The Boston Globe yearns for a more submissive teachers union. Its Sunday editorial Time for a Reset on Education Funding included a call for the Massachusetts Teachers Association to acquiesce and “If not, perhaps a group of teachers who don’t share MTA’s combative mentality could contribute some constructive ideas.” Who could the Globe have in mind? Here’s a match, from those fine folks who bankrolled the 2016 dark money charter schools campaign: Educators for Excellence.
E4E is a portfolio asset held by the Privatizing Cabal. It’s a spinoff of Teach for America with the aim of fostering divisions within the ranks of teachers unions, especially pitting young and relatively new and inexperienced teachers against older and tenured ones.
E4E has a Boston branch and imagine who funds it? If you guessed the Walton Family Foundation and Strategic Grant Partners, you have been paying attention. Both WFF and SGP provide “upstream money” that advances privatization through their charitable foundations (tax deductible, so you the taxpayer pick up about 39% of that). But when it came to the 2016 ballot campaign the Waltons and their Boston based friends could not contribute through their charitable foundations so they funneled millions in “downstream money” through a dark money front called Families for Excellent Schools, which later collapsed in corruption.
SGP got into the E4E business in 2015 with a $350,000 grant “to help launch organization in Massachusetts.” SGP followed up with $460,000 in 2016 and $951,000 in 2017. So that’s $1.7 million in three years. Happy launch!
That isn’t all though. The President of SGP is Joanna Jacobson and her family foundation gives to E4E too. In 2015 the family foundation gave $1 million to E4E, another $250,000 in 2016, and another $1 million in 2017. Since Joanna Jacobson is the President of SGP, that is $3.95 million under her control that has gone to E4E in the last three years for which records are available.
The Jacobsons contributed $2.04 million to Question 2, $2 million of that in dark money.
As to the Waltons the WFF has given E4E $2.08 million for national operations since 2015. Alice and Jim Walton gave over $2 million to Question 2, much of it in dark money.
(BTW Bernie Sanders, based on a union claim, asserted that Walton family members make more in one minute than WalMart workers do in an entire year. The Washington Post fact checked that statement — true!)
In 2016 the Barr Foundation (Amos Hostetter) gave $150,000 “to support launch of E4E Boston chapter.” Hostetter was good for $2 million in dark money to Question 2 in 2016.
E4E bills itself as working to assure that “teachers have a leading voice in the policies that impact their students and profession.” Which would seem duplicative of what unions do if you were naïve enough to believe it. Joanna Jacobson has not sunk $4 million into this operation to make teachers even more uppity than they already are.
As for the “educators” involved in Educators for Excellence … well not so much. The head of the Boston branch is an attorney with two years of Teach for America class work over a decade ago and experience organizing for Stand for Children. Looking at the Boston and national leadership there are few educators in Educators for Excellence which reminds me of Families for Excellent Schools, which had very few families.
E4E is staffed up well in Boston. Northwind Strategies pushes E4E. Northwind is led by former Deval Patrick campaign manager and chief of staff Doug Rubin. In 2016 the charters campaign was run by Governor Charlie Baker’s political aides. The Privatizing Cabal does not shop in the remainder bin.
Privatizers promote what they call a “new unionism” which is basically unionism that rolls over before the ruling elite. It sounds like the Boston Globe’s “group of teachers who don’t share MTA’s combative mentality.”
It’s like the Globe’s Dinner with Cupid series. Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match!
The Washington Post recently adopted a new slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness.” I agree.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money (and other things)].