OK, For anyone still reading this, I’ll outline the reality about the actual existing parent triggers. As a California parent activist, I’ve followed the two attempts closely.

Background: The organization Parent Revolution, which was created by charter school entrepreneur Steve Barr, came up with the parent trigger, and a friendly California legislator, former state Sen. Gloria Romero, sponsored it as a law. It (barely) passed the state legislature in 2010 in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to win favor for a Race to the Top application. Parent Revolution predicted that many schools would soon use the parent trigger to become charters.

Parent trigger 1: McKinley Elementary, Compton, CA, 2010. This was entirely created by Parent Revolution. Parent Revolution admits that it decided to deploy a parent trigger. It created a plan and pre-selected a charter operator to take over a school. Only THEN did Parent Revolution look around the state for a school to target. Parent Revolution sent paid operatives out into Compton to collect signatures door to door (“sign here if you want to improve your school”), and only then did any McKinley Elementary parents hear about it. When the petition was submitted and the charter takeover plan was announced, there was mass protest by McKinley parents at a school board meeting, denouncing the plan to become a charter. Eventually the plan to have the designated charter operator take over the school was dropped. The charter opened in a site not far away. Gleeful “reform” boosters predicted that this would destroy McKinley as parents flocked to the charter. Official enrollment figures show that McKinley enrollment dropped only 12.9% when the charter opened nearby.

Parent trigger 2: Desert Trails Elementary, Adelanto, CA, 2012. A faction of parents teamed up with a former principal of the school and a former school board member, connected up with Parent Revolution, and started a petition with a list of demands for improving the school, including small class sizes and more resources. (The school district had previously said the only way to meet those demands was to take resources from the district’s other schools.) Parent Revolution got the parents to circulate a second petition, calling for a charter takeover, supposedly as leverage. Only the charter takeover petition was submitted. Even the pro-parent trigger parents say they don’t want to become a charter. There’s a strong core of anti-parent trigger supporters (their emblem is the existing school spirit T-shirt). Many parents tried to rescind their signatures from the petition. A judge ruled that they could not — thus disempowering them. Currently, Parent Revolution is looking for a charter operator to take over the school. The only two that are in the running have unsuccessful records running their existing schools. That’s where that parent trigger currently stands.

How exactly does the story shown in Won’t Back Down resemble either of those actual situations? And as you can see, in neither case did parents try to turn the school into a charter. Gotham Schools! Please bring back the standards I thought you had!

I don’t understand your fascination with allowing one group of citizens to deny rights to another.  Should we remove failing students from a parent’s custody if a majority of teachers vote in favor of it?  We could call it a “teacher trigger” law.