Parents of children in public schools represent one of the largest constituencies in the United States. Yet parents have played a relatively minor role in recent efforts to improve education. Could this substantial group be mobilized to form a political movement demanding better schools? If so, what would such a movement look like?

Insight Labs is taking on the question in our Feb. 24 Lab with the CAA Foundation. To prepare, we’re interviewing several people with relevant expertise. The first is Ben Austin, founder and executive director of Parent Revolution. Austin’s organization fought for a “parent trigger” law in California that allows parents to initiate substantial changes to schools if they can gather the signatures of 51 percent of parents who support the reform. Options available to the organized parents include changing principals and staff, giving more budget control to the local community, or bringing in a charter operator to run the school. Today, Parent Revolution provides organizing and education support to groups of parents hoping to take advantage of the trigger law.

Could Parent Revolution serve as a model for a broader parents movement? Labs Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson tested out the idea in the following interview with Austin.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: What role would you say that parents play in schools in the status quo?

Ben Austin: In the status quo, parents are usually safely relegated to the sidelines. They’re welcome to raise money for the school at a bake sale or generate support for the school in other ways. But particularly at academically failing schools, outside of the context of what we’re doing there are few entry points for parents to challenge the status quo and demand something better for their kids.

ABN: What role do you imagine parents would play in the education system in your ideal world?

BA: I think the fundamental problem with the American public education system is that, at its essence, it is not designed to serve the interests of children.

I was up until recently a member of the California State Board of Education. I endeavored to make every vote thinking about what I would actually want for my two daughters. I voted in ways that pissed off teachers’ unions – I voted for accountability, for value-added analysis being a part of a teacher’s evaluation, and I voted for expanding high-quality charter schools. But I also voted in ways that made charter advocates angry – I voted to shut down charters that I wouldn’t send my own daughter to.

At the end of the day, we’re stuck in a series of false choices that have led us to where we are now. In LA, we have a fifty percent dropout rate and ninety percent of our kids don’t go to college. It’s not about charter schools versus district schools, or reformers versus teachers’ unions, or Republicans versus Democrats. It’s simply about giving parents power over the education of their own children.

In the closed-door meetings where the decisions are made that impact the lives of our children, I can tell you that the subject of kids just doesn’t come up that often. It’s not that people anywhere on the spectrum are conspiring to keep things the way they are. All of these people care about kids. It’s just that the system is designed to serve the interests of powerful adults. Things aren’t going to change because you get someone like me appointed to the board of education, or because you get someone like Michelle Rhee as the chancellor of schools in Washington, DC – there won’t be one single person. That theory of change is utterly flawed. At the end of the day, I don’t think I made that much of a difference, because the system is rigged against change.

By “change” I mean having a system where people make every single decision about schools as if it were going to affect their own child. The only way to get to that point is to effectuate a radical and unapologetic transfer of power from the defenders of the status quo to parents. Parents have a wholly different incentive structure and set of interests from everyone else.

Giving parents power won’t lead to magical results, but with their new power will come a radical new responsibility to educate themselves about how to best use that power. But having worked on this issue from many different angles, from the White House and at the state board of education, I can tell you that while transferring power to parents is not a perfect theory of change, it is the best one that I have seen for actually implementing a kids-first agenda as public policy.

ABN: I understand what you’re talking about in terms of a theory of change. But I still don’t know if I understand the actual role parents would play in your ideal system. Would it be too simplistic to just say that their new role would be “to be in charge”?

BA: Yes, that is too simplistic.

Most parents don’t know how to run a school, nor should they. But I’m not a doctor, and I know how to pick a good pediatrician for my daughter. I’m not a professional educator, but I know if my kids are getting a good education or not. I know if they’re going to good schools or not.

The example of the parent trigger campaign we’re currently working on grounds this somewhat. We’re working with a school called Desert Trails Elementary. They’re in the middle of the Mojave Desert outside of Victorville, California. They came to us last June hoping to start a parent trigger campaign. They’re in a bad school, the worst in their district and in the bottom ten percent of the state.

Our counsel to them was to slow down. We told them that with this new power comes a new responsibility to educate yourself on behalf of your kids. We helped them to form what we call a parent union chapter at their school. This is a real, independent organization with leadership and membership requirements that incorporates with the California Secretary of State. They also sign a memorandum of understanding with us that commits them to a kids-first agenda. In exchange for that commitment, we commit to giving them training.

