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Guest 11/20/2011 1:39:00 PM
Patrick,
Well, here we are... 11 months later... and the L.A. Times has set the record straight and thoroughly debunked your pathetic pro-charter info-mercial posing as an objective, balanced L.A. Weekly cover story.
With the benefit of hindsight, perspective, objectivity, balance, and extensive evidence/testimony gathered in interim (and sorely lacking in this original L.A. Weekly piece), the Times editor(s) wrote the following:
(NOTE: they also criticized Compton Unified's actions during 2012, so you can't say it's a one-sided hit piece)
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"Los Angeles Times
"Editorial: Lessons of 'Parent Trigger'
"The mistakes made at a Compton school led reformers to rethink how to get parents involved.
"November 14, 2011
"The so-called parent trigger option was first used nearly a year ago when parents at McKinley Elementary School in Compton presented a petition to the local school board demanding that a charter management organization take over the campus. California's trigger provision, which had been included in 2010 school reform legislation in an unsuccessful effort to win a federal education grant, empowered parents to force major change at a 'failing' school if half of them signed a petition.
"What followed in Compton was the stuff of high educational drama — claims of intimidation from both sides, an intransigent school board that put parents through ridiculous hoops to verify their signatures and, eventually, legal defeat when the petition was found lacking on largely technical grounds. Ultimately, the charter operator, Celerity Educational Group, decided to open a school a few blocks away instead, to predictions that this would wipe out McKinley by drawing away most of its students.
"But that's not what happened. Though the Celerity school quickly filled after it opened in September, relatively few of those students were from McKinley. In fact, only a third of the parents who had signed the petition — and only a fifth of those at the school — enrolled their children in the charter school. And Parent Revolution — the organization that decided McKinley would be a good poster school for the parent trigger, drew up the petitions, led the signature-gathering effort and designated Celerity as the preferred charter operator — went back to the drawing board to rethink its goals and tactics.
"What has emerged is a much less splashy version of the parent trigger, but one more likely to bring about real parent empowerment and meaningful reform. Instead of choosing the schools for a possible parent trigger and engineering the petitions, Parent Revolution now leaves it up to parents to determine whether they want to initiate major reforms and what kind. It will provide information and support to parent groups that ask for it, says Executive Director Ben Austin, but it's up to the parents themselves to set their agenda, organize other parents into a committed nonprofit group and gather signatures.
"The results so far are modest. A dozen or so parent groups have formed throughout the state to consider reforms, and only a couple of those are interested in abandoning their traditional public schools for charters. Some merely want a new principal; others seek to make it easier to get rid of teachers who consistently let their students down. Some yearn for basic, common-sense services such as regular communication from teachers. Not all of the groups are at schools that even qualify for parent trigger petitions — the schools have to be failing on a couple of fronts — but they nonetheless hope that an organized parent effort can strengthen their children's education.
"That's a promising model for any school. Individual parents who see weaknesses at their schools can complain to the principal or even the school board, but they have little chance of making an impact. The Parent Teacher Assn. functions more as a support organization for schools than as a mechanism for change. Parents might not even know that other families share their frustrations. A well-run organization that engages parents in improving education can be a powerful force even when it is a relatively quiet one. Many parents, rather than seek to overthrow their schools, want to work with them.
"This is a far cry from what parent trigger advocates had in mind when the law was passed. Then, the idea was that petitions would provide a revolutionary path for quick and radical change, including closing a school, replacing its staff or switching to a charter.
"As intriguing as the idea was, there were troubling issues surrounding how it would work. For one thing, the law was written so that the definition of a failing school was tied to whether it met the required gains under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which has been almost universally criticized for its rigid, unrealistic targets. McKinley is in sore need of improvement, but its scores on the state's Academic Performance Index have risen by more than 100 points since 2008.
