The three interest groups pushing to undermine the Massachusetts senate’s education funding bill are all Walton funded, two of them essentially full-time agents of the Waltons. They have to solve a problem for the right-wing Wal-Mart heirs: not that funding public education might fail, but that it will succeed.
The Waltons, who contributed over $2 million in dark and gray money to the pro-charters side in 2016 through mechanisms set up by Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts, would prefer to promote charter schools and charge toward a fully privatized system with employee relations mimicking those of Wal-Mart itself. But the political momentum now is all in the direction of a vast increase in public funding, and the Waltons’ best hope is to throw sand into the implementation gears.
One of the best explanations of the ideology that motivates free market radicals like the Waltons is from Thomas Edsall in The Rotten Equilibrium of Republican Politics: Charlatans Rise. Government Falls. Edsall asked officials at the conservative (but not extremist) Niskanen Center about conservatives’ hostility to government. Niskanen’s vice president for policy Brink Lindsey responded:
it starts in ideological self-delusion — that government is simply incapable of performing well, so starving it of funds is always a good idea and trying to make it work better is a waste of time. … And, of course, this ideological stance turns out to be incredibly convenient for rich donors looking for any excuse to keep their taxes down.
This is the ideological mind set of the Waltons, as explained by historian Nelson Lichtenstein in The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Of The Walton family’s interest in education, Lichtenstein writes:
Because so much of Walton and Wal-Mart philanthropy is crudely self-interested, critics are tempted to find a pecuniary motive for the Walton family’s interest in education. But their support for competition and privatization is an entirely ideological project, based on a desire to enhance the social and cultural value of a free market in which government is weak while public goods like hurricane relief, education, and health care are the fodder for entrepreneurial transformation. Since public schools are by far the most pervasive of public institutions, and highly unionized to boot, this “$700-plus-billion-a-year industry”—John Walton’s phrase—has been a good place to start.
If you think all this sounds somewhat Koch-like, Charles and the late David Koch committed to K-12 education reform too –by which they also mean to destroy public education. The Kochs and Waltons have kicked in $5 million each as partners in a project called 4.0 that will be an ideas factory for privatization. Also, never untangle the Kochs or Waltons ideology with their fervor for low taxes on themselves.
Thus the problem facing the Waltons is not that the Massachusetts senate bill won’t work, but that it will. The mission of Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts, Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, and Massachusetts Parents United is to draw off what funding they can, tie up local governments in state bureaucracy, and make the reforms in the bill as ineffective as possible. That’s the politics of what the Waltons are up to, this year, next year, and the decade after that. It’s not all the Waltons want but they have time. And lots of money.
“Why wait for popular opinion to catch up when you could portray as ‘reform’ what was really slow-motion demolition through privatization?” – Professor Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Plan for America.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not education.]