Hostile Takeover: Parents Seek Control of Failing School in Education Reform

By Stephanie Simon

Adelanto, California - Desert Trails Elementary School in the impoverished town of Adelanto, California, has been failing local kids for years. More than half the students can't pass state math or reading tests.

On Tuesday, the school board will discuss a radical fix: a parent takeover of the school.
 
For the moms and dads, it's a local, and intensely personal, debate. But their little school at the edge of the Mojave Desert has also become a flash point in a high-stakes national struggle over the future of public education, one that pits powerful teachers unions against some of world's wealthiest philanthropies.

Desert Trails, with children in kindergarten through 6th grades or roughly aged 5-12, could be the first school in the country to invoke the concept known as "parent trigger."

A 2010 California law permits parents at the state's worst public schools to band together and effectively wrest control from the district.

The parents can enact dramatic changes, such as firing teachers, ousting the principal, or converting the school into a charter institution run by a private management company. Several other states are considering similar laws.

Desert Trails has had high turnover in the principal's office. Parents complain about difficulty getting their children extra help when they fall behind. Just 31 percent of third-graders are proficient in reading and 14 percent score in the lowest level, "far below basic," in state testing.

A determined group of Desert Trails parents is leading the charge, with substantial help from a well-funded activist group, Parent Revolution. The trigger advocates say they have collected signatures from a majority of families in support of closing down the school this summer and reopening it as a charter school in the fall, to be run by a partnership of parents, teachers and the school district.

An equally determined group of parents, supported by both state and local teachers unions, aims to stop them. They say Desert Trails can be improved without being destroyed.

The parent-trigger battle is perhaps the most dramatic yet in an intensifying fight over the nation's $500-billion-a-year investment in educating kids.

BIG NAMES, BIG MONEY

Over the past decade, several of the nation's wealthiest philanthropists, who see public schools as needing transformative change, have shifted the terms of the education debate. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Los Angeles developer Eli Broad and the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, have poured billions of dollars into promoting aggressive reforms.

Their prescriptions, many of which have been adopted by the Obama administration, include expanding charter schools, tying teacher pay to student test performance and making it easier to fire teachers.

Unions see many of those reforms as an existential threat not only to their members, but to the very nature of public education. Charter schools are free public elementary or secondary schools that operate independently from the local school district. They often do not employ union teachers, and are typically run by a private management company.

Critics note that some charters are run by for-profit companies that don't open their books to show the public how they're spending tax dollars.

"There's an agenda that basically wants to take apart public education," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Union leaders complain that the reformers have little research to prove their overhaul tactics will work -- and that existing data show less-than-stellar results.

One chain of charter schools heavily backed by foundation money, for instance, is Green Dot - which founded the predecessor to Parent Revolution. Many of the 14 Green Dot charter schools in California have shown impressive academic progress, but all still fall below the state median on standardized test scores. Half rank lower -- many far lower -- than Desert Trails.

Nationally, studies suggest that charter schools rarely outperform regular public schools of similar demographics.

"Too many people on the outside are advocating for things that don't change student learning," said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, which represents 3 million public-school employees.

But to the outside reformers, it's the unions who have their heads in the sand, blocking efforts to remake a public education system that for too long has left too many kids behind. Teachers unions spend tens of millions a year on campaign donations and state and federal lobbying, giving them considerable clout among politicians, especially their traditional allies on the Democratic left.

The Gates and Broad foundations continue to pour huge sums into improving existing public schools; the Gates Foundation, for instance, has pledged $100 million to revamp teacher training, evaluation and pay in Hillsborough County, Fla. Foundation officials say they have no intention of destroying teachers' union or privatizing public schools en masse.

At the same time, however, they say they are committed to experiments like parent trigger.

A SEAT AT THE TABLE

Trigger backers say the mechanism isn't intended to convert local schools into charters in every case. Parent Revolution is working with several parent groups in California that have used the threat of pulling the trigger as leverage to negotiate more modest changes, such as cleaning up filthy school bathrooms.

At Desert Trails, the trigger team is negotiating with the district in hopes of reaching a solution that stops short of moving to a fully independent charter school.

"When big decisions about schools are made, there typically are only two players at the table, the teachers union and the district," said Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution. "What we're saying is, we need a third seat at the table for parents. Before, when they complained, they'd be told to go do a bake sale. Parent trigger utterly changes the game."

Parent Revolution started small, reporting assets of just $91,000 at the end of 2009, the year it began pushing parent trigger in California. When the law passed in early 2010, major philanthropies, including the Gates, Broad and Walton Foundations, pledged substantial donations.

Parent Revolution reported nearly $4 million in grants in 2010, the most recent year tax records are available.

The group has used the money to rally parents to consider using the trigger at low-performing schools across California. "At every step of this process Parent Revolution is here to support you," the group promises in a 12-page parent handbook.

Parent Revolution has also expanded to promote trigger laws nationwide. The group recently flew several parent activists from Buffalo, N.Y. to Houston, Tex., for a training session.

