Photo Credit: Brad Jonas -- NSFW
April 26, 2013
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This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.
When
I traveled to the desert city of Victorville in Souther California this
January, I little expected that the neighboring town of Adelanto would
become ground zero for a fight between billionaires on one side, and
poor, vulnerable minority parents and children on the other.
I first heard about the fight through the local right-wing paper, the
Victorville Daily Press,
which gleefully announced on its front page that a local school, Desert
Trails Elementary, had just made history as the first school in the
nation to be privatized under California's new "parent trigger" law. The
paper described the takeover as “promising a fresh start to the failing
elementary school,” and claimed it had received widespread support from
parents.
The national press gushed in similarly glowing terms. The
LA Weekly
described the Adelanto privatization as an “historic moment for the
education-reform movement picking up steam across the nation.”
The New York Timesdutifully
compared the takeover of Desert Trails to “Won’t Back Down.” An
“issues” movie starring Face of Indie Maggie Gyllenhaal, “Won’t Back
Down” promotes the parent-trigger law as a panacea for America’s
public-education problems, one that “empowers” parents to fight back
against self-interested public school teachers and their union.
All
in all, everyone agreed that this takeover of Desert Trails Elementary
represented a triumphant moment for parents and their children, a
victory for the people over rapacious elementary school teachers and
their unions.
But something didn’t seem right about this story —
it was too pat, too much like a triumph-of-the-spirit Disney tale, too
much like Maggie’s movie. So I made some calls and started spending some
time in Adelanto, to find out what really went on there.
* *
Motorists
entering the City of Adelanto are greeted with a big blue sign that
reads: "The City With Unlimited Possibilities." It's not clear who came
up with this slogan, or when. But, these days, the sign is a cruel joke.
Founded
in 1915 by the guy who invented the modern electric iron, Adelanto
never amounted to much. Mostly it served as pit stop and junkyard to a
nearby George Air Force Base. The base closed more than a decade ago,
and home values have collapsed since the last real-estate bubble popped.
Entire neighborhoods emptied out, and building companies went belly up,
leaving behind half-finished “master planned communities” that still
stand there, desiccating in the dry heat. Signs advertise brand-new
three-bedroom McTractHomes for zero down and $800 a month.
Today,
Adelanto is the end of the line. A poor, desert town, the city serves as
a dumping ground for low-income minority families who have been
squeezed out of the Greater Los Angeles-Orange County region and pushed
out over the San Bernardino Mountains into the bleak expanse of the
Mojave Desert, where housing is dirt cheap and jobs almost non-existent.
The
numbers tell the story: Of the 32,000 people who call Adelanto home,
one out of three are below the poverty line. Per-capita income is just
under $12,000 — nearly three times lower than the California average,
and about as much as the average person earns in Mexico. There are
almost no jobs here, and Starbucks ranks among the city’s top-ten
employers.
Nearly two-thirds of the population are Latinos, many
of them undocumented. Another one in five are African-American. Then
there are the 5 percent of the population that the census bureau
classifies as “institutionalized,” which is nothing but a wishy-washy
bureaucratic way of saying that 1 out of 20 Adelanto residents is
currently rotting in jail — a rate five times higher than the national
average. Adelanto does not have its own high school, but dropout rates
in the neighboring suburb of Victorville, also hard-hit by the subprime
bubble, are among the worst in the state — hovering somewhere around
50%.
If you stand at the city’s welcome sign, you can just make
out its three major prison facilities: a giant federal prison complex to
the north, a brand-new state prison to the west, and just north of
that, California’s largest private immigrant deportation facility. The
last was built recently by Geo Group, the nation’s second-largest
private prison contractor.
* *
I would spend
several weeks talking to the parents of children enrolled in Desert
Trails Elementary, meeting with them in local taco joints and strip mall
diners and talking about what happened. As I had suspected, their
version of events turned out not to match the Disney version in national
papers.
