Parents Defending Education. Parents United. The National Parents Union. Massachusetts Parent Action. Massachusetts Parents United. It feels like you can’t cross the street anywhere in Massachusetts nowadays without tripping over a new group with a similar name and a similar claim. A new right-wing-funded, phony and not-at-all representative of parents group, to be precise.
Take Parents Defending Education, recently in the news for bringing a lawsuit against the Wellesley Public Schools. PDE says it is grassroots but it’s really part of a national network of right-wing provocateurs aiming to spread chaos throughout public education.
The president of PDE is professional Koch network operative Nicole Neily. As president of an organization called Speech First, Neily pulled down $161,000 in 2018 and $150,000 in 2019, according to Speech First’s Form 990 tax returns.
It’s good money since the major role of Speech First seems to be accepting large donations from right-wing funders and passing them along to the law firm Consovoy McCarthy, which then sues colleges over issues touching upon race. In 2018, Consovoy McCarthy took in $950,000 from Speech First. In 2019, the amount was $750,000, also recorded in the Form 990s.
So who is being paid by PDE to bring the lawsuit against Wellesley? Why it’s Consovoy McCarthy, of course. The lawsuit largely attacks Wellesley for the sin of offering Asian American students an affinity space for discussion following the murders of six Asian American women and two other people in the Atlanta area.
For a newly hatched parents group, PDE sure seems to be sitting on a pile of money. William Consovoy is in the Federalist Society, was a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and has represented Donald Trump during a congressional investigation.
His firm sought to intervene on behalf of Trump in a case before the Supreme Court in which the Pennsylvania GOP sued to stop the 2020 presidential vote count. In defending Trump from a New York investigation, Consovoy told the court that Trump, while president, could not be charged with a crime if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue.
PDE employs veteran pro-privatization writer Erika Sanzi. Form 990 tax return records indicate that before the PDE gig, she was being paid about $120,000 per year from the billionaire-funded Education Post. In a 2017 story in the Post that appeared beneath a smiling picture of the two privatization pals, Sanzi wrote of Massachusetts resident Keri Rodrigues, "I consider her a partner in this work. And a friend."
The name Keri Rodrigues may sound familiar. She was the state director and a spokesperson for Families for Excellent Schools Inc. during the fight over Question 2, the 2016 Massachusetts ballot campaign that unsuccessfully sought to lift the cap on privately run charter schools.
As Families for Excellent Schools collapsed, Rodrigues slid over to "found" Massachusetts Parents United, which from 2017 to 2020 was deluged with more than $2.1 million from the antiunion Walton Family Foundation, plus additional sums from Boston-based foundations favoring school privatization. From 2017 to 2019, the related group Massachusetts Parent Action brought in $695,000 from unknown donors. Rodrigues’ compensation from the two "parent" groups in 2018-2019 added up to $378,522, according to Form 990 tax returns and Walton Family Foundation annual reports.
One must not stifle ambition, so in 2018 Rodrigues pitched a new idea to the Walton Family Foundation — setting up an organization to be named the National Parents Union. The stated concept was to aim the group’s activities toward the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries and, more specifically, "to take on the unions in the national and regional media, and eventually on the ground in advocacy fights."
The Walton-funded internet site The74 cast the launch of the NPU with a headline reading in part: "Two Latinas Gave Birth to a National Parents Union." And then, another miracle, the money came raining down: from the Waltons, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, City Fund (a vehicle for billionaires John Arnold and Reed Hastings), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Charles Koch. NPU hired the international communications firm Mercury LLC and Echelon Insights, the Waltons’ pollster. While the money poured in, the parents didn’t. My research found only four parent organizations represented — including Massachusetts Parents United — and mostly participants from the charter school industry.
Then we have Parents United, another entity formed in Massachusetts. The first thing to ask is: Who is funding you? The Boston Globe’s Yvonne Abraham asked that of Ashley Jacobs, the new group’s mom founder (it’s always "moms"). Jacobs not only wouldn’t answer but didn’t seem to know what the concerns of her own group were or who was putting them forward. In just a few months, Parents United was holding an expensive conference in Boston.
Rodrigues is furious that other groups are crashing the "parents" brand, as is apparent to anyone who follows her overheated Twitter feed. The NPU tries to present itself as championing parents of color, but along come Sanzi and Parents Defending Education, preaching white backlash, and Parents United doing heaven knows what.
That doesn’t matter to Koch and the Waltons since both take approaches that seek to create chaos in public education — and that help the wealthy privatizers; a little bedlam only harms students, parents, educators, school committee members, superintendents and principals. The bottom line here is the destabilization of public education, the decimation of unions, and oligarchy over democracy.
What stands in the way of all this is us — educators and other union members acting collectively for the good of our communities. Koch, the Waltons and their many allies in disruption hate collective action but we need it if our democracy — what Abraham Lincoln called "such an inestimable jewel" — is to survive.
We must all fight for our democracy.
retired earlier this year after a long career as an associate professor of political science at UMass Boston. He is the author of "Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization," which was published recently by Palgrave Macmillan.
