Archives for category: Massachusetts

 

Maurice Cunningham is a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts who has become an expert on the subject of Dark Money. He has his own name for the billionaires devoted to charter schools. He calls them the “Financial Privatization Cabal.” That’s clever and accurate but I stick with “corporate reformers” because there are fewer syllables.*

Cunningham (no relation to the charter-loving Peter of the same last name) has done a deep dive into the Dark Money funders of the 2016 campaign to expand charter schools in Massachusetts via a referendum called Question 2. A New York City organization called Families for Excellent Schools (FES) arrived on the scene to bundle and dispense Dark Money and renamed itself Great Schools Massachusetts. (FES was funded by the Waltons and has now been replaced by a new group which calls itself Massachusetts Parents United, also Walton funded.)

What is Dark Money? It is money given to political campaigns by donors whose identities are hidden. The donors do not want their names to be revealed. So they give to a group like “Families for Excellent Schools.” After the charter lobby lost in Massachusetts in 2016, beaten by a sturdy coalition of teachers, parents, and volunteers, the state’s Office of Campaign and Political Finance conducted an inquiry and fined FES for failing to disclose the names of its donors. The fine was $426,00, along with a five-year ban on future political activity in Massachusetts. Shortly thereafter, FES folded due to a #MeToo scandal involving its executive director.

Before it closed its doors, FES was required to reveal its donors. One of them was  billionaire Seth Klarman.

Maurice Cunningham has checked out Klarman and found that he is one of the top donors to the Republican Party in New England. He doesn’t like Trump, so he recently gave $222,000 to the Democratic Party. That was front-page news in the Boston Globe.

Cunningham wonders why Klarman’s gift of $222,000 to the Democrats made the front page, but his gift of $3 Million to the pro-charter campaign in 2016 didn’t merit even a mention. 

But then relentless Maurice Cunningham discovered this:

“Klarman also is a part owner of the Fenway Sports Group, the Boston Red Sox parent company that is led by principal owner John Henry. Henry is also owner and publisher of The Boston Globe.”

Blood is thicker than water. Money is thicker than blood or water.

It is way past time that I name Maurice Cunningham to the honor roll of this Blog for his indefatigable sleuthing and pursuit of Dark Money. As always: Follow the money.

PS: To learn more about Stand for Children as a conduit for Dark Money and about Strategic Grant Partners read this post by Cunningham. 

*He explains:

“A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: I’ve failed to come up with a catchy name for the dark money funders so for now I’ve settled on “Financial Privatization Cabal.” Financial since most of the dark money is coming from the financial services industry. Privatization, because I believe their intention is to privatize public services. Cabal because it denotes a secret plot.”

The highest court in Massachusetts ruled unanimously that the cap on charter schools is constitutional. 

It tossed out an effort by charter advocates to win in the judicial system what they lost at the polls in a state referendum in 2016, when the public voted against expanding the number of charter schools.

In an opinion issued Tuesday, Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court dismissed a complaint that the cap on the number of charter schools allowed to operate in state violates students’ rights under the state’s constitution.

The unanimous opinion, authored by Justice Kimberly Budd, affirmed a lower-court decision made in October 2016. It holds that even when public schools under-serve their students, that doesn’t mean state actors are failing in their constitutional duties — or that opening more charter schools is the only way to make it right.

The decision represents a third and possibly decisive setback for the proposal to lift the longstanding cap. In 2015, legislators decided against advancing Gov. Charlie Baker’s bill for more charter schools, instead leaving the choice to voters — who then voted it down by a 24-point margin in 2016.

It’s cause for disappointment and frustration among supporters of those schools, and for students and families who hoped to get in off their wait lists.

“Watching your own children have to suffer in a school that’s underperforming — and knowing that it’s the result of a political turf war… it’s crushing. It’s devastating.”

Keri Rodrigues

 Keri Rodrigues is one of those people. She’s an education activist who supported Question 2 in 2016. Now, she runs Massachusetts Parents United — an advocacy group supported in part by the pro-charter Walton Foundation. She has two sons who have tried and failed to get seats in a charter school. “Watching your own children have to suffer in a school that’s underperforming — and knowing that it’s the result of a political turf war… it’s crushing. It’s devastating…”

The plaintiffs argued that missed opportunity amounted to a violation of their shared right to an adequate public education, or to equal protection under the laws, as laid out in the state constitution.

