The parent-trigger law gives parents the right to force positive change in their children’s education. Retired California legislator Gloria Romero explains why she wrote the nation’s first parent-trigger law.
In the Education Week commentary piece, Romero explains:
Undoubtedly, if sweetheart contracts didn't enable effective teachers to bypass struggling neighborhood schools, and if bureaucrats actually used the federal laws at their disposal to transform such schools, I never would have had to write the parent-trigger law. But that was not the case. Lists of failing schools, representing hundreds of thousands of kids in California, were simply released and promptly ignored. Few people even knew about the lists, and those who did weren't outraged.
So I looked back to the foundations of our democracy and gave parents the right to take on their own government when it refused to act on behalf of their children. Thus, parent trigger was born.
