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Bob Shepherd: A Review of a Review of “Slaying Goliath”

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2024 //
16

Forgive me for posting two reviews of my last book, which was published on January 20, 2020.

As I explained in the previous post, I did not see either of these reviews until long after they appeared in print. Slaying Goliath appeared just as COVID was beginning to make its mark, only a few weeks before it was recognized as a global pandemic. In writing the book, I wanted to celebrate the individuals and groups that demonstrated bravery in standing up to the powerful, richly endowed forces that were determined to privatize their public schools through charters or vouchers.

America’s public schools had educated generations of young people who created the most powerful, most culturally creative, most dynamic nation on earth. Yet there arose a cabal of billionaires and their functionaries who were determined to destroy public schools and turn them into privately-managed schools and to turn their funding over to private and religious schools.

Having worked for many years inside the conservative movement, I knew what was happening. I saw where the money was coming from, and I knew that politicians had been won over (bought) by campaign contributions.

Publishing a book at the same time as a global pandemic terrifies the world and endangers millions of people is bad timing, for sure.

But the most hurtful blow to me and the book was a mean-spirited review in The New York Times Book Review. The NYTBR is unquestionably the most important review that a book is likely to get. Its readership is huge. A bad review is a death knell. That’s the review I got. The reviewer, not an educator or education journalist, hated the book. Hated it. I found her review hard to read because she seemed to reviewing a different book.

I was completely unaware that Bob Shepherd reviewed the review. I didn’t see it until two or three years after it appeared. He wrote what I felt, but I, as the author, knew that it was very bad form to complain, and I did not.

So I happily post Bob Shepherd’s review of the review here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, DFER, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, History, Hoax, Lies, Network for Public Education, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Race to the Top, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Unions, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Surprise! MacKenzie Scott Gives $2 Million to Pro-Public School Austin Group

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2024 //
10

MacKenzie Scott received billions of dollars in Amazon stock when she divorced Jeff Bezos. Every year, she gives large awards to mostly worthy groups. Up to now, she has not made a gift to a group that supports public schools. She just gave $2 million to a great organization in Austin, Texas.

I confess that I washed my hands of MacKenzie Scott and her advisors in 2022 when I read that she gave $25 million to Teach for America. TFA undermines the teaching profession by sending in amateurs to teach for two years. Worse, TFA has no financial need. It has way more than $300 million in assets and a long list of overpaid executives. With so many worthy and penniless groups struggling to survive, why enrich a bloated TFA?

But here is a good grant, though much smaller than what Scott gave TFA:

Austin Voices for Education and Youth Receives $2 Million Gift From the Yield Giving Open Call


For Immediate Release


Contact: Allen Weeks, Executive Director, Austin Voices


March 19, 2024
–
Today, MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving announced Austin Voices for Education and Youth as one of the Yield Giving Open Call’s awardees working with people and in places
experiencing the greatest need in the United States.

Austin Voices received $2 million.


Founded in 2003, Austin Voices for Education and Youth creates community collaboration to
strengthen families, support kids and improve schools. We believe our public schools can serve
as powerful hubs for bringing neighborhoods, families and students together to increase equity
and achieve positive change.

More information about Austin Voices, including our most recent Impact Report, can be found at http://www.austinvoices.org.


In March 2023, Yield Giving launched an Open Call for community-led, community-focused
organizations whose explicit purpose is to enable individuals and families to achieve substantive
improvement in their well-being through foundational resources.


“Receiving this generous gift from MacKenzie Scott and Yield Giving will allow us to serve more families in Austin, help more kids succeed in schools, and expand the next generation of student and parent leaders. In a time when schools are squeezed for resources, this gift is tremendously helpful,” says Allen Weeks, Executive Director of Austin Voices for Education and Youth.


The Open Call received 6,353 applications and initially planned for 250 awards of $1 million
each. In the Fall of 2023, organizations top-rated by their peers advanced to a second round of
review by an external Evaluation Panel recruited for experience relevant to this cause, and
underwent a final round of due diligence. In light of the incredible work of these organizations,
as judged by their peers and external panelists, the donor team decided to expand the awardee
pool and the award amount.

