In 2011 Stand for Children CEO Jonah Edelman boasted to the Aspen Ideas Festival of a legislative win over unions in Chicago, crowing that Stand had been able to “jam this proposal down their throats.” He won’t be invited back to brag on Boston. Last Friday Edelman announced that Stand for Children would abandon Massachusetts.
What happened? Simple. Strategic Grant Partners, the Boston foundation whose members have supplied the funding for every public school privatization move in Massachusetts for a decade, cut off the funding for Stand for Children.
From 2009 through 2014, Strategic Grant Partners rained money on Stand for Children, nearly $1.4 million for political activities conducted under the guise of a charitable front. But since the charitable operation can’t get involved in ballot campaigns, the “SGP Big Three” – Joanna Jacobson, Seth Klarman, and Joshua Bekenstein, floated Stand’s political arm at least $1 million from 2011-2012. (Bain Capital bigwigs filled in any spending gaps). SGP and the SGP Big 3 got their moneys worth – more charters in 2010, whacking teachers rights in 2012. In 2013 Stand for Children was angling to put John Connolly into the Boston mayor’s office but backed off when dark money became an issue. (Fear not, dark money front Democrats for Education Reform stepped in, with Walton money most likely). In 2014 SGP spurned Stand for Children and imported New York’s Families for Excellent Schools into the state for the 2016 charters ballot campaign.
Families for Excellent Schools documents I’ve seen show the Massachusetts privatization model works like this. Outside organizations like FES or SFC will come in if there is a guarantee of local funding. They all understand where that local funding comes from – Strategic Grant Partners. For example, FES’s plan for Boston was that it required $1.8 million in local foundation funding. From 2014-2016, it got $1.8 million from Strategic Grant Partners.
In 2016 FES suffered a humiliating defeat in the charters ballot campaign. In 2017 OCPF forced it to disclose its donors, largely billionaires from SGP. In 2018 FES collapsed in corruption. As this was happening Stand rose again in 2017, after sitting out the 2016 campaign.
I could see that SGP wasn’t funding Stand in 2015, 2016, and 2017 but failed to realize what the dog not barking in the night signalled. Stand has plenty of big donors but without local underwriting would not support the Massachusetts chapter forever. SGP’s penury would leave the Walton Family Foundation as the most likely Massachusetts funders, but the Waltons gave only $400,000 to national Stand in 2016-2017 and nothing in 2015 and 2018.
As of June 2017, SGP is still pouring money into faux teachers group Educators for Excellence, Teach for America, and TFA’s political arm Leadership for Educational Equity. The Waltons are bankrolling a bunch of fronts including Latinos for Education (another TFA offshoot), Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts of Arkansas, Educators for Excellence, and the AstroTurf Massachusetts Parents United of Arkansas.
The guy that didn’t get the memo on Stand for Children is Amos Hostetter, the money behind the Barr Foundation and second biggest dark money individual giver to FES in 2016. Barr gave $200,000 to Stand in both 2015 and 2016. Barr also is a philanthro-interest group and is funding $600,000 of the Globe’s coverage on education.
In the dark money world nothing is ever what it seems. But it looks like the fall of Stand has a straight forward explanation. SGP cut off their allowance. No Strategic Grant Partners, no Families for Excellent Schools. No Strategic Grant Partners, no Stand for Children.
“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, not education.]