Suppose WalMart swept into Boston and spent millions to acquire Market Basket. The town would go ballistic. It would be covered every day in every media outlet, front page of the Boston Globe. But the Walton Family Foundation of Arkansas—the exact same heartless* mercenaries—spends millions of dollars to take over public schools and it gets…
Category: Keri Rodrigues
Beware! Obsessing Creepy Professor!!!
So here I am a quiet, amiable, kindly old gentleman who tries to keep up with those youngs on the Twitter and such when I see Keri Rodrigues, the CEO of two multimillion dollar corporations, say I’m obsessive and creepy! Why that just placed a dark cloud over my retirement alright. Honestly, how’d this quiet,…
What Scot Lehigh Missed Today: The Waltons of Arkansas
If there was ever any doubt of the importance of the defeat of the charter school ballot question in 2016, Scot Lehigh’s frozen-in-time A Time for Real Education Change column in the Boston Globe today reminds us of its importance: a 62-38% shellacking of the billionaire backers of Question 2 by teachers unions. But the…
Three Women and a Website? Keri Rodrigues Will Have to Do Better Than That
It’s important to the billionaire-backed front National Parents Union to offer the facade of progressivism so what happens when one of NPU president Keri Rodrigues’s closest friends, Erika Sanzi, helps launch an overtly racist operation in the school privatization universe? Duck and cover is what happens. Let’s take a look at a Twitter exchange between…
Ten Questions for National Parents Union
The Koch-Walton backed National Parents Union is experiencing turmoil at the top and severe mismanagement with two boards of directors featuring revolving directors and a disappeared co-founder. The organization is holding a convening on May 15 and its members (if there are any) should demand some answers. Here are questions they should be asking the…
Your National Parents Union Reader
The Walton Family’s fantasy of what a union should look like, the National Parents Union, is having its Virtual Convening on May 15, so what better time could there be to look back at a year plus of peeling the onion off of this fake progressive group? By popular demand, Your National Parents Union Reader!…
Your Massachusetts Parents United Reader
This happened April 29. Boston Globe Education published a piece quoting Keri Rodrigues, president of the Walton backed AstroTurf front Massachusetts Parents United. A friend messaged me asking of the Globe “How are they so bad at this?” And my response was the Globe isn’t bad at this: it’s intentional. But just in case the…
The Marketing of National Parents Union
National Parents Union isn’t national, isn’t about parents, and isn’t a union—so what is it? It’s a corporate-type marketing front, and a successful one at that. Let’s take a look at the backgrounds of the leadership touted on NPU’s website from about January 2020 through sometime late in August when co-founder Alma Marquez vanished amidst…
Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, and the Christian Right
Two of the important props of the far right in America are Christian conservatives and economic royalists like the Waltons and Charles Koch. Those ties are becoming evident in school privatization including in financial support the Massachusetts Parents United has offered to a Christian right group and in National Parents Union’s funding from a Koch-Walton…
National Parents Union: Turmoil at the Top
National Parents Union, funded by the Waltons, Charles Koch, and other oligarchs has churned its leadership in one year so much that it deepens questions about NPU’s legitimacy. Two sets of boards of directors and the departure of a co-founder and board member will do that. Two boards? Yep. When you visit the National Parents…