Twenty-five trillion dollars. That’s the mind-boggling amount, in assets, controlled by pension funds, philanthropic foundations and sovereign wealth funds worldwide. For decades, that money has been invested in guns, oil, cigarettes and soda — big moneymakers that often detracted from the public good.
A new theory being discussed among investors, however, suggests that funds could make a bigger profit over the long haul by redirecting a small portion as investments in nonprofits or social entrepreneurs. Known as the Progress Pledge, the idea isn’t derived from the traditional arguments that, morally, corporations should be socially responsible; instead, the theory claims that the investment will reduce conflict globally and thus, volatility on the financial markets — providing a steadier and more profitable return from the entire market over decades. It’s not only the right thing for wealth managers to do, the argument goes, it’s their fiduciary responsibility to do so.
“When the world does well, asset managers do well. When the world does badly, their assets do badly,” says Tomicah Tillemann, senior fellow at the New America Foundation who’s pioneering the pledge. “It’s a small slice of $25 trillion, but the efforts by social entrepreneurs and civil society leaders will address the root causes of volatility and generate a lot more money over the lifespan of their investments.”
The Progress Pledge is part of the Bretton Woods II initiative (a reference to the 1944 pact that funded reconstruction after World War II and created the International Monetary Fund) by New America and has three main components. The first is the commitment of 1 percent (of assets for funds or of earnings for traditional corporations) to the cause. The money can go to an impact investment (think: Defy Ventures backing entrepreneurs with criminal histories), infrastructure enhancement or a civil organization. Secondly, money can only flow to countries that meet basic standards of “governance, accountability and citizen engagement,” encouraging those who lack civic institutions to catch up. Lastly, those who sign up will lobby for regulatory reform to remove red tape and streamline investments.
You see an example of the pledge’s possibilities in the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Tillemann points out. If a pension fund for airline employees like United or American had invested a sliver of their assets in medical care for underserved regions, a few cases of disease may never have worsened into a crisis. Airline travel would have remained at all-time highs, unaffected by fear of the deadly illness, and stocks would have likely continued on an upward trajectory.
“The Progress Pledge is really about changing the mindset,” Tillemann says. “Long-term investors need to think beyond simply assembling a basket of individual investments and instead try to create an environment in which their investments mature and minimize risk.”
The idea for the Progress Pledge first coalesced at an event in Boston last year. Tillemann, a former senior advisor to secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, was giving a speech about the difficulty of finding capital to fund socially minded organizations. “It’s a little discouraging,” he recalls saying. “These are the individuals doing the most important work on the planet, solving the biggest challenges facing humanity as a whole. And yet, it’s difficult or impossible for them to get access to the resources they need in order to scale.”
After the talk, Dan DiBartolomeo, president of Northfield, a firm that specializes in risk modeling of global markets, approached Tillemann with an idea. “If you really want to get engagement on this issue, you might want to take an angle where you argue that there’s actually a benefit to doing this,” DiBartolomeo remembers saying.
As with many a life-changing idea, the Progress Pledge unfolded over drinks, late into the night. At a hotel bar nearby, DiBartolomeo sketched out a rough calculation on cocktail napkins. Markets generally promise an average return of 8 percent annually, but the actual dollar amount three decades from now depends on how drastic the booms and busts are in between. An investment that sees years with 30 percent gains mixed with 10 percent losses will earn less than an investment with consistent returns year after year. A $1 investment in the former will earn you only $18 over 50 years while the latter will rack up close to $46 in profit over the same period.
Because funds like California’s $304 billion pension system or the $41 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are so focused on distant, multi-decade time horizons and are so large and diversified, any fluctuation in the market is worth millions. The question of exactly how much, however, is currently being studied by a team of researchers from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. They’re digging up historical examples of global investment, and then they’ll map out a predictive model for the future.
Asset managers who sign the pledge next year will invest a penny for every dollar. From that small amount, if all goes according to plan, their funds will profit, nonprofits will take their mission to scale, and we will all end up as stockholders in a better future.
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Tag: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
25 Universities, 100 Free Classes and the One Bold Idea That’s Making College More Affordable for Millions of Americans
Ditch your stuffy seminars and dusty libraries. A slew of big-name colleges are now accepting online courses for credit.
