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Parents Able To Close Failing Schools
The Los Angeles-based group Parent Revolution, pushed hard to pass a new law called the “parent trigger.” The new law requires school districts to make dramatic changes to a school if 51% the parents vote on the change(s). Parents could call for the school to be shut down, turned into a charter school OR, they could demand that the principal and half of the teachers be fired. The law was passed in January as part of an effort to make California more competitive for the “Race to the top” federal grant program. As a concession to the outraged teachers union, the law allows for only 75 schools statewide to be overhauled through the parent petition process. The state teachers union calls it the “lynch-mob provision,” and claim that backers of the law are charter school supporters. The law also has an open enrollment clause allowing parents to send students to other schools or districts from failing schools. For a school to be “parent triggered,” the following criteria must be present:
And now after five years of fighting Los Angeles Unified officials, fed-up parents at Mount Gleason Middle School in Sunland-Tujunga are using the new law to force change at their failing middle school. Mount Gleason Middle School has been on a federal list of under-performing campuses for a dozen years. Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, authored the bill. -Katy Grimes
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May 16, 2012
Too bad parents can’t close the entire failed system.
– John Seiler
A small victory for parents and students. Now if we could just force some reason into the union contracts, clean up the bloated education administration and give every student a chioce with charter schools, we will start once again graduating young men and women who are truly equiped to succeed in a free market country.