Ed Ring, president of the California Policy Foundation, penned a column about the effort by Palm Lane Elementary School parents to convert it to charter status, which was published in California Political Review and UnionWatch.com:
If you drive by Palm Lane Elementary School in Anaheim, California, nothing seems amiss. With modern buildings, partially surrounded by a park, the school seems like a tranquil refuge. Like so many settings in sunny Southern California, palm trees and sycamores compete for space on the spacious lawns, beckoning skyward, swaying in the warmth of a slight breeze. By appearances, Palm Lane seems a perfect place to send your children to get an education.
Appearances can be deceiving. Palm Lane does not deliver educational excellence to its students, and it is the latest epicenter of an escalating war for control of California’s failing public schools.Despite investing to create and maintain an impressive campus, academic achievement at Palm Lane has been sadly deficient. According to a report earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal, “In 2013 a mere 38% of students scored proficient or better on state standardized English tests and 53% in math. About 85% of its students are Latino and 60% aren’t native English speakers.”
Parents at Palm Lane School were not aware of the school’s designation as a failing school, but they noticed improvement when a new principal, Roberto Baeza, arrived in 2013. During 2014, however, the Anaheim City School Board (ACSB) demoted Mr. Baeza and he now works at another school. Parent protests led to the involvement of Senator Huff’s office, along with former State Senate majority leader Gloria Romero.
Back in 2010, Senator Huff, a Republican, joined with Democratic Senator Gloria Romero to pass “Parent Trigger,” a law that permits parents to take over the management of a failing school if a majority of them sign a petition. To get onto the list of eligible schools, among other things, a public school has to fail to meet academic performance improvement goals for four consecutive years. Palm Lane has failed to meet improvement targets for over a decade.
While concerned parents began to organize to gather signatures to invoke the provisions of Parent Trigger, the Anaheim Elementary Teachers Association – that’s “teachers union” in plain English – tried to discourage the effort. As noted in the Wall Street Journal article, “In an October newsletter, the union warned teachers that ‘If you see signature gatherers or unusual people on your campus, contact the office, and depending on the situation, approach them and inquire why they are there or what they need.’ While teachers by law can’t tell parents not to sign the petition, the union said ‘it is okay to make statements such as: If I were a parent at this school, I wouldn’t sign the petition.’”
You can read the rest of the column here.
The following passage from Ring’s column was omitted from this excerpt:
“Charter schools work. They work because they . . . [can] terminate incompetent teachers and retain excellent teachers. . . . Each charter school has the independence to try creative approaches to effective teaching. They are laboratories where the science of education is advanced far more quickly than in highly regimented traditional schools where student achievement must be accomplished without violating union work rules. Even more important, . . . they can be swiftly shut down or reorganized. Charter schools offer hope to literally millions of K-12 students in California.”
And now the rest of the story. Yes, charter schools work. Overall, however, do children attending charter schools record as much progress as students in regular public schools? No. Are teachers in public schools better prepared and more experienced than teachers in charter schools? Yes. Is substandard achievement in public schools caused by teacher unions? No. Are charter school laboratories within which the science of education advances? No. Education can never elevate itself to be on par with sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics. Do charter schools offer hope to students whose academic achievement year after year is significantly below the normal for their age and grade? Yes. At this point, is there any reason to believe that restarting Palm Lane as a charter school will close the achievement gap or that student achievement will increase at a faster rate that if these students were to remain in the current school? No.
I invite you to read the research.
Center for Research on Education Outcomes. (2013). National Charter School Study. Retrieve from http://tinyurl.com/npr5wq6
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.
I hope they would stop adults they don’t recognize, approach and determine if they belong. It is an elementary school where kids safety should be a priority.
BTW Ed Ring is a complete anti union guy. He hates the fact that they slow down the Republican agenda to privatize everything in California that is not nailed down. Read up on the wages for most workers, and see how they have gone down over the last few years. If it were up to the likes of him, minimum wage would be abolished and no one would have health care.
Unions are political, but for the most part fall on the side of the workers and middle class families and are a counterbalance to republicans.
I am glad my kids are getting older and will not be exposed to another deregulation experiment brought to you by wall street.
While people are bashing the superintendent and board (and rightly so), we should at least recognize that they TRIED last year by appointing Principal Baeza in the first place who had turned around schools before. It looks like that it could have been the apparent unwillingness of some teachers at Palm Lane to work with him but instead to complain that his efforts in turning around the school created a HOSTILE working environment, that was the root cause of the trigger
IF this is true AND IF there are layoffs due to the charter conversion which are NOT covered by normal attrition, I would think that it would be FAIR to the the other district teachers that the unwilling and complaining teachers be laid off FIRST. Other teachers that were LAST IN and were putting in the effort should not have to bear the pain by being the FIRST OUT.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/05/what-a-senators-confusion-about-charter-schools-illuminates/
This is the link for my previous post.