A consortium of 25 schools, including University of Memphis, University of North Carolina and University of Maryland, are allowing all or most transfer credits that students earn from a select number of online programs. The broad list of institutions — both public and private, two-year and four-year, for-profit and non-profit — will focus on roughly 100 intro courses in up to 30 subject areas that are offered either at a low cost or for free. It’s already received the stamp of approval from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with a $1.89 million grant.
This is welcome news to many, primarily the 31 million working adults who took a few college classes but never finished. Now, they’ll have a better shot at obtaining a degree, certificate or credential for the knowledge they’ve already accrued. The program also has major appeal to kids who followed a non-traditional path out of high school, first-generation and low-income students and pretty much any young person who doesn’t like the idea of graduating knee-deep in debt.
More and more students are taking some online courses: the most recent figure by the Department of Education says 5.5 million students took at least one virtual class. A degree earned online doesn’t always have the same heft as one from awarded on a physical campus, but sometimes it’s the only option.
The popular Kaplan University, for example, a school that’s been offering distance courses since 1999 and is a part of this program, draws non-traditional students. Two-thirds are over the age of 30, and nearly 8,800 active military, veterans and spouses are enrolled. On the flip side, at Kaplan (a for-profit), there’s been allegations that teachers felt pressure to pass underperforming students, and the school paid a $1.3 million settlement last month for hiring incompetent teachers without minimum qualifications. That’s not to say online education is inherently flawed, but there’s still a number of problems that must be addressed.
The American Council on Education (ACE), essentially a trade organization for colleges and universities, is working to resolve this. One of the most important aspects of the alternative credit program will be setting standards for online courses and helping the 25 schools verify sources and select criteria for evaluating quality. It’s also hoping this move leads the wider higher education community to have “greater acceptance of alternative forms of credit, in a way that ensures quality and encourages more people to complete their postsecondary education,” says Deborah Seymour, ACE’s assistant vice president for education attainment and innovation. If all goes well this year, ACE plans to recruit additional schools by the start of the fall term.
“The institutions serving in this pilot project will play a valuable role in helping enhance the work we have been doing for many years in developing quality mechanisms for determining the credit worthiness of education, training and life experiences outside of a formal higher education classroom setting,” says ACE’s President Molly Corbett Broad. Referring to the Gates Foundation, she adds, “We very much appreciate this generous investment and the commitment it represents to the effort to provide a more flexible and cost-efficient way to increase the number of Americans able to gain a college degree or credential.”
Wondering if your school is accepting online credits? Here’s the complete list:
- American Public University, Charles Town, W.Va.
- Capella University, Minneapolis
- Central Michigan University, Pleasant, Mich.
- Charter Oak State College, New Britain, Conn.
- Colorado Community College System
- Colorado Technical University, Colorado Springs, Colo.
- East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C.
- Fayetteville State University, Fayetteville, N.C.
- Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kan.
- Goodwin College, East Hartford, Conn.
- John F. Kennedy University, Pleasant Hill, Calif.
- Kaplan University
- Lakeland College, Plymouth, Wis.
- Metropolitan State University of Denver
- National Louis University, Chicago
- Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Ariz.
- Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, La.
- Notre Dame College, South Euclid, Ohio
- SUNY Empire State College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
- Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas
- Thomas Edison State College, Trenton, N.J.
- University of Baltimore
- University of Maryland University College, Adelphi, Md.
- University of Memphis
- University of North Carolina
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For Refugees, American Dream Starts With Better Mental-Health Screenings
In 2010, when Wasfi Rabaa, an Iraqi native, arrived in Seattle as a humanitarian refugee, he felt “hopeless” and drained. Six years earlier, he had been tortured and maimed by kidnappers who threatened to rape his wife. He escaped to Syria, then a safe haven, where his then 11-year-old son worked in a restaurant to support the family. There, fellow exiles predicted that in America, his children would “end up as drug addicts.”
Thanks to an innovative Seattle program called Pathways to Wellness, which identifies refugees with mental health problems, Rabaa was quickly diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and received medication and counseling. He answered a specially designed questionnaire, which takes most refugees less than 10 minutes to complete, and then was referred to a mental health center with bilingual staff. Speaking through an interpreter, Rabaa says that the intervention “brought smiles back to my family.” His son, now 20, is studying to be an engineer at a college in Washington State.
Since 1975, the United States has accepted more than 3 million refugees, and more than 58,000 in 2012 alone, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a subdivision of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. According to a meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association, roughly 30 percent of refugees surveyed suffer from PTSD and about 30 percent battle clinical depression.