Members were also in Florida earlier this month, mixing it up in a bruising political battle over a trigger bill. The mostly Democratic activists at Parent Revolution teamed with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a Republican, along with parents and lobbyists representing charter schools to promote the law.

They also worked with an aggressive new ally, StudentsFirst. Founded last year by Michelle Rhee, the former superintendent of Washington, D.C. public schools, the political advocacy group boasts 1.2 million members -- including Florida moms who flooded legislators with emails and rallied at the capitol. In other states, Rhee has run TV ads to push her agenda, which includes eliminating teacher tenure and supporting parent trigger.

Rhee says she is well on her way to raising $1 billion, though she will not discuss her funding sources.
Lining up against the parent trigger law in Florida were the teachers union, the Florida PTA and a rival group of fired-up moms, including Rita Solnet, a mother of three who says she distrusts charter schools. Solnet co-founded Parents Across America, an activist group that has received $25,000 from the nation's biggest teachers union, but says she spent her own money to fly to Tallahassee and knock on lawmakers' doors to lobby against parent trigger.

"These schools were built by the taxpayers of the past to support the taxpayers of the future," Solnet recalls saying. "You have no right to turn them over" to for-profit charter school corporations.
The Florida parent trigger bill narrowly failed.

In Adelanto, a fast-growing community of 32,000, Parent Revolution rented a house to serve as trigger headquarters and sent staff to help organize. Many parents were receptive to the campaign. Some said they had been trying for years, to no avail, to get improvements at the school, where nearly all the students are low-income minorities, mostly Latino and African-American.

BATTLE OVER PETITIONS

"We feel like we haven't been heard," said Doreen Diaz, a mother of two. "Unless we stand up and fight for our children's education, no one else will."

State law lets parents take over if they gather signatures from parents representing at least half the students at the school. Diaz and the trigger team did so.

But their opponents, backed by the teachers union, promptly challenged dozens of signatures as invalid. Some angry parents said they didn't want Desert Trails to become a charter. Others complained the trigger team had little to offer beyond vague promises that new management would make the school better.

"Where are their lesson plans?" asked Kimberly Smith, a former teacher at Desert Trails who now sends her two children there. "What is the curriculum?... How is it better?"

The school board has not yet ruled on whether the trigger petitions are valid. While the board will take public comment Tuesday, negotiations are continuing and no vote has yet been set on certifying the petitions.

Meanwhile, the daily routine continues at Desert Trails. Fifth graders are memorizing multiplication tables. Sixth graders are diving into "The Phantom Tollbooth." There are reading logs to complete and spelling lists to memorize.

Chrissy Alvarado, a mother of two students at Desert Trails, says she worries the bitter fight will be distracting. "That's what concerns me," she said -- "that our little school got brought into politics."

Google's New Privacy Policy May Violate EU Rules

By  Gabriele Steinhauser

Brussels - Google's new privacy policy appears to violate the European Union's data protection rules, France's regulator said Tuesday, just two days before the new guidelines are set to come into force.

Google announced its new privacy policy with much fanfare last month. The rules, which are set to come into force on Thursday, regulate how the Web giant uses the enormous amounts of personal data its collects through its search engine, email and other services.

However, the EU's data protection authorities are concerned about the privacy effects of the policy and earlier this month asked French regulator CNIL to investigate them.

"Our preliminary analysis shows that Google's new policy does not meet the requirements of the European Directive on Data Protection," CNIL said in a letter to Google Chief Executive Larry Page. The letter was sent Monday and posted on CNIL's website Tuesday.

The agency said Google's explanation of how it will use the data was too vague and difficult to understand "even for trained privacy professionals."

The new policy makes it easier for Google to combine the data of one person using different services such as the search engine, YouTube or Gmail if he is logged into his Google account. That allows Google to create a broader profile of that user and target advertising based on that person's interests and search history more accurately. Advertising is the main way Google makes its money.

However, CNIL said data protection authorities in the EU "are deeply concerned about the combination of personal data across services," adding they had "strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing."

Vivian Reding, the EU's Justice Commissioner who oversees the bloc's data protection rules, said she welcomed CNIL's letter and called on Google to delay its new policy.

Google argues that combining the data into one profile makes search results more relevant and allows a user to cross-navigate between different services more easily. It says the main purpose of the new policy is to combine the more than 70 different rules for Google's wide-ranging services into one that is simpler and more readable.

"We are confident that our new simple, clear and transparent privacy policy respects all European data protection laws and principles," Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, wrote in response to CNIL's original letter, adding that users had more than a month to get familiar with the new rules.

Fleischer also rejected CNIL's reiterated request to delay the rollout of the privacy policy until all concerns have been cleared up.

"We have notified over 350 million authenticated Google users and provided highly visible notifications on our home page and in search results for our non-authenticated users," he wrote. "To pause now would cause a great deal of confusion for users."

The probe of the privacy policy is one of several battle lines between Google and the European Commission, the executive arms of the 27-country EU.

Google's search engine has a market share of more than 90 percent in the EU, with rival services like Microsoft's Bing gaining little traction.

