education – Page 10

California tells for-profit chain to stop enrolling veterans

May 16, 2015 By Lisa Leff Leave a Comment

As reported by the Associated Press:

A for-profit college company with 15 campuses in California was ordered by the state Friday to stop enrolling new or returning students who plan to fund their educations with GI Bill benefits.

The order to ITT Educational Services came in a suspension notice issued by a division of the California Department of Veterans Affairs that sanctions training programs to serve veterans.

ITT operates more than 135 schools in 39 states under the names ITT Technical Institute and Daniel Webster College.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a fraud complaint against the Indiana-based company this week over an alleged scheme to cover up losses from private student loans that ITT had guaranteed to its investors.

California officials suspended ITT as an …

Click here to read the full story

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: education, Higher Education, ITT Tech, regulation, SEC, Veterans

Competition-Phobic Teachers Unions Still Trying to Decimate Charter Schools

May 13, 2015 By Larry Sand 1 Comment

As I wrote a couple of years ago, the teachers unions vacillate when it comes to charter schools. On odd days they try to organize them and on even ones they go all out to eviscerate them. But the organizing efforts haven’t gone too well. The Center for Education Reform reports that, nationwide, the percentage of unionized charter schools has dropped from 12 in 2009 to a paltry 7 in 2012. In California, there is a 15 percent unionization rate, but that number, from the 2009-2010 school year, is long overdue for an update.

So if you can’t join ‘em, you try to undermine ‘em. To that end, during National School Choice Week in January, the National Education Association claimed that charter schools are unaccountable and warned the public to be wary of them. Then last week, NEA posted “Federal funding of charter schools needs more oversight, accountability” on its website.

This is pure union obstructionism and especially laughable coming from an organization whose mantra is, “Let’s spend bushels more on public education … but don’t hold any unionized teachers accountable.” In fact, there is plenty of oversight and accountability for charters. As the California Charter School Association points out, unlike traditional public schools, charters “are academically accountable on two counts. They are held accountable by their authorizer (usually the local school district) and, most importantly, by the families they serve. When a team of school developers submit their charter petition, they must define their academic goals In order to be authorized, their goals must be rigorous. In order to stay open, they must meet or exceed those goals.” Additionally charters must abide by various state and federal laws, civil rights statutes, safety rules, standard financial practices, etc.

Perhaps most importantly, charter schools – schools of choice – have to please their customers: children and their parents. On that count, charters are doing quite well. Just about every study ever done on them shows that they outperform traditional schools, and Black and Hispanic kids benefit the most. Nationally, there are 6,440 schools serving 2,513,634 students, but the bad news is that there are over a million more kids on wait lists. And the situation is especially bad in areas that need charters the most: our big cities, which serve primarily poor and minority families. A new report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools points out that New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Boston, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami and Washington, D.C. fail to meet parental demand.

And then there is California.

The Golden State is the national leader in charters with 1,184, serving 547,800 students. But not surprisingly it also leads the country in kids who want to get in but can’t, and there are 158,000 of them. Of course the teachers unions are saying and doing what they can to deny parents – again mostly minorities and poor – the right to escape their unionized public schools. United Teachers of Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl recently stated that “a lot of charters don’t allow access for special-education students or English learners.” This of course is bilge; charter schools must serve all students. Lest his sentiments were not clear, he added, “The ascendant forces in California’s charter movement, I don’t see a lot of value in them.”

California Teachers Association president Dean Vogel recently opined. “There is a role for charter schools in California’s education system, and that role should be performed to the same high standards of integrity, transparency and openness required of traditional public schools.”

My goodness, no! I want charters to perform at way higher standards than traditional public schools … and thankfully most do.

Sadly CTA, now in eviscerate mode, is sponsoring four bills making the rounds in the California legislature. The union’s professed aim is regulation, but it appears to be a lot more likestrangulation. The bills, which you can read about here, are nothing more than ways to limit charter growth, harass them and take away any needed independence they now have. For example, Tony Mendoza’s SB 329 would allow a charter petition to be denied for “anticipated financial impact.” This is simply a way to deny a charter for any reason and use money as an excuse. (This bill is similar Mendoza’s AB 1172 which was vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2012.) AB 787 would require that all charters be run as non-profits. The bill’s author, Roger Hernández, said it would also “establish charter schools as governmental entities and their employees as public employees, giving them an increased ability to unionize.” Pure nonsense. Charters are fully capable of organizing now and only 10 in the state (less than one percent) are currently for-profit schools.

