Latest on The Barr Foundation K-12 Interest Group Team, 2022

Billionaires pour millions of dollars into K-12 interest groups in Massachusetts with almost no public accountability. The interests have upbeat sounding names like “Democrats for Education Reform,” “Educators for Excellence,” and “National Parents Union” but make no mistake, they exist to promote the policy preferences of oligarchs.

The public deserves a full accounting of who is funding interest group influence on K-12 policy. First, vast sums of philanthropic spending introduce a bias toward the policy preferences of the rich and is democratically unaccountable. Second, this is interest group funding. Third, big dollars roll in from outside (like from the Waltons of Arkansas) when two conditions are met: there is mayoral control of school politics without the messy democratic intervention of an elected school board; and second, local philanthropies like the Barr Foundation, but also the Boston Foundation, Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, and Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund spend money on K-12 interest groups.

Here is the latest on Barr, updated through the publicly available Form 990 tax returns from 2017-2022:

The $14,130,000 is more than the $10 million plus donated to privatization interest groups  by the Walton Family Foundation. Caution: Waltons’ funding of out-of-state operations who are active in Massachusetts like Democrats for Education Reform, Educators for Excellence, etc. may mean it spends much more in Massachusetts. But Barr is the largest known in-state funder of K-12 interest groups in Massachusetts.

The Barr Foundation is the philanthropic arm of billionaire Amos Hostetter. In 2016 he donated $2,025,000 to the pro-charters side in the ballot initiative election. Two million of that was in dark money, only revealed when the Office of Campaign and Political Finance ruled months after the election that dark money donations run through Families for Excellent Schools Advocacy, Inc. into the Great Schools Massachusetts ballot committee must be disclosed. In 2009 Hostetter gave $32,5000 to the Committee for Charter Public Schools.

MassInc lands on the list because Barr uses it for polling on a host of issues, including education. Commonwealth Beacon (then CommonwealthMagazine) acknowledged Barr’s support in a June 2022 article by Bruce Mohl: “The poll of 1,002 Massachusetts residents was conducted from June 8 -12 by the MassINC Polling Group. The poll was paid for by the Barr Foundation, a big supporter of making public transit accessible.” That is a good example of what should be a uniform practice. (Barr also funded polling in 2022 on transportation issues. I try to include only funding for education-related giving).

A story from State House News Service picked up by WBUR about a group called Voices for Academic Equity (consisting of many of the above organizations) did not mention that many of the groups are underwritten by the Walton Family Foundation and Barr (neither did the Boston Globe, as I wrote in Boston Globe and Corporate Elites Prop Up Their MCAS.) A May 24, 2023, GBH story about a poll conducted by MassInc and presented at an Education Trust forum did not identify the funder of the poll or that Education Trust is funded by Barr and that a source used in the story, National Parents Union, is underwritten by Walton and Barr.

But the big player in education news is the Boston Globe and there is a twist to its disclosure practices. From 2019-2022 the Globe has taken in $1.4 million from Barr to underwrite the Globe‘s education coverage.

We will deal with that in an upcoming post.

“Philanthropy is not just a beneficent activity or a funding mechanism. It is also a form of power.”—Lucy Bernholz, Chiara Cordelli, and Rob Reich, “Philanthropy in Democratic Societies” in Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values.

[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is in print.]