EduShyster (aka Jennifer Berkshire, a resident of Massachusetts) explains here how a coalition of parents, teachers, students, and civil rights activists defeated Question 2.

Question 2 was a measure on the ballot to expand the number of charter schools in the state by 12 every year, indefinitely. Opponents of the measure said it would drain money from the existing public schools, which enroll 96% of the children in the state. Advocates said it would not. Advocates claimed that they were fighting for opportunity for poor kids to escape failing public schools. Opponents didn’t buy it.

Support for Question 2 came mostly from out-of-state people of great wealth. These people, such as the Waltons and Michael Bloomberg, put up at least $26 million to advocate for more charters. I thought the charter advocates had put up $22 million, but Jonathan Pelto reported yesterday that they had actually spent $26 million. The opposition raised about $12 million, mostly from teachers’ unions and individual small contributions by teachers and parents.

For a billionaire to drop $2 million into a ballot issue in Massachusetts or anywhere else would be akin to one of us sending a dollar to the March of Dimes. They won’t miss it. At some point, however, if they keep losing, they might get bored and find a different hobby.

The election was a battle royal over the future of public education in Massachusetts, and large numbers of people mobilized to save their public schools. Support among black voters was the same as among white voters.

Question 2 was defeated by a vote of 62% to 38%. It was a knock-out punch for the billionaires and the many financiers whose names were hidden from public view because of arcane campaign finance laws that enable “dark money” to be spent without identifying its source.

Berkshire writes:

I could give you a long list of reasons why Question 2 went down in flames. It was a complicated policy question that should never have made it onto the ballot. Yes on 2, despite outspending the ‘no’ camp 2-1 couldn’t find a message that worked, and was never able to counter the single argument that most resonated with voters against charter schools: they take money away from public schools and the kids who attend them. #NoOn2 also tapped into genuinely viral energy. The coalition extended well beyond the teachers unions that funded it, growing to include members of all kinds of unions, as well as social justice and civil rights groups, who fanned out across the state every weekend. By election day, the sprawling network of mostly volunteer canvassers had made contact with more than 1.5 million voters.

Question 2 had not only unprecedented funding, it had the support of the Governor and the state’s Secretary of Education, James Peyser, who is a longtime advocate for charters and a member of the board of Families for Excellent Schools, the same organization that bundled money in New York and elsewhere to push for charters.

Berkshire writes that when people who had no particular interest in charters or public schools began to see who was behind Question 2, she realized that Question 2 was in big trouble:

Do you know why hating on the Yankees is such a popular pastime in Massachusetts? Because they’re regarded as rich, entitled assholes from New York. Which is why the decision to rely so heavily on well, rich, entitled assholes from New York to fund the Yes on 2 campaign puzzles one so. By the final tally before the election, Families for Excellent Schools, reduced to serving as a conduit for the offerings of rich Wall Street-ers, had gifted more than $17 million to the cause. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, meanwhile, kicked in an additional $250,000 on top of the $240,000 he contributed back in August. To average voters, unfamiliar with the reform trope of the billionaire changemaker, the outsized role being played by rich New Yorkers was utterly incomprehensible. It’s not enough to field the richest baseball team money can buy, now they want our schools too?

The Yes on 2 team insisted that the public schools would not lose any money if there were more charters, but school committees called out their lie:

By October it was clear that the Question 2 ship was beginning to list. The original claim, debuted in a massive ad buy during the Olympics, that expanding charter schools would actually increase funding for public education, had failed to resonate with voters, and so it was off to the next argument. It turned out that charter schools didn’t *drain* or *siphon* money away from district schools as team #NoOn2 kept insisting—and here was a press release about a study to prove it. But once again, Question 2’s proponents, including editorial page editors at the Boston Globe, which ran a prominent *no draining, no siphoning* editorial, ran into the buzzsaw of a whole bunch of people all over the state who actually knew stuff.

Those school committees, which just would not stop passing resolutions against the ballot question, could tell you exactly how much money their city or town was spending on charter schools. The Mayor of Northampton, which is about as far from Boston as you can get, pointed out that his town spends more to send kids to the specialized charter schools favored by affluent parents—a subspecies never mentioned during the campaign—than on an entire elementary school. Meanwhile, cities that are already home to the largest number of charters and would be most affected by the passage of Question 2, began tallying how much charters were already costing them. Lowell, for example, has seen a drastic spike in its charter school bill and now spends more than $16 million on a parallel school system, money that’s being diverted away from *extras,* like paving the roads in Mill City. The charter waitlist in Lowell, by the way, is dwarfed by the number of kids waiting to get into district schools.

The privatization movement lost in both Massachusetts and Georgia, where Governor Deal wanted to change the state constitution to allow the state to take over low-performing schools and give them to charter organizations. The lesson is that it is cheaper and easier to make campaign contributions to elect pro-charter candidates to state boards and state legislatures than to take a risk on a popular vote. In the case of Georgia, Governor Deal could not eliminate local control without changing the state constitution. And the voters said no, by a vote of 60-40.

Read the article. The defeat of Question 2 proves that big money can be beaten when citizens are informed, organized, and prepared to defend their public schools against privatization.