With just eight weeks to go until the November election, groups advocating for and against a ballot measure to lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts have raised a combined nearly $19 million.
That’s more money than has been raised fighting over any ballot initiative in the last decade, almost all of it raised in just a few months.
And a remarkable amount of those donations, especially in support of lifting the state’s charter school cap, have come from outside Massachusetts: roughly four-fifths of the $12 million in donations supporting the measure; and half from large donors in New York alone.
The findings come based on a review by WGBH News of financial reports filed with the state on Friday, and which represent the first detailed accounting of spending to support and oppose measures appearing on Massachusetts ballots this November.
They also come as the contention over Question 2—whether the cap on new charter schools should be raised—has spilled over into local and statewide elections. Just weeks ago, state Sen. Pat Jehlen, facing a challenge partly rooted in her opposition to charter expansion, declared that money from “Wall Street hedge funds” had been deployed to defeat her.
Friday’s reports confirm that when it comes to the charter question, Wall Street, and other outsize interests, are indeed weighting in with dollars.
Among the largest donors to four different groups supporting the effort to lift the cap on charter schools:
Only one group registered as opposing the charter cap: Save Our Public Schools, which had raised $6.8 million by Friday, just over half of the amount raised by supporters of the measure.
The vast bulk of that money came from three sources: the Massachusetts Teachers Association, a union which represents Massachusetts teachers; the National Education Association, the MTA’s parent union; and the American Federation of Teachers.
The flow of donations from outside of Massachusetts represents, to some degree, the fact that Massachusetts’ ballot question has become one more front in a heated national debate over the future of public schools, with vocal proponents on different sides of the issue appearing prominently in the donors’ ledgers—Bloomberg, the Walton family, and Families for Excellent Schools are vocal charter proponents; the teachers’ unions are openly opposed to charter expansion in this state and in many others.
But the records also point to the less-intuitive roles of corporations, nominally unaffiliated with educational causes, nonetheless appearing to weigh in.
In a single three-day period, employees of Fidelity Investments donated over $55,000 in 23 smaller donations to support raising the charter cap; and other hedge funds and capital and investment management firms appear among donors supporting lifting the cap as well.
No single ballot question has drawn as much in donations—supporting and opposing—as 2016’s Question 2, which would raise the cap on the creation of new charter schools in Massachusetts.
The next-most spent-upon question on this November’s ballot, the legalization of recreational marijuana, has drawn just over $3 million in overall spending—one-sixth the amount drawn by the charter cap question.
In 2014, a ballot effort to repeal the legalization of casinos drew $700,500 in spending in support of the measure and a whopping $15 million in spending opposed to the effort—but, combined, still less than has already been spent on this year’s charter question with two months to go.
