The Network for Public Education has its own blog, where it posts timely articles about the attacks on public schools and ongoing strife over privatization. This is an important article by Maurice Cunningham about the continuing interest of the Walton Family Foundation in Massachusetts. Walton (and other billionaires) tried but failed to win a state referendum to allow unlimited expansion of charter schools in 2016; Maurice Cunningham played an important role by exposing the Dark Money behind the referendum, which was pitched as “saving poor minority kids from failing public schools.” When school boards, civil rights groups, teachers’ unions, parent associations and other friends of public schools saw who was paying the bills, they overwhelmingly defeated the referendum. It would have been quite a coup to plant the flag for privatization in Massachusetts, the birthplace of Horace Mann.
Maurice Cunningham: Banned in Boston (Globe): the Walton Family’s 2021 Political Team
Maurice Cunningham is a retired professor and experienced tracker of dark and murky money in education politics. Periodically he rolls out some of the information that some media outlets never quite get around to publishing.
We all love us some Market Basket so imagine if the Walton family of Arkansas (d/b/a WalMart) bankrolled a takeover of our local grocer! News coverage would be constant—the Globe, the two NPR radio stations, local TV descending on shoppers to ask about their favorite possum pie recipes (it’s an Arkansas delicacy). But the Waltons spend millions to privatize Massachusetts public schools and what do we get for coverage? Bupkis.
So read on if you dare, you’ll see this information nowhere else, the super-secret 2021 WALTON POLITICAL TEAM!
What is the 2021 Walton political team? It is America’s wealthiest family underwriting fronts that seek to influence government to achieve the policy goal of school privatization. As political scientists Kristin A. Goss and Jeffrey M. Berry teach us philanthropies sometimes act as interest groups. This political spending constitutes, as Robert Reich has written in Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing and How It Can Do Better, a little recognized and unaccountable form of oligarchic power.
The National Parents Union is one of his favorite groups to track, and he’s adding another to the mix.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Because I’ve been leaving Educators for Excellence out of these equations. E4E is a billionaire funded “teacher” house operation intended to undermine real democratic unions. Diane Ravitch explains E4E here: “It is funded by the reactionary anti-union Walton Family Foundation, the Rightwing William E. Simon Foundation, the anti-union Bodman Foundation, and the Arnold Foundation, which wants to eliminate pensions.” From 2017-2021 E4E took in $5,495,000 from the Waltons, some of which probably found its way to Boston.
As to that asterisk in 2020 the Waltons sent $400,000 to Massachusetts Parents United to establish National Parents Union, installing MPU president Keri Rodrigues as co-founder (the other co-founder mysteriously disappeared, to be replaced as treasurer my Rodrigues’s husband). In 2021 the Waltons duked NPU another $1,200,000.
I did a search for “Walton Family Foundation” from 2017-present in the Boston Globe archives and found only five references[1] for Walton Family Foundation. None covered Massachusetts WFF’s political largess but for one letter to the editor (in response to a letter from NPU/MPU/Walton agent Keri Rodrigues) and a snippet from AP. Except . . .
For a 2021 op-ed by free-lance journalist Amy Crawford titled Do-it-yourself education is on the rise. Crawford offers a big plug for Rodrigues and wrote that WFF “channeled $700,000 into direct grants (to NPU) for technology, training, and supplies for homeschooling families, cooperatives, and learning pods, in which families pool resources to hire a private teacher.” But what I think Crawford meant was the $700,000 invested in NPU by the Vela Fund, a joint venture of the Waltons and Charles Koch. Both the Waltons and Koch seek the privatization of public schools.
The post is filled with detail and specifics of particular interest to folks who follow education in Massachusetts.
Bottom line: The Waltons spend millions to influence education policy in Massachusetts and the Globe not only keeps its readers in the dark about that but promotes DFER and Rodrigues/National Parents Union/Massachusetts Parents United as authentic voices of Democrats and parents.
