Jeanne Melvin of Ohio’s Parent Education Partners has provided a useful guide to help readers discern the differences between actual parent groups and billionaire-funded astroturf parent groups.
Actual grassroots parent groups rely mostly on volunteers. They want to strengthen, preserve, and protect their public schools. They lobby the state legislature for more funding for public schools.
Astroturf parent groups are supported by billionaires, and they usually have a sizable staff of well-paid people. They exist to carry out the goals of their funders. They complain about how terrible the public schools are, and they advocate for charter schools and choice.
Melvin names names. She calls out “Parents Defending Education,” “Freedom Works,” “Parents Rights in Education,” and “Moms for Liberty,” among others. Some of they may be at work in your state, representing themselves as ordinary parents who want “change.” The change they want is privatization, not better public schools. Before you get involved in any parent group, find out what their budget is and who pays the salaries and how many leaders have salaries.
Follow the money is a good rule.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Ohio also has bills in the Ohio House and Senate attacking the teaching of divisive topics and promoting school choice policies to create or expand programs that give parents vouchers.”
It’s literally the only “work” ed reformers perform in Ohio. No one in Columbus has lifted a finger on behalf of public school students in this state in years. They do no work at all for our students other than policing them to ensure no one mentions racism and endless, endless revisions of testing and ranking scales.
Any Ohio resident can look at what ed reform has “delivered” for public school students. It’s a public record. There was one whole session where the only work they completed was a mandate to put posters up in public schools proclaiming that we trust God.
The public system stagnates and declines while ed reformers devote thousands of publicly-paid hours lobbying for bans on “critical race theory”. Public school parents should be outraged, but not abut the imaginary teaching of “critical race theory”. They should be outraged that they’re paying thousands of state employees who return no value at all to the public schools that serve 90% of students.
The absolute incoherence of ed reform should really be studied at some point.
The same lobbyists who push massive amounts of state funding to private schools that have no ed reform mandates at all want to install “the critical race theory police” in every public school.
This is never discussed in the echo chamber. There’s not even the slightest effort at consistency or coherence among and between their various political campaigns.
And they want to design a whole new privatized system for 50 million kids! They’re not even consistent across 3 paragraphs of ranting. Imagine what the privatized systems will look like. An incoherent, jumbled, poorly thought out mess.
MomsforLiberty.org has a whole tab on its website dedicated to “Stop CRT,” featuring a video with a “Black Mom” speaking against CRT.
astro-turf protesting: this is SUCH a big thing lately, the money comes in from big money interests and the protestors get organized into pulling off very specific actions. It feels so much like ALEC and all of the legislation they write and push into state house after state house.
Yep. The person I know who has recently started a “Moms for Liberty” chapter lives in NC and is a Trump apologist whose husband attended the Jan. 6 rally (although he did not go to the Capitol).
The words “liberty” and “freedom”, when used by conservatives, are defined in an article at Daily Beast, “Let’s call religious freedom by its real name: poisonous LGBTQ bigotry.”
The words “people of color” can be interchanged with LGBTQ.
Bravo for that
Everyone should do due diligence on any group with the words liberty, freedom or patriots in the title. Follow the money indeed as these are generally right wing buzz words.
Deer Mr. Koch and Mr. Gates: Me and Darlene is jist plane, ordnary foks, but we have a vision you NEED to no about. We beleeve that the future of these United States depends own testing studints fer whiteness and wealth. Thats why we started Patriot Parents for Liberty, Sometimes Refered To As Freedom. We aint parents arselfs, but thats on account a Darlene’s troubles, which I aint gonna go into rite now. Anyways, please send ur contribushuns ASAP, cause we got to make sure we stop all this teching of Critical Race Theory and Godless Socialism and get are studints back to doing there personalized larning test prep like Jesus intended.
Thanks for the laugh.
Bob, you should join National Black Supermom Revolution for Freedom First American Citizens United. They have the best door prizes.
Leftist Coastal Teacher, I don’t need any doors, but thank you anyway.
You already have a door? Huh. In that case, knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Olive.
Olive who?
Olive you.
Knock knock. LMAO!!! So funny, LeftistCoastal.
While in 1936, knock knock jokes were gaining tremendous popularity in the American Midwest, and people were forming knock knock clubs and thinking of jokes as a mental game, Sigmund Freud hated knock knock jokes and wrote that the use of puns was a psychological condition. Freud, the Oedipus of psychology, was also attracted to his mother and fascinated by an item of her lingerie. It was a Freudian slip.
So, two psychoanalysts meet on the street.
“Funny I should run into you,” says one. “I just had the weirdest experience with a Freudian slip.”
“Oh really? Vell, tell me about it,” said the other.
The first says, “OK. I was having dinner with my mother, and I meant to say, ‘Could you pass the hot cross buns,’ and instead I said, ‘How come you ruined my life, you bi-ch.'”
When you say one thing and mean the mother!!!! LOL. That’s funny.
Makes sense. A Freudian slip is when you say one thing and mean the mother.
Knock knock. Who’s there? It’s not your mother because she never knocks.
You know why there are no knock knock jokes about liberty, don’t you? Freedom rings.
And that’s what this is all about, the importance of grass style, roots style groups like Freedom Parents for America Choice of Freedom in guiding the future of America. America!!!!!! FREEDOM!!!!!! Charter school laws that permit conflicts of interest and related party transactions!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You see what I did there, I turned the whole conversation into one big palindrome. I’ll take my door prize trophy now. You have one, I gather.
