Poor Mojo's Newswire

The parent trigger, an idea presented by the voices of corporate education “reform” as parent empowerment, won a round in court this week. Ironically, the court came down firmly in favor of disempowering parents, as the parent trigger’s sponsors had requested. The ruling by a California Superior Court judge decreed that parents who have signed a parent trigger petition do not have the right to change their minds and may not rescind their signatures. The ruling cast the future of the targeted school, Desert Trails in Adelanto, in Southern California’s high desert, into confusion. Charter operators will now be invited to bid for the school, even though Desert Trails parents on both sides of the controversy say they don’t want the school to become a charter — disempowering them even further. California’s so-called parent trigger law, called the Parent Empowerment Act, was presented as allowing parents to take over low-performing schools and force them to undergo one of three supposed transformation models or else shut down, if a majority of parents at the school sign a petition. One option is turning the school over to a private charter operator. The law was created by the Los Angeles organization Parent Revolution, which was founded by charter-school entrepreneur Steve Barr and funded by many of the wealthy backers of currently vogueish education reforms. The widespread assumption was that the law would mean many charter takeovers of struggling schools. Several other states have adopted or are debating similar laws. . . . The judge’s ruling appears to contradict language in the “Final Statement of Reasons” on the Parent Empowerment Act that states, “Nothing in these regulations precludes a parent/guardian from withdrawing his/her signature from a petition at any time,” according to the Victorville Daily Press, the local daily newspaper. . . .

So-called reformers say again and again that the U.S. education system is a failure and that academic performance is declining. What they never tell you is that the test scores of American students are at their highest point in history, as recorded on the only longitudinal measure of performance, the federal test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Maybe the reformers don’t know that. You can educate them with facts.

A high-performing Bronx public high school has been maintaining its 95 percent graduation rate by forcing dozens of students who underperform to transfer to other schools, students, staffers and other sources charge. The underhanded practice by the Bronx Health Sciences HS in Baychester lets it shed unwanted students to keep its pristine academic record, while hurting the booted kids and the stats at the schools that accept them, they said. Sources said dozens of students have been handed their walking papers in recent years, and that parents are pressured into signing forms that make the involuntary transfers appear aboveboard. “Basically, any student who in someone’s eyes isn’t worth the trouble and not worth investing in — they just pass the buck on them,” said a source familiar with the school. “The parents, a lot of them don’t realize they have a choice and they can say no. So they kind of steamroll over the parents.” Terrence Allen, a 19-year-old now at Bronx Regional HS, said Bronx Health Sciences HS prevented him from attending summer school when he fell behind in cre . . . His mom said she signed his transfer papers only because he had missed three weeks of school as a result of Bronx Health Science’s forced lockout. She said complaints to the Department of Education and the city’s 311 line have gone unanswered. “My son showed up for school in September last year and they told him, ‘Oh, no, no, no. You no longer go to this school,’ ” said Julie-Ann Allen. “They broke every rule in the book.” . . .