"The law also did not ensure that all parents at a targeted school would have a chance to be involved, or even informed. At McKinley, the signature-gathering process was carried out quietly, and many parents said they hadn't known about it. And because Parent Revolution picked the school, the reform and the charter operator and did most of the signature-gathering work, Austin now says, the petition lacked the parental buy-in that comes from a true community effort.
"There's also a difference between a one-time petition and ongoing parental involvement with schools. According to Austin, one major reason that so few parents enrolled their students in the Celerity charter school is the neighborhood's transience; many families moved out of the area before the new school year started. It's a familiar scenario; in the Los Angeles Unified School District, about a quarter of the students move every year. But it also raises questions about whether a petition signed by parents should have the power to invoke such major, permanent change when many of the people who sign it will be gone by the time it takes effect.
"The parent trigger still faces obstacles. Though many parents aren't seeking to do away with their existing school governance, the only leverage they have against an obstructionist system is the threat that they might demand one of the more sweeping changes, including switching to a charter. The problem is that charter operators have shown that they are not for the most part interested in turning around failing schools, preferring to open new ones. School boards therefore could call the parents' bluff — and that's why Parent Revolution's new tactic is all the more promising. Homegrown parent unions have a chance of becoming a long-standing force for change. Despite neighborhood turnover and the various pitfalls of reform, they send a message that as a group, parents committed to school improvement are here to stay."
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08/30/2011 4:21:00 AM
ANY change to ANY program that ever exists NEVER happens over night, in a year, in 5 years, etc. In order to implement meaningful change and see meaningful results in a comprehensive high school takes time. What do these ignorant parents think they are going to do when they "reform" a school and the test scores are the same or lower? What accountability do these parents have? Can the old teachers at the school be hired back if these so called parents make a mistake? What if the students at these schools PURPOSELY do horribly on exams because they are angry their teachers have been taken away from them? It WILL happen. Parents know NOTHING about education and should have NO right to interfere with educational programs. If you are a parent and have a problem with public schools then send your kid to a private school. If you can't afford it, then maybe drive your ass up to your kid's school and get involved in a positive manner in the programs that already exist there. Volunteer to be a tutor once a week at the school site if you know so much about education. Every single parent is welcome on every single school site in this country. The problem is, these parents will not get off their lazy asses to get involved. And don't give me crap about having to work so you can't attend a single meeting, open house, or conference. Chances are, your kid has been in their current school district for YEARS and you KNOW that there is an open house every single year and still refuse to take that one day off work or take off early to get involved in your student's education. Parents should have no rights to do the horrible things that these charter school representatives want them to do. A lot of these parents are uneducated and don't understand what they are doing by joining this so-called revolution. Uneducated parents have no right to voice their opinion of public education. A lot of them never graduated high school and good luck finding a large portion of them who are college educated. You won't! These are the people who are given this sick power by this stupid law. This is the dumbest thing I ever heard of. I am a teacher at a low performing school. However, we have had consistent growth for 5 years and are already implementing program improvement. How dare these ignorant parents think they should step in. They can NOT speed up progress! Nobody can-not they way these uneducated parents think should be possible. They can never get rid of me-I know that. They would have to arrest my ass to ever get me off that school campus. So, I say to the parents-get your education first before you attempt to change education for your child. You know NO better. You never studied education and have no idea how it works. Stupid!
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Mac 06/28/2011 7:32:00 PM
Great article....Great writing....enjoyed the story....God Bless to the Parents...
Remember - Physical Health is very important..Gym and health classes a must.
Music Dept a must...Playing an instrument will help many children concentrate.
My kids grew up with music lessons and sports. It really helps...Good Luck...
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X 12/14/2010 11:27:00 PM
Anything is better than the LAUSD schools we have now.
LAUSD promised better schools 30 years ago. They've only gotten worse. The only "change" has been tenure and pensions for the teachers who have become totally unaccountable to parents.
LAUSD supports more taxes, saying "don't starve the schools." But when teachers are criticized, they say teachers are helpless, and its the parents' fault for not teaching their kids how to read and write.
