Triggers Create Nothing but Chaos and Division
Caroline Grannan is a San Franc isco public school parent and a founding member of Parents Across America.
Updated March 18, 2012, 7:00 PM
The first parent trigger – a ploy born here in California – collapsed amid chaos, controversy, charges and countercharges of fraud and intimidation.
The second, also in California, ignited more battles, which are still being fought.
There've been no other parent triggers. So it's surprising to see this strategy, which has never improved a school, being proposed in other states. Power and money are being harnessed to push a fad with no track record, in pursuit of dubious turnaround strategies, like charter schools.
Parent Revolution, a well - financed organization founded not by parents but by the charter-school entrepreneur Steve Barr, has been behind both drives in California. Charter schools overall are no more successful than traditional public schools; “conversion” charters created from troubled schools are especially challenged.
It's surprising to see a strategy that has never improved a school, being proposed nationally.
The first parent trigger was deployed at McKinley Elementary in Compton, near Los Angeles, in 2010. The petition, circulated by paid staffers of Parent Revolution, called for turning the school over to a charter operator. After a divisive fight, courts threw out the trigger petition. And when a charter that the trigger advocates had supposedly clamored for opened not far from McKinley, only one-fifth of McKinley’s fa m ilies transferred their children there, according to The Los Angeles Times.
California's second parent trigger went off last month at Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto. The predictable charges and countercharges are flying.
“This is destroying friendships and all relationships,” a Desert Trails parent, Chrissy Guzman-Alvarado, told me this week. “With our school divided, parents are scared to speak out or sign anything, and our community is falling apart. All for what?”
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Topics: Education, charter sc h ools
