Education Week - March 18, 2015 - 20

Statute Provided Leverage
For Once-Sidelined Parents
At troubled school, threat of drastic action got results
By Karla Scoon Reid
Pomona, Calif.
Lexington Elementary School exhibited
many of the classic characteristics of schools
that wage parent-trigger campaigns in California.
Revolving-door
leadership. Pervasive student
bullying. Low student expectations and
test scores. Dismal teacher morale.
By the time a local resident called the Los
Angeles-based parent-trigger advocacy group
Parent Revolution for help in 2013, parent
frustration and anger had reached a tipping
point.
But parents at the K-12 school never collected
a single signature to mount a petition
drive under California's controversial Parent
Empowerment Act. They never sought a charter
school conversion, either, one of the sweeping
structural actions permitted under the law.
Rather, they used the so-called parent-trigger
law as leverage. After months of organizing,
meeting, and negotiating, the parents,
principal, and superintendent signed a memorandum
of understanding last May committing
to stronger student discipline and improved
parent involvement for example. They
even marked the occasion with a huge fiesta.
"We were worried that the district didn't
want to work with us," Maria Garcia, a member
of the Pomona Parents and Community
Members Union, said in Spanish during a recent
conversation at a local Starbucks, where
Lexington parents often gather.
Everyone involved in the negotiations agrees
that the threat of using options under the
parent-trigger was ever-present throughout
the discussions about Lexington. The school
is located about 30 miles east of Los Angeles,
and about 90 percent of the school's 600 students
are Hispanic and come from low-income
families.
Today, all parties say they are pleased
with the agreement, which included hiring a
teacher on special assignment in charge of student
discipline, creating three new computer
labs, adding extracurricular sports like soccer
and basketball, and holding parent education
sessions on subjects ranging from nutrition to
bullying.
So how did Lexington avoid a full-blown
parent-trigger campaign like the one that
transformed an Adelanto, Calif., school into a
charter, or the divisive petition drive currently
underway in Anaheim, Calif.?
The key players involved in Lexington's
negotiations believe it took persistence, a detailed
assessment of needs, empowered leadership,
and a willingness to accept responsibility
for past missteps.
Pomona Unified School District Superintendent
Richard Martinez, who was familiar
with California's drama-filled parent-trigger
ABOVE:
Parent volunteer Maria Garcia
kisses her daughter, Vanessa,
after helping students in a
kindergarten class at Lexington
Elementary School in Pomona,
Calif. With the help of Parent
Revolution, a parent advocacy
group, parents at the school
negotiated with the administration
to address problems.
campaigns, said he was determined to take a
different route.
"You've got to let that [parent] frustration
and anger come out," Mr. Martinez said during
a recent interview in the school principal's
office. "That's something you as a leader ... get
paid to do, to take a few of those hits-sometimes
a lot of those hits."
Honest Conversations
OPPOSITE:
From left, Excellent Educational
Solutions team members Jesus
Sanchez, Chief Strategy Officer;
Alfonso Flores, Founder and CEO;
and Angel Garcia, Chief Operations
Officer; promote collaboration
between parents and school
administrators on school
improvement.
That's not to say that Lexington's "nontrigger"
campaign was easy. During the early
stages of the process, the school's principal left
for a position with another district. Over a sixyear
period Lexington has had five principals.
Compounding the school's longstanding troubles
was the city of Pomona itself. Pomona, where
almost a third of residents live below the poverty
line, has been grappling with violent crime for
years. In January 2014, a man was shot in the
park adjacent to Lexington's heavily gated campus
just as students were being dismissed for the
'Trigger' Law
Shows Nuance
After 5 Years
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
ence so far has motivated only a few
states to follow its lead in adopting
a parent-trigger law as a model for
school overhauls: Six states have adopted
parent-trigger inspired laws
since 2010. This year lawmakers
in six more states are considering
parent-trigger legislation, according
to the National Conference of State
Legislatures. Amendments proposed
to laws in California and Texas this
year would increase the number eligible
schools.
The California Parent Empowerment
Act allows parents whose
children attend chronically low-performing
schools to force districts to
enact sweeping education reforms
that range from hiring a new principal
and replacing staff to transforming
the school into a charter. Parents
must garner support by petition from
50 percent of students' parents, plus
one, to set the law in motion.
Most of the handful of schools
where parents have used the law
serve predominantly Hispanic and
African-American students from lowincome
families, explained Alfonso
Flores, the chief executive officer of
the Excellent Educational Solutions,
a private consulting firm founded by
former parent-trigger community organizers.
