Tag: Education Reform

Fixing America’s Schools

Posted on by robbie

Ted Dintersmith isn’t your typical philanthropist. The straight-talking venture capitalist and former Obama appointee to the 2012 U.N. General Assembly is also one of the nation’s foremost voices on education reform. Dintersmith has no problem calling out other education reformers, such as tech billionaire Bill Gates or Success Academy Charter Schools founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz, on what they’re doing wrong with their approach to improving public education.
“Eva Moskowitz gets called a hero by some, but would any of those people [who are] cutting big checks to her send their kids to those schools? Hell no!” says Dintersmith, adding that schools need to change their focus from test scores to more meaningful measurements of success. “So much of education’s decline is based on these eight words: ‘But we have to be able to measure.’ That’s false. We have to be able to assess.”
In his new book, What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America, Dintersmith visits schools in all 50 states and discovers teachers doing extraordinary things with limited resources. Instead of reminding us that our public school system is broken, his message is one of hope. NationSwell sat down with Dintersmith to discuss his top four education innovations and solutions that he encountered while venturing across the country.

SOLUTION 1: REIMAGINE THE HIGH SCHOOL TRANSCRIPT

In 2009, New Hampshire — along with a handful of cities across the nation — adopted a competency-based approach to grading students, as opposed to the typical A-to-F letter grades.
Students tend to forget information after they take a test, especially if they cram for it. But with a competency-based approach, high school transcripts look more like scorecards, reflecting student comprehension of classroom topics rather than just a GPA based on letter grades.
“If we are going to hold kids and teachers accountable [for what they learn in school], we should look to New Hampshire, with kids demonstrating real competency of standards that are driven by design and based on real performance,” Dintersmith says. “And I think it is really encouraging because it shows what can be done at scale.” After a pilot program in 27 New Hampshire schools, the competency-based approach was introduced as a statewide initiative.
“Legislatures, school boards, commissioners  — all trusted teachers to lead the way in how they could reinvent the high school transcript,” Dintersmith says. “They turned it into [something] confidence-based and performance-based, with kids demonstrating important accomplishments and skills instead of [focusing on] getting a 70 or higher on multiple-choice tests.”

SOLUTION 2: BE IN THE STUDENTS’ CHAIRS

In another competency-based curriculum, teachers in Iowa thought the best way to get students interested in learning was to have them tackle real-world business and community projects. The program came about after an educator-led experiment asked about 60 local business and community leaders to put themselves in the shoes of students for a day.
“They got movers and shakers from all over Cedar Rapids to come in for a full school day, to see what life is like as a student,” Dintersmith says. “And then at the end, the teachers asked [them], ‘Do you think we should just try to keep doing what we’ve always done, or should we be thinking big?’”
The resulting program, named Iowa BIG, pairs schools in Cedar Rapids with nonprofit, business and government agencies. Students solve for community needs, such as creating public data portals for local sports results that reporters can use and building robotic kayaks that use spectrometers to beam back data on water quality.
Dintersmith says he was blown away by the program. “Kids do just as well on standardized tests because they are really energized, and [teachers] tell me 98 percent get into first-choice colleges,” he says. “Kids are getting great summer jobs too.”

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In his new book, Ted Dintersmith argues that schools need to change their focus from test scores to more meaningful measurements of success.

SOLUTION 3: CONNECT KIDS TO THE WORLD

Every spring, Coachella Valley, California, experiences a massive boom in population when it hosts its annual music-and-arts festivals. But whereas millions of dollars pour in over the course of just a month, Coachella Valley’s schools are some of the poorest in the nation.
“There are a lot of homeless kids, a lot of kids living in trailer parks — which is luxury housing for these families,” says Dintersmith, who visited the city during his tour. “These are kids desperately trying to escape poverty, but they’re under-resourced, which is the story of education in America.”
Coachella Valley’s school superintendent, Darryl Adams, recognized that one of the biggest challenges for students was access to technology. So Adams, a former musician-turned-music teacher, got a $45 million bond voted on by residents to focus schools on reducing the so-called digital divide, where poor students have less internet access than their wealthier counterparts. The money paid for an iPad for every one of the 18,000 students in the district. The grant also provided for WiFi on eight school buses that then parked outside of the city’s trailer parks, providing internet access for everyone in the neighborhood.
“Adams focused the schools on teaching students to create and invent [things like websites and robotics], and to use technology to show that you can make things that will impress other people, will be valued by other people, will make your world better, and will help you escape poverty,” Dintersmith says. “So really hard-hit kids suddenly have a reason to come to school and are getting good at something that will give them multiple career options going forward.”

