This is a hilarious description of a conference call in which Ben Austin of Parent Revolution joined with Congressman George Miller of California to discuss the value of parents seizing control of their schools.
Rita Solnet, the Florida parent activist who joined the conference call, quickly learned that parents were not allowed to ask questions, only journalists.
She heard Ben Austin claim that his organization, funded by the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and the Broad Foundation, is not only “grassroots,” but that it was vastly outspent by its opponents. Austin said they (the Parent Associations of Florida) have $8 billion (!) to spend, but he didn’t say where that $8 billion came from.
She heard him say that the Florida parent groups had more lobbyists than his allies in the charter industry. She counted 122 paid lobbyists working for the charter industry.
She heard George Miller decry the terrible status quo, but recalled that he has been writing the nation’s education policy for years. George Miller IS the status quo. In fact, George Miller was one of the architects of No Child Left Behind, and still defends it. Miller is a hero to Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the Wall Street hedge fund managers’ organization. DFER raises money for politicians who agree to support charters, and DFER has raised large sums for Miller.
This is a conversation you should read about.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“$8 billion (!)” is right. Not only where does it come from, but what kind of return are they expecting for that kind of investment?
Answer: the KIDS themselves. Imagine holding an entire nation of kids hostage by ridiculous policies that enrich the already richest of the rich. SAD country, SAD educational policies.
Where did Austin come up with the “$8 billion” dollar figure—the total amount that Parent Revolution’s enemies have spent figthing them? The entire budget of LAUSD — the second largest district in the country educating 700,000 students — is only $6 billion.
Why not… ohh… “$7 billion” or “$9 billion” or “$10 billion”, or ”$100 billion”?
SInce no one in the press has ever called Ben or Parent Revolution on this and other mendacities, they must figure that they can say just about any lie they can come up with to advance their agenda, and there will be no negative fallout.
Can Ben Austin and the Parent Revolution folks just make stuff up, state their ludicrous and easily-disproven lies publicly as if they were the truth, and then happily move on without anyone challenging them?
Can’t someone debunk and then expose this specious nonsense? Then shouldn’t it the be that after this, that Parent Revolution / Ben Austin should lost all its / his credibility?
Natasha Lindrom… or someone else in the Fourth Estate… why aren’t you on this?
allie,
It was probably similar to the following
scene in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.
The Joseph McCarthy-ish Senator and
his puppet-master mother are trying to
come up with a fabricated figure for the
number of Communists that he claims
are embedded in the Defense
Department.
CLICK here and go to about 01:20 :
(the quality of this YOUTUBE is
a little dicey… She sees “HEINZ 57”
on the ketchup bottle.. and now has
the number.)
In a similar vein, I’m imagining
Ben Austin, Pat De Temple and
that flip-flop-wearing Gabe Rose
trying to come up with a figure for
the amount of money spent that
the Parent Revolution’s enemies
have spent fighting them.
The three of them are riding in the
same car, waiting in the McDonad’s
Drive-Thru. Ben’s driving, with Pat
in the passenger seat. Gabe Rose
sits in the middle of the back seat
texting.
BEN AUSTIN: “How much should
we say that the corrupt defenders
of a failed status quo have spent
against us?”
PAT DE TEMPLE: “I dunno, a few
million or so… ?”
BEN AUSTIN: “Naahhh… that’s not
enough… we’re trying to be the
beleaguered underdogs fighting for the
education of the poor, unwashed
masses. We gotta really sell that!”
PAT DE TEMPLE: “Okay, well then
how ’bout… ohh.. I dunno…
..$100 million?”
BEN AUSTIN: “Nahh… that’s too weak.”
GABE ROSE:
—(looks up)
“Hey, I’ve got it! Look!”
—(points excitedly out the front windshield)
POV Shot of the McDonald’s sign:
“8 BILLION SERVED”
BEN AUSTIN: “That’s it!!!”
PAT DE TEMPLE: “Gabe, I take back
those digs about your flip-flops… you’re
a genius!”
DRIVE THRU SPEAKER: “Good
afternoon. Welcome to McDonald’s.
Can I take your order please?”
If you go back a few years, you can see that Miller was on the take from Princeton Review, ITT Education Services (owner of ITT Technology, a for-profit college), and Apollo Group, the owner of the for-profit University of Phoenix.
George Miller simply does the bidding of his masters who pay him.
LINKS: http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00007390&cycle=2010
“the owner of the for-profit University of Phoenix”
Congress passed regulation of for-profit colleges in 2009. The law was relatively strong until an absolute army of for-profit education people descended and the regulations were weakened dramatically.
They’ve taken extensive testimony on for-profit colleges, particularly the role of those colleges in ripping off veterans.
Any member of Congress who is still pretending these schools benefit students is on the take. There’s just no other excuse.
Reuters has a pretty good article showing the power of the for profits in watering down regulations – and Miller is the Dem top recipient of for profit college largesse:
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE70B6SM20110112
Also, his son is a lobbyist for a firm that has for profits as clients.
Rita Solnet does a great job of summarizing the underhanded approach of Austin and Miller. The parents of Florida put on a true grass roots demonstration regarding the parent trigger legislation and they did it two years in a row. It is amazing how Austin can twist the story and make it sound like his organization is the underdog.
And not letting the parents on the conference call ask questions? I agree that it’s time for Austin and his crew to change the name of their organization. They do not represent parents and they are not trying to improve our schools.
This should be a national news report.
Headline: Lying Dogs Continue to Lie!
Mller can go eat CAKE.
So. Did any member of Congress hold a conference call for parents on the traditional public schools that 95% of public school students attend?
It’s absolutely ridiculous that they spend all their time promoting charters and gimmicks like “parent trigger” while 95% of the existing public schools are neglected.
We really need to hire some people in government who have some interest in public schools. This laser-like focus on 5% of schools to the detriment and neglect of 95% of schools is possibly the dumbest policy approach I have ever seen. Forget “policy”. Reformers are terrible managers if they think this approach will provide any benefit to the vast majority of kids.
I’d also like to know how Ben Austin got a private meeting and a dedicated conference call with a House member to push his schools. Will my local public school superintendent get that kind of personal attention? Why not?
Ben Austin is truly pathological.
In the interview linked to BELOW, Parent Revolution leader
Ben Austin characterizes the opposition to the Parent
Trigger in Compton (December 2010) thusly:
“The teachers’ union struck back”,
He then proceeds to describe McKinley Elementary
in Compton (the target school) overall as a
child-abusing hell-hole.
(Oh really? Then why did 90% of the parents
choose to remain at McKinley… the child-abusing hell-hole…
instead of at the charter school that Parent Revolution helped
open just a block away?)
Seriously, Dr. Ravitch. You’re not going to believe this—but Austin claims
THAT the the unionized teachers at McKinley retaliated against the the
pro-Parent Trigger parents by physically torturing the children of
those parents (???!!!) while the children of anti-Parent-Trigger,
pro-evil-union parents were spared this Abu Ghraib-like physical
and mental torment.
Austin said this an interview for the far-right-wing, anti-union Choice Matters,
where he is being interviewed by Bob Bowden, who had previously made
an anti-union, pro-charter documentary, “THE CARTEL”.
Check out this link for the video:
(NOTE: the scary, unnerving tinkling piano music underscoring the urination / defecation torture story)
Next, try watching it while reading along to my transcript:
(ALSO NOTE: Dr. Ravitch, I was very precise in my transcription of this part of the interview—including all the pauses, ellipses ( … ), “uhh” ‘s, “uhhmm” ‘s, etc.. .
I did this to illustrate that Ben Austin is clearly lying his head off. Show this video
to any police detective, or anyone else trained in lie detection, and see
what they say. Compare Austin’s delivery and demeanor to that of
the interviewer Bowden, who is not under pressure to knowingly lie.
Austin is bumbling, while Bowden remains smooth.
Lying is hard work. It places intense cognitive demands and pressures
on the person who is lying, and as a result, when you get someone who
is not very effective and/or experienced in lying, you get a ridiculous, stumbling,
bumbling performance like that of Austin’s in the video.