The parents told me that a Los Angeles-based group
calling itself Parent Revolution organized a local campaign to harass
and trick them into signing petitions that they thought were meant for
simple school improvements. In fact those petitions turned out to be
part of a sophisticated campaign to convert their children’s public
school into a privately-run charter — something a majority of parents
opposed. At times, locals say, the Parent Revolution volunteers’ tactics
were so heavy-handed in gathering signatures that they crossed the line
into harassment and intimidation. Many parents were misled about what
the petition they signed actually meant. Some told me that the
intimidation with some of the undocumented Latino residents included
bribery and extortion.
They first noticed something was up in the
summer of 2011, when small groups of parents decked out in Parent
Revolution T-shirts started appearing around town, going door to door to
speak to parents of Desert Trails Elementary kids, spreading the word
that they were organizing a "parent union" to try to improve the quality
of their children's education.
At that, local parents who’d been
involved in school affairs started to grow suspicious. According to
several I spoke to, two of the leading members of this new “parent
union” had previously served in the school’s Parent Teacher Association,
and had resigned amid accusations of improprieties.
Why would they suddenly start a new parent organization? Spite? Revenge? And what exactly was Parent Revolution?
Parents
didn’t get much of a chance to ponder these questions. As soon as
summer vacation ended, the parent union began to reveal its true
function. Adelanto was to become the first victim of a giant corporate
push to privatize public schools.
* *
Put simply, a
parent trigger law allows a group of parents to hand over their kids’
public schools to private contractors, and then allows these new private
contractors to tear up teacher union contracts and fire or hire as they
see fit — all while receiving taxpayer money to fund their
private-charter school business.
The law works like this: If
enough parents sign a trigger petition (representing more than 50% of
the number of students in the school), they can fire its principal, lay
off unionized teachers or hand it over to a private charter school
company.
According to a recent investigation
by FryingPanNews,
Parent Revolution has received $14.8 million since its founding in
2009. Almost half of that — $6.3 million — came from the Walton Family
Foundation, which has long bankrolled the war on unions and public
education. The rest of Parent Revolution’s cash came from more liberal
sources, including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Broad
Foundation, each of which has given about $1.5 million to the group.
As reported in
Dissent,
these three foundations -- Gates, Walton and Broad -- spend roughly $4
billion a year to hand public K-12 education to the private sector,
giving them increasing leverage over a sector that's worth $500 billion
per year.
Parent Revolution is a direct outgrowth of the charter
school industry. Ben Austin, the outfit's leader, previously headed a
large charter-school firm called Green Dot Schools, whose backers
overlap nicely with Parent Revolution's backers -- Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Eli Broad, Phillip Anschutz,
and others. Austin's replacement at Green Dot Schools is a former
partner at Bain, Mitt Romney's old firm.
Parent Revolution's Ben
Austin has described the law as "a groundbreaking and historic new
policy" that will "transform public education," and has dressed it up in
the language of parents' rights. ALEC, which adopted a version of the
Parent Empowerment Act as a model for "parent trigger" legislation,
described it in similar terms, saying that it "places democratic control
into the hands of parents at school level."
And yet, for all this
empowerment, parents have never tried to pull the trigger on their own,
not without Parent Revolution coming into town and applying pressure,
intimidation and bait-and-switch techniques on unsuspecting parents.
In
recent years, Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of
Education under George H. W. Bush, has turned into the most eloquent and
forceful critic of charter schools and voucher programs. She tells me
that California's parent trigger law was not designed for the parents'
sake. Instead, Ravitch describes it as "a stealth tactic by charter
advocates to gain a larger market share by duping parents."
Charter
school advocates like Parent Revolution and so-called "school
reformers" like Michelle Rhee (recently discredited in a series of
test-score cheating scandals and for trying to conceal the wealthy Wall
Street funders of her "StudentsFirst" pro-privatization group) front for
some of the world's biggest, most powerful corporate figures.
Potentates from the extraction industry, Wall Street hedge fund tycoons
and others have invested huge sums into privatizing America's public
education system. For them, it is a public trough filled with up to $1
trillion just waiting to be converted into private profit, whatever the
consequences for children.
