A Letter to Massachusetts Education Reporters

On May 1 I wrote a letter to several education writers on the topic of why they should be reporting on the financial backing of groups like Massachusetts Parents United or Democrats for Education Reform. Citizens have the right to be informed and only the media can do that. I’m sharing that letter here in hopes you will pass it along to any education writers you know. I’ve included six reasons why the funding should be reported in every story. Feel free to contact me with additional reasons.

May 1, 2019

Dear

As you know I’m a political scientist at UMassBoston who studies Massachusetts politics, particularly over the past several years how money influences policy and politics in the state. By dark money I mean both “upstream” money that goes into interest group activity well before a ballot question and “downstream” money that is contributed to ballot question campaigns. I don’t research education but I spend a lot of time around the topic for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks – it’s where the money is.

As various education issues catch my attention I’ve come to note that a number of interests are involved but hiding behind front organizations, much as they did in the in the years leading up to the 2016 charters ballot question. Hidden behind names such as Massachusetts Parents United, Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts, Stand for Children, Educators for Excellence, and more are the same handful of wealthy individuals who have been the true power behind this movement for at least a decade. These individuals include the Walton family of Arkansas (WalMart wealth) and individuals associated with the Boston foundation Strategic Grant Partners (hedge fund wealth). These are the very individuals revealed as the true sources of the funding of Question 2 when the state’s Office of Campaign and Political Finance forced Families for Excellent Schools to disclose donor names of those who were passing their funds (millions per individual in some cases) through FES to the Great Schools Massachusetts ballot committee. FES also was required to pay a state record civil forfeiture and cease operations in Massachusetts. Within a year it collapsed.

I’m not concerned here with whatever positions the current corporate reform organizations take. But I can offer several reasons why their funders should be identified in news stories.

1. The days of private foundations providing some money to an operating charity and then backing off to allow good deeds to happen are long gone. Private foundations like the Walton Family Foundation give with explicit goals in mind and tightly measure progress. In the case of a group like Massachusetts Parents United, which appears to be almost entirely funded by the Waltons (over $800,000 in 2017-2018), it is fair to identify MassParents as a unit of the Walton family’s educational interests.
2. In terms of transparency it is not possible to tell in a given year what the level of funding might be. In most cases that information is delayed to public scrutiny for many months after the close of the foundation’s fiscal year, until it is listed in the foundation’s publicly available Form 990 tax return. Even then the purpose of the donation might be something as limited as “education.” It is entirely worthwhile to ask operating units like MassParents, DFER MA, etc., where their funding is coming from and to write where it has come from historically.
3. When readers, listeners, or viewers are presented with information that a certain position is taken by the teachers’ unions or the Massachusetts Association of School Committees or the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents can intuit what interest any of those organizations might have in an issue. But if they are presented with information identifying MassParents as a parents group or DFER MA as a reform group, citizens are not given adequate information because those groups are (like the others) presenting the positions of their principals. In essence, the organizations are the agents carrying out the designs of their principals. Only the corporate reform groups are not adequately identified, a significant unfair advantage to them.
4. As the principals the Waltons, members of Strategic Grant Partners, etc. should be obliged to explain why the policies they favor are the best for Massachusetts education. Perhaps as very successful individuals they have good ideas. Perhaps their explanations will move the public to favor their positions, and perhaps not. But the public has the right to that information.
5. The funders – and we are talking about a literal handful of individuals, a number I could fit in my small living room – are trying to spend to alter education policy in Massachusetts. They need to be held accountable, just as are other interest groups.
6. The upstream money – not ballot campaign money but the funds being spent to back interest groups like MassParents, DFER MA, Stand for Children, E4E, etc. are tax deductible. So the taxpayers are picking up about thirty-seven percent of those donations.

When Families for Excellent Schools was making its decision whether or not to expand to Massachusetts in 2014 it projected that it would need slightly over $1.8 million in upstream money from the Boston philanthropic community for three years of operations. From 2014-2016, Strategic Grant Partners contributed $1.8 million to FES.  That is important and interesting information for the public but it didn’t get to them (other than in my posts in MassPoliticsProfs.org, if I can be immodest. FYI when I post at the blog I always disclose that as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member). When OCPF required FES to disclose its downstream money in the 2016 campaign, about half of all funds were tied to members of Strategic Grant Partners.

Stand for Children pushed a ballot question in 2009-2010 that would have increased the number of charter schools in the state. The ballot fight was averted when a compromise was reached and the governor signed legislation that helped the state compete for Race to the Top funds. Who funded SFC’s upstream operations in the state and the downstream ballot question signature drive? The answer is Strategic Grant Partners and individuals connected to Bain for the upstream operations, and for the ballot committee, several of SGP’s key members as well as a few Bainers.

In 2011-12 Stand for Children advanced a ballot question to curtail teachers’ seniority rights. Who provided the upstream funding for SFC operations in the state? Strategic Grant Partners and Bain. Who provided the downstream funding for the ballot signatures? SFC did, channeling donations from SGP members and Bain.

In 2010 when DFER was in need of an infusion of cash who did it turn to? Not Democrats. It turned to billionaire conservatives like Julian Robertson (attendee at one Koch Brothers Seminar at least) and Rupert Murdoch.

I could go on. Really, I could. But I hope you will consider that providing this kind of information to the public is exactly the sort of service to our democracy that the media can uniquely provide and I would argue must provide for democracy to survive.

As one example of how things are never quite what they seem in the dark money world, I’m embedding a blog post I published April 30 about MassParents’ claims to be grassroots:

https://www.masspoliticsprofs.org/2019/04/30/massachusetts-parents-united-grassroots-or-astroturf/

As it happens today is the occasion when the Washington Post published its story about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s objection to Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller Report as failing “to fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the report. It was unusual for the special counsel to take such a step but what struck me was that several times in the story it was emphasized why Mueller wrote his letter to Barr. Mueller cited “public confusion” about the findings. The Barr summary would undermine a key reason for the existence of the special counsel’s office, “to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.” In a phone call with the attorney general “Mueller said he was concerned that media coverage of the obstruction probe was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work.” In essence, Mueller argues that the public has a right to accurate information on issues of serious public concern.

I hope that you will agree with me that the question of who is funding groups that seek to alter education policy in the state is also of serious public concern.

Sincerely,

Mo

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.” – Louis Brandeis

[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not education.]