Parent Trigger or Corporate Bomb?

[Modern School]

The well-publicized attempt to convert McKinley Elementary in Compton to a charter school, using California’s “Parent Trigger” law, has been hailed as a victory for parental choice and the movement to improve failing schools. Both claims are lies.

Underperforming, But Improving Dramatically Without Conversion
McKinley may have been a low-performing, low income school, but it had been making huge academic leaps, improving its API (Academic Performance Indicator) by 77 points over the last two years. With such dramatic improvement, McKinley should have been seen as a model of what is working, not as a poster boy for school privatization. Under NCLB’s absurd accounting methods, though, McKinley continued to be seen as a failing school, thus providing ammunition to the corporate vultures who saw a meal waiting to be snatched.

In Come the Corporate Raiders
Likewise, the vote to convert McKinley was led by a group called Parent Revolution, which is funded by Eli Broad, a billionaire financier and opponent of public education, and chaired by Steve Barr, former CEO of Green Dot Public Schools, Inc. Green Dot was also backed by Broad, and by Bill Gates. Parent Revolution targeted several low income communities in the Los Angeles area and went door to door to recruit parents. In other words, Compton parent trigger is looking less like a grass roots parental choice movement, and more like a gang of corporate raiders,

To Read more, please go to http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2010/12/parent-trigger-or-corporate-bomb.html