CHAVOUS: The New Rosa Parks

For years, many of us in the education reform movement have believed that the fight to ensure all children equal access to a high-quality education is the civil rights issue of our time. If that is indeed the case, the civil rights movement has found a new “Rosa Parks” - Kelley Williams-Bolar.

Ms. Williams-Bolar is a single mother of two daughters in Ohio who was sent to jail for 10 days for using her father’s address to get her kids in a better school. She wanted her daughters to get a good education. But the city wanted to make an example of her. Ms. Williams-Bolar, like struggling parents all over the country, was desperate to have her children attend a quality school. Was she legally wrong? Technically, yes. Was she morally right? Absolutely. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” Similar to Rosa Parks, Ms. Williams-Bolar may be just the person to demonstrate the need for quality options today for all children, particularly those from low-income communities.

She is not alone. Several weeks ago, parents in Compton, Calif., took advantage of a new parent-trigger law - which allows parents to petition and shut down failing schools - and effectively closed a school in their neighborhood that for years had failed to educate their children. Standing in front of the school she was helping to shut down, parent leader Ismenia Guzman said, “Us parents, we care. I don’t want our kids struggling in poor schools.” This unprecedented action sent a clear, unambiguous message to the school district: Either fix our school or we will put you out of business.

Clearly, something is happening in the push to reform American schools, and it is not going away. Slowly, but ever so surely, parents are injecting themselves into the discussion. For years, policymakers, visionary legislators, entrepreneurial school leaders and self-proclaimed education reformers have been fighting for changes in our education system. They all bemoan the fact that the long-standing achievement gap between children of color and white children is not being closed and that U.S. schoolchildren are falling behind the rest of the world in educational outputs. And while many of us who have been doing this work for a long time see positive signs of change with the advancement of charter schools, the education policy of President Obama and efforts being waged in many states, the catalytic moment signaling real change just hasn’t occurred. Until now.

It is increasingly clear that parents are fed up.

More here