On July 24, 2022 a story in the Los Angeles Times included this whopper: “. . . according to Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. Her organization has seen its membership rise from 185 local activist and advocacy groups to over 600 since its inception in January 2020.”
The LATimes doesn’t give an exact attribution for the membership claim but it’s a clear inference that it came from Ms. Rodrigues. The problem is, there is exactly zero evidence for either the 185 or the 600 number. Z-E-R-O. So I wrote the following letter to the LATimes:
The Times reports of National Parents Union that the organization “has seen its membership rise from 185 local activist and advocacy groups to over 600 since its inception in January 2020.” I have studied NPU extensively; there is absolutely no evidence for this claim.
National Parents Union has never published a list of its member parent organizations. I researched this question for my book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization and found membership dominated by charter school entities. Authentic parent groups are almost entirely absent. NPU is lavishly bankrolled by, among others, the Walton family and Charles Koch.
Moms for Liberty is included in the report too. M4L is an affiliate of the right wing billionaire funded Council for National Policy.
NPU and M4L are but two of a proliferation of fabricated “parents” and “moms” fronts. They should not be characterized as authentic parent representatives.
The original story was Focus on the economy, not ‘critical race theory’ or sex ed: Inside Democrats plan to win back parents by Courtney Subramanian.
[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is now in print.]
