So it begins: Democrats for Education Reform is pouring dark money back into Massachusetts politics.
That is apparent from today’s Matt Stout story in the Boston Globe: So it begins: Business-backed group opposing MCAS ballot question rolling out $250,000 ad campaign. One of the donors for a digital media buy from the Protect Our Kids Future: No on 2 ballot committee is Education Reform Now Advocacy, the dark money arm of DFER. As the story explains “as a nonprofit, it’s not required to disclose its own funders.” That means that you, the voters and citizens of this democracy, are being robbed by DFER of your right to know who is spending what is promised to be millions of dollars to influence your vote. You have the freedom to be kept in the dark, like a mushroom.
Never give a sucker an even break, eh DFER?
ERNA is the 501c4, Education Reform Now is the 501c3, DFER is the ballot committee and it has taken different forms including in 2016 the Advancing Obama’s Legacy on Charter Schools Ballot Committee which was mostly Walton funded and the Priorities for Progress committee. A good deal of this is in Democrats for Education Reform: Let’s Meet the Funders. There is Walton money, Barr money, and a host of famous Democrats like Rupert Murdoch and the late Jonathon Sackler of the OxyContin Sacklers.
Due to Massachusetts inadequate campaign finance reporting we don’t know how much of the $250,000 was kicked in by DFER and how much by the other donors Raymond Stata, Rick Burnes, Paul Sagan, and Bob Rivers. Stata has given hundreds of thousands to school privatization causes in the past. Burnes has given at least $100,000 to DFER and donated to Priorities for Progress. Sagan was chairman of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education under Governor Baker and got in hot water for kicking in $495,500 in dark money to Families for Excellent Schools Advocacy in the 2016 charter schools fight. (Plus, another $100,000 disclosed to a different pro-charters committee).
In the years since other committees were required by the Office of Campaign and Political Finance to disclose their secret donors, DFER/ERN has continued to run its dark money operations freely. In 2023 for instance, ERN donated $120,000 to DFER without disclosing the true check writers. DFER spent a good deal of that backing political candidates.
*Added July 30, 2024: As I thought about this I realized that DFER has been running its dark money scheme for eleven years in Massachusetts. It ran over a million dollars in dark money in favor of pro-charters candidate John Connolly in the 2013 Boston mayoral race. It spent over $176,000 in dark money in 2014 and $2,000 in 2015. DFER dark-moneyed over $266,000 in 2016 on candidates exclusive of its charter ballot question spending. From 2018-2023 DFER duked another $259,000 in dark money to candidates.
Where does DFER get that kind of money? To use a technical term: from fat cats. A handful of wealthy individuals like the Waltons who would like to gain control over education policy, the people be damned. For over a decade now DFER has been robbing voters of their right and freedom to know who is spending (sums most of us can’t dream of) to privatize our public school system.
Dark money isn’t back. It never left.
Added July 30, 2024. WBUR ran a story on the start of the Protect Our Kids Future: No on 2 campaign quoting Keri Rodrigues of National Parents Union without noting that Education Reform Now is Walton funded and so is NPU. And the beat goes on.
“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.]