“We are excited that our partnership with Yield Giving has resonated with so many organizations,” said Cecilia Conrad, CEO of Lever for Change. “In a world teeming with potential and talent, the Open Call has given us an opportunity to identify, uplift, and empower transformative organizations that often remain unseen.”


More information on the Yield Giving Open Call and other initiatives can be found at


http://www.leverforchange.org.


Yield Giving


Established by MacKenzie Scott to share a financial fortune created through the effort of
countless people, Yield Giving is named after a belief in adding value by giving up control. To
date, Yield’s network of staff and advisors has yielded over $16,500,000,000 to 1,900+ non-
profit teams to use as they see fit for the benefit of others.

To learn more, visit
http://www.yieldgiving.com.


Lever for Change


Lever for Change connects donors with bold solutions to the world’s biggest problems—
including issues like racial inequity, gender inequality, lack of access to economic opportunity, and climate change. Using an inclusive, equitable model and due diligence process, Lever for Change creates customized challenges and other tailored funding opportunities. Top-ranked teams and challenge finalists become members of the Bold Solutions Network—a growing global network that helps secure additional funding, amplify YIELD GIVING OPEN CALL AWARDEE TOOLKIT members’ impact, and accelerate social change. Founded in 2019 as a nonprofit affiliate of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Lever for Change has influenced over $1.7 billion in grants to date and provided support to more than 145
organizations. To learn more, visit http://www.leverforchange.org.

I spoke at Austin Voices for Education and Youth at a rally in front of the State Capitol in 2013
This is Allen Weeks

Mackenzie Scott should give $25 million to Austin Voices for Education and Youth and another $25 million to Community Coices for Education in ZHouston.

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform, Funding, Parent Groups, Resistance, Supporting public schools

Will Your Child’s Private Data Be Sold by the College Board?

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2024 //
11

In at least 20 states, the College Board collects and sells student data, despite state law forbidding it.

New York was one of those states, but activist parents led a years-long campaign to block the practice.

Recently, State Attorney General Letitia James won a judgment against the College Board for $750,000, and it agreed to stop monetizing student data in New York.

What happens in your state? Does your state protect the privacy of student data? Does it enforce the law?

Read Leonie Haimson’s account of how parents in New York pushed back and finally won. She includes a list of other states that protect student privacy.

She writes:

For decades, the College Board has been selling student names, addresses, test scores, and whatever other personal information that students have provided them,  when they sign up for a College Board account and the Student Search program. According to the AG press release, in 2019 alone, the College Board improperly shared the information of more than 237,000 New York students.  Since New York’s student privacy law, Education §2-d, calls for a fine of up to $10 per student, the penalty for selling student data during that one year alone could have equaled more than $2 million.

And yet for years, on their website and elsewhere, the College Board has also  falsely claimed they weren’t selling student data.  Instead they called  it “licensing” data, a distinction without a difference.  For years, they also claimed that they never sold student scores, though that was false as well, as they do sell student scores within a range.

The College Board urges millions of students to sign up for their Student Search program, with all sorts of unfounded and deceptive claims, including that it will help them get into better schools or receive scholarships.  The reality is that their personal data is sold to over 1,000 colleges, programs and other companies – the names of which they refuse to disclose — who use it for marketing purposes and may even resell it to even less reputable businesses.

Is your state one of them? Is the law enforced?

Categories Accountability, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Justice, New York, Parent Groups, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Mississippi: Parent Group Sues to Block Public Funds from Private Schools

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2024 //
7

In a court case in Mississippi, a parent group is seeking to prevent the state from disbursing public funds to private schools. The parents rely on a clause in the state constitution that explicitly bars public funding of private schools.

The story was reported by the Mississippi Free Press. SUPPORT LOCAL JOURNALISM!

Schoolchildren could be heard playing less than a block away from the Mississippi Supreme Court building as attorneys argued over whether federal public funds should be awarded to the state’s private schools on Tuesday.