We train the parents in two areas: community organizing and public policy. Nobody has ever done any of this before, so we’ve come up with a lot of this from scratch. But we’ve developed a parents’ curriculum where they take classes in those two subject areas. At the end of it, they spent a good part of the summer knocking on doors in their communities, trying to understand what other parents’ aspirations were for their kids. At the end of that process, the parents took the information from their surveys, overlaid that on top of their new understanding of education reform and policy, then came to some pretty sophisticated conclusions about their schools and their communities.

These particular parents, for example, are not very big fans of charter schools. There had been a charter school in their community that had gone bankrupt a few years earlier and given charters a bad name there. So they wanted to stay within the district and they wanted to stay unionized, but they wanted charter-like authority within that context. They wanted to be able to hire and fire the principal, and they wanted the principal to have the authority to manage the faculty, staff, budget, and curriculum. To me, that sounds like common sense, but if you go to a random school nearly anywhere in California or pretty much anywhere in America, the principal does not actually have the power to hire and fire staff or to identify teachers in need of development. The principal also does not have authority over the budget or the curriculum. The principal is in some ways a bureaucratic caretaker. So they wanted to create a system where there was a person with clear accountability for the education of their children.

So the parents organized a parent trigger campaign around a charter conversion, but instead of asking an outside charter operator to come in, they would form their own charter, where the parents would form the majority of the board. That’s their backup plan. They collected signatures representing the parents of 70 percent of the kids in the school. About three weeks ago they turned those signatures into the district with a 40-day deadline to negotiate a deal along the lines I described. They want to stay within the district, they want to work collaboratively, and they want to have a wall-to-wall unionized school. But at the end of the day, they feel the children are attending a failing school and they can’t afford to wait. They said that if this doesn’t work out, they are going to form their own charter school, and the parent trigger law gives them the power to do that.

What these parents have done is literally to unionize. They have organized in such a way that, for what may be the first time in American history, they are sitting at the table and being treated like other players with power are treated in public education.

ABN: So according to your model, parents are the key aspect that needs to change in public education. There are many different groups it is possible to work with, many different factors that can be improved, but you choose to primarily focus on parents. What particular aspects of that group led you to decide on them as  your focus?

BA: Well, I want to clearly state that we don’t think parents are a magical solution. Everyone in public education cares about kids. I think people throw around youth in a way that is politically irresponsible, so it’s important to take this issue of caring about kids off the table. But parents have different incentive structures from other groups. They have a lot to learn, but once they have learned what they need to, they have a different sense of urgency in bringing about change.

Unlike district bureaucrats or special interests, parents are not willing to wait around and see if a pilot program is going to work out. They are not willing to settle for a lowest-common-denominator compromise when it comes to their own children. I have sat in a lot of closed-door meetings where, when the reporters leave the room, the subject of kids just doesn’t come up. Parents change that game by being at the table. Without laws like parent trigger, parents who organized for that kind of change would be told to go do a bake sale.

ABN: You’ve mentioned that parents also have some unique problems and difficulties as actors in the education system. Can you explain what those are, and how you have dealt with them in your organization?

BA: The main problem is that organizing parents is hard work. The parent trigger law has gotten a lot of attention in California. There are 1,300 schools in California that are eligible for the trigger. But there are only two schools in the past two years that have actually organized to use the law on behalf of their kids.

The reality is that there are two sets of challenges. On the organizing side, it’s difficult to find any school in America where 50 percent of parents adamantly agree on anything. On top of that, it’s especially difficult in low-income communities where most of the bad schools are located. Many of these communities are utterly devastated – it’s utterly incomprehensible what these parents are going through, even just from an economic standpoint. You’re organizing people who may be in and out of housing projects or in homes that may be foreclosed upon. Because of that, the social fabric in these communities is frayed. So part of what you’re doing when you’re organizing is not just educating parents, but introducing them to each other. You are strengthening and sometimes creating a social fabric in communities that have been devastated by economic distress. That’s very, very difficult, and it takes a lot of old-school community organizing.

We talk about parent trigger as being primarily about kids, and it is. But it’s amazing to see the transformation in the parents. A lot of the parents that we work with have never felt powerful before. Empowering them is ultimately good for the parents and good for the kids.

