The "Parent Trigger" and its connections to the phony LA Parents Union, Green Dot, Steve Barr, and Eli Broad

NOTE: This entry was updated on 2/24/2010 with an explanation of the relationship between the entities above and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). h/t to rdsathene.

Originally conceived in Los Angeles by Steve Barr’s (of Green Dot) Los Angeles Parents Union, and largely funded by the Broad Foundation, the "Parent Trigger" has spread east, and here and here. This is an initiative where if enough parents can be convinced, pressured, and tricked to sign a petition, a school will be closed down and replaced with a charter. On each Form 990 from 2005 to 2008, Steve Barr is listed as the CEO/President of the LAPU board.

Eli Broad contributed nearly 50% of the funding for the launch of the LAPU (formerly the Small Schools Alliance, aka the Parent Revolution). The money he supplied helped pay for the propaganda to make it seem like the movement is being generated by "the people," when in fact it is a carefully planned, targeted marketing campaign designed to wipe out the public schools.

It is most important to know is that this organization is not grassroots; it's astroturf!

An absolute lie is being spread that it was "developed by the grass-roots group Parent Revolution in the Los Angeles Unified School District.’ The lie is that group was not a grassroots group by any means. Danny Weil explains its true astroturf nature. Community members in LA have even stated that they were offered monetary compensation [by Green Dot] in exchange for their signature on a petition. But when a potential buyer for the LA Times is Eli Broad, who would there be to investigate?

Broad-supported State Senator Gloria Romero, in the running as State Superintendent of Public Instruction, has been the main pusher at the California state government level.

GRANTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE BROAD FOUNDATION Source: Broad Foundation Form 990s (EIN = 954686318) obtained at the National Center for Charitable Statistics
Year	To Green Dot Public Schools/Green Dot Educational Project EIN = 95679811	To the Small Schools Alliance, dba as the Los Angeles Parents Union since 2007 (This organization became the “Los Angeles Parents Union” in 2007 and uses the same EIN = 202207418. The LAPU is the same organization as the “Parent Revolution” and has the web site www.parentsunion.org, making a total of four names for the same organization.)	To the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Education and Support Fund
2005	$700,000: “To support high-quality public charter schools in Los Angeles” (Total 2005 support in contributions, gifts, grants, etc. to this organization was $5,315,065)	$100,000: General fund (Total 2005 revenue for the Small Schools Alliance was $980,608. Broad supplied 10% of its direct funding)	None
2006	$700,000: “To support more high-quality public charter schools in Los Angeles (Total 2006 Direct Public Support in contributions, gifts, grants, etc. to this organization was $9,524,116)	None (Total 2006 revenue for the Small Schools Alliance was $383,500)	$64,750: “To engage SEIU members in Los Angeles around an education reform package to change the Los Angeles Unified School District”
2007	$1,210,040 total: $9,040 to the Green Dot Educational Project, plus $1,201,000 to Green Dot Public Schools, “To support the scale up of more high-quality charter schools in Los Angeles” (Total 2007 Direct Public Support in contributions, gifts, grants, etc. to this organization was $10,015,000)	$150,000 total: $75,000 “To match SEIU funds to support the Small Schools Alliance launch of the Los Angeles Parent Union” plus $75,000 “To match SEIU funds to support the Small Schools Alliance business plan of the Los Angeles Parent Union” (Total 2007 revenue for the Small Schools Alliance/LAPU was $323,343. Broad supplied 46% of its direct funding)	None
2008	$1,859,000 total: $9,000 to the Green Dot Educational Project, plus $1,850,000 to Green Dot Public Schools, “To support the scale up of more high-quality charter schools in Los Angeles” (Total 2008 Direct Public Support in contributions, gifts, grants, etc. to this organization is not available at this time on 2/21/10)	$25,000: “To match SEIU funds to support the Small Schools Alliance business plan of the Los Angeles Parent Union” (Total 2008 revenue for the Small Schools Alliance/LAPU was $324,628. Broad supplied nearly 8% of its direct funding)	None

QUESTION: What is the relationship between SEIU, Broad, and the Parent Revolution?

