PLANK SEPTEMBER 28, 2012
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When the new film Won’t Back Down, starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal and thumping with inspirational music, opens in theaters today, it will draw more than just moviegoers—it will also bring out public school teachers and parents of schoolchildren in protest. That’s because at the soul of Won’t Back Down is a controversial measure called the parent trigger law. In the movie, a fictional version of the law empowers a teacher (Davis) and parent (Gyllenhaal) to partner up and try to turn around a failing elementary school. But in real life, the outcomes of such laws are much murkier and potentially damaging—hence the protests. So what do parent trigger laws actually do? Below, a brief explanation.
Parent trigger law.
At their heart, most trigger laws give parents with children enrolled in a failing school the option to petition to “trigger” a transformation of the school—whether by shutting the school down entirely, scattering its student with vouchers for private schools, converting it into a charter school, or by firing many of its teachers or its principal. There are parent trigger laws, of various sorts, on the books in seven states. (Connecticut alone places the trigger option not with parents, but with the state or school district.) The laws define “failing” differently, but most include an option for charter school conversion. Trigger law critics and proponents alike tend to focus on the charter school aspect of these laws—placing them squarely in the political brawl over charter schools.
The trouble with triggers.
Plenty of evidence questions the wisdom of replacing public schools with charter schools. One study, from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, found that 83 percent of charter schools fared worse or no better than their public school counterparts in producing academic gains. Trigger efforts have also failed to work so far. Only two California schools have been subject to trigger petitions; one effort failed, another remains tangled in the courts. The laws have also been criticized for offering ill-defined options to parents: just because parents want their children to attend a charter over a public school, that doesn’t mean that charter schools will welcome the opportunity to teach their children, who may be several grades behind their peers.
Others are troubled by the backers of parent trigger laws. After Ben Austin, a California charter school overseer, dreamed up the original proposal, the idea was seized upon and propagated by the American Legislative Exchange Council—better known as ALEC, the model legislation giant behind the controversial “stand your ground” laws—and the Heartland Institute—notorious, of late, for comparing believers in climate change to the Unabomber. Both organizations have disseminated model parent trigger laws. (As pointed out by Center for Media and Democracy member Mary Bottari, the Heartland Institute’s bill notably allows parents to trigger a school’s transformation whether or not it’s failing.)
Parent triggers laws have widespread support—unless you’re a teacher’s union.
That’s not to say that parent trigger laws are backed only by partisan Republicans. In California, where the first such law was enacted, the measure’s most ardent backers were Democratic mayors. The U.S. Conference of Mayors voted unanimously this summer to endorse parent trigger laws. Michelle Rhee, a great supporter of such laws, is (or, insists again and again that she is) a Democrat. So are the Tennessee lawmakers potentially backing a parent trigger law in the coming legislative session. These laws’ biggest opponents, it will surprise no one, are teachers’ unions, with union booster Diane Ravitch as one of their loudest voices.
Where parents fit in varies wildly, but many veterans of the two Californian fights now testify to feeling like they were duped into signing over their children’s school to a charter school corporation, without understanding that there was no alternative option. And that, of course, is the worry attached to Won’t Back Down—more duping, set to the rousing strains of Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger.”
16 comments
And so we get more Republican propaganda released into the movie theaters, with rousing music and fictional good outcomes. How nice.
- AllanL5
September 28, 2012 at 11:34am
I take solace from the fact that trailers for this propoganda film are unlikely to trigger attacks on US consulates. Other than that, it sounds pretty stupid. The sequels should be interesting: "Won't Back Down 2 -- frustrated workers fight for their right to privatized social security" and "Won't Back Down 3 -- frustrated seniors fight for their right to negotiate directly with insurers for payment of medical services".
- Fishpeddler
September 28, 2012 at 12:03pm
It's hard to fathom the absurdity of this. We already have locally elected school boards, so the mechanism for parents to take over schools already exists. Maybe we need better mechanisms for school boards to hold their schools accountable, and if so, let's focus on that, but statutory support for a hostile takeover of a public institution is just wrong.
- IowaBeauty
September 28, 2012 at 1:59pm
Have you ever had to deal directly with a local school board Iowa? Expecting parents to have photo id to vote is a day at the beach compared to trying to get anything useful done with many of these extraordinarily inaccessible government bodies. Noisy public meeting that deliver foregone decisions followed by grim resignation is the norm in the most "democratic" districts. I don't have an opinion on the movie, but I am convinced that we need a serious movement for education reform that is willing to confront vested interests wherever they exist. And it's not hard to identify the teachers' unions, with some exceptions, as the most reactionary defenders of vested interest in the game.
