Count legendary school choice activist Howard Fuller among those who don’t have a problem with for-profit entities in education reform.

At the Black Alliance for Educational Options symposium in Orlando on Thursday, Fuller, who is BAEO’s chair, told several hundred participants at a first-timers orientation that “you also need to not have, at least in my opinion, a knee-jerk reaction to for-profits.”

“At the end of the day, judge something by what it does,” he said. “Don’t start by judging the label.”

The participation of for-profit companies is often raised by critics in parental choice debates on everything from virtual and charter schools to parent triggers and tutoring providers. It's also an issue to some extent within the choice community. A few months ago, Rick Hess from the American Enterprise Institute and Ben Austin with Parent Revolution engaged in a back-and-forth on the issue after Austin suggested nonprofits are more likely to put children first.

Fuller weighed in after letting attendees know BAEO supports effective public private partnerships. Here’s the full text of his remarks, as best as I could hear them: (more…)

Ben Austin of Parent Revolution and Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute have been engaging in a civil dialogue on the merits of educators and parents being able to purchase instructional and management services from for-profit corporations. Austin opposes allowing parents and educators to have this option, while Hess is a supporter.

Austin’s advocacy of parental empowerment derives from his belief that public education too often puts adult needs over the needs of children. He thinks giving parents more influence over how their children are educated will move students to the center of educational decision-making. But Austin opposes allowing parents to contract with for-profit corporations because he thinks these companies will be more concerned with profit than children’s needs. A summary of Austin’s position was recently posted on the Parent Revolution blog: “Because we believe children need to be put first in every decision, it is far better to have non-profit organizations – accountable to parents, taxpayers and a stated mission – than a for-profit organization, which by definition is accountable first and foremost to investors and shareholders … ”

Hess argues that for-profit corporations already provide billions of dollars of products and services to school districts every year, and if parents decide a for-profit company can best meet their children’s needs, they should be allowed to work with it.

I agree with Hess. While Ben Austin is clearly well intentioned, his argument is based on ideology and politics, and not good public policy. Parents should be free to contract with providers that best meet their children’s needs.

The ad hominem aspect of Austin’s argument is troubling. While I was doing my holiday shopping this year, the gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity of the salespeople I talked to was irrelevant, as was their employer’s tax status. What was relevant was the quality and price of the products or services they were selling. I suspect Ben has these same priorities when he shops, and he likewise does not consider a corporation’s tax status when he purchases products and services for his family and friends. (more…)

Texas: Recent political appointments show more stars lining up for vouchers in the next legislative session. (Houston Chronicle)

Michigan: Parent Revolution leader Ben Austin criticizes a parent trigger proposal in Michigan because for-profit charter schools would be among the options parents could select for a school turnaround. (Education Week)

Florida: School boards pass resolution after resolution against Amendment 8, which they think will open the door to more private school vouchers.

New Jersey: An Episcopal school in Newark becomes the first to convert to a charter school under a new law opposed by some Catholic leaders. (NJ.com)

Tennessee: Vouchers are an issue in legislative races, with some Republicans lukewarm about the idea (timesfreepress.com). Some charter schools in Memphis get rent-free school buildings, while others have to pay for their own space (Memphis Commercial Appeal).

Maine: The state's first charter schools open. (Associated Press)

Georgia: Some school board members complain the Georgia School Boards Association's opposition to a charter school ballot initiative has gone too far. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) (more…)

Pity the parent trigger. Its political identity crisis never ends.

In Florida, the trigger erupted in a state House race this week, with a Democratic challenger accusing her Republican rival in an attack ad of voting last spring “to take control of our schools away from parents and teachers, and give it to out of state corporations instead.” This is no surprise, given how effectively Florida critics – including many Democrats – have portrayed the trigger as a spawn of the right.

But meanwhile, one of the progressive Democrats most closely associated with the parent trigger indicated in an op-ed that he couldn’t support a trigger proposal in Michigan. Why? Because it doesn’t bar for-profit charter schools from being among the parent-picked turnaround options. Ben Austin (pictured here), who leads Parent Revolution, went even further, writing, “Parents must have power over the education of their own children. Profit has no place in that education.”

This guy is a wild-eyed privatizer?

Austin’s comments drew a swift rebuke from the ed policy director at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which many would consider conservative: “While the notion that schools should be ‘above’ self-interest and the profit motive has a certain raw populist appeal, a moment’s reflection reveals it to be ridiculous,” wrote Michael Van Beek. “Should schools also purchase only textbooks produced on charitable printing presses? Should their cafeterias only serve food grown on government farms?”

