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, amiable, kindly old gentleman even get into the conversation? Ms. Rodrigues and journalist Alexander Russo were Tweet-kvetching about Jack Schneider, a journalism professor at UMass Lowell who is an education scholar. Professor Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire wrote something they didn’t like but I had nothing to do with it until this:

I’m the professor; sort of like Lord Voldemort, she can’t say my  name. For a moment I got all tender-hearted about it because before she blocked me Ms. Rodrigues would often tweet in ALL CAPS when she was mad at me. I sorta miss that. And then, as the Sisters of Notre Dame taught us at Blessed Sacrament grammar school back in the Sixties, consider the source.

But as I thought of it a bit, Ms. Rodrigues is indeed the CEO of two corporations that have multi-million dollar budgets. One corporation, National Parents Union, somehow had so much money in its first month of operations that it hired the international communications firm Mercury LLC to handle PR. In 2018 Massachusetts Parents United spent over $152,000 with communications consultants (including with the firm of Alma Marquez who became Ms. Rodrigues’s co-founder of NPU, though she’s disappeared from NPU activities without explanation). And Ms. Rodrigues is herself a communications pro; she had her own radio show and if you’ve seen her on Fox News or quoted in print publications like The New Yorker or the Washington Post, she is very, very good. Full respect.

So given all that I began to feel a little bad about the obsessing and creepy thing. Ms. Rodrigues is a communications pro. She knows what that means.

I don’t recall ever meeting Ms. Rodrigues and I don’t care much about her one way or the other. But I do care about dark money fronts deploying millions of of dollars to win elections and transform public policy in ways and means that undermine democracy. She is, like I said, the CEO of two multimillion dollar corporations and they both do exactly that. She was also the state director of the 501(c)(3) version of Families for Excellent Schools, which bungled the charters school campaign of 2016. There was another related operation, the 501(c)(4) Families for Excellent Schools Advocacy and that’s important because FESA bore the bulk of the penalty when the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance found serious violations of state laws.  Nevertheless Ms. Rodrigues’s 501(c)(3) got a heavy sanction from OCPF:

From a period of four years from the date of this Agreement, FES will not engage in fundraising in Massachusetts, soliciting in Massachusetts, or engage in any ballot questions or other election-related activity in Massachusetts.

I mention this only because the creation story of MPU is that “Massachusetts Parents United started as three parents meeting in a public library around one big idea.” The creation story of National Parents Union is that Frustrated With the Educational Status Quo and Conventional Parent Organizing, Two Latinas Gave Birth to a National Parents Union. And then the library closed for the day and the Waltons started sending checks to MPU headed by the former FES state director (at least $1.32 million from 2017-2019) and after the birth of NPU by the former state director of FES and CEO of MPU a joint venture of the Waltons and Charles Koch put in $700,000 and money came pouring in from Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, John Arnold, Steve Ballmer, on and on and NPU hired Mercury and the Waltons’ pollster. It was some baby shower.

So, state director, CEO, CEO. I just don’t think you can project that profile, have national media quote you repeatedly as if your organization is exactly what Mercury LLC says it is, appear on Fox, and not expect someone might write things you don’t like. Especially when the things written are “dead-on balls accurate.” (My son and I watched My Cousin Vinny the other night; it was hard to stay up so late).

If I may hazard a guess, Ms. Rodrigues is actually displeased with me because I don’t buy the creation stories or much of anything that comes after or before. The comms consultants are selling plucky moms around the library table who rise up to defeat the teachers unions (the real targets of the Waltons and Koch). Instead, I follow the money.

On to the “isn’t even accurate” part. We’ve been through this before because it isn’t a new claim from her. Yet I don’t recall Ms. Rodrigues ever showing that anything I’ve written is inaccurate. That’s the problem. What I’ve written is true and also “dead-on balls accurate.”

A note on sources: If Ms. Rodrigues has any access to “his own folks” she should name them. But she doesn’t and she can’t. Nothing I have written about Families for Excellent Schools, Massachusetts Parents United, or National Parents Union depends on Ms. Rodrigues’s “own folks.” Everything I’ve written comes from documents: Form 990 tax returns, OCPF filings, OCPF Disposition Agreements, FES internal documents, media accounts, corporate filings, NPU and MPU websites, etc. I try to link to them in my posts but if there is something you’d like to confirm and can’t find it, write to me. I’m happy to share all my sources.

Now it is afternoon nap time, I need to go and cry myself to sleep.

Money never sleeps. Follow the money.

[Full disclosure: as a (retired!) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money and AstroTurf fronts, not education.]