All posts by The Frying Pan

education

Parent Revolution: Public Schools, Private Agendas

2 Comments

By Gary Cohn

At first glance, it is one of the nation’s hottest new education-reform movements, a seemingly populist crusade to empower poor parents and fix failing public schools. But a closer examination reveals that the “parent-trigger” movement is being heavily financed by the conservative Walton Family Foundation, one of the nation’s largest and most strident anti-union organizations, a Frying Pan News investigation has shown.

Since 2009, the foundation has poured more than $6.3 million into Parent Revolution, a Los Angeles advocacy group that is in the forefront of the parent-trigger campaign in California and the nation. Its heavy reliance on Walton money, critics say, raises questions about the independence of Parent Revolution and the intentions of the Walton Family Foundation.

While Parent Revolution identifies the Walton Family Foundation as one of several donors on its Web site, the full extent of contributions from the Walton foundation and other donors hasn’t been publicly known until now. Information supplied to Frying Pan News by Parent Revolution and publicly available tax records show that a total of 18 separate foundations have given more than $14.8 million to the group since its founding in 2009.

Other multimillion dollar contributors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($1.6 million); the Laura and John Arnold Foundation ($1.5 million); the Wasserman Foundation ($1.5 million); the Broad Foundation ($1.45 million) and the Emerson Collective Education Fund ($1.2 million), founded by Laurence Powell Jobs, the widow of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

But the Walton Family Foundation is by far Parent Revolution’s largest benefactor, contributing 43 percent of the $14.9 million total.

“Why is all this money coming in?” asks John Rogers, director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access, who has studied the parent-trigger movement. “It doesn’t seem to be about educational improvements . . . It seems to be about creating greater pressure to challenge teachers’ unions rather than an authentic way to improve education opportunities.” The parent-trigger law diminishes the influence of teachers’ unions and it allows public schools to be turned into nonunion charters.

The Walton Family Foundation, which is run by the family of Walmart founder Sam Walton, is one of the nation’s largest private donors to charter schools. The foundation has also used its money and clout to fund conservative research groups (including the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation) whose analysts have then defended Walmart and its anti-union policies on newspaper opinion pages and in testimony to government committees. In education, it is a strong proponent of the expansion of charter schools, school voucher programs and other efforts to privatize public education. It also gives money to the influential trade publication Education Week to write about parent empowerment issues.

Another large donor to Parent Revolution, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation of Houston, Texas, supports charter schools and also has funded conservative efforts to overhaul and limit pensions in California, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch. John Arnold is a billionaire former Enron trader who also founded a successful hedge fund.

The Broad Foundation, founded by Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, and the Gates Foundation, also are big backers of charter schools and other market-driven education reforms, though their overall policies are far less conservative than the Walton Family Foundation.

“Everything the Walton foundation has done over the years is to support privatization and anti-union policies,” Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush, tells Frying Pan News. “They want privatization and Parent Revolution promotes their goals.”

Ben Austin, Parent Revolution’s chief executive, strongly denies that the contributions from the Walton Family Foundation and other donors influence his organization’s stated mission.

“We’ve never had a funder call and intimate that we should do one thing and not another,” Austin insists to Frying Pan News. “We make every decision through the lens of giving parents’ power and helping parents to improve the outcome for their kids. What we are trying to do is give low-income parents a similar sense of power that middle class parents take for granted.”

Yet questions persist about the symbiotic relationship between funder and funded. Parent Revolution is no ordinary reform group, but the spearhead of a movement that seeks to take control of failing public schools and turn them around through conversion to charter schools or in-district reforms — including staff and principal firings. Likewise, the Walton Family Foundation is no ordinary benefactor. Based in Bentonville, Arkansas and fed by the profits of the world’s largest retail chain, it leaves a politically conservative mark on its favorite projects.

The Walton foundation, for example, wholeheartedly embraces all state parent-trigger laws, whose language stems from model legislation crafted by the American Leadership Exchange Council (ALEC) – a corporate-controlled generator of far-right legislation, including Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground gun law and the recent statute that made Michigan a right-to-work state.

A 2012 Education Week article described how, in 2010, the Heartland Institute, an ultra-conservative Chicago think tank, borrowed Parent Revolution’s new idea and took it to ALEC.

“Heartland put together a parent-trigger policy proposal and presented it to ALEC, which created model legislation, [that,] . . . sometimes with variations, ended up appearing in about 10 to 15 states,” reported Education Week.