Rob McDuff, a Mississippi Center for Justice attorney representing the pro-public education nonprofit organization Parents For Public Schools, called a prohibition in the state’s constitution on funding for private schools “an ironclad principle” that “doesn’t have exceptions” during oral arguments.

Mississippi Supreme Court justices Leslie King, Robert Chamberlain and David Ishee also heard arguments from attorneys representing the Mid-South Association of Independent Schools and the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office defending the use of COVID-19 relief funds for private schools..

Parents for Public Schools filed the initial lawsuit in June 2022 after state lawmakers passed bills appropriating $10 million to help MAIS member schools pay for broadband, water and infrastructure projects. One bill Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law created the Independent Schools Infrastructure Grant Program. The other allocated American Rescue Plan funds for the program. The Legislature had set the grant to go into effect on July 1, 2022.

The pro-public education organization’s lawyers argued that awarding the funds to private schools violates Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution and would give private schools a competitive advantage. That section of the Constitution says that “no religious or other sect or sects shall ever control any part of the school or other educational funds of this state; nor shall any funds be appropriated toward the support of any sectarian school, or to any school that at the time of receiving such appropriation is not conducted as a free school.”

“This is a case about a lot more than 10 million dollars,” Will Bardwell, an attorney from Democracy Forward, who also argued on behalf of Parents for Public Schools, told media after the Feb. 6 hearing. “This is a case about part of the Mississippi Constitution that reserves all of the state’s education funding for public schools. If we’re going to make exceptions to that for a 10 million dollar appropriation, then we can make exceptions about that for a 100 million dollar appropriation or a 500 million dollar appropriation. This is a simple case and it’s about a lot more than 10 million dollars.”

Please open the link to finish the story.

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Justice, Mississippi, Parent Groups, Privatization, Separation of church and state

CNN: “Moms for Liberty” Is Encountering Stiff Resistance

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2024 //
69

When an education story is featured by a major media outlet like CNN, you can bet it’s captured mainstream attention.

Many educators have worried about the pernicious agenda of “Moms for Liberty,” which arrived on the scene in 2021 with a sizable war chest.

What is that agenda? Defaming public schools and their teachers. Accusing them of being “woke “ and indoctrinating students to accept left wing ideas about race and gender. Banning books they don’t like. Talking about “parental rights,” but only for straight white parents who share their values.

M4L got started in Florida, as do many wacky and bigoted rightwing campaigns, but it has been shamed recently by the sex scandal involving one of its co-founders, Brigitte Ziegler. The two other co-founders dropped her name from their website, but the stain persists.

CNN reports that this rightwing group is encountering stiff opposition from parents who don’t share their agenda and who don’t approve of book banning.

The story begins:

Viera, FloridaCNN —

In Florida, where the right-wing Moms for Liberty group was born in response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates, the first Brevard County School Board meeting of the new year considered whether two bestselling novels – “The Kite Runner” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” – should be banned from schools.

A lone Moms for Liberty supporter sat by herself at the January 23 meeting, where opponents of the book ban outnumbered her.

Nearly 20 speakers voiced opposition to removing the novels from school libraries. One compared the book-banning effort to Nazi Germany. Another accused Moms for Liberty of waging war on teachers. No one spoke in favor of the ban. About three hours into the meeting, the board voted quickly to keep the two books on the shelves of high schools.

RELATED ARTICLEOusted Florida GOP leader Christian Ziegler won’t be charged with sexual battery

“Why are we banning books?” asked Mindy McKenzie, a mom and nurse who is a member of Stop Moms for Liberty, which was formed to counter what it calls a far-right extremist group “pushing for book banning and destroying public education.”

“Why are we letting Moms for Liberty infiltrate our school system?”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Gender, Hypocrisy, Injustice, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Media, Parent Groups, Privatization, Racism

Steve Nelson: These Are REAL Parental Rights—and Children’s Rights Too!

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2023 //
17

Steve Nelson is a retired educator. In this post, he contrasts the demands of the fake “parental rights” folk with a genuine agenda for the rights of parents and children:

As is true in many aspects of current American politics, the right wing conservatives dominate the discourse on education. As is also true in other aspects of current American politics, it seems not to matter that they are wrong – terribly wrong – and are gradually unraveling the critically important institution of public education.

