A new year, same old power plays.
Both reforms would give more power to families in chronically failing schools. So Democrats in the Assembly will find themselves having to choose between the interests of the union and that of parents.
When last we left it, before Christmas, SBX5-4 has passed the Senate and was awaiting action in the Assembly. It still is. The bill would put California on firmer ground in competing for a piece of the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion school reform grant program.
The two parent empowerment reforms are backed by Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, and Gov. Schwarzenegger. The open enrollment provision would give parents in the bottom 10 percent of low-achieving schools the right to choose a better school in another district, assuming there is space available. However, in response to serious questions raised at the Senate hearing about how the program would work, the bill needed to be fleshed out in detail over the Christmas break.
The parent “trigger” provision is the creation of Parent Revolution, an activist group behind the big school reform movement in Los Angeles Unified. If 50 percent of parents of students in a school – or 50 percent of parents in feeder schools, in the case of a high school – signed a petition calling for change, school trustees would have to take decisive action: turning the school over to a charter school operator, replacing the principal and majority of the staff, or taking other serious turn-around strategies. In its latest form, the provision would be restricted to the first 75 successful petitions in schools that had failed to meet federal No Child Left Behind targets for six or more straight years.