The SJC opinion accepts the plaintiffs’ arguments that, under Massachusetts’ constitution, state leaders must provide all students with an “adequate education,” and that “the education provided at their schools is, at the moment, inadequate” based on testing data.

But the court rejected the plaintiffs’ conclusions. The opinion holds that state officials and lawmakers must be allowed to work to improve poorly-performing schools, and that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the state’s current approach — including oversight and takeover of chronically underperforming schools — couldn’t jump-start progress “over a reasonable period of time.”

Rodrigues wasn’t persuaded. “Over what period of time are we talking about? Because parents get roughly 12 years to get their kids an adequate education,” she said. “So are we just supposed to roll the dice and hope the commonwealth is able to figure this out?”

But the SJC opinion goes further. It argues that even if students’ constitutional rights were definitively being violated, it still wouldn’t mean the charter program must be expanded. The opinion states, “There is no constitutional entitlement to attend charter school,” and further, that the court is barred from enforcing any “fundamentally political” remedy of that kind.

The decision, in short, says that the state has an affirmative duty to improve low-performing schools, not an affirmative duty to open privately managed charter schools.

Rodrigues was state director for the now-defunct Families for Excellent Schools (also Walton-funded), which bundled millions of dollars for the failed “Yes on 2” charter expansion referendum; she is now executive director of Massachusetts Parents United, another astroturf group created by Walton and other charter advocacy organizations.

Unlike most parent organizations, Massachusetts Parents United started its life with $1.5 million in projected income and more on the way from the Waltons and other friends. 

The decision affirmed that the charter advocacy groups cannot rely upon the judicial system to overturn the 2016 referendum that said NO to more charter schools.

 

A secret memo commissioned by the Walton Education Coalition sought to analyze why the well-funded charter advocates were beaten handily in a Massachusetts referendum in 2016 on expanding charter schools.

The memo says the opposition trusted teachers more than the governor. The opposition had a simple message: charters are funded at the expense of the local public schoools. The charter lobbyists thought they could threaten a referendum, and the legislature would cave and lift the charter cap to avoid a referendum. But the anti-charter forces refused to compromise and took it to the public.

Families for Excellent Schools, the hedge funders group, thought that the aggressive tactics they had used successfully in New York would work in Massachusetts. They didn’t, and FES was fined nearly half a million dollars for campaign finance violations (concealing the names of its donors) and banned from the Bay State for five years (FES disbanded soon afterwards).

What the analysis doesn’t acknowledge is that Massachusetts was a terrible choice to launch a charter campaign. On NAEP, it is the most successful state in the nation. It has a strong tradition of local control. Families are very attached to their town schools. Threaten the funding of the local public school, and you hit a hornets’ nest.

The pro-charter campaign was hurt too by the public recognition that it was fueled by out-of-state funding.

The opposition to charter expansion was well-organized and grassroots. The two national teachers unions spent millions, enough to stay competitive, but we’re outspent by the charter supporters by many more millions. Without their financial help (no dark money!), the charter industry would have owned the airwaves.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, led by Barbara Madeloni, organized teachers and collaborated with school committees to fight off the charter invasion. Almost every school committee in the state opposed Question 2.

Volunteers, parents, and activists turned out to defend public schools.

The only towns that voted to expand charters were affluent communities that expected they would never get a charter. Where charters already existed, the opposition ran strong because they knew there was less money for their town schools.

The defeat of Question 2 in Massachusetts was a very important milestone in the fight against privatization.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Republican-dominated State Board of Education in Massachusetts approved a Gulen charter school in the Springfield area. 

The Mayor of Springfield is not happy about it. He read Robert Amsterdam’s exhaustive report about the Gulen schools “Empire of Deceit”), and he knows that the public schools will lose funding to this charter chain operated by allies of the Fethullah Gulen Movement.

Of course, the Gulen charter school says it is not a Gulen school at all. It is just happenstance that the CEO of the school is a Turkish national. Gulen schools always deny any connection to Gulen, who now has a charter chain of about 160 schools. As usual, follow the money. If the landlord is Turkish, if contracts for construction go to Turkish firms, if a significant number of its teachers are Turkish, if the majority of the board is Turkish, it is a Gulen school. Chances are, as one fallen-away Gulen teacher told 60 Minutes, that the teachers are tithing their salary to Gulen. And th school is paying rent to a Gulen Corporation.

