…as an antidote to phony “parental choice”
Today, Parents Across America (PAA), a non-partisan, non-profit national network of public school parent activists, released a proposal for true parent empowerment that authentically involves parents in collaborative school decision-making and has a strong research base in improving student achievement.
Our position paper,“The Empowerment Parents Want: A Real, Effective
Voice in our Children’s Education,” proposes its “LSC model,” a form of elected parent-majority school governance, as an antidote to recent efforts of corporate school reformers to brand parent triggers, school choice, vouchers and other attacks on public education as “parental empowerment.”
We know that these strategies do not reflect what most parents actually
want, or what works for children and schools. A 2010 Phi Delta Kappa
poll found that 54 percent of Americans think the best thing to do about
low-performing schools is to keep the school open with the same staff
and give it more support. Only 17 percent wanted to close the school and
reopen it with a new principal, and just 13 percent wanted to replace it
with a charter school.
Even strong charter school proponent Ben Austin, of the Parent
Revolution, recently said that parents at most of the schools his
organization is working with are not interested in turning their school
into a charter school, but rather want to focus on improving their
existing schools (EdSource Extra, 1/12/12).
According to parent Lorie Barzano of the Coalition to Strengthen Austin
(TX) Urban Schools, PAA’s newest affiliate, “At every meeting I
have attended in the past year, at least one parent speaks out that ‘we
want to fix our public schools, not bring in outside contractors or
untested experiments.’ “
It’s not that parents aren’t concerned about bad schools. We are. But,
as explained in a recent report by Public Agenda, “What’s Trust Got to
do with it?,” parents and community members give tremendous value to
their local public schools. Closing their schools feels like a body blow
– as though the community itself is being written off.
Parents also doubt the ability of elected officials and district leaders
to make the right intervention and policy decisions; in fact, Public
Agenda found that a strong majority of the public trusts the judgment of
parents and teachers far more.
This lack of trust is reinforced when public officials cozy up to
wealthy hedge fund operators, venture philanthropists, and school
privatizers, take their marching orders from astroturf advocacy groups,
or “rent” supporters, as recently happened during school closing
hearings in Chicago.
“Parents in New York City and elsewhere are furious about the way in
which their children’s public schools are being forced to close, or
share space with charter schools,” said Leonie Haimson, a co-founder of
PAA and the head of Class Size Matters. “School choice does not really
exist when the priorities of thousands of parents to strengthen their
local public schools, rather than write them off, are completely
dismissed by policy makers.”
In New Orleans, parents’ efforts to have a voice in charter schools have
been blocked. “(Louisiana State School Superintendent) John White wants
us to believe that we can give input to those charters and they will run
the schools based on our input. There is nothing in law that requires
them to hear us. In fact, the time to engage the community should have
been before the charter was written, not after.This is fake community
engagement; input after you write a charter is not authentic community
engagement,” said New Orleans parent Karran Harper Royal, a founding
member of PAA.
Rather than requiring parents to “trigger” a restrictive, damaging set
of reforms or shop around among wildly divergent charter schools, PAA
supports the kind of empowerment which involves parents authentically at
the ground level and in district, state, and nationwide policy
discussions about how to improve schools.
To provide the opportunity for such authentic parent involvement at the
local school level, PAA recommends adoption of a school governance model
based on Chicago’s Local School Councils.
LSCs are duly elected,
parent-majority bodies at nearly every Chicago public school. They have
real power – including hiring, evaluating and firing a school’s
principal. LSC’s oversee a school wide process of program and budget
evaluation, planning, and monitoring that offers the kind of
collaborative effort researchers say is needed to make local reform
succeed.
Chicago’s LSC’s have proven to be a positive
element of effective school
reform for nearly two decades. For details, please see “Research Shows that Local School Councils Help Improve Schools!”.
“Anyone interested in learning about and advancing democratic,
participatory models of parent representation and governance needs to
understand the operational history of Local School Council (LSCs) in
Chicago, Illinois. As a teacher, organizer, and parent advocate, I
highly recommend those interested in improving conditions in public
education investigate the LSC model as an archetype for change,” said
Mark Friedman, a PAA member from Rochester, NY.
PAA understands that parent involvement and the LSC model are not magic
bullets.
Chicago’s schools, for example. continue to struggle for a
variety of reasons — despite
the best efforts of LSC’s.
However, the LSC model is a vastly superior “choice” for
involving
parents when included in a comprehensive set of research-based
reforms
including equitable and sufficient funding, pre-K programs, full-day
Kindergarten, small classes,
strong, experienced teachers, a
well-rounded
curriculum and evaluation systems that go beyond test
scores.*
We believe that
parents will be truly empowered, and children better
educated, only when parents
are full partners in education policy
making.
For more information on Parents Across America, check out our website at
www.parentsacrossamerica.org or email us at
