September 18, 2025
The Honorable Simon Cataldo
General Court of Massachusetts
State House, Boston, MA 02133
Re: EDUCATION COMMITTEE TESTIMONY, H. 698, and S. 338
Dear Representative Cataldo:
I understand that at the hearing on H. 698 and S. 338 on Tuesday you indicated that you had heard from only proponents of the legislation and not opponents. I could not be in attendance but vie email filed my testimony in opposition, with copies to each member. A copy of that testimony is attached. I also understand that you expressed skepticism that the push for the Science of Reading legislation comes from those who wish to privateer public education. As the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization and having written several posts on the topic for the MassPoliticsProfs.org blog, I have some additional thoughts on that topic I would like to share.
As my initial letters suggests, I regard the 2016 charter schools ballot campaign as a singular event in which wealthy privateers attempted to capture public goods for private interests. As an example, I wrote about the millions the Jacobson family had invested into pushing charter schools through the Great Schools Massachusetts ballot committee and Families for Excellent Schools (FES) non-profit and noted the Jacobsons are now advancing the cause of Science of Reading (SOR). As my book shows, their intertest and the interest of the foundation previously managed by Joanna Jacobson, Strategic Grant Partners (SGP), goes back even further. As far back as 2010 Strategic Grant Partners was funding a predecessor privateering operation called Stand for Children. The Boston Foundation was doing so as well, beginning at least a year earlier. Privatization has been pushed nationally by the WalMart heirs through the Walton Family Foundation. As Table 5.1 from Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization shows, from 2010-2017, SGP poured $7,579,400 into organizations seeking to privateer Massachusetts public schools. From 2010-2016, the WFF donated $145,803,234 (NB: the Walton Family Foundation donations were national, the SGP donations concentrated in Massachusetts). The recipients included Education Reform Now (related to Democrats for Education Reform), Educators for Excellence, Stand for Children, Teach for America, and Boston’s Pioneer Institute. You probably heard from some of them or from their former officers who have moved to different organizations at the SOR hearing.
Those earlier investments were related to two ballot questions pursued by privateering interests in 2009-2010 and 2011-2012. In 2009 Alice Walton gave $30,000 to the Committee for Charter Schools ballot committee to help pay for signature gathering. Members of SGP also donated for signature gathering. The pattern repeated in 2011. Globe columnist Lawrence Harmon wrote that Stand for Children would “unleash an army of workers.” The proposed 2010 and 2012 questions ended in compromise with the teachers unions, the true target of the wealthy interests, capitulating (for the last time).
The Network for Public Education has issued numerous reports on charters and their financial mismanagement, including Chater School Reckoning: Decline, Disillusionment and Cost, Doomed to Fail: An Analysis of Charter School Closures from 1998-2022, a Sharp Turn Right: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers Conservative Agenda, Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain, and Chartered for Profit II: Pandemic Profiteering.
In Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization I wrote about ballot question donations from major financial institutions who do business with the Pensions Reserves Investments Management (PRIM). A Federal rule prohibits financial firms from contributing to the campaign committees of governors who hold power over such investment boards. But there is no ban on contributing to a governor’s preferred ballot question and several firms did just that, sending along $5,260,710, $4,465,000 of that in dark money. I also wrote about a joint effort by the WFF and Gates Foundation in 2015, to hold an investors’ conference at the Harvard Club in New York to teach financiers how to make money off charter schools. I also wrote of the real investment and management profits being made off charter schools, what the education scholar Noliwe Rooks calls “segrenomics.”
In this context I refer you back to my original letter in which I cite the attorney for plaintiffs seeking to force SOR upon the public schools noting the “massive profits” to be made in literacy programs.
I have returned to the profit motive and the dubious research on SOR in a few of my blog posts. In The Barr Foundation and the Boston Globe “Rig the Discourse” I asked education expert Dr. Josh Cowen about SOR. He responded that “Science of Reading is 100% about undermining public schools.” I asked Dr. Paul Thomas about it, and he answered that “At the core of the SOR movement is an effort to clear the reading program market for new programs (again).” He referred me to several posts he had done on SOR including one that includes this: “The Reading League represents that, for the most part, the SOR movement is less about science and more a grift.” A peer reviewed study I included stated that “SOR advocacy becomes a performance that obscures privatizers’ efforts to use literacy legislation as a mechanism for securing a market share for their products and services.” I have already quoted Dr. Elena Adarova in my testimony but there is more from her in Expert Douses Boston Globe’s “Science of Reading” Advocacy. Dr. Aydarova also stated that “this SOR brand has paved the way for growing privatization, standardization, and centralization” and “As SOR aligned, that’s when they started seeing major surges in their profits.”
In over ten years now of following the dark and shadowed money in the education area, I have become accustomed to, if always frustrated by, the mainstream media’s unwillingness to “follow the money.” That may be why some are skeptical. I have argued many times that the media’s default is itself a gift to wealthy interests, who are never called to account. I also understand that some of these moneyed interest, such as philanthropies, have positive attachments for many people. But facts are facts. No interest should go unexamined even if adopting names like “Moms,” “Parents,” “Educators,” or “Families,” and even if they are funded by powerful interests.
Sincerely,
Maurice T. Cunningham
Cc: Chairperson Lewis, Chairperson Gordon, and committee members