Charter school advocates host 'Yes on 2' event in Springfield
Michelle Hernandez, a mother of three living in Springfield. Great Schools Massachusetts, an educational organization advocating for lifting the charter school cap, held an event in downtown Springfield on Monday, September 12, 2016 in support of the ballot effort to lift the cap.
The Republican/MassLive.com is running a series of stories looking at who is funding each of the four 2016 Massachusetts ballot questions. Here is a look at the money behind Question 2.
By far, the most well-funded ballot question is Question 2, which would allow the state to approve 12 new charter schools a year outside of an existing cap. Supporters of charter school expansion, primarily through the Great Schools Massachusetts committee, have raised $23.6 million. The opponents of expansion, Save Our Public Schools, have raised $14.1 million.
Some of the money funding the charter school effort comes from local corporations. One ballot committee, Expanding Educational Opportunities, raised a total of $575,000 from seven Massachusetts businesses -- MassMutual Financial Group, State Street Bank, EMC Corporation, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Partners Healthcare, The Kraft Group and Suffolk Cares. (The committee gave the money to Great Schools Massachusetts, the main pro-charter group, to spend.)
Other money comes from wealthy individuals from out-of-state. Arkansas' Alice Walton, who runs a family foundation funded by the proceeds from Wal-Mart, donated $710,000, while her brother Jim Walton gave $1.1 million. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg contributed $490,000.
A lot of the money comes from individuals in the financial industry, generally working in Boston. The investigative news outlet International Business Times reported that financial executives who manage money for Massachusetts state pension funds contributed $778,000 to groups backing Question 2.
There are also outside education reform groups who have contributed huge sums of money to the campaign. Most notably, the New York-based Families for Excellent Schools gave $15.6 million.
Groups like Families for Excellent Schools are nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors.
"This is a truly unprecedented financial push by the charter school industry and their billionaire backers to buy our election with untraceable money whose source we will never know," said Juan Cofield, president of the New England Area Conference of the NAACP and chairman of the No on Question 2 campaign, in a statement.
Dominic Slowey, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, responded that the outside money is a way to "balance the political playing field" with unions who have influenced federal, state and local elections for years. "For decades, the teachers' union has been able to outspend and outmaneuver and out-politick on Beacon Hill to control the debate and to influence legislative outcomes," Slowey said. "This is the first time that we're able to have some financial assistance behind us to put up a fight."
Slowey added that most of the charter school campaign's money is coming from business leaders, community leaders and philanthropists.
Mo Cunningham, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed corporations to give unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns, made so-called "dark money," where the donors do not have to be disclosed, much more common. "Outside spending and dark money is part of the landscape now," Cunningham said.
The anti-charter school money comes mainly from teachers' unions. The Massachusetts Teachers Association donated $7.5 million, the American Federation of Teachers donated $2 million, the National Education Association gave $5.4 million, and tens of thousands of dollars apiece came from local teachers' unions in Boston, Salem, Lynn, Lawrence and Lowell. Several labor unions also donated to the ballot committee.
The enormous amount of money on both sides of the question means that both campaigns have been running a large amount of paid advertising, in addition to conducting direct mail campaigns and grassroots organizing. Polling has found that voters are paying a lot of attention to the discussion, even though it will primarily affect urban districts, and it will likely be a tight race.