The second major impediment is education policy. At some schools you need to hit the reset button. At other schools you need a more strategic, surgical approach. Parents need to understand that their options are and what their tools are. What makes it difficult is that if you ask ten education policy experts the tough questions about how to turn around a failing school, you’re likely to get ten different answers.

Because parents have never really had political power before, policymakers haven’t spent enough time really thinking about what a kid-first agenda looks like. Even though it is their job to come up with solutions, they tend to be intellectually constrained by the politics of the possible. Whatever ideas they come up with are filtered through the district bureaucracy, the school board, the teachers’ unions, the state legislature, etc. Those are all gateways that the defenders of the status quo are all very good at controlling. By the time an idea gets through all those gateways, it has often been watered down so much that it is unrecognizable.

Parent trigger changes the game. The goals of parents are quite simple – they just want a better school for their kids. Part of what this movement is about is not just turning around failing schools, but finding a way to force policy-makers to grapple with the question of “What is an intellectually honest kids-first agenda? If the only thing that mattered was kids, what would you do?” It’s a question that we as a society have not spent nearly enough time thinking about.

ABN: It seems to me that you’re not just talking about a more effective way of organizing parents to achieve some particular policy objective. You’re really talking about a kind of constitutional change. What I mean by that is that when the Founding Fathers sat down to write the Constitution, they didn’t have a particular policy goal in mind when they established, say, an independent judiciary. They were smart guys – they may have felt that if you sat them in the legislature they would have come to the same conclusions without the help of another brach of government. But their real goal was to establish not just some specific policy, but a process for articulating the body of policy over time and making it more legitimate and just. It’s neat to think that parents could provide that difference for education. It’s interesting that parents would have to take some responsibility when things go wrong, though they could also take credit when they go right.

BA: Parents demand that the system be accountable for the performance of their kids, but parents obviously have skin in the game as well. All adults, from principals to teachers to administrators to elected officials to parents – everybody now needs to be accountable for student performance.

You’re also right that we are not advocating for a particular policy change. We don’t just think of parent trigger as a new law – we think of it as a new paradigm for education reform. It gets us out of this series of false choices.

When you look at the American classroom today, it looks strikingly similar to what classrooms looked like 100 years ago. There have obviously been a lot of changes in our society in that time, but the classroom has hardly changed at all. Our perspective is that we are reinventing and redefining what public education means for the 21st century.

ABN: It seems to me that if every school in the country were governed in the way you describe, with parents having an active political role, it would eliminate one of the main dichotomies that structures the debate over public education – namely, the question of whether schools or parents are responsible for student performance. It would no longer be possible for conservatives to say, “Well, the parents of these kids really need to step up.” I imagine the liberal equivalent of that opinion would look really different too.

BA: The state and the family are both responsible for the success of children. And in this context, that accountability is not theoretical. Desert Trails may succeed or fail, but it will be quite clear who is responsible for the results, and there will be consequences for failure. Everyone is on the line, and that’s the way it should be.

ABN: So to get to the degree of organization that Desert Trails and other schools have reached, you needed to change certain starting conditions. Most obviously, you needed to get the parent trigger law passed. What are some other starting conditions that you think would need to be altered in order to build a stronger parents’ movement for education reform?

BA: First of all, I don’t think that parent trigger is the only way to organize parents – it’s just the best way we’ve come up with. There are other models and other ways, but it’s important to keep in mind that for parents to have power, they have to have real power. I think parents have been frustrated for some time by being on the bake sale committee or on a school committee that may manage $50,000 but have no actual say over the governance of the school. There are certainly other ways for parents to have power. But they have to make sure it’s real power, and they have to be prepared for significant blowback from the defenders of the status quo.

ABN: I’m wondering about how your model might work in other contexts. You’re working in places where there isn’t a lot of existing infrastructure, so almost any kind of community organizing is a good in itself. And it’s more likely than not that any type of reform will help a school that has simply been neglected before. But let’s say you’re trying your model in contexts where parents are already highly organized toward various ends. Do you think you need to account for the risk that parents would organize to achieve some goal that would actually be harmful for children?

