Astroturf Organizing 101: Walton Family Gives $6.3 Million to Parent Revolution

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Parent Revolution (the Los Angeles organization behind many of that city’s Parent Trigger charter conversion attempts) has a radical, populist-sounding name. Its stated goal is to empower poor parents to transform their low-performing neighborhood schools into successful ones. Everyone from politicians and right wing demagogues to teachers and their unions pay lip service to empowering parents (or at least getting them more “involved” in their children’s education).

In reality, though, Parent Revolution is a front group for private charter school operators and their wealthy allies in the Education Reform movement who support weakening and ultimately abolishing the teachers’ unions, tenure and seniority; increasing testing, online learning and the deskilling of the teaching profession; lowering overall costs to increase charter school profits and lower state spending on education.

Parent Revolution’s executive director, Ben Austin, is a millionaire former state school board member and Los Angeles Deputy Member (under Mayor Riordin), who earns over $200,000 per year from the organization. He also earned over $94,000 in 2008 as a consultant for the private charter school organization, Green Dot, according to Schools Matter. It should come as no surprise that Parent Revolution, which advocates for the conversion of traditional public schools into charter schools by way of California’s Parent Trigger law, was created by Green Dot’s founder, Steve Barr, quite likely in hopes of winning some of the contracts to run the soon to be converted schools.

A recent investigation by Frying Pan News has found that the Walton Family Foundation has pumped $6.3 million into Parent Revolution since 2009. (An interactive infographic from Frying Pan News can be seen here). The Gates Foundation has donated $1.6 million, and a host of other wealthy donors (including Eli Broad) have also kicked in more than $1 million each. In total, 18 different foundations have provided the organization with over $14.8 million since 2009. The Emerson Collective Education Fund (started by the widow of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs) has also donated $1.2 million.

Not long after California’s Parent Trigger law was approved in 2010, similar legislation started to pop up across the country, thanks to model legislation created by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Commission) and the ultra-conservative Heartland Institute, in Chicago. The movement for Parent Trigger laws received additional support from the Hollywood propaganda flick, Won’t Back Down, which was produced and funded by Walden Media, which is owned by reactionary billionaire Philip Anschutz, a longtime supporter of free market education reform.

Parent Revolution’s succeeded in converting Desert Trails Elementary school in San Bernardino County, but not without controversy (the conversion was originally rejected by the school board because of irregularities in the petition process, as well as doctored signatures). However, even many of the parents who voted for the conversion ultimately felt duped. According to Alternet, Desert Trails parent Lori Yuan said Parent Revolution organizers tricked parents into thinking they were merely trying to improve conditions at the school, rather than turning it over to a private charter operator: “Our community was misled. . . Parents didn’t know they were signing for a charter takeover.”

New Astroturf Group Calls Tenure, Seniority Unconstitutional

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A right-wing astroturf group, Students Matter, has escalated the war on California’s teachers with a lawsuit seeking to overturn five state laws related to teacher tenure, seniority and the dismissal process.

The law suit, which was filed on May 14 in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of eight students, argued that "A handful of outdated laws passed by the California Legislature are preventing school administrators from maintaining or improving the quality of our public educational system," the Los Angeles Times wrote this week.

The suit is full of logical inconsistencies. For example, it argues that teachers can earn tenure too easily (in two years), well before their actual skill in the classroom can be determined. If successful, this would make it much harder for teachers to earn tenure and the right not to be fired without cause. Yet at the same time the suit aims to abolish seniority rules that protect experienced veteran teachers (i.e., those who have demonstrated skill in the classroom) during layoffs. This would make it much easier to fire veteran teachers with a proven track record, exactly the teachers districts should want to protect assuming they were really interested in providing the best teachers possible for students.

The suit cynically claims to be fighting for the rights of low income students under the equal protection provisions of the California Constitution. It argues that the current law protects ineffective teachers and “creates arbitrary and unjustifiable inequality among students,” according to Thoughts on Public Education. In short, the suit is saying that tenure, seniority and due process violate the state’s constitution, a claim that would be laughable if there wasn’t a powerful national movement behind it.

