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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.

In some states, parents frustrated with the public school system may have a new tool to fix their child's education. Parent trigger laws, passed in some form in four states already, give dissatisfied parents the power to fire teachers, convert a public school to a charter, or even shut down the school altogether. As one can imagine, such a dramatic solution to the problem of public education has created quite a controversy. Parents and educators alike are asking: should parents have their fingers on the trigger of public education? For the answer, we speak with Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, a parent advocacy group in New York City that pushes for smaller class sizes in public schools. We also speak with Gwen Samuel, president of Connecticut Parent Union. 

Let us now praise the public school parents of Florida. They organized to oppose a bill known as the "Parent Trigger" or "Parent Empowerment." Under this proposed law, if 51 percent of the parents in a public school signed a petition, they could take over the school and decide whether to close it or turn it over to a charter management organization. The bill was wrapped in a deceptive and alluring packaging. Who could resist the bold idea of giving parents the power to take control of their public school? Well, it turned out that Florida parents had become savvy after watching their elected officials endorse one bill after another to advance the interests of charter schools and for-profit entrepreneurs. They figured out that the real beneficiaries of this legislation would be charter management corporations, not parents or children.

In 2010, California enacted education legislation known as the "parent trigger." The legislation empowers parents of children at schools that have failed to meet annual yearly progress for at least four years to change the administration, convert the school to a charter, or shut it down completely if they gather signatures from at least 51% of parents at the school. Similar legislation exists in Mississippi and Connecticut, but has failed to become law in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, and Maryland. Parents at McKinley Elementary in Compton Unified - a school that only met yearly progress once in the last eight years -were the first in the nation to "pull the trigger" and remain the sole group to do so to date. As a result of their action, the State of California required the district to hire a "direct assistance intervention team," and later, an attempt by parents to convert the school to a charter was rebuffed by the school district on technical grounds. A case is currently pending in Los Angeles Superior Court. Many school reformers believe that this law puts the interests of children ahead of teachers and helps to save children in failing schools before the clock runs out. Many education professionals, among them the president of the California Federation of Teachers, view the law as a "lynch mob provision," intended to dismantle the public school system. The politics of the "parent trigger" are confusing, with the lines between conservatives and liberals often blurred. This debate will examine the arguments in favor and in opposition to this reform, focusing on the experience to date in California and developments in other parts of the country where similar legislation is being considered.

Parent trigger laws, according to their proponents, give parents power. Gregory McGinity, managing director of policy for the Broad Education Foundation, calls them "a way for parents' voices to be heard." Sounds good. But is the parent trigger concept a way to put parents in charge of their kids' education, or is it part of a political agenda that will rob parents of even more control?

Today, The Los Angeles Times published an editorial reflecting on the parent trigger's lack of success, and described Parent Revolution's retooling effort: Instead of choosing the schools for a possible parent trigger and engineering the petitions, Parent Revolution now leaves it up to parents to determine whether they want to initiate major reforms and what kind. The article charitably describes the organization's success at this new strategy as "modest." Of course, this "new" strategy is the primary strategy used by all effective community organizers in modern times, and by successful organizers in history before the term was even coined.

It appears that some voices around the country are discussing the Parent Trigger as though it had been used successfully at schools throughout California. But that's not true. The Parent Trigger has never succeeded at any school in California. There have been two known attempts to use it; both have failed. And Parent Revolution, the billionaire-funded Astroturf (fake grassroots) organization that created the Parent Trigger, appears to have basically abandoned it as a strategy.

Parents may have important effects on their children, but little work in economics explores how children's schooling opportunities impact parents' investment in children. We analyze data from the Head Start Impact Study, in which a lottery granted randomly-chosen preschool-aged children the opportunity to attend Head Start. We find that Head Start causes a substantial and significant increase in parents' involvement with their children-such as time spent reading to children, math activities, or days spent with children by fathers who do not live with their children-both during and after the period when their children are potentially enrolled in Head Start. We discuss a variety of mechanisms that are consistent with our findings, including a simple model we present in which Head Start impacts parent involvement in part because parents perceive their involvement to be complementary with child schooling in the production of child qualities.

A growing body of research has examined how cultural capital, recently broadened to include not only high-status cultural activities but also a range of different parenting practices, influences children's educational success. Most of this research assumes that parents' current class location is the starting point of class transmission. However, does the ability of parents to pass advantages to their children, particularly through specific cultural practices, depend solely on their current class location or also on their class of origin? The authors address this question by defining social background as a combination of parents' cur- rent class location and their own family backgrounds. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement, the authors examine how different categories of social back- ground are related to parenting practices and children's academic achievement. The results offer novel insights into the transmission of class advantage across generations and inform debates about the complex processes of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility.

As a parent who used to be in the classroom, I sometimes struggle with which perspective to think from: from that of a parent or from that of a teacher. Becoming a parent made me a much better and more understanding teacher. Conversely, strategies I used in teaching and things I learned there about human nature and interacting with children have proven invaluable to me as a parent. Interacting with other people's children, of course, is not the same thing as interacting with my own. My own children can tick me off in ways my students never could; I can have a hard time getting to that calm, clinical space with my own kids, even as I know I'd make fewer mistakes if I could get there. So sometimes I feel conflicted when it comes to advocacy and opinions. Watching my own children develop has taught me a lot about how people learn and has challenged some of my old (teacher's) thinking.