The assault is on two broad fronts:

*The persistent efforts to privatize education through charter and voucher schemes, accompanied by defunding traditional public schools and diverting support to all manner of incompetent opportunists.

*An overlapping campaign to bring more Christianity into publicly-funded education and remove any and all references to race, gender, sexuality and normal functions of the human body.

In service of these goals they have successfully captured the PR realm, with groups like the attractively named Moms for Liberty. Who wouldn’t love moms or liberty?

The most damage is being done with legislation at the local and state level. Right-wingers have taken control of school boards and many gerrymandered state legislatures. Once again, these zealots have seized the PR reins by using the inarguably appealing mantra of “parental rights.” What parents want their rights taken away? So, the significant body of laws and policies that already protect the rights of parents is being absurdly enhanced with laws and policies that give parents the “right” to dictate what books children can read, what bathrooms children can use, and what public health measures can be exercised. They also claim the right to micromanage curricula, thereby ensuring that a white, Eurocentric, Christian, heteronormative experience is enjoyed by all. Ozzie and Harriet are applauding from the grave.

We liberals and progressives have done a piss poor job of responding in kind. Lots of folks (like me!) opine passionately to minuscule effect, given that our readers are in the hundreds or, rarely, thousands. There are politicians and pundits who argue against the nefarious work of this loud, conservative minority, but we are seldom, if ever, on the offensive.

We too need slogans and initiatives with catchy names that capture the imagination.

Perhaps:

*Moms for Keeping Crazy Moms Out of Our Schools and Libraries.

*Parents for the Rights of Teachers to Teach Without Nut-bag Interference

*Citizens for Keeping God Safe in Our Churches and Out of Our Politics

*Parents of Black and LGBTQ Students Who Won’t Take This Shit Anymore

Nelson then lists an educational bill of rights that the overwhelming majority of parents and teachers would likely endorse:

Then, if and when we can get the crazies under control, the parents in the majority can address the actual needs of children. What might happen if a grassroots effort gathered momentum and demanded that schools and school systems adopt this Bill of Rights?

Bill of Educational Rights

The undersigned insist that our school(s) and all teachers:

Open the link to read Steve Nelson’s Bill of Educational Rights.

Would you endorse these principles?

Categories Censorship, Childhood, Creativity, Education Industry, Education Reform, Joy, Parent Groups, Parents, Play, Privatization, Real Education, Students

Philadelphia: How a School Board Keeps Out the Public

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2023 //
13

Lisa Haver is a retired teacher in Philadelphia and a tireless advocate for the kids and teachers of that city. She writes here about the undemocratic methods of tha Philadelphia school board, which prefers to operate without transparency.

She wrote the following report with Lynda Rubin on behalf of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.

The board’s speaker suppression policies are now doing double duty: not just to keep members of the community from speaking but to keep them out of the room altogether. A guard at the door to the auditorium told Lynda Rubin she could go in because she was on the speaker list but barred Lisa Haver because she wasn’t. Haver had tried to sign up but was told by the board that she would not be one of the 30 chosen speakers. She told the guard he could arrest her but that she was going in. Last month some APPS members were detained downstairs because they were not on the list…

Board Denies Charter Reapplication
In the end, the board voted 7-2 to deny the re-application submitted by Global Leadership Academy to operate a high school in the Logan section of North Philadelphia. But that was after a lengthy deliberation session in which some board members, bordering on groveling, expressed their regret at having to deny GLA. BM Sarah Ashley Andrews declared her allegiance to GLA CEO Naomi Booker, who makes approximately $450,000 annually to oversee one school, advising her, “Don’t be defeated.” BM Lam, on the other hand, challenged the statements of praise for GLA’s program. She cited the 1% Math achievement rate and poor attendance at the GLA schools. Most board comments centered around the contents of the application, not the increased stranded costs to the district or how another charter school in Logan would affect the neighborhood’s public schools. The entire process, from Charter Schools Office Director Peng Chao’s presentation and subsequent Q & A session, to the board’s final vote on Item 78, took almost an hour.

