Some of the financial contributions to the committees behind the MCAS question on the November ballot follow unfamiliar practices or lack transparency, experts say.
Question 2 on the Nov. 5 ballot seeks to end the MCAS as a graduation requirement. The “yes campaign,” run through the Committee for High Standards Not High Stakes, is financially backed by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, while the “no campaign,” run through the ”Protect Our Kids’ Future: Vote No on 2” committee, has received financial contributions primarily from a number of business groups and individual business executives.
The MTA, the sole financial contributor to the “yes” campaign, has given about $13.7 million to the High Standards Not High Stakes committee through non-monetary donations, known as in-kind contributions, such as staff time or research allocations, and one MTA political action committee donation, according to finance reports filed with the state’s Office of Campaign and Political Finance
The committee reports no receipts or expenditures in its campaign filings up until Oct. 20. Instead, the reports list the MTA as a vendor that pays sub-vendors, including advertisement production companies or consulting services, through the in-kind contributions on behalf of the committee, a practice some experts say is unfamiliar to them.
In a “Late Contribution Report” filed on Oct. 25, the committee received one donation of $150,000 from the Massachusetts Teachers Association Independent Expenditure Political Action Committee, reports show.
Both committees can submit “Late Contribution Reports” until Nov. 1, according to Jason Tait, the director of communications and public education at OCPF.
Ciara O’Neill, the state data lead at OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. that tracks money in U.S. politics, wrote in an email that both her and the data acquisition colleague for Massachusetts at OpenSecrets have “not encountered” the union’s practice of filing sub-vendors reports through in-kind contributions.
O’Neill has tracked elections and political spending for all 50 states with the organization since 2021, and previously worked as a researcher for the National Institute on Money in Politics.
Tait said in an email that his office has never studied the practice of using sub-vendor reports for in-kind contributions.
Dominic Slowey, the spokesperson for the “no” campaign, said the unions use of in-kind contributions and sub-vendor reports is “odd” and makes the committee’s donations “completely untraceable” to the public.
“There’s no way to trace where that money is coming from, because it’s all coming from the MTA’s bank account, which is quite large,” said Slowey, who has worked for decades as an advisor for other organizations such as the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association. “Our contributions are traceable, because all the people who donate money are listed, but [the “yes” campaign], not just the contributions, but the expenses, and I’ve never seen anything like that.”
The MTA did not respond to multiple requests to comment on their contributions to the “yes” campaign.
Tait said generally in-kind contributions come from the general treasury for unions which is usually comprised of union dues.
In-kind contributions themselves are “common” for ballot questions in Massachusetts, Tait said. For example, staff time is a contribution where employees earn a salary from an organization while doing work for a ballot question committee, he said.
In-kind contributions are also “all over the place in campaign finance,” said Sarah Bryner, the director of research and strategy at OpenSecrets. The donations are any exchange of services, such as staff time or staff travel, that have monetary value and are then given as a “gift,” she said.
“There is a little bit of fuzziness around an in-kind because you have to be able to draw the monetary value for something that’s non-monetary,” Bryner said. “What we see probably most often are in-kinds from one arm of an organization to a political arm of the organization … All of these groups, especially unions, typically have multiple forms.”
The address listed for the High Standards Not High Stakes committee is the same as the Quincy address listed for the union, and the treasurer of the committee, Mike Fadel, is also the treasurer for the MTA.
The MTA’s in-kind contributions to the committee include 18 categories, according to the OCPF reports. The largest contribution, almost $7.9 million, went toward campaign advertising and advertising production, the reports show.
Staff services, which includes staff travel, time, and organizing with the public, made up the second largest in-kind contribution from the teacher’s union which gave just over $2.6 million, according to the reports.
In 2023, the teacher’s union, based in Quincy with 117,000 members, reported $123 million in assets and made over $50 million in revenue with 98.1% from “program services,” according to Internal Revenue Service 990 forms. Program services revenue is related to the nonprofits mission, such as member dues, according to the IRS.