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Pathways to Wellness, a public-private partnership, is part of a grassroots trend in the last five years to address refugees’ mental health. A keystone for providers is the Domestic Medical Examination that newly arrived refugees can receive under the Federal Refugee Act of 1980. (Refugees also undergo a mandatory physical exam before they arrive in this country.) “It’s the first chance you get to explain what mental health is in the United States,” says Beth Farmer, program director of International Counseling and Community Services at Lutheran Community Services Northwest, which helped develop Pathways. “It’s the first time you get to reduce stigma.”
Funded by groups that include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pathways to Wellness is one tool that refugee settlement organizations can use to help those who’ve fled to the U.S. for a better life. “We wanted to find refugees in distress, get them to care, and have care that works,” says Farmer, who speaks about the initiative with the palpable pride of an adoring parent. Perhaps that’s because she spent considerable time defending her program from naysayers during its design in 2008 and 2009. “People said, ‘it’ll never work. We’ve tried it before. There are too many different languages. The stigma is too high,’” she recalls. But Pathways has proved effective and popular; more than 50 refugee aid organizations across the country and as far away as Australia have signed utilization agreements to replicate the program.
But such initiatives remain the exception rather than the rule, despite plenty of evidence that mental health screenings benefit newly arrived refugees. Many resettlement experts worry that the nationwide procedures for screening refugees for mental illness are scattershot and inadequate. Lisa Raffonelli, a spokesperson for the ORR, said it recently revised guidance to states, calling for “a head-to-toe review of all systems, including a mental health screening to assess for acute psychiatric emergencies.” The agency also plans to add one staff position devoted to the “emotional wellness” of refugees. But the federal government gives states wide latitude to design initial health exams, which were historically used to detect communicable diseases such as tuberculosis rather than PTSD or depression.
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“Some states have developed highly sophisticated programs with excellent screening,” says Ann O’Fallon, former executive secretary to the Association of Refugee Health Coordinators. “Other states, with smaller numbers of arrivals or smaller budgets, have struggled to develop a quality program.”
A 2012 survey of 44 state refugee health coordinators published in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies found that 19 states failed to screen refugees for symptoms of mental illness. Of the 25 surveyed states with screening programs, most relied on informal conversations with patients rather than screening tools tailored to assess refugees. The findings “dismayed” the study’s co-author, Patricia Shannon, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota. She believes that proactive questioning of refugees about their trauma is common sense. “People who are in need of mental health services, like torture survivors, are not going to raise their hand and say, ‘I’m the one you are looking for over here.’”
The format of the initial medical exam varies considerably, observes Paul Stein, national president of the State Coordinators of Refugee Resettlement and state refugee coordinator in Colorado. The spectrum ranges from “bare bones minimum — no mental health included, just a health screening that’s done in one visit” to multiple visits and a comprehensive emotional health checkup, Stein says. His state recently entered into a public-private partnership to open the Colorado Refugee Wellness Center in Aurora, something of a one-stop health shop where refugees can receive a range of services, including mental health screenings and treatment. “When you come in for one service, you can access other services at the same time in the same location,” Stein says. This helps avoid the care disconnects that can occur “when you are referred across town for a follow-up appointment.”
Exactly when to schedule mental health screenings spurs debate. Some newly arrived refugees may feel like they have just won the lottery, says Greg Vinson, senior research and evaluation manager at the Center for Victims of Torture in St. Paul, Minn. He pointed out that Somalis in the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya often refer to acceptance into the U.S. refugee program as the “Golden Ticket.” Once freed from immediate danger, many refugees experience “a honeymoon period . . . but then the issues re-emerge,” he says.
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Eh Taw Dwe, an ethnic Karen from Myanmar, knows that firsthand. As the “head man” of his village, Dwe found himself as a buffer between government soldiers and Karen rebels fighting a long and brutal conflict.
In 2002, government soldiers forced Dwe to watch four of his villagers executed. “They didn’t use a gun. They used a knife,” Dwe recalls. The soldiers imprisoned him at a military base for three days. There, an officer played Russian roulette with Dwe. “He put a gun right to my forehead. He counted ‘one, two, three’ and pulled the trigger. They laughed….” After Dwe’s family paid a ransom to his kidnappers, he was able to escape, and marched with his pregnant wife and two young children through thick jungle to Thailand. Toward the end of the harrowing 13-day journey — he had packed only enough food for 10 days — Dwe’s infant daughter became seriously ill. “She was dying,” he says, his voice breaking. “She had diarrhea. She could not breathe. I hold my wife’s hand, and I prayed.”
