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."
