Investigative journalists in Florida are all over the last-minute effort mounted by Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee to find parents who support the so-called “parent trigger.”
First they circulated a video allegedly made by a group called the “Sunshine Parents,” supporting the trigger. Unfortunately, no one ever heard of this group and it has no website, unlike the PTAs and other parent organizations fighting the trigger bill. Maybe it is based in Jeb Bush’s offices.
Then a petition emerged in support of the bill, but some signatories say they never signed it. Score another trick at the hands of Michelle Rhee.
It seems there is no dirty trick that these pretend reformers won’t stoop to. They work with California-based Parent Revolution, which has received millions from the Walton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Broad Foundation. Parent Revolution has sent a parent from Adelanto, California, to tell other state legislatures how wonderful the parent trigger is. She presents herself as but a simple parent who wanted to seize control of the public school that her community paid for. She doesn’t always admit that she is now an employee of the well-funded Parent Revolution or that her child no longer attends the elementary school she helped to close.
Parent Revolution is in trouble. It pushed through the trigger legislation more than three years ago, and only one school has been privatized, and it won’t get started until September as a charter.
The State Senate votes tomorrow. The bill already passed the House.
Will the State Senate fall for the hoax?
Or will they defend their community public schools against corporate predators?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We have the proof of how Parent Revolution fooled the parents at 24th Street. I will soon be loading up videos of that day at LAUSD on 24th Street. In one sentence they say how much they love the parents and in the next sentence of the MOU that charter is operating under it says that no parent will be on the board of directors. This is how much they love the parents. They purposely left this language out of the addendum which is what this “Parent Trigger” is all about.
Now, to the law in California. No group of parents, students, teachers and community is excluded from Pulling the Trigger, phrase from LAUSD, without the corporations and privatizers being involved at all. Is this not the so-called dream? You get to run your own school you all say is the dream, so why not live it if you can. If you all want to be closed minded to the actual opportunities go ahead and keep your head in the sand. If you do that you will get run over by the steamroller they have in place. Those parent in Louisianna have decided to turn it on its head by being able to after three years of a failed charter to turn it back into a district school. The same can be done by the Parent Trigger if you use the law. This law in Florida should go down for the repressive sections on taking away teachers rights. Read the bill before you comment. If you do not really know yourself what is in legislation you should not comment with authority as you have none just your ideology and that is destructive because of IGNORANCE. That is the antithesis of education. You cannot tell students to know their subject and you do not.
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You don’t get to run your own school under Parent Trigger because the law limits the actions parents can take to five “interventions.” Three of them seem like a type of receivership that require firing the principal and most of the staff. Another turns the school over to a charter operator (CMO or EMO), and another closes the school and moves the students to a different school.
Four of those interventions (Turnaround, Transformation, Restart, School Closures) are part of Race to the Top. Gloria Romero might have “written” this bill, but she did not create it.
This law doesn’t give parents any control at all. I wonder if by accepting Race to the Top money, parents have no legal recourse if their mayor or school board implement any of these actions. Parent trigger is to get the parents to do with that privatizers have not been able to do themselves in states where they do not control the mayors and the school boards.
I cannot find 5 CCR Section 4802.2, the section of the CA code that covers the selection of charter school operators.
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/pe/pedescofints.asp
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/pe/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnaround_model
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“Sunshine…” Students First…” “Parent Trigger…” soon they will run out of happy paint for their pigs.
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I’d put down money that once the school begins to operate as a charter that they won’t be able to keep teachers on staff.
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Here we go again with the fraudulence. Florida should be renamed, The Shenanigan State. Infuriating though! So very sorry I missed the grassroots webinar, hope to see it. I am very involved in ESE advocating, but am concerned for all students, traditional teachers, and keeping education public.
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Here’s a blast from the past—2 1/2 years ago to be precise—of the infamous events in Compton, California:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/45455171/astroturf-parent-revolution-compton-caper-flyer
This is the flyer—claiming to be from the parents running “McKinley Parents for Change”. This was supposedly group of parents of Compton’s McKinley Elementary who were ostensibly out gathering signatures to turn over McKinley Elementary’s multimillion dollar campus/annual school budgets in perpetuity over to the private Charter company Celerity—i.e. from the public sector where it is controlled by an elected school board accoutable to the public….to the private sector, where the Board meets in secret, and the public is cut out of all decision-making.
At this point, a community activist—with an admittedly anti-charter school point-of-view—named Robert Skeels then called the number at the bottom of the flyer, and here’s what he found out:
http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2010/12/update-on-veracity-of-mckinley-parents.html
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ROBERT SKEELS (December 2010): “Considering the certainty and conviction of the bullet points on the flyer by this newly formed, pro-Celerity ‘parent’ group, supposedly wholly unrelated to the well-paid professional staffers at the billionaire financed Parent Revolution, I figured my questions and concerns would be promptly addressed.