His family survived, arriving in Minnesota in 2004. Dwe underwent a health exam, but it did not include a mental health screening. Within two months, Dwe got a job as an interpreter with St. Paul-Ramsey County Public Health. At first, he felt euphoric, “because I don’t have to worry that people were going to kill me.”
Then the flashbacks started, imprisoning Dwe again in his cell on the military base in Myanmar. “The words that they say are still in my ears,” says Dwe, who started having angry outbursts. He was eventually referred to the Center for Victims of Torture, one of 30 federally financed programs across the country that rehabilitate torture survivors and advocate on their behalf.
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The center, founded in 1985, treats survivors at their headquarters in St. Paul. If he had not received therapy and medication, Dwe, who now runs his own translation business, imagines that life would be very different: “Maybe I would be in jail,” he says.
Ann O’Fallon, the former head of state refugee coordinators, praises states like Minnesota and Colorado — “a really beautiful model,” she says — for devoting more resources to refugees, but she faults the federal government for collecting insufficient data on mental health screenings. “It needs to be beefed up,” she says. “What percentage of refugees get screened? Is there a requirement that states report in?”
Paul Stein of Colorado understands the human and financial toll caused by not taking action. The longer that barriers to employment, such as mental illness, are not addressed, he says, “the longer it takes for somebody to start building income and paying taxes.”
Several mental health providers concur that not acting to detect and treat mental illness in new refugees amounts to neglect; some untreated refugees likely suffer from psychosomatic illnesses and as a result overutilize emergency rooms. Patricia Shannon, of the University of Minnesota, concludes that, in general, “the high cost for repeat medical visits that are based on mental health distress is something that isn’t quantified.” Instead, she offers anecdotal evidence. When a wave of Somali refugees settled in the Minneapolis area starting in 2004, many newcomers with mysterious illnesses turned up in emergency rooms. But doctors “wouldn’t find anything wrong with them,” Shannon says. “On some of the charts, I had residents tell me that they would write ‘Sick Somali Syndrome.’”
Data showing a connection between chronic stress, PTSD and depression and long-term poor health is “overwhelming,” says Dr. Michael Hollifield, a psychiatrist who primarily designed the Pathways to Wellness questionnaire.
Hollifield does not consider improved mental health screenings a cure-all for the many challenges faced by refugees, but he is certain that it is the sensible place to start. When contemplating the issue, he says he often thinks about a classic television commercial for Fram oil filters, in which a mechanic rolls out from under a broken-down wreck with a gunked-up engine and delivers the company’s catchphrase: “The choice is yours. You can pay me now or you can pay me later.”
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The Radical School Reform That Just Might Work
For years, parents at the troubled 24th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles protested the plight of its students, 98 percent of whom are Hispanic or black. Test scores were abysmal. Only a third were reading at grade level. And the stench of dead animals rotting in the air ducts was making kids sick.
Parents organized two protests and petitioned to have the principal removed, but according to Amibilia Villeda, parent of a fourth-grader, “nobody ever listened or paid attention.”
Then an organization called Parent Revolution showed up. The Los Angeles nonprofit group helped the parents form a union and transform their failing school through new leadership, new teachers and a unique partnership between a district and a charter school. The parents even negotiated for free universal preschool.
The revamped school opened its doors last August, and parents who fought for change already see the difference on their kids’ faces. “Smiles!” says Esmerelda Chacon, another parent of a fourth-grader. “They want to come to school.”
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How did these parents do it? Emboldened by California’s pioneering Parent Empowerment Act, which passed in 2010, parents at a persistently failing school who gather signatures from 51 percent of the parents now have the right to take over the school, hire a new principal, new staff or convert it into a charter.
The law, informally dubbed the parent trigger, was the brainchild of Ben Austin, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles and an ex-member of the California State Board of Education, who founded Parent Revolution in 2009. Since his unlikely success in getting the bill passed, parents have transformed five California schools, while six other states have enacted similar laws and nearly 20 more have considered them. The United States Conference of Mayors passed a unanimous resolution endorsing the concept in 2012.