However, he said education
reformers' egos, in some cases, can
muddy debates and lose sight of those
critical societal pressures.
"Parents just want to feel like their
child has a shot at the American
Dream," Mr. Flores said. "They don't
give a hoot about the politics."
Meanwhile, Parent Revolution, a
nonprofit created to support parents
choosing to use the parent-trigger
law, is seeking new leadership after
longtime executive director Ben Austin
resigned late last year. Parent
Revolution, which has drawn the ire
of critics who see it as divisive, selfpromoting,
and yielding few tangible
results, rebuffs detractors' assessments
of the group, and remains undeterred
that the parent-trigger law
is a viable education reform tool.
"We've always said that we're trying
to spread a movement, not an
organization," Gabe Rose, Parent
Revolution's chief strategy officer, said
during an interview at the group's
downtown Los Angeles office, where
the décor is inspired by Silicon Valley
technology firms. "We desperately
want more parent organizations and
other allies to pick up this work."
'Wild West'
But parents living outside of California
haven't shown much appetite
to take the parent-trigger plunge.
In fact, a spokeswoman for the National
pta, the nation's largest parentadvocacy
organization, said the Alexandria,
Va.-based group does not have
20 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 18, 2015 | www.edweek.org
an official position on the law.
So far, nationally, only one school,
Desert Trails Elementary School
in Adelanto, Calif., has been transformed
into a charter while another
six schools in the state have used the
parent-trigger law in some way to secure
changes on their campuses.
Ms. Romero said lawmakers often
overlook the importance of monitoring
how a law is implemented. "If you
"
Parents just want to
feel like their child has
a shot at the American
Dream. They don't
give a hoot about the
politics."
ALFONSO FLORES
Excellent Educational Solutions
don't know the law, you can't use the
law," she added.
Ohio's parent-trigger pilot program
in Columbus may have fallen victim
to this pitfall. Greg Harris, executive
director of the pro-charter nonprofit
group StudentsFirst Ohio, said Columbus
parents received little to no
information about the state's parenttrigger
law. Under the law, it was up
to the school district to publicize the
option to parents.
"Parents will do their homework
and will look for other opportunities
for their kids," Mr. Harris said. "It's too
soon to call parent trigger a failure [in
Ohio.] It hasn't really had its day."
However, John Rogers, an associate
professor in ucla's Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies,
predicts the parent-trigger law may
have run its course in California.
Mr. Rogers, who co-authored an upcoming
research paper about the law,
for the journal Teachers College Record,
explained that the parent-trigger
law was a byproduct of the nation's
crippling fiscal crisis, which ultimately
left public schools facing steep budget
cuts and angered some parents who
already felt their schools were underfunded.
Now, California is injecting
more money into public schools, and
the state's new funding law requires
parental input.
Calling it an "old Wild West metaphor,"
Mr. Rogers said the law "taps
into a real frustration at the core of
many parents' experiences, but it deflects
from the real cause of that frustration."
Instead
of shifting power from a "recalcitrant
bureaucracy to parents with
a holster," he said developing empowered
relationships among parents and
educators would be more effective for
the entire community.
That's the direction three former
Parent Revolution organizers want
to take community-organizing efforts
with their firm Excellent Educational
Solutions, which was founded last
year. Mr. Flores said the organizers
grew disillusioned working for Parent
Revolution, which he says became too
preoccupied with "pulling triggers"
and downplayed more collaborative
campaigns like the agreement
reached at Lexington Middle School
in Pomona, Calif.
Jesus Sanchez, the chief strategy
officer for the Hesperia, Calif.-based
firm, said their vision is to create a
safe environment where parents and
educators can have honest conversations
about their school. They want to
be proactive and develop meaningful
parent-engagement plans with school
districts.
'Power to Parents'
While some view the parenttrigger
law as a political enterprise,
Mr. Flores said for his team of organizers,
it's personal. All three men
are Hispanic and are graduates of
Southern California public schools in
low-income communities. They see
their own families when they look
into the faces of the parents they
help, he said.
Mr. Sanchez acknowledges that
parent-trigger campaigns can be divisive.
"But," he noted, "so are presidential
campaigns. The one thing
parent trigger does accomplish, it
does make people [respond.]"
For her part, Ms. Romero-whose
nonprofit hired Excellent Educational
Solutions to help organize
parents at Palm Lane in Anaheim-
is much less inclined to support
collaboration with district officials
when it comes to parents who she
Photos by David Walter Banks for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - March 18, 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - March 18, 2015
