After months of pre-release publicity, including a televised, ironically titled “Teachers Rock” concert in Los Angeles, the pro-parent trigger movie “Won’t Back Down,” starring Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Holly Hunter, opens tonight. The film has received predominately poor reviews, with one critic saying, “‘Won’t Back Down’ is to school reform what ‘Reefer Madness’ is to drug policy.”

The film, produced by the same people who backed “Waiting for Superman,” tells the story of a mother and a teacher who join forces over union objections and use a parent trigger law to take control of a failing school.

“Won’t Back Down” is an offensive, lame, union-bashing drama, which somehow stars Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal”—Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

Although the film claims to be “inspired by actual events,” CTA and especially our members in parent trigger targets Compton and Adelanto know that this is a work of pure fiction. It does not show the chaos, division, and educational disruption created by the parent trigger law when outsiders with a national political agenda invade a community and begin their one-sided signature-gathering campaign.

“Grossly oversimplifying the issue at hand, writer-director Daniel Barnz’s disingenuous pot-stirrer plays to audiences’ emotions rather than their intelligence.”—Peter Debruge, Variety

To further boost the film’s visibility, Michelle Rhee’s Students First and the Chamber of Commerce have announced a “Breaking the Monopoly of Mediocrity” tour, featuring the film and panel discussions.

WHERE WE STAND

Fictionalized accounts of public schools that pit parents against school employees may make an interesting story line and generate dollars at the box office, but the dramatic story lines don’t reflect the on-the-ground reality. In school districts throughout California, educators and parents are working together closely to improve public education and find sustainable solutions that put children at the center of reform. In Compton and Adelanto, the first two places in the country where the trigger has been attempted, our local associations have been deeply involved, working with parents on reform efforts district-wide and at the targeted schools.

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The Adelanto Elementary School District Board of Trustees boldly stood up for students and the rights of all parents in the school community by rejecting an attempt led mainly by a group of outside organizers to shut down an elementary school, replace the entire staff, and create a privately managed charter school.

The trustees recognized that Parent Revolution organizers at Desert Trails Elementary School had failed to meet the simple majority threshold required by the state’s so-called “parent trigger” law because many parents who initially signed the petition now wanted their names removed amid allegations of misrepresentation and harassment by some signature gatherers.

The Adelanto School Board meeting drew some heavy-hitter outsiders to the district, including parent trigger author and former state senator Gloria Romero. Acknowledging she had never been to Adelanto before, she urged the board to send a national message and approve the trigger petition. One board member respectfully reminded her that their role was not to send political messages, but to follow the law and do what is best for Adelanto students. The final vote was 5-0 against the petition.

The California Teachers Association opposed the parent trigger law when it was proposed for a number of reasons, none of which included any desire to exclude meaningful parent participation in struggling schools. On the contrary, educators welcome parent involvement and we know that students perform best when parents take an active role in their progress and in their school. Our concerns about the trigger law were borne out of the lack of concrete regulations and procedures, which has played out in both failed attempts in Adelanto and Compton, where irregularities on the petitions and public charges and counter-charges of bad behavior were rampant.

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Parent Revolution needs to stop lying about the California Teachers Association. Over the past several days that organization has, predictably, sent out attacks blaming CTA for their failure to reach the parent majority signature threshold needed to invoke California’s new parent trigger law at Desert Trails Elementary, a struggling school in the Southern California desert community of Adelanto. Because what’s been happening in Adelanto has been a local, parent-driven effort, CTA has made every effort to take the high road, to ignore Parent Revolution’s ridiculous attacks on us, and to steer media focus back to Adelanto, the chaotic parent trigger law, and to the concerned parents and educators grappling with important issues there. But as Parent Revolution continues to lie and overstate our role, and to use press releases to forward false allegations, we’d like to set the record straight.

CTA’s role in Adelanto

Here are the facts: Our local affiliate, the Adelanto District Teachers Association (ADTA), has one CTA staff person who lives in the high desert community, and who works with ADTA and with many other CTA affiliate chapters in the area on a myriad of issues like contract negotiations, professional development, grievance processing, building strong community relations, and general problem solving. After the parent trigger was pulled at Desert Trails, school parents who opposed the petition (some of whom had not even been approached to sign or given an opportunity to voice their opinion), asked to meet with ADTA to discuss ways to redress the situation, if possible. Having been more or less blindsided and not included in the trigger effort discussions, and hearing different things from different parents about what the petition actually meant, they sought discussion with ADTA in development of a parent-led effort to have conversations and clarify what petition signers had been told, to provide forums for open discussion, and to allow people to state for the record their experience if in fact petitioners had not followed the process correctly.

The CTA local staff person, who, again, is not assigned full time to Adelanto, invited colleagues with additional expertise in charter school law and bilingual community outreach to provide Spanish language translation help and  to provide explanations of the parent trigger and charter school laws. Those two CTA staff members were in Adelanto on a very intermittent basis. Other local high desert teachers who live near Desert Trails were invited in to assist parents. Area teachers who could provide insight into local reform efforts that were improving achievement at schools in surrounding districts also offered assistance. All of this was a back seat to and in support of the local, parent-led effort to get the truth out.

Lies, lies, and darned lies

Yet Parent Revolution continues to send out breathless press releases and fabricate or hallucinate “cadres of CTA operatives flown in from Sacramento,” when there is absolutely no truth to this. Their Executive Director, Mr. Ben Austin, is simply making things up.  And while making these utterly false (and mostly irrelevant) charges, Mr. Austin never mentions the fact that Parent Revolution has had a paid, full-time organizer and additional help in Adelanto, and that they paid to rent a house up there as a headquarters (where it’s reported they held a hastily arranged “parent movie night” to conflict with a scheduled open parent forum organized by anti-trigger parents).

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