The man whose concept of parent triggers so impressed the Heartland Institute is Parent Revolution’s Austin, a former state school board member and Los Angeles deputy mayor under Richard Riordan. Just as Parent Revolution has become the leading player of the parent-trigger movement, so has Austin become Parent Revolution’s national face. As his group’s executive director, Austin received a total compensation of $239,451 in 2011, according to the organization’s latest available tax filing.  

California became the first state to pass a parent-trigger law in 2010. The law allows systemically struggling schools to be taken over if parent activists are able to get 51 percent of a failed school’s parents to sign a petition. The movement received a big boost from Hollywood last year with the release of the film Won’t Back Down, which tells the story of two parents (one a teacher) who use a parent-trigger type law to take over their children’s failing school in a poor Pittsburgh neighborhood. The movie largely depicts the teachers’ union and school bureaucracy as opponents of change. It was produced and funded by Walden Media, which is owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz, a longtime champion of hard-right causes.

Michelle Rhee, whose group StudentsFirst is one of the nation’s leading proponents of parent-trigger laws and other efforts to privatize public education, sponsored a series of screenings and hosted panel discussions to promote the film and its message. Panelists included former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Parent Revolution’s Austin.

While advocates claim parent triggers are intended to empower parents, critics charge that they target schools in the poorest areas with high immigrant neighborhoods, populations that are particularly vulnerable and susceptible to manipulation. The critics contend that parents may lose power once a school is converted to a charter.

“Parents get the idea they will have a say in how a [charter] school is run,” says Brian Hayes, a former English teacher who has taught in both traditional and charter schools in Los Angeles. “In many cases the parents are shunted aside when an outside charter organization takes over a school.”

Diane Ravitch, an outspoken opponent of parent triggers, points out that alternatives to privatization include reducing class sizes and working to solve specific problems in public schools – if, say, a school has a large number of Latino students who speak only limited English, one way to improve the school would be to send in more Spanish-speaking teachers.

In a recent interview with Frying Pan News, Austin vehemently disputed the notion that his organization is pushing for privatization of schools or that it blindly follows its funders’ agendas. Austin, who was joined by Patrick DeTemple, Parent Revolution’s senior strategist, spoke at the group’s downtown headquarters. The ambience was more Google campus than corporate: Austin and DeTemple sat on big floor cushions in a meeting room, while a large foosball table and a couple of swings dominated the main corridor of the office.

As one indication of his group’s autonomy, Austin points to Parent Revolution’s opposition last year to a proposed Arizona parent-trigger proposal that would have allowed for the use of “empowerment accounts” (in effect, school vouchers), even though its biggest funder, the Walton Family Foundation, has long been an advocate of vouchers. He also wrote an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press last year in which he generally supported a Michigan parent-trigger bill, but opposed a provision that would have allowed for conversion of public schools to for-profit charters, as opposed to non-profits.

“We have the freedom to take these positions,” Austin says. “Our funders fund us because they believe in parent empowerment. If they disagree they don’t have to fund us.”

DeTemple stressed that turning schools over to charter operators was only one of the options available under California’s parent-trigger law. “We’re agnostic on the question of whether parents choose a charter school or a non-charter school [option],” DeTemple says. “There aren’t enough [top quality] charters. The only real path must involve transformation of district school systems. The charter path [alone] does not get you to that goal.”  

So far, however, parent trigger has only been successfully used in one instance – and in that case, a public school is being converted to a charter. It occurred in Adelanto, a blue-collar town tucked onto San Bernardino County’s High Desert. After a bitter, bruising fight that split the community and ended up in court, the Adelanto school board voted in January to convert its struggling Desert Trails Elementary School to a charter, beginning next fall.

Opponents, including Desert Trails parent Lori Yuan, say that this parent-trigger effort was controlled by organizers brought in by Parent Revolution, and that they tricked the community into believing this was simply an effort to improve conditions at the school, not to give it over to a private charter operator. Parent Revolution officials, in turn, say that their opposition used unethical tactics in contesting the petitions.

“Our community was misled,” recalls Yuan, who has two children at the school. “Parents didn’t know they were signing for a charter takeover.”

Shelly Whitfield, who has five children at Desert Trails Elementary, says she was repeatedly approached at home and school to sign a petition. “They came to my door several times and said they were going to get computers and help get the kids better lunches,” she remembers. She says she is strongly opposed to the end result – the conversion of the school to a charter operation.