The Commission is already examining whether Google uses this dominance to stop other search engines from entering the market. It is also investigating complaints from Microsoft and Apple into whether Motorola, which Google is in the process of taking over, is breaking EU competition rules in its aggressive enforcement of standard-essential patents.

Influence Game: Leaks Show Group's Climate Efforts

By Seth Borstein

Washington — Leaked documents from a prominent conservative think tank show how it sought to teach schoolchildren skepticism about global warming and planned other behind-the-scenes tactics using millions of dollars in donations from big corporate names.

More than $14 million of the money used by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute would come from one anonymous man, according to the leaked documents prepared for a meeting of the group's board.

Heartland is one of the loudest voices denying man-made global warming, hosting the largest international scientific conference of skeptics on climate change. Several of its documents were leaked this week to the news media, showing the planning and money behind its efforts. Heartland said some of the documents weren't accurate, but declined to be more specific.

As detailed in the papers, Heartland's plans for this year included paying an Energy Department consultant $100,000 to design a curriculum to teach school children that mainstream global warming science is in dispute, even though it's a fact accepted by the federal government and nearly every scientific professional organization. It also pays prominent global warming skeptics more than $300,000 a year and plans to raise $88,000 to help a former television weatherman set up a new temperature records website.

"The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland's president for a board meeting that took place on Jan. 17," Heartland said in a statement. "The authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed." The institute singled out one of the six documents — claiming to be a summary of efforts on the issue of global warming — as a fake.

Because Heartland was not specific about what was fake and what was real, The Associated Press attempted to verify independently key parts of separate budget and fundraising documents that were leaked. The federal consultant working on the classroom curriculum, the former TV weatherman, a Chicago elected official who campaigns against hidden local debt and two corporate donors all confirmed to the AP that the sections in the document that pertained to them were accurate. No one the AP contacted said the budget or fundraising documents mentioning them were incorrect.

David Wojick, a Virginia-based federal database contractor, said in an email that the document was accurate about his project to put curriculum materials in schools that promote climate skepticism.

"My goal is to help them teach one of the greatest scientific debates in history," Wojick said. "This means teaching both sides of the science, more science, not less."

Five government and university climate scientists contacted said they were most disturbed by Wojick's project, fearing the teaching would be more propaganda rooted in politics than peer-reviewed science.

Businesses and other interests often offer free curriculum materials to financially strapped schools, hoping that teachers will use them and help disseminate their views or promote their products.

Energy Department spokeswoman Jen Stutsman said Wojick's federal work has nothing to do with climate change and that the agency maintains that global warming is real and manmade.

Heartland also planned to spend $210,000 to help Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas tour the nation to speak about municipal debt, according to one document. Pappas lost to Barack Obama in the 2004 

Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat. Pappas confirmed this in a phone interview, saying what Heartland was doing was exposing a "financial tsunami" of municipal debt.

The leaked document also discusses a new million-dollar Heartland initiative to promote the ability of patients to use experimental drugs that have not yet received federal safety approval, and efforts to support embattled Wisconsin Republican leaders in "Operation Angry Badger." Those parts of the documents were not independently confirmed.

The documents also show Heartland has raised more than $2 million from large insurance companies and nearly half a million dollars from tobacco interests.

A person who emailed 15 media and bloggers as "Heartland insider" sent six different documents purporting to be from the libertarian think tank. The insider then killed the email account used to send the documents and could not be reached. Heartland spokesman Jim Lakely would not confirm or deny the claims made in the five documents that he did not call fake.

The most sensational parts of the documents — and much of what has been confirmed independently — had to do with global warming and efforts to spread doubt into what mainstream scientists are saying. Experts long have thought Heartland and other groups were working to muddy the waters about global warming, said Harry Lambright, a Syracuse University public policy professor who specializes in environment, science and technology issues.

"Scientifically there is no controversy. Politically, there is a controversy because there are political interest groups making it a controversy," Lambright said. "It's not about science. It's about politics. To some extent they are winning the battle."

A 2010 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences surveyed more than 1,300 most cited and published climate scientists and found that 97 percent of them said climate change was a man-made problem. Yet, public opinion polls show far more doubt in the American public.

An environmental advocacy group, Forecast the Facts, on Thursday started a petition and social media campaign to complain to two of Heartland's corporate donors listed on the documents, Microsoft and General Motors. The two were not the biggest donors; Microsoft donated $69,000 over three years, while the General Motors Foundation gave $45,000. But those are companies that "need to hear from their customers" that they are not happy about promoting climate skepticism, especially after General Motors got a government bailout, campaign director Daniel Souweine said.

General Motors spokesman Greg Martin said the company's foundation gives money to "a variety of different groups holding a variety of opinions." Microsoft said through its public relations agency that it donates software to 44,000 nonprofits that pass IRS standards, as Heartland does, and that it considers climate change a serious issue.

The documents showed how heavily Heartland relies on a single person it identified only as "Anonymous Donor." In the past six years, the man has given $14.26 million to the institute, nearly half its $33.9 million in revenue.