Compton parents pulled the trigger this week by voting for a new educational option. According to the Los Angeles Times, parents at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, Calif., are planning the first test of a new state law which allows parents to force reform in traditional public schools. The "parent-trigger" requires the district to bring in a charter operator or deliver a satisfactory reform plan.
"The only way to succeed is to bring about a radical and unapologetic transfer of raw power from defenders of the status quo to parents, because they're the only ones who care only about kids," said Ben Austin, a state board of education member and executive director, Parent Revolution, a nonprofit advising McKinley parents.
Parent's nationwide are exercising whatever options for better education they have available to them. More than half of U.S. parents exercise educational choice despite a system of local control designed to limit their options. A system designed to give voice to parents has in most cities turned in to an attendance-boundary bureaucracy, but most parents are still exercising options according to my friend Bruno Manno in a recent EdWeek editorial:
Policymakers continue to debate whether to expand or restrict the opportunity for all U.S. families to choose the K-12 schools their children will attend. Without fanfare, these families--especially low-income ones--have voiced their views. The result? A growing majority have voted with their feet to endorse school choice. Out of slightly more than 57 million K-12 students in the United States, nearly 52 percent, or almost 29.4 million, are enrolled in a K-12 school of choice.
You hear about charter schools, homeschooling, and online learning, but Bruno points out that the biggest category of choice are the families representing nearly 13 million students (an NCES estimate) that move to gain access to better schools--the "real estate choice."
Parents of another 9 million students access in-district choice or enroll their children in a charter school. Parents of 13 million students send them to private schools or educate them at home.
Here's Bruno's math (enrollments in millions):
• Real estate choice: 12.7
• District choice: 7.6
• Private school: 6.1
• Charter school: 1.7 (2.1 with waiting lists)
• Home school: 1.5
• Online courses: 1.5
I've predicted that learning at home (home educated plus virtual charter schools) will grow to almost 5 million by 2020. Charter schools will also serve close to 5 million students by 2020.
The emerging and radically scalable choice option is learning online. It would be possible starting in January to offer every high school student in America every Advanced Placement course, every high level math and science course, and every foreign language course; they would be taught by effective teachers using proven materials. This level of choice could be supported in 60 days by existing online learning providers but local and state policies prevent student access.
Behind our achievement gap (and now our financial gap), America has an education governance problem. Our patchwork of 14,000 school districts with school attendance boundaries often traps low income students in low performing schools--state accountability systems and federal policy interventions have done little to change that basic condition.
Now that anyone can learn anything anywhere, except for where prohibited by state policy, it's time to rethink how we provide public education in America. As the Digital Learning Council recommended last week, states should approve multiple statewide online learning providers. School districts should incorporate online learning into new blended formats that personalize learning and allow students to progress based on demonstrated competence.
Students and families deserve high quality choices--now. Parents have pulled the trigger--a majority of them now exercise choice. It's time for state policies to reflect parent demand and educational opportunity--it's time to make educational choice the norm not the exception.
Follow Tom Vander Ark on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tvanderark
Ben Austin: McKinley Elementary Parents Continuing Their Fight for Change
Sarah Butrymowicz: Charters and Traditional Public Schools: Partners Rather Than Rivals?
And so it would appear that the big parent push at McKinley is more of the smoke and mirrors that privatizers of public education are using to sway opinion in their favor...tsk tsk.
Anyone interested in more details can check out Jim Horn's post on Schools Matter:
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/
Imagine this: 51% of a local Wal-Mart's customers assemble and, under a new state law, seize that store and run it as they like or even force it to close. Of course, that is an insane idea. So why do we tolerate it with schools?
It is time to make the pros run their schools and impose direct accountability on them. Of course, I am talking about teachers. Abolish the waste, general idiocy and corruption that informs school boards, whose members serve term after term thanks to low turn outs and a frustrating paucity of information provided to parents,who then just give up, and allow teachers to innovate on the local level with oversight provided by the state department of education without interference from turf protecting and innovation-phobic school board dorks, almost none of whom have ever taught in a classroom. Add to that mandatory but free parenting classes for all first time mothers and fathers and also allow any child to attend any campus their parent deems fit for them. Then when a school continues to fail, the teachers get the axe.
Talk about a winner all the way around! And it addresses every facet of the educational system, unlike most reform proposals.
As a retired school board "dork", feel free to stick it. You don't have a clue as to what you're talking about, obviously.
Furthermore, you don't indicate whether you have ever taught yourself. Test scores in a school full of ESL students, like my old high school now is, aren't going to be very high and it ain't necessarily the fault of the instructional staff, but rather a failure to control illegal immigration that allows tens of thousands of illiterate or borderline illiterate students to flood our schools every year. Only someone with no instructional experience would have your opinion.
You also fail to address the corruption and malfeasance that informs too many school boards, which constitutes a layer in the funding chain, complete with offices, maintenance staff for them, public relations flacks and lawyers. By getting rid of this layer, teachers have no one but themselves to blame if a school is deemed a failure and there is more money for actual instruction and not for puffing up the resumes of boobs on school boards.
Canning administrators, who are mostly useless anyway, is also a good idea, but I ran out of space to mention that in my earlier post. Another winner for taxpayers.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1211-compton-school-20101211,0,4177045.story
Reformers need to begin thinking in terms of the entire system. School boards have way outlived their usefulness, parents have to be more accountable and teachers given more responsibility for what happens on their campuses. And the state department of education, which has largely escaped any press scrutiny since Bill Honig's whole language fiasco, also bears being re-examined. Yet, all the so-called self-appointed reformers want to do is hammer teachers when they have very little real power with regard to the daily operation of a campus or how schools get funded or what textbooks are permitted to be used.
"Ultimately, motivated children find the best teachers: themselves. "
Yup. But parents have to give them some tools to use. My parents were teenagers when they had me (accidental pregnancy) but yet managed to ensure that I could read before I entered kindergarten. My parents modeled reading, as we took regular trips to the library as a family.
School choice is also important. That is, any child should be allowed to attend any public school their parents see fit. When I started high school, I really hated it. The whole vibe just put me off and I didn't really feel I belonged there. I would have dropped out as soon as I could. Fortunately, we moved due to financial and workplace location decisions and my new high school was a perfect personality fit and I actually enjoyed going there. I subsequently graduated from college with honors.