Cynthia Ramirez, one of the parents behind the parent-trigger efforts in Adelanto, says that at first the parents tried to work with school officials to make changes.

“At the beginning, nobody was considering a charter,” she recalls. But Ramirez says district officials repeatedly rebuffed and disrespected efforts by the parent group to bring about changes. Among other things, she says parents were seeking a voice in picking a new principal and continuous say in how the school would be run. “We wanted to have some kind of power, to be involved,” she says.

Ramirez, who has a daughter at the school, says wasn’t satisfied with the quality of education at the school. Homework was too easy, kids weren’t being challenged, she says.

Parent Revolution provided help in many ways. It rented a house for the Desert Trails’ activist parents to use as a headquarters, provided a full-time organizer to work with them, and also sent in experts to train and advise parents on everything from strategy on dealing with the school board to writing letters to help in researching potential charter schools, Ramirez and others say. It even provided T-shirts.

“They’ve been providing everything we asked for,” says Ramirez, adding that Parent Revolution left all final decisions up to the local parents.

Yuan and other parents had contested the signatures gathered by parent-trigger advocates, but their challenge was rejected by a San Bernardino County Superior Court judge. In the end, only 53 of the 466 original signers would vote in an election to determine the school’s future. The bad feelings in the community over the battle for charter conversion have continued to this day.

“This was a true test of the mettle of empowered parents,” trumpeted FreedomWorks, a prime force in the Tea Party movement.

Yuan disagrees: “We’ve known all along this wasn’t a grassroots movement.”

The focus of Parent Revolution has lately shifted to the city of Los Angeles. In February, the city’s board of education approved the first use of the parent-trigger law at the West Adams District’s 24th Street Elementary School. It’s still not clear exactly what changes will take place at the school, or whether it will be given over to a charter operator. Other struggling Los Angeles schools, including Weigand Avenue Elementary in Watts, are also likely to consider or adopt parent-trigger takeovers in the months ahead.

Adelanto, meanwhile, represents the application of Parent Revolutionary theory into practice, with school children as the experiment’s key ingredients. The school, whose students are predominantly Latino and black, won’t become a charter until August, but will be operated by LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy, a high test-scoring nonprofit school whose “back to basics” curriculum includes classes in Latin and classical literature.

Whitfield, however, won’t be sending her children to LaVerne in the fall.

“My kids are not going to go there,” she says. “They’re taking away all the teachers my kids have been around for years. They took over our school, and I don’t think it’s fair. They’re not for the kids.”

(Gary Cohn writes for Frying Pan News.)

Uncategorized

Five New Reasons Not to Buy Matzah at Walmart

By Danny Feingold

If you’re like me, right now you may be scrambling to stock up on all of your Passover essentials. So what if I told you that you could get 12 boxes of matzah – more than enough to cover the eight days and nights of breadless revelry – for just over $40 bucks?

Ah, but there’s a catch: You’ll have to buy this miracle matzah pak at Walmart. Moral dilemma? You bet.

Last year we provided a short list of reasons you might want to think twice about a Walmart matzah binge. We wish we could report that Walmart had cleaned up its act since then, but alas, the world’s largest retailer has racked up a series of alleged corporate crimes and indiscretions that would make a pharaoh blush.

So before you succumb to those everyday low prices, here are five more reasons not to buy matzah at Walmart:

1) Hunger Strike: Remember those passages in the haggadah about the bread of affliction? When workers stop eating to protest conditions, you know things are really bad. That’s what happened in Cambodia earlier this month, when workers who sew clothes sold at Walmart staged a hunger strike because they weren’t being paid the extremely meager wages they were owed.

2) Forced Labor: If this doesn’t hit close to home, you really need to brush up on your Passover narrative. Last summer Walmart suspended one of its seafood suppliers  after an investigation discovered that workers were being forced to work up to 24 hours consecutively and had been locked in the plant. The same team found workplace violations at a dozen other Walmart food suppliers. Many of the aggrieved employees were foreign workers – strangers in a strange land indeed.

3) Fatal Factory Fire: Last November, in a tragedy eerily reminiscent of the Shirtwaist Triangle Factory Fire of 1911, 112 workers died in a blaze at an Indonesian factory that supplied clothes to Walmart. The New York Times discovered soon after that Walmart had played a leading role in blocking efforts to address safety concerns at Bangladeshi factories.

