The New York Times has just published an article about a new plan by the Chicago School District for parent involvement/engagement.

Check out School Plan to Engage Parents Arouses Skepticism.

I’ve posted previously about the absolutely awful job the New York City schools seem to do related to parent involvement/engagement (Does The New York City Dept. Of Ed Have Any Clue What They’re Doing In Parent Engagement?).

Well, this week the new NYC Schools Chancellor fired the head of parent engagement for the city’s schools and hired a new person.

Here are some additional perspectives on the change.

A group of twenty-five New York City parents filed suit today to stop the District from forcing schools to share facilities with charters. It’s all pretty interesting, and you can read about it in The New York Times and at the NYC Public School Parents blog.

Parent trigger rules are, with a nod to Colbert, ‘reforminess’ is a good take on the recently-approved California regulations for the Parent Trigger.

It’s written by Gary Ravani, vice president of the California Federation of Teachers.

School officials search for funding for parental involvement program is the headline in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The budget for an ambitious and apparently successful parent involvement program is going from $2 million to $100,000 or so and from 35 schools down to…two.

Two months after completely bungling elections for Parent Councils (and that election was a “do-over” because they had completely bungled it the first time), they have announced spending $2 million dollars for a survey to parents.

I have voiced my concerns about the use of surveys in previous posts. I am amazed, though, the the survey is not even to ask parents about what they think should be done in schools. It’s about “what parents want to know and how they want to receive information.”

The comments following the newspaper article very articulately express a clear critique of the plan. Here’s one:

In other words, there’s no money for classroom supplies and we’re going to lose several thousand teachers through attrition. Yet money is found for pet projects like this one. If the DOE wants to know what parents are thinking, ask the schools and staff (e.g. parent coordinators) who are on the front lines every day dealing with them. That wouldn’t cost a dime. Secondly, parents and the communities they come from know that their voices are not heard. At the PEP meetings to close schools, parents were ignored by the thousands. The community school boards have been stripped of all power. The real stakeholders are the private corporations who “support” the schools and eat up money with no-bid contracts.

What are they thinking in the DOE offices?

Calif board OKs rules giving parents school power is the headline of an ABC News article describing the California State Board of Education’s approval of regulations to govern use of the parent trigger law.

As I’ve written many times before, it’s a bad law that should have never been passed. Given that it is the law, however, it’s important that it have much clearer regulations than it had under the temporary rules.

And, at this point, it doesn’t matter a great deal since it’s safe to say the parent trigger law appears to be disappearing on its own….

Legislative Momentum Stalls for ‘Parent Trigger’ Proposals is the headline in an article today at Education Week.

Here’s an excerpt:

The momentum behind “parent-trigger” proposals, one of the hottest ideas for overhauling struggling schools, has slowed in statehouses amid political opposition and vexing questions about how those bold plans should be implemented at the local level.

Numerous states this year have introduced parent-trigger proposals, which would allow parents the opportunity to restructure or close academically struggling traditional public schools or convert them to charters.

Most of those proposals, which have drawn varying levels of bipartisan support, have stalled or died, while others have been scaled back significantly.

Some of my education predictions for 2011 might not come to pass, but it certainly looks like I’m going to be right on for at least one of them:

Efforts to implement the so-called “parent-trigger” will fail miserably, and the idea will fade from memory…

Gloria Romero, the former California State Senator who attacked the PTA and compared schools to batterers, was warned by the state ethics agency for violating lobbying restrictions in her advocacy for the parent trigger.

You can read about it in the Los Angeles Times: Former state Sen. Gloria Romero warned about lobbying.

A very major effort is getting underway in Birmingham, Alabama, to create a series of “Parent Universities” throughout the school district.

I’ve written quite a bit about “Parent Universities” in the past.

Elisa Gonzalez, our school’s Parent Engagement Coordinator, has done an extraordinary job working with parents to create an extremely popular Parent University — on that focuses on what parents say they want to do and learn, and one that does not have a pre-packaged curriculum. In addition, parent leaders and Elisa work with the University of California-Davis to identify learning resources.

Many classes done in the name of “parent university” around the country, however, do not seem to share that same emphasis on parent leadership.

I hope that’s not the case in Birmingham…