While it is true that low income schools tend to have higher percentages of younger teachers, it is not because of seniority, tenure and due process. Rather, these are the toughest schools to teach at and require teachers to work much harder than at more affluent schools, but for the same pay. In districts like LAUSD, where student test score data are used to evaluate teachers and where teachers’ Value Added (VAM) scores are publicly posted, there is a significant disincentive to teach at these schools.

One should also question why we have an Apartheid system in which some schools are filled predominantly with low-income students, while others within the same district (and sometimes only a few miles away) are predominantly affluent. Likewise, California continues to have among the lowest per pupil rates of K-12 funding in the nation. These are the real stories of educational inequality and they have nothing at all to do with the teachers or their job protections.

In reality, abolishing tenure, seniority and due process rights has nothing to do with protecting children or making their schools better. It is really about three things: union-busting, increasing administrators’ power, and cutting salary costs so they can be reallocated to other things, like administrators’ salaries or irrational and unproven reform efforts.

The lawsuit would provide administrators with much greater flexibility in getting rid of higher paid veteran teachers, as wells as union activists and vocal advocates for student and teacher rights. By stacking schools with rookies and novices who must keep their mouths shut and suck up to their bosses longer in order to avoid being laid off, administrators can more easily push through “reforms” like increased class sizes and teacher evaluations based on student test scores and student surveys that are detrimental (see here, here and here) to both students and teachers.

This suit could have monumentally negative consequences for students and schools. Making it easier to get rid of experienced teachers could result in a large influx of novices who not only lack the experience to teach well, but who also have a much higher attrition rate than veteran teachers, thus increasing the turnover of teaching staffs. It could also accelerate the exodus of experienced teachers from teaching to other professions. And while it could save schools money by allowing them to replace relatively expensive veterans with much cheaper rookies, it would hurt K-12 education in the long run through its tacit acceptance of educational defunding by the state.

Students Matter, which is a relative newcomer to the teacher bashing game, was founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch and, not surprisingly, has received much of its funding from Ed Deform Czar Eli Broad. Its advisory committee includes Students First, Michelle Rhee’s fake student advocacy group; teacher-bashing former state senator Gloria Romeo; and the Parent Trigger charter school front group, Parent Revolution.

The Thoughts on Public Education (Toped) blog says that California’s dismissal law can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per teacher to fire a teacher for unsatisfactory performance, thus compelling districts to find workarounds, like shunting teachers from school to school [or filing trumped up disciplinary charges against the teacher].

This really misses the point. If a teacher is truly doing a bad job of teaching, but really wants to continue teaching, he should be provided professional development, mentoring and other support at the district’s expense. This would be far cheaper than going through the 10-step dismissal process and all the accompanying legal costs.

It also glosses over the important question of what really constitutes bad teaching and how is this being assessed? In my 15 years of teaching I have seen very few truly rotten teachers and only a handful of mediocre ones. This may be coincidental; however, I think the whole bad teacher hysteria is really a red herring, something intended to rally the public to support union-busting in the guise of children’s innocence and safety.

Indeed, Toped notes that while the suit claims 8 students suffered because of ineffective teachers, it did not cite any evidence of any specific teachers having a negative impact on the plaintiffs. Rather, if focused on research by the National Council On Teacher Quality and Eric Hanushek. The latter concluded that by dismissing the weakest 6-10% of teachers, students’ academic success and earnings as adults would increase.

“Weakest,” however, does not necessarily mean bad, inadequate or worthy of throwing into the unemployment line. As in any profession there is a spectrum of different skill levels and this is not necessarily detrimental. For example, I may not be able to see the same physician who treats the 49ers, but that doesn’t mean my orthopedist is doing a bad job or should be banned from practicing.

Furthermore, there is no accurate method for determining who the weakest 10% of teachers are. Even if there was such a method, we could find that 100% of teachers were effective, but there would still be a bottom 10% who would be fired just to fill Hanushek’s quota and mollify the Ed Deform wolves.

