If you want to understand why families must have the power they need and deserve to help their kids to succeed in life — and why school reformers must embrace all tactics needed to make this a reality — all you need to do is look at the events of the past week.

parentpowerlogoIn Southern California, Parent Power activists are battling with the Los Angeles Unified School District after it decided last week to ignore the Golden State’s Parent Trigger law. Why did the nation’s second-largest school district and its superintendent, John Deasy, decide to oppose Parent Power after having been willing to embrace it over the past few years? L.A. Unified officially argues that the No Child waiver granted by the federal government to it and other districts under the California Office for Reform Education didn’t allow for the Parent Trigger law to be used.

But as Parent Revolution and others pointed out, the U.S. Department of Education specifically told the district that it must obey the law. More than likely, Deasy is doing the will of the district’s board and the American Federation of Teachers’ City of Angels affiliate in order to avoid another of the many battles he will likely face in the next few months over the union’s demand for pay raises. As a result, Parent Revolution and others are taking action — and this will likely include a lawsuit against L.A. Unified and Deasy to enforce the law as it should.

In North Carolina, Wake County Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood ruled in a case brought by the National Education Association’s affiliate there that the Tar Heel State could not continue its newly-launched school voucher program. According to Hobgood, the voucher program was unconstitutional because it violates Article 1, sections 15 and 19 of the state’s own constitution, along with Article 9 and by granting $10 million taxpayer dollars to poor and minority families who pay taxes so they help their kids escape failure mills to better-performing private schools.

Yet a closer look at Hobgood’s decision shows he is wrongly interpreting the law. The two sections of Article 1 in the Tar Heel State constitution essentially declare that citizens have a right to education, that state government is supposed to safeguard it, and all citizens are protected by the state’s Equal Protection Clause. Essentially, those sections essentially grant the state the ability to structure public education as it sees fit so long as it provides all children with high-quality education. More importantly, while Article 9 requires the state to provide uniform education, it also doesn’t prevent the state from providing vouchers; in fact, the opening verbiage declares that the state must “encourage” education because “religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind”.

The state is also granted the power under the constitution to grant responsibility for providing education to any local government or other entity it sees fit. [The fact that Judge Hobgood ignores the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Zelman, which supersedes any state ruling, is also glaring.] More than likely, the state will succeed in overturning Hobgood’s decision on appeal. But if not for Parent Power activists, who pressed to defend the lawsuit even after North Carolina’s attorney general declined to do so (at behest of state legislators who his agency serves), chances are school choice would have already been killed.

Meanwhile in Connecticut, Parent Power activist Gwen Samuel and the Connecticut Parents Union announced that she would file a motion asking a state court judge to grant an injunction restricting Gov. Dan Malloy from appointing Erin Benham, an apparatchik of the American Federation of Teachers’ Connecticut affiliate, to the state board of education. In her complaint, Samuel argues that Malloy’s move denies Nutmeg State families equal representation on the board overseeing the state agency that oversees public education. In the process, notes Samuel, Malloy is essentially is giving both the AFT affiliate and Benham (who is also a public employee) “undue influence” over the quality of education provided to all children, especially those from poor and minority backgrounds.

Through her injunction, Samuel also points out how the AFT, along with the NEA’s Connecticut unit, has worked hard to deny families lead decision-making roles in American public education. This includes AFT Connecticut‘s effort three years ago to first stop passage of, then water down, the state’s Parent Trigger law, which included closed-door meetings with legislators that excluded what is now Connecticut Parents Union and other reform groups, as well as punishing then-State Rep. Jason Bartlett at the ballot box for daring to carry the legislation forward. [The details were revealed by Dropout Nation to the AFT’s embarrassment.] Declares Samuel in a press release on the motion: “This is about constitutional rights being protected and equal representation for all education stakeholders.”

What all three events make clear is how American public education — and the coterie of teachers’ union officials, school board players, and traditional district bureaucrats — have long done all they can to keep families from being the lead decision-makers in education policymaking as they should be. And you can’t successfully advance Parent Power and school choice for children and their families without using every political avenue available.

Last June’s California Superior Court ruling in Vergara v. California has galvanized Parent Power activists and many reformers to take to the courts in order to advance systemic reform. In New York, both the New York City Parents Union and Campbell Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice have already filed their own Vergara suits, both of which will likely be consolidated into one at the request of the Empire State’s attorney general. Students Matter, the California-based outfit which helped finance Vergara, is now looking to undertake similar suits in the rest of the nation.

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The AFT’s success in stamping out earlier Parent Power efforts, such as those in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, show why reformers and families must work together on placing parents at the forefront of education decision-making.

One would think that this would be celebrated by reformers. After all, it opens up another avenue by which the movement can advance systemic reform. Yet among some reformers, most-notably conservatives within the movement, the very idea of litigation is not welcomed at all. From the perspective of conservative reformers such as Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Michael Petrilli (and to a lesser extent, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute), the fear is that civil litigation means that judges will be legislating from the bench, encroaching on decision-making that should only be done in the legislative arena. Proper reform, in their view, should only be done in statehouses.

