brendan halpin

You may have heard about the anti-Boston Public Schools ad that was pulled by the MBTA. The ensuing controversy about the ad and the decision to pull it is a distraction from the two important issues here, which are: who’s placing this ad, and why?

Let’s start with who. As is so often the case in “ed reform” circles, it’s difficult to untangle. MassLive says the ad was placed by MassPotential, “a K-12 nonprofit” and “a new coalition in the nonprofit” called Next Chapter Boston.

At the helm of MassPotential is Mary Tamer, who once ran for city council and mailed out an “accidentally” racist flyer before getting whupped by Kendra Lara Hicks in the general election. When I went to vote for Hicks in that election, I had to run a gauntlet of Tamer supporters who, if I may judge a book by its cover, were off-duty cops, and were illegally lining both sides of the entrance to the school where I voted saying, “Mary Tamer. Mary Tamer,” to everyone who walked in.

Okay, one of my issues with Tamer at the time is that she had a history of anti-public school activism, having worked at the Mass Charter Public School Association and School Facts Boston. After losing her city council race, she became executive director of Education Reform Now. She’s not the first person who couldn’t cut it in real education work and followed the money into the ed reform grift, but she’s one of them.

Okay, so what about this latest organization Tamer is heading up? MassLive told me it was a nonprofit, so I looked them up on the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s website, and guess what? MassPotential doesn’t legally exist! Kind of like School Facts Boston! If you go to try to donate to MassPotential (please don’t), you can find that it is “a fiscally sponsored project of Goodnation Foundation.” As near as I can tell, New York-based Goodnation Foundation provides this service to organizations that don’t want to go through the process of applying for 501c(3) status.

But the ed reform movement has extremely deep pockets and could surely spare the roughly two thousand bucks it takes to incorporate a nonprofit. But of course the fact that these organizations don’t have any official legal status also means they’re not subject to any of the transparency requirements that govern nonprofits incorporated in Massachusetts.

So: how much money is Mary Tamer making for her role in this project? We don’t know! How much money does the “organization” have? We don’t know, though Tamer asserts they dropped $1.5 million on the anti-BPS ad. Whose $1.5 million was that? We don’t know! Then add that Next Chapter Boston, who apparently paid for the ads, is nested within MassPotential which is nested within Goodnation foundation. (We see Tamer’s fellow School Facts Boston alum Vernée Wilkinson is on this gravy train too. Get that bag, I guess).

Next Chapter Boston of course asserts that it consists of “parents, neighbors and Bostonians,” which, since there are two employees, is technically true but of course deceptive, since this is yet another ed reform astroturf organization. Nested inside another ed reform astroturf organization. Nested inside a nonprofit that provides logistics.

You want to know something funny? On the “What We Believe” section of Next Chapter Boston’s website, one of the three core values they list is “transparency.” LOL!

So why are the ed reform grifters turning up the heat on Boston Public Schools now? Well, as I’ve written before, (here, here, and here) Boston’s charter schools are in serious trouble. City on a Hill and Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy have both closed down, and here in October 2026, 8 months after the lottery for the supposedly scarce and in-high-demand charter school seats, Academy of the Pacific Rim, Roxbury Prep, Boston Prep, and Neighborhood House charter schools are all still looking for students across multiple grade levels.

The whole “let parents vote with their feet” thing espoused by charter school founders has really come back to bite them. Parents are providing accountability that the Commonwealth fails to provide and avoiding schools with long hours, draconian discipline, and a well-deserved reputation for not adhering to special education laws, and charter schools are suffering.

I find it interesting that they’re no longer even trying to put forward a pro-charter case. They’re attacking BPS because they’ve failed to make a case with parents that charter schools should continue to exist. The worse the outlook for Boston’s charter schools, the nastier the failing ed reform movement is bound to get. Strap in!