Note the quotation marks. I’m not calling DFER a bundler I’m quoting DFER’s former president calling DFER a bundler. In a 2012 interview then president Joe Williams explained “We’re essentially bundlers.”[1]
But bundlers for whom? DFER has a long established right wing dependency. As I show in Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization famous Democrat Rupert Murdoch donated at least $1,000,000. Another Republican DFER underwriter is Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone. “Searches through opensecrets.org show that Langone has been a consistent giver to Republican and conservative causes, and his place in the conservative universe is confirmed by participation in at least one visit to a Koch Seminar, in 2010.”[3]
Plenty of Democratic oligarchs donate as well. As Sarah Reckhow et al. argue in “Outsiders with Deep Pockets,” and Henig, Jacobson, and Reckhow detail in Outside Money in School Board Elections there are wealthy Democrats who help fuel DFER’s bundling.[2] That’s true in Massachusetts too. DFER and its siblings Education Reform Now Inc. and Education Reform Now Advocacy could clear up the donor identification issue at any time but then they would have a lot fewer donors.
Even using the plural “Democrats” is a stretch. DFER MA has no membership. It’s just a checkbook.
The largest stakeholder in DFER is the Walton family which funds 30%-33% of ERN’s national budget and has underwritten DFER’s dark money shuffling in Massachusetts. The Arkansas WalMart heirs are the dominant supporters of school privatization in Massachusetts.
ERN’s major local supporter is the Barr Foundation the foundation of Amos Hostetter the fifth largest dark money donor ($2,000,000) to the losing charter schools privatization ballot campaign in 2016. Barr funds some of the Boston Globe’s education coverage.
Barr is a privatization interest group. Its $600,000 donation to the Globe for 2019-2020 marked “the dawn of philanthro-interest group journalism.” Barr re-upped with another $400,000 for the Globe’s Great Divide coverage according to Barr’s 2021 Form 990 tax return.[4]
That’s right. Barr funds both DFER and part of the the Globe’s education coverage.
Money never sleeps. Follow the money.
For more on DFER I have an entire chapter on it in my book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.
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 a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy.
[1] Stephen Sawchuk, “New Advocacy Groups Shaking Up Education Field: Their Sway Over Policy and Politics Appears to Be Growing, Especially at the State and Local Levels,” Education Week, May 14, 2012, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/05/16/31advoverview_ep.h31.html?r=767,077,806&preview=1.
[2] Much of what I’m writing here is based on Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization so I’m not going to continue citing to it. Instead, rush out and buy a copy.
[3] Sarah Reckhow, Jeffrey R. Henig, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Jamie Alter Litt, “‘Outsiders with Deep Pockets’: The Nationalization of Local School Board Elections,” Urban Affairs Review 53, no. 5 (2016): 18, 21; Jeffrey R. Henig, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Sarah Reckhow, Outside Money in School Board Elections: The Nationalization of Education Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2019), 64-65.
[4] Barr foundation Form 990 on file with author.