MONTEBELLO, Calif. – The law can be a dangerous thing.

But perhaps even more dangerous is actually learning about a law that empowers individuals to stand up to their own governing officials’ policies.

Throughout history, people have been arrested for simply attempting to educate people about the law. The great novelist Upton Sinclair in 1923 dared to read from the Bill of Rights at a rally to support constitutional free speech rights. He and hundreds of others were promptly arrested. The arresting officer proclaimed: “We’ll have none of that Constitution stuff.”

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Sinclair’s arrest was one of several in the 1920s, when activists across the country were jailed for attempting to read the Constitution or Bill of Rights in public.

But in 2015, it seems laws granting parents powerful rights to help their children escape chronically academically underperforming schools may be just as “dangerous.”

On Jan. 23, three organizers with the California Center for Parent Empowerment (of which I happen to be the founder) faced arrest when the principal of Joseph A. Gascon Elementary in the city of Montebello called the police to stop the organizers from talking to parents about California’s Parent Empowerment Act – despite that they were in a legal public space outside the school.

Ironically, the police were called just as celebrations commenced for the fifth anniversary of National School Choice Week, which showcases the broad range of parental school choice options available, including open enrollment policies, parent trigger laws, magnet and charter schools, online learning and home schooling.

The Montebello school is one of 1,000 campuses that California identifies as chronically academically underperforming. Under the 2010 Act, which I wrote, parents of children enrolled at these schools have the right to seek transfer of their child into a higher-performing public school. School bureaucrats and employees have resisted the law, in part because taxpayer education dollars transfer with the child to a new school.

Most parents don’t know the law exists, and school officials have been lackadaisical about informing them despite being mandated to do so.

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Sadly, this is not the first time the three CPE organizers – Daniela Gonzalez, Alejandra Cortez and Arlene Espinosa, all college graduates who understand that education is the key to the American Dream – have been threatened with arrest when they’ve braved cold mornings to stand outside schools and inform parents about the law and how to use it. Ironically, the organizers have had to spend valuable time educating principals and school officials who typically rush out to shoo organizers away from telling “their” parents about their legal rights to hear about the parent empowerment law.

The law is necessary because California operates a monolithic education delivery mode system, based on ZIP code. For a great many California families, there is no ability to leave the school even when it is state-identified as failing. They are simply trapped. School officials, motivated by money and cowed by teachers unions, fail to restart their schools. Parents at Anaheim’s Palm Lane Elementary School recently filed 332 signatures to restart the failing school but are being fought by school officials.

California enacted the Parent Empowerment Act’s provisions to offer kids trapped in failing schools a pathway out.

But in order to use the law, parents need to know the law exists, and it doesn’t help when organizers telling parents of their rights are threatened with arrest.

The Montebello police officer summoned to arrest the organizers departed after speaking to them, suggesting they move, but acknowledging that no law was broken. It’s inconceivable that police were called at all, but Sinclair would probably be pleased that nobody was arrested for reading parents the law.

Staff opinion columnist Gloria Romero is an education reformer and former Democratic state senator from Los Angeles.

Originally published here

Published with permission