Who’s Pulling the Trigger?
This weekend, David Feith, an editor at the WSJ, advertised on his newspaper’s opinion page “a radical school reform” that most people outside of California and a handful of other states, like Connecticut, don’t know much about. He was describing a California law known colloquially as “parent trigger” that passed through the state legislature late in 2009 and was signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on January 7 of this year.
One of the key groups that strongly pushed for the parent trigger law was an L.A.-based advocacy group calledParent Revolution. The L.A. Times described the organization in December 2009 as “a parent organizing and lobbying group closely affiliated with Green Dot Public Schools, which operates charter schools.” Feith defined it as “a liberal activist group,” so there must be some confusion about what the organization is exactly.
After being signed into law, parent trigger became effective on April 14. Under the law, if 50% of the parents of students at a school sign an official petition calling for the school to be remade, their local district is required to make one of four school transformations. The school cannot be labeled a “persistently lowest-achieving school,” but it must have failed to meet adequate yearly progress under NCLB for at least four years. What’s most unusual about parent trigger is that the majority of parents who sign the petition calling for major school changes also get to choose how the school will be reformed, unless the local district makes a serious case that their recommendations are impossible to implement.
In his opinion piece, Feith suggests that parent trigger will demonstrate that parents actually do want to be