Former "Junk Bond King" and convicted
felon Michael Milken, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, Netflix founder
Reed Hastings and billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr are just
some of the names betting heavily on privatized education. Black Rock,
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and just about every other big name in
Wall Street and private equity are in on the action, as well.
An investigation by the
Huffington Post revealed
that Michelle Rhee's secretive, well-funded pro-privatization group
StudentsFirst is backed by hedge fund tycoon David Tepper, who pocketed
$2.2 billion in 2012 alone. Another backer is billionaire John Arnold, a
former Enron trader who reportedly gave Rhee's group "tens of millions"
of dollars. Arnold, a self-described "libertarian" who profited heavily
from Enron's manipulation of the California energy markets, is funding
the drive to slash California teachers' pensions through his
front-group,
The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.
Just last month, Rhee
joined the "Parent Revolution" group for a
joint march in
support of parent trigger and charter schools in Los Angeles. It's a
small world, school privatization, and its inhabitants have very deep
pockets.
So these are some of the people behind the parent trigger
law, which should indicate what it’s really about. The law will give
these corporate interests a new weapon with which to privatize public
education and access to a virgin vein of taxpayer dollars. Best of all,
the trigger law makes it look as if parents are choosing to privatize
public education out of their own free will. They were given a choice,
and they put their trust in the private sector.
California is just
the beginning. In the past few years, parent trigger laws have popped
in seven states so far, and another dozen others are currently
deliberating similar legislation.
But this kind of reform did not
come easy. The parent trigger law was conceived as a con, but that
didn’t mean that parents would fall for it automatically. That’s what
Parent Revolution learned when it used the trigger law for the first
time shortly after it passed in 2010.
Parent Revolution first
tried using the law to take over a school in Compton in 2010, organizing
a small clique of local Compton parents and waging a blitz
fake-grassroots campaign to dupe parents into pulling the trigger on
their kids’ school. But the campaign crashed and burned after parents
and teachers pushed back hard. Compton parents accused Parent Revolution
organizers of deception and harassment, and many of those who signed
the petition eventually rescinded their signatures. “They told me the
petition was to beautify the school," one parent told the Los Angeles
Times. “They are misinforming the parents, so I revoked my signature."
To
fight back, Parent Revolution called in a favor from Los Angeles Mayor
Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Chicano community organizer turned
charter school advocate. Villaraigosa, who has stacked the LA County
Board of Education with
former employees of the Eli Broad empire, counter-accused Compton parents of harassment, and equated them with union-busters:
“It's
particularly alarming to see these parents resort to the kind of
intimidation, the kind of smear campaigning, the kind of rumor-mongering
that is all too reminiscent of the way bad employers try to intimidate
working people.”
But it was no use. Even Compton — a city
synonymous with gangs, poverty and violence — was neither poor enough,
nor isolated enough to take Parent Revolution’s “power empowerment”
program without a fight.
An isolated desert suburb about halfway
between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, home to some of the poorest families
in Southern California, would prove to be much more vulnerable to the
tactics used by Parent Revolution.
* *
So they
went to Adelanto. By enlisting local parents to canvass the neighborhood
speaking out against the teacher’s union, Parent Revolution had already
laid the groundwork. The “parent union” was a classic PR strategy,
designed to create a rift between parents and the local teachers’ union.
Parent Revolution’s aims were initially vague, except on one issue,
which was demonizing the teachers union. Parent Revolution volunteers
all told the same story: The school’s problems were the fault of bad,
self-interested teachers, who cared more about their own pay benefits
and job security than about educating the children. As the group's
website explained, "Our schools are failing our children because they
are not designed to succeed. They have been designed to serve adults,
not children."
In September 2011, the local “parent union” was
joined by the big guns: a troop of trained, experienced organizers sent
in from Parent Revolution’s main office in Los Angeles.
