A while back I submitted the following oped to the Boston Globe. It was not selected for publication. I’ll leave it here as submitted and have more to say about it soon. The Globe covers numerous aspects of education but never explores the enabling force behind interest groups like Massachusetts Parents United or Parents Defending…
Category: Parents Defending Education
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…
Nicole Neily, Keri Rodrigues, and the “Parent” Group Gravy Train
Lisa Graves and Alyssa Bowen at True North Research have a new research article at Truthout Tax Docs Link Right-Wing “Parents Group” to Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Network. It’s stunning. Stop reading this and go read Graves and Bowen right now. Ah, you’re back. The Truthout piece is a masterful use of research and logic…
National Parents Union and Parents Defending Education in Faux Civil War! Can Charles Koch Save Them?
A mock civil war is raging between bogus National Parents Union and sham Parents Defending Education and only one man can feign to suppress it: Charles Koch. Koch funds both National Parents Union and (almost certainly) Parents Defending Education so he has a fantasy moral obligation to pretend to step in. The latest blanks in…
Newton Schools Racist Messages: Be Shocked, Not Surprised. It’s Deliberate.
On Friday Travis Anderson of the Boston Globe reported that two Black principals in Newton had received “racist and confrontational” messages for doing their jobs: to help their students process the verdicts in the Kyle Rittenhouse and Tracy McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan Jr. (murderers of Ahmaud Arbery) trials. The hate came rolling in…
Trump’s Lawyer Sues Wellesley for Charles Koch’s Phony “Parent” Group
Tuesday the Boston Globe had a story National conservative group files lawsuit against Wellesley public schools and I thought, I could write a headline that is both more clickable and more dead-on balls accurate than that so here it is: Trump’s Lawyer Sues Wellesley for Charles Koch’s Phony “Parent” Group. Do you like it? The…
The Corporate Critical Race Theory Attack: Chaos is the Product
Below is a piece I originally did for Diane Ravitch’s blog, link here. With billionaire driven phony parents groups like Parents Defending Education, Parents United, Students United, and Massachusetts Parents United around, read this for what is really happening here in Massachusetts and across the nation. Btw, verbal and physical attacks on school committee members,…
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…