When I wrote Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, the attack on pub-

lic education came mostly from billionaire-funded neoliberal fronts. In the two years
since its publication, radical right billionaires have pivoted to create anti-public edu-
cation operations like Moms for Liberty (M4L) and Parents Defending Education (PDE).
This guide will introduce neoliberal and right-wing groups working to privatize public
education in America. You may not see the name of a group active in your state. Rest
assured, though, the elements of these organizations are similar across the board, even
as particular groups serve distinct functions. They are deeply entwined, so following
the thread of who is funding what can be quite confusing...which is to their advantage.

These groups are highly networked, centrally conceivedand managed, and they hide
their true donors. They have to — when the public understands who they are and what
they want, people reject them. That is because they are out to destroy public goods,
including schools, end the rights of us all to join unions and fight for our rights, and
as Nancy McLean has titled her essential book, place Democracy in Chains. We’ll look
at Networks, Organizations, and Donors. Then, because many of you are facing toxic
organizations in your communities, we will look at a few state and local operations.

Many of these networks, organizations, and donors are also involved in other cam-
paigns that enrich their donors while harming our communities. A short list would
include climate change denialism, anti-science, vaccine alarmists, masking opponents,
public health critics, and January 6 funders, activists, and supporters.

Networks
Throughout the anti-public education campaigns, we will repeatedly find the Koch
Network and the Council for National Policy. For more on pro-charter networks, see
my prior report for the Network for Public Education, Merchants of Deception: Parent
Props and Their Funders.

The Koch network, now known as Stand Together, was established by billionaire

Maurice T. Cunningham, Ph.D., J.D., is author of Dark Money and the

Politics of School Privatization. He retired in 2021 as associate professor
of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. His work
has been distributed through the Independent Media Institute and has
appeared in the Boston Globe, Alternet, Tampa Bay Times, The Daily
Progress (VA), Idaho Education News, New Hampshire Bulletin, The Detroit
Free Press, and The Portland Press-Herald (ME), and at Diane Ravitch’s
Blog, dianeravitch.net.

His Twitter handle is @MassPolProfMo and he blogs at MassPoliticsProfs.

org. He can be reached at maurice.cunningham153@gmail.com.
Charles Koch and his late brother David and meets twice a year at Koch seminars.
Much of what goes on is secret, and attendees are expected to contribute to Koch
political causes. The entry fee typically is $100,000. Political figures seeking the back-
ing of deep-pocketed right-wingers present themselves for approval. Politico recently
reported the January 2018 meeting offered an important draw: Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas was there to attend “a private dinner for the network’s donors.” At
that same January 2018 meeting, The Washington Post reported that the network would
pivot to “melding the minds of the next generation by making massive, targeted invest-
ments in both K-12 and higher education.”

Leonard Leo was a key conduit in delivering Thomas to the Koch gathering. Leo was
then a leader of the radical right legal operation, The Federalist Society. The six con-
servative Supreme Court justices are all current or past members of The Federalist
Society. Leo is also involved in the school wars, contracting with the Koch-tied Parents
Defending Education, as exposed in a report by TrueNorth Research’s Lisa Graves and
Alyssa Bowen in Tax Docs Link Right-Wing “Parents Group” to Leonard Leo’s Dark
Money Network.

Leo is a member of the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy (CNP).
The CNP is a secretive right-wing directorate consisting of wealthy conservative do-
nors, Christian nationalist leaders commanding large media empires, and the heads
of far-right organizations including the Heritage Foundation, the Leadership Insti-
tute, and Turning Point USA. Heritage is perhaps the most powerful think tank on
the right. It has released a blueprint for policies to be pursued by the next Republican
president, including privatization of public schools. Heritage president Kevin Roberts
is a CNP board member. Leadership Institute (LI) was founded by Morton Blackwell
over forty years ago to train conservatives in the arts of political combat. Blackwell
also co-founded CNP. In 2017, the CNP urged the incoming Trump administration to
advance toward abolishing public education to be replaced by “free-market private
schools, church schools, and home schools as the normative American practice.”

Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Money, Media, and the Secret Hub of the Radical
Right reports that while Koch is not a CNP member, his associate and Koch network
member William Walton, a Heritage trustee, was chosen in 2019 to serve as president
of CNP.

Funders
Neoliberal donors purport to represent underserved families and support “school
choice” options like charter schools and vouchers. Right-wing donors support white
backlash and anti-LGBTQ operations that are responsible for book banning,school
board disruptions, and back home schooling and religious schools. In terms of the
end game of destroying our public education system, there is little difference between
neoliberal billionaires and right-wing billionaires. They simply take different paths to
the same goal. Neoliberals seek to undermine public education from within the liber-
al coalition, calling “school choice” the “civil rights issue of our time.” Right-wingers
appeal directly to racial and gender grievances.

