According to Education Week, Arne Duncan announced yesterday that "we will revise our ESEA reauthorization proposal to require parent and community input," a response to recent challenges by PURE and others to his administration's failure to acknowledge the need to involve parents and the community in critical decisions about schools, starting with his own Race to the Top and  ESEA revision plans.

In a speech to the NAACP, Fed Ed Head Duncan said that states and districts will have to involve parents in addressing school turnarounds in  order to qualify for federal funds. This means, he said, "notification, outreach, public input, and honest, open discussion about the right option for each community."

Unfortunately, Duncan's track record in Chicago makes us skeptical that this is anything more than empty rhetoric. His efforts to "involve the community" in turnrounds here meant that perfunctory hearings were held where hundreds turned out to offer powerful testimony about a school's strengths along with thoughtful, research-based suggestions about how to support and improve the existing school, yet Arne Duncan ignored it all and shut the schools down.

Duncan replaced empowered local school councils elected by parents and the community with toothless advisory councils appointed by – Arne Duncan.

And, most importantly, Duncan's school “turnarounds,” which were so vociferously opposed by parents, community members, teachers and students, left Chicago with schools that were not better than the ones they replaced, except in their facility for weeding out and eliminating the most challenging students.

So, parents will continue to challenge Arne Duncan's plans. Leadership on real, meaningful parent involvement must start at the top, in the Department of Education. This means that Arne Duncan must begin really listening to parents, and the only way we will know that he is actually hearing us is when he begins to modify the RTTT and ESEA proposals that parents so strongly oppose and replace them with solid, proven programs that parents want.