There was a story in the L.A. Times this week about an underperforming elementary school in Compton being the subject of a different manner of operation that's come into law in California. It's known as the parent trigger and in short, it can change the operation of a school by a majority of parents petitioning for the change. In the Compton case, a charter school operation will be in charge of the school.
"Parents present signatures to take over a Compton school-
Using the new 'parent-trigger' law, they take the first step in demanding a charter operation at McKinley Elementary." By Howard Blume and Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-compton-school-20101208,0,5155683,full.story
The L.A. Weekly has it's own story on the situation with updates, "Compton Parents Petition to Take Over Chronically Failing Public School Through 'Parent Trigger' Law, Send Shock Waves Throughout the Nation," By Patrick Range McDonald, Wed., Dec. 8 2010. http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2010/12/parent_trigger_compton_unified.php
This story has reader comments that give assorted views. The main thing here that I see is that the parents using this approach will force the change whereas current methods of complaints on progress have resulted in the snail's pace rate of change in many cases, with little noticeable change to encourage any more patience.
The criticism can be made that you could have a schools educational process equally fumbled after a change but weighing that possibility against continuing "as is" or "status quo," the temptation is strong to make a change, especially if the operators of the school program have been considered and identified in advance. There would be not much point in moving control of a school from a group with no performance improvement methods working to parents without any plan for or idea of what's going to be done next. The goal should be to improve education immediately, not to make a change for just a hunch that it would be better.
My continuing reluctance here is that the special education aspects in education will likely be poorer not better. In working to make for better performance, you can see that the problem areas, the challenges, will be given some attention to reduce that aspect of responsibility. In that regard, you may be allowing for an increasingly disparate impact on students due to a variety of disabilities that a non-conventional school would seek to exclude among their duties.
We see the teachers union against this and that's expected; only the reasons will differ and some may be valid and others obviously weak. Again, this is in Compton and not the LAUSD, so much is still to be seen, and it is at an elementary school level and not a high school.
My observation here is that teachers, supported by their administrators and staff, need to work on linking up with the parents (and that can be one formidable task with some parents) so that there is communication and a better level of response to the needs of the students. At least among parents signing petitions, the perception currently in place demonstrates that this is not happening and a change is called for. Teachers who want to avoid this outcome would be well served to head this off by working to establish contact with parents and develop something of responsiveness to student needs as well as show what's been done and what the student needs to do (especially where classroom management problems involve the student).
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