Parent Power | Bill Boyarsky | Jewish Journal

Parent Power | Bill Boyarsky | Jewish Journal



“Raw power, an unabashed transfer of political power to parents.”
That’s how Ben Austin describes Parent Revolution, the organization he founded and heads up, which aims to shake up Los Angeles’ public schools. It aims to remove the administration and faculty from low performing schools, and, if the parents desire, convert them to charter schools, which are independently operated, without strong unions, and financed by LAUSD.


Austin is a parent whose daughter will enter the Los Angeles public school system after she graduates from Temple Israel of Hollywood’s preschool. He has served as a political aide in the Clinton White House and in Richard Riordan’s City Hall. Public education reform is one of Riordan’s big interests, and after Austin left city hall in 2001, he continued to work on his old boss’ issue, independently and with Riordan and others interested in education. In fact, Austin planned to run for the school board in the Westside district in 2008, but had to drop out after a campaign assistant fouled up gathering the signatures needed to get him on the ballot.


A few months later, with backing from the private nonprofit foundations of arts and education philanthropist Eli Broad and Casey Wasserman (a philanthropist and the grandson of entertainment scion Lew Wasserman) and others, Austin and a few other parents created Parent Revolution, for which he serves as executive director. He also is a part-time prosecutor in the city attorney’s office. Parent Revolution, which now has an annual budget of about $500,000, began by organizing parents of students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles and Mark Twain Middle School in the Mar Vista-Venice area. It plans to move on to other schools.


“We represented half of the parents in the enrollment boundaries,” he said. “After that, more parents came to us.” Then they sought help from L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa and allies on the school board. Last spring, members of the group met downtown and went to the school district headquarters. The result of this activity was a plan, presented by the mayor in 2009, which called for 250 school campuses, including some new ones, to be turned into charter organizations or other nonprofit groups. The teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), opposes the idea. But in a surprising defeat for the usually powerful union, the school board adopted the plan. Last month the teachers union filed suit to block its implementation.