Statement from Ben Austin regarding his removal from the State Board

Here's Austin's statement two days later, after he was sacked.  How true (and how sad): "Unfortunately, in the Governor's first full day in office, he chose to stand with the state's most powerful interest group that spent millions to elect him, rather than the parents and children of California."

 

Statement from Ben Austin regarding his removal from the State Board

01.5.11, http://parentrevolution.org/?p=682

 

Just one month ago, California Federation of Teachers President Marty Hittleman – the same man who called the Parent Trigger the "lynch mob provision" – confidently predicted to the media that Governor Brown would immediately remove me from the State Board because I had used my position to advocate for radical kids-first change, ominously stating that I would not be serving on the State Board "in a month or so."  It turns out he was right.  Unfortunately, in the Governor's first full day in office, he chose to stand with the state's most powerful interest group that spent millions to elect him, rather than the parents and children of California.

 

I am proud to stand with Michelle Rhee, Gloria Romero and other courageous kids-first reformers who lost their jobs because a kids-first agenda is the most radical political agenda in America.  The honor is not to serve on the State Board of Education — the honor is to serve the parents and children of California, and that is what I did.

 

From the day I was appointed to the State Board of Education, I endeavored to cast every single vote as if it would literally affect my two daughters, Fiona and Eloise.  Sometimes that meant standing with charter advocates, sometimes it meant standing with teachers unions.  But it always meant standing with parents and children.  I knew a kids-first agenda was radical, and that it would anger the most powerful interest groups in California.  But I also knew that the false choices inherent in the current debate — charters vs. district schools, unions vs. reformers — have lead us to the precipice of today's failed status quo.
 
Nine months later, and working alongside other reform-minded board members, I used that kids-first philosophy to begin to shift the paradigm.  I fought to transform teacher evaluations and include cutting-edge "value added" data, so that teachers can be evaluated at least in part based on how much their students ultimately learn.  As a parent, of course I want to know whether or not my daughters' teachers are effective based on common sense, fair evaluations, so I stood up for change.  I strongly supported President Obama's revolutionary Common Core standards, so that our children can have access to the best curricula and assessments — moving us past the days of multiple choice standardized tests, and into the 21st century where critical thinking skills will trump rote memorization.

 

And to the surprise of many, I took the lead on charter school accountability, authoring groundbreaking regulations to increase accountability and ultimately shut down our state's lowest performing charter schools.  On individual votes, I supported good charter schools and voted against bad ones, even when sometimes under immense political pressure to do the opposite.  A failing school is bad for children no matter what label we give it, and we should not tolerate failing schools of any type for our children.

 

However, if I've learned one thing from my time on the State Board, it is that the type of kids-first change we seek is never going to come from inside the system.  Thanks to our state's historic Parent Trigger law, parents no longer have to sit around and wait for someone else to do it for them.  They can do it themselves. If half the parents at any failing school sign a petition, the parents can turn their school into a high-performing charter school, or they can keep it a district school but bring in new leadership and a new staff. For the first time in American history, parents now have real power over the education of their own children.

 

Parents are already organizing throughout California to take back and transform their children's failing schools, and they will not rest until they succeed.  The kids-first change we seek is infinitely more likely to come from a small band of determined parents in Compton, fighting for the future of their own children, than from the dais of a board room in Sacramento.

 

Parents can't wait. They can't freeze-dry their kids. They operate on a different clock than district bureaucrats and politicians. They get one shot to give their kids the education they need and the future they deserve. And they are going to take back their schools for their kids and their future by any means necessary — whether I'm a member of the State Board of Education or not.