Parents for Education’s Hit and Run Job on Milton Public Schools

The Boston Globe‘s Adria Watson recently reported that Parents Defending Education has filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against the Milton Public Schools.   It sounds daunting. But PDE is not parents, it’s an obedient franchise of right-wing donors like Charles Koch.

PDE’s Milton complaint is based on an email exchange one anonymous individual had with a Milton official. (PDE always hides the true complainant). The individual fussed about a program called The Calculus Project which the Milton official characterized as aimed to “increase the number of African American/Black and LatinX students who enroll and succeed in high-level mathematics courses at Milton High School, culminating with the study of calculus in their senior year . . . There are many supports and programs for all students to achieve at high Levels.” The complainant responded that the program seems discriminatory against white students.

PDE then relied on excerpts from the project’s webpage. For instance, The Calculus Project “us[es] research-supported strategies to increase the representation and success of Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, People of Color and low-income students in advanced mathematics” and supports “cultural sensitivity and its commitment to sustainability” and the project “is part of a movement.” (It’s clear the movement is to improve math achievement.) The complaint can’t even keep the story straight in a single paragraph—in just two sentences it asserts that the program is entirely race based then quotes the Project’s website as seeking to aid “students of color and those who are economically disadvantaged.”

That’s a federal case to PDE—one grumbling anonymous individual and an unbalanced website reading. It’s consistent with other low-proof PDE complaints like one against a Washington state district based on the evidence of a right-wing radio talk show host’s commentary. Or an Ohio complaint where the Columbus Post-Dispatch reported that PDE “lists no one from Columbus involved as a participant.” The Portland (ME) Press-Herald reported of PDE’s complaint against that city that “The group’s complaint does not provide specific examples of any individual who is being excluded.”

PDE apparently never tried to contact Project Calculus founder Adrian Mims but Max Larkin of WBUR did. Mims stated that “any student between grades 8 and 12 can apply to participate.” WBUR reports that up to 20% of students participating in seven Massachusetts school districts are white.

So far as I can tell from reviewing all twenty-three OCR complaints PDE has filed with DOE, PDE has never contacted a district before filing a complaint and launching a press release. I’ve seen no instance in which PDE has identified a complainant.

If PDE had any sincere interest in education, it would contact the school district before heading to Washington. Instead, it sent out a press release. the Milton attack is poorly researched, anonymous, without the courtesy of reaching out to the district. A hit and run job.

No PDE representative would talk with the Globe. PDE ducks questions from real journalists who might ask awkward questions like “who is funding you?” But you can regularly find PDE’s Nicole Neily or Erika Sanzi on right wing media like Fox, which eagerly pass along PDE’s propaganda points. PDE not only hits and runs, it runs and hides.

True North Research has recently exposed PDE’s ties to the heart of right-wing billionaire efforts to destroy public education in Tax Docs Link Right-Wing “Parents Group” to Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Network. Leo is perhaps the right’s most successful channeler of dark money. Donald Trump granted him virtual carte blanche to pick conservative justices for the Supreme Court.

PDE president Nicole Neily, a veteran Koch political network operative, told the Columbus Post-Dispatch “We just all work from home. We’re all working moms.” But the operation collected over $3,100,000 in its first year of 2021, most of it untraceable. True North concluded “All this shows how PDE’s sudden arrival has been met with major funding from secret sources as it continues to portray itself in the media as merely ‘local moms’.”

Of the twenty-three civil rights complaints PDE has filed DOE is investigating only three and that doesn’t mean anything will come of them (a few are recent and are likely under review). But the advocacy director for AASA, the School Superintendents Association told Education Week investigations are “incredibly time-consuming and burdensome for districts”—even bad faith ones.

Then there is the foreseeable consequence of feeding these complaints to right-wing propaganda outlets like Breitbart, Daily Caller, and Fox. A PDE lawsuit filed against Wellesley (settled on terms favorable to the town) brought “obscene” and “awful” emails targeted at the school superintendent. A Breitbart story generated by PDE led to “racist and confrontational” messages to two Black principals in Newton.

DOE has just decided to investigate PDE’s complaint against Newton North High School. The group claims five affiliated parent groups in Massachusetts and fifty incidents in the state.

Generate news coverage (especially in right-wing media), disrupt education, and bring educators under attack. Those are PDE’s tactical goals. The end game is to crush teachers’ unions, decimate public education, and turn schools into a private profit-making industry.

Parents Defending Education is an agent of right-wing billionaires out to destroy public education. Don’t let them do it.

“One thing big money typically lacks is credibility, which is why those who deploy it work so hard to cover their tracks.”—Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is now in print. For more on phony parent groups like PDE, see my Masters of Deception: Parent Props and Their Funders].