Martin Luther King Jr. Day Marks the Second Anniversary of 'Parent Revolution' in the US: Is the Revolution Floundering?

While the Parent Revolution's website touts the success of their movement and congratulates itself on its second-year anniversary, the LA Times paints a picture of a well intentioned movement in the throes of chaos.

According to their mission statement, the "Parent Revolution aims to transform public education rooted in what’s good for kids — not grown-ups — by empowering parents to transform their own children’s low-performing schools through community organizing."

Empowered by the Parent Trigger Law, their mandate to increase accountability in the public school systems, this America wide movement claims to be a community initiative that started out of Los Angeles County, CA that collects its own data on school performance.  It does not use standardised testing as a measure of 'success'  rather looks at issues of engagement by analysing figures such as drop-out rates and percentages of college admissions.

On the surface, this movement that encourages greater participation in the education process from parents as stakeholders on behalf of their children appears to be an encouraging one. Late in 2010, however, the Parent Revolution put forward the bid to enact the law at McKinley Elementary in Compton, one of the lowest ranking schools in the state. Since then, accusations from both inside and outside of the movement have been laid against the Parent Revolution and have ranged from being simply chaotic to intimidatingly conspiratorial. At McKinley Elementary, the Trigger Law has received its first test and is struggling to achieve a passing grade.

The accusations of chaos seem to come from the idea that while the movement encourages parental participation and contributions, beyond the instituting of a charter, there doesn't seem to be any means inherent in the movement of establishing any kind of consensus with regard to school reform once the Parent Trigger is enacted. Parents have claimed they have been tricked into signing in order to hand over power to the charter holders themselves. Charter schools operate on a charter that, among a set of other criteria, are free from union regulations.  As the parents themselves in the Revolution have formally formed a 'Parent Union', far from facilitating greater parent involvement, this has produced the danger of effectively cutting parents out of nearly any influence in school operations while the school works to meet the conditions of their charter.  It is this lack of consensus too that brings about accusations that far from being an organic movement, it is actually an initiative by charter school operators in league with professionals and funded by billionaires and corporate giants such as Bill Gates.

In the days that have followed the second anniversary of the Parent Revolution, it seems unclear at this point whether it is an inspiring move by parents to enact real and necessary education reform or a cynical bid to further the move toward the standardisation of education. In any case, charges of intimidation and the ongoing and ruthless battles between parents and teachers do not seem to serve the best interest of the children. This seems to be an example of the Parent Revolution falling short of their mission.