Selected Right-wing Funders

The Koch network has gone all-in on privatization since its January 2018 Koch seminar
when network oligarch Stacy Hock, co-founder of Texans for Educational Opportunity,
“The lowest hanging fruit for policy change in the United States today is K-12.” Koch
network money suppliers Donors Trust and the Snider Foundation fund Parents De-
fending Education. Donors Trust is a donor-advised fund that allows wealthy patrons
to hide their donations while still directing them to favored interests. Parents Defend-
ing Education’s president is Nicole Neily, a long-time Koch network political operative.
Parents Defending Education has multiple ties to the Koch network.

The Charles Koch Institute and the Walton Family Foundation formed a joint venture
called the Vela Education Fund in 2021 with Koch oil and gas executive Meredith Ol-
son as president. Vela’s first grants went to the neoliberal and Walton-created National
Parents Union, a Koch-Waltons joint venture called 4.0 Schools, and the right-wing
Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). 4.0 Schools claims to fund education
innovators. In 2019, it received pledges of $5 million each from the Charles Koch Foun-
dation and the Walton Family Foundation. From 2012-2016, it got over $1.9 million from
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

HSLDA’s founder, Michael Farris, is a Christian Right activist who, in 2017,became

president of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a legal shop that the Southern
Poverty Law Center has identified for hatred against the LGBTQ community. ADF was
behind the Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v. Wade “on the road to becoming a pro-
life nation.” ADF’s goal is “to take down the education system as we know it today.”
Farris is a long-time member of CNP. His influence on groups like Moms for Liberty is
obvious, though downplayed by M4L.

Yes. Every Kid (YEK) founded in 2019, is also a weapon in Koch’s drive to privatize
public education. YEK’s first chairperson was Meredith Olson, the oil and gas manager
who also founded and now runs the Vela Education Fund. YEK purports to transform
education toward a family-centered model, but as Peter Greene shows, it is run by
political operatives, not educators. “There is nowhere in sight anyone with real expe-
rience or expertise in education.” YEK is a 501(c)(4) advocacy group (allowed substantial
leeway for political involvement), and the Yes Every Kid Foundation is a 501(c)(3) ad-
vocacy group that can be involved in policy, education, and advocacy. As Sourcewatch
from the Center for Media and Democracy has found, both are dependent on Koch
network funding, especially from elements of Koch’s own Stand Together.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez argues in State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big

Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation that
the Koch-tied American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), State Policy Network
(SPN), and Americans for Prosperity (AFP) are a powerful “troika” that does the bid-
ding of corporate and far-right interests. ALEC is a corporate bill mill feeding prefab
legislation to conservative state lawmakers. It has been funded by Koch, the Lynde and
Harry Bradley Foundation, and a host of far-right donors. SPN is a network of think
tanks in all fifty states that support ALEC and pump up its model legislation. AFP is the
Koch network’s political organization. The troika has combined to debilitate unions,
attack climate change science, fight for school privatization, and pursue far-right
legislative and regulatory goals in the states. These organizations present an ongoing
danger to public education.

This account only scratches the surface of Koch’s investment in school privatization.
His network is nicknamed “the Kochtopus.”

The Council for National Policy, exposed in Anne Nelson’s Shadow Network: Media,
Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, brings together wealthy conservatives,
many from the oil and gas realm; Christian evangelists with vast communications net-
works; and groups that can turn out groups like the National Rifle Association. CNP is a
central directorate passing down plans to “obedient franchises” like Moms for Liberty.
The key CNP members that oversee M4L are the Leadership Institute and Heritage
Foundation. They run the annual summits, provide the training and literature, and
even sue the Biden administration on M4L’s behalf.

As Adam Laats recounts in The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in Ameri-
can Education, Heritage entered the school wars when it provided legal representation
to protesters in the Kanawha County, West Virginia upheaval in 1974 where “shootings,
bombings, and violence became near-daily occurrences.” Original M4L co-found-
er Bridget Ziegler, who is married to Florida Republican Party chairman and paid
M4L consultant Christian Ziegler, left the M4L board early and was replaced by CNP-
trained Marie Rogerson.
M4L co-founder Tina Descovich is also trained by CNP. After Ziegler was re-elected to
her school board seat with a $10,000 donation from a CNP member, she was signed on
by Blackwell to run LI’s school board training. Heritage gave M4L its Salvatori Prize for
American Citizenship (and $25,000) in 2022. CNP member Turning Point USA is deeply
embedded in Christian nationalist politics and a sponsor of M4L’s national summits.
TPUSA runs a School Board Watchlist, which generates threats and harassment against
school board members.