Teacher Unions formulated and defend the ridiculous and tortured process for firing teachers that takes 6 years and almost a million dollars to fire one teacher as "necessary" to preserve the rights of teachers. Meanwhile, students are irrelevant.
The Union defends the ludicrous grant of tenure after 2 years as "necessary" for teachers. Tenure? After 2 years?
The Union has fought any linkage of teacher performance to promotion or compensation: it even fought the release of productivity data by the LA Times, claiming that even that little fragment of data on teacher perormance was harmful and demoralizing to teachers. The students dropping out at rates that sometimes exceed 50%? Who cares!
The Unions forced the elimination of beneficial practices like "In-Service" week before school, where teachers used to meet and prepare for the start of school.
For years LAUSD was run by inside hacks who were incompetent at worst and indifferent at best.
I salute the Legislature for passing the Trigger bill, despite its joined at the hip relationship with the Unions. I applaud the Compton parents who decided not to accept endless excuses and bureaucratic justifiations for endless failure.
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RobE 12/14/2010 12:35:00 AM
Patrick, you're either a dupe who got hustled or a shill.
What is going on here is akin to how televangelist Paul Crouch created a minority front company to expand his network of stations while Crouch himself made the actual day to day decisions over the stations in question.
The same thing appears to be occurring with these parents, with charter school hustlers calling the actual shots.
You can position this as an example of grass roots organizing against the establishment goliath, but that facile and long ago played angle appears to be all you have for justifying this scam.
Not long ago, the Weekly ran an article about how convicted bunko artist Barry Minkow is still hustling the media, faith based groups and politicos. You must not have read that cautionary tale or you're on the take. At this point it's hard to tell which.
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12/12/2010 4:43:00 AM
Patrick Range McDonald "I'm surprised Robert D. Skeels, who seems to have a background in standing up for those without power, doesn't support this kind of political tool." Considering it's a political tool for and by the lucrative charter-voucher industry created to increase their market share, you shouldn't be surprised. Ben Austin, Vielka McFarlane, Eli Board, Bill Gates, and all the other wealthy charter-voucher sector players are hardly people "without power." How much power will those parents have once charters take over, and their private, secretive, unelected boards make decisions without any input? Perhaps if you paper spoke to public education activists, instead of just privatization advocates, your piece and this once respected newspaper would gain some balance and credibility. Here's your chance Mr. McDonald: I'm running for the District 2 seat for the LAUSD Board.
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Patrick Range McDonald 12/12/2010 1:07:00 AM
Thanks for all of the comments.
The Parent Trigger in Compton has obviously stirred things up. It has made people nervous, defensive, and angry. Why? Parents now have a legitimate tool to demand better from the public education establishment. And if that establishment doesn't do better for their kids, parents can act. That's a power shift that terrifies a lot of powerful people and their allies and supporters, especially when the public education establishment has been holding all of the cards for so many decades.
But that's the point of the Parent Trigger: to wake up the status quo, hold it accountable, and force it to do better. It's the kind of situation that's been sorely lacking at Compton Unified, where a July, 2010, report sent to CA Superintendent Jack O'Connell revealed that adults operating that school district showed a "lack of a sense of urgency related to student achievement."
School districts like Compton can no longer tell parents to wait another three or four years and their school will get better -- and their children can't afford to wait that long, anyway. School officials have to act now, or deal with the consequences.
I'm surprised Robert D. Skeels, who seems to have a background in standing up for those without power, doesn't support this kind of political tool. Low-income, immigrant parents in Compton, who had little to no political leverage in the past, now have to be taken seriously with the Parent Trigger at their disposal.
Take care,
Patrick Range McDonald,
LA Weekly
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12/11/2010 9:05:00 PM
Wow! A sudden lapse in the normally dishonest dominant discourse by the charter-voucher sector sycophantic Los Angeles press? Effort to convert Compton school to charter draws fire.
