…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
Seattle Education 
Ken,
From the PAA member who gathered all of the information:
Dora, past PDK polls are not free – I didn’t feel like paying $5 for the
2010 poll to confirm what I got from the Public Agenda report which
reproduced this question from the 2010 poll on page 6 of their report:
Click to access WHATS_TRUST_GOT_TO_DO_WITH_IT.pdf
Julie
“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.”
I’m familiar with the Kappan polls and down loaded the 2010 report. However, I can’t find the table or tables that contain the data you quoted. Can you direct me to the appropriate table in the report, please? Or, is it possible this was from the 2011 report or some other year?
I am preparing an article about Local School Councils, in lieu of charter schools and other “market-driven” alternatives. Would appreciate clarification, asap; as this article needs to go out soon.
Ken,
I will direct your question to the PAA members who prepared this document. Give me 24 hours to get a response for you.
Dora
Parent involvement in decision making is one of the recommendations of the Letter to Obama signature campaign. See the letter at http://dumpduncan.org. Nearly 1700 total signatures from around the U.S. have been obtained in 4+ days.
Dora
I agree that empowering the parents is probably the most effective method of improving our schools. I worked in an inner-city secondary school that was extremely challenging. The schools are not failing, the students are struggling.
Some of the main problems are as follows; lack of parental involvement, family issues that affect a student’s attendance and achievement, lack of administrative disciplinary follow-through, and economic necessities that force teens to work after school or at night leaving much less time for studies.
The WASL itself drove students to drop out. They said they would fail the test so why come to school when they can work instead. Another problem is created when a critical mass of struggling students is assembled in one school or classroom overburdening the available resources. If teachers spend an inordinate amount time working with struggling students there is not enough time to work with the other students.
I worked with 9th and 10th grade students that had a 4th and 5th year understanding of mathematics. They were promoted despite their deficiencies because the parent makes the decision to move them ahead. You can imagine the work this creates for secondary teachers, and it creates a large number of drop-outs in high school where they need to pass classes to graduate.
Instead of jettisoning programs that support music, the fine arts, wood shop, metal shop, horticulture etc. schools should strengthen them.
Corporations could provide students with mentors and tutors, like in the Everett School District. This would do more than anything to improve achievement. It would also put a live human in the equation, of course this is not on their to-do list because they want a capital intense computer to do the work of a labor intense human.
As you have articulated, the job of public education is not to train students to work for Gates or whomever, but to provide a broad-based curriculum in the arts and sciences that will prepare the student for whatever career they choose. If corporate America wants students specifically trained for their particular industry they should develop a multitude of internships and work with the schools to implement student participation.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the work you are doing. Public Education is the last line of defense of a free world. People forget that Italy was a corporate state under Mussolini.
David Fisher