Not What Democracy Looks Like
President Streater began the voting session, at 10:37 pm, by quickly rattling off the numbers of the items remaining on the agenda after the vote on Item 78 and the withdrawal of six other items. He instructed the board that all 71 items would be included in one roll call vote. As the individual board members began to enumerate their No votes and abstentions before the vote, Lisa Haver stood up to object. After the vote concluded, and General Counsel Lynn Rauch read the tally, Streater allowed her to come to the mic. Haver objected to the board’s voting on 71 items, for contracts totalling almost half a billion dollars, in one roll call vote, calling the process “shameful”. She also reminded the board that members who abstain from a vote because of a potential conflict must clearly identify the conflict. Streater did not respond. BM Cecelia Thompson, a longtime community advocate herself, said later, “I agree with Ms. Haver.” Thompson said that taxpayers do have a right to know how their money is being spent. Hopefully Thompson will refuse to participate at the next meeting and demand that each item be deliberated and voted on separately.

This is not just a procedural question. We tallied 29 items on the agenda that do not include a provision for any bidding process. The board is passing items for no-bid contracts after barring the public from speaking on most of them, attempting to keep people out of the room, conducting little to no public deliberation on them, and voting on all of them in one vote.

We wrote to the board after the April incident, pointing out that they had only set up 82 chairs in an auditorium that seats 240 people. Thus, the same people who were denied the right to speak now no longer have the right to be present. Did the board not want APPS to witness its voting to spend over $500 million in taxpayer money on 78 official items? Or voting on a charter application that would cost the district hundreds of millions over the next five years? A governmental body not accountable to the public can become tyrannical and dictatorial. We need an elected school board.

In response to APPS’ letter to the board after the April action meeting, Streater defended the practice by citing the board’s need for “efficiency”. Neither the City’s Home Rule Charter nor the board’s own mission statement mandates efficiency. The board promises community engagement and transparency, then conducts its business in a hurried and secretive manner.

Among the contracts passed with little to no deliberation:
Items 73 and 74: $40 million for new Reading and Math curricula, which, according to teachers familiar with the programs, replaces book-centered programs with online programs for every student in every grade from pre-K through 12th. Why does the board and the Watlington administration want to do this? Do children need more on-screen time? Many parents are limiting screen time for health issues and because of the built-in tracking system.

When will democracy come to the city that is the cradle of democracy?

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Parent Groups, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Kathryn Joyce: How Sarasota County Became Florida’s Laboratory for Far-Right Extremism

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2023 //
7

If you read one article today, make it this one.

Kathryn Joyce is an outstanding journalist who has written several excellent articles about the far-right conspiracy to destroy public education. In this important article, published by both the Hechinger Report and Vanity Fair, she examines the rightwing takeover of public schools in Sarasota, Florida, by the extremist Moms for Liberty and their hero Governor DeSantis.

Joyce begins:

SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — On a Sunday afternoon in late May 2022, Zander Moricz, then class president of Sarasota County’s Pine View School, spent the moments before his graduation speech sitting outside the auditorium, on the phone with his lawyers. Over the previous month, the question of what he’d say when he stepped to the podium had become national news. That March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, quickly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on all mention of gender identity and sexuality in K–3 classrooms and restriction of those discussions in higher grades as well. Moricz, a student LGBTQ+ activist, had led several protests against the act that spring and joined a high-profile lawsuit against the state. In early May, he charged on Twitter that Pine View’s administration had warned that if he mentioned his activism or the lawsuit at graduation, his microphone would be cut. (In a statement released last year, the school district confirmed that students are told not to express political views in their speeches.)

In the tumultuous weeks leading up to the ceremony, Pine View — Sarasota’s “gifted” magnet institution, consistently ranked one of the top 25 public high schools in the country — was besieged with angry calls and news coverage. Moricz stayed home for three weeks, he said, thanks to the rvolume of death threats he received, and people showed up at his parents’ work. When a rumor started that Pine View’s principal would have to wear a bulletproof vest to graduation, he recalled, “the entire campus lost their minds,” thinking “everyone’s going to die” and warning relatives not to come. His parents worried he’d be killed.