The mendaciousness of the wealthy Ben Austin and his junta of school privatization drones including Gabe Rose, Pat DeTemple, Shirley Ford, and Mary Najera is legendary. While I was researching my first article on LAPU/Parent Revolution's foppish millionaire from Benedict Canyon, I had parents from Garfield HS tell me that Mary Najera used to go monolingual Spanish church services with English petitions and tell them to sign the petition if they wanted their children to go to college. Of course, there's also the well documented incidents of shameful class and race-baiting discussed in Code Words and Green Dot’s Pandering to Westside Racism. It doesn't take much to understand that the Gates and Walton Foundation funded "Parent" Revolution are still employing such deceptive and deplorable tactics.
The entire network of charter-voucher front groups for the CCSA and DFER, which are a collection of astro-turf 501c3s including Families in Schools, Alliance for a Better Community, Families That Can, and first and foremost -- Parent Revolution (née LAPU), are a despicable collection of liars and thieves.
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12/11/2010 8:37:00 PM
Effort to convert Compton school to charter draws fire
The mendaciousness of the wealthy Ben Austin and his junta of school privatization drones including Gabe Rose, Pat DeTemple, Shirley Ford, and Mary Najera is legendary. While I was researching my first article on the LAPU/Parent Revolution's foppish millionaire from Benedict Canyon, I had parents from Garfield HS tell me that Mary Najera used to go monolingual Spanish church services with English petitions and tell them to sign the petition if they wanted their children to go to college. It doesn't take much to understand that the Gates and Walton Foundation funded "Parent" Revolution are still employing such deceptive and deplorable tactics.
The entire network of charter-voucher front groups for the CCSA and DFER, which are a collection of astro-turf 501c3s including Families in Schools, Alliance for a Better Community, Families That Can, and first and foremost -- Parent Revolution (née LAPU), are a despicable collection of liars and thieves.
I want to commend Howard Blume for having the courage to write this article given Russ Stanton's editorial policy of non-stop charter-voucher industry cheerleading.
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RobE 12/11/2010 3:33:00 PM
Can someone please tell me why we continue to allow amateurs to oversee education? I am mainly talking about school boards members, but now you have parents who haven't even prepared their kids for school properly wanting to manage campuses.
Imagine this: 51% of a local Wal-Mart's customers get together and, under a new state law, are allowed to seize that store and run it as they like or even force it to close. Of course people would say that is an insane idea. So now why do we allow it with schools?
It is time to make the pros run their schools and impose direct accountability on them. Of course, I am talking about teachers. So abolish the waste, general idiocy and corruption that comes with school boards, whose members serve term after term thanks to low turn outs and a frustrating paucity of information provided to parents,who then just give up, and allow teachers to innovate on the local level with oversight provided by the state department of education (another actor here that the LA Weekly fails to address) without interference from turf protecting and innovation-phobic school board retards, almost none of whom have ever taught in a classroom. Add to that mandatory but free parenting classes for all first time mothers and fathers and also allow any child to attend any campus their parent deems fit for them. Then when a school continues to fail, teachers can no longer pass the buck to the school board and they get the axe.
So with my proposals, the pros get all the performance onus put on them, a big layer of expensive bureaucracy and its accoutrements goes away and students get more opportunity to attend a campus whose culture is more congruent with their personality and goals while schools compete with one another for the favor of parents. Talk about a winner all the way around! And it addresses every facet of the educational system, unlike the LA Weekly's articles. I know, this is too common sense to be enacted, but we have to start as a nation thinking bigger and more comprehensively about this issue. Otherwise, all the rhetorical and monetary exertions will prove futile in the long run.
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RobE 12/11/2010 3:12:00 PM
"Celerity president Vielka McFarlane, a former educator and administrator at Los Angeles Unified School District, says parent input will be taken seriously if Celerity becomes the charter school at McKinley, as expected."
Which means that McFarlane was part of the LAUSD culture that perpetuates failure and now you're going to let her run a charter school? Yeah, that will go well. Or not.