4) Quashing Freedom of Speech: As you prepare your Passover meditation on the meaning of freedom, keep in mind that among the most basic of liberties is the right to speak freely. This is not a right enjoyed by Walmart employees, which is why last December Walmart workers in 10 countries participated in a global protest against the company’s use of intimidation and firings to silence disgruntled workers.

5) Bribery Scandal: Last April, the New York Times broke the story that Walmart had allegedly covered up a bribery scandal in Mexico. The corporation’s Mexican subsidiary reportedly gave tens of millions of dollars to government officials to grease the wheels for store development there, and Walmart’s head honchos back home in Bentonville turned a blind eye. What’s the connection to Passover? We’re not sure, but we know your bubbi would not approve.

(Danny Feingold is communications director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.)

Uncategorized

L.A. Times Misses the Story Behind Living Wage Campaigns

By Roxana Tynan

On Sunday the Los Angeles Times published a story about the important successes of campaigns to pass local minimum wage and living wage laws. However, while highlighting new developments that will impact local economies and the lives of workers, the Times missed the real story and forces behind this growing trend.

The piece focused on two ballot-box victories for living wage laws: a minimum wage for hotel workers in Long Beach and a citywide minimum wage increase in San Jose.

“The victories put these two California cities on the cusp of an emerging trend,” wrote Wesley Lowery. “Ballot initiatives, labor experts say, have the potential to rewrite labor’s playbook for how to win concessions from management.” Throughout the piece, Lowery presented the minimum wage ballot measures as a tactic put in place and managed from behind the scenes by labor leaders.

In fact, both measures were conceived and carried to victory by broad coalitions of people and organizations interested in improving their cities – together with key labor partners who see their role as improving the lot of all workers’ lives. The San Jose measure germinated in a San Jose State University class, whose students – none of them yet labor leaders to my knowledge – studied the concept in 2010 and presented what was to be taken up by a citywide movement. Groups such as the United Way of Silicon Valley, the NAACP of San Jose and the Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley probably didn’t see themselves as puppets dancing on the strings of labor leaders; they no doubt saw themselves as partners with union members and leading organizations, such as Working Partnerships USA, in pursuing shared missions to mitigate poverty, address inequality and improve the lives of working people.

As with Long Beach, the labor movement was not “behind the scenes” but out front in partnership with community allies with a vision about how to improve our economy.

Dozens of small businesses jumped on board to support the Long Beach minimum wage for hotel workers. They recognized that higher pay for low-wage workers would immediately translate into more money spent locally – a natural stimulus for an economy struggling to leave the recession behind.

Long Beach residents felt that large hotels owed something to the community, since their success was supported in part by millions of dollars in taxpayer investment and development subsidies. In Long Beach, as in San Jose, students also played an important role. Students from Long Beach State University and local colleges and high schools bucked their generation’s reputation for political apathy, joined the movement and took leadership in shaping their communities.

Far beyond seeking “concessions from management,” supporters and voters saw these measures as concrete ways that voters could use to address economic problems and set their cities on a better course. At least as important as the narrative of these measures as a growing tactic is the story of the overwhelming support they found with the general public. The San Jose measure, which raised the minimum wage from California’s $8 to $10 per hour, passed with 58 percent of the vote, despite the opposition outspending supporters two to one. The Long Beach measure, setting a minimum wage of $13 per hour for workers in large hotels, passed with more than 64 percent of the vote.

These totals represent massive public support – it should be noted that every ballot measure starts with an uphill climb to pass it, as voters’ default vote is usually “No.” The biggest takeaway from Long Beach and San Jose should be that voters – residents, students and business owners – don’t find the status quo acceptable. Long Beach and San Jose voters, like all of us, live in an economy marked by extreme inequality and wages that don’t keep up with living costs, despite record profits for employers. When given an option of making concrete change — and shown the way forward by an energetic and diverse coalition – voters will embrace it.

Los Angeles Area

Jan Perry: Speaking Power to Truth

By Madeline Janis

A recent Los Angeles Times profile portrayed mayoral candidate and L.A. City Councilmember Jan Perry as a politician with a “willingness to speak her mind” and, quoting Perry herself, as someone who likes to “cut to the chase in my words and deeds.” The Times also quoted dignitaries who credit Perry for being a leading force behind Downtown’s revival and for creating thousands of jobs that she has promoted with tax subsidies.