Protect Our Kids’ Future: Vote No on 2, the campaign against removing the MCAS as a graduation requirement, has received about $4.8 million in donations, primarily from businesses interests, OCPF reports show.
The largest contributors behind the “no” campaign are individual business executives and business groups, the reports show. Among the top contributors is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that does not legally have to disclose the source of its donations and contributions to the public, a practice scrutinized by government transparency groups and called “dark money” contributions, two experts said.
Individual contributors make up about 85% of contributions, with top donors including Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Inc., Jim Davis, the chairman of New Balance, Richard Burnes, founder and partner of the Charles River Ventures, and Raymond Stata, cofounder of Analog Devices, according to OCPF reports. Business contributions make up about 11.5% of the campaign’s donations, reports show.
“[Businesses] have a lot at stake in the outcome of the ballot question, because they have tens of thousands of jobs that they’re trying to fill with competent candidates, and they would much rather fill those jobs with competent candidates from Massachusetts,” Slowey, the campaign’s spokesperson, said.
Education Reform Now Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and its partner organization, Education Reform Now Advocacy Inc., a 501(c)(4), have donated $153,255 to the committee, just over $50,000 of which is in the form of in-kind contributions for staff time, according to finance reports.
Education Reform Now Advocacy Inc. is the fourth largest contributor to the campaign, and is a “non-partisan, nonprofit think tank and advocacy organization that promotes increased resources and innovative reforms in K-16 public education,” according to its website.
Education Reform Now and the lobbyists for the organization in Massachusetts did not respond to requests to comment on either entities’ finances.
501(c)(3) nonprofits are “quite limited in the amount they could give” to political campaigns, according to Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a specialist on dark money in politics.
501(c)(4) organizations, on the other hand, can spend 51% of their time on “social welfare” activities which has been interpreted as political activity, Bryner, the research specialist at OpenSecrets, said.
“The question is, who’s the real check writer behind the name Education Reform Now,” said Cunningham, who is also a member of the MTA. “We certainly don’t know who’s really giving the money.”
Bryner said 501 (c)(4) organizations are “less transparent” and the nonprofit calls donations from those organizations ”dark money,” Bryner said.
“We have these groups that are operating within the legal restrictions given to them in theory, but they don’t have to disclose their donors in the same way that other political committees do,” Bryner said. “It is inherently mysterious, unless the group, voluntarily discloses its donors … it’s a way for political entities to give or spend without having to tell you who they are.”
Education Reform Now Inc., based in New York, reported $20 million in revenue in 2022, 99.5% from contributions, according to IRS 990 filings. Education Reform Now Advocacy Inc., also based in New York, reported just over $15 million in revenue in 2022, 99.3% from contributions, IRS 990 filings show.
Slowey referred questions about Education Reform Now Inc. and Education Reform Now Advocacy Inc., to the organization itself.
Along with Education Reform Now Advocacy Inc., Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, Inc., another top contributor to the campaign, is also a 501(c)(4).
The organization is a “public policy group comprised of chief executive officers of some of the Commonwealth’s largest businesses” with board members who include Brian Moynihan, the chair and CEO of Bank of America and Marc Casper, the chairman, president and CEO of Thermo Fisher Scientific according to their website.
Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, Inc. did not respond to request for comment on their finances.
Edward Lambert, the executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has donated $60,500 to the “no” campaign, said that outreach from the campaign to other philanthropists will “round out” donations over time.
“A lot of folks who have the ability to donate bigger dollars often find themselves retired from business or they’re current business leaders and that’s the way things are,” Lambert said.
Keri Rodrigues, the founder of Massachusetts Parents United and president of the National Parents Union, said that teachers and parents who are part of the “no campaign” and cannot donate are spending their time volunteering.
“[The MTA] automatically has this pipeline of money that they’re able to use, so we are scrappy, and we are doing what we can,” said Rodrigues, a parent with children in the state’s school system. “It makes sense for us to go to people who actually have money and could invest in this, instead of going to poor folks and parents to say, ‘Could you finance this campaign?’”
Ava Berger writes for the Gazette as part of the Boston University Statehouse Program.