Betsy DeVos and her American Federation for Children are leading privatizers who
have made significant inroads in state legislatures and school boards. DeVos supports
charter schools, religious schools, vouchers—almost anything that will end public
schooling as she pursues schools that will “advance God’s kingdom.” She has backed
anti-LGBTQ rights groups, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy
Network, and multiple Koch initiatives. After her tenure as Donald Trump’s Secretary
of Education, she advocated for the department’s abolition at the 2022 Moms for Liber-
ty national summit.

Dick and Liz Uihlein have become known as “the Koch brothers of Wisconsin politics,”
but they have also funded privatization efforts in Illinois and elsewhere. They are GOP
“megadonors” who have underwritten election denial campaigns and in favor of a bal-
lot initiative that would have placed a roadblock in the path of citizens trying to legalize
abortion in Ohio.

Farris Wilks and Dan Wilks are billionaire Texas brothers called “the Koch brothers
of the Christian Right” who fund some of the jewels of Koch’s political empire, includ-
ing SPN, ALEC, and Heritage. They are virulently anti-LGBTQ and among the largest
donors to PragerU, which is not a university at all but rather a video operation that
produces far-right instructional videos. The Florida Department of Education recently
accepted a PragerU video for instruction that features a cartoon Frederick Douglass
soft-pedaling slavery. The Wilks brothers also contribute to climate denial operations.

Jeffrey Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire, spent over $1 million to defeat pro-teacher

mayoral candidate Helen Gym in a race for mayor of Philadelphia. He is Pennsylvania’s
biggest advocate for charter schools. He has donated elsewhere, including $600,000 in
dark money to support a charter school initiative in Massachusetts. He sunk $15 million
into a Super PAC called School Freedom Fund. Yass is dedicated to destroying pub-
lic schools. He funds numerous cash awards to privatizers. Billionaire funders like to
create prizes and then award them to the organizations they have created as a means
of generating cachet. In 2023, he gave $5 million to public school enemies in Arkansas,
Iowa, and Oklahoma and $12 million in Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding,
and Permissionless (yes, STOP) awards in addition to what Yass describes as “the es-
teemed $1 million Yass Prize” a bequest bestowed all the way back to 2022 and which
Yass bashfully calls “the Pulitzer Prize of Education Innovation.”
The Yass prizes are managed by the Center for Education Reform, an associate mem-
ber of the State Policy Network, and a member of ALEC’s Task Force on Education and
Workforce Development. Center for Education Reform has also gotten funding from
Gates, Bradley, and the Waltons.

Selected Neoliberal Funders

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Wal-
ton Family Foundation are the “Big Three” of neoliberal privatizers. They support
political organizations like Stand for Children and the National Parents Union. They
fund Democrats for Education Reform, Educators for Excellence, Teach for America,
and others. They underwrite pro-privatization publications like The74 and EdPost. And
they generate research from anti-public school think tanks. (One such think tank em-
ployee admitted to Professor Megan Tompkins-Stange that they were uncomfortable
with “the willingness on our part to make stuff up.”)

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made such sizeable bets on its favored
education reforms (such as Common Core) that it has dragged along public investment
behind. Many of those investments have been for nought. Melinda Gates admitted in
2020 that “We certainly understand why many people are skeptical about the idea of
billionaire philanthropists designing classroom innovations or setting education poli-
cy.” But no one should underestimate the Gates Foundation’s impact, including major
investments in Stand for Children, Educators for Excellence, Teach for America, Cen-
ter for Education Reform, Manhattan Institute, and others. In 2022, the Gates Founda-
tion lists grants of $290 million for K-12 education and $38 million for U.S. charters.

The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Foundation is a major donor to charter schools and
privatization fronts like National Parents Union. The late Eli Broad created the Broad
Academy, which Diane Ravitch notes is “an unaccredited program that trains would-
be superintendents in his top-down management philosophy of closing public schools
and opening charter schools.” Broad was a key figure in creating Education Post (Ed-
Post), an online publication that puffs up charter schools. Other EdPost funders in-
clude Michael Bloomberg, the Walton Family Foundation, and Laurene Powell Jobs.

The Broad Foundation has underwritten numerous privatization organizations, in-

cluding Educators for Excellence, KIPP Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, and the
online publication The 74, also funded by the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation, Gates
Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Jonathon Sackler, the Doris and Donald Fisher
Foundation, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.

