This week’s two Boston Globe stories on “public” schools in Boston prompted yesterday’s post Boston: Two Different “Public” School Systems? An article by Tom Edsall on The “Rotten Equilibrium” of the Republican Party illuminates some further aspects of how the city’s Oligarchs pick winners and losers in the schools.
A brief summary of the post Boston: Two Different “Public” School Systems?: as the Globe showed this week, the tax payer funded Boston Public Schools system is struggling, while a city charter school with taxpayer supplied public funds bolstered by tax-deductible contributions from Massachusetts Oligarchs, is looking up. (Many of the same Oligarchs poured dark money into the 2016 Question 2 ballot measure for more charter schools).
I didn’t go into it yesterday but taxes are the important subtext. It takes revenues to run public schools. The Oligarchs are willing to direct their tax deductible donations to support a charter school but not pay taxes to support the BPS system. Ideology, anti-unionism, and taxes are all at work here. Labor is the only countervailing force to big money in politics, and unions advocate for higher wages and better working conditions as well as worker dignity and power, which cuts into Oligarchic power. As importantly, unions advocate for programs that serve the public and cost money – taxes. And Oligarchs do not want to pay taxes.
Edsall’s piece didn’t have to do with schools but it did touch on the ideology of conservatives, which applies to our Massachusetts Oligarchs. Ideologically they dislike government and think the market has all the answers. Edsall’s idea was that right wing governments actually benefit if working class people are doing poorly, so they have a stake in government not working. This could even explain some of the incompetence of the Trump administration.
So Edsall posed his question to some of the thinkers at the conservative Niskanen Center. The responses were quite telling.
And from Brink Lindsey, vice president for policy:
It isn’t new thinking either. In the Nineties Bill Kristol wrote a famous strategy memo instructing the Republican Party that they had to kill the Clinton health care plan because if people ever figured out that government is good at providing things they need, the GOP would be toast.
And this is what is at work in Boston. Starve the publics, which will then do worse, which will bring calls for “reform.” Fund “public charters” (public $ + tax deductible donation $) which then appear more attractive. Yes it’s picking winners and losers, but it is Oligarchs who get to pick.
It’s the Un-Virtuous cycle.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money (and other things)].