SOLUTION 4: TRY OUT TRADE SKILLS

In Waipahu, a suburb of Honolulu, the poverty rate is 2 percent higher than the state average and disability rates are almost double. That translates into little funding for local schools — especially for the expensive hardware that much of technology requires.
“We all think of Hawaii being luxury hotels, but Hawaii has these acute pockets of poverty, especially in Waipahu, one of the poorest areas outside of Honolulu,” says Dintersmith, who was intrigued by one school’s approach to integrate design thinking into their curriculum.
The school asked technology companies to partner with its students. The idea was to mix applied learning with classroom instruction. Students learned how to create products and build out technology-driven solutions to help other members of the community.
“These kids were so impressive,” Dintersmith says. “They’re mixing the applied with the academic, and they’re getting these great career paths, but they take such pride in their school and their community. Again, it’s that really clear understanding that the applied is a great way to develop academic perspective.”
Dintersmith also found out about another school not far from Waipahu that was using a similar applied-learning approach, but with marketing and journalism instead of tech.
“If you simply relegate these kids to an academic-only environment, many kids find it’s not interesting, and when you get them in high school, you only have one option, which is college,” Dintersmith says. “As they come through school, we owe it to these kids to give them as many possible career options outside of a more formal education. Because, at the end, all they’ll do is keep their fingers crossed and hope they can find a career.”

How Do You Make Teachers Agents of Change?

Posted on by robbie

Educators 4 Excellence (E4E), a coalition of 20,000 teachers in six American communities, got its start in a pizza joint in New York City’s East Village. There, a group of young teachers, including Sydney Morris and Evan Stone, who taught second and sixth grades, respectively, at P.S. 86 in the North Bronx, shared their frustration with the public school system. Of all the complaints, the one that stood out the most was that the educators felt like opportunities for growth and transformation weren’t available, but that they couldn’t do anything about it. In 2010, Morris and Stone founded E4E to empower teachers to be changemakers. NationSwell spoke with the pair about the challenges and rewards of working with an entrenched education system at the green-apple-filled E4E headquarters in Lower Manhattan.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
Morris: We were coming to this work straight from the classroom, and I think one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve ever gotten was “People first, people second, people third.” It really is all about the people, the talent, the ideas they bring, the culture they help create.

Stone: Another piece of advice that we got early on was “Decide what your north star is, and keep your eye on it.” Because you’re going to get lots of ideas from lots of people that sound exciting and could pull you in lots of different directions. But stay true to why you launched this organization, why it’s important. That’s something we constantly check each other on.

Evan Stone joins New York City educators and E4E members in advocating for teacher-informed measures of performance in New York State’s teacher evaluation.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
Morris: One thing that our teachers are incredibly excited about, all across the country, is around school climate and student discipline reform. Certainly in today’s times, our membership and our team is incredibly driven by a lens of equity, and we see hugely disproportionate rates of suspensions, expulsions and discipline — particularly for boys of color. Thinking about how we transform our schools into the kinds of safe spaces in which all kids can truly learn really is very closely intertwined with how we discipline students. Moving from a more punitive discipline model to one that is more restorative is something that we’re doing a lot of work on supporting teachers, districts and school systems, because we think it is so directly linked to better outcomes and opportunities for all students.

Stone: Another huge shift that’s happened in our landscape that’s opening the space up for a ton of innovation is we have, for the first time in 16 years, a new federal education law: No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act. A lot of the systems under NCLB that were federally mandated have been loosened up to allow state and district flexibility. (This is distinct from Common Core; it’s much broader: how we hold districts accountable, how we fund schools, services that are provided for special populations of students — it’s the whole federal education code, essentially.) [Recently], we had a group of teachers in Albany, [N.Y.] meeting with state education officials, union leaders and others to try to think about what opportunities are available for innovation and how do we really make sure teachers are helping to drive those changes. This is going to be happening in every state, so it’s a real opportunity for our members to take ownership over the new structures that govern school and their profession can look like.

Through E4E, a group of teachers went to Albany, N.Y., to meet with state education officials to discuss the Every Student Succeed Act.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Stone: I’m glad that people didn’t tell us too much, because I think naïveté is sort of a blessing in a startup. As we launched this out of our classroom, I don’t think we had any idea about some of the challenges that we would face in building and running an organization. That allowed us to take each challenge as it came, one at a time, which was really necessary in the early days, when we were still working in school part-time, trying to run this organization part-time and figuring out the myriad things that you need to do to launch and run a nonprofit.