The Walton Family Foundation (more a right-wing donor and placed here in recog-
nition of its “Big 3” status) boasts that it has put more than $407 million into charter
school development since 1997. It also has contributed to conservative non-profit pri-
vatization advocates such as the Heritage Foundation, American Legislative Exchange
Council, American Prosperity Foundation, the Cato Institute, American Enterprise In-
stitute, the Manhattan Institute (home of anti-Critical Race Theory propagandist Chris
Rufo), and the Independent Women’s Forum (tied to Independent Women’s Voice). IWF
and IWV leader Heather Higgins in 2020 was a gold circle member of CNP.

The City Fund underwrites charter schools and other entities in the charter industry.
InfluenceWatch reports that City Fund’s donors include “Hastings Fund, the Arnold
Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation,
and the Ballmer Group.” Arnold has also funded efforts “to gut public pensions.” Hast-
ings has advocated for the abolition of elected school boards.

Additional wealthy backers of charter schools include Michael Bloomberg, Daniel

Loeb, Kenneth Langone (Home Depot), Roger Hertog, Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul
Tudor Jones, and the Robin Hood Foundation of New York; Doris Fisher, John Fisher,
and Bill Bloomfield of California; Michael and Susan Dell of Texas; Steve Ballmer of
Washington state; the late David Koch and his estate; and the Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation of Wisconsin (funders of many far-right causes). Rupert Murdoch has put
at least $1 million behind Democrats for Education Reform. As I showed in Dark Money
and the Politics of School Privatization, a handful of Boston oligarchs funded the bulk
of the 2016 charter schools ballot initiative; they lost 62 percent - 38 percent. Many of
them defended themselves against a state regulatory investigation into their violations
of state campaign finance law. They did not appreciate the attention — that’s why they
use dark money in the first place!

The Network for Public Education has additional publications exposing the billionaires
who attack public schools. Billionaires pay for university research (George Mason,
Stanford), think tanks (Manhattan, Heritage, Cato), community organizations (National
Parents Union, Moms for Liberty), legal shops (Parents Defending Education, Alliance
Defending Freedom), and the media that offer them fawning coverage (The74, EdPost).
Because billionaires have far different policy priorities than the public and because
their involvement brings suspicion, they must hide behind these upbeat-sounding
front groups. The point here is not to name them all but to reiterate that the drive for
privatization is almost wholly an oligarchic pursuit without mass approval.
Key Privatization Organizations
Neoliberal operations purport to be champions of the disadvantaged, out to rescue
students through charter schools. Conservative fronts appeal to white backlash and
discrimination against the LGBTQ community and, shamefully, attack transgender
teens.

Selected Right-wing Organizations

The 1776 Project raises money to dispense to right-wing school board candidates,
often working alongside Moms for Liberty. A recent online funding appeal included
entreaties from such extremist luminaries as Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, Glenn
Beck, Laura Ingraham, and others. Like M4L it has had mixed success in school board
races, but its ability to raise funds and promote havoc should not be underestimat-
ed. It endorsed over 100 school board candidates in 2022 (including Bridget Ziegler in
Sarasota County, Florida) and draws major funding from right-wing billionaire Dick
Uihlein.

Gays Against Groomers is one the more bizarre allies of Moms for Liberty. It appar-
ently formed in 2022. As Media Matters has reported, Gays Against Groomers is led
by two former Trump operatives. They have become darlings of far-right propaganda
media. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Gays Against Groomers has
allied itself with the Family Research Council, an anti-LGBTQ hate group.

Moms for America (M4A), as reported by TrueNorth Research’s Alyssa Bowen, has
been a major player in “pushing voter suppression, election denialism, attacks on
public schools and COVID-19 misinformation.” Moms for America leaders were deeply
involved in the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally and other aspects of Trump’s Big Lie.

Unlike many of the other “moms” and “parents” groups, M4A has been doing the right-
wing’s dirty work for some time, having formed in 2005 under a different name. M4A
has held training on how to disrupt school board meetings and run for school board.
It is also tied to the Council for National Policy. Funders include the Rush and Kathryn
Adams Limbaugh Family Foundation, Freedom Works Foundation (the 501(c)(3) compo-
nent of a Tea Party operation), the George Jenkins Foundation ( Julie Fancelli), and the
Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation (the mother and late father of Betsy DeVos).