A presentation delivered at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform sponsored 2008 Emerging Knowledge Forum was called “Green Dot Public Schools & LA Parents Union.” The presentation team consisted of Steve Barr (Founder & CEO, Green Dot Public Schools), Sandy Blazer (Chief Academic Officer, Green Dot Public Schools), Christine Boardman, (President, Service Employees International Union, Local 73), and Ryan Smith (Executive Director, LA Parents Union). This is from their accompanying report.

“Steve Barr noticed that at one of Green Dots’ high schools, a large proportion of students has parents who were members of Local 1877 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). From this observation, a partnership evolved between Green Dot and SEIU’s national organization, as well as its Los Angeles affiliate. While most professional unions have opposed charter schools, SEIU has embraced LAPU’s reform agenda because their members’ children are the main victims of failing urban schools. For almost a year, SEIU has formally worked with Green Dot and LAPU, providing LAPU with both funding and technical assistance from experienced organizers. In turn, SEIU is interested in exploring how Green Dot’s model and LAPU’s organizing efforts can drive school reform in other urban districts across the country.”

Mike Garcia, President, Service Employees International Union Local 1877, is currently listed as a member of Green Dot’s board of directors. Teacher union members beware: the SEIU is not your friend.

Interesting facts from Green Dot’s 2007 Form 990

• Joanne Weiss, who is now running the Race to the Top program for Arne Duncan, is listed as a board member, as well as Kevin Hall of the Broad Foundation
• Steve Barr as Executive Director/CEO was paid $215,467
• Marco Petruzzi as Board President was paid $204,022. His current Green Dot bio says he is also Venice chapter president of the Los Angeles Parents Union.

Also, this is the document which contains the following:

“The Corpoation's [sic] review, which was completed on August 15, 2008, concluded that during the period from January 2004 through September 2007, the Corporation reimbursed Mr. Barr in error a total of $50,866 for charges that were either not reimbursable in nature, or were insufficiently substantiated or documented to qualify for reimbursement.” More information here.

About Ben Austin, the Executive Director of the Parents Union

The section “Compensation of the Five Highest Paid Independent Contractors for Professional Services” shows that Ben Austin, with an address listed in Beverly Hills' Benedict Canyon, was paid $94,475 that year. In April 2008 he became the Executive Director of the Parents Union (aka LAPU/aka Parents Revolution). In his bio, Austin proudly states that he will be sending his two daughters to Warner Avenue Elementary. To demonstrate how exceptional and affluent the families of this school are, in 2007 the Warner Avenue Foundation (EIN 95-4072053) provided the school with an extra $449,022 (or an extra $747/kid).

Parents like Ben Austin provided supplementary funds to pay for "teaching assistants for each classroom, as well as providing all students with access to a physical education, art, computer, science and music specialist" ($330,979), capital improvements and facilities maintenance ($7,223), educational, computer, copy, emergency and cleaning supplies ($49,639), and teacher and principal grants and student scholarships ($27,583). The biggest money making events were the spring auction ($94,844), a Halloween event ($61,470), a walk-a-thon ($40,238), and a holiday boutique ($14,064). Oh, the poor public school attending children of Ben Austin, their LAUSD experience will be just like that of everyone else. By the way, Austin's day job is an assistant city attorney for Los Angeles. He was previously a Deputy Mayor under Mayor Richard Riordan, who is a longtime friend of Eli Broad and another Gloria Romero supporter and have hosted big fundraisers for her.

Read here to find out how Austin/Parent Revolution is trying to distance itself from Green Dot. Good luck with that, folks, especially since Mr. Green Dot is your board CEO/President.

More eye-popping differences between Ben Austin's LA public school and that of everyone else	Warner Avenue Elementary	Los Angeles Unified
African American	2%	10%
Asian	17%	4%
Latino	5%	74%
White	75%	9%
Socioeconomically disadvantaged (	3%	78%
Gifted and Talented Education	25%	12%
English Learners	6%	31%
Students with Disabilities	7%	12%
Average Parent Education Level: "1" represents "Not a high school graduate" and "5" represents "Graduate school."	4.47	2.22
Academic Performance Index	971	694

So now we have the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Parent Union and one of the originators/pushers of the “Parent Trigger” meeting with poor, limited English-speaking parents to convince them to sign school closure petitions and representing himself to them as just another typical LA Unified parent with children heading off to struggling schools, when in fact he resides in one of the most affluent areas of the city and will be sending his kids to one of the public schools which has absolutely no demographic relation to the schools used by his uninformed-about-the-dynamics and easily manipulated parent targets.

