Governor Jindal endorses ‘Parent Trigger’ policy

By Zoe Sullivan
Contributing Writer

With Louisiana’s schools ranked as some of the worst in the nation, in mid-January, Governor Jindal announced his support for a policy measure that would ostensibly give parents more power over their children’s schools. The policy is called the “Parent Trigger.” It gives parents at a failing schools the right to sign a petition to call for one of four ways of dealing with the school. These four approaches are: Closure, restarting as a charter school, turnaround and transformation. The “turnaround” option involves re­placing the school’s administrators and loosening some of the rules governing them while the “transformation” model adds further supervision to the “turnaround” approach.

The policy is endorsed by a Chicago-based think tank called The Heartland Institute. The organization’s brief on the “Parent Trigger” explains why this is an approach to school reform that should be amenable to progressives. Yet the document blames teachers’ unions for trying to prevent the policy from becoming adopted more widely, praising California for passing the measure into law in 2010.

GOV. JINDAL

However, some of the criticisms seem less well-founded than the document claims. For example, the report states: “Unions are so afraid of the Parent Trigger, they are willing to use underhanded tactics to stop it.” It then states that United Teachers of Los Angeles circulated rumors to scare Latino parents away from signing a “trigger” petition. Yet the LA Times blog post that the Heartland Institute cites as one of its sources for this actually says that there was no evidence to show that the teachers’ union was responsible for the fliers behind the rumor. Another article cited, however, does mention the possibility that the petition was actually spurred by a group outside the school affiliated with a charter school company, and not the parents themselves.

Responding to The Louisiana Weekly about how the “trigger” policy would affect teachers, United Teachers of New Orleans President, Larry Carter, said: “I think it’s basically a play to say at a state level that you wants parents to have some control over schools.” And while this may be positive in some respects, Carter feels it would be a superficial way of dealing with education issues. “I think it creates an environment where you’re looking for a popular vote as opposed to real, concrete measures as to what should maintain successful schools.” Parents aren’t always aware of the changes happening within a school, Carter said, and suggested that data and other criteria should be used to evaluate school performance.

The Governor’s Office issued a fact sheet and the text of the speech where he introduced his endorsement of the policy, but it did not respond to questions from The Louisiana Weekly about the charter schools’ performance in New Orleans or the test-laden system imposed on all public schools by No Child Left Behind.

The Recovery School District did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Karran Harper Royal, a founder mem­ber of Parents Across America (PAA), expressed her disagreement with the Governor’s proposal in an email to The Louisiana Weekly.

“I am very concerned that those wanting to privatize public education will co-opt parents’ voices and push them to pulling the trigger to utilize forms of school improvement that results in charters or other destabilizing methods to so-called school improvement.” Harper Royal said in that email. “Personally, rather than pull a trigger make a school a charter, I’d like parents and community members living nearest the school to have a larger voice in how the school improves, along with educators at schools.”

PAA offers another way to deal with poorly-performing schools in contrast to the “trigger” proposal. In a press release, it “proposes [a] ‘LSC model,’ a form of elected parent-majority school governance, as an antidote to recent efforts of corporate school reformers to brand parent triggers, school choice, vouchers and other attacks on public education as ‘parental empowerment.’”

This article was originally published in the February 6, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper