Much of the progressive community, led by transformative leaders like President Obama, has come around recently to the shortcomings of this analysis. The progressive education reform movement has concluded that our American system of public education – with huge centralized bureaucracies micromanaging our schools, no meaningful adult accountability for student performance, and little/no parental choice for working and middle class families – is fundamentally broken. President Obama and others have taken the lead, through innovative programs such as Race to the Top, in forcing states and school districts to make the politically difficult choices necessary to transform this system into something that will work for the 21st century, and will finally fulfill America’s promise of a great public education and real social mobility for all. Think tanks like Brookings have outlined how parental choice can work in a progressive context, and in a way that works for all students. And high-quality charter schools have proven that there are innovative school models that can effectively educate all students today, and send whole communities of children to college instead of prison.

However, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that our schools in California ARE still badly underfunded, and DO need additional resources if they are ever to fulfill their potential and promise. And the current cycle of continuous budget cuts, both in K-12 and in higher ed, are dragging an already broken system even further towards the bottom, destroying the futures of countless young lives. Obviously these are difficult times across the board, but we at Parent Revolution stand with those who took to the streets last week and demanded no further cuts to our system of public education, be it K-12, community college, or the UC/CSU systems.

Again, there are structural changes that could help us better deal with the challenges we face. Layoffs based purely on seniority are decimating low-income schools throughout Los Angeles, and must be stopped.  It is critical that we slim down LAUSD’s huge bureaucracy and drive more dollars to schools and classrooms where they belong. And future funding streams, such as LAUSD's proposed parcel tax, should help all public school students, and shouldn't unfairly penalize students and teachers in public charter schools.  But we also must not forget the basic needs of our schools to have The promise of a great public education for all is the basis of the California and American dreams, and there is simply no way we can attain it without both structural reforms and additional investment of resources. All solutions must be on the table, and common sense ideas – like charging an oil severance fee to big oil companies to help preserve public education – must be adopted. The cuts have to stop.

The quality of teaching matters … a lot. And it’s differential.

Figuring out exactly how to find, train, and retain the best teachers possible is a critical and incredibly complex task. However, if we can simply agree on the above statement, I think people on all sides can (and must) ultimately come together and figure out the details. There are already several reform union contracts (Camino Nuevo and Green Dot are two great examples) that are helping to drive parts of this conversation forward, as well as positive movement in Philadelphia that we noted a few days ago.  However, if we all can’t agree on that as a starting point – that teaching quality matters and its differential – then it seems to me that we have quite a bigger hill to climb.

Very excited to read the whole piece, and will definitely post my favorite excerpts in the next day or two.

The teachers have been suspended as the L.A. Unified School district investigates. According to officials, children at Wadsworth Avenue Elementary School were carrying pictures of [Simponson, Rodman, and RuPaul] at a parade Friday on the school playground.

Other students were carrying pictures of President Obama and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

We stood yesterday with an array of civil rights leaders, including the local NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Action Network, and others, in calling for those teachers to be held accountable for their offensive and derogatory actions. Teaching our students to respect and be proud of their own culture and that of others is a critical part of building a system of public education that is about what is best for children.

Also: see below for local tv news coverage of the incident, including Eric Lee of SCLC and Leon Jenkins from the NAACP explaining their outrage.

Even in a school system known for its academic troubles, the numbers at Vaux High School are jaw-dropping: More than 90 percent of 11th-graders tested last year could not read or do math at grade level.

But next fall, at least half the teachers at Vaux and 13 more of Philadelphia's worst schools could be gone. And the school day, school week and school year could be longer.

While federal law has long allowed the overhaul of chronically failing schools, such extreme makeovers are likely to become more common because of more money from Washington, a growing consensus on education reform, and newfound willingness on the part of teacher unions to collaborate, experts say.

…

Philadelphia's turnaround effort, dubbed Renaissance Schools, is backed by a union contract approved last month that requires teachers at failing schools to reapply for their jobs; eliminates their seniority rights when it comes to rehiring them; and extends the school day by up to an hour, with the possibility of class up to two Saturdays a month and 22 days in July.

In exchange, all district teachers get raises, possible performance bonuses and the chance for a voice in the restructuring — or the choice of transferring to another school.

This is a picture perfect example of how a kids-first agenda can (and ultimately must) co-exist with a pro-labor one. So much of the research on school turnarounds has demonstrated the importance of things like school autonomy in staffing decisions and extended school days for underserved students, and the local teachers union stepped up and is helping the District to provide these crucial elements of success. And in exchange, teachers get paid more and have an opportunity to meaningfully participate in the process. Everybody wins!

Hopefully models like this can be spread to other districts, like LA Unified, that are in desperate need of successful turnarounds for dozens (if not hundreds) of our underperforming schools.

(For more research and updates on school turnarounds, I would highly recommend the Meeting the Turnaround Challenge blog, hosted by Mass Insight.  It's where I originally found this article, and is a real wealth of information about all this).

The Los Angeles Unified school board looked transformation in the eye -- and blinked. By overriding several recommendations of its top experts and cutting three of the region's most respected charter organizations out of the picture, the board sadly demonstrated once again that it is devoted more to the politics of running schools than to the education of students. (...)

What was supposed to be one of the most important factors in the decisions -- whether the applicants could demonstrate a record of educational success -- ended up not being a factor at all. The board gave Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa a third school he sought against the recommendation of staff, who had proposed giving just two to his Partnership for Los Angeles Schools. The partnership has made a sincere, concerted effort to improve the schools it already runs, but its record is mixed. Meanwhile, charter groups such as Green Dot Public Schools, Inner City Education Foundation and the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, known as committed school operators with excellent records, were given none. In all, charter groups ended up with only four of the 30 schools.

We stand by our original support for the idea of creating a competitive mix of innovative educational models in the school district -- and we applaud the teacher groups that devised their own, strong plans for reform. But we're also forced to stand by our original suspicion that the board would find many ways to make a mess of it.

Matt Yglesias had a smart post yesterday titled “LA Teachers Union gets its shot,” with essentially the same take-away that Ben had yesterday.

Along those lines, EGP writes about the high expectations for the new Esteban Torres pilot schools in East LA.

La Opinion  also weighed in largely agreeing with our take:

This is an opportunity for the UTLA to show whether it is part of school reform to improve learning, or whether it is one of the problems when the union is more interested in defending inept educators at student and taxpayer expense. We hope learning wins out.

The LAUSD needs deep reform because the state of student learning is disastrous. At first glance, today’s teachers and administrators are not a model for transformation, but the time has come for them to prove otherwise.

Last but not least, I wanted to share a personal anecdote that strikes me as an apt summary ofall this.  I sat down with the lead teacher on one of the teacher led proposals a few weeks ago (before any decisions had been made) to chat about their plan.  I came away incredibly impressed with the energy, passion, and thoughtfulness that had been poured into their plan, but also expressed some skepticism that they’d be able to pull it off.  So I asked, “You have gone and made all these promises to these parents, and said that this plan will finally give you the ability to deliver – what if it doesn’t work?  What if student achievement doesn’t drastically improve?”

He looked at me, smiled, and simply said “Well, they just passed that Parent Trigger thing, didn’t they?”

I think that pretty well encapsulates this process.  We truly wish all the winners from Tuesday the absolute best of luck, because the children of Los Angeles desperately need them to succeed.  If they don’t, and they fall short of the promises they have made, parents will hold them accountable.  Either way, change is coming to LA Unified, and not a moment too soon.

EVERY great movement has its ups and downs, experiences good days and bad, and takes steps forward and back. And on Tuesday, the reform effort at the Los Angeles Unified School District took a big backward step.

...

Tuesday's farce of a vote is no surprise in the wake of a similarly farcical advisory vote the district presided over a few weeks ago. School officials said they wanted the input of all "stakeholders" before deciding to turn out the schools to charter.  But ballot boxes were stuffed by school employees... and there were no restrictions on how often a person could vote or at how many schools. Naturally, the advisory vote advised the school district to keep the status quo...

...

In any case, this is just one step backward for education in Los Angeles. It hardly means the journey is over.

Indeed, it has only just begun, whether the Board of Education likes it or not. This was only the first handover of schools; there will no doubt be more thanks to "parent trigger" legislation that allows parents to collectively force inclusion into the School Choice program.

One small bump in the road isn't likely to change the desires of Angelenos to turn around the flailing educational system and make the city a model for education excellence.

We couldn't agree more.