Beek also criticized the trigger because it’s limited to parents in the poorest performing schools. All parents, he wrote, should have access to this power. (more…)

Like the Democratic Party platform on education, this is no surprise: Democratic tension over school choice and parental empowerment is on display at in Charlotte. But some of the developments and statements are still worth logging in.

StudentsFirst co-sponsored a special screening of the new movie “Won’t Back Down” at the DNC yesterday, just as it did at the RNC in Tampa last week. And in the panel discussion that followed, Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution, told the audience that the parent trigger law – upon which the movie is loosely based – is a progressive idea aimed at giving parents more power to right struggling schools. According to coverage of the panel by Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog:

The laws allow parents to "unionize and collectively bargain, just like teachers' unions," said Austin, who served in the Clinton White House. "Parent trigger fundamentally makes public schools more public. ... We need to be modern 21st-century progressives" who stand for government working.

To be sure, people like Austin and former California state Sen. Gloria Romero have tried, mightily, to dispel the notion that the trigger is a right-wing creation, but the myth persists. In June, the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously endorsed the parent trigger idea, and among the big-city Democrats who led the charge was Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Villaraigosa is chairman of the Democratic National Convention this year, as the Huffington Post notes in this piece over the weekend. He’s also a former teachers union organizer. Wrote the HuffPo: “It is hard to paint the school reform movement as a right-wing conspiracy. Support for taking on teachers’ unions is growing in Democratic and liberal circles.”

More DNC coverage of the growing divide between Dems and teachers unions in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Times.

by Gloria Romero

Diane Ravitch, are you listening?

This is former state Sen. Gloria Romero calling.

I am the author of California’s first Parent Trigger law, the first parent trigger law in the nation. Since I first wrote that law, some 15 other states have seen some version of the law introduced in their states.
I wanted to reach out to you since we have never met, and I look forward to meeting you so we can one day talk directly with each other. Woman to woman.

In one of your recent blog posts on Education Week, you wrote that the parent trigger came from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). On the blogosphere, I now read many claims that ALEC wrote the law. This is completely false, and I ask you to correct this.

Please, stop saying that some organization I had never met until just this year gave me the idea and somehow, miraculously, turned it into law without me not knowing about it. ALEC happens to like the law and encourages other states to write similar laws. That is true. But that does not mean it developed either the idea or the law. That’s preposterous!  Quite frankly, it’s also a bit sexist and ethnocentric to assert my work actually came from someone else - that somehow the Latina senator from East Los Angeles couldn’t think on my own, or figure out how to write a bill and turn it into law.

To be fair, you are not alone in failing to acknowledge my role, or the role of other strong individuals (mostly women of color) in getting the bill passed. I always recognize Ben Austin from Parent Revolution for suggesting the idea. Unfortunately, the materials Parent Revolution distributes make it sound as if parents cascaded on the state Capitol and forced this into law. It seldom concedes in its materials that someone actually had to write a bill and argue and negotiate for its enactment. While it sounds romantic to say parents demanded this and descended on the Capitol to force this into law, that is too much Hollywood.  In fact, we did have parents in Sacramento. But many of them were from organizations that were not affiliated with Parent Revolution, and they are seldom acknowledged.

One day I will write the full story of how the Parent Empowerment Act (its official title) became law. In the meantime, let it suffice to say that both you and Parent Revolution and anyone else who writes about the law should know that once the idea was discussed with me, I chose to expand and develop it in a bill. I developed a strategy. I worked with my legislative staff to write language. I assembled a “rag tag” army of civil rights activists who understood that this was our moment to enact the change in which I so strongly believed. And I never saw an ALEC representative. (more…)

It’s getting harder and harder for critics to torpedo education reform ideas like the “parent trigger” by distorting political affiliations. The evidence just keeps getting in the way.

The latest example is what happened at the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Orlando last weekend. With prominent Democrats leading the charge, the mayors in a voice vote unanimously endorsed parent triggers, which aim to help fed-up, low-income parents turn around struggling schools.

“Too many districts,” their resolution said (go to page 169), “continue to turn a blind eye toward some of the worst performing schools … ”

Now, whatever you think of parent triggers as a school-improvement tool – and there’s plenty of room for fair-minded debate here - it’s undeniable that critics have gotten considerable traction by portraying the notion as conservative, corporate, far-right and Republican. This was especially true in Florida. Parent trigger legislation was narrowly defeated in March after weeks of being caricatured as another sinister device for Jeb Bush, the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council to mine billions of dollars from the privatization of public schools. (If you think my description is over the top, please watch this video.)