Parent
Revolution's "lead organizer," a former Green Beret by the name of
Alfonso Flores, headed the campaign. Flores is not just any old
organizer. He has worked as a public school teacher, run a Los Angeles
charter school called Global Education Academy and is considered an
expert in the field of applying free-market solutions to public
education. In 2008, Flores led a panel at a seminar hosted by the
Pacific Research Institute, a GOP think-tank linked to ALEC and the Cato
Institute, and backed by major oil, tobacco, pharmaceutical and health
insurance firms. (Pacific Research Institute flaks served on President
George W. Bush’s environmental advisory panel in 2001.) The same year
that it hired Flores to offer advice on how charter-school
administrators could improve student behavior, Pacific Research
Institute was lobbying hard against the healthcare reform and a
government-run medical system, saying that it would inevitably result in
Soviet-style shortages and the rationing of medical care.
Alfonso
Flores set up a command bunker in a rented home just a block away from
the school, on Delicious Street. Parent Revolution advisors and
organizers sent in from LA continuously came to the house to hold
strategy sessions, instruct trigger parents on everything from
collecting signatures to handling the media. They used it as a forward
operating base to launch tactical operations into the community. Hanging
in the living room and overlooking all this activity was a
black-and-white poster depicting Parent Revolution’s mission and raison
d'etre. The top part of the poster showed a big black fish eating a
group of disorganized little fish. This was the “system” eating the
“parents.” Below it was another big black fish, but this time it was
being chased by an even bigger fish made of organized smaller fish. This
was the local “parent union” eating “Desert Trails Elementary School.”
Devouring
a public school—nothing better describes what Parent Revolution was
doing in Adelanto. Over the next three months, packs of trigger
activists and organizers would spill out of the house and swarm the
neighborhood, aggressively pushing parents to sign some sort of petition
that they barely bothered to explain.
First, they started with the school. Parent Revolution’s lead organizer Alfonso Flores led the pack.
One
mother described the group’s aggressive petition drive in a signed
statement filed with the Adelanto School District. I was able to obtain
this statement from anti-trigger parents:
“The man came
to my car over several days and constantly begged me to sign the
petition when I asked to get it & turn it in later he stated that he
couldn’t do that so after several minutes of harassment I gave in and
signed the petition unaware of the consequences. He was very pushy &
persistent. I wish I that I wan’t intimated [sic] by him & that I
didn’t sign the petition.”
It got so bad that parents had
to ask the school to deploy more security to protect them from Parent
Revolution’s pushy canvassers.
“They were there every day, every
morning and every afternoon,” says Maggie Flamenco, a mother of two
special-needs children enrolled in Desert Trails, and a member of the
Adelanto’s Special Education Parent Advisory Committee. We met at a
Denny’s just around the corner from Desert Trails Elementary. The way
Flamenco describes it, the trigger campaign was much more like a
low-intensity war designed to break the parents’ will using
intimidation, harassment and deception, than anything like the
“empowerment” that the Parent Trigger advocates claimed it was.
She
described to me how Parent Revolution volunteers would block cars with
their bodies to get the parent driver to sign their parent –trigger
petition; how they’d knock on windows, hound and follow parents when
they dropped their kids off and when they picked them up after school.
They were so persistent about it that it got to the point where parents
like Maggie dreaded going to collect their own children.
Maggie
told me she had to file a police report against a Parent Revolution
activist because the man kept harassing her every time she came to pick
up and drop off her kids at school. “Because I was one of the parents
who did not want to sign... he blocked the car with his body and
prevented me from leaving, writing my writing my plates down, taking
pictures of my plates, taking pictures of the kids...it was just
harassment."
The harassment worked. Maggie didn’t sign the
petition, but she did withdraw her kids from the school because of the
stress and fear they were suffering from the repeated harassment.
"Their
anxiety was high. Their teachers and aids were saying, 'The school is
gonna be done.' They were scared," she explained. “The doctor put them
on a home hospital due to their anxiety. All this stuff with their
school they were just freaking out that it was going to get taken over,
that they are not going to have their aides, their teachers anymore.
They are autistic so they don't understand anything. They told me the
other day, ‘I hope they don’t close the school when we’re in there.’”
This
was clearly no longer a grassroots campaign run by local parents, nor
was its mission to empower the community. Its primary goal now was to
force as many parents as possible to sign "parent trigger" petitions.
