California School 'Parent Trigger' Deemed 'Historic' Step in Power Movement: 5 Questions

_{Winter Hall and daughter Neia, a 1st-grader at West Athens Elementary School in California.}

A group of California parents are set to announce a deal this afternoon with the Los Angeles Unified School District to bring changes to their school, West Athens Elementary. The resolution marks one of just a handful of victories in the movement for parental power in schools.

West Athens Elementary School in southern Los Angeles is a historically low-performing school serving a low-income community. In addition to poor academic results, the campus was rampant with student-on-student violence and bullying, parents say.

Now, nearly a full academic year after West Athens parents banded together to pressure district officials to fix problems at the failing school, LAUSD is committing $300,000 in new resources to pay for a psychiatric social worker, counselor, heightened security, and programs and policies to improve school culture, Parent Revolution Executive Director Ben Austin said. Parent Revolution, a group founded in 2009, lobbies for parent empowerment laws known as a "parent trigger."

For years, parents across the country had little legal ability to transform underperforming public schools -- until 2010, when California pioneered the nation's first parent trigger law, laying out provisions for how parents can legally petition poorly performing schools to enforce turnaround efforts that could include dismissing the principal, replacing the staff, or converting the school to a charter.

Since 2010, a number of states -- including Texas, Indiana, Louisiana and Connecticut - have enacted similar legislation; however actual instances of it being used remain scarce.

West Athens becomes the sixth school in California to benefit from parent trigger, but perhaps more significantly the third of those schools where parents didn't have to fully utilize the law to obtain the school improvement they sought. Instead, the threat of the trigger gave them leverage to negotiate with school officials.

Winter Hall is a 33-year-old stay-at-home mother of one and a member of the parent group that forced LAUSD to strike the school improvement deal at West Athens. The self-described parent leader said she joined the West Athens Parents Union last fall when her 1st grade daughter consistently complained about being bullied at school and school officials were nonresponsive. RealClearEducation's Emmeline Zhao spoke with Hall and Austin on Thursday to talk about the movement and resulting deal. 

What happened at West Athens?

Hall: West Athens has been in a severely poor academic situation for years. It's been a failing school and the children in the community had to deal with that. Nothing's been done about it.

In October 2013, I enrolled my daughter in the school. In November, she started complaining to me she was being bullied by a young man. So immediately I go to the school and decide I'm going to sit in on her class because I want to know exactly what's happening in the classroom. I have a conversation with her teacher and find out that the young man had bigger issues than I thought. So I went to see if I could see the principal, whom I'd never met. Every time I wanted to speak to her, she was unavailable, she wasn't there, or was in a meeting. I just couldn't get her to speak to me. I soon found out from another parent that they were having bullying issues as well.

Then the school report card came in the mail, and I found out that West Athens is one of the worst schools in the area academically, so that put me even more on edge.

Was that the turning point for you joining the parents' movement? When did the union form?

Hall: I signed on and got involved in December of 2013. The union officially started in September. With me not being able to get any type of help from the principal, I was disturbed, frustrated, and angry. When I ran into some of the young ladies already part of the parent union and the organizers, I was invited to a meeting. We found out other parents were having the same problem, incidents of molestation going on in the bathroom, issues with students with autism, so I realized this was something I needed to be a part of. [Parent Revolution] said we didn't have to do this in an aggressive matter, there's another way to fix the situation with the school.

Once the parent union started organizing and growing in size and we started being more active in the school, teachers and administrators started seeing us there all the time. Parents who weren't a part of the union also had complaints, and then the instructional director got introduced to our union, so we started having dialogue with her and let her know about the problems. Once she heard about them, she decided that she wanted to have a sit-down and try to work something out. As a parent union, we opted out of trigger and decided maybe this would work, maybe we could collaborate instead, if they're willing, and see if we can resolve this in a more peaceful manner.

So the parents' union chose not to utilize trigger to reach a resolution - like two other schools. So why is trigger even necessary, then?

Austin: Without the leverage of the parent trigger I don't think the deal would've happened. But I think that the bigger picture answer to that is this movement is growing and evolving, and you look at the kind of stages of evolution of this movement where the first-ever parent trigger was at Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, the parents tried to do what Winter is describing here and not only did the district not collaborate as they did here, the district forced parents literally to sue them to implement parent trigger and follow the law of the state of California. The parents won, opened a high-performing charter school, and it's doing well now.

Then at 24th Street Elementary, parents turned in a petition, brought in a charter operator to take over the school, but then LAUSD joined the process and wanted to win back the school. The parents were able to forge an unprecedented agreement where the district and charter are able to run it collaboratively, which is unheard of.

The next step in the evolution of the movement is West Athens where instead of having to begin the laborious process of collecting a trigger petition and using the process the way parents of 24th St. did, the district engaged in a collaborative negotiation so parents never even had to use the law in the first place.

What does this all mean for parent empowerment going forward?

Austin: The fundamental change is that parents, who have a whole different set of incentive structures and more urgency for obvious reasons than others, can be taken seriously in a way that low-income parents traditionally have not been. This signals a brand new chapter in the parent empowerment movement when it's not about any specific programmatic outcome, but about low-income parents having a seat at the table for the first time in history the same way that public employee unions do when advocating for the members of their union. This kind of work takes time because parents like Winter are, for the first time, having to learn how to sit at the table and exercise real political power and grow into a leader than can effectively do that. It's also significantly more transformative than generic education reform work because we're not just changing systems, we're changing people and the communities that the systems operate in.

How much does district leadership matter in cases like these? Has having a superintendent like John Deasy made things easier for parents than they might be elsewhere?

Austin: It makes a huge difference when you can work collaboratively with the school districts instead of adversarially, but to collaborate, you need a partner. What Supt. Deasy recognizes is that empowered parents are not only not a threat, but they're the district's biggest ally if you're a superintendent trying to do what's best for kids. I think LAUSD leadership is in some ways being pushed by empowered parents. They were willing to go where no district had gone before at 24th St., not only being the first district to recognize the rights of parent trigger without being forced to by court order but also to participate in the process to effect change. This is another first where they bargained with the parents union the same way they bargain with public employee unions.

Well intentioned top-down solutions cannot by themselves transform public education, and that's because the politics of public education are messy and complicated and dominated by special interests that are more powerful than we are or will ever be. We can't get what's best for our children unless parents are not just demanding change but working toward it in a dedicated way. It's a messy, bottom-up grassroots organizing theory of change, two steps forward one step back theory, but it's the only way to get to a kids-first agenda.

Hall: Because these parents are told they don't have as much money as these other people on this other side of town, they don't realize they have the right to have children in schools without bullying or security breaches, so they're happy to settle for anything. What trigger stands for is a new light for these types of areas, because now these parents realize, "Oh, I do have rights to these things and I can advocate for my child and I don't have to use violence to do it?" What does a lion do when their cub is being attacked? Now you have the tools.

I hope that with this campaign, that the district, schools, and other schools see this and understand that this is not always about tearing something down.