What the unions will never admit is that charter schools are effective because they are independent and not bound by the union contact, and when they are unionized, they are no different from traditional public schools. Jay Greene, in The Wall Street Journal, cited a study conducted by Harvard economist Tom Kane which found that, comparing apples to apples,

… students accepted by lottery at independently operated charter schools significantly outperformed students who lost the lottery and returned to district schools. But students accepted by lottery at charters run by the school district with unionized teachers experienced no benefit. (Emphasis added.)

The war between teacher union leaders who insist on a one-size-fits-all cookie cutter education system run by them, and parents who want to get their kids out of failing schools and into charters rages on. In the meantime, there are thousands of kids in California whose futures are in jeopardy as the teachers unions direct their cronies in the legislature to do their bidding and decimate charter schools.

This piece was originally published by UnionWatch.org

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Charter Schools, CTA, Dean Vogel, education, education reform, Larry Sand, National School Choice Week, unions, UTLA

Half of Juniors Opt Out of Common Core Tests in Affluent High School

April 30, 2015 By Sarah Tully Leave a Comment

More than half of the 11^thgraders at an affluent high school in Los Angeles County are opting out of new tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards – an ever-growing issue nationwide, but rare so far in California.

Parents in the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District are citing concerns about privacy over children’s data and the relevance of the Smarter Balanced Assessments that millions of California students are taking this spring as reasons for opting out.

At Palos Verdes High School, 260 of the school’s roughly 460 juniors are skipping the tests that began last week and are continuing this week, Superintendent Don Austin said. Elsewhere in the 11,600-student district, an additional 222 students are sitting out of the tests in a different high school, as well as intermediate and elementary schools.

“We think it’s fantastic,” said parent Barry Yudess, who leads RestorePVEducation, a parent watchdog group that opposes the Common Core tests.

The state has yet to track this year’s numbers of students who are opting out of the exams, which is allowed under California law. School districts will submit the opt-out reports after testing is completed by June and statewide numbers likely will be available in the fall.

But this is the highest number of opt-outs that California Department of Education officials had heard of so far, said Pam Slater, a department spokeswoman. Smarter Balanced testing began in March, with roughly half of the state’s 3.2 million students taking it so far.

Compared to several other states, California has not been a breeding ground for opposition to the Common Core standards, the new academic standards adopted by California and 42 other states.

For example, in six large school districts where EdSource is tracking implementation of the Common Core, school superintendents indicated that there has been relatively little opposition and no greater number of parent requests to opt out of standardized testing than in previous years.

In several states, students have opted out in far larger numbers or even walked out of Common Core-aligned tests. In New York, some schools have reported between 60 and 70 percent of students skipping the tests.

On the Palos Verdes peninsula, the district sits along the ocean, with average home prices of $1.5 million, and enrolls just 3 percent of students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch.

The RestorePVEducation group got the word out by sponsoring forums with Common Core opponents, putting up a YouTube channel, setting up a Facebook page and sending out emails. But the most effective method likely was handing out fliers and opt-out forms outside of schools, Yudess said.

Yudess and Joan Davidson, a grandmother and another group leader, said they have concerns about the privacy of the data being collected electronically through the tests.

“There really is no good reason to take the test,” said Kimberly Ramsay, the parent of a 7^thgrader and a senior.

The school district’s website boasts that 98 percent of its graduates enroll in college, so that some parents and students are questioning the relevance of taking a test they don’t see as related to achieving that goal.

“It’s ridiculous,” Yudess said. “They don’t want their time wasted. They are looking at going to top colleges. They are thinking, ‘Why waste my time, taking this meaningless test?’”

School superintendent Austin said he believes most parents decided to opt out their 11^thgraders after Common Core opponents put fliers on cars, stating that the students could spend more time studying for Advanced Placement tests that students can take for college credit.

During testing weeks, teachers are dividing students by those taking the test and those who are not, and supervising the students who opted out, Austin said.

Austin said he has tried to get answers from the state about the consequences of failing to have enough students take the tests in certain schools. Under the federal No Child Law Behind law, 95 percent of students in certain grades are expected to take annual standardized tests. If they don’t, they are labeled as failing to make “Adequate Yearly Progress,” or AYP. Austin said he was unsure how many of his campuses would end up falling below the 95 percent mark until the Smarter Balanced testing is complete.