Also, the bolding during the torture story is mine, Jack)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
TRANSCRIPT: (00:41 – 02:06)
AUSTIN: “Instead of being embraced and applauded for getting involve
in the education of their own children, (THE PRO-PARENT-TRIGGER PARENTS) were intimidated uhhh… and abused and harassed… uhhmm… and… uhmmm… we quiclkly found out that there were few… moral boundaries that the other side was unwilling to cross.
“One story in particular that was… uhmmm… jaw-dropping.. was that… uhmm… we found out pretty quickly that parents… whose… who—uhh… children whose parents signed the petitions… uhhm… were not allowed to go to the bathroom, and… when the children peed in their pants, they were sent to the… Nurse’s Office… uhh… and… that is where the parents… uhmm… parents got called in to bring in clean underwear… uhh… and that’s where the parents got hit up to give their … uhhh… to rescind their… signatures.”
BOWDEN: “Let me get this straight? In the same classroom where the parents who didn’t support the Parent Trigger petition… those students were allowed to go to the bathroom, and if your mom or dad supported the Parent Trigger, you were told, ‘Too bad. Stay there.’ ” (and thus, be forced to urinate/defecate on yourself, Jack)
AUSTIN: “That’s right. I mean it’s.. it’s… i-i-i-i-i… the-the… Things got so bad that the parents… uhhmmm… uhh… had to
—-(AUSTIN STARES DOWN AT SOMETHING… another “tell” of lying)
” … uhhmmm… sue the school district… and uhhmm… they … ”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Austin doesn’t even seem to believe the
bullshit that he’s spewing. His mind is jumping
around awkwardly… rambling about kids peeing in
their pants, then about parents forced to
bring clean underwear…
It’s like he’s trying to remember whatever phony story
that he, Gabe Rose, Pat DeTemple, and/or other Parent Rev. folks
vomited up during a secret strategy session.
In this instance at least, Austin’s a pretty unconvincing liar.
the same video is also here:
I have never seen a video where it was
more completely obvious that someone (Austin) is
lying his head off. The “uhh..”‘s,
“uhhmmm”s… pauses etc…. repeatedly’
the staring down, and looking to the side.
Again, note the contrast with cadence
and manner of the interviewer,
who is not lying.
CONCLUSION:
THIS__STORY__IS___TOTAL___AND___UTTER___BULLSHIT.
NOTE: Austin was an uncredited consultant to the
screenwriters of ‘WON’T BACK DOWN’. The urination
scene is in the movie, with the added wrinkle
that the evil unionized teacher first locked the
pro-Parent-Trigger parent’s kid in a dark closet.
When the hero mom shows up, the evil teacher
says that’s what your kid gets for you being
a trouble-maker—i.e. signing the petition,
and gathering signatures.
Sheesh!
If that ever happened in real life, the teacher
would be taken out of the school in handcuffs.
These Parent Rev. people are sociopaths, or
psychopaths who are so steeped in pathological dishonesty—
telling whatever lie they want to tell
whenever they want to tell it, so long as
it advances their agenda—that, in this
instance at least, they’ve lost
touch with reality.
In my next two posts,, I’ll tell you about
1) the bogus “McKINLEY PARENTS FOR CHANGE” flyer
that Robert Skeels wrote about:
2) Parent Revolution’s despicable “Plan B” they tried to put into effect in Compton, and which ultimately failed.
Before I get to the post about the flyer and “Plan B”, check out this near the end of the BEN AUSTIN / BOBBY BOWDEN INTERVIEW video:
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
( 02:51 – 03:13 )
BOWDEN: “What happened to the teachers who did that?”
AUSTIN: “Nothing”
—-LONG PAUSE where Ben doesn’t clarify this in the least
BOWDEN: “They’re still working?”
AUSTIN: “Uhhmmm… yeah… and… and… I mean our-our goal is not to teacher-bash… or even union-bash… for some people see this simply as a struggle for power… not an issue of social justice… not an issue of …. ”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Right… Ben says that he and Parent Revolution are “not about teacher-bashing”… Oh, no… not at all… he just tells some horrific (and totally bogus) story about teachers at a school torturing children as a means of winning a “struggle for power.”
As anyone on either side of the issue would, Bowden is genuinely interested in whether or not the perpetrators of this were ever held accountable for this alleged conspiracy of abuse.
But Ben doesn’t want to go there… other than to say “Nothing.” when asked if the anything happened to these teachers.
Somewhat embarrassed and staring down (another “tell” of lying), Ben just quickly moves on from this line of questioning to blather about “struggle for power” and “issue of social justice.”
—I’m going into Sam Kinison voice as I type this (I know that dates me with some folks reading)
Hey Ben!!!!!
Didn’t someone ever think of alerting Compton Unified?!!!
Didn’t you think of calling the police?!!
Have those kids gotten psychological treatment?!
Have the child victims’ parents done anything in response?
Are they suing?
The answer to all these question is,,,
—more Sam Kinison Voice
HELL- NO!!!!
Why?
BECAUSE NONE OF THIS EVER FREAKIN’ HAPPENED!!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
BEN AUSTIN… YOU FREAKIN’ LIAR!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
—back to normal voice
I’m an elementary school teacher who has to take the Child Abuse Awareness Training video and test annually.
Here’s how it works.
If I—or ANY teacher / administrator—became aware that another teacher or an administrator had been torturing a child—forcing the child to urinate / defecate on himself / herself…
Like all teachers, administrators and other “mandated reporters”, I am required BY LAW to report this immediately… if not, I will be immediately removed from the classroom, will be prosecuted, and will be open to be sued for a six-figure sum (at least), and I will lose my job and my credential… and eventually get banned from teaching for life.
Look at how blase Austin is when Bowden asks him if anything happened to these teachers. There’s not the slightest bit of anger or outrage on Austin’s part… he’s a bit annoyed at the question, and instead moves on..
Oh well, la-di-dah… kids got tortured… let’s change the subject…
Austin then abruptly changes the topic to “we’re not here to teacher bash or union bash”…
Ridiculous!
If this HAD actually happened, the Parent Revolution douchebags would have gone to the police, held press conferences, had the “pro-bono legal team” sue everyone and every organization in sight—Compton Unified, the teachers, the union, the administrators… etc.
And then publicize the hell outta ALL OF THE ABOVE from now till Doomsday. They’d milk this for all its worth, AS PROOF OF HOW EVIL TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND and HOW EVIL TEACHER UNIONS ARE.
Why haven’t they?
—going back into a Sam Kinison Voice
BECAUSE_IT_NEVER_FREAKIN’_HAPPENED!!!!!!
—more Sam Kinison Voice
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
BEN AUSTIN… YOU FREAKIN’ LIAR!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
Next, here’s a post describing how Ben makes a false equivalency between elections and signature gathering for a petition… as a hare-brained way to defend parents not being able to rescind their signatures.
This little tid-bit relates to Parent Revolution’s biggest “success” to date…
the takeover in Adelanto.
A hastily-organized and penniless group of parents
in Adelanto tried to have their signatures rescinded,
claiming that they had been lied to and misled into
signing the petition by Parent Revolution operatives.
They even testified to that in court.
This testimony from Ben Austin responding to their claims says it all:
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
BEN AUSTIN: “There are certainly voters who are going to vote
on ballot initiatives this November that do not understand
everything they’re voting on… That doesn’t illegitimize
an election.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Wow!
That is some Classic Ben Austin! You can find it here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/03/wont-back-down-inspiratio_n_1935876.html
Ben is tacitly admitting that—in the course of Parent Revolution’s
signature gathering—there were and are indeed petition signers
who were misled and confused when signing on
(and presumably would not have signed otherwise)…
with Austin conceding that it was AT LEAST SOME OF
HIS OWN SIGNATURE GATHERERS WERE DELIBERATELY
MISLEADING AND CONFUSING PEOPLE.
There were almost 100 parents who wanted to rescind
their signatures after finding out they had been “duped”.
