It’s happening in local school board races around the nation.
Out-of-state money is pouring in to capture seats on local school boards.
The money comes from billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Reed Hastings, owner of Netflix, and Alice Walton of the Walmart family. They fund candidates who support privatization of public education. Their resources overwhelm local candidates.
The first high-profile race to attract big money was last year in Denver, when large amounts of money arrived from businessmen with no previous interest in school board races, targeted to defeat Emily Sirota, a Denver mom. Sirota threatened control by hard-line privatizers.
Earlier this year, millions of dollars were spent by out-of-state donors to hand control of the Louisiana state school board to Governor Jindal, so he could pursue his privatization plans.
In Washington State, the charter referendum is financed by a handful of billionaires, some local, like Bill Gates, some not, like Alice Walton of Arkansas.
In Georgia, the charter referendum is funded almost entirely by out-of-state donors like Walton of Arkansas.
Now in little Los Altos, California, out-of-state money is targeting a charter school critic with negative ads. The school board member had raised questions about a charter school serving some of the wealthiest residents of the district.
The privatization movement may not have a popular base, but it is adept at marshaling big money to buy support and elections. The only way to stop them is to build an informed public.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Unfortunately the public will not understand what it is happening until the wolf is at their own door. I don’t know of anyone (teachers included) outside of Bridgeport, Hartford, Windham, and New London who care much about what is happening to education in these districts. By the time people realize what’s going on, it may be too late.
So how does this work? Is there an underground network where BOE prospective candidates can submit grant applications, or is it market testing first by interested investor/reformers looking to run low quality shell-schools to filter public $ into their pockets? Do they target a community and bring in their own “mole” to infiltrate? I’m not being sarcastic here-the amount of money involved to me means a level of preparation that goes beyond just putting a few signs out on lawns. If that level of aggressive subversion of democracy is being used to wrestle control of local schools away from local people, THAT’s the kind of “class warfare” we need expose.
The real issue is the incredible concentration of income and wealth and the corrupting influence of that power flowing from it.
Well, why don’t we just go over to their houses and take their wealth away from them?
You really are ridiculous. Do you feel okay about the Walton, the Kochs, and the Bloombergs buying school board seats across America? Have you ever heard of democracy–government of the people, by the people, for the people? That is different from government purchased by plutocrats for plutocrats.
Is it illegal for them to do that? You can fume over it, but can you address it legislatively? Not possible because, as the Supreme Court has ruled ‘money is speech.’ From their point of view, I suspect, they are just being civic minded. They are trying to reverse the corrupting liberal bias in the public schools which by their very existence encourages people to depend on the state rather than themselves. They are, presumably, thinking they are helping the nation to RESTORE government of the people, by the people, and for the people. At present much government is not “for” the people but for the bureaucracy. Public schools engage in systemic indoctrination in statism just by their very existence, and until recently, semi-monopoly status. They FORCE ignorance on people. So called “democracy” is not the prime American value, but freedom of choice is. Democracy is only a means to the end of insuring maximum feasible liberty. ANY government subtracts freedom, but some government is necessary to secure liberty. Keeping the government as small as possible is the desideratum.
A similar development in Nashville:
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20120529/NEWS03/120701005/Nashville-charter-school-advocates-push-their-vision
http://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/battle-board-factions-fight-elect-metros-next-school-board
I’m not surprised, having lived in Silicon Valley for nearly 20 years. For those unfamiliar with the geography (both physical and economic), Los Altos is just south of Palo Alto and right in the heart of Silicon Valley. The population is therefore full of engineers, scientists, businesspersons, and financiers who all made fortunes during the dot-com and real estate booms. For them, the Book of Jobs has replaced the Book of Job; and the Gospels new New Testament are written by Friedman, Hayek, Mises, and Rand. They haven’t just drunk the kool-aid, they swim in it.
I remember being at a wedding reception and chatting about school voucher with a young engineer from Google. My table mate was very nice, sincere, highly intelligent (gradate of MIT), and completely convinced that vouchers were far better than traditional public school, despite not having any children in school and no experience teaching. But for him, the logic of the “free market” was self-evident, not just from his paycheck, but from the mathematical logic of finance and economics. The only problem, of course, is that mathematical logic is meaningless if it doesn’t describe reality. But when you live and work in such gilded cages as Los Altos and Google, your reality very much looks like “Atlas Shrugged”.
So, expect to see this everywhere the wealthy can reach. We can only keep offering a mirror to show the ugliness of reality to the fantasies. We can only keep arguing for what’s true and right. The one encouraging fact is that the use of personal fortunes to win votes often fails, as was well-demonstrated in California when Jerry Brown beat Meg (EBay) Whitman and Carly (Hewlett Packard) Fiorina lost her bid for the Senate.
But this also brings out another sad fact–The Valley is very Blue and has been a strong base for Clinton, Kerry, and Obama. The fact that we see this behavior in the Valley only demonstrates again that Obama is not our friend and we should vote for a third party candidate. If you’re still thinking about this questions, I hope you’ll read this:
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/27/the_progressive_case_against_obama/.
Big money has been buying elections for years . That money often came from teachers unions such as the AEA in AL’s case.
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