But there would be no financial consequences. Only schools that receive money for low-income students, called Title 1 funds, might be affected. Palos Verdes is not one of those schools.

Also, high school students might be unable to use their Smarter Balanced scores when applying to California State University campuses and other colleges to prove that they don’t need remedial courses. But there are other ways for students to demonstrate that that they do not need to take remedial classes.

Last week at the Education Writers Association meetings in Chicago, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was asked what would happen to states if large numbers of students did not take the tests. He said that he expected that states would make sure that they did. “If states don’t do that, then we have an obligation to step in,” he said, without detailing any specific actions.

Austin said he has been unable to get good answers about what the consequences will be for his district as a result of children opting out of the standardized tests. “This is a very, very sophisticated community. They are asking the right questions. Our inability to answer those questions is only adding fuel to the fire,” Austin said. “I do think without some accurate information quickly, it’s only going to get worse and we’re going to end up being a model for the state.”

Originally published by EdSource.

Louis Freedberg contributed to this story.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Common Core, EdSource, education, education reform, Palos Verdes, Testing

Common Core tests well under way

April 29, 2015 By Katherine Ellison 1 Comment

With less than two months of instruction time left before summer vacation for most California schools, roughly half of the 3.2 million students expected to take the first online tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards have begun to do so, the California Department of Education reported Monday.

“From what we understand, things are going well,” said department spokeswoman Pam Slater. “We haven’t had a lot of reports of computer malfunctions and we’re happy with results so far.”

The computer-based tests, known as the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, are replacing the multiple-choice, pencil-and-paper California Standards Tests that students had been taking since 1998.

School districts began administering the tests on March 10, with testing windows varying widely among different districts, depending on their instructional calendars. Most districts will complete testing by mid-June, although a small number of California schools that offer year-long instruction will be giving the tests up until Aug. 31.

The assessments, in math and English Language Arts, are being given to students in grades 3 through 8 and 11. The test developer, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, has estimated the tests will take students between seven and eight-and-a-half hours to complete, but it is up to the schools to decide precisely how to schedule the assessments. Slater has said that in most cases students are taking the tests over several days, in blocks of time as short as 30 minutes to an hour.

Of the more than 1.6 million students who have embarked on the tests to date, 573,299 have so far completed the tests in English language arts and literacy, and 366,794 have finished the tests in math.

“We think this is a really big week for the testing, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on the system,” said Cindy Kazanis, the state’s director for educational data management.

At the peak so far, 287,778 students were online at the same time, with no interruption in the state system monitoring results, Kazanis said. She expected that number to increase this week, but said she was confident that districts will avoid major problems.

“We’re not getting any panicked calls that this isn’t working,” she said.

Originally published by EdSource.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Common Core, EdSource, education, education reform, Standardized Tests

Teachers’ Union Propaganda Is Creeping Into CA’s Public School Curricula

April 26, 2015 By Larry Sand 2 Comments

To say California’s teachers’ unions wield outsize influence over state education policy is hardly novel. From setting tenure rules to rewriting dismissal statutes and blocking pension reforms, the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers roam the halls of the legislature like varsity all-stars. But less well known are the unions’ efforts to remake curriculum — and thereby influence the next generation of citizens and voters.

According to labor expert Kevin Dayton, organized labor has been trying to get its collective hooks into classroom content since 1981, when the City University of New York developed the “American Social History Project.” The idea was to present the history of marginalized and oppressed groups — including labor unions — to a “broad popular audience.” In California, the project took a great leap forward in 2001, when Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg cooked up the Speaker’s Commission on Labor Education, which, as Dayton explains, was established “to address issues of labor education in California’s public school system.” At the commission’s behest, Governor Gray Davis signed a bill that encouraged school districts to set aside the first week in April as “Labor History Week” and “commemorate it with appropriate educational exercises to make pupils aware of the important role that the labor movement has played in shaping California and the United States.”

By 2012, labor’s “week” had morphed into “Labor History Month,” and California’s teachers’ unions began advancing their politicized agenda. The CFT’s elementary curriculum includes a story about a “mean farmer” and his ticked-off hens that organize against him. The CTA meantime offers up a passel of lessons with a heavy emphasis on issues such as “tax fairness.” The University of California’s Miguel Contreras Labor Program joined in, adding an anthology of stories promoting the IWW, a radical union noted for its ties to socialism and anarchism, as well as a biography of America’s singing Stalinist, Pete Seeger.

