Remember when privatizers came up with the “parent trigger?” It was 2010, right after the release of the charter propaganda film “Waiting for Superman,” and the “reformers” assumed that parents everywhere were longing to seize control of their public school and give it to a charter chain. They thought it was a brilliant idea to turn public schools over to the charter industry and use parents to do the deed. All that was needed was a petition that was sign ed by 50% of parents plus one, and the school could by law be privatized.
The first such bill was passed in late 2010 by the California Legislature. A charter enthusiast named Ben Austin created an organization called Parent Revolution, funded with millions from Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, the Waltons, and other billionaires. Parent Revolution sent organizers to poor communities to foment parent anger and collect signatures.
The producer of “Waiting for Superman” signed up star talent for another movie to promote the idea of the Parent Trigger. The movie was called “Won’t Back Down.” It failed at the box office and was the lowest grossing movie of the year.
Other states passed Parent Trigger legislation, on the assumption that parents were yearning to turn their public schools over to charter operators.
One of those states was Louisiana, which passed a Parent Trigger in 2012.
Mercedes Schneider reports here that the law is On the books, but no parent group has ever applied to turn its public school into a charter.
The only option for those who pull “the trigger” is to join the celebrated Recovery School District. Schneider lists the names of the Failing schools in the RSD.
Guess it is not that easy to fool parents into privatizing their schools.
Seven years after passage of the Parent Trigger law in California, either one or two schools have converted to charter status, and only after a bitter fight among parents about the validity of petitions. Its main effect is to divide communities.
How many millions were spent to convert one or two schools to charters? Billionaires probably for a tax write off. They don’t care.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane I appreciate that bit of history. It should be plastered on every child’s refrigerator in the nation.
“Reform” has never been a grassroots parent movement. It has always been a top down political movement designed to move public funds into private pockets. It has never been legitimate, except for a few “true believers,” many of whom like the NAACP have stepped away from it, when they realized “reform” was mostly a money making proposition designed to enhance segregation.
What the privatizers miss or are ignoring is the fact that most parents form their opinions of public education from the schools their children attended.
And the most recent annual Gallup/KDP poll shows that the vast majority (79-percent up from 76-percent in 2016)) of those parents like the public schools their children attended.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.aspx
It’s obvious that with all the crap propaganda being churned out by the privatizers, parents are paying closer attention to their local, community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit public schools and finding that they are better than what they were hearing from the lying privatizers.
The privatizers are learning, if they are capable of learning, that you can’t fool everyone.
LOL. Inside the Ed Deform bubble chamber: one to plan G.
One of the options in the original California Parent Trigger law was to close down the school. That reveals how utterly unfamiliar the operators behind it (Ben Austin and former CA state Sen. Gloria Romero) were with kids, parents and school communities. They stopped talking about that pretty fast when they realized that the idea outraged parents. But in California, the failed attempts at Parent Triggers and the one-and-a-fraction that have “succeeded” in charterizing a school have been based on lying to the parents who sign the petitions — “sign here to improve our school”; “sign here to beautify our school”; sign here to improve parking around our school.” Even disgruntled parents are not thrilled with the idea of turning their kids’ school over to some strange new entity, so collecting signatures requires brazen lying.
Another problem with the whole notion is that it turns out charter operators actually don’t want to take over existing schools with existing problems and existing students they’ll have to kick out; they want to start new schools from scratch. Romero, Austin et al. hadn’t really thought of that problem either, and again, didn’t know enough to see it coming. So with the one-and-a-fraction that have charterized, the Parent Trigger orchestrators have had to flail desperately to find a charter operator.
A bigger issue is the notion that the school belongs only to the parents of the children in the school at that time, rather than to the community. That has been compared to allowing the passengers riding the municipal bus at a given moment to take over the bus and turn it over to a private bus operator. But given the total lack of enthusiasm of the parents of the children in a given school for taking over the school and turning it over to a charter operator in any case, that problem turned out not to matter.
It’s ridiculous that the Parent Trigger is still discussed anywhere, given its crashing failure.