Just over a decade ago, parents and students trapped in failing schools had a way out, known as the Parent Empowerment Law.
Unfortunately, the law was murdered in the dark and has been almost entirely forgotten.
Under this bipartisan law, authored by then-Sen. Gloria Romero, parents meeting certain requirements could pull the “trigger,” which could be used to compel action from a school or district to either replace half the school staff, replace the principal, close the school and transfer children to other schools or convert the school into a charter school.
The law was popular in impoverished areas where schools had failed generations of students. But a bureaucratic tweak by unelected bureaucrats backed by teacher unions that hated both the trigger law and charter schools circumvented the Legislature and rendered the law null and void.
The law was only around for approximately seven years, which was not long enough for many schools to trigger. The process itself took a while and was met with formidable resistance, but in that short time there were some major success stories.
In 2015, parents of students at Anaheim’s Palm Lane Elementary School submitted a petition to convert the failing school to a charter. Around that time, a mere 19% of its students met English standards while just 12% met math standards.
After a lengthy court battle, the transition was allowed to move forward and it became the Palm Lane Global Academy. Today its students’ proficiency rates have improved substantially.
Parents of 20th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles used the trigger to demand less drastic changes in 2016. In the 2014-15 school year, only 19% of students met standards in both English and math. Today those scores have improved substantially as well.
While it was as obvious then as it is now that the status quo is not working, the education establishment has resisted change. In the 2013 documentary We the Parents about parents’ effort to trigger McKinley Elementary School in Compton, which was the first effort of its kind, the president of an influential teacher union explained in the most condescending terms that parents aren’t teachers and are therefore unqualified to assess a school’s problems.
“You don’t let the patient decide what the doctor is going to do,” said Marty Hittelman, the then-President of the California Federation of Teachers. “It would be silly to think that anyone could be educated enough, or the general public could be educated enough, to decide what doctors should do and shouldn’t do. But yet they feel like they can do that in education.”
I don’t know where Marty gets his medical treatment, but in most places doctors aren’t roaming the streets performing surgeries without the patient’s consent. But that’s a minor point – his broader point is equally flawed.
Envision a scenario where patients in need of medical attention were required to go to their local hospital only – they had no other choice. And the success rate was 10%, which was near the math and English language proficiency rates of McKinley around that time. Wouldn’t it be “silly” to think patients needed to know more about medicine in order to accurately assess that the hospital was awful?
Sadly, as absurd as Hittelman’s attitude was towards parent empowerment and protecting the status quo, it was not an outlier. This is the prevailing attitude of California’s education establishment.
In May of 2021, when students, parents and schools were scrambling to adapt during COVID shutdowns, parents of students in Los Angeles Unified School District sued the district to reopen schools in-person to honor its constitutional requirement to provide an education. Attorneys for LAUSD responded by arguing there was no legal right to an education of “some quality.”
In other words, parents should shut up and be happy with whatever they get.
That’s the drop-dead attitude the parent trigger law sought to combat. It gave parents the power to demand better for their children. It wasn’t a perfect solution by any means, but it was still a solution. As Ben Austin, one of the main proponents of the parent trigger law, told me, the “underlying theme was that the law served a constituency with no power.”
The requirements to trigger were straightforward. They included a requirement that at least 50% of affected parents supported the effort and that schools had failing Academic Performance Index scores for at least 3 years. The API was a measurement that included scores from various state tests of student performance.
But in 2015, the California Board of Education decided to scrap the API scores in favor of a new school dashboard. This made triggering impossible because it was predicated on unacceptable API scores.
It’s impossible to say if the state fled from the API scores as a way to get rid of the parent trigger law. But it’s safe to say many in the education establishment were pleased that that was a result.
Too many students and parents are trapped in school districts that are failing. When 57% of students statewide can’t meet English standards and 67% can’t meet math standards, there is a problem. A significant problem. A persistent, intractable, break-in-case-of-emergency kind of problem.
Absent spending significant time and money to hire tutors and enroll in after school learning programs to do the job too many schools can’t, students and parents have few options. With no school choice, they can either move or they have nowhere else to go.
It’s time for lawmakers to give students and parents a fighting chance and revive the parent trigger law.
Matt Fleming is the communications director for the Pacific Research Institute, a Pasadena-based think tank promoting free-market policy solutions.