John Thompson, teacher and historian in Oklahoma, describes the arrival of Parent Revolution operatives in Oklahoma City, come to sell the charter school snake oil. In the five years since PR managed to get legislation in California, only a handful of schools have been converted into charters, so apparently they started beating the bushes in other states.
Oklahoma has thus far escaped the promises and lures of chartering its cities to out of state entities.
Thompson writes:
I wish local charter leaders and philanthropists would disassociate themselves from the Parent Revolution and the agenda of competition-driven reformers. True believers that “the market” will magically solve education’s problems have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in failed experiments in Newark, New Orleans, Memphis and, now, Chicago and Boston. Last week, the secret $2.7 million corporate campaign for mass charterization of Los Angeles was revealed.
Those experiments mostly took bad inner city schools and made them worse. The one semi-success (New Orleans) spent incomprehensible sums of money, beyond anything we could conceive in Oklahoma, as it created a mostly all-charter system. It produced some gains through nonstop teach-to-the-test, but they came at the cost of pushing thousands of high-challenge students out of school and into the streets.
If we follow the Parent Revolution, we will be back to what we saw during the economic bust of the 1980s. OKCPS did its best, but our overwhelmed system had no chance of reaching the dozens of out-of-school kids who we used to see wandering through each of our high-poverty neighborhoods during the school days.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Parents will be sold a bill of goods when it comes to the Parent Trigger. But, all they have to do is look at California. The law is a disaster and has failed miserably. The first trigger, Desert Trails in Adelanto, has been denied a renewal. It has been plagued by huge teacher and administrator attrition and there are numerous questionable associations between the founder and the management company. The main goal of Parent Revolution was to turn schools over to charters. But, no one realized that CMOs and EMOs do not want to take over underperforming schools and instead want to start new schools that allow them to cherry pick their students. That’s why former LAUSD superintendent Deasy had to hastily create a fake CMO called Practitioner Center Schools to run 24th St. Elementary because the parents realized that they were not presented with decent options by any well known and successful charter organizations. So, now the school is basically run by LAUSD with union teachers. Not the outcome that Parent Revolution really wanted, but better than having the Parent Trigger exposed for the sham that it is.
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John and Diane, only ONE school anywhere, ever in the entire country, has been converted into a charter school by a parent trigger — Desert Trails in Adelanto, CA. When Parent Revolution or its competitors (the insiders in this “movement” repeatedly turn on each other and become enemies, so now there are two or more operations) claim otherwise, they’re lying. In another school in LAUSD, a new charter school was “co-located” (given space) in an existing school, but the existing school remained non-charter — now the parent trigger operators are apparently claiming that was a takeover, but that’s not true. So be clear that they’re lying when they say more than one school has ever been converted to a charter by a parent trigger.
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