I was tempted to give an entire day to this post about the Dark Money group deceptively called Families for Excellent Schools.
The “families” are financiers, billionaires, and garden-variety multimillionaires. They enjoyed great success in New York, where they made an alliance with Governor Cuomo and launched a $6 Million TV buy to promote charter schools. Under pressure from Cuomo, the state legislature compelled the City of New York to provide free space to charter schools and to give Eva Moskowitz whatever she wanted.
Then, Families for Excellent Schools opened shop in Massachusetts, where they launched a multimillion dollar campaign to increase the number of charter schools.
Parents, teachers, the teachers unions, Rural and suburban communities turned against charter schools. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren joined the opponents of charter schools. Before the vote, the backers of Question 2 were revealed in the media (though not all of their names), and the referendum to expand the charter sector went down to a crashing defeat.
After the election, things went bad for FES.
“This September, the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance fined Families for Excellent Schools a comparatively nominal $426,500. But it also forced the charter group to reveal its donors — a who’s who of Massachusetts’ top financiers, many of whom are allies of Gov. Charlie Baker — after it had promised them anonymity.”
In addition to the fine, FES was banned from the Bay State for four years.
One of the big donors to FES was the rightwing, anti-union Walton Family, which gave FES more than $13 Million between 2014 and 2026. The chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education gave FES nearly $500,000.
Now FES is trying to redefine itself.
Here is a suggestion: support the public schools that enroll nearly 90% of children. Open health clinics in and near schools. Invest in prenatal care for poor women. Lobby for higher taxes for the 1%.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This families for excellent schools has balls beyond belief. The leader this guy Jermiah Kettridge is a complete troll – he knows nothing about education but to just smear anything negative he can think of in his mind. The organization is so corrupt and is preys on the notion that people are stupid and can be manipulated. This story deserves a toast to the people
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Glad you posted this. Eliza Shapiro is one of the better education reporters out there and her articles often try to go into more depth about issues.
And Families for Excellent Schools deserves a very close look. I’m not sure if the organization itself should get credit for their wins in Albany, or if their funders — who also just happen to be the same people who donate huge amounts to Cuomo and many Albany politicians — just use them as their PR firm to make it seem like the politicians they own are acting in response to “grass roots” support instead of support from the handful of pro-charter donors who call the shots.
FES and the groups they funded did poorly in Massachusetts because those same donors couldn’t buy voters the way they buy politicians. No matter how much they spent trying.
I suspect FES will cease to exist as soon as billionaires decide to put their money into other PR efforts. Their existence seems to be entirely at the whim of their rich pro-charter donors.
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BUSINESS AND EDUCATION
A business man walks into a bar and brags about how his blueberries are the best in the country and how his business makes all this money. The business man said to the teacher, “if I ran my business the way you run your school I would be out of business”!!!
The teacher said to the business man: “Tell me what happens when you get a bad or rotten shipment of blueberries and they are all mostly rotten??” The business man replied… ” I send them back of course!!!”
The teacher replied to the business man: ” Well in the schools when we get a bad shipment of kids we cannot send them back we have to keep them!”. Business is very different from education.
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Google Jaime Vollmer and The Blueberry Story to get the real events that morphed into the bar story.
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Having breathed sighs of relief through most of the article, heartened that democracy and justice had overcome the treachery of DFER and StudentsFirst — and great thanks and kudos to Massachusetts voters — I winced at the last few paragraphs. Watch out for this, y’all: “Now, smaller charter groups are exploring whether it’s possible to create a real grass-roots movement to promote charters — and how to address the nagging concern there’s an inverse relationship between money and political wins in the charter world.” They’re money is going to go even darker.
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Their money, that is.
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Keri Rodrigues is one of the lieutenants in the mafia Family for Excellent Schools. She recently posted a blog in which she attacked FairTest, Citizens for Public Schools of Massachusetts, a true non-profit organization which works tirelessly to protect our schools, and its executive director Lisa Guisbond. Her post is full of fake assertions about the board, its composition and its work, while she champions Walmart, the Davis and the Barr foundations. She also implies that the phrase “dark money” is racist. I won’t post a link, as her claims are easliy refuted and the last thing I want to do is to amplify her reach.
However, what angers me is that Peter Cunningham has commented on the post, legitimizing it, as follows:
“Peter Cunningham · Executive Director at Education Post
Well said Ms. Keri. Truth and transparency wins the day.”
Cunningham’s actions remind me of an owner petting a lapdog which has just lunged at a neighbor’s small child.
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