Moms for Liberty (M4L) is a Southern Poverty Law Center designated anti-govern-
ment extremist group embedded in far-right politics. It has been identified by PENA-
merica as leading the country’s book-banning movement and called out by the Human
Rights Campaign in declaring a national emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans. M4L was
born and nurtured in the far-right politics of Ron DeSantis’s Florida. After an M4L
chapter in Indiana caused a furor by quoting Hitler in a newsletter, Christian Ziegler
advised M4L members never to apologize for such an outrage. Co-founder Tiffany
Justice told 2023 summit participants, “’One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler.
I stand with that mom.’ The crowd cheered.”

Fancelli is not the only M4L-connected individual who traffics in election denial.
Christian Ziegler attended the January 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington. Bridget
Ziegler’s largest campaign contributor is a CNP member who traffics in election deni-
al theories. M4L’s legislative director helped form a Florida group (with Roger Stone)
to pressure Senator Rick Scott to vote against certifying Joe Biden’s Electoral College
victory.

M4L’s creation story is that two moms, former school board members, joined together
to form an organization as the Covid crisis alerted them to the terrible things happen-
ing in schools. The truth is that M4L is entrenched in far-right Republican politics.
Immediately upon launching M4L became a darling of right-wing media, getting signal
boosting from the Rush Limbaugh program, Steve Bannon’s podcast, Fox News, and
others. Mainstream media is almost worse. Christian Ziegler gloated on a Washington
Post headline about M4L’s 2023 national summit: “Probably the best headline I’ve ever
seen.” The Post runs M4L stories presenting co-founder Tina Descovich in a Superman
pose.

Heritage produces defenses of M4L when it cozies up to Hitler, is identified for lead-
ing book bans, or is called an anti-government extremist group. Those defenses will
be amplified in right-wing media and allied right-wing think tanks like the Koch-tied
American Enterprise Institute.

No Left Turn in Education is another operation I detailed in Merchants of Deception.

In 2020 it took in just over $3,500, in 2021, it received over $483,000, including $150,000
from the Israel-based Underground Family Foundation and $50,000 from the Marcus
Foundation, the philanthropy of right-wing donor Bernard Marcus. No Left Turn in
Education also gets money from Koch network affiliated Donors Trust and the Snider
Foundation. (Snider and Marcus also fund PragerU). The organization’s growth has
been boosted by right-wing media, including Fox News. Founder Elana Fishbein re-
lates her moment of truth came as she reacted with horror to public school efforts to
stress social justice following the police murder of George Floyd.

Parents Defending Education was launched in March 2021 and as I wrote in Masters of
Deception, it was immediately suspicious. By then, thanks to Isaac Kamola and Ralph
Wilson’s Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War, I had
learned much about billionaire fronts deployed to attack professors. PDE’s approach
of filing Department of Education civil rights complaints against teachers echoed what
Koch-supported groups were doing to professors. PDE’s complaints are often based on
flimsy “evidence,” such as a column by a right-wing radio host. Claiming a fear of the
“woke mob,” they hide their complainants’ names. They don’t contact the school dis-
trict first, as would anyone seeking to rectify a complaint honestly. Instead, they go to
the right-wing press. While a few of their complaints have proceeded through the DOE
process and even succeeded, the major result has been to promote fear among educa-
tors. To PDE and allies, chaos is a success.

Turning Point USA has a broad portfolio in the far-right with conservative youth. As
Kyle Snyder shows in Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconser-
vative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power, its president, Charlie Kirk, is a prolific
fundraiser and a member of the Council for National Policy. TPUSA’s funders include
“the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, Foster
Friess, Michael Leven and various Koch brothers-affiliated groups, such as the Foun-
dation for Economic Education, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.”

Selected Neoliberal Organizations

Neoliberal “reformers’ share the goal of the extremist Alliance Defending Freedom—to
take down public education. Charter school teacher Florina Rodov left and became an
education reform critic when she saw that billionaires were funding charter school
campaigns to hasten the demise of public schools. When St. Louis parent and educa-
tion reformer Gloria Evans Nolan presented her ideas for improving public schools to
Empower America CEO and funder Eric Scoggins he replied “That won’t work. We have
to burn it down.” She left the organization.