What inspires you?
Morris: The education space is incredibly complex. What helps me get up in the morning is that the positions that we take, the work we do and what our members stand for is a true, rational middle in an otherwise polarized space. One of the biggest myths that exists in the education space is that, if you are pro-reform or pro-change in education, then that must mean you are inherently anti-union. What our members are showing is that, in fact, they are pro-union and pro-change at the same time, calling for critical and significant shifts for the way our profession operates and the way we serve our students, while also believing in the power of teachers coming together to collectively create change.

What’s on your nightstand?
Morris: Do you want the honest answer? I am almost finished with “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Sometimes you go home, and you just need to clear your head. What could be better than wizards and magic and spells? I’ve never read it before, so I felt like I was missing out on a major cultural phenomenon here.

Stone: I am almost finished with “Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream,” Andy Stern’s new book. He’s a really inspirational labor leader that’s thinking about how do we ensure, as our world and our country continues to change, that the American Dream can still exist. It’s a pretty exciting book that pushes our thinking. Even if — when — we have a high-quality education serving all kids, what are the jobs of the future we’re preparing them for? How do make sure that our school system lines up with that and that our country supports opportunity for everyone?

What’s your favorite book of all-time?

Stone: My favorite book of all time is “The Brothers Karamazov,” and the reason is I read it my senior year in high school. It was probably year when I didn’t want to do much work, and my English teacher, with whom I spent three or four months on it because it was quite the tome, was just phenomenal. It made me want to see myself as an intellectual. That book and that teacher had a significant impact on me. One of the goals of the education system is to inspire learning, and that combination of those two did that for me.

Morris: The literature you read at defining moments in your life can be the books that stick out most vividly to you. One of those for me is a book that both played a role in my understanding and appreciation for spirituality and also for a woman’s journey: “The Red Tent.” I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of women, too, in our work, because teaching in many ways was one of the first careers open to women, and it is a profession where the majority are women, so I’ve been thinking about the role women have to play in leading that change.

What’s your perfect day?

Stone: Besides lying in bed all day eating a cheeseburger and french fries with a milkshake, which sounds pretty good to me sometimes, my perfect day is when I have the opportunity to see our work in action. That could be at a school with one of our outreach directors helping to facilitate a focus group of teachers, and seeing those teachers experience what it’s like to know that your voice matters and feel heard. Having that be a big piece of my day is really important.

Morris: One thing my mother always said to me was “Do good and do well.” A perfect day for me is when I feel like I’ve done something good, whether that’s a small act of kindness toward somebody else or a big win in our work, and also when I feel like I’ve brought my best self and best work towards that end.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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What’s the Secret to Keeping Kids on Track in School?

Posted on by robbie

There’s really no debate that kids who regularly miss school will also miss out academically. But who knew that chronic absence would make such a drastic difference?
According a new study from Attendance Works, each year, an estimated 5 million to 7.5 million American students miss nearly a month of school. As the Huffington Post points out from the report, these chronically absent students can potentially fall one to two years behind in learning compared to their peers.
Also included in the study were the attendance rates of students from different ages, socioeconomic backgrounds and racial groups state by state, which the nonprofit advocacy group analyzed. Across the board, the organization found that students who were regularly absent were more likely to score lower on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (which is like a national report card for 4th to 8th graders) compared to their peers.
MORE: Ask the Experts: How Can We Fix Early Childhood Education?
“While students from low-income families are more likely to be chronically absent, the ill effects of missing too much school hold true for all socio-economic groups,” the report says.
The good news is that these trends can be reversed. According to the report, schools in New York City started successful mentoring programs that help reduce chronic absence rates and also increase graduation rates. Chicago also saw their matriculation rates rise when schools focused on boosting attendance.
September happens to be Attendance Awareness Month. In case you didn’t know, students — from kindergarten to high school — shouldn’t miss more than nine days of school each year in order to stay engaged and on track to graduation.
For smart advice on how parents can help ensure their kids show up to school every day, click here.
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Why Are America’s Innovations in Education Spreading Worldwide But Not Here?

Posted on by robbie

At a recent NationSwell Council event, Wendy Kopp spoke about the irony of having American innovations in education being put to use all over the world, but failing to find momentum to spread them far and wide here in the U.S.

