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Andrew Rotherham: Can Parents Take Over Schools? | TIME Ideas | TIME.com:

Can Parents Take Over Schools?

New "parent trigger" laws are triggering debate, but not enough attention is being paid to what happens afterwards

By ANDREW J. ROTHERHAM | @arotherham | March 8, 2012 | 9

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ALEX GALLARDO / REUTERS

Chrissy Guzman speaks in frustration during a Adelanto School District board meeting regarding the parent trigger law, in Adelanto, California, March 6, 2012.

If your child’s school is lousy, would you want the option to band together with other parents and take it over? That’s the idea behind “parent trigger” legislation that enables parents in low-performing schools to vote to change the governance of their children’s school — and remove teachers and the principal if they want to. Although only four states have enacted such a law (California was the first to do so in 2010), legislators in Florida are debating this week whether it should become the fifth, and similar bills are pending in a dozen states.

But so far parents have yet to make a trigger vote stick. Yesterday, parents in Adelanto, Calif., resubmitted a petition to take over a school there after their first petition was rejected by t

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/03/08/can-parents-take-over-schools/#ixzz1ojM7lCFK

Parent Trigger is Part of School Choice (or Why Andy Rotherham is Off-Target)

by RiShawn Biddle

Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times

To understand why Parent Trigger laws are critical parts of expanding school choice and Parent Power, consider P.S. 45 in my home neighborhood of South Ozone Park in New York City and its strong ties to the families who send their kids there. Better-known these days as the school that hip-hop star Nicki Minaj attended long before she found inexplicable fame (and the onetime grounds of a certain editor and education columnist), P.S. 45 isn’t exactly one of the Big Apple’s finest schools. While it garnered a ‘B’ overall among its peer group of elementary schools in the Big Apple, just 64 percent of its students scored at level three or four on the math portion of New York State’s standardized tests while a mere 52 percent scored at the top levels on the reading portion. It has also not done well in closing achievement gaps, especially among young black and Latino men.
One can imagine the parents of kids attending P.S. 45 would send their kids to other traditional, charter, or even private schools if choice was available. This could include the better-performing P.S. 97 in the Woodhaven section of Queens, or St. Clare’s School in the Rosedale section of the city. But for those families, especially single mothers and blue-collar households, choice sounds great in the abstract until one thinks about the high cost of transporting their kids out of their own neighborhoods just so they can get a high quality education. This is especially for a community (part of the zip code of 11436) in which 69 percent of residents own their homes (higher than the national average of 66 percent) and (along with