Children has established
a leadership program for parents
called Stand UP-for Stand University
for Parents-a 10-week course
for parents of elementary students
during which they learn how to interpret
school data and grades, how
to build effective relationships with
teachers and administrators, how to
support their child's academic goals,
"They're tapping into what the
research suggests is very important
for improving student outcomes," he
said, such as teaching parents how to
be involved with their children's education
and how to create meaningful
relationships with their children's
teachers. Mr. Lubienski cited those
efforts as ways to create an authentic
grassroots leadership cohort.
However, Stand for Children has
announced that the program is undergoing
some changes and will no
longer exist in its current iteration.
Although the organization will still
hold parent-engagement classes, it is
unclear on what form they will take.
Trust in Teachers
But these groups are also up
against a culture of distrust of education
reforms and the political process,
said Patrick McGuinn, an associate
professor of political science at Drew
University in Madison, N.J. He wrote
munity. Only 20 percent agreed that
there should be more public charter
schools and vouchers, according to
the poll of about 1,000 parents.
The poll also found that when
asked who has the "right ideas" for
public education, teachers had the
highest credibility rating, with 81
percent of the responding parents
choosing them. Teachers were followed
by principals (77 percent) and
parent organizations (70 percent).
'Triggering' Change
Perhaps one of the most highprofile
examples of parents exerting
more direct control over their
neighborhood schools is the growth
of parent-trigger initiatives and laws
around the country.
Those laws, which allow parents
to initiate a turnaround process that
could include the transformation
of their local school into a charter
through a petition, have only been
invoked in one of the seven states
with them on the books-California.
At least 25 state legislatures,
however, have considered such laws
since the first one passed in California
in 2010.
Ben Austin, the executive director
of the Los Angeles-based Parent Revolution,
which has led parent-trigger
initiatives in the state, said the laws
are intended to distribute power to
all parents to advocate high-quality
schools.
"Fundamentally, parents do have
power already if you're upper-middleclass
and educated. In many ways,
what this movement is about is making
sure that poor parents, workingclass
parents, undocumented parents,
and parents of color have a similar
amount of the power that middleand
upper-middle-class parents
enjoy," he said.
That requires many of those un-
raising their children, he said, so it
is the organization's job to "do all the
legwork to get [the parents] to the
capital, ... so that everything is cued
up, teed up, and ready to go, so all
[parents] have to do is show up."
That mentality could jeopardize
the authenticity of their efforts, said
Jeanne Allen, the president emeritus
and founder of the Washington-based
Center for Education Reform, a provoucher,
pro-charter advocacy and
research group, which is considering
extending its parent-outreach efforts.
Organizations should focus their
efforts on fostering and supporting
a smaller number of parents who
have the time, energy, and desire to
be politically engaged in education,
rather than amassing a laundry list
of parents who are more superficially
tied to the issues, she said.
"The reform movement needs to understand
and spend time cultivating
small pods of people who can literally
become the experts that we in the
policy world support, as opposed to
us being the experts and the parents
following along behind us," she said.
Mr. Herrera, the parent-turnedorganizer
for Families for Excellent
Schools in New York, admitted that in
6 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 15, 2014 | www.edweek.org
and what the role of the parents is in
their child's education.
While Stand for Children works in
11 states, Stand UP only operates in
Arizona, Illinois, and Tennessee.
Ginger Spickler is a parent and
a member of Stand for Children in
Memphis, Tenn., who has facilitated
two sessions of Stand UP courses.
Ms. Spickler comes from a family of
advocates and has always felt empowered
to push for changes to the education
system, but Memphis is much
different from the small western Kentucky
town where she grew up. "You
have a lot of low-income, low-educated
parents who don't feel empowered in
the same way [as I do]. They don't
feel empowered to talk to their kid's
teacher, much less go to the school
board," she said.
Stand UP teaches parents how to
start conversations with principals
and teachers and how to become advocates
for their children, she said.
Christopher Lubienski, an associate
professor of educational organization
and leadership at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
said that Stand UP represents an authentic
effort to engage and empower
parents in their children's education.
Jose A. Herrera, an organizer with
Families for Excellent Schools, an
advocacy group in New York City,
meets with fellow parent Cynthia
Robinson at a bagel shop in the
city's Brooklyn borough.
a paper for the American Enterprise
Institute, a Washington-based think
tank, about parents becoming involved
in education activism.
"Parents by far trust teachers more
as messengers of information than
any other source, so to the degree
that these groups ignore or are unable
to persuade teachers about the
kinds of reforms they're advocating,
they'll have a hard time convincing
[parents]" he said. "Charter schools
are a tough sell to teachers."
Representatives from the 1.5 million-member
American Federation
of Teachers suggest that these new
and vocal groups might not be representative
of parents nationwide.
They point to a nationwide parent
poll conducted in July by Hart Research
Associates. It found that 77
percent of respondents felt the best
way to improve public education was
to make sure all children have access
to a good public school in their com-
derserved parent groups to change
the way they view themselves, Mr.
Austin said. To that end, Parent
Revolution provides parents with
curricula that addresses communityorganizing
strategies and education
policy, he said.
"Even if we disagree with the deci-
sions they're making, it's our job to
give them the tools to make smart
decisions and then back them up,"
said Mr. Austin.
Critics, such as Mr. Rogers of UCLA,
however, point to the contentious
and divisive fights in communities
where parent-trigger laws have been
invoked as evidence that such movements
do little to empower local parents
and communities. (See Education
Week, Oct. 16, 2013.)
In those communities, "you've
seen an erosion of social trust, both
between teacher and parents but
also among parents," he said. "For
me, the critical question would be ...
whether such efforts build capacity
and leadership over the long term,
and whether [they] build a sense of
social trust that will enable communities
to direct policies in their own
interests for the longer term."
The Charters & Choice blog tracks news
and trends on this issue.
www.edweek.org/go/charterschoice
Brendan Hoffman for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org/go/charterschoice http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - January 15, 2014

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