Meanwhile for other reformers, the problem lies with the idea that families should be lead decision-makers in education. From where they sit, parents are ill-equipped to involve themselves in school operations, and, even worse, will end up fighting with other parents who may not agree on the same direction. From where they sit, what parents should only do is to escape failing schools and choose schools fit for their kids. This antipathy toward families in school decision-making explains why so many Beltway policy wonks and institution-oriented reformers such as charter school operators have been dismissive of Parent Trigger laws on the books in seven states and why they prefer a set vision of school choice as merely that of parents being consumers; that families may not always agree with the agenda they want to set is also part of the problem.

Both perspectives are misguided. Conservative reformers skeptical and opposed to using the courts for litigation fail to remember this simple fact: Courts are one of the three co-equal branches of government at federal and state levels. More importantly, it is the branch charged with interpreting the constitutionality of laws passed and executed by the legislative and executive branches. This means that the judiciary is charged with serving as the guard against legislators and other politicians more-concerned with favoring their comfortable interests than protecting the rights of the people who are afflicted. This includes children and the families who love and care for them.

By using the courts to take on policies and practices that have violated the constitutional rights of children — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — to high-quality education, reformers and Parent Power activists are embracing the examples set by civil rights activists of the last century, who successfully challenged Jim Crow segregation laws that harmed an earlier generation of black and brown children. At the same time, by working through the courts, which are charged by federal and state constitutions with interpreting laws (and thus, rejecting legislation that violates the principles contained within them), the school reform movement is holding executive branch officials and legislatures accountable.

This isn’t to say that using the courts alone is enough to advance reform. As Dropout Nation has noted in two pieces written this month, the judiciary branch doesn’t have the tools the actually enforce the rulings handed down; even when judges attempt to do so on their own, they (and, ultimately, plaintiffs) are vulnerable to being accused by recalcitrant politicians and their allies of engaging in judicial activism. As seen in the case of North Carolina’s voucher ruling, the fact that traditionalists can also avail themselves of the courts also means that reform efforts can be vulnerable to judicial rulings. This is why reformers must continually engage in all aspects of politics. All that said, reformers aren’t doing their best on behalf of all children if they do not avail themselves of the courts.

Meanwhile reformers reluctant to advocate for families to be lead decision-makers in education policymaking fail to keep in mind some inconvenient facts. The first? That you cannot sustain systemic reform if families aren’t at the head of the table of education decision-making. In fact, the most-successful school reform efforts have been driven by parents and other impromptu leaders who knew little about education until their concern for children (especially their own) led them to embrace reform. This includes Virginia Walden Ford, whose efforts in D.C. to expand school choice launched reform efforts there, and Samuel, who helped pass Connecticut’s Parent Trigger law as well as pass legislation that ended criminalizing families for violating Zip Code Education laws that keep them from providing their kids with the learning they deserve.

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When families are given power, as seen in the success of parents who took over Adelanto’s Desert Trails Elementary, they become champions for reform and ultimately, for their kids.

By dismissing Parent Trigger laws and Parent Power efforts in general, reformers weaken much-needed support for the very overhauls they tout from the very people they need the most. This is because when families can shape the education provide to their children, they become champions of reform on the political level as well as fully engaged in helping their kids academically on a personal one. This can be seen in places such as  Adelanto, Calif., where efforts to use Parent Trigger laws have led to takeovers of failure mills and the removal of laggards on school boards. Even when families don’t use Parent Trigger laws to take full control of schools, the laws give them a much-needed negotiating tool to stand for their kids against those within districts and other school operations who don’t have their best interest at heart.

This isn’t to say parents are always going to make the best decisions all of the time. Nor does this mean that every parent wants to be fully engaged in school operations and curricular decisions. This is why intra-district choice, course selection, charters, vouchers, and voucher-like tax credits are as critical as Parent Trigger laws. But it is clear that families can make smart decisions for their kids and work well with others when provided the tools and the data needed to do so. So they deserve the right to be players and not just consumers in education.

For reformers and for families, embracing Parent Power is especially important. This is because NEA and AFT affiliates, along with other traditionalists who benefit from keeping American public education in its current state of academic decrepitude, have no interest in giving families real power in education decision-making. As Temple University Professor William W. Cutler III noted in Parents and Schools: The 150-year struggle for control in American education, traditionalists have long enlisted families to further their goals and little else. This can be seen in the research of Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg of the Sage Colleges on how districts mistreat urban and low-income families, in Karyn Lacey’s Blue-Chip Black on how suburban black families are denied information on college-preparatory courses their children need, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville battle between black families and the AFT’s Big Apple local in the late 1960s, and in how teachers’ union bosses try to dominate education policymaking through campaign donations in school district races and control of seats on state school boards.

It is politically and intellectually senseless for reformers to not stand by families and help them gain their rightful roles in education policymaking. More importantly, we must stand by families as lead decision-makers in education because it both the moral and responsible thing to do. After all, as the men and women charged by God with caring for and nurturing their children. From both a religious and ethical humanist perspective, denying parent power in education is purely immoral and unethical. There’s no way anyone can deny families the power in education endowed by their Creator and granted to them by law.

So reformers must stand by families and helping them take their rightful roles in education decision-making. This means taking to the courts as well as to the streets, statehouses, and Beltway corridors. Our children need their parents to have power to make education decision on their behalf. And that means holding no quarter in making that reality.