ANATOMY OF THE “DUPING”:
the Parent Revolution organizers rented a house
across the street from the school, and elicited what
the parents by saying, “This is to make the school better… ”
Well, duh! Who’s not going to sign that?
In an argument that inexplicably prevailed with
an appeals court judge, Ben tries to draw an equivalency…
between petitions and elections…
in that both usually have signers / voters
who may be misled or confused when they
vote for / sign something… and so what if they do?
Once again…
– – – – – – – – – – – –
BEN AUSTIN: “There are certainly voters who are going to vote
on ballot initiatives this November that do not understand
everything they’re voting on… That doesn’t illegitimize
an election.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
WTF???!!!
This idiotic argument—attempting to equate elections
and signature-gathering for a petition—essentially legitimizes
wholesale fraud in signature-gathering.
It essentially gives license to any and
every kind of dishonest tactic:
— lying,
—phony promises
—threats
and on and on…
Because later, you can just claim… “well, they do this in elections,
and you’re not allowed to take your vote back… so you shouldn’t
be allowed to take your signature back.”
Unlike an election, petition-gatherer engages in a one-on-one communication
and relationships with the prospective signer… one in which the prospective signer
is at the mercy of the signature-gatherer as to what he or she is
saying—promises, representations, threats, etc.—are actually
truthful.
If the signer of the petition—once he discovers that has “been had”—
is not then allowed to rescind the signature… then the whole fraud
will then run rampant.
An election is nothing of the kind.
The only reason this was not appealed to the Supreme Court was that the School Board in Adelanto had been financially drained by Parent Revolution’s high-powered lawyers. This cash-poor school district was broke, so they had to basically surrender at this point.
Now, here’s the post about the phony flyer & “Plan B”:
Here’s a blast from the past—2 1/2 years ago to be precise—of the infamous events in Compton, California during December 2010:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/45455171/astroturf-parent-revolution-compton-caper-flyer
This is the flyer—claiming to be from the parents running “McKinley Parents for Change”.
This was supposedly group of parents of Compton’s McKinley Elementary who were ostensibly out gathering signatures to turn over McKinley Elementary’s multi-million dollar campus/annual school budgets in perpetuity over to the private Charter company Celerity—i.e. from the public sector where it is controlled by an elected school board accountable to the public…. to the private sector, where the Board meets in secret, and the public is cut out of all decision-making.
At this point, a community activist—with an admittedly anti-charter school point-of-view—named Robert Skeels then called the number at the bottom of the flyer, and here’s what he found out:
http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2010/12/update-on-veracity-of-mckinley-parents.html
– – – – – – –
ROBERT SKEELS (December 2010): “Considering the certainty and conviction of the bullet points on the flyer by this newly formed, pro-Celerity ‘parent’ group, supposedly wholly unrelated to the well-paid professional staffers at the billionaire-financed Parent Revolution, I figured my questions and concerns would be promptly addressed.
“I left a message with my name and number for McKinley Parents for Change last night, and lo and behold Parent Revolution returned my call this morning. Yuri (not sure if I’m spelling that right, my apologies if I’m not) must not be aware of my years of investigative journalism exposing the insatiable greed of the lucrative charter-voucher industry. The poor woman couldn’t answer any of my questions about Celerity’s lack of compliance with the Modified Consent Decree or the State Board of Education’s proposed regulations on their Corporate Charter Trigger Law, so she said she’d have Gabe Rose (an official of Parent Revolution) call me back to clarify.
“She also was very helpful and explained to me that Gabe Rose played a major role in the creation of the flyer (who would have guessed?), so he was the best person to explain it. So much for McKinley Parents for Change’s claim that they are parents at McKinley Elementary School. I somehow doubt I’ll receive that second phone call.”
– – – – – – – – – – – –
Over a hundred McKinley parents demanded that they be allowed to rescind their signatures that Parent Revolution collected, claiming that the signature gatherers were not McKinley parents, and that those paid signature-gatherers lied to them about the full implications of what all the parents were signing (“This is for new computers… sign here…. this is to beautify the campus… sign here… ” and on and on)
Parent Revolution officials disputed this, claiming that 70% of the parents at the school signed with fully knowledge of the petition’s implications, and that all those parents were indeed demanding Celerity take over the school.. and that it was the McKinley parents, not Parent Revolution doing all the signature gathering.
(See BELOW where Parent Revolution eventually comes clean about this lie)
This went to court, and also prompted hearings at the State Board of Ed.
Hmmm… who was telling the truth?
Well, we eventually found out, as there eventually was a metric to
show which side was telling the truth.
Parent Revolution then assisted Celerity in opening a charter school a block away from McKinley in an abandoned Catholic school building (NOTE, this was a charter authorization separate from the contentious Parent Trigger process.)
The new “Plan B” was to depopulate McKinley—with the students leaving to the new Celerity school—and then use Prop. 39 to have Celerity co-locate and invade the school anyway because of all the empty classrooms—Prop 39 allows this. They were even promising free laptops to all the students who defected from McKinley to the Celerity Charter. Given how impoverished the typical family was/is in this community, free laptops must have been tempting.
Check out L.A Weekly’s Simone Wilson’s article about Parent Revolution’s ‘Plan B’ :
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/05/parent_trigger_plan_b_charter_school_to_open_2_blocks_from_mckinley_elementary.php
(the pro-Parent Revolution / pro-charter writer, Simone Wilson, is positively salivating at this prospect of Celerity “U-Hauling its top-notch operations” into McKinley):
– – – – – – – – – –
SIMONE WILSON: “Indeed, Plan B is looking pretty promising. If Celerity opens a first-rate campus — laptops for all ! — two blocks from McKinley, chances are at least 200 of roughly 400 students will leap at the chance for a better education. This would leave the McKinley campus ‘underutilized,’ at which point another controversial California law, Prop. 39, could force the district to let a charter school take over its facilities.
” ‘I’m excited because I know my daughter is going to get the education she needs and deserves,’ parent Shemika Murphy told the Los Angeles Times.
“With this kind of support, Celerity would be ready, willing and perfectly poised to U-Haul its top-notch operations from the church over to the elementary school — virtually the same outcome as a successful Trigger would have allowed.
“… In the end, we’ve got to give props to Revolution for finding the sneaky back-door alternative to a Trigger. Whatever it takes to rescue Compton kids from the poor-get-poorer dis-educational system to which district officials have condemned them.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
How nice. Simone praising the “sneaky back-door” antics of Ben Austin & Co. That speaks volumes for the character of all who were participating in, and backing “Plan B”.
Alas, Simone was salivating over this “sneaky back-door” tactic in vain as it turned out.
In the coming fall, the public finally got definitive proof that the Parent Revolution was not on-the-level. Only 10% (or less, depending on reports) of the parents opted to go to the new Celerity school—far short of the 70% Parent Revolution organizers—and writers like Simone Wilson—had been telling everyone were clamoring for the Celerity takeover.
Also, U-Haul must not have been pleased as Celerity had to cancel any trucks they had booked for invasion and exfiltration of McKinley.
At about the same time, Parent Revolution’s Ben Austin was removed from the State Board of Ed. by California’s newly elected Governor Jerry Brown.
In the face of this public relations fiasco—where it became obvious to all that only a mere 10% (or less) of McKinley parents actually wanted Celerity taking over their school, after all—Ben Austin and Parent Revolution put out this new version:
http://parentrevolution.org/content/mckinley-elementary
– – – – – – – –
PARENT REVOLUTION: “We have also been very public about the fact that the McKinley campaign was not a perfect campaign… the vast majority of the signatures gathered were ultimately gathered by our organizers, not by the parents themselves.”
– – – – – – –
Oh really, Ben?
That’s most certainly NOT what you and your cohorts were saying back December 2010. No, you said it was the parents doing everything, with only minimal Parent Revolution assistance… or again, that’s what Parent Revolution claimed.
Their new story was that Parent Revolution had recently “became very public about” all this… yeah… but this was ONLY AFTER people like Robert Skeels exposed them, and the shenanigans in which they were engaged.