Parent trigger “gives parents a historic amount of power to sit at the table and bargain with the traditional interests that have power in the education system,” says Austin, who began his career working in the Clinton White House. They can “bargain on behalf of their kids and not be told to go do a bake sale when it’s time for the grown-ups to make the decisions.”
The idea behind the parent trigger law is simple: The rights of kids must come first, and no one has a greater interest in seeing kids receive a quality education than parents. “Everybody cares about kids, but there’s no doubt that parents have a different sense of urgency than everybody else,” Austin says. “Parents can’t sit around and wait for pilot programs or half measures. Their kids need a great education now.”
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Austin, a father of two, ages 4 and 7, has seen firsthand how the quality of public education varies dramatically based on “who you are, what color skin you have and what ZIP code you live in.” He sends his older daughter to one of the best public schools in Los Angeles, where parents have the clout to get kids what they need.
“I have the very unique experience of dropping [my daughter] off and then driving to places like 24th Street Elementary, which is in the same school district, the same city, the same type of neighborhood school, same age kids, but it feels like you’re in a different universe,” Austin says. “If there was a dead animal on [my daughter’s] campus, there would be a SWAT team of paramedics surrounding it to resuscitate it before any parent ever noticed. But these parents had been complaining for years, and it took the leverage of the parent trigger to force the district to act.”
There is a systemic reason the quality of education is so much worse in poor neighborhoods.
A 2009 investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that 98 percent of teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)were receiving lifetime tenure with little or no performance review — a situation the current superintendent has worked hard to change, amid fierce opposition from the United Teachers Los Angeles union.
Once teachers in California receive tenure, state laws make it difficult to fire them for any reason. The process is so lengthy, costly and arduous that attempts are rarely made except in egregious cases of misconduct and abuse. Even then, it’s not easy. LAUSD even had a hard time firing former elementary school teacher Mark Berndt, who is currently serving a 25-year sentence after pleading no contest to felony lewd conduct charges that included blindfolding his students, spoon-feeding them his semen, putting cockroaches on their faces and photographing these crimes. The district paid Berndt $40,000 to leave, and he’s still receiving his nearly $4,000-per-month pension. (The school district now removes teachers accused of misconduct from the classroom, sending them to so-called “teacher jail,” where hundreds are paid full salaries totaling $1.4 million a month to sit and do nothing, as the district investigates the claims.)
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LAUSD and other school districts have pushed for changes to state law. However, the California Teachers Association (CTA), arguably the most powerful lobbying group in the state, so tightly guards teacher tenure protections that in 2012 it managed to kill a bill in the state Legislature that would have made it easier to dismiss teachers who abuse students. Lawmakers who sided with the CTA faced backlash, and one was booted out of office.
A CTA spokesman said he agrees that the teacher dismissal process needs to be “streamlined,” and last year CTA backed its own bill. However, district superintendents, education reform groups and the president of the California School Boards Association all complained that the CTA-backed bill made the problem even worse. Gov. Jerry Brown, a strong CTA ally, vetoed it.
On Jan. 27, a historic trial began in California challenging the constitutionality of the state’s teacher tenure and seniority rules. Plaintiffs in Vergara v. California claim that they deprive low-income students of equal access to quality education. There are also several ballot measures in the works to address the issue.
However, the lack of change to date frustrates Austin.
“If after three years, tens of millions of dollars of litigation and two different legislative attempts, we can’t figure out how to fire teachers who feed their own semen to children,” Austin says, “how in the world are we going to figure out how to run an effective system for kids?”
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When ineffective teachers can’t be fired, schools in poor neighborhoods become the dumping grounds for the lemons. (After Berndt’s arrest, a second teacher at the same elementary school — located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city — was also arrested for lewd conduct.)
The parent trigger law upends that dynamic, allowing parents to hire a new staff or convert to a charter that isn’t bound by the same tenure rules. Parent Revolution helps parents unionize, learn their rights and organize petition drives so they can collectively bargain on behalf of their kids or force change.
“The parents are not asking for Olympic-sized pools in their schools,” says Alfonso Flores, Parent Revolution’s district director, who was previously an Army Special Forces soldier, a teacher and principal. “They’re asking for clean restrooms, interactive lessons, science and social studies — basic things that should already be happening.”
Nevertheless, school districts and teachers’ unions have not taken kindly to such a radical power shift. “It would be silly to think that the general public could be educated enough to decide what doctors should and shouldn’t do, but they feel like they can do that in education,” says Marty Hittelman, former president of the California Federation of Teachers, in the documentary film “We the Parents”, released last fall.