BA: I have a couple of thoughts on that. First, I think it’s very important to recognize that it’s much harder than people realize to organize fifty percent of the parents of a school. Not only are you trying to organize in economically devastated communities and in the face of political opposition, but there’s the fact that the district has “the list” of contacts. I come from a background of political organizing, and I can tell you that if one side has “the list” and the other side doesn’t, I can tell you ninety-nine times out of 100 which side will win. So the first answer to your question is that it’s very hard to get to fifty percent, and that process filters out a lot of the gadflies who aren’t all about kids. You have to appeal to a very wide swath of your community.

Secondly, in California’s law, it officially stipulates that parents can only organize around issues of academic performance or public safety. Third, the only schools that are eligible in the first place are schools where there is systemic failure, schools that have been failing for four or more years (though some of these schools have actually been failing for decades). So there are very strong checks and balances on this process that are rooted in the kind of organizing required and in the law itself. They guard against the kinds of outcomes that you’re talking about.

At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that this is not a perfect law. The results of the work we’re doing shouldn’t be judged against some utopian ideal. They should be judged against the status quo.

ABN: Sure, it makes sense to acknowledge that there’s risk of mismanagement in any model. Many cities have switched from a school board model to a mayoral control model. Well, there’s always the chance that you could have an incompetent or ideologically-driven or racist mayor, just as you could have groups of parents with those characteristics. Evil exists in any system – you’re just arguing that this system has a greater ability to contain it.

BA: Yeah, I’d say that’s right.

ABN: It seems to me that you’ve laid out a pretty solid model for how to improve the way parents organize for their own kids and their own schools – in fact, your theory of change depends on that connection. But let’s say we’re trying to organize a movement of parents who are willing to stand up for strong schools not just for their own kids, but for all kids. How do you move from the kind of movement you describe to a more national kind of awareness? Or is that even desirable?

BA: It’s a great question. If you really break down what the parent trigger movement is really all about, it’s asking parents to do something that is really quite selfish, which is to advocate for a better future for their own child. But if you add up the self-interested acts of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of parents standing up for their own children, all those individual acts would add up to an altruistic, collective good, because we would have a kids-first agenda in public schools: more children would graduate, more children would go to college, more children would have the opportunity to fill their potential.

So on a high, theoretical level, I think it’s true that your average parent is somewhat limited in their perspective. The average parent is not going to march to Sacramento every day. But they will stand up for their own kid. Part of what this movement is about is incentivizing parents to do that, but it also incentivizes them to stand together. They need to talk to each other and listen to each other in order to come to consensus.

When you think about people who support education reform, as well as people who oppose reform, the main way they have dealt with parents in a political context is to wait for a big meeting or conference, then hand out a bunch of T-shirts, tell everybody to get on a bus, then cheer when they say to cheer. That is obviously not empowering.

The theory of change around parent trigger is to meet parents where they’re at. All they know is that they want a better school for their kids. We have fourteen parent union groups organizing in and around Los Angeles. They are organizing around the parochial interests of their kids and their schools. That’s fine. Parent trigger gives them a tremendous amount of power in that context. But as you know, there are also larger systemic issues that need to be addressed. There are issues with districts, unions, state laws, federal laws.

So when parents begin to run up against common obstacles, we link them up. In some cases, we’ve been able to organize parents to drive all night overnight to make committee meetings happening in the morning in Sacramento. They can testify on behalf of their kids in ways that are eloquent and consistent because the parents really understand how it impacts them. But you’ve got to meet parents where they’re at, and as they begin to organize, they come to realize that they have a lot more in common with parents at other schools than they may have realized. Even parents who might look different, live in different neighborhoods, or speak different languages have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the defenders of the status quo.

ABN: This all makes sense to me, but I’m still not quite content with the model. Let me share with you the example that inspires my concern. I grew up in Johnson County, Kansas, which is the wealthiest part of the state and is generally considered to have the best school districts. The parents in those districts were usually happy to support additional bond measures and such for their schools. But there is constant wrangling over the issue of “equity” – the balance of local versus state funding of the schools and how equally funding is distributed across districts. Many parents of the area where I grew up are fairly organized in opposition to the current funding scheme because they argue that it limits their ability to fund their own schools.