As a longtime public school parent who has used schools in my community with demographics much more aligned to my district as a whole, I am wise to the con Ben Austin is pulling off. ¡Qué cojones!

Addendum: Steve and Ben's project is certainly making the rounds. Arranging events and attending meetings must be what Barr has been busy with since he stepped down from his position as CEO of Green Dot last November.

From an email sent to me:

Get Smart Schools is part of a group of non-profits hosting an exciting new speaker series. Please join us at the event described below!

Want to help ensure that all kids in your community receive the very best education? Save the Date to join us for the next speaker in our series.

Speaker: Ben Austin, Los Angeles Parents Union (LAPU) and a Parent Revolution representative.

Thursday March 4, 2010

This is in Denver, Colorado.

GetSmartSchools is a program sponsored by the Piton Foundation. Christopher Scott, a parent and past Denver Public Schools school board candidate warns about Piton in the following statement submitted to the Denver Post last fall. For those of us who have been studying this intense neo-liberal attack on public education which is referred to as "education reform," it's Denver's version of more of the same:

"Secondarily, DPS senior executives have allowed the District to become the domain of special interests. Organizations such as Piton Foundation have unfettered access to District leadership, sitting important District committees like the Application Review Team evaluating charter applications for charters funded by the foundations themselves, providing recommendations to the District for more charter schools, while profiting by these recommendations. Moreover, under Michael Bennet, political action committees were brought to town to shape the school board election. This PAC, Stand for Children, poses as a pro-parent organization, but, in reality, its Chief Executive, Jonah Edelman, is a long time friend of Mr. Bennet, grew up next door to Tom Boasberg, whose sister served on Stand's Board of Directors until this month. According to Mr. Boasberg, he had no idea Stand was coming to Denver, as the decision was made while Bennet was Superintendent."

It is important to know that "The Piton Foundation is a private, operating foundation established in 1976 by Denver oil man Sam Gary. It is funded by the Gary-Williams Energy Corporation to develop and implement programs to improve education, expand economic opportunities for families, and strengthen lower-income communities." On the advisory board of GetSmartSchools are the usual ed deform/school privatization malanthropic foundations, big business interests, and charter-linked suspects:

• Amy Anderson, Donnell-Kay Foundation
• Jill Barkin, JP Morgan Chase & Co.
• Becca Bracey-Knight, Broad Foundation
• Phil Caplan, Urban West Group
• Heather Carroll, Edmonson Foundation
• Yee-Ann Cho, Envision Schools Colorado
• Ami Desai, Denver Venture School
• Wayne Eckerling, Former Assistant Superintendent, Denver Public Schools
• Sandra Elliott, Gnow-How
• Nora Flood, Colorado League of Charter Schools
• Lisa Flores, Gates Family Foundation
• Marcia Fulton, The Odyssey School
• Chris Gibbons, West Denver Prep
• Merlin Holmes, National Heritage Academies
• Rebecca Holmes, KIPP Colorado Schools
• Brooke Johnson, Carson Family Foundation
• Michael Johnston, Mapleton School District
• Rachel Kelley, Teach for America
• Ed Kennedy, Edison Schools
• Kim Knous-Dolan, Donnell-Kay Foundation
• Bill Kurtz, Denver School of Science and Technology
• Cathy Lund, Walton Foundation
• Zach McComsey, Atlas Prep School
• Alex Medler, Colorado Children's Campaign
• Gretchen Morgan, Envision Schools Colorado
• Alex Ooms, West Denver Prep
• Reyna Perez-Oquendo, Donnell-Kay Foundation
• Audra Philippon, AXL Academy
• Jane Shirley, William-Smith High School
• Tim Taylor, Colorado Succeeds
• Sean VanBerschot, Teach for America
• Brian Weber, Stapleton Foundation

To see what I've written previously about Green Dot and Steve Barr, read here and here.

It is most important to know is that this organization is not grassroots; it's astroturf!