The first two parent trigger campaigns met with fierce opposition, legal challenges and allegations of harassment, vandalism and dirty tricks, including threats to deport parents who were undocumented immigrants. Parent Revolution’s first attempt to transform a school in Compton, Calif., ended in failure after a court ruled that the parents’ petitions were invalid because the signatures were undated.
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Austin also has been the target of vicious personal attacks. Education historian Diane Ravitch called him “loathsome” and an “idiot” and said there was a “special place in hell” reserved for his funders after parents at Weigand Avenue Elementary School in Watts — one of the worst schools Los Angeles — successfully petitioned to replace the principal, during whose tenure the school’s performance had grown radically worse. (Ravitch later apologized.)
“All the parents wanted was new leadership because their principal had a track record of abject failure for their children,” Austin says. “If that is so offensive that people are condemned to hell, I think it exposes opponents of this movement as being not against charters but against parents having power of any kind. If parents can’t exercise power in this situation, I would ask our opponents: When is it that they think it’s okay for parents to have power?”
Critics have charged that Parent Revolution, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and the Walton Family Foundation, is attempting to turn public schools into private, for-profit ventures.
However, only one of the five transformed schools has converted to a nonprofit charter after the district refused to negotiate. (Parent Revolution opposes for-profit charters.) The other four schools implemented various forms of in-district reform. In some cases, just the threat of a parent trigger has given parents enough leverage to negotiate for changes before they even finish collecting signatures.
“We’re making public schools more public and responsive to the public that they supposedly exist to serve,” says Austin, who takes the criticism in stride. “I don’t like having people dislike me, but if you’re not running up against entrenched interests, you’re probably not fighting for big social change.”
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Austin is not a guy who crumbles under pressure. When he was 16, his father, an alcoholic author who published five novels before falling on hard times, committed suicide. Then in 2006, Austin fought for and lost a state ballot initiative to tax millionaires to pay for free universal preschool. Two years later, he lost his bid to join the school board.
“I’ve had more epic public failures than most people in life,” Austin says. “But you have to be able to get back up when you fall flat on your face. It is one of the most important skills in life, and it’s a skill my father didn’t have.”
So when Austin’s first attempt to transform a school through parent trigger failed, he didn’t give up. He examined his mistakes and completely revamped Parent Revolution’s organizing model. In Compton, Parent Revolution chose the school’s transformation path and a charter operator to replace the failing school.
“It was too top down for it to be an organic movement,” Austin says. “Instead of doing the work for the parents, we [now] give parents the tools to do it themselves.”
And that means the parents’ interests don’t always align with his. For instance, the parent trigger law is criticized for being “divisive,” but at 24th Street, LAUSD’s reform-minded Superintendent John Deasy welcomed petitioning parents into his office and apologized for what their kids had endured. Instead of fighting the parents in court, LAUSD competed against various charter operators to win back the right to run its own school.
Austin viewed this as a rare opportunity to work collaboratively with a district on reform, and he hoped the parents would choose LAUSD’s proposal.
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Austin’s community organizers thanked him for his opinion but said parents would decide for themselves.
“We at Parent Revolution had lost all control of this process, and the parents were driving it — every step of the way,” Austin says. “This was parent empowerment on steroids.”
LAUSD agreed to meet all the petitioners’ demands, but parents were still distrustful after years of neglect. What they did next was something Austin never envisioned — something that had never been done before. They asked the top two finalists, LAUSD and Crown Preparatory Academy charter, to work together jointly to run the school.
Parents interviewed and approved the new principal and teachers, retaining a few who had reapplied for their jobs. And when 24th Street reopened last August, it had four new grades, with LAUSD running preschool through grade four, and Crown Prep running grades five through eight.
“It took empowered parents telling all of the interests to play well in the sandbox together to force a deal like that,” Austin says. “There isn’t anything in the law that says you can force a district and a charter to work together for the first time in history. They just figured it out.”
Austin expects these newly empowered parents to continue fighting for change on a state and national level. “One of the things no one has gotten their heads around is the unintended ripple effects when whole communities that have been left for dead rise up,” he says. “I think they appreciate the help we’ve given them, but they don’t see me as their hero. They don’t see me as having done this for them. They feel the power in themselves.”
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