A group called Education Voters of Idaho refused to disclose its donors until required to do so by a court order.
The biggest donor is a businessman who is an investor in K12, the online charter corporation ($250,000); the second biggest donor is Mayor Michael Bloomberg ($200,000).
EVI promotes the anti-union, anti-teacher, privatizing policies of state superintendent Tom Luna. Supporters of public education are seeking to repeal the Luna laws, which are deceptively called “Students Come First.” The phrase echoes Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst and Joel Klein’s Children’s First.
Luna has received heavy funding from technology corporations, and his laws mandate the purchase of a laptop computer for every student, and every student must take two online courses for graduation. They eliminate tenure and seniority. They require that student test scores count for 50% of every educator’s evaluation, including district superintendents, principals and teachers. All educators will have a one or two year contract. They initiate bonus pay based on test scores for all educators. Teachers will not get a written explanation if the principal decides to fire them.
A sample of one of the laws:
School districts no longer have to prove a financial emergency before reducing teacher numbers. School boards can reduce teacher numbers at their discretion but cannot consider seniority when deciding who to eliminate.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bill Moyers report on our rising plutocracy may help shed some light on this:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/10/bill-moyers-plutocracy-rising.html
I am all for education reform and realize that reform requires abandoning the way things were done in the past, at least to some extent, and tenure may be one of the items that needs to be left behind BUT it needs to be replaced with rules that protect educators. Giving a principal this much power can spell doom for morale and can lead to serious classroom management issues. Imagine a teachers sends a student to the office for a serious offense but the principal decides that he/she has more pressing issues (or that the offense was trivial) and sends the kid back to class. The teacher refuses to allow said student back into the classroom because the kid will cause further disruption. A power struggle ensues between the teacher and principal. Principal fires teacher and is not required to give an explanation.
My example may sound extreme but is, in fact, based on a true story except that the teacher did not get fired because she was protected under tenure. I do believe that tenure protects teachers that no longer care and are just waiting for retirement but removing any and all “protection” from getting fired will not create a good working environment and will/can lead to “management by fear” leadership style in our schools. This can trickle down to the way teachers lead their classrooms. Will this cause the filtering out of “slow” learners and those that misbehave so that the classroom demographic is made up of only “ideal” students that are more likely to succeed on standardized tests?
Perhaps the current reform effort is not about education at all but all about money. The bring’em in, burn’em out is a tried and true management policy in the retail world to keep payroll cost low since payroll cost is the # 1 controllable expensive for that and other industries.
The only thing I can’t understand is why so many outsiders are interested in funding education reform. Are they interested in “breeding” a less educated workforce? Or is it ignorance on their part? Do they want more politicians like Akin and Mourdoch running around? Sounds like Yoda had it right “The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the future is.”
Rudy
He is not called “Tom the Lunatic” without reason.