Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts had a policy conference Wednesday to tout a report it did comparing schools in Boston and Lawrence. It’s a great case study on how wealthy philanthrocapitalists are able to set the agenda on issues.
It was timely too because in the morning I was re-reading a book chapter by Aaron Horvath and Walter W. Powell titled “Contributory or Disruptive: Do New Forms of Philanthropy Erode Democracy?” in Rob Reich, Chiara Cordelli, and Lucy Bernholz, Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, and Values. Horvath and Powell contend that philanthropies pushing a political agenda (yes, the Waltons made it into the article) present a profound threat to the functioning of our democracy.
The scholars write that “changing the conversation” is an especially effective method for the wealthy to advance their ideological or interest-based arguments. It is “worrisome when it shapes public conversation in the image of philanthropic, not public, interests and weakens or delegitimizes democratic or deliberative processes in setting public agendas.” Wealthy philanthrocapitalists have the financial capacity to hire the finest communications experts to promote their interests and make them appear as if they have nothing but the public interest at heart.
So from an agenda setting perspective it was fascinating to watch the rollout of DFER MA’s recent effort to change the conversation by comparing schools in Lawrence and Boston. DFER put out a report comparing Lawrence favorably to Boston. The study was authored by an individual identified as a policy associate at Education Reform Now Advocacy but his credentials as an expert on education were not otherwise apparent. Shortly thereafter two former state legislators, both women and one a Latina, published an op-ed in the Boston Globe extolling Lawrence in comparison to Boston. One of the legislators was a lobbyist for privatization interests; she had also been a consultant to Families for Excellent Schools in 2016. The day after the op-ed appeared DFER MA held its policy day which featured a presentation by former Boston city councilor John Connolly, the 2013 mayoral candidate DFER had backed with $1.3 million in dark money. Connolly is fronting a new parents group in Boston that is funded by the Barr Foundation, whose Amos Hostetter put $2 million in dark money into the 2016 charter schools ballot campaign, putting him in the company of the Waltons among other oligarchs.
Do we have to go back over who is funding DFER and thus, whose interest it serves? Okay for most of it hit the link but this Democratic groups is about thirty percent funded by the Waltons. Past (and possibly current?) funders have included such conservative and Republican billionaires as Paul Tudor Jones, Ken Langone, Julian Robertson, and even Rupert Murdoch.
In an interview with The Guardian, Anand Giridharadas said that ““What wealthy people do is rig the discourse. . . . For example, elites often make charter schools look better than they are or make unions look worse than they are.”
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Louis Brandeis
Photo source: Flickr.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not education.]