LAUSD: Can Parents Turn Their Kids' Schools Around?

I follow news of what happens in huge, admittedly troubled Los Angeles Unified School District pretty closely. Like Chicago, New York City, and DC, Los Angeles' school system is a lab for experimentation and reform. While many schools within the system are quietly doing a great job day-in and day-out, there are inevitably schools blighted by burned-out teachers and ineffectual administrators unable to reach a student population that lacks motivation and/or the right support. There's always a sense of urgency when it comes to underperforming schools--no one wants willy-nilly experimentation when a kid's education is at stake. And nobody wants mediocrity if we can help it. We all want the solution that works right away. Like, yesterday.

And though my own child attends public schools in a much smaller district, I'm always interested in what's happening in the USD next door; plenty of children and families are affected who are our friends and neighbors. I follow LAUSD just in case the trouble starts to seep into the USD my kid attends. What if we have to move back into LAUSD, or when my child gets older he shows abilities that would be better suited to a LAUSD magnet school, something our home USD doesn't offer? For these reasons, I like to keep a watchful eye open.

With that in mind, this brief post in EdWeek caught my eye:

In regulations crafted by Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines and his team to guide the district's new school choice policy, parents with children in a school that has been in California's "program improvement" status for three or more years can "trigger" the process to open the school up to outside managers if a simple majority of them sign a petition.

Talk about a public option!

What may be even more remarkable is that prospective parents, or those whose children are eligible to attend the failing school by virtue of living in its attendance zone, can also trigger this action by the same means: collecting signatures that total 50 percent plus one of the parents with children who attend the feeder campuses for the troubled school.

This could be big news. First we heard the unthinkable--some PTAs were disbanding. Schools that had been assessed as needing improvement could be eligible for charter school status.

Now a simple majority of parents signing a petition can invite outside help, such as a charter management organization, to come in and help turn floundering schools around. The inclusion of prospective parents (so long as they still fall within reasonable guidelines, such as having a child in a feeder school to the underperforming school) is new to me. But it sounds promising to give potential stakeholders a say too, because how else do we increase the participation of parents worried about their children's educations?

I know there are lots of battle-scarred LAUSD moms who write here. I'd love to know if you think this will help--and hasten the process of improvement by giving more power to parents. And if anyone here has pulled the "trigger," I'm curious to know the details of parental involvement in choosing the charter management organization. If the same old district that wasn't so great at solving the problems in the school to begin with is left to find the partner who'll help turn things around--well, that might not instill much confidence.

With the economy still in bad shape, I think for many of us private schools are not an option. But are charters the right choice, or are they the choice that is better than a bad status quo?

In any case, it looks as if we Los Angeles-area moms can't afford to stay in the dark about the region's public schools. It's something we big-city moms are always on the alert for, and I imagine parents who send their kids to more reliably and uniformly good schools in the suburbs or in small towns don't spend any time fretting about it the way we do.

Cynematic writes about positive parenting from the point of view of a politically-minded Asian Pacific American mom at P i l l o w b o o k, and at P i l l o w b o o k Picks, her review blog.