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Friday, December 17, 2010

The Answer Sheet - Schwarzenegger's misleading account of 'parent trigger'

The Answer Sheet - Schwarzenegger's misleading account of 'parent trigger'

Schwarzenegger's misleading account of 'parent trigger'

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has been on a public relations campaign to tell the world about his state's new law that allows parents to petition to have troubled public schools transformed through one of four avenues. In fact, he wrote about the first effort to invoke the "parent trigger" in an op-ed in Thursday’s Washington Post, waxing poetic about how wonderful it was that parents at troubled McKinley Elementary School in Compton were taking advantage of the "parent trigger law" to fix their local school. But it turns out that the governor forgot to mention one not so tiny detail. He didn't say that he had ordered the state attorney general to investigate alleged intimidation of the parents at McKinley. Intimidation by whom? It turns out that the Compton parent action was actually organized by a nonprofit group called Parent Revolution, which was founded by a group of charter