The New Education Lobbyists

“What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must be what the community wants for all of its children.”

--John Dewey, educator and political activist

Bertha Ruvalcaba sat across from the state senator and went down her list.

“We need after-school programs with academics and art and other things,” said the 35-year-old mother of three. “We need laptop computers that kids can take home.”

It was not Ruvalcaba’s first meeting with politicians on their turf. She was not afraid; with her that day were hundreds of other parents from one of the nation’s most successful community organizing campaigns, the Industrial Areas Foundation Network of Texas.

When they all left Austin last February, they took with them a guarantee for a $14-million check--the largest ever for the school grant program that parents help run.

Foundation organizer Christine Stephens, a nun who began working with the group 22 years ago, said that even she has been amazed by the parents’ power. Politicians, she said, laughing, “think they have to listen to us.”

But that is seldom the case across the nation.

In recent years, much political lip service has been given to increasing parent involvement at the school and school board levels--and there are plenty of examples of where that has happened--but the effort rarely extends to state legislatures.

“The closest we come to parent representation is legislators with school-age children,” said Assemblyman Bill Leonard (R-San Bernardino).

Occasionally there are glimmers of recognition that not including parents is a serious oversight, resulting in laws that do not work as intended.

What parent would have taken the memorization out of math, instituted a test not aligned to what students were being taught, or ended automatic promotion to the next grade without providing catch-up classes for those who failed?

Many ask: Has Sacramento forgotten who really is the customer?

Gov. Gray Davis is so concerned about the lack of parental participation in Sacramento that he told The Times he is considering interactive Internet sites with them in mind.

“I would like to see real parents up here testifying on legislation, but the realities that prevent them from participating with their [children’s] teachers keep them from coming up here. They have to go to work, cook meals and raise their kids,” he said. And besides, he added, “Sacramento is like an armed camp, ringed with people that know how to work the system. The average taxpaying citizen has very little chance up here.”

During public hearings for the governor’s nine-week special session on education last year, not a single parent testified--not when their children were consigned to a do-or-die graduation test, not when decisions about what counts most in judging schools were made, not even when parents nearly got cut out of the improvement teams at failing schools.

When state Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine) shoe-horned a larger role for parents into a bill requiring review of troubled schools’ performance, he said: “Of all the folks that have an interest . . . apart from the kids themselves, there are no greater stakeholders than the parents. The parent ought not to be the last to have their opinion considered, but . . . among the first.”

The shift of power from local districts to Sacramento caused by Proposition 13 made it more important--and harder--for parents to get involved in state-level policy discussions that directly affect their children. And, although a parent in Downey might have quite different opinions from one in Santa Monica, they share an important perspective: a front-row seat on how changes in the education system really affect children.

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Interest groups such as teachers unions do carry some parent concerns to Sacramento, but only when the concerns coincide with their own. Without a persistent wake-up call from parents themselves, some say, the causes of school decline are easier to overlook.

“The best way to set up a system is where the two people who know the kids’ names--the parent and teacher--are in charge of setting policy,” said state Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside). “Right now, the system is organized so teachers care about what the principal says, principals care about what the superintendent says, the superintendent cares about what the school board says and the school board cares about what the Legislature says.”

In a 1997 Times education survey, parents statewide proved to be independent thinkers, siding with teachers on some issues and not on others.

* Parents were somewhat more likely than other adults to say schools are improving, but only about half as likely as teachers.

* They were more likely than either teachers or the general public to say that classes were too large and to favor publicly funded vouchers for private school.

* They were more likely than the public to bemoan the proliferation of uncredentialed teachers in the classroom.

California has taken baby steps toward involving parents in state decision-making, and some believe that it’s only a matter of time before things change dramatically. The Parent Teacher Student Assn. opened a lobbying office in the capital last year, although its lobbyists are all volunteers. And, on another front, parents empowered at the school level are starting to find their way to Sacramento when legislation that affects them arises.

Yet when parents make it to the Capitol, their reception is less than warm. They take time off work only to find hearings canceled without warning, public testimony unwanted because a deal has already been cut privately and politicians rushed and even rude.

Mari Rodin drove three hours to speak against a bill that would have doomed the new Ukiah charter school she was helping start for her son and 59 other children last fall. Nervous, she wrote and rewrote her speech. She would have missed her cue had a charter school lobbyist not motioned her forward.