What’s Going On in LA & Eli’s Cake

Both are likely to be dirty. Is anyone surprised?



Maria Guadalupe Mena of Garfield High School: "Community members stated they were offered monetary compensation [by Green Dot] in exchange for their signature on a petition."

The Parent Revolution group Ms. Mena refers to is also known as the Los Angeles Parents Union, and is a descendant of a Green Dot “project” called the Small Schools Alliance.

The 2007 Form 990 for the Broad Foundation shows that it gave $75,000 to the Small Schools Alliance, “To match SEIU funds to support the launch of the Los Angeles Parents Union.” Broad also gave $75,000 directly to the Los Angeles Parents Union (aka The Parent Revolution”) to support its business plan. It’s almost certain that more Broad contributions will show up for 2008; when I get access to those records I’ll let you know. Incidentally, Broad directly gave $1,210,040 to Green Dot Public Schools in 2007. Green Dot is Steve Barr's charter management organization which took over LA's Locke High School and brought an armed security force to campus.

I believe the money supplied by Broad is what would be paying for the propaganda (leaflets, on-air spots, websites, etc), to make it seem like the movement is being generated by "the people," when in fact it is a carefully planned, targeted marketing campaign.

So this is how it works.

Green Dot invents an organization called Small Schools Alliance (“SSA”). Then Eli Broad gives that organization some money to give birth to another organization they will call the Los Angeles Parents Union (aka The Parent Revolution). Then Broad delivers another chunk of money directly to support the business plan of that secondary organization (LAPU/Parent Revolution). This is probably not the only money the organizations have received; there's a strong likelihood other pro-charter "philanthropists" are making huge contributions, too.

Then the organizers hook up with Ben Austin and hire him as the Executive Director of the LAPU/Parent Revolution. It should come to no surprise that Austin once worked for Green Dot Public Schools and was also a Deputy Mayor under Mayor Richard Riordan. An LA Daily News opinion piece (August 22, 2009) explains things further:

Austin's day job is an assistant city attorney for Los Angeles. His second job is executive director of Parent Revolution (n e Los Angeles Parents Union). Surprisingly, this seeming conflict of interest goes unchallenged, despite his financial interest in passage of Flores Aguilar's resolution. Parent Revolution is an AstroTurf group. It was founded by, funded and shares an office building with Green Dot. Parent Revolution supplied the audience at these town halls, an audience vetted for its allegiance with the mayor, Flores Aguilar, and Austin's corporate charter school choice resolution.

You can read more here.This whole scheme was probably devised over lunch or at a dinner party in the privacy of one of these players' homes, rather than having been generated from the grassroots level.

Now get ready for what's just appeared on the horizon.

Riordan and Eli Broad have been good friends for years and have recently been holding campaign fundraisers for State Senator Gloria Romero, who has decided to run for Jack O’Connell’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction position. This is all about manipulating things behind-the-scenes and leveraging power.

Last March, Tom Vander Ark announced "Eli Finally Won."

But did he? I hope not.

At any rate, those of you who adore Broad as much as I do will appreciate this article where he "chuckles" while eating the no-tax cake made just for him by ingenious bakers on Wall Street, ingredients courtesy of the super-corporate-elite-friendly U.S. government.

“The Wealthy Find New Ways to Escape Tax on Profits” by Diana B. Henriques with Floyd Norris, New York Times, December 1, 1996.

Last spring, Wall Street bankers made an irresistible sales pitch to Eli Broad, the billionaire home builder and co-founder of the booming SunAmerica insurance empire. For a fee, they would help him lock in $194 million in profits on some of his SunAmerica stock and free up cash to pay family debts -- best of all, without having to sell the stock and give up all future profits on his shares. He would therefore not owe a penny of the estimated $54 million in taxes he would face if he sold the shares.

Broad accepted. "We have our cake," he said recently with a chuckle, "and are eating it too."

The thousands of less affluent investors who also own SunAmerica stock, either individually or through mutual funds, get no such deals. To cash in on their stock, they almost invariably have to sell it and face a federal tax of up to 28 percent on their profits.