Moreover, a lot of these parents are going to find out there is a HUGE difference between campaigning and governing. This movement is an inchoate collection of disgruntled parents who have modeled failure for their children (having a kid when you are too poor to even afford to attend college and then subjecting them to the ghetto or coming illegally from another country and still having children even though they were already in economic straits dire enough to compel them to leave their homeland) and then put them in neighborhoods which have been failure machines for decades.
And it's not just that: each district has a school board. Then how come the school board gets none of the blame here? If these parents were so outraged that they want to stage a hostile takeover of their local school then why didn't they either organize against the conduct of the school board or run for seats on it? After all, the school board hires and fires teachers, principals and allocates educational resources in their locality. Was that just too much of a hassle for these parents?
As for calling Rhee "an educational reformer," she is anything but. What she has done is aid and abet her husband Kevin Johnson's criminal financial and sexual misdeeds while he ran a charter school and then attempted to orchestrate a cover up of them. http://rokdrop.com/2009/11/23/michelle-rhee-linked-to-kevin-johnson-sex-scandal-cover-up/
As for Villaraigosa, didn't he take over some schools and create a bureaucracy for them that was WORSE than what teachers had to deal with from the LAUSD? Why yes he did! And you give him a complete pass here for that.
Come on LA Weekly. Do your homework. This article was just another myopic hit piece on teachers. Approach this in a more holistic manner rather than making scapegoats of the folks who are caught in the middle of two different interest groups (parents and school boards), the teachers. Otherwise you guys are no better than your typical "get off my lawn" teabagger.
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Alistair 12/10/2010 8:09:00 PM
"...the only way we're going to get there is to transfer power to the only people who only care about kids: parents."
I'm a teacher in a different country, but I find that quote insulting. I went into this profession because I care about kids. I find it insulting that someone would assume teachers don't. Any teacher who doesn't, shouldn't be in the profession.
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William Joseph Miller 12/10/2010 5:32:00 PM
Patrick Range McDonald spins a compelling narrative of heroic parents versus evil teachers' unions. However, he forgets Miller's Law - namely, the success of a charter school is directly proportional to the number of students a charter school rejects and the length of its waiting list.
Unlike public schools, charter schools do NOT have to admit everyone. Following the basic principles of economics, the more students a charter excludes, the greater its prestige and the higher quality of student it will attract. This inevitably results in sterling test scores.
Charter schools who want a high API will automatically exclude children who don't do their homework, and children who don't show up to after school tutoring sessions. They do not want parents who are difficult to reach, or who work so many different shifts that they can't come to Open House or other school gatherings. They will definitely exclude children with "special needs" simply because such children endanger their API.
Indeed, if I were to advise anyone who wanted to start a charter school in Compton, I'd tell them to "think big, but start small" or to "focus on quality rather than quantity." That's fancy charter-school talk for dumping all potentially toxic children and their potentially toxic parents onto neighboring schools. Ironically, some of the parents who are taking over McKinley Elementary could find their own children excluded from the charter they are fighting to establish.
In addition, charters don't always exist for the needs of the children. A number of years ago, educational "reformers" lionized Edison Schools, a for-profit chain of private schools which would revolutionize education by dumping greedy, unionized teachers. School districts which contracted with Edison Schools often found their students short-changed, while the CEO and founder of Edison Schools, Chris Whittle, lived in a mansion in the Hamptons. A recent article by Geraldine Baum in the Los Angeles Times (December 8,2010) points out that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg rigged the tests and test scores in the charter schools he established, presumably to preen his bid for the presidency.
What is to prevent a McKinley Elementary charter school from engaging in similar tactic? Compton has a long track record of corruption and nepotism which includes administrators, board members, and even parents, as well as parent advisory groups and parent councils. In many Compton schools, the only people trying to make an honest effort are the very people LA Weekly loves to hate - the teachers.