Guess Which State is the Tops for Education

Posted on by robbie

We can thank this state for many things: The Red Sox. John F. Kennedy. And one hell of a strong city. And as it turns out, the Bay State is also the best place in America for an education.
Massachusetts, home to some of the nation’s top universities, is wicked smaht. The Washington Post recently published a column about the state’s superior education system, citing results from Education Week‘s annual Quality Counts report card.
For the seventh time running, the small New England state has topped the country’s scorecard and is the only state to score an A- on a child’s so-called “chance for success,” that weighs all the factors that would help a young person thrive academically. Meanwhile, the country as a whole scored a measly C+.
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The study found that more than 60 percent of children in Massachusetts have at least one parent with a post-secondary degree, 14 points higher than the national average. There are also many more children enrolled in preschool — 59.4 percent, compared to 47.7 percent nationally. Additionally, a higher percentage of Massachusetts middle schoolers are proficient at standardized testing (47.5 percent on reading and 54.6 percent on math) compared the national average (34.0 percent and 34.4 percent, respectively).
And while we often lament how our country’s youth lag behind the rest of the developed world in reading and math, Slate reports that Massachusetts students actually rank fifth in the world in reading — ahead of pupils in Singapore and Japan. In math, Massachusetts is ninth, leading both Japan and Germany.
ALSO: Why the U.S. Should Adopt the “Finnish Way” of Education
So why is Massachusetts so academically advanced? As the Post puts it simply, “a bipartisan commitment to education reform.”
To any politician reading this, results happen when people work together. The state has consistently shown heavy support for education system over the years, especially with its Education Reform Act of 1993 that put a lot of public dollars towards its schools (especially ones that are low-income), and demanded high standards from its educators.
And even though our country is currently deeply divided between conservative and liberal values, since the passage of the act, “Massachusetts Republicans and Democrats alike continued investing heavily in education,” the Post says.
Granted, Massachusetts didn’t score perfectly across the entire educational spectrum; like many other states it needs to close its achievement gap for minority and low-income students. Still, it looks like the whole country might want to look northeast to learn a thing or two.
DON’T MISS: A Simple Solution For America’s Achievement Gap

Watch: A Young Girl’s Inspirational Invention and Four Other Stories That Inspired Us in June

Posted on by robbie

When 11-year-old Lily Born noticed her grandfather’s Parkinson’s Disease was causing him a lot of hand tremors, she snapped into action, creating a three-legged ceramic cup that is more durable and less likely to flip over. Watch her brilliant invention and four other videos about the people, ideas and solutions that moved and motivated us in June.
Watch the full videos here:
When This Grandpa Had Trouble Holding a Glass, His Granddaughter Put on Her Inventor’s Cap
Why Does This School Let Its Students Record Hip-Hop Tracks?

This Janitor’s School Family Gifts Him Money to Visit His Family Overseas
These Wheels Help Those Paralyzed Travel Over More Than Just Hills, Dells, and Dusty Trails
How One Man is Saving His Community, One Child at a Time
 
 

