Last Thursday, the parents of Desert Trails Elementary School -- a small, working-class desert community roughly 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles -- made history. They turned in Parent Trigger petitions representing 70% of parents at the school, demanding reform rooted in what's good for their kids, not...

My daughter believes in magic.

When our home's power went out last week because of a storm, she cast a spell to turn it back on. I love her magical world. I love jumping into it with her because -- even if it's just for a second -- I...

At the beginning of October, Dr. Diane Ravitch launched a broadside against Parent Trigger and the parent empowerment movement, calling it a "stealth assault" and a "deceptive scheme" to undermine public education. She employed a series of personal attacks, half-truths and conspiracy theories that have come to characterize...

Since the Republican presidential debate in Iowa, commentators have marveled at the unanimous declaration from every candidate that they would veto a budget deal which included $10 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. While polarization inside the Beltway is certainly not news, that moment served as a...

After journalists and bloggers from around the country reported on the American Federation of Teachers' (AFT) secret plot to kill Parent Trigger, Parent Unions from New York, Connecticut, Texas and our own in California gathered on a conference call this week to demand an apology from AFT's President...

It's been seven months since the brave parents at McKinley Elementary School approached Compton Unified and handed in the petitions that sounded off a revolution that has the entire country talking. Today, they know that, starting this fall, they will get the quality education they fought...

For much of this young century, we've heard that reformers can't support tax increases, or that unions don't support reform. We've faced false choices between charter schools and district schools. And we've seen our debate about the future of public education devolve into an ideological battle that means...

I'm going to tell you a rather startling fact: Since submitting their historic Parent Trigger signatures (representing over 61 percent of their school) to the Compton Unified School District over a month ago, the parents of McKinley Elementary have not heard a word back from their school district.

Not one...

As the Executive Director of Parent Revolution, our organization has always had one simple mantra -- it is time to make decisions in public education based on what is best for children, not adults. 

We believe that education policymakers need to start casting every single vote as if it would literally...

As I described in my last post, the Parent Trigger is a brand new California law that gives parents -- for the first time in the history of America -- the formal, legal power to transform their failing school simply through community organizing. This law represents not just a new...

This Friday marks the opening of "Waiting for 'Superman,' " the latest documentary from Davis Guggenheim (director of "An Inconvenient Truth"). The movie follows five families whose traditional public schools are failing their children and their desperate, heart-wrenching quests to enroll their children in better public schools. Each of the...