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 Union website and click on Leadership you’ll see three board members: Peter Cunningham, Bibb Hubbard, and Dan Weisberg. But NPU registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation with the Secretary of State in in Massachusetts where its latest annual report filed November 1, 2020 shows two directors: Keri Rodrigues and Tim Langan.
Then there are the officers. On the website Keri Rodrigues is identified as “co-founder, Founding President.” In the Massachusetts filing she is president, and clerk too. Timothy Langan, the other director in the Massachusetts filing, is treasurer and the expiration of term for them as officers and directors is set for December 31, 2025. On the website Mr. Langan is identified as Chief Operating Officer. The 74 million.org (like NPU, funded by the Waltons) reported that Ms. Rodrigues was elected as founding president at NPU’s initial conference in January 2020 to a three year term.
That election for president takes on more mystery when we look over NPU’s original articles of organization filed with the Massachusetts Secretary of State on April 4, 2019. Ms. Rodrigues was already president! (and clerk too). The treasurer was Jennifer Rego. There were three directors: Ms. Rodrigues, Mr. Langan, and Alma Marquez of California.
Ms. Marquez was identified as an original co-founder but disappeared from the website sometime between August 17 and September 2, 2020 (information derived from archive.org). Here’s how it looked in January 2020:
Ms. Marquez was an important part of the creation story of National Parents Union as captured in the first line of a story in US News and World Report: “Two Latina mothers from opposite sides of the country have joined forces to form their own union to disrupt an education agenda . . . . “ A story on the74million.org titled Mothers of Invention: Frustrated with the Educational Status Quo and Conventional Parent Organizing, Two Latinas Gave Birth to a National Parents Union emphasized that “The National Parent Union is the brainchild of two Latina mothers.” At that first meeting, Ms. Marquez was elected to a three year term as secretary-treasurer. On January 28, 2020 Ms. Rodrigues and Ms. Marquez made a joint appearance on a podcast hosted by Lennie Jarrett of the far right Heartland Institute. But only seven months into her three year term, Ms. Marquez disappeared from NPU’s website without a trace. Ms. Marquez’s bio on the website of her business Del Sol Group doesn’t mention her time with NPU at all. According to its 2018 tax returns the Massachusetts Parents Union, funded by the Waltons and with Ms. Rodrigues as president, paid $25,000 to Del Sol Group for consulting services.
Gerard Robinson has disappeared too. He was one of the four board members listed on NPU’s website back in January 2020. Mr. Robinson was, it appears, the only person of color on the NPU website version of the board (Ms. Rodrigues, a Latina, is named on the Secretary of State version as a director). Mr. Robinson was of interest because of the possibility that he was on the board as a proxy for Charles Koch, suggesting that Koch was putting money into NPU. Mr. Robinson was still a board member as of November 15, 2020. By December 8, 2020, he too had been removed from the leadership page of the NPU website (information derived from archive.org). It has been confirmed that Koch is invested in NPU through a joint venture with the Walton family.
In summary, according to the website last January Ms. Rodrigues was elected to a three year term as president, a position she already held according to records at the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office, which records her as serving a six year term. She is a board member at the Secretary of State filing but not on the NPU website. Ms. Marquez was a director in the Secretary of State filings but now is not. She was elected to a three year term as secretary-treasurer but seems to have been removed from that post without a successor. Mr. Robinson was a website director but did not survive a year.
Two boards of directors and a revolving door. What have we learned here? That in the world of dark money, nothing is ever as it seems.
UPDATE MARCH 12, 2021: Within hours of this post noting that NPU lacked any people of color on its board, surviving NPU co-founder and president for either three or six years depending on which NPU source you believe in, Keri Rodrigues, tweeted about new board members, see below. There is no update from National Parents Union about what happened to former co-founder and Secretary of State records board member Alma Marquez or website board member Gerard Robinson, both of whom have disappeared. Also the tweet doesn’t say which of the two existing boards the new members are on, though a subsequent update to the website shows they are website board members. If you are scoring at home, the website board has had a four member version, a three member version, and now an eight member version. The Secretary of State’s records have had a three member version and a two member version. There has been no overlap between the boards.
Money never sleeps. Follow the money.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money.]
The “two Latina moms” is a nice creation story, but Keri Rodrigues isn’t Latina. Professor of Education Julian Vasquez Helig at the University of Kentucky pointed this out on his blog “Cloaking Inequity” in 2019, where he wrote about the Waltons’ usurping the name of an organization he founded:
“The problem is the National Parents Union already exists and was founded in 2012. I know because I am a founding member and it is incubated under the New York City Parents Union since 2012.”
He goes on to point out:
“The president is supposed to be Keri Rodrigues Lorenzo, a White woman from Boston. She is not Latina although she purposely misleads everyone to think she is. Rodrigues Lorenzo is founder of Mass Parents United, that was created in 2017. She is the former Massachusetts state director for the defunct, AstroTurf, Families for Excellent Schools. The ones responsible for the biggest, most expensive, education reform defeat in history. It was epic. Not only did the parents and people of Massachusetts see through and reject their hypocrisy, but the chicanery, corrupt, unethical and illegal actions of the education reformers resulted in historic huge fines and banishment from Massachusetts.”
Many things are not what they seem.
To speak locally, for a moment, Boston is about to have a mayoral election. The Waltons, long embittered over their 2016 Question 2 failure, would love to get their fingers in the public school pie, which the mayor controls. This tweet, from a Boston parent, shows what we can expect :
“Warning. Warning. Keri Rodrigues has maxed out her donations to Andrea Campbell.”
https://twitter.com/johnflerner/status/1367847409678696449?s=20
Deval Patrick’s wife endorsed Andrea Campbell. Not surprising- Deval Patrick, an ally of Obama , rejoined Bain Capital during the past few years.
Neoliberals gonna neoliberal.
So good to see these extreme right-wing groups exposed. As someone who watched and documented the Walton and Broad funded Los Angeles Parents Union [sic], which later morphed into the equally misnamed Parent Revolution, I’ve been curious about how the national efforts to push school privatization were going.
I’d be very interested in reading anything you did on LA Parents Union, and what happened to Alma Marquez? NPU disappeared her.
Most of the stuff I wrote on them is at these two locations:
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/search?q=parent+revolution
http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/search?q=parent+revolution
I also had a bunch of articles about LAPU/PRev on K12NN and Daily Censored, but those sites are gone now. I also have a copy of the “Annenberg Document”, which proves that the original “Parents Union” [sic] was a creation of the charter school industry. https://www.scribd.com/document/25496653/Green-Dot-Public-sic-Schools-Los-Angeles-Parents-Union
Thank you. I appreciate this.
I updated post. After I posted that NPU had no POC on board, they announced 5 new board members. It’s nice to be acknowledged.