The unions were on the move again in 2014, as the California Department of Education began its periodic review of the state’s history framework. In November, the CFT sent a proposal to the Instructional Quality Commission, an advisory body to the state board of education on matters concerning curriculum, instructional materials, and content standards. The union’s suggestions included downplaying the Second Great Awakening—the eighteenth-century religious revival that had a profound effect on the temperance, abolition, and women’s rights movements—in favor of greater emphasis on anti-Muslim discrimination after the 9/11 attacks. The union also wants the United States described as an “empire” that regularly “dominate[s] other civilizations,” despite the nation’s record of rebuilding countries we have defeated in war, such as Germany and Japan after World War II.

Naturally, the CFT makes a case for a “Labor Studies” elective. California is considering a lesson that would let students “participate in a collective bargaining simulation to examine the struggles of workers to be paid for the value of their labor and to work under safe conditions. They can examine legislation that gave workers the right to organize into unions, to improve working conditions, and to prohibit discrimination.” The Speaker’s Commission on Labor Education co-chairs, Fred Glass and Kent Wong, weighed in with a letter of their own urging the Instructional Quality Commission to establish the labor studies elective.

Will the unions advocate a full and fair treatment of labor’s history, including routine episodes of union violence and intimidation? Can students expect thorough exploration of labor economics, including how collective bargaining lowers the pay of many workers due to wage compression? Probably not. It’s even less likely that students will hear anything about the teachers’ unions twenty-first century political ventures—such as how the CTA spent more than $26 million in 2000 to defeat a school-voucher initiative that would have let families escape failing schools, or how, in 2012, it successfully lobbied to defeat SB 1530, which would have simplified the process of firing pedophile teachers.

The teachers’ unions are clearly lobbying for changes to a curriculum they believe presents a sanitized version of U.S. history, but they would simply replace disfavored “myths” with their own versions. As an American history teacher for much of the last decade of my career, I was faithful to the state framework and taught extensively about slavery and other injustices in our collective past. Most other history instructors I knew did the same. We didn’t browbeat the kids, however, into believing that American history was riddled with treachery and malevolence. If parents and citizens don’t take action, a bundle of America-bashing lessons, distorted history, and indoctrination into the glories of collective bargaining may become a part of the Golden State’s curriculum.

Originally published by City Journal.

Larry Sand, a retired teacher, is president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network and a contributor to City Journal’s book, The Beholden State: California’s Lost Promise and How to Recapture It.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: CFT, CTA, education, education reform, Gray Davis, Larry Sand, unions

The Money Man Exits the Lobby

April 20, 2015 By Lloyd Billingsley 2 Comments

John Mockler cast a long shadow over the modern history of public education in California. “I once suggested in print that California needed a constitutional amendment requiring [John] Mockler to live forever,” wrote Zócalo Public Square columnist Joe Mathews of the man who authored Proposition 98, the 1988 constitutional amendment that earmarked 40 percent of the general fund budget for K–12 education. Mathews did not get his wish, of course. On March 3, at the age of 73, Mockler died of pancreatic cancer and prominent Californians marked the passing of a legend.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson called Mockler a “giant.” He was the “brilliant wonk” responsible for steering $65.7 billion to public schools in the coming year, $5 billion more than last year, wrote Sacramento Bee editorial page editor Dan Morain. He was a man who “cared deeply about schools.” Governor Jerry Brown tweeted that Mockler “knew education law like no one else and was able to put school finance on a solid footing that endures even today.” Former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called Mockler “a true champion for our children,” and a man who was “honest and provided excellent advice on how best to improve our educational system.”

Aside from Prop. 98, Mathews observed in his obituary, Mockler was “deeply grounded in the realities of kids” and “he also had a great devotion to facts.” But more than a few important facts were missing from the eulogies, most notably Mockler’s lucrative career as a lobbyist. Mockler personified the stereotype of the “revolving door” in politics, moving back and forth every few years from consulting and lobbying to the public sector. In the mid-1960s, Mockler became a consultant to the state assembly’s education committee, and from 1974 until 1977 he served as a senior staffer to Wilson Riles, the state superintendent of public instruction. In 1977, Mockler left Sacramento for a post with the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the United States. One year later, Californians passed Proposition 13, which limited the power of government to raise property taxes, which were a prime source of revenue for schools. Mockler was not a fan. In 1980, he formed Murdock, Mockler and Associates, a lobbying firm specializing in education policy. But before long, he returned to government as Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s education adviser from 1983 to 1985, when public education reform was a raging issue.