Seventy-five years after it was enacted, the federal tax on profits from the sale of stock, land or other assets -- known as the capital-gains tax -- is becoming largely academic to the nation's wealthiest taxpayers.

Even as a growing number of Americans with more modest incomes are paying capital-gains taxes because of their growing mutual-fund profits, wealthy taxpayers like Broad can take advantage of a growing arsenal of Wall Street techniques to delay or entirely avoid taxes on their investment gains.

These strategies, some granted by Congress and others using the tax code in legal but wholly unanticipated ways, give taxpayers these breaks:

• Owners of a private business can sell it to their employees without paying capital-gains taxes, as long as they put the proceeds in certain investments -- investments that Wall Street is eager to provide.
• Real-estate owners can swap properties without the capital-gains tax required when a sale is made, allowing them to diversify their holdings and raise cash for other purposes.
• Large shareholders can use any of several exotic Wall Street strategies to raise cash and lock in their stock-market profits without actually selling their shares, which would create a tax bill.

Some of these techniques have been around for a dozen years or more but are now being used in new and aggressive ways. Others are new -- the technique Broad used is only 3 years old. It allowed him to use his SunAmerica stock as a sort of informal collateral for an ingenious security issued and sold by Merrill Lynch, which then passed much of the money raised from that sale back to Broad.

Coming a decade after Congress enacted changes designed to make the tax system simpler and more equitable, the proliferation of these tax-avoidance techniques among the wealthiest Americans raises questions of fairness in some minds.

"The simple fact is that anyone sitting on a big pot of money today probably isn't paying capital-gains taxes," said David Bradford, an economist at Princeton University and a critic of the current income-tax system. "And the government can adopt rule after rule after rule -- but the people who will get stuck paying capital-gains taxes will be the ordinary investors who own mutual funds."

William Gale, an economist at the Brookings Institution, agreed: "How fair is a tax that the wealthy can apparently avoid but the middle class gets stuck with? I don't see any fairness in that."

The consequences of Wall Street's ingenuity worry even some of those who profit from it. "I am torn on this issue," said Robert Willens, a managing director and tax analyst at Lehman Brothers.

It’s all lovely, just lovely.

Linda Darling-Hammond Didn’t Play Basketball

The latest to come out is an article in The New Yorker about Green Dot Public Schools and its founder and chairman, Steve Barr. The piece was written by Douglas McGray of the New America Foundation, a D.C. based policy institute which includes education reform as one of its key issues. Green Dot was founded in 1999. In 2006, billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad gave Green Dot $10.5 million to open up 20 more schools. It currently operates 18 high schools, mostly in L.A.

Years ago, Barr became friends with Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix. Hastings funded Green Dot’s launch. Hastings also helped to start the New Schools Venture Fund, an organization which additionally received $22 million from the Gates Foundation in 2003 to “create systems of charter schools through nonprofit charter management organizations.”

Hastings and Don Shalvey are the co-authors of the California Charter School Initiative introduced to the legislature by Assemblyman Ted Lempert and signed into law in 1998. This repealed the 100-school limit of California’s 1992 charter school legislation. With the cap raised for the number of charter schools in California, Hastings and Shalvey then co-founded Aspire Public Schools and started engaging in even more pro-charter activities.

Steve Barr calls Shalvey one of his “Most Influential People,” along with former California Governor Pat Brown. Incidentally, Barr named one of his dogs “Jerry Brown.” Other connections are that Broad and Hastings donated generously to State Superintendent Jack O’Connell’s campaign, and that Jerry Brown set up two charter schools in Oakland early during his tenure as mayor, Oakland School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute. He continues to aggressively advocate for these two schools and keeps them pumped up with extras. I’ve heard enough at Brown's public appearances to know that he despises the form of Oakland's traditional public schools.

According to the McGray article, this past March,

… Barr got a call from the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. He [Barr] flew to Washington, D.C., at the end of March, for what he expected to be a social visit. At the meeting, Duncan revealed that he was interested in committing several billion dollars of the education stimulus package to a Locke-style takeover and transformation of the lowest-performing one per cent of schools across the country, at least four thousand of them, in the next several years. The Department of Education would favor districts that agreed to partner with an outside group, like Green Dot. "You seem to have cracked the code," Duncan told Barr.