The mayor understands that the charter will drain funding from the local public schools, where the overwhelming majority of children are enrolled.

Why do we allow a religious sect to operate what are supposed to be public schools?

In 2016, the voters of Massachusetts overwhelmingly rejected a state referendum to expand the number of charter schools in the state. Why is the State Board still increasing their number? The chair of the State Board donated large sums to the pro-charter side. He lost.

Is the State Board determined to undermine one of the top-performing states in the nation?

 

 

Maurice Cunningham is a treasure. He follows the money involved in efforts to privatize public schools in Massachusetts. In this post, he takes issue with the Boston Globe writer Scott Lehigh, who has a sentimental attachment to privately run charter schools.

Leigh mocks the idea that “corporate reformers” are hell-bent on privatization. Such were the “fevered imagines” of charter opponents, he writes.

Cunningham responds:

“As someone who accurately identitied that raging fever I’ll concede that “corporate” reformers may not be the best description. Rather it was the hedge fund plutocrats of the Financial Privatization Cabal who were most responsible for seeking the privatization of public education.”

He then posts the list of campaign contributions—all staggeringly large—made by Families for Excellent Schools to the Massachusetts referendum about charter expansion in 2016 that caused that organization to be fined nearly half a million dollars by state campaign finance officials, banned from the state for five years, and shuttered.

Cunningham writes:

“Why deem the “corporate” reformers the Financial Privatization Cabal? Because most of the money came from hedge fund and other financial services titans. They ardently seek privatization. And as they knew transparency would be the death of their plot, their strategy depended on a secret cabal.”

Before he finished writing, he noticed that the former director of the disgraced FES is now leading the “Massachusetts Parents Union” and has been invited by the state board to represent parents. That’s a good one!

“Just as I was picking up Mr. Lehigh’s column off my twitter feed came tweets that Keri Rodrigues, former state director of now Banned-in-Boston Families for Excellent Schools and present state director of Massachusetts Parents United is invited to represent parents at DESE. I confess I know little of this and won’t say anything about DESE because … read the disclaimer below.

“But as I wrote in Why Massachusetts Parents United?, MPU is a front for the Walton heirs and other plutocrats tied up in the 2016 privatization campaign.

“DESE’s promotion of the MPU state director is consistent with my argument in Why Massachusetts Parents United? in that the invitation confers legitimacy on the organization that may help it attract attention from the press and add members – all useful when it comes time for the Financial Privatization Cabal to offer up a “parents group” to call for more privatization, including charters.”

As readers here know, I usually refer to the Privatization moment as “corporate reformers,” but Cunningham says it is more accurate to call them the “Financial Privatization Cabal.”

What do you think?

His last bit of advice: Follow the money. Dark Money never sleeps. When a parent group pops up and suddenly has a million-dollar budget, look for the source of the funding.

 

 

Maurice Cunningham is a political scientist in Massachusetts who follows the trail of Dark Money. “Dark Money” refers to groups that conceal their donors and that use phony front groups that pretend to be grassroots families and parents.

In 2016, the Bay State held a referendum on whether to expand charter schools, and the Dark Money flowed through a NYC group called Families for Excellent Schools. FES was a front for hedge fund managers, mostly from out-of-State. The pro-charter forces vastly outspent the teachers’ unions but the proposal was overwhelmingly defeated. It lost in every part of the state, e crept for a few affluent communities that never expected to see a charter school in their neighborhood. Most towns, especially those that already had charters, knew that the arrival of a charter meant budget cuts for their public schools, and they voted no.

After the election, state campaign finance officials punished Families for Excellent Schools for its lack of transparency. It fined the group nearly $500,000 and banned from Massachusetts for five years. Shortly afterwards, FES closed its doors.

But, Cunningham reports, the Dark Money has returned. 

First, it created a from group called Massachusetts Parents United, only three months after the 2016 election. This was supposed to be regular parents, right? But the money rolled in, more than any group of concerned parents could muster.