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is a pass-through to obscure billionaires’

contributions to privatization campaigns or, as former president Joe Williams ex-
plained in 2012, “We’re essentially bundlers.” The press has politely averted its eyes
from this confession. Instead, it regurgitates polls and op-eds generated by DFER and
its sister organizations, Education Reform Now Inc. and Education Reform Now Ad-
vocacy. Hedge funder Whitney Tilson has explained the organization’s purpose as an
“inside job” to use the Democratic Party (or at least some of its donors) to attack unions
and expand charter schools. At one time or another, Democrats for Education Reform
claimed branches in twenty states and the District of Columbia, plus an organization
called DFER for Teachers or Teachers for Education. Today, DFER lists eight state affil-
iates on its website.
Educators for Excellence (E4E) is a Teach for America alumni spinoff with funding
from the Waltons, right-wing William E. Simon Foundation, Koch-connected Bodman
Foundation, Arnold, and Gates. E4E purports to promote the voice of teachers while
doing the work of privatizers in undermining the authentic voice of teachers unions.
Like DFER, it offers a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” approach. Money brings credibility
with certain mainstream media, though, as shown when the Boston Globe published
op-ed commentaries from the local heads of DFER and E4E (never mentioning that
both of them receive funding from the Barr Foundation, which also has donated over
$2 million since 2019 to the Globe’s education coverage).

Latinos for Education was generated by Teach for America alum with an immediate
infusion of $455,576 in 2016, its first year of existence. It aims to place Latino leaders
into the education system. The Walton Family Foundation provided $216,400 in start-
up funding and a total of $1,635,358 through 2022. Latinos for Education has become a
billionaire privatizer favorite with funders like The City Fund. Latinos for Education
has received $5 million from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife Mackenzie Scott.

Leadership for Educational Equity is yet another Teach for America spinoff designed
to train TFA alumni to run for school boards and legislative seats where they can pro-
mote privatization and neoliberal economic policies.

The Walton Family Foundation created National Parents Union (NPU) after its defeat
in the 2016 charter school ballot campaign in Massachusetts. In that race, the public
pierced the privatizers’ facade while responding positively to a source they trusted:
teachers. So, first, the Waltons manufactured the Massachusetts Parents United and
then, with the same leadership, the National Parents Union. NPU follows the script of
producing polling and “reports” to garner press attention.

NPU asserts it has over 1,000 affiliated organizations in all fifty states plus D.C. and
Puerto Rico, and mainstream media routinely echoes this talking point. There is no
evidence for that claim at all. When I reviewed publicly available membership claims in
2020, I found that most “members” were actually components of the charter school in-
dustry. NPU is funded by the Walton Family Foundation and foundations or individual
contributions from Gates, Broad, additional Waltons, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Dell,
Hastings, Arnold, and through the Vela Education Fund, the Waltons, and Koch.

Stand for Children (SFC) was taken over by what Diane Ravitch has called “the billion-
aires boys club” and converted from community work to privatization around 2009.
SFC is a political organization with some successes, prominently in Illinois. In a 2011
talk to the Aspen Institute, president Jonah Edelman crowed that SFC had nine state
affiliates but would grow to twenty by 2015. Today, it lists eight state affiliates on its
website.

Teach for America (TFA), as Diane Ravitch has written, “supplies low-wage tempo-
rary teachers for some public and many charter schools.” Donors include the Waltons,
Jeff Bezos, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Gates, Broad, and others. Some TFA alums
pursue careers as education reporters, others in policy or elected offices. Two years
of teaching pales in impact next to a career proselytizing in government, foundations,
and journalism.

When assessing these groups, I like to look at the creation story. It goes something like
this. Two or three concerned parents/moms/educators get together over coffee at a
kitchen table or in a library conference room. They discuss what they see as the short-
comings of the public schools, especially the teachers’ unions. Hearty souls that they
are, they form a modest little concerned parents/moms/educators non-profit orga-
nization to save the children by promoting vouchers or charter schools or high stakes
testing, and before the coffee cools or the library closes for the day, they are sitting
on millions of dollars from the Waltons, Gates, and other oligarchs. Miraculous. The
concerned parents/moms/educators are professionals in communications or politics
with backgrounds in privatization organizations, represented by a costly communica-
tions firm, employing an expensive polling company, while proclaiming themselves the
people’s voice (with few actual members in evidence). Miraculous. And they rarely get
called on this charade by the media. Miraculous.

State Level Privatization Fronts

Across the nation numerous state level organizations have arisen to attack accurate
teachings of history, public health measures, teacher unions, school boards, and to
promote privatization.

Awake Illinois works with Moms for Liberty on the litany of right-wing issues, includ-
ing opposing vaccines and masks against the accurate teaching of history, LGBTQ dis-
crimination, and book bans. Awake Illinois is a “conservative group that warns parents
about the indoctrination and grooming of children” and supports conservative school
board candidates.

Californians for Equal Rights Foundation was founded in 2020 and is led by a number
of Asian Americans who are veterans of the No on 16 campaign, which defeated a Cal-
ifornia ballot proposal that would have restored race-conscious affirmative action to
the state. “Distinguished Advisors” include Moms for Liberty’s favorite conspiracy the-
orist, James Lindsay and anti-CRT provocateur Chris Rufo. Donors include the Schwab
Charitable Fund and the Fidelity Investment Charitable Gifts Fund, both donor-ad-
vised funds that keep the true check writers hidden.