- Robert Powell
September 28, 2012 at 2:35pm
But Robert, this process is being driven by the corporations that want to be the new vested interest. I'm not sure replacing an unresponsive body with a potentially more unresponsive body is the right direction to be moving. Privatization is not inherently evil in my book, but it TENDS to be, because the focus is primarily on profitability, with little consideration for accountability. And that is natural, because the prime mover is usually, as is the case here, the group hoping to profit.
- Fishpeddler
September 28, 2012 at 3:22pm
Whatever happened to public school choice? The big problem with the "trigger law" is the alternative is conversion to a charter school or bringing in a new crop of mabye-better/maybe-worse personnel. In Chicago, the handful of students allowed to pick their public school (at their own cost in transportation and time) under the No Child Left Behind lottery showed tremendous improvement in test scores. However charter schools here have generally been a failure.
- Lymon1
September 28, 2012 at 3:53pm
I don't see this as an "either/or" situation. Both corporations and public school districts have a role to play. The best idea is to open things up so that we can compare what works with what doesn't, and reinforce the former. A lot of charter schools have been disappointing, but some have been dramatically successful. Let's emulate the lessons from the good ones. Accountability is the key, and to the extent that anyone--corporate bodies, teachers' unions, the ever-growing raft of dunderhead "administrators"--resists it, they are enemies of the kids and by extension the public interest. Next to, or maybe alongside, accountability is the funding issue. Others have made the point, but I just want to reinforce it. The system of funding the schools with property taxes is awful, and needs to be replaced with system-wide funding that avoids our current apartheid network of good schools in "good" neighborhoods and abysmal ones in poor neighborhoods.
- Robert Powell
September 29, 2012 at 4:04am
In which Robert Powell shows himself to be more in thrall to ideology than actual evidence or facts.
- chaitless
September 29, 2012 at 11:50am
To be clear, RP, your last comment is much better, but there's a reason that groups like StudentsFirst (Michelle Rhee's) always stress that our schools are failing and the only remedy is to break teachers' unions. It's the same reason why Chris Christie is so beloved by the Kochs. Unions, regardless of the recent NYT article that tried to show otherwise, are an important organizing coalition within the Democratic Party. No matter what happens to schools and student performance when you break them up, there's a net positive for rich Republicans: the Democratic Party is permanently weaker, which is one way to come to terms with the fact that the Republican Party is hurtling towards structural minority status. This is almost certainly the reason Michelle Rhee continues to stress that she's a Democrat, even if the effects of her policies scream otherwise: it puts a gloss on the actual battle going on here. Now as to StudentsFirst, just think about it for a second. You have studies (often funded by right-wing funded education reformers) that say that only 20% of the variation in achievement is school-related, and a fraction of that fraction is teacher-related. What do these organizations do? They say that teachers and teachers unions are the most important factor in student achievement and they must be stopped. Isn't there a missed connection here? Yes. If you press them, they will more scrupulously note that teachers are the #1 school-based factor and that since poverty will always be with us, we shouldn't brook any excuses in our effort to rescue children from educational failure. That's right. Ignore the poverty. Fire the teachers and pay new ones less. How does this make sense? It makes sense if you consider the fact that addressing the 80%--the non-school factors--means addressing income inequality, fixing inequality of opportunity that exists for poor children from the point of birth, instituting paid maternity leave, ensuring that parents living in poverty can feed and house their children consistently, and federalizing the education system to eliminate local inequalities in education funding and the blindingly obvious racial discrimination (and class discrimination) that property tax-based funding guarantees. Do you know who doesn't like coming to terms with that reality? Rich people in the US who pay some of the lowest taxes in the developed world and would like to keep it that way. If you can seed the idea that it's all teachers fault for not curing their children of the effects of poverty all by themselves, you can relax as teachers, parents, and the broader taxpaying public fight it out for decades only to eventually find out that it was all a ruse. And while this is happening and the Democratic Party is weaker, you can roll back some more of the taxes aimed at you, like the estate tax and capital gains tax (the Republican debates, ticket, and platform have variously called for the elimination of these taxes as well as the repeal of post-Enron corporate accounting reforms as well as Dodd-Frank finance reform). So, with all their money, instead of pushing for long-desired changes (changes that LBJ only began to address in the War on Poverty's ESEA in 1965) to our education funding system and reforms that are proven to work, like instituting pre-K across the nation and providing wraparound services to all schools and not just a few in the Harlem Children's Zone, these people gin up rage with the system and try to make common cause with the constituency of people who think taxes are always and everywhere too high and that they shouldn't pay for the education of people who don't look like them and whose poverty is their just desert. Are we shocked that it's been working so far?