Also, do you remember when Parent Revolution
started a “Debunk Diane Ravitch’s Lies” truth
site?
Wow… they needed to do that to counter the
$8 billion that Parent Revolution’s enemies had
spent.
—————————————————
DIANE RAVITCH:
“Parent Revolution, funded with millions of dollars by the Walton Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Broad Foundation, has decided to create a ‘truth site.’
“The story says:
“ ‘The site’s initial focus will be on attempting to debunk claims made by NYU education historianDiane Ravitch, who earlier this month quasi-apologized for calling Parent Revolution head Ben Austin “loathsome” and on Friday penned another critique of the parent trigger (which as of this afternoon has already attracted 60+ comments).”
“Apparently Ben Austin’s ‘open letter’ to me on Huffington Post didn’t do the job of explaining his views.
“Nor did my response to him on this blog satisfy Ben.
“So, let’s see how much energy Parent Revolution is willing to devote to “debunking” my claims. Will Ben Austin bring himself to say the name ‘Irma Cobian’? That’s the principal whose reputation and career Ben Austin decided to destroy. In his very lengthy letter to me, he did not mention Irma Cobain. Please keep her front and center. She is the victim. Not Ben Austin. Not me. Irma Cobian, a real person, respected by her staff, doing her best, roadkill for Parent Revolution.”
There’s a great article about the Adelanto PARENT REVOLUTION fiasco.
Since I’m too lazy to excerpt it, I’m going to post the whole thing BELOW.
I love the last paragraph where the writer discovers an interesting advertisement:
— the charter company taking over as a result of the Parent Trigger—you know, the private, union-free company that’s going to be the savior of the Desert Trails sstudents—-is advertising for teachers who only have a substitute credential… (the traditional public school the Parent Trigger eliminated and replaced requires teachers with a full credential.)
(****WARNING**** this is verrrrrryyyy long, so you may want to skip this and / or read it in its entirety later)
Here’s the link:
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/parent-trigger/7b67c93a41fdc20f1fdf095032cde124246e59e2/
Here’s the text:
– – – – – – – – – – –
The Bitcoinfinger Issue :: April 16, 2013
Pulling the Trigger
By Yasha Levine
When NSFWCORP sent me to Victorville this January, I little expected that the neighboring town of Adelanto would become ground zero for a fight between billionaires like Anschutz on one side, and poor, vulnerable minority parents and children on the other.
I first heard about the fight through the local right-wing paper, the Victorville Daily Press, which gleefully announced on its front page that a local school, Desert Trails Elementary, had just made history as the first school in the nation to be privatized under California’s new “parent trigger” law. The paper described the takeover as “promising a fresh start to the failing elementary school,” and claimed it had received widespread support from parents.
The national press gushed in similarly glowing terms. The LA Weekly described the Adelanto privatization as an “historic moment for the education-reform movement picking up steam across the nation.” The New York Times dutifully compared the takeover of Desert Trails to “Won’t Back Down.” An “issues” movie starring Face of Indie Maggie Gyllenhaal, “Won’t Back Down” promotes the parent-trigger law as a panacea for America’s public-education problems, one that “empowers” parents to fight back against self-interested public school teachers and their union.
All in all, everyone agreed that this takeover of Desert Trails Elementary represented a triumphant moment for parents and their children, a victory for the people over rapacious elementary school teachers and their unions.
But something didn’t seem right about this story — it was too pat, too much like a triumph-of-the-spirit Disney tale, too much like Maggie’s movie. So I made some calls and started spending some time in Adelanto, to find out what really went on there.
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Motorists entering the City of Adelanto are greeted with a big blue sign that reads: “The City With Unlimited Possibilities.” It’s not clear who came up with this slogan, or when.
But, these days, the sign is a cruel joke.
Founded in 1915 by the guy who invented the modern electric iron, Adelanto never amounted to much. Mostly it served as pit stop and junkyard to a nearby George Air Force Base. The base closed more than a decade ago, and home values have collapsed since the last real estate bubble popped. Entire neighborhoods emptied out, and building companies went belly up, leaving behind half-finished “master planned communities” that still stand there, desiccating in the dry heat. Signs advertise brand-new three-bedroom McTractHomes for zero down and $800 a month.
Today, Adelanto is the end of the line. A poor, desert town, the city serves as a dumping ground for low-income minority families who have been squeezed out of the Greater Los Angeles-Orange County region and pushed out over the San Bernardino Mountains into the bleak expanse of the Mojave Desert, where housing is dirt cheap and jobs almost non-existent.
The numbers tell the story: Of the 32,000 people who call Adelanto home, one out of three are below the poverty line. Per-capita income is just under $12,000 — nearly three times lower than the California average, and about as much as the average person earns in Mexico. There are almost no jobs here, and Starbucks ranks among the city’s top ten employers.
Nearly two-thirds of the population is Latino, many of them undocumented. Another one in five are African-American. Then there is the 5 percent of the population that the census bureau classifies as “institutionalized,” which is nothing but a wishy-washy bureaucratic way of saying that 1 out of 20 Adelanto residents is currently rotting in jail — a rate five times higher than the national average. Adelanto does not have its own high school, but dropout rates in the neighboring suburb of Victorville, also hard-hit by the subprime bubble, are among the worst in the state — hovering somewhere around 50%. If you stand at the city’s welcome sign, you can just make out its three major prison facilities: a giant federal prison complex to the north, a brand-new state prison to the west, and just north of that, California’s largest private immigrant deportation facility. The last was built recently by Geo Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison contractor.
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I would spend several weeks talking to the parents of children enrolled in Desert Trails Elementary, meeting with them in local taco joints and strip mall diners and talking about what happened. As I had suspected, their version of events turned out not to match the Disney version in national papers.
The parents told me that a Los Angeles-based group calling itself “Parent Revolution” organized a local campaign to harass and trick them into signing petitions that they thought were meant for simple school improvements. In fact those petitions turned out to be part of a sophisticated campaign to convert their children’s public school into a privately-run charter — something a majority of parents opposed. At times, locals say, the “Parent Revolution” volunteers’ tactics were so heavy-handed in gathering signatures that they crossed the line into harassment and intimidation. Many parents were misled about what the petition they signed actually meant. Some told me that the intimidation with some of the undocumented Latino residents included bribery and extortion.
They first noticed something was up in the summer of 2011, when small groups of parents decked out in Parent Revolution T-shirts started appearing around town, going door to door to speak to parents of Desert Trails Elementary kids, spreading the word that they were organizing a “parent union” to try to improve the quality of their children’s education.
At that, local parents who’d been involved in school affairs started to grow suspicious. According to several I spoke to, two of the leading members of this new “parent union” had previously served in the school’s Parent Teacher Association, and had resigned amid accusations of improprieties.
Why would they suddenly start a new parent organization? Spite? Revenge? And what exactly was Parent Revolution?
Parents didn’t get much of a chance to ponder these questions. As soon as summer vacation ended, the parent union began to reveal its true function. Adelanto was to become the first victim of a giant corporate push to privatize public schools.
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Put simply, a parent trigger law allows a group of parents to hand over their kids’ public schools to private contractors, and then allows these new private contractors to tear up teacher union contracts and fire or hire as they see fit — all while receiving taxpayer money to fund their private-charter school business.
The law works like this: If enough parents sign a trigger petition (representing more than 50% of the number of students in the school), they can fire its principal, lay off unionized teachers or hand it over to a private charter school company.
According to a recent investigation by FryingPanNews, Parent Revolution has received $14.8 million since its founding in 2009. Almost half of that — $6.3 million — came from the Walton Family Foundation, which has long bankrolled the war on unions and public education. The rest of Parent Revolution’s cash came from more liberal sources, including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Broad Foundation, each of which has given about $1.5 million to the group.
As reported in Dissent, these three foundations — Gates, Walton and Broad — spend roughly $4 billion a year to hand public K-12 education to the private sector, giving them increasing leverage over a sector that’s worth $500 billion per year.