Mockler, a liberal Democrat, rejected the conclusions the National Commission on Excellence in Education reached in A Nation at Risk. In Mockler’s view, public education was not drowning in a “rising tide of mediocrity.” He often decried what he called the “California schools suck industry,” and people “who make their living hand-wringing about how bad California schools are.” Mockler persisted with his belief in the Golden State’s excellence until the very end. “If a kid goes out and steals a lunch, you’re going to hear about that,” Mockler said. “But how about a headline saying 93 percent of students went to school today and got along just fine? You’re not going to hear about that.” But Mockler also knew that evaluation was not his strong suit. “I feed the pig,” Mockler would often say when he lobbied for L.A. Unified. “Other people weigh the pig.”

In Mockler’s world the problem was simple: the education establishment was underfunded and needed more money—always. That was also the default position of the California Teachers Association and State Superintendent Bill Honig, who recently told the Los Angeles Times, “back in the ’80s we were so frustrated by the underfunding of schools.” Mockler conceived Prop. 98 as an “antidote” Prop. 13. Yet the school establishment’s complaints about poor funding persisted. So did the public’s complaints about dysfunctional and dangerous schools. Prop. 174, the Parental Choice in Education Initiative, appeared on the 1993 ballot as the antidote in turn to Prop. 98. At a San Francisco conference, I heard Mockler fulminate against the measure. The jovial man who joked that Prop. 98 would help send his own kids to Stanford was opposed to low-income parents choosing the schools their children would attend. Voters soundly rejected the choice initiative and preserved the status quo.

Soon afterward, Mockler formed the lobbying firm of Strategic Education Services, where his clients included the Association of American Publishers, California Public Radio and Television, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, and the California Association of Administrators of State and Federal Programs. Another client was L.A. Unified, not known as a bastion of achievement or accountability. Mockler’s lobbying connections came in handy when he served a brief stint as secretary of education and later executive director of the State Board of Education under Governor Gray Davis. There he would play a key role in selecting the textbooks the state would purchase. For some observers, that was troubling. San Jose Mercury News education reporter Jessica Portner noted that Mockler, “established personal financial relationships with lobbyists for the publishing industry.” After joining the board, Mockler “received loan payments from two textbook industry representatives who purchased his lobbying firm.” Portner also reported that Mockler co-owned a Bodega Bay vacation home with state school board member Marion Joseph. She remained on the state board after Mockler left, retaining “significant sway over which texts are selected.”

Whether those texts were any good is subject to debate. But as Portner saw it, they were certainly more expensive. The average price of English textbooks for students in kindergarten through eighth grade ballooned 212 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars between 1990 and 2002; the price of math books climbed 156 percent over the same period. Mockler never complained. Nor did he ever experience the sort of legal trouble that took down his friend Honig in 1993, when he was convicted of felony conflict-of-interest charges—specifically, making contracts in which he had a financial stake.

Californians should remember Mockler as a government success story in the style of Robert Klein, the real estate tycoon who made out well with Proposition 71 and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Likewise, environmental zealot Peter Douglas gained a veritable state within a state in the California Coastal Commission. Like that pair, Mockler wielded great power but never once had to face the voters. His career confirms that California’s government education system has a for-profit subsidiary a clever insider can exploit for a lot of money, working both sides of the table.

Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Exceptional Depravity, and the forthcoming Bill of Writes, a collection of journalism.

Originally published by City Journal online

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: education, Gray Davis, John Mockler, Prop. 2, Prop. 98

Future of UC System in Hands of “Committe of Two”

March 20, 2015 By Joel Fox 1 Comment

Ironically, in the midst of Sunshine Week, designed to create more open government and freedom of information, the “Committee of Two” considering the financial situation of the UC system – Gov. Jerry Brown and University of California President Janet Napolitano – are not forthcoming in revealing details about their negotiations. Despite protests to the contrary, this may be a necessary thing.

Yesterday at the UC Regents’ meeting in San Francisco, both Brown and Napolitano did a two-step around whatever progress is being made in their talks about the proposed tuition increase. Napolitano and the Regents supported tuition increases if the university system did not get more money from the state. Brown refused to be bullied.

Now the two are working on a plan that will try to re-set some university finances without raising tuition or dramatically increasing the state’s contribution. Not an easy task, but they claim they are making progress.