Scab Teachers Undermining Their Own Colleagues

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Teachers, like all other workers, must sell their labor to earn a living. Like all workers, they must make considerable compromises and sacrifices in order to ensure that they get a paycheck each month. The primary difference between teachers and other workers is that the public (and many teachers themselves) believe that teachers’ rights and working conditions should be subordinate to the needs of their students.

Image from Teamster.net

Workers who cross the picket line, thus undermining their coworkers’ solidarity and their struggle to improve working conditions, are known as scabs. The term could accurately describe any worker who deliberately undermines working conditions or solidarity. An example would be teachers who relinquish their contractual rights by volunteering to work longer hours (see here, here and here). They are scabs because they weaken the standing of their coworkers who still want their hard won protections. They are scabs because they are giving away their labor to the bosses for free or at a discounted rate compared to their peers. They are scabs because they deliberately aligning themselves with the bosses and against their own interests and those of their coworkers.

Unfortunately, in education, such behavior is relatively common. This is due, in part, to the fact that many teachers are willing to try anything, regardless of how much extra work is required if they are told it will help their students. Ed Deformers exploit this weakness by bombarding teachers and the public with a plethora of ill-conceived reforms that lack credible evidence of efficacy, (but which show strong likelihood of increasing their profits) under the guise of improving student outcomes.

One way the Ed Deformers do this is through astroturf organizations that masquerade as real grassroots organizations (see here, here and here), creating the illusion that regular people are empowering themselves to create change. The New York City-based Educators 4 Excellence (E4E) is an example of this. Ostensibly a grassroots movement made up of innovative young teachers willing to challenge the orthodoxy of the stodgy old unions, E4E has been funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to the tune of $1 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.

E4E has now opened shop in Los Angeles teachers, calling for the linking of teacher evaluations to student test scores and ending seniority protections. Because the group is made up mostly of young teachers, it could be argued that their demands to end seniority have more to do with creating job security for themselves at the expense of their veteran colleagues, than serving the interests of their students.

Who Needs Tenure? Who Needs Green Dot?

The new contract between New York's United Federation of Teachers and Green Dot, the California-based charter school operator, offers teachers no tenure or seniority-based layoffs, according to Gotham Schools. Green Dot NY teacher evaluations will be based 20% on student standardized test scores and 20% on other measures of student academic growth.

Dana Goldstein (lady wonk) sees this as a model for teacher contracts of the future, assuming that teachers are well-trained and allowed to participate in the administration of their schools. She sees Green Dot as a “healthy” environment that emphasizes collegiality and professionalism and that has little “administrative overreach.” Randi Weingarten told her that she could envision entire districts based on Green Dot-like contracts.

The problem is that even if it was true that Green Dot was a “healthy” work environment that truly valued collegiality and professionalism, there would necessarily still be an adversarial relationship between management and employees, as there necessarily is in all workplaces. As long as someone else is in charge of one’s income, working conditions and job security, the relationship is exploitative and adversarial by definition.

Forgetting (or denying) this is asking to be walked all over. Without tenure, seniority, or other job protections, teachers at Green Dot can be fired or disciplined for almost any reason, like at non-unionized charter schools, including organizing or taking job actions to defend their contract or fight for a better one.

The other problem is that Green Dot is not a “healthy” work environment that values its employees. It is a private, for-profit enterprise whose entire raison d’etre is to maximize profits. They do this by exploiting teachers, paying them as little and working them as hard as possible. They cannot afford to give teachers any real autonomy or authority and will inevitably try to impose policies that are detrimental to students’ and teachers’ wellbeing. Without tenure and seniority protections, teachers are far less likely to challenge such policies, no matter how “collegial” or “professional” the environment.

Let’s not forget that Green Dot was behind the intimidation campaign in Compton by the astro-turf Parent Revolution. Green Dot has been sucking millions of dollars from cash-strapped public schools in Los Angeles and elsewhere, with some of its schools performing so poorly they have gone under. They have surrounded some of their schools with private thugs who have pepper sprayed students.

In short, Green Dot is a dysfunctional and dangerous work environment, not a “healthy” environment to which teachers should aspire. And Weingarten and UFT are collaborationist sellouts—unhealthy for teachers.