Parent
Revolution operatives followed people into local businesses, harassed
them with constant phone calls and staked out people's homes. One father
got a panicked call from his child, who was scared because a man was
lurking outside their home for a long time. Panicking, the dad rushed
home, only to find a Parent Revolution organizer camped outside waiting
for a signature.
Some Desert Trails parents noticed that Parent
Revolution organizers had somehow obtained contact information that was
not publicly listed, including cell phone numbers and addresses, and
worried that the group had somehow illegally accessed their children’s
confidential school records.
One mother outlined her suspicions in a signed statement later filed with the Adelanto School District:
“I
received a call on my cell phone, and the parents came to my house
twice. My cellphone is not public record and when I questioned the
gentleman on the phone how he received my cell # the call disconnected. I
then called back and did not receive and [sic] answer. I am also
wondering how they knew my address. I feel there has been a breech in
confidentiality of my 2 childrens [sic] record at the school … I am now
afraid they have my childrens [sic] Social Security numbers.”
Parent
Revolution used every debt-collector trick in the book, purposefully
making life so miserable for parents that they would agree to sign just
to get the canvassers off their backs. “Most of the reason the parents
signed was because they were tired of not answering their door, of
hiding from them,” said Maggie Flamenco.
Lori Yuan, a mother of
two kids Desert Trails and a member of Adelanto’s planning commission,
who would later lead the parent effort to resist Parent Revolution,
agreed: “Most folks were duped and had no idea the consequences of this
petition succeeding.”
Statements filed by parents with Adelanto’s
school district all say pretty much the same thing: “We were duped and
pushed.” Here are just a few examples:
“I was misled and
told that we weren’t going to fight to be a charter school. They kept
coming to my home and insisted I sign. I am upset thats not what I
wanted for my students.”
“The petitioner kept coming to my
doorstep, for many days, my wife told me not to sign it but I did
because I felt harassed, and I wanted them to leave me alone. I don’t
blame them I blame myself but I don’t agree with the petition now that I
understand it.”
Just a few months before Parent
Revolution showed up in town, there had been a huge scandal involving
the Adelanto Charter Academy, a new publicly-funded charter school that
embraced “conservative and Christian values” run by a couple of
businessmen with deep connections to San Bernardino County’s GOP
political machine. At the time, it was Adelanto’s only charter school.
District officials started to notice something was up when they
discovered administrators didn’t bother with even the most basic
bookkeeping, and a deeper audit revealed that the school failed to meet
basic education requirements, served tainted food and functioned as
little more than a shell company that diverted public education funds
into private bank accounts and political campaigns.
On top of all
that, it turned out that the charter school was set up with the help of
San Bernardino County Supervisor Bill Postmus, who crashed and burned in
that special way only evangelical closet-cases manage to pull off: he
was arrested for possession of meth while under investigation for a long
list of corrupt dealings and kickbacks. Right before the Adelanto
Charter School scandal broke, Postmus pleaded guilty to fourteen
felonies, including bribery, conspiracy, extortion and the
misappropriation of public funds.
It was big, ugly mess, and it
did not make charter schools look very good. So Parent Revolution
canvassers did what any honest community organizer would do: they
pretended that their petition had nothing to do with charter schools.
"When
Parent Revolution came to my door, they explained they wanted to make
the school better, get water fountains, the playground set and making
sound like they were gonna do a makeover, instead of a takeover,” said
Eleanor Medina, who moved to Adelanto 10 years ago from Buena Park in
small city in Orange County to retire, and has been helping raise her
grandchildren. “They also said that everyone was going to get a
computer.”
Other parents report they were told pretty much the
same thing: Parent Revolution promised that they were not trying to
convert Desert Trails into a charter school, and reassured parents
current teachers would not be fired. Organizers also made the dubious
claim that if the petition went through, each child was going to receive
a laptop to own.
For parents who insisted on giving the petition a
closer read, Parent Revolution used a crude bait-and-switch technique:
canvassers asked the parents to sign two completely separate petitions,
and invoked two different clauses of the parent trigger law. The first
petition sought only to introduce reforms and give parents greater power
over administering the school. The second petition invoked the full
privatization package: firing all the teachers and handing the school
over to a private charter- school company (the specific company would be
chosen at a later time).
