Readers may recall that an organization called Parent Revolution led the battle for a “parent trigger” law in California in 2010. Parent Revolution is funded by Gates, Broad and Walton foundations.
Earlier this year, Parent Revolution worked with parents in Adelanto, California, to take over low-performing Desert Trails elementary school. Some parents wanted to rescind their signatures from the petition to take over the school, but the judge would not permit them to do so. The parents who did not sign the petition were not allowed to vote on choosing a charter operator.
When it was time to select a charter school, only 53 parents in a school of more than 600 children cast a ballot.
In one of the strangest twists in the parent trigger case in Adelanto, the five leaders of the parent trigger action sued the district for $100,000, even though all their legal costs were handled pro bono. According to this article, the parents plan to split their winnings.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here is another twist in this strange story:
Division among Parent Trigger group
Parent union says it ousted two members; others say they resigned
from the High Desert Daily Press
“Adelanto – Two of the original five filers of the “Parent Trigger” lawsuit against Adelanto School District were voted out of the Desert Trails Parent Union’s steering committee, according to the group’s lead organizer, Joe Morales.
Morales said that Kathy Duncan and Olivia Zamarripa were ousted because they are in favor of seeking financial compensation through the lawsuit in the midst of the school’s transition to a charter academy.
However, other members dispute this report, stating the women resigned from their DTPU posts.”
Read more: http://www.vvdailypress.com/articles/parent-38115-trigger-adelanto.html
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There are a couple of interesting points involving the press coverage here. The coverage of the Adelanto brouhaha by the local daily newspaper, the Victorville Daily Press, was consistently pro-Parent Trigger and consistently ignored the opposition and the obvious flaws — and then the Victorville Daily Press was sold. Suddenly stories like the one posted above began to appear, with the same reporter doing the coverage. The strong inference is that the previous owner would allow no negative coverage of the Adelanto Parent Trigger brouhaha.
Meanwhile, coverage by the wider press, including the Los Angeles Times, pretty much vanished after it became apparent how exploitive and flawed the Parent Trigger process was in Adelanto. The last major news coverage was a Dec. 14 report by Claudio Sanchez on NPR that gave a pretty fair airing to the opposition. http://www.npr.org/2012/12/14/167167100/in-california-parents-trigger-change-at-failing-school
My interpretation is that the press has been responding compliantly to Parent Revolution’s bids for coverage, and Parent Revolution has now grasped that the spotlight is starting to illuminate its ugly aspects and ceased its PR efforts.
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Now we know where the ‘best’ of the graduates of the ‘no-excuses’ schools of compliance go after they finish obedience training. Would help explain the puff pieces that dominate coverage by the mass media.
Just saying’…
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My opinion agrees with your interpretation. It’s a deliberate control of media exposure conspired by those who are determined to financialize, leverage, privatize everything. Especially a large part of the US economy and low lying fruit for corruption by the uberclass.
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I wish we could hear from someone in the legal profession who could comment on the concept that only parents who had originally signed the trigger petition and who did not revoke their signatures were allowed to vote. Can you imagine if we employed these same tactics in one of our political races? In one article, the Superintendent of Adelanto was quoting from a state document that parents could revoke their signatures. There is also a section in the CA Code of Regs that mentions that parents can’t be “harassed” into revoking their signatures and not that they can’t do it. Why would they even bother to add this statement if revoking was not allowed? See below:
(g) ………. Signature gatherers, students, school site staff, LEA staff, members of the community, and parents and legal guardians of eligible pupils shall be free from harassment, threats, and intimidation related to circulation of or signing a petition, and from being discouraged to sign or being encouraged to revoke their signature on a petition. Signature gatherers shall disclose if they are being paid and shall not be paid per signature.
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I’m also curious about why a big-time L.A. law firm provides pro bono legal services to Parent Revolution, which as noted is bounteously funded by some of the nation’s most prominent billionaire-backed foundations. Presumably its involvement has something to do with why there haven’t been more vigorous legal challenges to these patently ridiculous provisions in the Parent Trigger law.
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It was always about the money or other advancement with these players.
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Given the horrific events at Newton, isn’t it time for the
media and the proponents of this so-called reform to abandon the
image of parents pointing a gun at a school? As a member of the
California State Board of Education, I objected to this terminology
when the matter was before us for establishing regulations based on
the law. Wouldn’t it be fitting as a memorial to the heroic
educators at Sandy Hook who gave their lives protecting their
students to abandon this distasteful image?
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First the API scores at Desert Trails are about 710. Not good, but not real bad. Below 600 and you are up for anything they want to do to you. The Adalanto School District has two charter schools already and they are just over 500 on their API scores. Didn’t the Parent Revolution look at the district or what? How is it that only 1/10 of the parents decide what is going to go on anyway? Something stinks on this one as did the one in Compton. In Compton they had illegal signatures and the people who gathered the signatures have national exposure to this, Ben Austin. This was not an accident. The ”
Parent Trigger” is a good law for its intended purpose the problem is those who put it up. When a school district will not respond to reasonable requests that are serious they must have an option.
You must also understand that the person who was superintendent during all of this except at the end is now the superintendent of the Compton Unified School District where they have serious problems with school police brutality against parents and students which is continuing under the new superintendent just from Adalanto.
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I forgot one thing. One of the first charter school promoters and runners of a charter school, Yvonne Chan of Vaughn Street Learning Center, also only has a 715 API after over 18 years of running the same charter school. These scores stink, especially after so much time and also after her being a member of the California State Board of Education recently in the past. How can someone with this low of performance be considered a wizard of education? No one looks at the facts is how. I have gone back more than 10 years on her school on the California Dept. of Education (CDE) website for this information. Here in California you can check out stats on school districts back 16 years and on individual schools for 11 years. I have found that if you want to know anything you need to look back 10 years. If this is all that can be done by a leader why are we following a failed program unless it is for the money and control in the long run.
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Cui bono? Hmm….
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