When NSFWCORP sent me to Victorville 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 Times dutifully 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.
