I found the article on Parent Trigger Laws to be very interesting. The idea and implementation of Parent Trigger Laws was entirely new to me; I was not aware of such laws. I agree with the professor in that these laws seem like another neoliberal push for education reform, and I agree that there seems to be several problems with them.
At first glance, the idea of Parent Trigger Laws seems to be helpful for education reform and for providing students with the best education possible. It seems like a fair, parent-empowering democratic process: parents can organize and initiate a total reformation of a school with the support of at least 51% of all the parents with children who attend that school. I find several problems with this.
First, I feel as though 51% is a relatively low proportion of parents in order to initiate some kind of change as drastic as the options available under Parent Trigger Laws. Sure, it may be difficult to get more than half of the parents in a district on board for something like this, but you still only need just over half of the parents to be on board with a decision that will undoubtedly affect the entire school population. In my opinion, a two-thirds majority (or perhaps even greater) would have to support such a decision in order for it to be considered the general consensus of the community.
Second, one of the options is to convert the school to a charter school. As we have seen from several readings in the class, this supports the neoliberal agenda to push for competition and accountability among and within schools. This does not necessarily lead to greater innovation, considering most charter schools don’t perform any better than public schools, and considering the ones that do tend to keep their “secrets to success” hidden.
As the professor points out in his article, the seemingly democratic nature of Parent Trigger Laws has made them very appealing to parents and communities. However, the options granted by Parent Trigger Laws all seem to support a market vision mentality for schools – is this a truly democratic process? Sure, these laws give parents a choice, but it is a choice between several options that all support the same neoliberal reform measures. And by only requiring 51% of parents to support a petition, you are essentially removing any choice the other 49% of parents may have had.
Comments
6 responses to “Parent Trigger Laws: An illusion of choice”
I think that people support Parent Trigger Laws because it is seen as a way of giving a voice back to the parents in the district. Just to play devil’s advocate, I would think that a parent who is upset that their child is not performing well in school but sees their child working hard at home, would want to have a say in how the curriculum at their school plays out. There is good intention in the parent trigger law but it does not work out so well.
I agree, as a parent, I might want this kind of power. As an outsider, however, it is easier for me to critique such a move. Imagine if I was a retiree, or if I didn’t have children in the local public school. I might not care as much about the day to day operations of the school as a parent, but my tax dollars would still support the school. Parent Trigger would seem to discount my views on how the place should be run. Is that democratic? In the paper, I argue that it is not. Still, I think it is easier for me to argue for “democracy” when my kids are not being subjected to a substandard education. I might be whistling a different tune if my circumstances were different.
I agree with you in that 51% of parent support may not be the most effective or fair way of implementing Parent Trigger response, or the take-over of traditional schools. In addition from not taking other parents’ perspectives into consideration, Feuerstein’s article points to how simple signatures on a petition may not be representative of true, long-term support from parents. I thought about the power of community organizing and how actors behind neoliberal interests would be able to win the trust and support of parents who believed in their superficial, “manipulated” messages. Considering schools would have to be classified as “failing” for a few years before even having Parent Trigger laws as a viable opinion, one possibility could be that parents, by that point, would already have lost faith in their local schools and its staff. Where parents don’t believe in the power of their school, sweet words from a seemingly trustworthy source might seem like the only smart play left in the book. This is to say that I understand how the framing works so effectively in these situations (given the increase in the number of charter schools despite what we have learned in class).
I think the idea behind the Parent Trigger laws are well-intentioned, but I also struggle with the idea that there are predetermined choices that parents can make. Choose one of four options, even though those four options may not be effective in changing results in the first place! We see that charter schools don’t really have different levels of achievement, so what good would happen if one took the school over? Firing the teachers and administration would be effective in changing things, but how are you going to find replacements, and what if you fire the good teachers as well as with the bad? What about the teachers and administrators that are working for change? I think that the idea of giving parents a choice in how the schools are managed is good, because they have a vested interest in the school’s success, but then are they really knowledgeable enough to make an effective decision?
To add to what I said above, there seems to be very little balance when it comes to educational reform. People with too much reliance on data and not enough empathy and understanding (of how changes would affect neighborhoods, families, etc.). And people who care a ton about the school (i.e. parents) but aren’t being provided with or searching for reliable and informative data about certain school reforms.
I think that overall the idea of Parent Triggers is a move in a positive direction. A lot of the time we criticize how our school systems are run, how they fail to incorporate those opinions of parents and teachers at that school in particular, and rather decisions are made by an outsider who may in fact have no idea what is going on within that school system. How to make it successful though is a little questioning to me. I think that all schools should have a program set up for parent input. With that being said though, the school needs to try and respect the input given and place it into action to create an environment supported both by the community and parents. I think that more than just parents should have a say, but ultimately it is their child who they are trying to help achieve success, so their opinion should matter a lot when it comes to decisions. It is discouraging when a parent is in total disagreement with how a school system is run. That can only have negative consequences on their child. I would love to see some overarching system in place that takes things like this more into consideration, but how we do that is troublesome.