When we read an article in the Boston Globe sports page about the Boston Red Sox, we frequently see a critique not just of the performers on the field but also of manager Alex Cora, the coaches, team president Craig Breslow, the geeks in “baseball ops,” the minor league staff, and owner John Henry, who also owns the Globe. But Boston Globe articles about K-12 education interests cover only the performers and rarely the powerful actors who put them in to play. Why?
(Please read the Disclosure below. Michael Podhorzer puts it so much better than I do).
This omission occurs again today in MCAS ballot question pits Massachusetts Teachers Association against business community—again. The Globe treats highly compensated performer Keri Rodrigues as leading the “Many parents (who) are lining up on the other side. National Parents Union president Keri Rodrigues, a former labor organizer who lives in Woburn, says her group has a presence in 22 cities and towns in Massachusetts….”
Keri Rodrigues represents the educational interests of those who pay her hefty salary. Not parents. That means the Walton Family Foundation of Arkansas which from 2020-2022 invested $2,200,000 in National Parents Union (NPU) and from 2017-2021 another $2,266,000 in Rodrigues’s Massachusetts Parents United (MPU). Boston’s Barr Foundation helped put Rodrigues into play from 2019-2022 with $945,000 to Massachusetts Parents United. Boston donor advised funds (allowing the true givers to remain anonymous) at the Boston Foundation, Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, and Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund also put millions of dollars into MPU. We don’t know much about them other than they have a ton of money. Not parents. In the case of NPU, add the Broad Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, John Arnold and Reed Hastings through the City Fund, and on and on. Oh, and Charles Koch. Not parents. Billionaires.
Look at NPU’s 2022 Form 990 tax return. It raised $2,535,449 in 2022. Rodrigues, who according to records at the Secretary of State’s office is president and also on the NPU board of directors, paid herself (across NPU and MPU) $408,846. NPU and MPU paid her husband Tim Langan, chief operating officer and a director, $252,929. Total family compensation: $661,775.
I’m only asking for a little common sense here. If interests are paying you and your spouse $661,775 a year you are answerable to those interests and not to some amorphous “parents” who may or may not exist.
Money Never Sleeps. Follow the Money.
(Two important Disclosures below. Please read them.)
“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
Disclosure 1: I adapted the sports coverage analogy for what I hope are obvious reasons but the real credit goes to the brilliant Michael Podhorzer, using the analogy of movie critics ignoring the real story about what is presented in the theater. Here he is:
Imagine movie critics who either did not know, or did not care to know, that movies have producers, script writers, directors, financiers, or casting directors, and so based their reviews on the premise that it was the actors alone who created the storyline, dialogue and mise en scene, and that the most successful actors were those who best understood the audience. That is essentially how all politics is covered in 21st century America.
Disclosure 2: I have a dark confession to make. It’s me. I’m the one funding the Massachusetts Teachers Association. That’s because 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.
It’s odd to me to see the Globe duke it out with the MTA. In a time not so long ago, their target was the AFTMA affiliate, Boston Teachers Union. Guess it gets right in the billionaires’ teeth that the MTA is no longer the servile, cowed org it was under Turncoat Turner.
The Globe has a pronounced bias toward management and wealth and away from workers and labor. What is gobsmacking though–and I don’t care at all about how they come down editorially although i do care about how they present their editorials–is that the Globe offers itself as an accurate objective source of news while ignoring and even propping up operations like National Parents Union that are clearly fronts for the policy preferences of the wealthy. To paraphrase Podhorzer, ‘Imagine reporters and editors who either did not know, or did not care to know . . . That is essentially how all k-12 politics is covered in the Boston Globe’ That’s the problem.
City Fund, Carnegie, Silicon Valley Community Foundation also large donors
True. That’s for another post.