When Mayors MEET: 5 Brilliant Education Ideas Coming to a City Near You

Posted on by robbie

Even the casual observer of current events knows that education reform is a major concern for Americans. Turn on Fox News, MSNBC or any nightly news program, and you’re likely to hear debate on a number of issues, from teacher unions and Common Core to pre-K opportunities and the overall cost of education. But by watching the national debate, which can be as combative as it is complex, it’s easy to forget that we live in a country with nearly 20,000 municipal governments — each of which is working on unique, location-specific efforts to improve their respective public school systems.
Last fall, mayors from four of those municipalities — Michael Hancock (Denver), Kevin Johnson (Sacramento, Calif.), Julian Castro (San Antonio, Texas) and Angel Taveras (Providence, R.I.) — rallied to rise above the national chatter and actually collaborate to improve public schools. And to do that, they hit the road on the inaugural Mayors for Educational Excellence Tour (MEET), an initiative with a simple premise: The four mayors visit one another’s cities to learn successful methods being used in pre-K through 12th-grade public schools, which can then be implemented in their own hometowns — and cities across America. The tour kicked off last October in Denver with Mayor Hancock, before stopping in Sacramento and San Antonio. It’s slated to end April 24 in Providence with Mayor Taveras.
At each stop, the host city’s mayor showcases his community’s most innovative education initiatives. The host city also holds a town hall meeting where all the mayors can engage with parents, students and other education leaders in a wide-ranging conversation about public-school reform. “MEET was designed to be an echo chamber where the mayors could have unfiltered conversations over a day or two in a particular city, as opposed to a rushed 15-minute meeting,” says Peter Groff, a principal at MCG2 Consulting in Woodbridge, Va., and a former Colorado legislator with a longtime interest in education reform. Groff conceived and developed the tour with Hancock; this included choosing the three other mayors based on their education-focused administrations. “They’ve heard about what the other mayors have done, but they haven’t seen it firsthand.”
That Hancock, Johnson, Castro and Taveras are all progressive mayors who favor more liberal reform policies no doubt makes this kind of teamwork easier. All four mayors are also governing the very cities they grew up in — and are graduates of the public-school systems they’re trying to fix. But the biggest factor contributing to their success may be the very fact that they serve as mayors.
Last October, a Pew Research Center report found that just 19 percent of Americans trusted Washington to do what’s right most of the time or all of the time. But living outside the Beltway, MEET’s four mayors say they can buck that stereotype to actually make measurable progress.
“Mayors mostly govern in a nonpartisan environment, so we don’t have to tow the party line from one side to the other,” Mayor Castro says. “Being in local communities, the residents are more likely to know their mayors — people actually approach mayors, so they’re not cardboard cutouts, or just the bad guy or the good guy. Cities are where things can still get done. And that’s not something they can say in Washington, D.C., and most state capitals.”
MORE: Ask the Experts: 7 Ways to Improve K-12 Public Education
With the final stop on the tour approaching, MEET’s organizers are already thinking about next year and how to scale their mission. Mayor Hancock says he’s received inquiries and requests from other mayors to join. And the Educational Excellence Task Force of the United States Conference of Mayors, an organization for leaders of cities with more than 30,000 people, is working to document digitally the lessons from MEET’s first run so all its members can access the takeaways. “If a mayor on another side of the country wants to see what Denver’s doing, they just need to go online and read the case study,” Hancock says. “We’re moving forward with what we’ve learned. We’re moving nationally. And all that is because of this tour.”
Here’s a look at 5 big ideas from MEET that may be coming to a school near you:
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Ask the Experts: 7 Ways to Improve K-12 Public Education

Posted on by robbie

The United States bests almost every country in the world in many areas, but when it comes to educational achievement, American students are just plain mediocre. According to the most recent (2012) results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) — a test of critical thinking administered every three years to about half a million 15-year-olds around the globe — U.S. students are lagging behind those in many other countries, including China, Finland and Korea, in math, reading and science. Compared with other developed nations, the U.S. performs average or below. Worse, among the 34 countries surveyed, the U.S. school system ranked fifth in spending per student, at $115,000. That’s a hefty chunk of change for so-so results.

PISA scores aren’t the only measure of an educational system, but most experts agree that American schools are in need of a major overhaul. The question is: What kinds of reforms will result in lasting, meaningful changes?

As part of NationSwell’s Ask the Expert series, we asked our panel to share their ideas on how best to improve K-12 public education. Read on for their thoughts, and then join the conversation by leaving your own ideas in the comments box.

MORE: The Radical School Reform That Just Might Work
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6 Ways We Can Make America Home to the ‘Smartest Kids in the World’

Posted on by robbie

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Author Amanda Ripley readily admits that as an investigative reporter for Time, The Atlantic and other publications, she avoided covering education for years, considering it too “soft.” Fast forward six years and the author of The Smartest Kids in the World has become a leading voice on the American education system, its problems — and ways to fix them.
While covering Michelle Rhee, the controversial superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C., Ripley started to feel the urgency many teachers expressed.
She soon embarked on a year-long investigation, following three American exchange students to Poland, Finland and South Korea from 2010 to 2011. Each country has a different approach to education — from the pressure-cooker model to the utopian one — and all three have made marked progress in their students’ overall performance. NationSwell spoke with Ripley recently after she headlined a panel at the fifth annual Women in the World conference in New York City. Here are six things we learned about recharging our education system.
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The Radical School Reform That Just Might Work

Posted on by robbie

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.”
ALSO: Is This the Pinterest of Math and Science Education?
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.)
MORE: The Neediest Students Couldn’t Afford His Help, So This Test-Prep Prodigy Stepped Up
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?”
DON’T MISS: This Clever Idea Could Solve One of Public Schools’ Biggest Technology Problem
 
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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