But after all the controversy, graduation day was a success. Moricz, now 19, delivered a pointedly coded speech about the travails of being born with curly hair in Florida’s humid climate: how he worried about the “thousands of curly-haired kids who are going to be forced to speak like this” — like he was, in code — “for their entire lives as students.” Videos of the speech went viral. Donations poured into Moricz’s youth-led nonprofit. That summer, he left to study government at Harvard.

Half-a-year later though, when Moricz came home, Sarasota felt darker.

“I’m wearing this hat for a reason,” he said when we met for coffee in a strip mall near his alma mater in early March. “Two years ago, if I was bullied due to my queerness, the school would have rallied around me and shut it down. If it happened today, I believe everyone would act like it wasn’t happening.”

These days, he said, queer kids sit in the back of class and don’t tell teachers they’re being harassed. A student at Pine View was told, Moricz said, that he couldn’t finish his senior thesis researching other states’ copycat “Don’t Say Gay” laws. (The school did not respond to a request for comment through a district spokesperson.) When Moricz’s nonprofit found a building to house a new youth LGBTQ+ center — since schools were emphatically no longer safe spaces — they budgeted for bulletproof glass.

“The culture of fear that’s being created is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. And much of it was thanks to the Sarasota County School Board.

Over the last two years, education culture wars have become the engine of Republican politics nationwide, with DeSantis’s Florida serving as the vanguard of the movement. But within the state, Sarasota is more central still.

Its school board chair, Bridget Ziegler, cofounded the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty and helped lay the groundwork for “Don’t Say Gay.” After a uniquely ugly school board race last summer, conservatives flipped the board and promptly forced out the district’s popular superintendent. In early January, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to transform Florida’s progressive New College into a “Hillsdale of the South” — emulating the private Christian college in Michigan that has become a trendsetting force on the right — that was in Sarasota too. In February, DeSantis sat alongside Ziegler’s husband and Moms for Liberty’s other cofounders to announce a list of 14 school board members he intends to help oust in 2024—Sarasota’s sole remaining Democrat and LGBTQ+ board member, Tom Edwards, among them. The next month, Ziegler proposed that the board hire a newly created education consultancy group with ties to Hillsdale College for what she later called a “‘WOKE’ Audit.” (Ziegler did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

The dizzying number of attacks has led to staffing and hiring challenges, the cancelation of a class, a budding exodus of liberals from the county, and fears that destroying public education is the ultimate endgame. In January, Ziegler’s husband, Christian — who chairs the Florida Republican Party — tweeted a celebratory declaration: “SARASOTA IS GROUND ZERO FOR CONSERVATIVE EDUCATION.”

It wasn’t hyperbole, said Moricz. “We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.”

For as long as Florida has been grading schools and school districts — a late 1990s innovation that helped spark the “school reform” movement — Sarasota, with its 62 schools and nearly 43,000 students, has enjoyed an “A” rating. Perched on the Gulf Coast just south of Tampa, the county’s mix of powder-soft beaches and high-culture amenities — including an opera house, ballet and museums — have made it a destination for vacationers and retirees. And that influx has made Sarasota one of the richest counties in the state.

Since many of those retirees, dating back to the 1950s, have been white Midwestern transplants, it’s also made Sarasota a Republican stronghold and top fundraising destination for would-be presidential candidates. Both the last and current chairs of the state GOP — first State Senator Joe Gruters and now Christian Ziegler — live in the county. Sarasota arguably launched Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, thanks to Gruters’s early support. These days, though, Sarasota isn’t just conservative, but at the leading edge of Florida’s turn to the hard right.