As she began speaking, she noticed that two committee members she had hoped to sway were not in the room. Others engaged in side conversations. “I only had half of them listening to me, and I was really frustrated,” she said.

The bill that Rodin opposed did not pass, so her initial frustration did not dampen her enthusiasm for taking part in politics.

Polling is often cited as one way parents’ perspectives consistently break through to the Capitol. The governor, legislators and even the wealthier special interests such as the California Teachers Assn. routinely use polls to test their proposals and troll for popular ideas.

But new research by the Children’s Partnership, a national nonprofit group created to inform the public about children’s needs, shows that in long-term polls parents are rarely quizzed separately from other adults, and their perspectives about education are stirred into the larger vat of responses from people who may be less involved with schools.

That’s an even bigger obstacle in California’s urban areas, where high proportions of parents of school-age children are not registered to vote and therefore are less likely to be polled.

Likewise, relying on voters to speak with their ballots when they are unhappy with their children’s education ignores a troubling fact: Parents whose children attend the worst inner-city schools are among the least likely to vote.

Engaging parents of all types in what can often be a complex and hostile political process is not easy.

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Parents are busy. When a group of Latino parents from the Bay Area was bused to Sacramento to speak against the confirmation of controversial Orange County lawmaker Marian Bergeson to the State Board of Education last fall, several began their testimony by mentioning how hard it was to leave home at 5 a.m. with sleepy toddlers in tow.

If parents find time to get involved in education, it’s generally closer to home--first in the classrooms, then in school governance and sometimes in school board meetings.

Moreover, parents find that much of the school reform debate leaves them cold. John McDonald, a public relations consultant with years of experience representing Los Angeles education reform groups, counts himself among the confused.

“There’s no connection between Sacramento and reality,” he said. “As a parent, even one who watches this stuff, it’s hard to know what’s going on.”

Last January, a survey done by a consulting firm in conjunction with the Pew Charitable Trust exposed a gap between what parents want and what they get, indicating how policy might shift if parents played a larger role.

A majority of parents support replacing staff at failing schools, the survey found--an extreme measure not used in California and legal in only 16 states. Parents want to receive campus report cards, already required in California, but they want them to include more information on teachers’ qualifications and less on student demographics, feeling that the latter are too often used as an excuse for lower test scores.

The study also showed that parents’ attitudes tended to be more extreme than those of taxpayers in general. In addition to deep worries about large classes, parents were markedly more concerned about graduation rates and the number of students per computer.

Parents also wanted to see their child’s school compared with other schools without weighting for size, location or poverty. As one Texas father told the researchers, once his son graduates from school, “is he going to be competing against kids who went to similar-sized schools? No, he’s going to be competing against everyone in the state or nation.”

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Measuring Students’ Progress

Polls show that parents’ priorities sometimes differ from taxpayers and educators. Here are some examples.

Which do you think is more important: knowing how a child is doing against a set standard or knowing how a child is doing relative to other children?

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Asked to rank items that should be used to hold schools accountable, parents felt test scores were less important than some other measures, including safety. The survey asked about items that typically appear on school report cards and asked parents, taxpayers and educators to rate them on a scale of 0 to 10.

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CATEGORY PARENTS TAXPAYERS EDUCATORS School safety 9.6 9.4 9.3 Teacher qualifications 9.3 9.2 8.3 Class size 8.9 7.9 8.8 Graduation rates 8.7 8.2 8.3 Dropout rates 8.3 8.1 7.4 Statewide test scores 8.2 8.0 7.1 SAT/ACT scores 8.1 7.9 6.9 % of students promoted to next grade 8.0 8.1 7.0 Course offerings 7.8 7.9 7.3 Attendance rates 7.8 8.0 7.6 Per-pupil spending 7.6 7.6 8.0 Teacher salaries 7.3 7.8 7.6 Hours of homework per week 7.2 7.3 6.3 % of students to 4-year colleges 7.0 6.9 6.8 % of students with A or B average 7.0 6.5 5.8 Students per computer 6.9 6.4 6.1 Demographics of students 4.5 4.6 5.0

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Another proposal would overhaul persistently failing schools by replacing the teachers and principals with new staff and keeping them under strict observation. Is this a good idea?

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Source: Reporting Results, survey by A-Plus Communications and Education Week published in January 1999