“I left a message with my name and number for McKinley Parents for Change last night, and lo and behold Parent Revolution returned my call this morning. Yuri (not sure if I’m spelling that right, my apologies if I’m not) must not be aware of my years of investigative journalism exposing the insatiable greed of the lucrative charter-voucher industry. The poor woman couldn’t answer any of my questions about Celerity’s lack of compliance with the Modified Consent Decree or the State Board of Education’s proposed regulations on their Corporate Charter Trigger Law, so she said she’d have Gabe Rose (an official of Parent Revolution) call me back to clarify.
“She also was very helpful and explained to me that Gabe Rose played a major role in the creation of the flyer (who would have guessed?), so he was the best person to explain it. So much for McKinley Parents for Change’s claim that they are parents at McKinley Elementary School. I somehow doubt I’ll receive that second phone call.”
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Over a hundred McKinley parents demanded that they be allowed to rescind their signatures that Parent Revolution collected, claiming that the signature gatherers were not McKinley parents, and that those paid signature-gatherers lied to them about the full implications of what all the parents were signing (“This is for new computers… sign here…. this is to beautify the campus… sign here… ” and on and on)
Parent Revolution officials disputed this, claiming that 70% of the parents at the school signed with fully knowledge of the petition’s implications, and that those parents were demanding Celerity take over the school.. and that it was the McKinley parents, not Parent Revolution doing all the signature gathering. (See BELOW where Parent Revolution eventually comes clean about this lie)
This went to court, and also prompted hearings at the State Board of Ed.
Hmmm… who was telling the truth?
Well, we eventually found out. Parent Revolution then assisted Celerity in opening a charter school a block away from McKinley in an abandoned Catholic school building (NOTE, this was a charter authorization separate from the contentious Parent Trigger process.) The new “Plan B” was to depopulate McKinley—with the students leaving to the new Celerity school—and then use Prop. 39 to have Celerity co-locate and invade the school anyway because of all the empty classrooms—Prop 39 allows this.
Check out L.A Weekly’s Simone Wilson’s article about Parent Revolution’s ‘Plan B’ :
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/05/parent_trigger_plan_b_charter_school_to_open_2_blocks_from_mckinley_elementary.php
(the pro-Parent Revolution / pro-Parent Revolution/ pro-charter writer, Simone Wilson, is positively salivating at this prospect of Celerity “U-Hauling its top-notch operations” into McKinley):
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SIMONE WILSON: “Indeed, Plan B is looking pretty promising. If Celerity opens a first-rate campus — laptops for all! — two blocks from McKinley, chances are at least 200 of roughly 400 students will leap at the chance for a better education. This would leave the McKinley campus ‘underutilized,’ at which point another controversial California law, Prop. 39, could force the district to let a charter school take over its facilities.
” ‘I’m excited because I know my daughter is going to get the education she needs and deserves,’ parent Shemika Murphy told the Los Angeles Times.
“With this kind of support, Celerity would be ready, willing and perfectly poised to U-Haul its top-notch operations from the church over to the elementary school — virtually the same outcome as a successful Trigger would have allowed.”
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Alas, Simone was salivating in vain as it turned out.
In the coming fall, the public finally got definitive proof that the Parent Revolution was not on-the-level. Only 10% (or less, depending on reports) of the parents opted to go to the new Celerity school—far short of the 70% Parent Revolution organizers—and writers like Simone Wilson—had been telling everyone were clamoring for the Celerity takeover.
Also, U-Haul must not have been pleased as Celerity had to cancel any trucks they had booked for invading McKinley.
At the same time, Parent Revolution’s Ben Austin was removed from the State Board of Ed. by California’s newly elected Governor Jerry Brown.
In the face of this public relations fiasco—where it became obvious to all that only a mere 10% (or less) of McKinley parents actually wanted Celerity running their school, after all—Parent Revolution put out this new version:
http://parentrevolution.org/content/mckinley-elementary
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PARENT REVOLUTION: “We have also been very public about the fact that the McKinley campaign was not a perfect campaign… the vast majority of the signatures gathered were ultimately gathered by our organizers, not by the parents themselves.”
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Oh really? That’s NOT what they were saying back December 2010. No, they said it was the parents doing everything, with only minimal Parent Revolution assistance… or again, that’s what Parent Revolution claimed.
Their new story was that Parent Revolution had recently “became very public about” all this… yeah… but this was ONLY AFTER people like Robert Skeels exposed them, and the shenanigans in which they were engaged.
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