That doesn’t stop critics from demanding the negotiations be more open. As one student was quoted in the Sacramento Bee, “We need a committee that not just represents a committee of two, but a committee of 240,000,” referring to the number of students in the system.

University business

Are private talks setting government plans ever the way to go? Historians have suggested that, if the United States Constitution was cobbled together in open meetings the document would be much different and, they suggest, not better.

Tackling tuition hikes is not the same as constitution writing. However, to continue the broad analogy, what comes out of these private meetings may set a course of change for the way the university does business, just as the long ago constitution-writers went beyond their original assignment of fixing the Articles of Confederation.

I know – a little bit of a grandiose comparison. But it is quite possible the UC system might look and feel quite different if the negotiators come to an agreement and any proposed changes are approved after debate. Online courses, larger teaching loads for professors and a shorter time to graduation all may alter the university experience as we have come to know it over the last few decades.

Whatever the Committee of Two comes up with would have to withstand vigorous public debate. There is no guarantee any Committee of Two proposal will pass the test. I served on a half-dozen state commissions over the years and few commission recommendations were turned into state policy.

Pensions

One big issue that is affecting all government-related organizations is employee pensions and health costs. When the issue of raising tuition first surfaced, the university’s financial division pointed to pension costs as one of the culprits. That issue must also be part of the negotiations, along with rising retiree health care costs.

We will see if the Committee of Two can come up with any solutions on the pension/health care front that succeed and maybe set the course for reform in this area for other government entities.

One suspects big changes are coming to the UC system. Getting the ball rolling is happening in private.

This piece was originally publish by CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: education, Janet Napolitano, Jerry Brown, Tuition, UC, UC System, University of California

School Choice Week Highlights Vouchers, Opportunity

January 26, 2015 By John Seiler Leave a Comment

National School Choice Week kicked off yesterday, designed to heighten awareness for innovations in education. According to SchoolChoiceWeek.com:

“Independently planned by a diverse and growing coalition of individuals, schools, and organizations, National School Choice Week features thousands of unique events and activities across the country. The Week allows participants to advance their own messages of educational opportunity, while uniting with like-minded groups and individuals across the country.”

California is a mixed bag on school choice. It has been a leader in charter schools, which are public schools that operate without most of the red tape of regular schools. According to the California Charter Schools Association, the number has grown from 31 in 1994, the first year they were allowed, to 1,130 in 2014.

Parent Trigger Law

Another development is the Parent Trigger Law, authored by former Democratic state Sen. Gloria Romero of Los Angeles. It allows a majority of parents in a failing school to “fire” the administration, and start over on a more successful model.

It has succeeded in a couple of cases, including Desert Trails Preparatory Academy in Adelanto.

But it has faced numerous challenges. It just overcame one. Romero wrote last month in the Orange County Register:

“The California Senate Legislative Counsel issued last week a sweeping opinion, concluding a controversy as to whether a school district – Los Angeles Unified, in this case – can proclaim itself exempt from California’s historic Parent Trigger law….”

She quoted the Leg Counsel:

“[T]he legislative intent in enacting [the law] … was to allow parents or guardians of pupils enrolled in schools that have been underperforming … to request specified interventions. It would be inconsistent with that legislative intent to conclude that … [they] … are deprived of the remedy set forth … on the basis that a school district has received a federal waiver whose purpose is to relieve that district solely from compliance with federal performance requirements. [I]t is our opinion that the … waiver … does not exempt that school district from compliance with the [law].”

And she noted a controversy in Anaheim:

“parents at Palm Lane Elementary School in Anaheim are mobilizing to turn around their school. Already they have faced obstacles imposed on them by some hostile school board members and school officials, but the parents have surmounted each obstacle and could become the first parents in Orange County to succeed in using the Parent Trigger law on behalf of their children.

“At a time when too many people complain about the lack of parent involvement in their kids’ educations, these parents should be celebrated as everyday heroes.”

No vouchers

However, the school voucher program active in several states has not done well here. It gives each student a voucher, or scholarship, to the school chosen by him and his parents. The school could be public or private.

Facing fierce teacher-union opposition, it twice was heavily defeated at the polls: with Proposition 174 in 1993. And with Proposition 38 in 2000.

That’s probably a lost cause here for school-choice fans.

But overall, parents do have more choices in California for their kids’ schools than 20 years ago. Charters are secure and spreading. And the Parent Trigger Law has survived legal challenges, albeit its progress remains slow.

Originally published at CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Ed reform, education, School Choice Week, Vouchers