Two petitions? Well, Parent Revolution’s
reps explained that the second petition would never be used officially,
but only employed as a negotiating tool — a prop that could be used to
threaten the school district if it attempted to stall implementing the
demands of its first petition.
Chrissy Alvarado, a mother of two
students at Desert Trails, says she always thought the two petitions
were just a ruse, a way to sow confusion. “They never explained
themselves enough for us to understand anything,” she said. “In reality,
it was all about the charter.”
She was right.
In early
January, Parent Revolution activists announced that they had collected
signatures representing 70 percent of the students, and proceeded to
submit the petition calling for full charter conversion.
The news
outraged Desert Trails parents, but it finally spurred them into action,
and the small group emerged to try and stop the petition.
Eleanor
Medina couldn’t believe they had the gall to dupe parents like that:
"You're talking about my kids' education. They need to go to college.
Pretty soon they're gonna need to go to college just to get a Jack in
the Box job."
“We didn't know what we could do, because no one had
done this before,” Lori explained as she met me for coffee, before
heading to an Adelanto planning commission meeting. “We were in
overdrive, 24 hours a day, doing nothing but research, pounding the
pavement, driving around, having meetings, going crazy. Literally
nothing else in life existed how do we beat this, what do we do.”
Very
quickly it became apparent a whole lot of parents had been duped, and
would happily rescind their signatures if they got a chance.
“We
called hundreds of lawyers, but no one would help us. They didn’t even
refer us to the right lawyer who could help us,” Lori explained, shaking
her head. “Meanwhile, Parent Revolution had a slick legal team working
for them pro bono.”
Anti-trigger parents were grasping at straws,
and felt totally alone. Local teachers couldn’t help them; they were
afraid to even talk. The union told them to stay quiet because it was
afraid of legal action from Parent Revolution. Anti-trigger parents say
that, in the end, the only real help came from California’s teachers
union, but even that was mostly restricted to legal advice on how to
properly collect statements from parents so that Parent Revolution would
not be able to challenge them in court.
“We got no real help from
anyone,” said Lori. And that included the press, which tended to smear
anti-trigger parents as union stooges and thugs out to intimidate
low-income minorities into submission. LA Weekly ran a series of
particularly nasty articles, specifically attacking Lori for doing the
bidding of corrupt teachers who care more about “cushy union contracts”
than their students’ education. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial
features editor (and son of raging neocon Douglas Feith) David Feith
published a string of pieces attacking the efforts of anti-trigger
parents to push back against Parent Revolution’s astroturf campaign.
Feith smeared their genuine grassroots organizing as a “systematic and
legally questionable pressure campaign waged against parents” on behalf
of the “hostile unions” and the “education establishment.”
Lori
started to feel surrounded by intrigue. She says, “I would do these
interviews with these people and reporters and journalists and bloggers.
Anyone that would call I would talk to because I need to get this
information out because people need to know this. And then I'd get the
article and I'd be like this has nothing to fucking do with what I said.
I got to the point when I started thinking, do they — and by they, I
mean Parent Revolution — do they own everything? Do they own the fucking
editors, do they own the newspapers?"
Lori’s paranoia-sense was not that far off the mark.
Parent
Revolution might not own the press, but the people and companies who
fund groups like Parent Revolution and stand to profit from school
privatization, well . . . they quite literally do own the press.
Sometimes they are the press.
Among the major investors in privatizing education is Rupert Murdoch.
It
was Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox that put out “Won’t Back Down,” Maggie
Gyllenhaal’s parent trigger film bankrolled by Phillip Anschutz, the
right-wing oil billionaire who funds everything from anti-gay ballot
initiatives and Christian Identity, to teaching creationism in schools.
Anschutz is also a major backer of ALEC, the right-wing lobby group that
pushed through the “Stand Your Ground” vigilante laws that resulted in
Trayvon Martin’s murder. ALEC is also spearheading parent-trigger laws
in states across the country.
