I’ve wondered this before but it began anew when I saw this tweet about a Sunday Globe story Low-income school districts are receiving ‘game changer’ Student Opportunity Act Funding. Will achievement gaps finally shrink?:
Two of the corporate entities whose leaders were quoted for the story were the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education and Massachusetts Parents United. MBAE has been around for years and didn’t get Walton funding until 2017, the year after the Walton-backed Question 2 to increase charter schools was overwhelming rejected by the people at the ballot box. From 2017-2019 the Waltons have poured $567,000 into MBAE. In 2016 Massachusetts Parents United did not even exist. From 2017-2019 the Waltons wrote $1.46 million in checks to MPU, half of each year’s fundraising totals. So the Waltons have put in over $2 million to just these two fronts (there are others).
Let’s talk about principal-agent theory. There is a very important chapter called “Representation, Relationships and Campaign War Chests” in John McDonough’s book Experiencing Politics: A Legislator’s Stories of Government and Health Care. I used to teach it in my public policy class. Basically there is a principal, an agent, and a contract between the two. The agent is employed by the principal for the purpose of representing the principal’s interests. The agent may have more or less discretion but is bound by the relationship to stay within the parameters of the principal’s instructions. The principal has more power in this relationship. If unhappy with the agent’s work representing their interests the principal has a range of consequences they might impose, including terminating the agent or cutting off funding to the organization.
For example, Keri Rodrigues is identified as president of Massachusetts Parents United. It sounds like parents but since half the money comes from the Waltons it is the Waltons. The Waltons are the principals and MPU through Ms. Rodrigues is the agent. Let’s say hypothetically Ms. Rodrigues represents some segment of parents (she doesn’t, it’s a hypothetical). As an agent of her principal, the Waltons, she can only represent parent views if they are consistent with the Waltons’ preferences. Beyond that parents are on their own. If Waltons’ views conflict with parents, Waltons win.
Play this game. What leverage do parents have over MPU? Nada. What leverage do the Waltons have over MPU? Life or death. You decide.
But that’s not how the Globe reports it.
What we have here is Hidden Politics and the Politics of Pretending. To me the interesting thing is not politics on the surface, quoting spokespersons of MBAE and MPU. It’s who is behind those organizations, the check writers. Hidden Politics is where the real power is.
That brings us to the Politics of Pretending. Unless stories like Sunday’s identify the true interests involved–and by that I mean the money, the check writers, the Waltons—then we’re just pretending about the politics of the school funding issue. That’s bad because citizens never see an important part of the story.
I always thought that if out-of-state billionaires could be proven to have entered the state using local fronts to change Massachusetts education policy that would be a great, great, great story. I’ve been proven wrong again, and again, and again. I still think it’s a great story, it’s just a great story that only gets told at a small political science blog. Why is that?
*“On Thursday, a jury in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, in Green Bay, found that Walmart had violated the Americans With Disabilities Act, which bans discrimination based on an employee’s disability, and awarded Ms. Spaeth $125 million in punitive damages and $150,000 in compensatory damages.” (Ms. Spaeth is a former employee with Down Syndrome terminated by WalMart). Under federal law, the award was reduced to $300,000.
[Full disclosure: as a retired educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not education.]
The Glob and other Boston news outlets like WBUR and WGBH ofter cite Paul Reville. Reville was indeed Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth, but before assuming that post, he was the founder of MBAE. In that capacity, he spearheaded MBAE’s development of and advocacy for Massachusetts historic Education Reform Act of 1993, aka “the Grand Bargain”. In other words, Reville is a Businessman Pretending to be an Educator.
Thanks Christine. I don’t have a thorough command of the history–I came into this late and I follow money, not schools policy. For some reason, the Globe and others you mention would like to avoid the topic of money. There is a mind set that exists where a Guardian Elite of managers who went to business school (usually Harvard Business School) know best and if we just got out of their way, miracles would burst forth. I see no reason to believe that business types should run education policy.
I think that some time ago the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education had a secret merger, which has resulted in an unholy alliance. Reville’s other claim to fame is he founded Harvard’s Education Redesign Lab. That’s the organization that former MA BESE member and economist Roland “Two-Tier”Fryer had to resign from due to allegations of sexual harassment. (Two-tier, because during an interview he stated that his own kids in Concord schools should have time for Shakespeare, but kids in Boston should be given standardized tests every day. At 48:18 here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?304111-1/roland-fryer-education)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/business/economy/harvard-roland-fryer-sexual-harassment.html
” … Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education had a secret merger …” You nailed it! They even share faculty.
You can probably still read about public education in The Globe (and in other major newspapers) but you would have to look in the Finance and Technology sections. It’s just another commodity now.
I was watching Lisa Graves interview Gordon Lafer the other day and Lafer was stressing the point that a lot of big $$$ Democratic donors are in tech, which stands to make a bundle from de-emphasizing actual flesh and blood teachers and other school personnel and replacing them with tech. So that helps explain the “bi-partisan” money. To me I don’t give much credence to Democratic or Republican, I pay attention to the Oligarchic Party.
“News” stories are weaponized to gain politically as well as financially. One way in which it is done is described at Catholic Philly (6-15-2020), “Website Pilfering Copyrighted Catholic News in 4 states”. Wikipedia describes the businesses of Brian Timpone, a conservative media tycoon, as receiving funding from Republican activist, Uihlein. The website described in the article has no ads which leads the reporter to speculate that e-mail addresses are being harvested after readers respond to an invitation to get new updates or offerings.
I din’t read the articles from the Wisconsin dioceses that were selected for Timpone’s Catholic Tribune Wisconsin ( the other states are Minn., Fla. and Mich.) but, I’d guess some relate to school choice. The state Catholic Conferences promote school choice. At least two executive directors of Catholic state conferences take credit for their state’s school choice legislation.
Timpone was in the news yesterday as part of the focus of a CNN investigation into a story that Fox, Breitbart, Daily Mail, etc. posted. CNN wanted to know if an organization inflaming racial tension in Dallas Texas actually existed.
Info. at the Crux website, “Crux was founded as project of the Boston Globe in 2014 but has been fully independent since March 2016.”
Crux is a “news site dedicated to…coverage of the Vatican and Catholic Church.”
State Catholic Conferences and bishops promote school choice.
Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston was quoted in a post at the Knights of Columbus site , 3-15-2016, “Crux and Knights of Columbus to Partner”. The quote followed a paragraph that included a sentence about the site’s independent editorship. “We appreciate The Boston Globe having provided the start up of Crux and am confident that the Knights of Columbus under the capable leadership of Supreme Knight Carl Anderson will achieve new levels of success with this new important communication tool, on behalf of the Church and the good of the wider community.”
BTW-Carl Anderson was a legislative aide to Jesse Helms.