And according to the New Yorker’s abstract

This month, Barr expects to meet with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (A.F.T.), and her staff and outline plans for a Green Dot America, a national school-turnaround partnership between Green Dot and the A.F.T. Their first city would most likely be Washington, D.C.

But now let’s turn to basketball.

Luckily for him, Steve Barr played basketball in high school and playing hoops is still one of his main hobbies. He’s read Laker Coach Phil Jackson's The Last Season at least twice. Barr says, "Basketball is the perfect metaphor for anything.” This history and outlook sets him up nicely for being accepted by Arne Duncan and President Obama.

Secretary of Education, Call-Me-Arne, Duncan (see photo caption) is a former private-school attending Chicago native who graduated from Harvard in 1987 with a B.A. in Sociology. He was on the college’s basketball team, and after graduating, played professional basketball in Australia for four years.

After his oversees basketball adventure, Duncan returned to Chicago and was immediately given a job by John Rogers, a longtime friend and former Hyde Park basketball buddy who had also attended the Chicago Lab School. At that point, Rogers had become the CEO of the largest US minority-run mutual fund firm, Ariel Capital Management. Rogers is the son of the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School who then became a prominent Republican lawyer. It was she who nominated Richard Nixon.

So in 1991, Rogers placed Duncan in charge of running the Ariel Education Initiative, a non-profit set up by Rogers' firm to advance "...educational opportunities in economically disadvantaged areas.” It seemed like a good fit for Duncan, after all, he had tutored a lot at his mother’s inner-city after school program when he was a kid, he had an unused bachelor's degree in sociology, and he was Rogers' friend and a basketball player.

The rest is history. In 1998, after running Rogers’ local non-profit for several years, Duncan went to work for Chicago Public Schools, becoming Deputy Chief of Staff for former CEO Paul Vallas. In 2001, he was appointed CEO of Chicago Public Schools by Mayor Daley. At the press conference when Obama announced his appointment of Duncan as U.S. Secretary of Education, Rogers was right there to praise him. Duncan was sure to thank Rogers, his "mentor" and close friend of 35 years.

Basketball happens to be a HUGE part of Rogers’ life. For years he has played in three-on-three basketball tournaments where Arne Duncan has been a regular member of his team. Rogers also recently attended a Michael Jordan basketball fantasy camp where his playing caused quite a stir; he is interviewed here. By the way, an upcoming three day camp in Las Vegas with Jordan is priced at $17,500.

Another of Rogers' regular basketball teammates for many years is Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s older brother. Both men attended Princeton and played on the school's basketball team. After graduating from college, Robinson became a wealthy businessman but gave up that work in 1999 to become a college basketball coach.

Knowing Rogers via her brother, Michelle introduced Obama to him when she started dating Obama seriously, around 1990. This would have been about the time Arne Duncan returned to Chicago and was starting to work for Rogers' non-profit, as well as playing basketball with him again. Connections made on the court, rather than on the green.

So now the relationship between Rogers, Robinson, Duncan, and Obama is explained. By the way, Rogers' ex-wife, Desirée Glapion Rogers, is the new White House social secretary. Read more about Obama's basketball life here.

This is a world where basketball means a lot, and where it is believed that important qualifications for a person are borne out on the courts. From The Audacity of Hoops:

But before matters between Barack and Michelle could advance too far, she had a test to administer. Having grown up listening to her father and her brother, a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton, insist that a man’s character gets laid bare on the court, she hatched a plan. Craig Robinson rounded up a quorum of friends of varied abilities. “I didn’t want the game to be too intimidating,” he says, because it would’ve been painful to tell Michelle the prospect with the odd name hadn’t made the grade. He needn’t have worried. Obama found that sweet spot between not shooting every time and not always passing to Craig. In campaign appearances Robinson would retell the story with a kicker: “If I could trust him with my sister, you can trust him with your vote.”

It's a cute story, but after figuring things out, it's a little scary to think that this type of thinking may have been a factor in why Arne Duncan was ultimately selected.

So let's not be surprised to imagine that Barr has also passed some sort of basketball-character test. I'd bet 20 bucks that, as of late, he's been heading for the courts so he can get himself back into tip-top shape.