Banned in Boston (Globe): the Walton Family’s 2021 Political Team

We all love us some Market Basket so imagine if the Walton family of Arkansas (d/b/a WalMart) bankrolled a takeover of our local grocer! News coverage would be constant—the Globe, the two NPR radio stations, local TV descending on shoppers to ask about their favorite possum pie recipes (it’s an Arkansas delicacy).  But the Waltons spend millions to privatize Massachusetts public schools and what do we get for coverage? Bupkis.

So read on if you dare, you’ll see this information nowhere else, the super-secret 2021 WALTON POLITICAL TEAM!

What is the 2021 Walton political team? It is America’s wealthiest family underwriting fronts that seek to influence government to achieve the policy goal of school privatization. As political scientists Kristin A. Goss and Jeffrey M. Berry teach us philanthropies sometimes act as interest groups. This political spending constitutes, as Robert Reich has written in Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing and How It Can Do Better, a little recognized and unaccountable form of oligarchic power.

I’ve done this for 2019 and 2020 so if you want to know more information about each of these front operations, click on prior years. Here is what the Waltons spent on their Massachusetts political team from 2017 through 2021 (the last year for which data are available):

Donee	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	Total
Latinos for Education	$200,510	$267,000	$601,458	$350,000	$300,000	$1,728,958
Latina Circle		$150,000	$100,000			$250,000
Massachusetts Parents United	$366,000	$500,000	$500,000	$850,000*	$450,000	$2,266,000
Pioneer Institute	$160,375	$164,625				$325,000
Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education	$200,000	$150,000	$217,500	$432,500	$250,000	$1,250,000
Massachusetts Charter Public School Assoc.	$300,000	$874,500	$600,000	$700,000	$600,000	$3,074,500
Total	$1,226,885	$2,106,125	$2,018,958	2,332,500	$1,600,000	$8,894,458

*Note that $400,000 of this amount seems to be targeted for MPU to use to get the National Parents Union up and running.

That number is low because WFF also funds Education Reform Now, the sugar daddy of Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts. ERN is a multi-state operation with no spending breakout by state available. But from 2017-2021 WFF loaded up ERN with $18,180,000 and it’s fair to assume some of that made it into Massachusetts. WFF funds about 30% of ERN’s yearly income. WFF explains in its 2021 Form 990 tax return why the notoriously anti-worker heirs and heiresses fund ERN: “to build the capacity of Democratic policymakers and left-leaning institutions to challenge the status quo and take bold action on education issues.” Translation: attack unions. This is what the oligarchs who fund ERN and DFER call “the inside game.” (Chapter 7 in my book is called “Democrats for Education Reform and the Inside Game.”) The Globe doesn’t reveal who funds ERN/DFER but it offers a favored position to DFER MA, including using it in news stories and turning over op-ed space to it.

Remember the 2016 ballot question to further privatize Massachusetts education by increasing the number of charter schools? DFER formed a ballot committee named Advancing Obama’s Legacy on Charter Schools to support it. Jim Walton and Alice Walton provided about 80% of the money behind it and the remainder was provided by Education Reform Now. The Globe did little to cover the millions in dark money backing the pro-charters side.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Because I’ve been leaving Educators for Excellence out of these equations. E4E is a billionaire funded “teacher” house operation intended to undermine real democratic unions. Diane Ravitch explains E4E here: “It is funded by the reactionary anti-union Walton Family Foundation, the Rightwing William E. Simon Foundation, the anti-union Bodman Foundation, and the Arnold Foundation, which wants to eliminate pensions.” From 2017-2021 E4E took in $5,495,000 from the Waltons, some of which probably found its way to Boston.

As to that asterisk in 2020 the Waltons sent $400,000 to Massachusetts Parents United to establish National Parents Union, installing MPU  president Keri Rodrigues as co-founder (the other co-founder mysteriously disappeared, to be replaced as treasurer my Rodrigues’s husband). In 2021 the Waltons duked NPU another $1,200,000.

I did a search for “Walton Family Foundation” from 2017-present in the Boston Globe archives and found only five references[1] for Walton Family Foundation. None covered Massachusetts WFF’s political largess but for one letter to the editor (in response to a letter from NPU/MPU/Walton agent Keri Rodrigues) and a snippet from AP. Except . . .

For a 2021 op-ed by free-lance journalist Amy Crawford titled Do-it-yourself education is on the rise. Crawford offers a big plug for Rodrigues and wrote that WFF “channeled $700,000 into direct grants (to NPU) for technology, training, and supplies for homeschooling families, cooperatives, and learning pods, in which families pool resources to hire a private teacher.” But what I think Crawford meant was the $700,000 invested in NPU by the Vela Fund, a joint venture of the Waltons and Charles Koch. Both the Waltons and Koch seek the privatization of public schools.

A search in the Globe database for 2017-present finds thirty-five entries for Keri Rodrigues. A search for “Walton Family Foundation” and “Keri Rodrigues” finds two entries: the Crawford article and the letter to the editor.[2] In other words, the Globe regularly offers space to the spokesperson for NPU/MPU/Waltons but Globe readers would have almost no information that the person the Globe is touting as the leader of parents’ groups actually works for the Walton family (making $412,000 from them in 2021 [source Form 990 tax returns for MPU and NPU]).

Bottom line: The Waltons spend millions to influence education policy in Massachusetts and the Globe not only keeps its readers in the dark about that but promotes DFER and Rodrigues/National Parents Union/Massachusetts Parents United as authentic voices of Democrats and parents.

“One thing big money typically lacks is credibility, which is why those who deploy it work so hard to cover their tracks.”—Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is in print.]

[1] The search through UMass Boston’s Healey Library of the Boston Globe database from 1980 forward returned 10 hits, five of which were duplicates.

[2] As with the earlier search the search terms returned additional hits and duplicates were removed from the count.