It should be obvious that appointing a corporate lobbyist to the Massachusetts K-12 Statewide Graduation Council as a “parent” is a bad idea. Just in case, I wrote the following letter to Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler urging him NOT to consider appointing National Parent Union’s Keri Rodrigues as a parent representative to the Massachusetts K-12 Statewide Graduation Council.
Dear Secretary Tutwiler,
I understand that appointments are being made to the Massachusetts K-12 Statewide Graduation Council and that at least one parent member may be selected. I am writing today to urge that Keri Rodrigues of National Parents Union (NPU) not be considered for appointment. Far from a genuine parent representative, Ms. Rodrigues is a professional advocate for the Walton family and allied corporate interests.
I am a retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization. For the last decade I have been studying “parents” and “moms” groups like NPU, Moms for Liberty, and Parents Defending Education. They all burst on the scene purportedly generated by concerned parents. In no time at all they are sitting on millions of dollars of corporate donations and supported by professional public relations and political consultants.
NPU came to public attention in January 2020 with a report in the Walton Family Foundation (WFF), funded publication The74. What was most interesting in that article was the candor in disclosing the early funders of what The74 termed a founding by “two Latina mothers” Keri Rodrigues and Alma Marquez. The funders included the foundations of not only the Waltons, but “EdChoice; the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; National School Choice Week; the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation; and The City Fund, which in turn receives funding from Walton, the Hastings Fund, the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures), the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Ballmer Group.”
Within months Vela Education Fund, a joint venture of the Walton Family Foundation and Charles Koch Institute, sent $700,000 to NPU. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative gave $260,000. The new organization quickly hired international public relations firm Mercury LLC and pollster Echelon Group, which also works for the Waltons and Republican political figures. Since 2017 the Walton family has poured at least $5,366,000 into NPU and Massachusetts Parents United (MPU), also headed by Rodrigues.
In other words, NPU is corporate, not grassroots.
Let me pause here and assure you that the Arkansas-based Waltons already have organizational representation on the Massachusetts K-12 Statewide Graduation Council. From 2017-2023 the Walton Family Foundation invested $2,250,000 in the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and$3,974,500 in the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association.
One role Rodrigues played for her corporate backers was as a “parent” opponent of ballot Question 2 of 2024. Here is how the Boston Globe described her plans in February 2024:
National Parents Union president Keri Rodrigues, a former labor organizer who lives in Woburn, says her group has a presence in 22 cities and towns in Massachusetts and can get its message to more than 250,000 families to vote against the union’s MCAS question. Her group will put that network to work, she said, . . .
There is no evidence whatsoever that NPU got its message to 250,000 families, or that there is any network, or that NPU can influence families at all. NPU doesn’t reveal its members but when I traced membership claims in 2021, I found that most of the “member” groups were in the charter schools industry.
Before NPU, Rodrigues was employed by Massachusetts Parents United, Families for Excellent Schools (FES), and Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). All are (or were) reliant on Walton funding. FES paid a record civil settlement with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance after egregious campaign finance violations during its 2016 campaign to increase charter schools in Massachusetts. FES eventually collapsed. DFER has just been sued by its most recent Massachusetts state director for serious allegations of gender and age discrimination. DFER has dropped the Massachusetts chapter from its website and also appears to be near collapse.
NPU’s Form 990 for 2022 shows that NPU and MPU paid Rodrigues and her husband (who replaced the second “Latina mother” as treasurer only months into NPU’s existence) $661,775 in 2022.
How many typical Massachusetts parents pay themselves $661,775 per year?
Parents deserve real representation on the Massachusetts K-12 Statewide Graduation Council, not a proxy for out-of-state corporate lobbying.
Cc: Karissa Hand