Dark Money Behind 'Parent Groups' vs Public Education In U.S.

Thousands of events take place across the US annually in the last week of January for “School Choice Week,” organized by a self-described “nonpartisan, nonpolitical public awareness effort” group, Alyssa Bowen, Ansev Demirhan, Julia Peck and Evan Vorpahl reported for Truthout.

Photo Insert: For one, nonprofits like Moms for Liberty are strongly opposed to mask mandates in schools.

In truth, National School Choice Week — which has been taking place every year since 2011 — has been bankrolled by right-wing special interests, and its local events are mostly organized by schools and organizations that support diverting public education dollars to private alternatives.

Among those most vocal in celebrating this School Choice Week — for which 26,000 events are slated to take place across 45 states — are a new wave of “parent” groups, deployed to make it appear there is wide opposition to public school policies while advancing the agenda of their (largely undisclosed) funders.

Staffers from such organizations as Moms for Liberty (MFL), Parents Defending Education (PDE), and the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) have been featured in right-wing media as “concerned parents” attacking public schools without disclosing their positions in dark money-funded organizations.

These “parent” groups appear to have joined the decades-long coordinated dark money effort to dismantle public education. Rather than focusing explicitly on promoting privatization, they have attacked public schools — going after masking policies, remote learning, and evidence-based curricula they dislike.

“School choice” advocates often claim to promote “freedom” for parents to choose the form of education they see best for their children. But the strategy of “school choice” is to move public funding away from public schools into private hands. “School choice” is rooted in efforts to keep schools racially segregated, and still today these programs in effect maintain segregation by race, class, and disability.

While disavowing that history, donors — like Charles Koch, Betsy and Dick DeVos, and the Walton family (Walmart heirs) — have continued to push school privatization.

“Shock Doctrine” author Naomi Klein predicted in March 2020 that COVID-19 presented an ideal opportunity for “disaster capitalism,” a tactic pushed by school privatizers in the wake of the last financial crisis.

She identified the global pandemic as a “shock,” or disruptive event that global elites often use to introduce free-market “solutions” that redistribute wealth upwards.

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