It’s true a lot of “conservative” ed reformers like the idea of a parent trigger. But it’s true, too, that the idea of giving low-income parents leverage and options, including the possibility of converting their schools into charter schools, has roots in “liberal/progressive” circles. (My apologies for the air quotes; after covering education in Florida for eight years, the labels just no longer make sense to me.) The sponsor of the original parent trigger bill in California, former state Sen. Gloria Romero, is a Democrat. Ben Austin, who heads the Parent Revolution group that is pushing the idea from state to state, is a former staffer in the Clinton White House. Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to Barack Obama and now mayor of Chicago, is a fan, too.

All that wasn’t enough to scrub the perceived partisan funk off the Florida bill. But all indications are that it will resurface next spring. And maybe last weekend’s vote will help it be judged on its merits rather than its alleged lineage. (more…)

Parent trigger advocates are applying more presure on AFT president Randi Weingarten to pay more penance after an AFT document surfaced in Connecticut that detailed a textbook plan on killing "trigger" legislation. Notably, prominent California Democrats and parent-trigger backers Gloria Romero and Ben Austin have written Weingarten suggesting that simply distancing herself from the Connecticut document is insufficient.

As Romero, a sponsor of California's trigger law, writes in her letter to the union chief:

I am requesting that you make public all other Power Points that were developed to train AFT members on how to disable and kill parent empowerment legislation that were used in subsequent states where Parent Trigger legislation was introduced. To my count, there have been at least thirteen other states ...

... This type of “lesson plan” and strategies are offensive and dismissive to the very individuals who should be fully respected for their goals to further the educational opportunities of their very own children: the parents. I believe you need to go one step further and offer an immediate apology and a commitment to never let something like this happen again.

The Connecticut strategy, emblazoned with AFT's logo and titled, "How Connecticut Diffused The Parent Trigger," outlined how AFT leaders in that state worked to "kill the bill" that would have established a parent trigger similar to California's (The document was originally on AFT's Web site but has since been removed; Dropout Nation editor RiShawn Biddle copied the presentation and made it available to his readers). Romero also says she was singled out in that strategy and wants that "lesson plan" public as well.

Austin, the executive director of California's Parent Revolution, wrote to Weingarten saying that:

Over the last year, we have requested on multiple occasions to meet with you and discuss our common agenda. Each time, you have refused to meet. Now, after reading your memo, it has become clear why. You seem to view parent empowerment as a zero-sum game: if parents win, teachers must lose ...

... the substance of your plan includes ensuring that parents are “not at the table” when real decisions are made, and creating fake "governance" committees that trick parents into thinking they have power when they actually do not. The fact that this memo has surfaced in the wake of the president of your California affiliate calling the Parent Trigger a “lynch mob” law – and then also refusing to apologize even after civil rights groups demanded it – makes your reaction to this incident all the more troubling.

As much as we have in the past viewed you as a progressive leader and potential partner in kids-first transformation, we cannot have a respectful dialogue with someone who cannot disavow those positions and tactics. If you view parental power as a threat to be "killed," then we unfortunately don't have much to talk about.

"We're living in a revolutionary moment," says Ben Austin, executive director of the Parent Revolution, as we begin our interview for redefinED's inaugural podcast. And the moment to which he refers has been marked by California's "parent trigger," a law that has upended the status quo at one Compton school in a way that few education measures can do with such sweep. A majority of parents at McKinley Elementary wanted a charter operator to come and take over their struggling school, just as the parent-trigger law allows, and what Austin and the Parent Revolution fought for, and the Compton Unified School District has done everything possible to make their job harder. The struggle will be left to the courts to resolve, but Austin does see success in the very nature of what the law has sanctioned.

The trigger has allowed parents to essentially organize and effectuate change at a bargaining table that has been the exclusive province of school boards and teachers unions. Whatever the outcome at McKinley, the law has transformed relations between school boards and the parents at their failing schools, said Austin, a former member of the California State Board of Education, who also served Los Angeles as a deputy mayor from 2000-2001 as well a variety of roles in the Clinton White House. "Already there are parents across California that are organizing to get to 51 percent with no intention of at least initially turning the signatures in," he said. "They're organizing to bargain. They're organizing to basically say, 'You haven't listened to us for years, but now we have the power to fire you, so you have to listen to us.'"

We talked with Austin about the launch of the Parent Revolution and how its role as a parent union might manifest itself at the bargaining table. What else did we ask?

Why the parent trigger, and not a more collaborative approach? "It's people with power that want a collaborative approach ... Power and Money is the language that the other side understands, and if you're not speaking that language, they're not going to listen to you."

Can the PTA fulfill the role as a parent union? "We've had good experiences with the PTA, and we've had bad experiences with the PTA. We believe there needs to be a lot more "P" in the PTA."

Click here to listen to the rest of the conversation, which runs about 24 minutes.