Now my uninformed opinion is that it would be better for society if they had a movement to increase funding for all schools in the state, since kids from the other counties deserve an education  just as much as the kids who grew up in mine. But the point is that I don’t think you would get there via a model where parents were organized in support of their own kids’ schools. They would have to have a change of heart where they felt that education for all children (or at least all kids in Kansas) was as important as their own kids’ education. Don’t you think that at some point along the way there has to be a change in consciousness and not just improved organizing?

BA: Yes. Of course. There is no doubt that the parent trigger model is not going to solve every societal problem. And the problem you’re raising is a serious one.

I live in a nice neighborhood in west LA. The school I’m going to send my oldest daughter to is a district school that is largely upper middle-class. I would be surprised if most parents at that school felt that they had much in common, politically or otherwise, with the parents in Compton. But at the end of the day, I think we’re going to be able to make the case that they do. I think we can surprise a lot of these parents.

When it comes to funding, I may be an anomaly, but I would actually argue that my daughter needs less funding than someone’s daughter in Compton. But my daughters also have a whole lot in common with kids in Compton when it comes to building a kids-first agenda. We want there to be accountability for what happens in the classroom. We want money to be spent in the classroom and not on bureaucracy. We want every single decision to be filtered through the lens of how it would affect the decision-maker’s own kid.

We’re not going to be able to solve every problem neatly. But the first step toward solving them is developing connections between parents that are real, and are rooted in a common understanding of what we want for our kids. We certainly can do that.

ABN: So I’d like to know what you make of another perspective. My wife taught for three years in a Baltimore City public school that had its share of challenges. I think that if you talked to some of the most committed teachers there, they would say that they view their work as making up for a lack of parenting or family structure in kids’ lives. I’m sure that’s true for many of the worst schools in the country – they exist in places where for many people the family has broken down. Now I understand the community-building aspect of parent trigger that you described above. But what would you say to someone who argues, look, if we’re trying to help the most vulnerable children in society, working with their parents is not a meaningful option?

BA: There certainly are parents who are just not good parents. That’s not okay.

Our view is that right now nobody is accountable for student performance. Schools fail for decades and no one is held accountable. We’re saying the opposite. We’re saying everyone should be accountable – the principal, the administrators, the teachers, the district leadership, and the parents. And parents have a long way to go. They have a long way to go in terms of education and organizing. Also – and I say this as the parent of two young daughters – the most important thing that parents need to learn to do is to be good parents. They need to be loving and supportive. Without that, kids are going to have a difficult time.

ABN: So you’ve been working on this problem for a long time. We’re going to bring together a group and try to generate some new thinking on it in about three hours. Y’know, modest goal. When you look back on your time working on this issue, what the biggest fallacies you see? What are some of the things you wish you had known when you got started that you think our group should know too? What are some of the pat conclusions you hope we avoid as we try to come up with something new and different?

BA: First of all, parent trigger is about as new and different as you can get in this context. Several states are considering parent trigger laws now. I would say that you don’t necessarily need to re-invent the wheel, because the wheel is in the process of being invented.

I’ve worked on the “inside” in all sorts of different ways. I’ve been a deputy mayor, I’ve worked in the White House, I’ve approached this from a bunch of different entry points. And I think the system is so calcified, so resistant to change, that any theory of change that relies upon implementing a new policy or law are not likely to have a transformative impact. That’s sort of a crazy statement, because the way we’re taught about democracy in school is that you work to pass a law and then that changes things. But education is a system that is really resistant to change. So I would say that if you come up with an idea that relies upon the system adopting a new policy or implementing a policy the way it is intended, you should think twice about it. Parent trigger isn’t just a new policy – it was designed to shift the playing ground on which policy is made and implemented.

ABN: Is there anything else that you’d be really disappointed to hear that we’ve come up with?

BA: There are some really obvious wish-lists of the education reform community, like getting rid of “last in, first out” hiring policies, removing some of the barriers to expanding high-quality charter schools -  I would actually throw into that  making it easier to get rid of bad charter schools, which is also a part of the problem. I would say expanding or removing tenure unless you can show tenure is actually benefiting kids. Creating policies that allow principals and administrators based at least in part on student performance. These are all already part of the reform community’s roadmap, which the possible exception of shutting down bad charters.

All these ideas are dependent on the idea of working within the existing system. But the theory of change should not be to adopt a new policy. It should be to transfer power.