Partly that’s thanks to the Zieglers, who have become one of Florida’s premier power couples, with close ties to both Trump world and the DeSantis administration and a trio of daughters enrolled in local private schools. As founder of the digital marketing company Microtargeted Media, Christian did hundreds of thousands of dollars of work for pro-Trump PACs in 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. After being elected state GOP chair this February, he announced his goal was “to crush these leftist in-state Democrats” so thoroughly that “no Democrat considers running for office.” Although Bridget stepped down from Moms for Liberty shortly after its founding, she subsequently helped draftFlorida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which helped pave the way for DeSantis’s 2021 ban on mask mandates and ultimately last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. In 2022, the right-wing Leadership Institute hired her as director of school board programs, and built a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Sarasota to serve as a national hub for conservative education activism. This winter, DeSantis also appointed her to a new board designed to punish the Disney Company for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ laws….

Last year, when Ziegler was up for reelection and two other board members were terming out, she ran as a unified slate with former school resource officer Tim Enos and retired district employee Robyn Marinelli. The candidates drew support from both DeSantis’s administration — which unprecedentedly endorseddozens of school board candidates across the state — and local members of the far-right. A PAC partially funded by The Hollow’s owner campaigned for the “ZEM” slate (a shorthand for the candidates’ surnames) by driving a mobile billboard around the county, calling one of their opponents a “LIAR” and “BABY KILLER” because she’d once worked for Planned Parenthood. Proud Boys hoisted ZEM signs on county streets and a mailer was sent out, castigating the liberal candidates as “BLM/PSL [Party of Socialism and Liberation]/ANTIFA RIOTERS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD BABY KILLERS, [who] WANT GROOMING AND PORNOGRAPHY IN OUR SCHOOLS.” (Enos and Marinelli did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

Open the link and read all of the article. It is a devastating article about the takeover of the school board by hateful extremists whose tools are fear and divisiveness.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Gender, Injustice, Lies, Parent Groups, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Safety, Shame, Students

“Moms for Liberty” Labeled an Extremist Organization

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2023 //
107

The respected Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designated “Moms for Liberty” as an extremist group, along with a number of other astroturf anti-government organizations that popped up during the pandemic to protest masks and vaccines.

In its annual report on hate groups, SPLC named Moms for Liberty and 11 other “parent”groups as extremists who feed on racism, misogyny, homophobia, and bigotry:

Moms for Liberty joins the ranks of groups including the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and the United Constitutional Patriots, a self-styled militia that “patrols” the U.S.-Mexico border.

Other astroturf “parent” groups were identified as extremist by SPLC:

The 12 “parent’s rights” groups labeled by the SPLC as extremist groups: Moms for Liberty; Moms for America; Army of Parents; Courage is a Habit; Education First Alliance; Education Veritas; No Left Turn in Education; Parents Against CRT (PACT); Parents Defending Education; Parents Rights in Education; Purple for Parents Indiana and Parents Involved in Education.

Will Carless wrote in USA Today that Moms for Liberty “pitched itself as a potent grassroots movement of outraged parents, many of whom weren’t active in school politics until COVID-19 restrictions forced them to pay attention. It has sprouted local chapters in at least 40 states, claims more than 100,000 members and has the ear of the Republican establishment: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has championed their efforts to restrict teaching about race in schools and universities. Critics in Florida slam the group for turning schools into a political battlefield.”

Both DeSantis and Trump will address the annual conference of this two-year-old organization of hate-mongers.

Moms for Liberty and the other organizations are being designated as “anti-government extremist groups,” based on longstanding criteria, explained SPLC Intelligence Project Director Susan Corke. Corke said the grassroots conservative groups are part of a new front in the battle against inclusivity in schools, though they are drawing from ideas rooted in age-old white supremacy.

“[The movement] is primarily aimed at not wanting to include our hard history, topics of racism, and a very strong push against teaching anything having to do with LGBTQ topics in schools,” Corke said. ”We saw this as a very deliberate strategy to go to the local level…”

Despite the national profile, these organizations spread conspiracy theories and operate on the myth that educators are engaged in “Marxist indoctrination” of the nation’s children by imbuing them with dangerous ideas about equality and sexuality, the SPLC said.

While the movement may be reasonably new, it is founded on the same traditional racist, misogynist and homophobic views that brought people out to protest the desegregation of schools in the 1950s and ’60s, the SPLC argues.

