I hate to be the one who spreads rumors, but this one is true: Media in small towns, rural districts, and major cities across this county cover dark money in K-12 politics. It happens. Just not in Boston.
Selectively, even the Globe has done it! The paper has revealed in editorials or op-eds that Citizens for Public Schools has union funding, while in the same pieces ignoring the oligarchic funding of operations like National Parents Union (NPU) and its well-heeled allies. It’s a choice.
The74, an online publication that pretty much exists to produce pro-privatization journalism for the Waltons, sometimes reveals in its reporting on NPU that the Walton family funds both The74 and the National Parents Union. That’s how I found out that National Parents Union (Is) a Unit of the Billionaire Boys Club—The74 disclosed it!
The Globe has ducked on dark money coverage of K-12 privatization fronts for over a decade, going back to its credulous coverage of billionaire funded Stand for Children in 2011. After Families for Excellent Schools arrived in Boston from New York in 2014 to ramp up its charter school ballot question campaign, the Globe didn’t cover who was funding FES. Families for Excellent Schools got fawning coverage on the Globe‘s opinion page. I exposed FES’s funding in blog posts in 2016 and in my book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, in which I showed that from 2014-2017 FES took in $8,425,000 from four Boston foundations, plus outside money from the Waltons and their allies. After the ballot campaign got rolling, the Globe did publish one very good story from Michael Levenson Donors behind charter push keep to the shadows. Levenson identified oligarchs who were later (after the votes were counted) proved by the Office of Campaign and Political Finance to be among the dark money donors. But his piece appeared on an August Friday before any campaign finance reports were filed in 2016.
If you want to see some great reporting on dark money influence on K-12 education, you’ll have to go out of town. Award-winning journalist Phil Williams of NC5 TV in Nashville regularly reports on dark money undermining how the legislature treats privatization. Watch his scorcher REVEALED: Secret recording shows pressure on Republican lawmakers to vote for school vouchers. KTVB in Idaho does a great job on dark money and education, so does Kelcie Moseley-Morris of StatesNewsRoom, formerly of the Idaho Capital Sun. Here’s an excellent piece in The Lever on the Koch network getting involved in the Covid school safety debate—on the side of illness. Russell Haythorn of Denver 7 ABC News did this one in 2023, Dark money from billionaire out-of-state donors has made its way back into Denver school board races.
On Monday, the Pulitzer committee announced that ProPublica has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service for its series on billionaires lavishing expensive gifts and vacations on supportive Supreme Court justices. At the heart of the series was dark money.
It is a decade since Families for Excellent Schools (which collapsed in corruption in 2018) got a free pass from Boston media. Nothing has changed. FES’s successors–National Parents Union, Educators for Excellence, Democrats for Education Reform–are still running on the same billionaire donations with some of the same well-paid “parents” out front and that is still not being reported.
Dark money behind corporate reform K-12 interest groups is not going to be reported in the Globe or other Massachusetts media.
Call out NPU, E4E, DFER, etc. whenever you can in every forum. Carry the message to your legislators, governor, union members, neighbors, local school boards (who understood this in 2016 and endorsed against charters), community schools, and the real grassroots.
In the darkness of secrecy, sinister interest and evil in every shape, have full swing. . .. Publicity is the very soul of justice.”—Jeremy Bentham
[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 now in print.]