- chaitless
September 29, 2012 at 12:18pm
Robert - then put your money where your mouth is. There's plenty of research supporting reforms that have nothing to do with the teacher union/accountability boogeyman you push (there are some that do, such as weeding out *very* low peforming teachers, which can be done without undue risk of catching-up decent teachers and which many unions have indeed fought). Universal preschool is number one (though universal kindergarten isn't even a reality). The research is SO strong on that by your logic you are an "enemy of the kids" by not making it your top priority.
- Lymon1
September 29, 2012 at 12:19pm
To be clear Rahm and I are not advocating that unions be "broken", just that they act responsibly. Things like more realistic work rules, fair and reasonable tools to measure performance, and non-agricultural schedules are not things that would bust a union. I'd like to see universal preschool too, and would like to pay for it by reducing the number of "administrators" currently clogging up the system, or by funding education on a state-wide rather than neighborhood property tax basis. Look, the point is that we need serious, multi-faceted reforms. We're not going to get it if unions and their uncritical supporters among Democrats fight tooth and nail against any and all attempts to make them.
- Robert Powell
September 30, 2012 at 7:47am
Where has the spending increased? I'm pretty sure that as the rich tax base leaves an area and creates concentrated poverty there, spending doesn't automatically increase. The problem, RP, is that you are playing a decent game saying that you're a moderate who wants common sense reforms but you aren't squaring away with the reality of the side that you are supporting. "Me and Rahm" think. Have you talked to him? What are his reforms? How is he effecting them? Why those and not others that have better evidence for success? How do these reforms fit within the broader landscape of educational reform? Where's the money coming from, and is it sustainable? These are questions you should answer, rather than just "trotting out straw men". Actual reform is hard because the best reform would drastically change the funding system. No one is talking about it amongst the rich people who are so concerned about our "failing" educational system. Wonder why? I wrote a post about it. Read it. Rubber rooms and sexual abuse are straw men. The idea that teachers unions are the problem is an even larger straw man because there are plenty of non-unionized states and localities and they perform abysmally. What's terrible is that you know this and still insist that teachers unions are the always and everywhere hindrance to making schools better. If that were true, why haven't schools in MS, TN, or NC outshone those in MA or even NY? Why not? It would be better for you to come to terms with some of these questions rather than just ignore them and write a paean to how reasonable you and Rahm are and how mortified you are that people are vicitimizing you even though they don't understand where you're coming from as a former teacher and unionist. I don't care. Talk about the data that you alternately hallow and then ignore and let's go from there. People have referenced data in these comments and that hasn't changed your devotion to the ideology that the lack of educational progress is mainly the fault of teachers' unions. Weird, since the NAEP shows relatively constant progress across the country over the last two decades, reform or no reform. Weird since there have been several states with high-profile cheating scandals where the rot went all the way to the top--administrators complicit in the fact that they were cooking the books in order to look better in the eyes of NCLB. That's right--administrators and teachers not only teaching to the test, but sweetening the results instead of making sure their students get a well-rounded education. These are things that happened as a direct result of the last wide-scale reform, which magically tackled educational assessments instead of guaranteeing equal funding, equal opportunity, and desegregating schools by race and income. It would be better for you to abandon your ideology and think holistically, methinks.
- chaitless
September 30, 2012 at 10:34am
No need to repeat--see my response on the "fix the economy" post.
- Robert Powell
September 30, 2012 at 12:45pm
What chaitless said x 10. Oh man. Since WHEN do corporations have a role to play in every single aspect of our lives? This is getting to be too much. Education is not a function of the corporate world period. If they want to help, and they should, since we're their farm so to speak, they should donate no strings cash and lots of it to where it will do the most good and also, stop the capital strike - holding us hostage to far right wing politics favoring THEM. Finally they should pay decent wages and provide some job security instead of here today, gone tomorrow low paying, no benefit "jobs."
- Sophia
September 30, 2012 at 12:47pm
I have to admit, this is a very educational article. I had thought parent trigger laws had to do with guns. Silly me. Back to corporations v education: give those guys a chance they'll be teaching that there's no such thing as air pollution let alone global warming due to carbon fuel emissions. Corporations are in business to make a profit period, whether it's good for the world or not and mostly, it's not. Please keep education as far away from these guys as possible.
- Sophia
September 30, 2012 at 12:49pm
A final point (for now) - remember way back when the Church was the "corporate" master of its day? What did Catholic schools teach? Was it - Galileo? Anatomy a la Michelangelo? Unbiased, open minded art and science? Did they teach women? Were women (are women) part of the Church and the world's hierarchy? Are we equal in any sense? Can we get contraceptives on our health care plans? OK. Put Exxon Mobil/Bain Capital in place of "Vatican." Then discuss. What could possibly go wrong with an educational system tied to corporate money and power and far right wing politics and ideology, along with an ever-hardening and more polarized class system not to mention union busting plus a few ignorant witch burning parents.
- Sophia
September 30, 2012 at 12:54pm