“Teachers' leaders attacked plans set out by Gordon Brown today giving parents the power to demand regime change in struggling schools.

Parents will be given the power… to trigger a ballot of all parents in the school if they are unhappy with the standard of education their children are receiving.”

Even more about the proposal here. We knew that giving parents unprecedented power through the Parent Trigger would have national implications, but who would have thought the idea would go international! Seems like parents all around the world are coming together and demanding real power to fix their children’s schools.

In a remarkable show of political cowardice, several LAUSD school board members overrode Superintendent Cortines’ thoughtful recommendations and removed three of the highest quality charter schools in Los Angeles from having the opportunity to serve children and run any of the schools they had been recommended for. In an even more stunning display of the backroom deal making, the school board voted to remove high-quality charter operator ICEF from the new Barack Obama Middle School after exactly 0.0 seconds of discussion.

What started six months ago today as an historic break with the past, and a promise to finally put kids first -- was exposed Tuesday as the same old business-as-usual politics played by grown-ups, for grown-ups, about grown-ups.

While there was deep disappointment amongst the hundreds of parents who showed up to demand change -- including the dozens who literally camped out outside Beaudry the night before -- we believe there is a huge silver lining in Tuesday’s outcome: For the first time in the history of Los Angeles Unified, groups of teachers and the District are actually going to be accountable for student performance. While UTLA has traditionally opposed performance-based contracts, they just signed the biggest performance-based contract in the history of LAUSD, if not the nation. Groups of teachers and LAUSD administrators spent the past six months promising parents that they could produce better student achievement than high quality charter operators. And now, they will have to prove it.

While we are clearly skeptical of many of these plans, and cynical about the processes that gave them control, we truly wish them the best of luck. While we are encouraged by increased local control, we think that a system that still sucks 40% of dollars out of the classroom to a centralized bureaucracy and that contains little to no adult accountability is unlikely to succeed. We deeply hope, however, that our skepticism is proven wrong. It is critical that we all find ways to work together to develop in-district reform models that can out-perform high quality charter schools. The children and parents of Los Angeles desperately need more options that work, and if UTLA-run pilot schools or other in-district models prove to be successful, we will gladly embrace them and work for their expansion. but if they don’t, we hope that those who embraced these models will join us in the historic struggle for transformative change that serves every single child in Los Angeles.

* The Parent Trigger is unlikely to actually succeed at schools because of the difficulty of getting parents to agree, and because turning around failing schools is incredibly difficult

* Parents are probably too busy to be able to do this type of organizing

* Policymakers should just fix our schools and give parents more choice rather than putting the onus on them through the Parent Trigger

I'd like to briefly address the first two points. Anyone who is organizer, especially with parents, knows that they ARE extremely busy, and community organizing IS incredibly difficult. And anyone who has tried to turn around a failing school will surely tell you that it is an incredible challenge, and hardly guaranteed to succeed. But just a year into the Parent Revolution, we have seen parents rise up in a way that many pundits or columnists might think is impossible. We speak every day with parents who are desperate to transform their schools, to change what they know is a failed status quo for their children, and are willing to fight for it. They can be found amongst the 3000 parents who showed up to pass the Public School Choice Resolution; the thousands who faxed, called, emailed, and rallied to demand Sacramento pass the Parent Trigger; and the thousands who have signed onto the Parent Revolution, demanding change at their local schools.

(Click Read More to continue reading...)

· In the past decade, LAUSD has spent $3.5 million to fire just seven (!) of its 33,000 teachers

· LAUSD secretly paid 32 underperforming teachers an average of $50,000 to leave without a fight

· After spending years trying to oust just one teacher, many principals simply give up and don’t even try to dismiss underperforming teachers

Meanwhile, a Stanford professor recently published his research showing that removing just the lowest performing 6% of teachers could make a dramatic difference in student achievement. As he says, “The majority of teachers are effective. They are able to compete with teachers virtually anywhere else in the world. Then these effective teachers are lumped in with a small group of completely ineffective teachers, who are permitted to continue damaging students' educational experiences."

This is a dysfunctional system in which everyone – students, parents, principals, and hardworking teachers – all lose. We need a system of public education that is built around one thing and one thing only – what is best for children. Ultimately, parents and teachers must march hand and hand in the pursuit of that goal, mostly because we have far more in common than what divides us. It's good for children when teachers are paid more.  It's good for children when teachers are treated like professionals, given more local control, and not micromanaged by some far-away centralized bureaucrat.  It's even good for children when teachers are unionized.  But it's also good for children when all adults, including teachers and parents, are held accountable for student performance.  

