Principal removal and REAL parent empowerment
by pureparents
Last week, a Parent Revolution-backed petition drive collected enough signatures to force out the well-respected principal of Weigand Avenue Elementary School in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. According to the article, 21 out of 22 teachers at the school have asked for transfers in protest.
That’s parent empowerment?
We’re sceptical, in part because of the many deceptive tactics used by the well-funded Parent Revolution astroturfers – most recently exposed here for paying their so-called parent activists to promote the disastrous “Won’t Back Down” movie and to go around the U.S. testifying about the parent trigger. We also know that parents have little or no voice in the running of charter schools, which is the form of “reform” Parent Revolution prefers.
For contrast, let’s take a look at how Chicago’s local school council (LSC) model addresses the need for strong principal leadership. PAA supports the LSC as a model for effective parent empowerment – see our position paper, The Empowerment Parents Want: The LSC Model for School Reform.
Local School Councils (LSCs) were created by the Chicago School Reform law of 1988 in response to frustration with the lack of progress and accountability in Chicago’s public schools. LSCs are duly-elected bodies at nearly every Chicago Public Schools (CPS) elementary, middle and high school. Unlike other