Parent Revolution is a direct outgrowth of the charter school industry. Ben Austin, the outfit’s leader, previously headed a large charter-school firm called Green Dot Schools, whose backers overlap nicely with Parent Revolution’s backers — Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Eli Broad, Phillip Anschutz, and others. Austin’s replacement at Green Dot Schools is a former partner at Bain, Mitt Romney’s old firm.
Parent Revolution’s Ben Austin has described the law as “a groundbreaking and historic new policy” that will “transform public education,” and has dressed it up in the language of parents’ rights. ALEC, which adopted a version of the Parent Empowerment Act as a model for “parent trigger” legislation, described it in similar terms, saying that it “places democratic control into the hands of parents at school level.”
And yet, for all this empowerment, parents have never tried to pull the trigger on their own, not without Parent Revolution coming into town and applying pressure, intimidation and bait-and-switch techniques on unsuspecting parents.
In recent years, Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush, has turned into the most eloquent and forceful critic of charter schools and voucher programs. She tells me that California’s parent trigger law was not designed for the parents’ sake. Instead, Ravitch describes it as “a stealth tactic by charter advocates to gain a larger market share by duping parents.”
Charter school advocates like Parent Revolution and so-called “school reformers” like Michelle Rhee (recently discredited in a series of test-score cheating scandals and for trying to conceal the wealthy Wall Street funders of her “StudentsFirst” pro-privatization group) front for some of the world’s biggest, most powerful corporate figures. Potentates from the extraction industry, Wall Street hedge fund tycoons and others have invested huge sums into privatizing America’s public education system. For them, it is a public trough filled with up to $1 trillion just waiting to be converted into private profit, whatever the consequences for children.
Former “Junk Bond King” and convicted felon Michael Milken, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr are just some of the names betting heavily on privatized education. Black Rock, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and just about every other big name in Wall Street and private equity are in on the action, as well.
An investigation by the Huffington Post revealed that Michelle Rhee’s secretive, well-funded pro-privatization group StudentsFirst is backed by hedge fund tycoon David Tepper, who pocketed $2.2 billion in 2012 alone. Another backer is billionaire John Arnold, a former Enron trader who reportedly gave Rhee’s group “tens of millions” of dollars. Arnold, a self-described “libertarian” who profited heavily from Enron’s manipulation of the California energy markets, is funding the drive to slash California teachers’ pensions through his front-group, The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.
Just last month, Rhee joined the “Parent Revolution” group for a joint march in support of parent trigger and charter schools in Los Angeles. It’s a small world, school privatization, and its inhabitants have very deep pockets.
So these are some of the people behind the parent trigger law, which should indicate what it’s really about. The law will give these corporate interests a new weapon with which to privatize public education and access to a virgin vein of taxpayer dollars. Best of all, the trigger law makes it look as if parents are choosing to privatize public education out of their own free will. They were given a choice, and they put their trust in the private sector.
California is just the beginning. In the past few years, parent trigger laws have popped in seven states so far, and another dozen others are currently deliberating similar legislation.
But this kind of reform did not come easy. The parent trigger law was conceived as a con, but that didn’t mean that parents would fall for it automatically. That’s what Parent Revolution learned when it used the trigger law for the first time shortly after it passed in 2010.
Parent Revolution first tried using the law to take over a school in Compton in 2010, organizing a small clique of local Compton parents and waging a blitz fake-grassroots campaign to dupe parents into pulling the trigger on their kids’ school. But the campaign crashed and burned after parents and teachers pushed back hard. Compton parents accused Parent Revolution organizers of deception and harassment, and many of those who signed the petition eventually rescinded their signatures. “They told me the petition was to beautify the school,” one parent told the Los Angeles Times. “They are misinforming the parents, so I revoked my signature.”
To fight back, Parent Revolution called in a favor from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Chicano community organizer turned charter school advocate. Villaraigosa, who has stacked the LA County Board of Education with former employees of the Eli Broad empire, counter-accused Compton parents of harassment, and equated them with union-busters:
“It’s particularly alarming to see these parents resort to the kind of intimidation, the kind of smear campaigning, the kind of rumor-mongering that is all too reminiscent of the way bad employers try to intimidate working people.”
But it was no use. Even Compton — a city synonymous with gangs, poverty and violence — was neither poor enough, nor isolated enough to take Parent Revolution’s “power empowerment” program without a fight.
An isolated desert suburb about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, home to some of the poorest families in Southern California, would prove to be much more vulnerable to the tactics used by Parent Revolution.
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So they went to Adelanto. By enlisting local parents to canvass the neighborhood speaking out against the teacher’s union, Parent Revolution had already laid the groundwork. The “parent union” was a classic PR strategy, designed to create a rift between parents and the local teachers’ union. Parent Revolution’s aims were initially vague, except on one issue, which was demonizing the teachers union. Parent Revolution volunteers all told the same story: The school’s problems were the fault of bad, self-interested teachers, who cared more about their own pay benefits and job security than about educating the children. As the group’s website explained, “Our schools are failing our children because they are not designed to succeed. They have been designed to serve adults, not children.”
In September 2011, the local “parent union” was joined by the big guns: a troop of trained, experienced organizers sent in from Parent Revolution’s main office in Los Angeles.
Parent Revolution’s “lead organizer,” a former Green Beret by the name of Alfonso Flores, headed the campaign. Flores is not just any old organizer. He has worked as a public school teacher, run a Los Angeles charter school called Global Education Academy and is considered an expert in the field of applying free-market solutions to public education. In 2008, Flores led a panel at a seminar hosted by the Pacific Research Institute, a GOP think-tank linked to ALEC and the Cato Institute, and backed by major oil, tobacco, pharmaceutical and health insurance firms. (Pacific Research Institute flacks served on President George W. Bush’s environmental advisory panel in 2001.) The same year that it hired Flores to offer advice on how charter-school administrators could improve student behavior, Pacific Research Institute was lobbying hard against the healthcare reform and a government-run medical system, saying that it would inevitably result in Soviet-style shortages and the rationing of medical care.
Alfonso Flores set up a command bunker in a rented home just a block away from the school, on Delicious Street. Parent Revolution advisors and organizers sent in from LA continuously came to the house to hold strategy sessions, instruct trigger parents on everything from collecting signatures to handling the media. They used it as a forward operating base to launch tactical operations into the community. Hanging in the living room and overlooking all this activity, was a black-and-white poster depicting Parent Revolution’s mission and raison d’etre. The top part of the poster showed a big black fish eating a group of disorganized little fish. This was the “system” eating the “parents.” Below it was another big black fish, but this time it was being chased by an even bigger fish made of organized smaller fish. This was the local “parent union” eating “Desert Trails Elementary School.”
Devouring a public school—nothing better describes what Parent Revolution was doing in Adelanto. Over the next three months, packs of trigger activists and organizers would spill out of the house and swarm the neighborhood, aggressively pushing parents to sign some sort of petition that they barely bothered to explain.
First, they started with the school. Parent Revolution’s lead organizer Alfonso Flores led the pack.
One mother described the group’s aggressive petition drive in a signed statement filed with the Adelanto School District. I was able to obtain this statement from anti-trigger parents:
“The man came to my car over several days and constantly begged me to sign the petition when I asked to get it & turn it in later he stated that he couldn’t do that so after several minutes of harassment I gave in and signed the petition unaware of the consequences. He was very pushy & persistent. I wish I that I wan’t intimated [sic] by him & that I didn’t sign the petition.”
It got so bad that parents had to ask the school to deploy more security to protect them from Parent Revolution’s pushy canvassers.
“They were there every day, every morning and every afternoon,” says Maggie Flamenco, a mother of two special-needs children enrolled in Desert Trails, and a member of the Adelanto’s Special Education Parent Advisory Committee. We met at a Denny’s just around the corner from Desert Trails Elementary. The way Flamenco describes it, the trigger campaign was much more like a low-intensity war designed to break the parents’ will using intimidation, harassment and deception, than anything like the “empowerment” that the Parent Trigger advocates claimed it was.