Florida lawmakers want to give parents the power to dictate the future of poorly performing public schools, sparking criticism from parent advocates and others that the effort is part of a continuing campaign to privatize education. Florida's version of a "parent trigger" law won favorable committee votes Tuesday in the Florida House and Senate. The bills would allow parents - if more than 50 percent agree - to determine a "turnaround plan" for a struggling school. That could include turning it into a charter school or allowing a private-management firm to run it.

This paper describes an experiment designed to investigate the impact of aligning student, parent, and teacher incentives on student achievement. On outcomes for which incentives were provided, there were large treatment effects. Students in treatment schools mastered more than one standard deviation more math objectives than control students, and their parents attended almost twice as many parent-teacher conferences. In contrast, on related outcomes that were not incentivized (e.g. standardized test scores, parental engagement), we observe both positive and negative effects. We argue that these facts are consistent with a moral hazard model with multiple tasks, though other explanations are possible.

Shoehorned into a small living room in a South Los Angeles apartment, a dozen parents discuss why their kids' school ranks as one of the worst in the nation's second-largest school district. The answers come quickly: Teachers are jaded; gifted pupils aren't challenged; disabled students are isolated; the building is dirty and office staff treat parents disrespectfully. "We know what the problem is-we're about fixing it," said Cassandra Perry, the Woodcrest Elementary School parent hosting the meeting. "We're not against the administrators or the teachers union. We're honestly about the kids." School parent groups are no longer just about holding the next bake-sale fundraiser. They're about education reform.

Now, in the midst of the latest controversy, it has become clear that ALEC has also played a major role in writing the so-called "parent trigger" laws designed to allow charter management organizations to engage in hostile takeovers of public schools. Interestingly, the web page on the ALEC site which contained the model "parent trigger" law has been taken down, out of the fear, one would presume, that increased public attention on ALEC and its role in promoting reactionary, anti-public education legislation could become a tad bit embarrassing. But the good folks at ALEC Exposed, a virtual clearinghouse on all matters ALEC sponsored by the Center for Media and Democracy, have a library of all the draft ALEC education legislation, and there one finds the missing ALEC model "parent trigger" legislation.

As many as 20 states have considered enacting parent trigger laws, which would let parents who are dissatisfied with the way a school is being run, turn it into a charter, replace the staff, or even shut it down, if 51 percent of the school's families agree. The laws - which have been passed in various forms in California, Connecticut, Mississippi and Texas - have generated controversy and even inspired a movie to be released this fall. Do these laws give parents the first real power over their children's education? Or do they put public schools in private hands and impede real improvements?

"One can't help but be moved by the characters and story portrayed in Walden Media's film "Won't Back Down." The film is successful in driving home the sense of urgency parents and educators feel to do everything they can to provide the best possible education for their children. That is abundantly evident in this film-it's what I hear as I visit schools across the country, and it's what I heard when I sat down with parent and community groups from across the country last week. We share that pain and frustration. And we firmly believe that every public school should be a school where every parent would want to send his or her child and where every teacher would want to teach. Unfortunately, using the most blatant stereotypes and caricatures I have ever seen-even worse than those in "Waiting for 'Superman'"-the film affixes blame on the wrong culprit: America's teachers unions."

"This week I went to a screening of Won't Back Down starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal.  The movie is about a mom and a teacher who band together and use the Parent Trigger law (which is never mentioned by name) to take over and turnaround a failing elementary school in Pittsburgh.  The film is loosely based on real events (though in my research I couldn't find anything other than the Los Angeles based parent trigger law, which was backed by a big charter school organization), and produced by the same man who produced Waiting for Superman. As someone who has been deeply embroiled in the discussion and reality of parents advocating for better schools, for student and parent rights, and as a PA C0-President who has worked closely with many teachers and administrators, this movie got to me on many levels. So, I have decided to break it down in two parts: As a movie and then as a propaganda film."

Mayor Bloomberg said today that "The teachers' union represents the employees and the city represents the students."  This comment reflects tremendous chutzpah. He and the Governor in recent days have claimed to be acting in the interests of the children who attend our public schools, yet both have ignored the priorities of parents and their right to have a voice in determining education policies. We parents are the really the ones who speak for our children.  What do New York parents want?  The vast majority want equitable and adequate funding, smaller classes, a well-rounded curriculum, and less emphasis on standardized testing.

"We have a parenting problem, not a poverty problem," Mike Petrilli writes at Flypaper. I agree that parenting matters greatly to a child's academic success or failure, and in fact may be the single largest determining factor. But Petrilli concludes that the best way to solve the "parenting problem" is through cultural messaging promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce, so that kids benefit from growing up in two-income households. This ignores, I think, the concrete reality of life in many low-income neighborhoods, where many women are making a rational choice when they remain single.

Suddenly parents, a huge and untapped force for improving our schools, have become the hottest players in education reform. On a policy level, it's an encouraging development. For years, well-heeled reformers, well-meaning politicians and education bureaucrats have imposed an agenda on public school children with almost no regard for the families of the children they claim to be serving. The trigger creates an opportunity for parents to be heard. But around the dining room table, parents of school-age children could be forgiven for greeting the proposed legislation with weary disbelief.