Education Week - March 27, 2013 - 27

EDUCATION WEEK

MARCH 27, 2013

www.edweek.org

New Wave of ‘Parent Trigger’ Laws Reignites Debate
charter school conversion or other
turnaround process, they can exercise as much power as middle- and
upper-middle-class parents typically do, said Ben Austin, the executive director of Parent Revolution. The Los Angeles-based group
was instrumental in successful
parent-trigger petition drives in
California.
“At the end of the day, this is
going to be up to local community
groups and local parents to determine how the law is implemented
in individual states,” said Mr. Austin, who noted that by the start of
the 2013-14 school year, California schools could be undergoing
changes of various kinds because
of the parent trigger.
(Parent Revolution receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also helps support
Education Week’s coverage of parent empowerment.)

Bills on the Move
Parent-trigger laws allow a majority of parents to officially request
an overhaul at their school, which
often leads to conversions to charters, although not always.
California was the first state
to pass a parent-trigger law;
roughly 20 states have at least
considered enacting one, according to the National Conference of
State Legislatures.
But outside of California, no
school has been the subject of a
parent-trigger petition. (In California, a bill is under consideration to
expand the number of schools eligible for the parent trigger.)
The parent-trigger bill in Oklahoma, as of late last week , had
advanced the furthest, having
passed the Oklahoma Senate.
Florida lawmakers are considering versions of the bill in both
the House and the Senate. (A
Colorado parent-trigger bill was
defeated this year, as was the
Georgia legislation.)
Trigger laws now on the books
in various states generally ensure that the mechanism can’t
be used just on a whim. Except
for Connecticut, every state with
a trigger option requires that a
school must first be designated
as low-peforming by the state in
some way for two or three consecutive years before the trigger
can be used. For example, Louisiana’s 2012 parent-trigger bill
requires a school to get a D or F
grade for three consecutive years
to be eligible.
Although those definitions can
apply retroactively to schools for
years before the bills pass, there
aren’t many schools that fit such
definitions, said Josh Cunningham, an education research analyst at the Denver-based ncsl.
Even then, pulling a parent trigger isn’t easy, he said.
“You really have to have a lot
of organization and a lot of resources,” he said.
Last year, Florida was on the
verge of approving a parent-trigger law, but a tie vote in the state

Phil Sears/AP

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 23

Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda, a Democrat in the Florida
legislature, tries to raise a question during discussion of a
parent-trigger measure. The concept is back before lawmakers.

Senate killed it. That hasn’t deterred its supporters, who think
2013 will present a friendlier political climate for the idea.
Florida Sen. Kelli Stargel, a Republican who introduced the Senate version of a parent-trigger bill
this year, said that her proposal
includes all the amendments that
were eventually added to the 2012
Senate version of the bill. (The
same parent-trigger proposals are
in a House bill this year.)
For example, she said, this year’s
proposal requires that those gathering petition signatures can’t be
paid for it, and that parents whose
only children in the relevant
school are seniors set to graduate
after the current academic year
can’t sign the petition.
Last year, the bill died in the Florida Senate mainly because of political squabbling—not concerns about
the bill’s merits, Ms. Stargel said. In
addition, five of the eight Republicans who voted against the bill are
now out of office.
But she also said part of the public battle is to assure people that
the law isn’t simply about opening
the door to more charter schools.
“There are many other choices
that parents can make,” Ms. Stargel said.
But Kathleen Oropeza, the cofounder of Fund Education Now,
said the parent-trigger bill represents a continuum of policy imposed by stubborn Florida lawmakers, that includes newly defined,
lower cutoff scores on tests, and
what she said were predatory private charter school operators waiting for business opportunities.
Since the 2012 parent-trigger
bill failed, for example, the Florida
naacp and the League of United
Latin American Citizens in Florida joined the state pta in opposition to the idea, she noted.
Ms. Oropeza also cited the example of a 2012 legislative race in
which Democrat Rep. Karen Castor
Dentel used the support of the parent trigger by her Republican opponent, former Rep. Scott Plakon,
against him in television ads, although Ms. Stargel said that argument was exaggerated and off-base.
Ms. Dentel won the race.
“Legislators are standing alone
in their desire to have this, and

they’re not listening to the people
who voted them into office,” Ms.
Oropeza said.

Growth Potential
Some opponents of the concept
see its backers as poised to sweep
into other states and effectively set
the agenda for supposedly grassroots efforts.
Pamela Grundy, the co-founder
of Parents Across America, a
Chicago-based group opposed to
parent-trigger laws, said such
bills continue to be pushed by the
American Legislative Exchange

Council, a conservative Washington think tank, and the Foundation for Excellence in Education,
a Tallahasse, Fla.-based organization led by former Florida Gov.
Jeb Bush, a Republican, that advocates policies such as A-F school
grades and charter schools.
Part of the strategy, she contended, is to support “a tremendous scattershot of legislation,” especially in gop-dominated states,
to spread groups like hers thin.
(Republicans control the Florida,
Georgia, and Oklahoma legislatures, but Democratic legislators
are in charge in Connecticut and
California.)
Up until late last week, Georgia
had appeared on the verge of being
the eighth state to pass parenttrigger legislation. The measure
had already passed the state’s
House of Representatives and
seemed poised to glide through the
state Senate.
But the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Edward R. Lindsay, the House majority whip, yanked the legislation
before a Senate committee could
consider it, after members of his
own party expressed major concerns, saying the measure could
pit teachers and administrators
against each other. The bill would
have allowed a majority of either
parents or teachers at a school to
sign a petition requiring a conversion to a charter school or other
turnaround model.
And, like parent-trigger laws

elsewhere, the bill was opposed
by a myriad of public education
groups.
“I think the bill needed more
evaluation and more understanding of its impact before becoming
law,” said Tracey-Ann Nelson, the
government-relations director for
the Georgia Association of Educators.

Parental Outlook
Mr. Austin of Parent Revolution
said that while his group would
support resources and guidance to
community groups in states seeking to use the parent trigger, the
organization wouldn’t simply drop
into states to take the wheel for
such efforts.
Mr. Austin also rejects the idea
that parental support for trigger
legislation somehow illustrates
where parents stand on other
heated K-12 policy issues.
“They don’t really care about
high-minded philosophical debates about teachers’ unions
versus education reformers, or
charter schools versus district
schools, or Democrats versus Republicans,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to
this story.
Coverage of parent-empowerment
issues is supported by a grant from
the Walton Family Foundation, at
www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org.

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Education Week - March 27, 2013

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