We had another fine example yesterday of “What wealthy people do is rig the discourse” in the Boston Globe’s story about high school graduation requirements based upon a report by Voices for Academic Equity. Nice name—but what is Voices for Academic Equity?
The Globe story is Half of all Mass. high schools don’t abide by state recommended graduation requirements and says Voices of Academic Equity is “a coalition of education reform nonprofits and advocates who support keeping the MCAS exams in place as a tool for objectively measuring student progress.”
But you, dear reader, know better if you have read Why Do the Walton Family and Charles Koch Fund Voices for Academic Equity Member National Parents Union? and More on Walton and Barr Stakes in Voices for Academic Equity. You know that Voices of Academic Equity is a group of faux educator/parent/business operations that front for the policy preferences of oligarchs such as Amos Hostetter of the Boston-based Barr Foundation and the Walton family of the Boston suburb of Arkansas.
The report states that: “This report was made possible thanks to essential support from the Barr Foundation, The Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation, and the Mifflin Memorial Fund.” All of these foundations have given to pro-school privatization causes in the past.
This is not political giving in terms recognized by the IRS or Office of Campaign and Political Finance. The foundations are IRS 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation as is the “convenor” Education Reform Now (aka DFER), so the oligarchic donors get a tax break for their donations.
The Barr Foundation also funds some of the Globe’s education coverage (at least $1,400,000 from 2019-2022) but that information is rarely disclosed in Globe stories covering other Barr recipients and is not in today’s story. In fact, Barr is not mentioned at all in today’s story.
How much weight should we put on billionaire funded interest group studies? Recent scholarly work helps.
In The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, Josh Cowen shows “how a small band of interconnected and insular groups of conservative advocates, tightly networked to some of the wealthiest and most influential players in right-wing US politics invented a rationale for school privatization largely from nothing and out of nowhere.” The ‘wealthiest players’ include the DeVos and Koch families. Cowen goes into detail about how the intellectual groundwork was set for the vouchers movement out of reports subsidized by oligarchic interests.
In The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement, Neil Kraus shows how billionaire funded neo-liberal think tanks have successfully constructed an image of an economy that does not really exist, and then turns around to blame the public school system for not meeting it imaginary mandates. Here is a telling quote from Kraus:
The interests of a large and growing number of firms are a fundamental component of the education reform movement. Numerous firms profit from the universal implementation of standardized tests, the sale of myriad educational services and products, and the proliferation of charter schools, for example. The educational consulting industry has become the primary beneficiary of the permanent crisis model—in both K–12 and higher education—upon which the fantasy economy is premised. And the leaders of numerous education reform organizations frequently earn high salaries to advocate for education reform policies.
To be honest though my favorite quote on this topic (I put this one in my book) is from Megan Tompkins-Stange’s Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence, from a Gates Foundation official: “The willingness on our part to make stuff up.”
The Voices of Academic Equity did achieve its goal though, which was a pro-MCAS story in the Boston Globe. Win.
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.—Michael Podhorzer.
[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.]