Democrats for Education Reform face-planted again in Tuesday’s Boston municipal election and that got me thinking about how to define DFER in two quotes from DFER itself. Here they are.
“We’re essentially bundlers”—Joe Williams, DFER president, 2012. (He went on to be director of the Walton Education Coalition and now is political director of Walton Enterprises). What Williams was saying is that DFER is “essentially” a dark money campaign finance money bundler.
Williams was too modest, however. DFER also pays for occasional polls to get media coverage. It pays for the occasional “report” to get media coverage. It’s executive director writes the occasional letter to the editor to get media coverage. It’s executive director writes the occasional op-ed to get media coverage. It joins the occasional “coalition” with other Walton funded “education reform” groups to lobby the legislature and get media coverage. DFER has no members. It’s a checkbook.
As to the bundling, look no further than Boston’s municipal elections. On August 1, 2023, Education Reform Now Advocacy of New York duked $50,000 to DFERMass SuperPAC and on October 19, 2023, ERNA tossed another $70,000 over the transom. ERNA is another legal construct within the DFER/ERN family. It’s an IRS 501(c)(4) operation which means it can bundle money from anonymous oligarchs to prop up politicians. DFER used about $25,000 of that money to oppose Ricardo Arroyo and support Jose Ruiz in the September District 5 city council preliminary election in Boston. Arroyo, already a wounded duck, was defeated. DFER then shoveled over $30,000 into Ruiz’s general election effort but he was handily beaten. As I wrote in my book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, DFER has a poor record of winning races in Massachusetts.
“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican Party, it was the Democratic Party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic Party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job.”—Whitney Tilson, director, Education Reform Now. Tilson is a hedge funder. What he means here is, teachers’ unions are an important component of the Democratic Party and we need to get rid of them. So let’s name this front after “Democrats” and we’ll use the Waltons’ money to attack teachers’ unions from the inside.
Dear Reader, I have too much respect for you to dive into an extended explanation of why hedge funders and the Waltons would want to screw unions.
Shall we end this post with a quiz? If I were to ask you to name two self-described “progressive” operations that push privatization of our public schools, what fronts would you name? Before long you’d come up with DFER and National Parents Union.
Right-wing extremist billionaire Charles Koch funds National Parents Union. Fox News billionaire Rupert Murdoch funds DFER. The anti-union billionaire Waltons fund them both.
Again, Dear Reader, I have too much respect for you to explain this further.
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
For more on DFER I have an entire chapter on it in my book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.
[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy.]