California Policy Center is a right-wing operation formed in 2010 and an affiliate of

the State Policy Network. In 2020, CPC helped to engineer a ghostwritten “report” that
the Orange County Board of Education relied upon to reopen schools during Covid
without masks or social distancing guidelines. CPC’s “Parents Union” held a rally out-
side teachers’ union offices urging a reopening of schools during Covid. The “Parents
Union” was a pro-charter operation. CPC recently teamed up with Moms for Liberty,
Moms for America, Christian-right school board member Sonja Shaw, and others for
“A Rally for Parental Rights” in Simi Valley.

Coalition for TJ in Virginia has been at the forefront of legal battles and protests
against what it claims is discrimination against Asian American students. It recently
filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to hear a case alleging discrimination at the
Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology. New admissions policies at the
high school “led to the most diverse class in recent history, boosting Black and Latino
enrollment, as well as adding more low-income students, English-language learn-
ers and girls than prior classes” as well as “a dip in Asian American representation.”
The Coalition for TJ is being represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, which has
recently specialized in anti-affirmative action litigation but previously represented to-
bacco interests and climate change denialists. A co-founder of Coalition for TJ is Asra
Nomani, a former vice-president of Parents Defending Education. After being fired by
PDE, Nomani landed at The Federalist and Independent Women’s Network, a project of
Independent Women’s Voice.

Denver Families Action is the recently formed political arm of another new organiza-
tion, Denver Families for Public Schools. It is an arm of the charter school industry and
is funded by The City Fund. It is tossing around money in the Denver school board race
in 2023.

Fight for Schools and Families also formed in Virginia. As I wrote in Merchants of
Deception, Fight for Schools and Families “follows a familiar pattern: a creation story
(or stories), explosive resource growth, a communications professional at the top, and
embedded in Republican politics.”

Idaho Freedom Foundation is a good example of an operation that tries to crush pub-
lic education on the road to crushing democracy. IFF’s president Wayne Hoffman, has
stated “I don’t think government should be in the education business. It is the most
virulent form of socialism (and indoctrination thereto) in America today.” IFF’s biggest
known subsidizers include Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, both vehicles for
hiding money donated by Charles Koch and other anti-public education oligarchs. IFF
is a member of the Koch network-allied State Policy Network. The Charles Koch Insti-
tute has donated directly to IFF.

Invest in Kids is one of the privatizers exposed by Illinois Families for Public Schools.
DeVos’s American Federation for Children hired a lobbyist in Illinois named Nate
Hoffman, who has pushed vouchers for the Invest in Kids scholarship granting oper-
ation and is a board member of another upbeat sounding privatization front named
the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Illinois Families for Public
Schools reports that “The main beneficiaries of Invest in Kids include the Archdiocese
of Chicago and other organizations that run or support religious schools.”

The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy and Koch’s Americans for Prosperity have
agitated for vouchers in New Hampshire. Conservative legislators passed vouchers
through the state budget because they knew it was so unpopular with the public it
would endanger them as a stand-alone vote. Key voucher support came from a re-
port by the SPN affiliate Bartlett Center, a think tank with funding from Donors Cap-
ital Fund. Koch’s political operation, Americans for Prosperity, conducted a mail and
door-to-door campaign that contributed to an increase in applications in the first
year of the voucher program, draining about $8 million from public schools. Moms for
Liberty’s local branch was not to be outdone. After a law forbidding the teaching of di-
visive concepts passed, Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, an AFP favorite who
home-schooled his seven children, launched a website for anyone to snitch on a teach-
er. Moms for Liberty, NH offered a $500 bounty to whoever first reported a teacher.

Let MI Kids Learn was the most recent Betsy DeVos front employed to attempt school
privatization in her home state of Michigan. Her most recent failure was an effort
to pass vouchers through a ballot question process that in a usual twist of state law,
would only have to pass the Republican legislature while avoiding a certain veto by the
Democratic governor. It also would have avoided being voted on by the people. DeVos’s
scheme failed as the legislature turned from red to blue. The DeVos family and dark
money allies funded the ballot committee called Let MI Kids Learn. DeVos’s measure
was also praised by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, an SPN member with fund-
ing from DeVos, the Bradley Foundation, the Koch network, and others.