Moms for Liberty does not report the names of its funders.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Gender, Hoax, Lies, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republicans, Shame

Maurice Cunningham: The Strange Disappearance of the 2023 “National Parents Union” Elections

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2023 //
17

Maurice Cunningham is a retired professor of political science in Massachusetts. He is an expert on Dark Money in education issues. His revelations about the money behind a state referendum to expand the number of charters indefinitely in Massachusetts in 2016 helped to defeat the referendum. I wrote about his role in my book Slaying Goliath.

What Happened to Election Day at National Parents Union?

There I was on the edge of my seat in front of the television waiting for Steve Kornacki to break down the numbers in the election for the hotly contested highest offices in the National Parents Union. Could Keri Rodrigues be re-elected to another three year term? Might Alma Marquez, elected secretary-treasurer three years ago before mysteriously disappearinglaunch a comeback bid? Would the networks call a winner before my bedtime?

But no, nothing. No network call. No Steve Kornacki. No election at all.

That was a huge disappointment because on January 27, 2020, Beth Hawkins of The74 reported “Founders Keri Rodrigues and Alma Marquez were voted into three-year terms as inaugural president and secretary-treasurer, respectively.”

So I waited three years for the next election. If you can’t get reliable information about a Walton Family Foundation franchise like NPU from a Walton Family Foundation publication like The74, where can you look?

I’m kidding. I knew there would be no election, just like I knew the Hawkins piece was corporate puffery, and just as I knew there was no real election in 2020 where Rodrigues and Marquez “launch[ed] the National Parents Union on Jan. 16, when they … [held] an inaugural summit in New Orleans with 125 delegates from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.” For one thing, Rodrigues signed NPU’s incorporation papers on April 4, 2019 as president. Then on the 2020 annual report Rodrigues signed as president with a term ending December 31, 2025. Tim Langan (later to marry Rodrigues, in 2022) replaced Marquez as treasurer. There has never been any accounting of what happened to the duly elected treasurer and apparently zero curiosity about her from the “125 delegates from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico” who presumably left New Orleans thinking they had elected her to a three year term.

Still, an election for a part-time job that pays $232,000 for twenty hours per week would seem attractive enough to draw some opposition. (Source: National Parents Union Form 990 tax return for 2021)

The $180,000 is from a related organization, the Walton Family Foundation franchise Massachusetts Parents Union, also a 20 hour per week gig. (Source: Massachusetts Parents United Form 990 tax return for 2021)

Reading over The74 article I’m struck by how important it was for the Waltons to portray NPU as something like a real union. But it isn’t. For one thing unions elect their leadership democratically. Rodrigues promised Fox News that NPU would “be creating a national parent council and a board of advisers. We will assemble delegates, agree on by-laws, vote on ratification, and form our union.” The parent council has never materialized, no by-laws have been made public, and ratificationwas about as valid as the treasurer’s vote. But they did appoint delegates! Then NPU killed off all the delegates. They were replaced with a 7 person parent “advisory council.” Keep your bags packed, councilors.

Who would vote if NPU did hold an election? Rodrigues recently tweeted “Just held our last @NationalParents Union leadership meeting where @TafshierCosby announced we have now grown to almost 1,000 affiliated organizations in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.”

There are no parent organization affiliates. The only verifiable affiliated organizations are those, as I wrote in Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, that are in the charter school industry or related privatization fronts. Cosby is identified at the NPU website Senior Director of the NPU Center for Organizing and Partnerships and “also the CEO of Parent Impact.” Parent Impact is apparently part of the KIPP charter school business. Itwas recognized by the IRS as a tax exempt organization only on September 10, 2020. IRS placed Parent Impact on the auto-revocation list for not filing tax returns on May 15, 2021.

I didn’t let the popcorn go to waste on election night but I sure did miss Steve Kornacki.

Maurice T. Cunningham is author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization. As a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, he is a union member.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Education Industry, Elections, Fake, Funding, Hoax, Parent Groups, Walton Foundation
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