Protect Our Kids Future Committee Flips Off Massachusetts Political Press. How Will They Respond?

The Protect Our Kids’ Future: No on 2 campaign announced a new ad featuring Keri Rodrigues of National Parents Union as a typical Massachusetts parent. It’s a direct challenge to Massachusetts media outlets: are they going to swallow Rodrigues as a typical Massachusetts parent, or report her her as a highly compensated professional spokesperson for billionaire interests?

When I posted Framing the MCAS Opposition: Business Community” or “Parents?” yesterday I was writing about how the media was framing the MCAS opposition. The Protect Our Kids Future folks want the frame to be parents.  Here’s what I wrote yesterday:

Rodrigues has been climbing the ladder of the corporate education reform campaign for at least ten years, as indicated in her Linkedin profile. She was executive vice president for strategy and communications for Democrats for Education Reform from November 2014-October 2015. She has been the face of Massachusetts Parents United since December 2016 and of National Parents Union since 2019. . . .

You might have noticed a gap in Rodrigues’s Linkedin profile from October 2015-November 2016. During that period, she was state director of the 501(c)(3) Families for Excellent Schools Inc. Let’s go back to that OCPF determination letter:

For a period of four years from the date of this agreement, FES (the (c)(3), for which Rodrigues was state director) will not engage in fundraising in Massachusetts, soliciting in Massachusetts, or engage in any ballot question or other election-related activity in Massachusetts.

The media institutions who push the “parents” frame could ask Rodrigues about her role as state director of FES. They haven‘t. Reporters might be curious about why the person they represent to the public as a typical parent pays herself and her husband (as of 2022) $661,775 per year. The reporters are not curious. They might query about other donors to NPU, including a joint venture between the Walton family and famous Democrat Charles Koch. That doesn’t happen either. They could ask for proof of the 250,000 members NPU claims in Massachusetts or the 1,700,000 nationally. Proof is non-existent.

The press release also quotes “John Schneider, Chair of Protect Our Kids Future: No on Question 2.” Schneider is also on the board (as is Rodrigues’s husband) of National Parents Union, which, if you need a reminder, is a Walton-Koch-roster of the billionaires boys club.

This is really flipping off the state’s political press. Let’s see how they respond.

“One thing big money typically lacks is credibility, which is why those who deploy it work so hard to cover their tracks.”—Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

[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 in print.]