The political capacity for pretending something is what it is not amazes. Take yesterday’s FBRC hearing. Families for Excellent Schools would have been there but for it collapsing in corruption but FES’s funders, especially the Walton family of WalMart bucks were well represented by fronts like Massachusetts Parents United, Democrats for Education Reform, Stand for Children, and Educators for Excellence. It’s like 2016 never happened.
From 2010-2017 the Walton Family Foundation has given Education Reform Now (funder of DFER) $20.4 million, Educators for Excellence $3.9 million, Latinos for Education $416,000, and Stand for Children $2.9 million. In 2017 the Walton Family Foundation gave Massachusetts Parents United $20,000, though a July 2018 article in CommonWealthMagazine pegged the Walton contribution to MPU at $400,000. The Waltons have given the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association $2.8 million since 2010 and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education $200,000 in 2017.
Then we have the donations from Strategic Grant Partners from 2010-2017. That would be Education Reform Now $138,000, Educators for Excellence $1.76 million, and Stand for Children $1.38 million. Educators for Excellence is a special project of SGP’s leading family the Jacobsons. Their private foundation has donated at least $3.25 million to E4E since 2014.
Here’s a chart and keep in mind that SGP’s donations would be for Massachusetts operations while Waltons’ are more national in scope.
All those contributions were tax deductible at the thirty-nine percent rate. In other words these are tax payer subsidized investments. It’s good to be rich.
Walton contributions to Education Reform Now since 2013 amount each year to about thirty percent of all contributions and grants to Education Reform Now Inc., giving the Waltons a dominating position in DFER. I’ve been writing about the Republican backing of DFER since the group’s 2016 ballot committee entry was run on Walton money: Democrats Using Republican Money for Education Reform Now to Advance Obama’s Legacy on Charter Schools. I’ve also written about the strange phenomenon of Rupert Murdoch, Kenneth Langone (a Koch seminar attendee) and other conservative corporate titans coming to DFER’s aid when its Democratic donors weren’t raising enough money in Hey There Little Red Riding Hood! Or, Should the Democrats Take Advice from Democrats for Education Reform?
I confess I’m less confident that I understand Massachusetts Parents United’s funding than when I wrote Why Massachusetts Parents United? MPU’s ties to DFER need further exploration and the tipoff should have been the Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement between Education Reform Now and MPU signed in January 2017. There are other connections as well. It looks more like MPU is an organ of DFER; we’ll see.
In the dark money world things are never as they seem. Take note, Education Committee.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Justice Louis D. Brandeis
[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.]