This is a sampling of The Education Report, Katy Murphy's Oakland schools blog. Read more atIBAbuzz.com/education. Follow her at Twitter.com/KatyMurphy.

Sept. 16: A new California law known as the "Parent Trigger" could soon be taking shape in Oakland and other Bay Area cities. The first of its kind in the nation, the legislation allows parents to unionize -- and to effect major changes at some low-performing schools, such as a staffing shake-up or a conversion to an independently run charter school.

Parent Revolution, the Los Angeles-based group behind the law, stopped in Oakland this week on a promotional bus tour through California. Most of the people who came to Brookfield Elementary School to learn more about the trigger were either part of the bus tour or members of the Oakland chapter of the NAACP, invited by Oakland school board member Alice Spearman. I noticed that only a handful of current Oakland public school parents (maybe just two or three) were in the room to learn about a movement described by organizer Shirley Ford as "grass roots in every sense of the word."

That appears to have been by design. Spearman explained to the small group Wednesday that she wanted to start with "all the key players in Oakland" to decide whether to form a parent union chapter. If so, she said, she would then bring other groups and "the grass-roots

parents" into the discussion.

Some critics of the Parent Trigger see it as a tactic by the charter school lobby to run more schools, especially since