She described to me how Parent Revolution volunteers would block cars with their bodies to get the parent driver to sign their parent –trigger petition; how they’d knock on windows, hound and follow parents when they dropped their kids off and when they picked them up after school. They were so persistent about it that it got to the point where parents like Maggie dreaded going to collect their own children.
Maggie told me she had to file a police report against a Parent Revolution activist because the man kept harassing her every time she came to pick up and drop off her kids at school. “Because I was one of the parents who did not want to sign… he blocked the car with his body and prevented me from leaving, writing my writing my plates down, taking pictures of my plates, taking pictures of the kids…it was just harassment.”
The harassment worked. Maggie didn’t sign the petition, but she did withdraw her kids from the school because of the stress and fear they were suffering from the repeated harassment.
“Their anxiety was high. Their teachers and aids were saying, ‘The school is gonna be done.’ They were scared,” she explained. “The doctor put them on a home hospital due to their anxiety. All this stuff with their school they were just freaking out that it was going to get taken over, that they are not going to have their aides, their teachers anymore. They are autistic so they don’t understand anything. They told me the other day, ‘I hope they don’t close the school when we’re in there.’”
This was clearly no longer a grassroots campaign run by local parents, nor was its mission to empower the community. Its primary goal now was to force as many parents as possible to sign “parent trigger” petitions.
Parent Revolution operatives followed people into local businesses, harassed them with constant phone calls and staked out people’s homes. One father got a panicked call from his child, who was scared because a man was lurking outside their home for a long time. Panicking, the dad rushed home, only to find a Parent Revolution organizer camped outside waiting for a signature.
Some Desert Trails parents noticed that Parent Revolution organizers had somehow obtained contact information that was not publicly listed, including cell phone numbers and addresses, and worried that the group had somehow illegally accessed their children’s confidential school records.
One mother outlined her suspicions in a signed statement later filed with the Adelanto School District:
“I received a call on my cell phone, and the parents came to my house twice. My cellphone is not public record and when I questioned the gentleman on the phone how he received my cell # the call disconnected. I then called back and did not receive and [sic] answer. I am also wondering how they knew my address. I feel there has been a breech in confidentiality of my 2 childrens [sic] record at the school … I am now afraid they have my childrens [sic] Social Security numbers.”
Parent Revolution used every debt-collector trick in the book, purposefully making life so miserable for parents that they would agree to sign just to get the canvassers off their backs. “Most of the reason the parents signed was because they were tired of not answering their door, of hiding from them,” said Maggie Flamenco.
Lori Yuan, a mother of two kids Desert Trails and a member of Adelanto’s planning commission, who would later lead the parent effort to resist Parent Revolution, agreed: “Most folks were duped and had no idea the consequences of this petition succeeding.”
Statements filed by parents with Adelanto’s school district all say pretty much the same thing: “We were duped and pushed.” Here are just a few examples:
“I was misled and told that we weren’t going to fight to be a charter school. They kept coming to my home and insisted I sign. I am upset thats not what I wanted for my students.”
“The petitioner kept coming to my doorstep, for many days, my wife told me not to sign it but I did because I felt harassed, and I wanted them to leave me alone. I don’t blame them I blame myself but I don’t agree with the petition now that I understand it.”
Just a few months before Parent Revolution showed up in town, there had been a huge scandal involving the Adelanto Charter Academy, a new publicly-funded charter school that embraced “conservative and Christian values” run by a couple of businessmen with deep connections to San Bernardino County’s GOP political machine. At the time, it was Adelanto’s only charter school. District officials started to notice something was up when they discovered administrators didn’t bother with even the most basic bookkeeping, and a deeper audit revealed that the school failed to meet basic education requirements, served tainted food and functioned as little more than a shell company that diverted public education funds into private bank accounts and political campaigns.
On top of all that, it turned out that the charter school was set up with the help of San Bernardino County Supervisor Bill Postmus, who crashed and burned in that special way only evangelical closet-cases manage to pull off: he was arrested for possession of meth while under investigation for a long list of corrupt dealings and kickbacks. Right before the Adelanto Charter School scandal broke, Postmus pleaded guilty to fourteen felonies, including bribery, conspiracy, extortion and the misappropriation of public funds.
It was big, ugly mess, and it did not make charter schools look very good. So Parent Revolution canvassers did what any honest community organizer would do: they pretended that their petition had nothing to do with charter schools.
“When Parent Revolution came to my door, they explained they wanted to make the school better, get water fountains, the playground set and making sound like they were gonna do a makeover, instead of a takeover,” said Eleanor Medina, who moved to Adelanto 10 years ago from Buena Park in small city in Orange County to retire, and has been helping raise her grandchildren. “They also said that everyone was going to get a computer.”
Other parents report they were told pretty much the same thing: Parent Revolution promised that they were not trying to convert Desert Trails into a charter school, and reassured parents current teachers would not be fired. Organizers also made the dubious claim that if the petition went through, each child was going to receive a laptop to own.
For parents who insisted on giving the petition a closer read, Parent Revolution used a crude bait-and-switch technique: canvassers asked the parents to sign two completely separate petitions, and invoked two different clauses of the parent trigger law. The first petition sought only to introduce reforms and give parents greater power over administering the school. The second petition invoked the full privatization package: firing all the teachers and handing the school over to a private charter- school company (the specific company would be chosen at a later time).
Two petitions? Well, Parent Revolution’s reps explained that the second petition would never be used officially, but only employed as a negotiating tool — a prop that could be used to threaten the school district if it attempted to stall implementing the demands of its first petition.
Chrissy Alvarado, a mother of two students at Desert Trails, says she always thought the two petitions were just a ruse, a way to sow confusion. “They never explained themselves enough for us to understand anything,” she said. “In reality, it was all about the charter.”
She was right.
In early January, Parent Revolution activists announced that they had collected signatures representing 70 percent of the students, and proceeded to submit the petition calling for full charter conversion.
The news outraged Desert Trails parents, but it finally spurred them into action, and the small group emerged to try and stop the petition.
Eleanor Medina couldn’t believe they had the gall to dupe parents like that: “You’re talking about my kids’ education. They need to go to college. Pretty soon they’re gonna need to go to college just to get a Jack in the Box job.”
“We didn’t know what we could do, because no one had done this before,” Lori explained as she met me for coffee, before heading to an Adelanto planning commission meeting. “We were in overdrive, 24 hours a day, doing nothing but research, pounding the pavement, driving around, having meetings, going crazy. Literally nothing else in life existed how do we beat this, what do we do.”
Very quickly it became apparent a whole lot of parents had been duped, and would happily rescind their signatures if they got a chance.
“We called hundreds of lawyers, but no one would help us. They didn’t even refer us to the right lawyer who could help us,” Lori explained, shaking her head. “Meanwhile, Parent Revolution had a slick legal team working for them pro bono.”
Anti-trigger parents were grasping at straws, and felt totally alone. Local teachers couldn’t help them; they were afraid to even talk. The union told them to stay quiet because it was afraid of legal action from Parent Revolution. Anti-trigger parents say that, in the end, the only real help came from California’s teachers union, but even that was mostly restricted to legal advice on how to properly collect statements from parents so that Parent Revolution would not be able to challenge them in court.
“We got no real help from anyone,” said Lori. And that included the press, which tended to smear anti-trigger parents as union stooges and thugs out to intimidate low-income minorities into submission. LA Weekly ran a series of particularly nasty articles, specifically attacking Lori for doing the bidding of corrupt teachers who care more about “cushy union contracts” than their students’ education. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial features editor (and son of raging neocon Douglas Feith) David Feith published a string of pieces attacking the efforts of anti-trigger parents to push back against Parent Revolution’s astroturf campaign. Feith smeared their genuine grassroots organizing as a “systematic and legally questionable pressure campaign waged against parents” on behalf of the “hostile unions” and the “education establishment.”
Lori started to feel surrounded by intrigue. She says, “I would do these interviews with these people and reporters and journalists and bloggers. Anyone that would call I would talk to because I need to get this information out because people need to know this. And then I’d get the article and I’d be like this has nothing to do fucking do with what I said. I got to the point when I started thinking, do they — and by they, I mean Parent Revolution — do they own everything? Do they own the fucking editors, do they own the newspapers?”