Murdoch recently announced his plans
for aggressive expansion into the private primary education sector,
saying, "When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion
sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”
Murdoch’s
News Corp media empire is vast. The Washington Post Company — which
owns The Washington Post, Slate.com, Foreign Policy magazine, among
other news media holdings — relies heavily on its for-profit education
subsidiary, Kaplan Inc, which generated 62% of the company’s revenue in
2012. Then there’s The Financial Times and The Economist, both of which
are owned by Pearson, a multinational mega-media company that’s also
heavily involved in private education.
Incidentally, all three
companies have been members of ALEC’s pro-charter Education Task Force,
which has been at the forefront of the effort to enact legislation to
privatize public education in states all across America.
But for
Adelanto residents, the centralization and corruption of news media was a
bigger issue. The main concern for Lori and other anti-trigger parents
was to collect as many rescissions as possible.
As they made their
rounds, they found that the vast majority of parents they spoke to had
had no idea that the petition would convert the school to a charter. The
magnitude of Parent Revolution’s deception came as a shock. “In our
canvassing to gain rescissions, there were maybe three people or
households that I can recall that actually said, ‘Yep, we know exactly
what this petition will do, we want the teachers fired’,” explained
Lori.
Over the course of two months, anti-trigger parents managed to collect somewhere around 116 rescission statements.
As
the group collected rescissions, talked to parents and educated as many
as possible about what Parent Revolution’s intended to do with Desert
Trails, tension in the community continued to mount. There was real
anger and bitterness. Friends and neighbors suddenly became mortal
enemies, and even kids started getting drawn into the conflict.
Desert
Trails’ principal David Mobley told the Los Angeles Times that kids
whose parents were on opposite sides of the trigger issue had started
fighting at school. "It's sad because these kids used to be really good
friends. Now these kids have become pawns in a political mess, and it
just breaks my heart,” Mobley said.
Chrissy Alvarez’s best friend
-- I’ll call her Mary (not her real name) -- was one of the leading
members of the trigger group. Chrissy explained that their friendship
turned into hostile after she realized that Mary had been an accomplice
to Parent Revolution’s swindle and knowingly helped sell out her
community — something Chrissy could not forgive.
Why would Mary do the bidding of a corporate front group, pouring her energy and time into privatizing her kid’s school?
Turns
out that Mary, who had a second-grade daughter in Desert Trails, had
good reason to join the campaign. Chrissy says she had serious problems
with her immigration status and was facing deportation. Parent
Revolution promised to make those problems disappear. It was an offer
than must have been hard to resist: help a group pull off its trigger
campaign or face deportation and the possibility that she’d never see
your family again.
"No shit?!" I blurted out. We were sitting in a
taco shop in a strip mall on the edge of town with a couple of other
parents. We were in a family setting, and there were kids around. But I
couldn’t restrain the profanity. I was too shocked. I just couldn’t
believe it.
“Yes! She told me! She was my best friend,” Chrissy
explained. "We were still best friends until the time she submitted the
petition. And I told her to her face: 'You guys have been bs'ing. These
were bought with citizenship.' She had already signed two documents that
she was supposed to leave the country years ago. She was in a heap of
trouble. She had gone to a lawyer, who told her that there was no way
around this other than you going back to Mexico.”
I recognized the
woman’s name. She had been interviewed by cable news networks, and
appeared in dozens of news stories talking about parent empowerment and
the need for parents to take an active role in their children’s
education. She even squirted a couple of tears for reporters once.
Dangling
citizenship in front of a desperate mother facing deportation—this is
what parent empowerment looks like to the billionaires trying to
privatize public education. And it appears she was not the only one...
Multiple
sources told me that Parent Revolution had propositioned other
undocumented Latino immigrants, promising to help resolve their
immigration status in return for their support of the parent trigger
petition. Help with immigration in exchange for a single signature? It’s
an offer that many families must have found difficult to turn down.
I
made multiple to attempts to verify these allegations. But no one would
talk or even communicate with me — on or off the record. Through a
third-party, I was told that they feared retribution from Parent
Revolution and did not want to put their families in danger. “One, they
are tired. Two, they are scared. Three, they are thinking: ‘What’s the
point? The school is already gone’,” explained a parent who had tried to
arrange a meeting.