At the end of the day, there is nothing more important to a child than the quality of their teacher, and it is impossible to have a great school without great teachers.  By blocking any sort of accountability, we are hurting not only children, but the vast majority of good and great teachers who must own a stake in the future of public education in Los Angeles and beyond.  By blocking kids-first, common sense reforms, we may also be forgoing one hundred million federal dollars From President Obama's Race-to-the-Top program at a time when the District is asking for a 100 million dollar parcel tax from struggling homeowners, and recently announced that they literally lost another 200 million dollars by paying people who didn't work there anymore.  Woops!

None of this makes any sense.  But if we just make it all about kids, things get a whole lot simpler.  And that's where the parent trigger comes in.

Click below and check it out!

With regard to Superintendent Cortines, we join others in strongly urging him to make his choices based on academic outcomes and proven track records, rather than politics or ideology. We reject out of hand the arguments being made by some that every school should be won by LAUSD plans, just as we would reject an argument that all schools be won by charters. (Click 'Read More' to continue reading)

More high-level classes in the poorest schools, tax incentives for dedicated teachers, and parent empowerment to overhaul ineffective staff were some proposals state Rep. Jason Bartlett, D-Bethel, and the General Assembly's Black and Puerto Rican Caucus announced Thursday in Hartford to improve education for children from poor and minority communities.

(snip)

Another proposal, called Parent Trigger, is modeled after California legislation. It would allow 51 percent of parents of children in a failing school to petition to overhaul the staff leadership, Bartlett said.

The introduction of a Parent Trigger created a huge splash throughout the state - you can read more about it here, here, and here. Leading op-ed writers in the state are already coming out in favor, declaring "Only parent power can fix schools."  Less than six weeks after California become the first state in America to give parents real power through the Parent Trigger, already other parents throughout our nation are rising up to take back power over their children's education. We truly are living in a revolutionary moment, and one by one, community by community, and state by state, parents will continue to take control and transform their schools and public education for the 21st century.

Update: Eduwonk calls it "Bastille Day."

"But with the mudslinging and questionable behavior by some district staff, the application process has occasionally deteriorated into an ugly disinformation campaign," declared the LA Times last week. Leading education blogger John Fensterwald called on Cortines to "take all the votes and shred them," due to the extremely discredited process.

It was both telling and sad to see some of the very same people who had been engaged in willfully misleading and lying to parents celebrate these votes as if they had won some grand victory. We happen to think that when parents are confused, mislead, and lied to, everybody loses. We think that when conversations about our schools start with anti-immigrant scare tactics like this, and end in outright lies like this, that we have taken several steps back, not forward. Over the last two months, these conversations about reform and choices in the media and with parents have had almost nothing to do with the only thing that should matter - student outcomes, and helping our children graduate from high school and college.

Even against these odds, it was clear that parents wanted change from the status quo. At the new Barack Obama Middle School in South LA, over half the parents (52%) voted for a non-District plan, with 42% specifically supporting ICEF Public Schools. Over 65% of parents at Central Region Elementary voted for Celerity Educational Group over the District plan, and at the new Central Region Elementary #15, over 47% of parents voted for Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, despite a desperate smear campaign against them. At Valley Region Elementary School #10, over 75% of parents voted for a non-District option, with only 25% supporting the District status quo.

As the Public School Choice Resolution states, this process should be about one thing and one thing only - kids. To maintain any shred of legitimacy in this process, the Superintendent and the board must make decisions based on who will best help our children learn. Period. If they don't, every parent in California now has historic power to take back their schools with the parent trigger.

On the positive side, the teachers of Hillcrest have made one of the most serious attempts at in-District reform this process has seen.  They have written an affiliated charter proposal, which will give them some – if not nearly enough – additional control over budgetary and staff decisions.  A local group of parents and teachers would be empowered to hire and fire their own principal, and at least some additional accountability measures would be required of teachers beyond the basics of the District's existing failed contract.  We have serious concerns about the lack of strong accountability and local control that an independent charter application would have provided, as well as the lack of any track record of success – Hillcrest is arguably the lowest performing elementary school in LAUSD right now.  Nonetheless, the UTLA teachers’ proposal seems thoughtful, has at least some parental buy-in, and could present a significant improvement over the status quo.  And at a minimum, the teachers have made promises to which parents – through California's historic parent trigger – are now empowered to hold them accountable.

