When the 24th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles opens Tuesday, Amabilia Villeda expects to feel a rare sense of pride. She is not only the parent of a fourth-grader, but also one of the first parents to battle for a better school under a controversial California school reform known as “parent trigger.”
Villeda led more than 350 fed-up parents who challenged the operation of the school — one of the worst performing in the state — and forced the Los Angeles Unified School District to revamp it.
Today, 24th Street no longer looks like the “junkyard” it once did, she says. It has a new principal and mostly new teachers, whom parents helped interview and hire. It has a preschool program, a new partnership with a top-performing charter school and high expectations for students.
There’s no guarantee that the overhauled 24th Street school will succeed, but California’s parent trigger law, signed in 2010, has given it a better shot. Six other states — Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio (for a pilot program in the Columbus School District) and Texas — have passed similar laws, and about 20 others have considered them.
Such steps are worthy of experimentation because failing schools are notoriously immune to change, and federal and state efforts to fix them haven’t made much headway. For years, principals and teachers have complained that motivated parents are one of the missing ingredients. Yet now that parents are flexing their muscles, unions, some administrators and school boards are ganging up on them.
In Compton, Calif., a parent petition drive set off a legal battle that ended only when a court threw out the parents’ petition, largely on technical grounds. In the small desert city of Adelanto, Calif., parents beat back a similar assault, and last month, their Desert Trails Elementary School opened, operated for the first time by a highly rated non-profit charter.
California’s law makes it difficult to petition for control, which is how it should be. The parent trigger can be used only when a school has failed academically, under federal standards, for at least three years. Petitions must be signed by half of the school’s parents — a high bar in low-income neighborhoods with many one-parent households and long working hours.
The only schools to pull off change have been assisted by Parent Revolution, a non-profit advocacy group. Now it and its leader, Ben Austin, are being unfairly demonized by critics as outsiders with nefarious motives.
Los Angeles School Superintendent John Deasy has taken a unique and savvy approach to the trigger law. He welcomed the parents from the day they dropped off their petitions at school headquarters and collaborated with them. “They are the taxpayers; they are the customers,” Deasy says. “If all else fails and they are dissatisfied … their voice has to have meaning.”
It now will at a handful of schools in California. The trigger laws are extraordinary steps that ought to be reserved for extraordinary situations. But when so many other reforms have failed, it’s at least worth finding out what parent power can accomplish.
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Photo: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY
Source publication: USA Today