Strengthen and straighten out state’s parent empowerment process
Recent events at McKinley Elementary School in the Compton Unified School District have brought to light flaws in the state’s new parent empowerment or “trigger” law. This law must be fixed immediately so that the actual process for empowering parents is as worthy as the goal.
Using the new “trigger” provision, parents at McKinley were asked to sign a petition to turn their low-performing school into a charter school to be run by an outside organization. Unfortunately, this first real-world application of the new trigger provision has deeply divided the school’s community and pitted well-meaning parents against each other.
The most empowering part of the new law: It allows a petition to be circulated among parents at chronically low-performing schools that calls for a specific turnaround strategy, thereby