“Soon the plucky parents had a website, services of two political communications firms, several thousand members (so-claimed), and projected income of $1,500,000 and expenses of $800,000 for 2017. MPU operated under a sponsorship agreement with Education Reform Now, which bankrolls the millions that enables Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts to fertilize state politics with dark money. MPU’s state director, who also served in that capacity for Banned-in-Boston Families for Excellent Schools, is on the Advisory Council of DFER Massachusetts.”

Does your local parents’ group have that kind of money? I didn’t think so.

“In the Empty Bottle I spelled out some of the contributions made by MPU’s funders to the 2016 charters campaign. Let’s update that first with contributions from WalMart heirs. Jim Walton gave $1,125,000 into the Campaign for Fair Access to Quality Schools. Alice Walton provided $710,000 to the Yes on 2 Ballot Committee and slipped another $750,000 of dark money into the coffers of the now Banned-in-Boston Families for Excellent Schools Advocacy. Thus the Waltons spent down the inheritance by $2,585,000 for Question 2.

“But the Walton Family Foundation, a tax deductible organ of the Walton family, had been putting upstream money into the Massachusetts charters effort for years. From 2010 through 2016, WFF gave over $12,000,000 to Education Reform Now (the Walton family sustaining the funder of a Democratic front is, uh, what?). WFF gave nearly $14,000,000 to the collapsed-in-corruption Families for Excellent Schools, almost half of that in the 2015 run up to the ballot question. Across those years WFF slid over $900,000 to the Pioneer Institute.

“Then there is the Longfield Family Foundation and its benefactor Chuck Longfield. In Empty Bottle I noted that Chuck Longfield had contributed $125,000 to two pro-charter ballot committees. When OCPF forced the disbanded-in-disgrace Families for Excellent Schools to disclose its donors, it revealed that Longfield had given another $600,000 in dark money. He also contributed to the weird Mekka Smith situation, which was also bound up in charters.

“The Barr Foundation is the charitable foundation of Amos Hostetter, who funneled $2,000,000 in 2016 dark dollars through the invested-in-iniquity Families for Excellent Schools Advocacy.

“The largest giver of dark money to formed-in-fraudulence Families for Excellent Schools Advocacy was its office mate engorged-in-effluvia Families for Excellent Schools Inc., which laundered $3,700,000 through FESA to Great Schools Massachusetts. On May 26, 2016 the Davis Foundation sent $100,000 to FESI and on November 2, 2016 another $10,000, and also invested $20,000 in Pioneer for “Project to Expand Educational Opportunity in MA.”

“Charters were killed off in 2016, you say? In Washington state charters failed at the ballot box in 1996, 2000, and 2004 before squeaking by on a fourth try in 2012, and that was with the help of the Gates family. Privatizers play the long game. Money never sleeps.”

What do they want? Why spend so many millions?

The Dark Money club wants privatization. They want to undermine public schools in the most successful state in the nation.

 

Tom Birmingham was one of the fathers of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993. He writes here that the teaching of history has always been considered a foundational part of education in Massachusetts, the birthplace of public schooling. History is fundamental to citizenship, and citizenship is the main purpose of public schooling.

He writes:

“ABOUT 25 YEARS AGO, as a member of the Massachusetts Senate, I co-authored the Massachusetts Education Reform Act. Drafting a complex bill with such far-reaching consequences requires significant compromise, but one thing my counterparts in the House of Representatives and then-Gov. Bill Weld all agreed upon was the importance of educating students about our nation’s history.

“As a result, the law explicitly requires instruction about the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers and the US Constitution. We also made passage of a US history test a high school graduation requirement.

“Sadly, subsequent generations of political leaders have not shared our view of the importance of US history. It is now becoming an afterthought in too many of our public schools.

“The Founding Fathers believed that to exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship, Americans had to understand our history and its seminal documents. They also saw it as the role of public schools to pass on what James Madison called “the political religion of the nation” to its children. As the great educational standards expert E.D. Hirsch said, “The aim of schooling was not just to Americanize the immigrants, but also to Americanize the Americans.”

“Without this, they believed the new nation itself might dissolve. They had good reason: Until then internal dissension had brought down every previous republic.