Southlake Families PAC is a conservative operation written about by Laura Pappano in

her forthcoming book School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle
for Public Education. The PAC has agitated successfully against CRT. Pappano relates
the creation story of the Southlake Families PAC. A local activist invited the Texas
Republican Party chairman Allen West to an early meeting, and the group immedi-
ately raised $75,000. Halfway through the 2022 election cycle the PAC had raised over
$172,000 and hired national Republican campaign consultants.

Beating the Privatizers

Chaos is the product. It’s a lot easier to break something than to build something or to
improve upon it.

Let’s not downplay the harm caused by book banners and hate spewers like Moms for
Liberty or Parents Defending Education. Yes, M4L managed to get five GOP presiden-
tial candidates to its 2023 national summit, including Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.
Right-wing propaganda media and mainstream outlets are both willing to build them
up.

The story repeated on M4L is of two (Bridget Ziegler often is left out) suburban moms
who start up their own group to protect kids from schools and vaccines and reopen
schools, and then it explodes into a national operation. That is blindingly naïve cover-
age. M4L and the other recently launched right-wing groups were carefully conceived
in right-wing think tanks and institutions like the Council for National Policy, Leader-
ship Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Koch Network. They are obedient franchises
of conservative establishments.

The on-the-ground impact of M4L and the 1776 Project PAC is less than they claim.
Numerous independent reports show M4L and 1776 PAC doing no more than break
even in 2022 school board races and getting shellacked in 2023. The Washington Post
found some school board victories but limited success for culture warriors in the 2022
election. M4L performed poorly even in Texas and North Carolina. The AP confirmed
that despite M4L and the 1776 Project pouring millions of dollars into school board rac-
es, the results were disappointing. Politico reported that culture war candidates were
hammered in Wisconsin and Illinois in 2023. M4L’s electoral strength has mostly been
in the South, but even in Florida, one M4L-supported candidate accepted their help
only on the grounds that they did not identify as M4L while campaigning for her. When
M4L has taken over school boards, the results have been chaotic.

Professor Heath Brown points out that M4L’s growth has been concentrated in four
states, and M4L’s “political power is considerable and expanding in some states, but
nearly absent and even waning in others.” Social media researcher Erin Gallagher
found it nearly impossible to map out M4L’s membership claims and concluded it is
not grassroots but astroturf. A Brookings study finds the impact of M4L mixed—there
is little doubt it has generated “noise and controversy.” Its electoral strength seems
more muted with most victories coming in red counties.

There is accurate, carefully researched information on these groups from outlets like
TrueNorth Research’s The Disinformation Playbook Targeting Our Public Schools.
Their work not only reveals the machinations behind the right-wing operations but
introduces readers to effective organizations — real parents, teachers, and communi-
ty members—who are battling for thriving public schools across the nation. One such
group is Red, Wine, and Blue — suburban moms who fight for an honest education for
all kids.

Its Parents Playbook: A Step-by-Step Guide for Mainstream Moms Who’ve Had
Enough BS is a toolbox for parents to get organized and win. Defense of Democracy is
another effective organization with state chapters that take on the privatizers and book
banners. Look close to home, too — across the country, citizens are coming together to
beat the corporate education reformers and MAGA moms. Such groups include Virgin-
ia Public Education Partners, Illinois Families for Public Schools, and Save Our Schools
Arizona.

Some of the best suggestions come from the Parents Playbook. Find a good place to
communicate. Monitor local school board meetings and meet with your elected offi-
cials. Be aware of what local conservative operations are up to, and do your research.
Message matters! Use social media to communicate internally. Use social media to
communicate with the outside world. Attend meetings — if school boards only hear the
voices of intolerance, they won’t know that the majority do not support book bans and
want accurate teaching of history. Organize, organize, organize. Seek out allies — other
parents, teachers, librarians. Christian Ziegler counseled Moms for Liberty to depend
on the press to be “lazy” and uninformed. Do your research, marshal your facts, and
educate the media. Write letters to the editor and guest columns, and write inde-
pendently on social media. Organize, organize, organize.

Community action works. When Moms for Liberty tried to piggyback on the Republi-
can presidential debate in Milwaukee, protests from the teachers’ union and commu-
nity groups forced their site to cancel them, and the candidates M4L promised to back
out, sending M4L into hiding. Bridget Ziegler boasted that a Leadership Institute run
for school board training would draw 80-100 people. A dozen showed up.
Fight. Our public schools and our democracy need you.
This guide is intended to be dynamic — so if you see a privatization group getting
involved in school politics in your area, send that information to maurice.cunning-
ham153@gmail.com and I’ll add the group to this list.

Proper sourcing of information is very important so please send any news articles
about the group and links to its website.