The psychoanalyst joke had me laughing pretty hard. TAGO!
One of my favorite jokes. I never tire of telling it.
Here’s the completely unbiased Scientists of Ed Reform holding yet another promotion and marketing event for charter schools:
“The 74
What’s next for charter schools in America? Join the discussion with experts on reinventing public education this Wednesday at 1 pm ET”
I mean, come on. Who is supposed to believe this is some kind of analytical exercise?
I don’t mind that they work exclusively for charter and private schools but can we please stop pretending this has anything at all to do with “improving public schools”?
Hire and elect these folks if you want charters and vouchers. If your interest is strong public schools hire someone else.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Do not trust an organization with a fancy-sounding patriot title if the money that supports it comes from billionaires. Most if not all billionaires cannot be trusted. They are billionaires because they worship at the altar of greed.
Remember when the whole ed reform echo chamber assured the public that vouchers were only for low income families?
“The State Representative for House District 91 in Indiana, Robert Behning, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Indiana’s expanded scholarship program, and current trends in school choice across the country.”
Not true and they knew it wasn’t true when they all repeated it.
When is this “movement” going to be held accountable for their repeated misleading of the public on their plans for privatization?
50 million children and families rely on public schools. We’re going to allow 5 billionaires and their employees to destroy an existing public system and replace it with their sloppily engineered ideological experiment?
Who loses if this grand experiment in free market ideology fails and we end up with a fragmented and lower quality privatized educational system? The lobbyists and politicians and paid cheerleaders who sold it to the public as “an option” without any concern or thought at all to the students who attend public schools?
Wow- these social engineers better be as brilliant as they think they are- if we end up with a low quality junk contractor system someone is going to have to explain how that happened.
Not that it will affect any of them. The “CEO” of just one these ed reform lobbying groups makes half a million a year.
Awesome. Thank you, Ms. Bailey, Ms. Melvin, and Diane!
Based on the staff bio’s at the Freedom Works site, it appears unlikely that it is a bi-partisan group. One of the approx. 45 staff bio’s included, “When not fighting back the Left’s attempted takeover of our great country…”
Quite a few of the people listed were associated with Trump or the Heritage Foundation (Koch). There are staff who came via Turning Point USA, ALEC, Manhattan Institute, and the offices of DeSantis and Rick Scott. Quite a few of the staff list educations at evangelical or Catholic colleges. The Freedom Works President identifies Georgetown as his school.
Out of the approx. 45 photos, only 3 appear to be Black, all 3 are men. The bio of one of the 3 wasn’t available. Of the other two, one was the former President of the National Baptist Convention of America. The other lists his attendance at Boston University.
Oh, the irony, reportedly, Freedom Works gave an award to Rep. Louie Gohmert, “Freedom Fighter”. In April of this year, Gohmert joined the caucus that Marjorie Greene formed. The caucus heralds “Anglo Saxon political traditions”. Critics label it racist.
The founder of Parents Defending Education gave her spin in a podcast interview at Global Catholic Radio. An internet search shows that the co-founder of Moms for Liberty was featured in a segment at WDMC Divine Mercy Catholic Radio. A webpage which identifies as that of Parents Rights in Education promoted a program featuring a speech by Mary Rice Hasson, a fellow at EPPC “where she also directs the Catholic Women’s Forum.”
“The new official contents of sex education in Mexico: laicism in the crosshairs”, Epub 3-3-2021, at the Scielo site is really worth a read. It is broader in scope than the title suggests.
On that note though, there are a myriad of school reformers that are not funded by millionaires and can be harmful in in school reform and making progress. Imagine a small college city with grassroots organizations headed by college professors, without children or who send their children to private schools, that have hundreds of teens and young adults (under 24) at their disposal to canvas their cities. Science shows that the brain does not finish developing until 24/25. High school teachers may teach students until they’re 21- but it’s generally accepted that we are not to impose our political views on our students to mobilize politics. Pacs led by the professors I mentioned above, have no moral obligation to abide by such. They can even fund local elections and politicians and at anytime can mobilize hundreds of college students to canvas and fight on behalf of their beliefs, while having the means to send their children (if any) to private school or live in different districts. At a minimum, I suggest watching ‘Miss Virginia’ on Netflix. While some groups are fighting for a utopia that may or may not ever reach fruition- real children are suffering in bad schools- bad schools these ‘leaders’ children do not have to attend . So perhaps there are solutions that fall in this gray area- between the multimillionaires and the ‘grass roots’ efforts that we find endearing.
In Oklahoma we have PLAC that our state superintendent Joy Hofmeister and Oklahoma Education Association have used to influence to lobby our legislators. When you look at their admins on their parent pages you see it. Parents have been kicked out PLAC for questioning the status quo. Here in Tulsa we have Deborah Gist that you have spoken on many times Ms Ravitch. She has destroyed our district plummeting anything that was Tulsa Public Schools. PLAC defends the billionaires taking over TPS when parents question the insanity. I don’t agree with your sediment of Moms for Liberty who are truly only volunteers at local level. Parents have been ignored by bad superintendents like Deborah Gist.
Moms for Liberty is funded by Charles Koch.
Yes, I have tangled with Deborah Gist since the time she was State Commissioner in Rhodesia Island an approved the firing of the entire staff at Central High School in Central Falls.
I think Joy Hofmeister is wonderful. I hope she beats Gov Stitt when she runs against him.