You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/maurice-cunningham-banned-in-boston-globe-the-walton-familys-2021-political-team/
———-
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Starting off with possum pie being a delicacy in Arkansas is prejudiced against Southerners. As a leftist Southerner living in Maine, I don’t care to read any article so grossly bigoted. I doubt that anyone in Arkansas eats that, and saying they do is an attempt to dehumanize the people there. My friends were liberals and leftists and fought to preserve the public schools. My son graduated from public school in Little Rock and is now a biochemist in Massachusetts. What is the value of othering Southerners to make your point?
Posssum pie as a delicacy is prejudiced against Southerners? Grossly bigoted? Really?
And you have a PhD behind your name? What are you? A chatbot?
Really?
Ain’t no possum in possum pie. From Taste of Home:
Ingredients
6 ounces cream cheese, softened
3/4 cup confectioners’ sugar
1 graham cracker crust (9 inches)
1/4 cup chopped pecans
1-3/4 cups cold whole milk
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup instant vanilla pudding mix
1/3 cup instant chocolate pudding mix
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream, whipped
12 to 16 pecan halves
Directions
In a small bowl, beat cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Spoon into crust. Sprinkle with chopped pecans.
In a bowl, whisk the milk, vanilla and pudding mixes for 2 minutes. Let stand for 2 minutes or until soft-set. Spoon over the pecans. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours. Top with whipped cream and pecan halves.
That was clearly not the implication of the jab. Chatbot? A third or more of Southerners do not subscribe to the fascist politics being implemented in Trump states. We are neither stupid nor ignorant. The scourge of fundamentalism has made far too many people willing to accept nonsense as truth. Monetizing education will further that end. Arkansans have elected demagogues since the first gubernatorial election though there have been exceptions. Rather than vilify the population, going after the oligarchs might bring more people to understand what is at stake. I have taught from Maine to Arkansas and students fall on the same bell curve for intelligence everywhere. What the tests measure is not potential but financial security and conformity.
Olga,
I wish I knew what it would take to open the eyes of people in red states to the political agenda of the people who control the states. I keep wondering why they continue to vote for politicians who serve the oligarchs and preserve poverty.
Implicit jab? I think not. You’re taking it that way but after knowing what possum pie is, I don’t think so.
“We are neither stupid nor ignorant.” Never said nor implied that “we” were. Just that you have overblown the possum pie statement.
“What the tests measure is not potential but financial security and conformity.”
The tests measure nothing. They assess, evaluate, judge many things, most of which are not explicitly stated as you point out “financial security and conformity”.
“We are neither stupid nor ignorant.”
Kind of reveals how Fox has succeeded bringing in many in the South, does it not?
Olga-
There’s a fair amount of deflection created by focusing on perceptions of backwardness in red states. The central states have a political powerhouse in the right wing Catholic Church which is taking the nation backward. (Koch funding and the Catholic Church agenda align.) Conservative Catholics take credit for school choice legislation in states like Indiana and Florida (DeSantis was raised Catholic.) In the states of the traditionally-described Deep South, evangelicals and conservative Catholics steer the right wing agenda. Btw-Louisiana is unique in the south by being more Catholic than protestant evangelical. It’s convenient for people to ignore conservative religion in favor of jabs at rednecks.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R) in Wisconsin can rely on Koch funding when he runs against Tammy Baldwin (D) in Wisconsin for her Senate seat. Gallagher is Roman Catholic and a graduate of Georgetown (Catholic) University. Georgetown didn’t admit its first Black student until 1953. In 2022, Georgetown hired Ilya Shapiro for its law school. He made an infamous tweet about Justice Ketanji Brown.
It’s more politically correct for people in the Northeast to disparage the lifestyles of southerners than it is to put a spotlight on the right wing Catholic Church. Catholics in the Northeast are liberal outliers of the sect but, many act as tribalists. Aiding them, is the false perception that Catholicism Isi liberal which was based on a brief period in the U.S. when the Church was. It definitely is not liberal now. GOP voting in red states relies on the alliance of right wing Catholics and evangelicals. Writings that disparage their leisure activities and food is deflection.
The Walton’s decimated small businesses throughout the country with their scorched earth low wage efficiency. They depend on government largess to care for the employees they under pay. Their theory of disruption as an economic philosophy has poisoned the well of social capital. Their laser focus on privatization brings them wealth through the altar of exploitation. A truly evil empire.