They were scared. And who could blame them?
As
undocumented immigrants, they had nothing to gain by talking to me. On
the contrary, they had everything to lose. The sprawling private
deportation facility located just a few miles north of the school,
dedicated to corralling and booting out people just like them, served as
a constant reminder of just how much they had to lose, and how easily
deportation could happen to them. A speeding ticket is enough to
initiate deportation these days, and it doesn’t matter if they have
children or family: recent stats show that a quarter of people deported
are parents with children who are U.S. citizens.
I could
appreciate this kind of fear. My family fled the Soviet Union in 1989,
and we spent seven nerve-racking months living in European refugee
camps. We had no money, no citizenship and no idea about the future. I
was just a kid, but I was deeply affected by the fear, anxiety and
insecurity that dominated our lives. We certainly didn’t think we had
any rights, or that we were entitled to anything. The most important
thing was to keep your head down and not rock the boat.
No wonder Parent Revolution chose Adelanto. Out here it could act with near-impunity.
Even so, there was some pushback. Even the poor don’t like being ripped off.
Armed
with the stack of rescissions collected by Lori and Chrissy, Adelanto’s
school board invalidated 100 of the 466 original petition signatures
submitted by trigger activists, bringing the number below the simple
majority required by law. And so on March 2012, Adelanto’s school board
unanimously voted to reject Parent Revolution’s petition on grounds it
had failed to meet minimum signature requirements.
But it was a short-lived victory.
Parent
Revolution lawyered up, and after a year of court battles, forced the
Adelanto’s school district to accept the trigger petition. In the summer
of 2012, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Steve Malone ruled
that the school district had no right to reject the petition because
California's parent trigger law did not give it authority to rescind
signatures. It was a bizarre decision, and didn’t seem to accord with
the spirit and letter of California’s Parent Empowerment Law.
But was it valid?
That’s
not clear. Adelanto’s cash-strapped school district didn’t appeal the
decision. It simply didn’t have the resources to continue a lengthy
court fight. Not that it would have continued to fight for very long,
even if tired. Shortly after the decision, two parents who had been
involved in Parent Revolution won spots on Adelanto’s school board,
finally and totally tipping the board’s ideological balance in favor of
charter school.
"I thought the ruling was crazy,” said Diane
Ravitch. “If anything, it seems totally not to have empowered the
parents, but to say: you mistakenly signed a petition and you can't take
your name off. That's not parent empowerment, that's parent deception.”
“It’s
basically the taking of public property,” said Ravitch, unable to hide
her annoyance with the claims made by trigger advocates. “In the nature
of public education, people come and go. In the course of a few years,
there is a lot of turnover in terms of who the parents are in a school.
But they don’t own the school. The public owns the school. So you’re
taking a public facility that was paid for by tax dollars and saying
that they people who are using it right now this year have the right to
turn it over a private operator.”
Imagine if we did the same thing
with other public services like buses or libraries... "Take a vote of
everyone who happens to be in a public library at any given moment and
say we want to hand it over to the Library Corporation of America to run
for a profit.”
But the reality was even worse than that.
On
October 18, Desert Trails parents met in a park adjacent to the school
to vote and pick the specific charter company that would take control of
the school. California’s Parent Empowerment Act allows only the parents
who signed a trigger petition to cast a ballot in this vote, which
meant that hundreds of parents should have shown up to make the
decision, and to exercise their newfound empowerment. But in the end,
only 53 ballots were cast — with 50 of them voting to give the contract
to LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy, a small charter operator that
runs one other school in a nearby town.
A decision made by 53 people in a town of 32,000? That’s less than 0.2% of the population. Parent empowerment indeed.
As
this article goes to press, LaVerne Academy has posted a job ad looking
to hire teachers for the newly rebranded Desert Trails Preparatory
Academy. According to the ad, job seekers only need a substitute
teachers permit to apply. Apparently that’s all that’s required to help
improve education at a chronically struggling school.
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