Additionally, ICEF Public Schools, one of the strongest charter operators in Los Angeles, submitted an application to transform Hillcrest into two small, high-performing schools.  Given ICEF’s impressive track record of success, this is clearly a great option for the parents of Hillcrest.  We strongly applaud ICEF for doing what no other charter did this year -- they volunteered for the extraordinary challenge of turning around an existing, failing school.  (We recognize there were several huge obstacles that kept other charters from doing so this year, including an extremely short time frame and ever-changing rules of the game, but we hope that future years see an increase in charters willing to take on turnarounds at the schools that currently need them most).

Unfortunately, all these positive developments have become overshadowed by the tactics of one of the applicants, which has decided that lying to parents is the only way to win their support.  Last week, Hillcrest teachers began circulating this flyer with a series of absurd lies and misinformation about the ICEF plan, the most egregious of which was that if ICEF wins, many students will no longer be allowed to attend Hillcrest, but rather be bused to some undisclosed, faraway school.  Perhaps such misinformation could be excused as a misunderstanding if it were coming from a random teacher or other individual.  This flyer, however, came directly from the Hillcrest teacher leading their effort, a UTLA chapter chair from another campus, and the UTLA Board President himself, Alex Caputo-Pearl.  Anybody who has filled out an application or paid one iota of attention to this process knows that every applicant had to agree to accept every child within attendance boundaries as a precondition of even applying for a school, which of course ICEF explicitly does in their application.  Any assertion that these individuals did not know this fact is beyond disingenuous.

Even worse, this is far from an isolated incident.  As the LA Times opines today, "mudslinging" by District staff has occasionally deterioriated the process into "an ugly disinformation campaign."  Just as we saw during the past presidential campaign, it is clear that when one side starts disseminating lies and scary rumors, it is because they have run out of real ideas and solutions.  Hillcrest is undeniably one of the lowest-performing schools in LAUSD – barely 20% of their students are at grade level in English and math.  But rather than engage parents in an honest discussion about the status quo and how to improve it, some have decided to slander an applicant with a history of successfully educating these same children.  Rather than fighting with facts and reason, they have turned to scare tactics and smear campaigns.

Ultimately, we believe far more unites than divides us as parents and teachers because it's impossible to have a great school without great teachers. We believe that we all must eventually march together in the long journey to transform public education.  We understand if we can't agree on a common agenda for improving our schools today. But if we can't treat each other as current partners, we can at least treat each other as future partners. We can disagree on policy without sinking to lies and smears in some win-at-any-cost game in which our children are the only sure losers.

In many ways, Hillcrest has become a microcosm of not only this entire resolution process, but also the entire movement to reform public education.  There are hopeful moments that reflect upon the better angels in us all.  Moments where we put aside our differences, and even our narrow self interest, to stand together for our children.  These moments give us all tangible hope for a better tomorrow.  Because we can see this hope in our own actions today.  And then there are moments where we revert back to base instinct.  Where we see a dark side of the process, where defenders of the status quo will sink to almost any level in order to stop transformational change.  These moments are the reason we needed a parent trigger.  They're the reason why parents deserve the historic power we now have.  Because we only get one fleeting chance to transform public education for our kids, and we're not going to waste that chance. 

In the coming months and years, it is crucial that we learn from Hillcrest, and preserve what's best about this process while eliminating what's worst.  But with or without this process, we will take back and transform our schools for one simple reason – because we have no choice. We are simply parents who love our children, who will fight by any means necessary to give them the education they need and the future they deserve.

The case for ICEF is relatively straightforward. (Click Read More to read the rest).

(Click Read More to continue reading)

Their plan splits a large school up into three separate academies of less than 500 students each, giving parents choice and allowing each student to get the personal attention they need. The current principal, Mr. Samaniego, is clearly a talented and dedicated school leader, and his leadership should provide a huge boost to this newly designed school. Additionally, their “elect to work” agreement makes important strides towards adult accountability, allowing some additional flexibility to its otherwise traditional contract, and giving school leadership greater staffing control.  While we would have liked to see a high quality charter apply for Burbank as well, even if one had, Burbank Middle School's plan includes enough innovative reform and strong leadership that we likely would have endorsed both plans to co-exist as separate academies on the same campus.

