A Coalition of Billionaires masquerading as the Mass Reads Coalition is lobbying the legislature to pass a corporate coveted reading bill. It is mostly a familiar gaggle of privateering interest groups underwritten by the Boston Foundation, Barr Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.
At the Mass Reads website, you will find the Coalition of Billionaires members. EdTrust, Educators for Excellence, Latinos for Education, Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, Massachusetts Business Alliance, National Parents Union, Teach for America, Teach Plus—all have taken in millions of dollars from the Barr Foundation (supported by Boston billionaire and 2016 charters ballot question dark money donor Amos Hostetter) and the Waltons of Arkansas (union-hating heirs to the WalMart fortune). All of them except EdTrust and National Parents Union have also received money from the Boston Foundation.
Walton family client ExcelinEd is in there too. ExcelinEd is Jeb Bush’s outfit and you may remember them from Mass. DESE Helps Jeb Bush Sell Out Public Education citing a report from the Washington Post that ExcelinEd (then the Foundation for Excellence in Education) “has been criticized as a backdoor vehicle for major corporations to urge state officials to adopt policies that would enrich the companies.”
Gee, I wonder if any major corporations would be interested in the “massive profits” that could be at stake in the privateers’ legislation?
You can contact the Coalition of Billionaires by writing to Mass Potential. The founder and executive director is Mary Tamer, former well-compensated Massachusetts state director of Democrats for Education Reform. DFER was underwritten by Barr and the Waltons. We will not know for some time who is funding Mass Potential, but our phone lines are open.
Another member of the Coalition of Billionaires is the National Council on Teacher Quality. NCTQ’s donors include Barr, Walton, and the Boston Foundation, plus the Charles Koch Foundation. The Conservative Transparency Project also lists donations from such far-right donors as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Jacquelin Hume Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and Searle Freedom Trust.
Dr. Denny Taylor is an education expert, and she takes apart the NCTQ approach in a Substack post:
Most high-income countries include children’s health and wellbeing as a pre-requisite for children learning to read and write in laws that are designed to protect them. Not in the U.S. and not in Massachusetts where the gap between rich and poor is ignominious and extreme.
If the thirty groups that are part of the coalition that make up Mass Reads want to make sure every child learns to read and write in Massachusetts, they should put all their efforts into addressing the impact of adverse life experiences on the lives of children and on the disproportionally high number of children in Massachusetts who are in crisis.
But that would take taxes, and the Coalition of Billionaires do not want their excess millions going to sustain and educate the children who live among them. Instead, why not create profit-making opportunities off public education?
Money Never Sleeps. Follow the Money.
“One thing big money typically lacks is credibility, which is why those who deploy it work so hard to cover their tracks.”—Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson
[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.]