In my new book, Slaying Goliath, I focus on heroes of the Resistance. One of them is Professor Maurice Cunningham of the University of Massachusetts. He is a professor of politics and a blogger who believes in “follow the money.” His relentless pursuit of Dark Money in the Massachusetts charter referendum of 2016 (where voters overwhelmingly rejected charter expansion) led to the demise of the billionaire-funded front group called “Families for Excellent Schools.” It so happened that the “families” were billionaires who never set foot in a public school and never will.
In this post, Cunningham describes his fruitless effort to get a media outlet to acknowledge that the “parent group” it featured was Walton-funded.
Back on June 10 Masslive.com ran an editorial titled Meet the Newest Education Union: Parents which turned out not to be about education or unions at all but about the WalMart-heir front Massachusetts Parents United of Arkansas. Helpful as always I sent an op-ed to Masslive setting the record straight but they paid no attention. Oh well. You can read the op-ed below.
It surprises me how little most media care about writing the basic facts about corporate “education reform” groups like MPU of AK, which would be non-existent without the millions of dollars poured in by the Waltons. The editorial board can take any position on issues they wish but it doesn’t excuse them from not informing their readers about who is funding and thus controlling the privatization fronts. Are they just not curious? I can’t imagine the motto “We don’t ask too many questions” would look good on the masthead. Is “follow the money” an elective in journalism school that got axed due to budget cuts? Is it not news that state education policy is being hijacked by family of billionaires? Is it still not news that the billionaires are from Arkansas?
If you’re from western Massachusetts, ask Masslive yourself, and feel free to pass along my Letter to Massachusetts Education Reporters which has six reasons why reporters should report on who is behind front groups with tantalizing names like Massachusetts Parents United, Educators for Excellence, and Democrats for Education Reform.
Cunningham says “Dark Money never sleeps.”
Any Group funded by the Waltons or other billionaires is by definition “inauthentic.”
Cunningham hates hypocrisy.
So do I.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The news article somehow missed the numerous charter and voucher lobbying groups:
Here’s one- the national alliance of charter schools:
“The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools is the leading national non-profit organization committed to advancing the charter school movement. We work to empower parents to send their children to a school that best fits their needs and help seed the growth of high-quality schools. We also fight for funding equity and aim to protect the autonomy of charter schools while ensuring that we reflect the diversity of our students.
ADVOCATE
We are the leading force in Washington, D.C., in state legislatures, and in the court of law advocating for the creation, support, and replication of high-quality charter schools.
PROMOTE
We are a leading voice for the charter school movement, cultivating a positive image of charter schools and ensuring that all Americans understand what charter public schools are and where charter schools fit within the larger fabric of education. ”
Nothing on behalf of public schools and public school students. They lobby for charter schools. Period. Yet we all have to pretend these folks are “agnostic” and this is about “great schools”. Their own groups contradict that.
Why can’t public schools have dedicated advocates, then? Charters have them. Vouchers have them. Yet for some reason public schools and public school students may not. Ed reformers call foul on that. It’s not permitted.
There is NPE!
No money to give away but fighting every day to push against privatization!
Maximizing every dollar we have.
It’s up at OpEd News: https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/When-Parent-Groups-Are-F-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Education_Education-Funding_For-profit-Education-190625-496.html#comment737361
with this comment which has links to the Ravich Blog.
Read about The Deluge of Cash Flowing Into the Charter School Industry
Billionaire Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has hired an advocate of for-profit colleges to oversee higher education for the federal government .
Bill and Melinda Gates have spent billions to drive their agenda on education and other issues. Now, they have created a lobbying group to push even more.
and they pay the legislators behind the curtain and thus Colorado: State Turns Over School District to Private Management Corporation
First their corrupt legislators defund the schools and then take over: Ohio: Impoverished East Cleveland District Sues to Stop State Takeover
I am so very, very pleased to learn that Dr. Ravitch’s new book will be published, in hardcover, with a deckle edge. In the old days, when books were made of handmade paper, some of the semiliquid paper would leak out around the wooden form (the deckle) used to hold the paper’s shape, creating a rough, or deckled edge. A rough edge in a book could also result from the signatures of the book (the groups of leaves that were sewn together on the binding side) being cut by hand.
At any rate, a deckled edge gives a book a handmade, artisan look, which in this case, is altogether appropriate, for Diane Ravitch is an artisan scholar who works tirelessly, without a staff, to preserve public education and humane letters against the ravaged of the Education Deformers. What a contrast there is between her honesty and integrity and the phoniness of the many, many shill and shell organizations—the astroturf organizations—funded by billionaires with the purposes of
a) promoting top-down micromanagement of thought in U.S. education via the Common [sic] Core [sic] and standardized testing;
b) undermining the last bastion of unionism in our country (the government-sector unions, including those to which teachers belong);
c) destroying public schools via vouchers and charters;
d) replacing teachers with software;
e) promoting narrow, career-focused education that deemphasizes literature, languages, history, and the arts–that which is best in us;
f) creating vast Orwellian surveillance and tracking databases for stack ranking, command, control of the rest of us (the Proles); and
g) expanding their obscene fortunes via computerization and privatization.
It goes withouts saying, of course, that the billionaires who fund those organizations are con artists and liars. This is what they do. They give their astroturf organizations names like Students First and Parent Revolution so that these will have the appearance of being grassroots.
In her new book, Dr. Ravitch celebrates the heroes of the Resistance to Ed Deform. But she is altogether too modest about her own role in that Resistance, the greatest hero of which is none other than Dr. Ravitch herself—our Boudica, our Jeanne d’Arc, our warrior queen.
Goliath is going to be a handsome book. Look out, oligarchs. The forces of Resistance will gather around the pages of this, the definitive celebration of their sacred cause.
Teachers, take back your classrooms.
The wait has been and is long. I can’t take the wait.
I know not to judge a book by its cover, but that’s a great looking cover.
These “parent groups” are probably like everything else at Walmart. Made in China.
Hey now, don’t be a bigot, GregB. Not everything made in China is cheap ass Walmart crap. You denigrate the good Chinese by your statement. 😉
From one bigot to another, I get your point and defer to your statement of fact!
Dark Money and the Dark Web have two things in common. Evil never rests and Evil is always lurking in the shadows until, emboldened, Evil pounces on the innocent and honest among us.
Here’s the latest exposé from the good Professor – how low Boston’s newspaper of record has fallen! Taking money from privatizers to write edu-news.