The Times added that, “On occasion, Perry has also stood up to unions, as she did in 2008 when labor allies tried to force the Fresh & Easy market chain to guarantee 30 living wage jobs in return for city approval of a housing and retail project in a Historic South-Central area that needed a grocery store. ‘This puts the project in serious jeopardy,’ Perry wrote in a letter to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.”

I was the “labor ally” who pushed for a living wage in exchange for a $2.5 million subsidy for that 18,000 square-foot market on the border of Downtown and South Los Angeles. As a member of the Board of the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency for 10 years, I repeatedly interacted with Perry on hundreds of development projects. In my view, the real question about Perry’s record is not whether she has been willing to speak her mind to “labor allies” and community groups, who have seldom supported her financially during her political career. Rather, it revolves around her opposition to policies like the living wage – and who she was advocating for.

An even more important question, in a city still dominated by developer interests, is this: Has Councilmember Perry been willing to stand up to the corporate lobbyists whose clients have been her biggest financial supporters and the beneficiaries of her advocacy over her 12-year tenure on the City Council?

The answer to that question is an emphatic “No.” In my experience, Perry almost always pushed for whatever the large developers wanted, with as few strings attached as possible, often times putting enormous pressure on all levels of decision-makers to approve deals involving millions of dollars in public subsidies and land – with little public input, without important community benefits and without clear, well-drafted agreements in place.

The Adams and Central Fresh & Easy market deal is a good example of this behavior. The original proposal was for a $2.5 million public subsidy to pay for an 18,000 square-foot market, to be operated by Fresh & Easy, a supermarket chain owned by the British corporate giant, Tesco. This proposal was unusual, in that it called for a direct grant to go to the developer to pay for the market, rather than the more typical loan that has to be paid back over time. While the grant was structured as an “easement” on the property, the “easement” had few conditions other than the requirement that there be some sort of food sale on the property.

At the time, I was one of seven CRA board members tasked with reviewing and approving all projects. When the proposal was initially put on the board agenda, I wrote a memo to the agency CEO on behalf of three board members asking that the agreement be crafted to ensure transparency and enforceability, given the size of the public investment. (Two and a half million dollars for 30 part-time jobs worked out to be an unprecedented $83,000 per job, more than twice the $35,000 maximum allowed in federal economic development subsidy programs.)

At the time, the three of us wanted to ensure that – in exchange for the public investment – there was an enforceable program guaranteeing that local residents could gain access to those jobs and that the jobs pay at least a “living wage” (then about $10 per hour). We also asked that the market on the property be required to sell “healthy food” and that the final, signed agreement be circulated to every board member in advance of the hearing, so that it could be fully and fairly vetted before approval.

What happened next was classic Jan Perry. Rather than calling up the board members and engaging in a conversation about how to craft the best deal, she wrote a highly intimidating letter directly to the mayor excoriating us for even proposing the living wage idea. Because of that intense political pressure, the chair of the CRA board decided to move the matter to a quick vote, despite the fact that final agreements on the project had not been fully negotiated or signed by the developer, as was typically required by CRA policy. The project was then approved by a majority of the board.

Fast forward to the end of 2012 and Tesco’s decision to close all of its Fresh & Easy markets in the United States. Without guarantees of a full-service supermarket or living wage jobs, the taxpayers may soon end up with a 99 cent store selling processed foods — and jobs that pay $8 per hour in exchange for our $2.5 million investment.

Unfortunately, I witnessed this type of intimidating, reckless behavior by Perry on many occasions.

Another incident came when one of my board colleagues and I questioned an $11 million subsidy to a developer who had been accused by the Legal Aid Foundation of civil rights abuses and Perry again vehemently argued that the deal needed to be approved immediately. (That project’s developer was later found to have committed civil rights violations by a federal judge.) Also, when two board members questioned a multimillion dollar subsidy to a garment factory owner who had proposed moving from South Gate to South L.A. (with few if any net new jobs), Councilmember Perry once more acted swiftly to push the deal through, accusing us of being “out of touch” and “naïve.”

Courage, unlike beauty, is not in the eye of the beholder– it’s either there or it’s missing. The L.A. Times may portray Jan Perry as “plainspoken” and “hard to fit in a box,” but it doesn’t take bravery to stand up to advocates for Los Angeles’ poor and underemployed – only the backing of powerful developers. This is especially critical when millions of dollars of precious public resources hang in the balance.

(Madeline Janis is co-founder of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy and serves as its National Policy Director. She led the L.A. living wage campaign in the 1990s and from 2002 until 2012, she was a member of the board of commissioners of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency.)