Lori’s paranoia-sense was not that far off the mark.
Parent Revolution might not own the press, but the people and companies who fund groups like Parent Revolution and stand to profit from school privatization, well . . . they quite literally do own the press. Sometimes they are the press.
Among the major investors in privatizing education is Rupert Murdoch.
It was Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox that put out “Won’t Back Down,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s parent trigger film bankrolled by Phillip Anschutz, the right-wing oil billionaire who funds everything from anti-gay ballot initiatives and Christian Identity, to teaching creationism in schools. Anschutz is also a major backer of ALEC, the right-wing lobby group that pushed through the “Stand Your Ground” vigilante laws that resulted in Trayvon Martin’s murder. ALEC is also spearheading “Parent Trigger” laws in states across the country.
Murdoch recently announced his plans for aggressive expansion into the private primary education sector, saying, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”
Murdoch’s News Corp media empire is vast. The Washington Post Company — which owns The Washington Post, Slate.com, Foreign Policy magazine, among other news media holdings — relies heavily on its for-profit education subsidiary, Kaplan Inc, which generated 62% of the company’s revenue in 2012. Then there’s The Financial Times and The Economist, both are which are owned by Pearson, a multinational mega-media company that’s also heavily involved in private education.
Incidentally, all three companies have been members of ALEC’s pro-charter Education Task Force, which has been at the forefront of the effort to enact legislation to privatize public education in states all across America.
But for Adelanto residents, the centralization and corruption of news media was a bigger issue. The main concern for Lori and other anti-trigger parents was to collect as many rescissions as possible.
As they made their rounds, they found that the vast majority of parents they spoke to had had no idea that the petition would convert the school to a charter. The magnitude of Parent Revolution’s deception came as a shock. “In our canvassing to gain rescissions, there were maybe three people or households that I can recall that actually said, ‘Yep, we know exactly what this petition will do, we want the teachers fired’,” explained Lori.
Over the course of two months, anti-trigger parents managed to collect somewhere around 116 rescission statements.
As the group collected rescissions, talked to parents and educated as many as possible about what Parent Revolution’s intended to do with Desert Trails, tension in the community continued to mount. There was real anger and bitterness. Friends and neighbors suddenly became mortal enemies, and even kids started getting drawn into the conflict.
Desert Trails’ principal David Mobley told the Los Angeles Times that kids whose parents were on opposite sides of the trigger issue had started fighting at school. “It’s sad because these kids used to be really good friends. Now these kids have become pawns in a political mess, and it just breaks my heart,” Mobley said.
Chrissy Alvarez’s best friend — I’ll call her Mary (not her real name) — was one of the leading members of the trigger group. Chrissy explained that their friendship turned into hostile after she realized that Mary had been an accomplice to Parent Revolution’s swindle and knowingly helped sell out her community — something Chrissy could not forgive.
Why would Mary do the bidding of a corporate front group, pouring her energy and time into privatizing her kid’s school?
Turns out that Mary, who had a second-grade daughter in Desert Trails, had good reason to join the campaign. Chrissy says she had serious problems with her immigration status and was facing deportation. Parent Revolution promised to make those problems disappear. It was an offer than must have been hard to resist: help a group pull off its trigger campaign or face deportation and the possibility that she’d never see your family again.
“No shit?!” I blurted out. We were sitting in a taco shop in a strip mall on the edge of town with a couple of other parents. We were in a family setting, and there were kids around. But I couldn’t restrain the profanity. I was too shocked. I just couldn’t believe it.
“Yes! She told me! She was my best friend,” Chrissy explained. “We were still best friends until the time she submitted the petition. And I told her to her face: You guys have been bs’ing. These were bought with citizenship. She had already signed two documents that she was supposed to leave the country years ago. She was in a heap of trouble. She had gone to a lawyer, who told her that there was no way around this other than you going back to Mexico.”
I recognized the woman’s name. She had been interviewed by cable news networks, and appeared in dozens of news stories talking about parent empowerment and the need for parents to take an active role in their children’s education. She even squirted a couple of tears for reporters once.
Dangling citizenship in front of desperate mother facing deportation—this is what parent empowerment looks like to the billionaires trying to privatize public education. And it appears she was not the only one…
Multiple sources told me that Parent Revolution had propositioned other undocumented Latino immigrants, promising to help resolve their immigration status in return for their support of the parent trigger petition. Help with immigration in exchange for a single signature? It’s an offer that many families must have found difficult to turn down.
I made multiple to attempts to verify these allegations. But no one would talk or even communicate with me — on or off the record. Through a third-party, I was told that they feared retribution from Parent Revolution and did not want to put their families in danger. “One, they are tired. Two, they are scared. Three, they are thinking: ‘What’s the point The school is already gone’,” explained a parent who had tried to arrange a meeting.
They were scared. And who could blame them?
As undocumented immigrants, they had nothing to gain by talking to me. On the contrary, they had everything to lose. The sprawling private deportation facility located just a few miles north of the school, dedicated to corralling and booting out people just like them, served as a constant reminder of just how much they had to lose, and how easily deportation could happen to them. A speeding ticket is enough to initiate deportation these days, and it doesn’t matter if they have children or family: recent stats show that a quarter of people deported are parents with children who are U.S. citizens.
I could appreciate this kind of fear. My family fled the Soviet Union in 1989, and we spent seven nerve-racking months living in European refugee camps. We had no money, no citizenship and no idea about the future. I was just a kid, but I was deeply affected by the fear, anxiety and insecurity that dominated our lives. We certainly didn’t think we had any rights, or that we were entitled to anything. The most important thing was to keep your head down and not rock the boat.
No wonder Parent Revolution chose Adelanto. Out here it could act with near-impunity.
Even so, there was some pushback. Even the poor don’t like being ripped off.
Armed with the stack of rescissions collected by Lori and Chrissy, Adelanto’s school board invalidated 100 of the 466 original petition signatures submitted by trigger activists, bringing the number below the simple majority required by law. And so on March 2012, Adelanto’s school board unanimously voted to reject Parent Revolution’s petition on grounds it had failed to meet minimum signature requirements.
But it was a short-lived victory.
Parent Revolution lawyered up, and after a year of court battles, forced the Adelanto’s school district to accept the trigger petition. In the summer of 2012, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Steve Malone ruled that the school district had no right to reject the petition because California’s parent trigger law did not give it authority to rescind signatures. It was a bizarre decision, and didn’t seem to accord with the spirit and letter of California’s Parent Empowerment Law.
But was it valid?
That’s not clear. Adelanto’s cash-strapped school district didn’t appeal the decision. It simply didn’t have the resources to continue a lengthy court fight. Not that it would have continued to fight for very long, even if tired. Shortly after the decision, two parents who had been involved in Parent Revolution won spots on Adelanto’s school board, finally and totally tipping the board’s ideological balance in favor of charter school.
“I thought the ruling was crazy,” said Diane Ravitch. “If anything, it seems totally not to have empowered the parents, but to say: you mistakenly signed a petition and you can’t take your name off. That’s not parent empowerment, that’s parent deception.”
“It’s basically the taking of public property,” said Ravitch, unable to hide her annoyance with the claims made by trigger advocates. “In the nature of public education, people come and go. In the course of a few years, there is a lot of turnover in terms of who the parents are in a school. But they don’t own the school. The public owns the school. So you’re taking a public facility that was paid for by tax dollars and saying that they people who are using it right now this year have the right to turn it over a private operator.”
Imagine if we did the same thing with other public services like buses or libraries… “Take a vote of everyone who happens to be in a public library at any given moment and say we want to hand it over to the Library Corporation of America to run for a profit.”
But the reality was even worse than that.
On October 18, Desert Trails parents met in a park adjacent to the school to vote and pick the specific charter company that would take control of the school. California’s Parent Empowerment Act allows only the parents who signed a trigger petition to cast a ballot in this vote, which meant that hundreds of parents should have shown up to make the decision, and to exercise their newfound empowerment. But in the end, only 53 ballots were cast — with 50 of them voting to give the contract to LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy, a small charter operator that runs one other school in a nearby town.
