What Is the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership?

 

 

 

 

 

When anyone asks me why I follow so-called education reform groups in Massachusetts I tell them it’s for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: it’s where the money is.  So while I can’t say too much about the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership (MEEP) only 24 hours after its launch, I can say that it has a lot of ties to privatization shops funded by 2016’s dark money All-Star team, the Walton family and Strategic Grant Partners.

Let’s start with the obvious, that yesterday’s story on MEEP in the Boston Globe presents Keri Rodriguez as a leading spokesperson. Ms. Rodriguez was state director in 2016 for Families for Excellent Schools, which paid a record state forfeiture for its illegal dark money activities and eventually went out of business. FES operated on millions of Walton and Strategic Grant Partner contributions. She resurfaced not long after as the state director of the brand new and lavishly funded Massachusetts Parents United. As I showed in Massachusetts Parents United: Old Wine in an Empty Bottle and in Why Massachusetts Parents United?, MPU is funded by the Walton family and by Charles Longfield, who combined to put millions (much of it in dark money) into the failed Question 2.

That’s the easy one – MEEP is another layer in the veiled Walton family operation. Let’s look at some of the other members of the Partnership, from Monday’s Globe story:

Strategic Grant Partners members were the most lavish givers to Question 2 in 2016, almost all in dark money. No SGP, no Question 2. Coaching for Change has gotten $325,000 from Strategic Grant Partners in the past few years. Latinos for Education is run by alumni of Teach for America, the biggest national recipient of Walton Family Foundation money, and TFA Massachusetts also got $1.5 million from Strategic Grant Partners since 2013. Anti-union Educators for Excellence – Walton family money, SGP money and if that isn’t enough, the director of SGP Joanna Jacobson has sent at least $2 million from her family’s foundation to E4E’s Massachusetts operations the past few years. As for Stand for Children, its peak political years in Massachusetts were from the 2009-10 ballot measure to increase charter schools through the 2013 Boston mayor’s race. Stand’s SGP infused dark money funding in those years was a masterpiece of obfuscation. Stand is back and hiring political operatives in Massachusetts.

So yes, it looks like several MEEP partners are funded by the Waltons and thus it operates at least indirectly on the Waltons behalf, which makes sense since the Walton Family Foundation has targeted Boston for its charter expansion efforts.  The Waltons play the long game and they’ll never run out of money; 2016 was just a learning experience.

Money never sleeps. Follow the money.

“Why wait for popular opinion to catch up when you could portray as ‘reform’ what was really slow-motion demolition through privatization?” – Professor Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Plan for America.

[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money (and other things). I don’t write about education policy.]