However, we remain disappointed with aspects of the plan. While there is increased accountability, it still falls far short of the ideal. While the pilot school model gives some increased autonomy and budgetary control, it does not go nearly far enough in allowing local control and freeing the school’s budget from a massive, inefficient centralized bureaucracy. And it is worrisome that there is no existing track record of success – Burbank’s current student performance is alarmingly poor.

In conclusion, while we remain concerned about some significant aspects of Burbank’s plan, we do not believe this is a time to let perfect be the enemy of good. We urge Superintendent Cortines to select this plan, and implore UTLA and the Burbank community to prove any skepticism we have wrong, and show that in-District, kids-first reform is indeed possible.

(Click Read More to continue reading)

In the letter, sent out on District letterhead (presumably) to all local parents, Superintendent George McKenna answers a number of hypothetical questions parents might have about the new Central EL #15. What he fails to mention, of course, is that there is a process occurring right now that will determine who is even going to run those schools in the first place, which in theory should render almost every one of his answers completely meaningless at best, and incredibly misleading at worst.

To see such a blatant dismissal of the entire process that our school board passed and our Superintendent is currently charged with implementing is disturbing, to say the least. That District resources and authority are being used to misinform parents about the options for their new elementary school is deeply disappointing. Not only do we have UTLA members passing out false and misleading information such as this flyer to parents under the guise of shadowy, fake group names, but the District leadership itself is acting as though the decisions have already been made.  Which begs a crucial question - have they?  Were Camino Nuevo and Youth Policy Institute just wasting their time submitting 200+ page applications to help serve the children of this community?

We still believe in this process -- partly because we must. It just might represent our last opportunity to save public education as we know it in Los Angeles. While these advisory votes may already be tainted, we believe the district still can and must salvage the process itself. We call upon sup cortines to denounce these tactics. And we urge him to refer back to the resolved clause in the original resolution that states that this process must be about one thing and one thing only: our children.

If this process devolves into a tragic turf battle over adult interests, then we will have no choice but to help parents organize parent trigger campaigns all across Los Angeles. One way or another, parents will take back our schools for our kids and our future for one simple reason: we have no choice.

Track record of the operator

- Does the applicant have a record of success? Have they produced impressive student achievement with similar student population to those attending the school they are applying for?

Proposed plan

To what extent does the plan contain:

- Accountability for all adults to student performance?

- More dollars in the classroom rather than to a bureaucracy?

- Choice for parents and students - multiple educational options for students?

- Strong school leadership?

- Local control - ability for local school to make staff and budgetary decisions?

- Personalized learning environment for students?

- Parental involvement - are there pathways for and prioritization of parents being involved?

Community engagement

- To what extent has the applicant engaged the community?

It is imperative that we seize this moment to pass health insurance reform.  As a Clinton White House alum from the last time we tried to pass health insurance reform, I am acutely aware that these moments of opportunity for progressive change are rare.  While it would be far better to pass a bill that included a public option – so that consumers can benefit from real competition between profit-driven corporations and a Medicare-like government agency – Congress still has the opportunity to provide quality health insurance to tens of millions of poor and working class American parents and children. 

Passing healthcare would have an added political benefit for President Obama and Congressional Democrats: it would free them up to pivot to an inherently bipartisan issue on which the Obama Administration has already demonstrated genuine leadership: education reform.  Without President Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan, there is no Race to the Top and there is no parent trigger.  The President should assemble a bipartisan coalition in Washington similar to the one we assembled in Sacramento.  In one short year, parents all across California have stood up, stood together and won historic power over the education of our own children.  Now it’s time for parents all across America to stand with President Obama and do the same thing.

If we’re serious about ensuring that every child in America grows up with real opportunity to realize their full potential and achieve their dreams, then parents and politicians have a responsibility to ensure that all of our children grow up with access to a quality public education and quality healthcare.  Right now, in this moment, President Obama, Congress, and the parents of America have the power to do just that. 

This is our moment.  This is our time.  Let’s seize it together and build a better future for every parent and child in America.