“According to Professor Hirsch, the public school curriculum should be based on acquiring wide background knowledge, not just learning how to learn. This belief is diametrically opposed to the view held by many that the main purpose of public education should merely be to prepare students for the workforce. As it turns out, the evidence is fairly strong that students who receive a broad liberal arts education also tend to do better financially than those taught a narrower curriculum focused on just training students for a job.

“The role of public schools in creating citizens capable of informed participation in American democracy was particularly important in a pluralistic society like ours. Unlike so many others, our country was not based upon a state religion, ancient boundaries or bloodlines, but instead on a shared system of ideas, principles, and beliefs.”

Some people think that the way to reinvigorate history in the curriculum is to require standardized history tests. I disagree. History must be taught with questions, discussions, debates, theories, and curiosity. Standardized tests would reduce history to nothing more than facts. Facts matter, but what makes history exciting is the quest and the questions, the controversies and the uncertainty.

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%.

Maurice Cunningham, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, has been tracking the movement of out-of-state “dark money” into local elections in Massachusetts. He exposed the source of millions of dollars that flowed into the state to press for passage of Question 2 in November 2016, for the purpose of lifting the limit on charter schools. Once the public understood that the Waltons and Wall Street were trying to buy their public schools to turn them private, dark money lost. Question 2 was overwhelmingly defeated.

After the election, state ethics officials fined the Dark Money conduit “Families for Excellent Schools” almost half a million dollars and directed them to stay out of the state for four years.

But they are back.

Now the privatization industry wants to buy a seat on the Malden school board.

There’s a race for school committee in Ward 3 Malden that is sending a signal about the direction of Massachusetts politics. Candidate Mekka Smith, chief of staff of charter school operator KIPP Massachusetts, is running away in the money race. And she’s doing it with backing from the Dark Money/Privatization Industrial Complex.

The money in this case isn’t hidden although it does involve a few of the reluctant stars of Families for Excellent School’s dark money disclosures from the 2016 charter school ballot question. Andrew Balson of Newton, who invested $100,000 in FES’s scheme, gave $1,000 to the Malden candidate. Charles Longfield, who posted $650,000 to FES’s secret stash, gave $250 to Ms. Smith. In 2016 he also gave $25,000 to Great Schools Massachusetts and $100,000 to the pro-charter Campaign for Fair Access to Quality Public Schools ballot committee. And along with the Walton family, the Longfield family funds Massachusetts Parents United (see here and here), whose state director occupied the same role for Banned-in-Boston Families for Excellent Schools.

The total amount invested by KIPP, including loans Ms. Smith made to herself, is $3,950. Individuals affiliated with Teach for America (backed in Massachusetts by Strategic Grant Partners) have contributed $1,500. Charter school backer and venture capitalist Arthur Rock of San Francisco contributed $500.

Candidate Smith raised $14,966 as of October 20. Excluding funds she has lent to her own campaign, she has raised $425 from Malden. Thus Malden residents have been outspent by investors from San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, Newton, Cambridge, Boston, and Summit, NJ. And also of course by KIPP and TFA.

School committee races, especially ones for a small area like a ward, are usually sleepy little affairs funded by friends and family. But they have become of interest to investors who can tip a race with relatively small sums of money. This has been happening all over the country.

Even worse news. The fake reformers “Stand for Children” are funding races across the state. Keep your eye on “Stand.” They are a front for the big money.

Maurice Cunningham, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, is an expert on the infusion of Dark Money into education.

He wrote several articles about the millions of dollars that poured into Massachusetts to promote the referendum to increase the number of charter schools in November 2016.

This article is about a Dark Money passthrough called Stand for Children, which began its life as a pro-public school group but turned into a pro-Privatization, anti-union, anti-teacher organization. It highlights the role of Stand for Children in Massachusetts. It does not explore its national activities, where it plays a pernicious part in the attack on public schools, unions, and teachers.

http://blogs.wgbh.org/masspoliticsprofs/2017/10/6/your-dark-money-reader-special-edition-stand-children/

Those who remember the early days of SFC now call it “Stand ON Children.”

It has funneled money to corporate reform candidates in cities from Nashville to Denver. It tried to squelch the Chicago Teachers Union by buying up all the top lobbyists in Illinois. It has funded anti-union, anti-teacher campaigns.

It pretends to be a “civil rights” organization. It is not.