And what will happen if the new, idealistic, naïve teachers that McKinley's parents hope to attract, do indeed uncover wrong-doing? Because they have no union backing, because they can be fired at the whim of any disgruntled parent or administrator, these teachers can do absolutely nothing. Although teachers have no power to prevent in-school corruption, they will inevitably get the blame when the scandal breaks (and eventually it will.) Then, of course, Patrick McDonald and L A Weekly will run another article about the horrible lemon teachers.
Before demonizing teachers, LA Weekly and Patrick McDonald need to walk a mile in their shoes. Try teaching in a school in Compton, or get a job as a substitute teacher. Compton is a toxic environment that no teacher in his or her right mind want to would work in.
P.S. (I know from experience. I grew up in the area; my mother taught at Compton Union High School; and I taught a semester at Compton Community College before I landed a job at LAUSD, which, believe it or not, was much better than anything Compton had to offer. )
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Herb 12/10/2010 4:01:00 PM
In a sense, teachers are the new Jews. We won't see anything as obvious as death trains full of them, but they make a good, easy scapegoat during this Great Recession because they appear to have it good: OK salaries, good benefits, seeming job security. Also they are represented by feckless, ultra-PC unions which don't forthrightly state that teaching is dependent on what students and parents bring to the table. The article references a woman who "moved here from Mexico more than 20 years ago" (that is, likely an illegal) and still needs to speak through a translator. This is not effective parenting. I teach in a Latino neighborhood and one of the biggest obstacles to good teacher-parent communication is the language barrier. Also the cultural barrier--parents don't always "get" the concept of studying. So the cry goes up: it is the teachers' fault! Put those slobs on the street and get dedicated 24-year-olds from Teach For america who will burn themselves out in two years! Folks, Garrison Keillor is KIDDING when he says all children can be above average. Half of all students will always be below average. And not everyone should go to college. The biggest job growth category in this area is projected to be hotel maid. Why not unionize them and give them a decent wage and dignity?
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chacha 12/09/2010 3:21:00 AM
I love this story. This is great I wish Boyle Heights parents that have children in public schools like Roosevelt stand up and take action. The power is there, lets use it.
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12/09/2010 12:43:00 AM
The article states the paid charter-voucher proxies of Parent Revolution "Staffers say they're not only organizing parents for the Parent Trigger but also for longer-term engagement in their children's schooling." Sure, just like when when Austin and his privatization junta hid cowardly while parents from his previous parent organization were cast to the curb when Marco Petruzzi shut down Animo Justice by fiat declaration? Is that their idea of long term engagement? Pernicious only begins to describe what Austin, Rose, et al are. Good thing the LA Weekly serves as Ben Austin's personal public relations arm.
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12/09/2010 12:13:00 AM
One thing Austin, Romero, Barr, and Schwarzenegger don't mention is that their petitions can legally contain parents who won't send their children to the school including: parents sending their kids to parochial schools and parents that will move before their kids attend a school. They also don't bring up the fact that community members (ie. taxpayers that finance the school) have no voice in the corporate trigger process. In other words, a tiny minority of the 'stakeholders' have sway over the process. How convenient for the well financed proxies of the charter-voucher sector, like Parent Revolution, are able to use this carefully crafted legislation to subvert any semblance of democratic processes. That's how corporate America rolls, right?
Lastly, I'm hope all the McKinley parents with special needs children will be sure to thank Ismenia Guzman for essentially casting their children to the curb. Given the dearth of Celerity's special education capacity, that future Guzman speaks of will be quite grim for the neediness children of all. But charter-voucher supporter don't care about 'those' kids. Greedy, heartless, and selfish doesn't begin to describe...
With less than 1/5 of CMO/EMOs outperforming average public schools, you've got to wonder why all the "free market" kooks support them. How does railing against "big government" schools explain the fact that 83% of public schools are better than charter-voucher schools. Further, unlike charters, public schools are required to educate every child, and they still outperform their privatized counterparts. Sadly these charters eschew responsibility to special needs children for no other reason than it cuts into profitability.
