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 to expose the ties behind Parents Defending Education, a self-professed grassroots parents group, and Leonard Leo, the boss of bosses of dark money distribution. I’ve previously written about the links between PDE president Nicole Neily and the Koch network. But this from Graves and Bowen just blew me away:
Notably, the dues paid by local parents barely covered the bonus Nicole Neily paid herself in 2021, as PDE’s leader and the president of its board. Neily’s base salary was $125,000, and on top of that compensation and retirement funding, she received an additional bonus of $67,500, or literally 50 percent of her base salary. It would be unusual if any of her dues-paying members ever received such a large bonus. Neily’s bonus was more than the annual real median earnings of working Americans in the U.S. With the five-figure bonus, Neily’s total compensation was $195,688 for 11 months of work in 2021. In Neily’s application for PDE’s tax exempt status, she stated that bonuses would be “no more than 10% of an employee’s annual salary” and that such compensation is approved by others on PDE’s board.
Wow. Neily starts a grassroots parents group and raises over $3,100,000 in one year all while telling the Columbus (OH) Post-Dispatch “We just all work from home. We’re all working moms.” How does a working mom then go on to score a $125,000 salary and a bonus of $67,500???!!! Here’s how: Neily is not only president of PDE, but also president of the board of directors! Some working moms just have all the luck.
Neily is nothing but a petty piker next to Massachusetts own Keri Rodrigues. She was state director of the privatizer Families for Excellent Schools Inc. during the 2016 charter schools ballot proposal loss and Executive Vice President for Strategy and Communications at Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts before that. She apparently caught the eye of Boston education reformers the Walmart heirs of Arkansas, because after FES collapsed the Waltons installed her as president of Massachusetts Parents United then as president of National Parents Union. The most recently available evidence of her compensation from those Walton fronts is from 2021 Form 990 tax returns for the organizations. She was paid $412,000 consisting of $232,000 for 20 hours per week at NPU and $180,000 for 20 hours per week at MPU. But no grassroots parent should be expected to scrape by on $412,000 per year so Rodrigues has her husband Tim Langan as COO of both NPU and MPU, and together they brought home just over $676,000 in 2021.
Talk about some love from the board! Here’s where this reminds me of Neily. NPU has at least two boards but on one of them, Rodrigues and Langan are on the board. MPU has a four member board and Rodrigues and Langan are on that one too, and the third member, according to MPU’s 2021 Form 990 tax return, is Rodrigues’s aunt!
Wait until the other MassPolitisProfs find out about the board meeting I just held by myself!
In the darkness of secrecy, sinister interest and evil in every shape, have full swing. . . . Publicity is the very soul of justice.”—Jeremy Bentham
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.]
“Neily starts a grassroots parents group and raises over $3,1000,000”
I think you’ve missed a decimal point or something. 😉
Thanks