A decision made by 53 people in a town of 32,000? That’s less than 0.2% of the population. Parent empowerment indeed.
As this article goes to press, LaVerne Academy has posted a job ad looking to hire teachers for the newly rebranded Desert Trails Preparatory Academy. According to the ad, job seekers only need a substitute teachers permit to apply. Apparently that’s all that’s required to help improve education at a chronically struggling school.
Here’s a video that covers some of the same territory as Yasha Levine’s articles:
If you really want the truth about these privatizing bastards, watch this and share this:
Here’s some anti-Parent Trigger testimony
in front of the LAUSD School Board.
First, UTLA President Warren Fletcher (NOTE how pro-Parent Trigger Board Member Tamar Galatzan tries to prevent him Fletcher from speaking):
Here’s UTLA Area Chair and LAUSD Parent Ingrid Villeda:
Whooops! I messed up on the link to UTLA President
Warren Fletcher’s speech attacking the Parent Trigger.
Here’s the real link:
Again, notice how pro-Parent Trigger Board Member Tamar Galatzan tries to keep Warren Fletcher from speaking against it.
In the manner of Paul Vallas out in Connecticut,
Ben Austin also has licensing problems.
Ben Austin was disbarred. Here’s the documentation:
Robert Skeels posted this about Parent Revolution’s Ben
Austin being disbarred and “not eligible to practice law
in California because of his failure to take a LEGAL
ETHICS course as part of Minimum Continuing Legal Education.”
Given the countless lies Austin throw around impuning
the “ethics” of others, I think it’s fair game to point Austin’s actual
and documented ethical lapse, and should be circulated
to as wide an audience as possible.
Here’s the link:
http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2011/11/schools-matter-parent-trigger-charlatan.html
and here’s text with Robert Skeels’ take (in
Robert’s inimitable prose):
– – – – – – – – – – –
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Schools Matter:
Parent Trigger charlatan Ben Austin
booted off The State Bar of California
First published on Schools Matter on November 9, 2011
“Making students accountable for test scores works well on
a bumper sticker and it allows many politicians to look good
by saying that they will not tolerate failure. But it represents
a hollow promise. Far from improving education, high-stakes
testing marks a major retreat from fairness, from accuracy,
from quality, and from equity.” — Sen. Paul Wellstone
(1944-2002) quoted on Alfie Kohn’s site
Defend Public Schools from Corporate Charter-Voucher
Charlatans like the foppish millionaire from Benedict Canyon,
parent trigger pusher Ben AustinApparently the right wingers
at Parent Revolution are immune to cognitive dissonance.
How else could we explain an organization that frequently
co-hosts meetings with The Heartland Institute calling the
National Educators Association (NEA) teabaggers?
In a desperate attempt to preserve George W. Bush’s
fringe right-wing No Child Left Behind legislation (NCLB),
the Parent Revolution reactionaries claim that anyone
opposed to Rod Paige’s vicious anti-public school
project are teabaggers, and somehow opposed
civil (read corporate) rights.
The basis for these wild and specious claims?
Parent Revolution doesn’t want to see what they term
“accountability” removed from ESEA/NCLB. Never mind
that NCLB’s false forms of accountability were never
intended to do anything other than make it easy for
the neoliberal consensus in Washington to push the
corporate agenda.
That agenda includes forced school closures,
reconstitutions, and ultimately the privatization of
the whole system for the benefit and profits of Wall
Street hucksters like Whitney Tilson, real estate
moguls like Eli Broad, and convicted predatory technology
monopolists like Bill Gates. Indeed, in defending NCLB, Parent
Revolution wants to maintain the standardized testing status quo.
All their astroturf blather about “accountability” got me thinking.
When I think of paragons of accountability, Ben Austin and
Parent Revolution are poles apart from those thoughts in every
sense. Let’s look at the facts. California Parent Trigger author
Austin was under investigation by the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission
(Case # 2010-36) because he was collecting a check at
the City Attorney’s Office while at the same time he was a
full time charter school advocate (and part time Green Dot consultant)
at Los Angeles Parents Union (aka LAPU or Parent Revolution).
Besides double dipping, he used his city employee connections to host closed meetings with his political connections garnered from his City job, like with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Those connections also brought lucrative business to his wife, Tracy Austin, who makes a fortune as a fundraising consultant for the very same politicians that gave Austin a pass on his ethics violations. Where was the accountability in all of that?
Of course, Austin’s conflicts of interest while working at the City
of Los Angeles pale in comparison to when arch-reactionary
Milton Freidman acolyte Schwarzenegger appointed the Parent
Revolution chief to the California State Board of Education (SBE)
to join the rest of the charter-voucher profiteers the SBE was stacked
with. Austin used his SBE seat to push through the California Charter
Schools Association agenda. He also used the seat to lobby for and
manipulate the implementation ofhis and Gloria
Romero’s hideous charter takeover law
entitled the Parent Empowerment Act, but most often
referred to by culturally loaded name Parent Trigger.
Austin’s unethical and illegal behaviors on the SBE earned
him a letter of censorship from the SBE demanding he stop
breaking the law. Where was the accountability in all of that?
Ben Austin’s latest foray into the realm of accountability?
Parent Trigger charlatan Ben Austin booted off State Bar of California
Here’s the link to the documentation of Ben Austin’s
disbarment”
I’ll reproduce my original take on this situation:
Parent Trigger author, Benjamin Benchley Lain Austin,
aka the Beverly Hills Barrister, aka the Foppish Millionaire
of Benedict Canyon is not eligible to practice law
in California because of his failure to take a
LEGAL ETHICS course as part of
Minimum Continuing Legal Education.
It’s no small irony that a charlatan that claims to know
so much about education doesn’t keep up with his own,
and more importantly, avoids taking classes on ethics!
I suppose we can’t blame Austin for avoiding classes on ethics,
since ethics are anathema to him. So next time the slick charter
school spokesman and his band of pernicious privatizers prattle
about accountability, we can remember that they have no
understanding of the word whatsoever.
Special thanks to Lisa for bringing Austin’s current State Bar of
California status to our attention.
Addendum: A reader chastised me for not noting another
form of accountability Parent Revolution astroturfers are guilty
of shirking, and that’s keeping their paperwork for tax exempt
status in order. I’m a little embarrassed that I neglected to
mention this, but inTrigger Happy Parent Revolution Refuses
Form 990 Request,we explored how the Parent Revolution
scoundrels weren’t accountable to the tax paying public.
The IRS sent me a letter explaining that they are investigating
these poverty pimps.
What else would you expect from crooks? Crony capitalism at its best.
Caroline Grannan and I have been exposing Parent Revolution (née LAPU) for as long as I can remember. Can’t speak for Caroline, but I sure wish I could have partaken in the phantasmagorical $8 billion Austin speaks of. Rita’s piece is wonderful, and it further illustrates pRev’s uncanny abilities of projection.
It’s testament to Ben Austin’s fine tuned practice of deception that he can be funded to the tune of millions by the wealthiest in the world, have deep alliances with powerful right-wing organizations like Heartland, ALEC, and DFER, have broad bipartisan support among neoliberal minded politicians, have entirely uncritical coverage (cheerleading really) in the corporate media, and have every other advantage imaginable, yet still paint himself and his organization as victims.
The real victims are the communities his organization has subjected to drive by privatization shootings, parent triggers blazing, sowing nothing but discord and divisions that will last for years, perhaps decades.
I tried to access the link at the beginning of the article “This is a hilarious description of a conference call” with “hilarious description” as the linking agent. This is what happens when I try to click through: “Error 404 – Not Found. You’ve reached a page or file that is no longer available”
Has this been pulled or is there another way to access this. I’d love to hear it.
I just checked. EdNext took down the post.
If anyone has the full printout of the parent listening in to the discussion of Parent Revolution between Ben Austin and George Miller, please print it in the comments, and I will blog the whole conversation.
Thanks!