Here is one very impressive piece of news from the elections.
In Santa Clara County, school board member Anna Song ran for re-election and was opposed by a massive amount of money from charter supporters.
Song had dared to vote against a proposal to authorize 20 new Rocketship charters in her district.
She was one of two board members who voted in opposition a year ago.
Maybe she thought it would be tantamount to privatizing a large part of the public school system.
Rocketship supporters predicted that the achievement gaps in the district will be closed by 2020.
For that effrontery, the charter lobby amassed a fund of nearly $250,000 to punish her.
The fund was enriched by contributions from very wealthy individuals, few of whom lived in the district, as well as a member of the board of the Rocketship charter corporation:
“Among the big donations to the PACs are $75,000 from the California Charter Schools Association Advocates; $50,000 from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; $50,000 from Gap heir John J. Fisher; $40,000 from Emerson Collective, the nonprofit run by Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs; and $10,000 from Rocketship charter schools board member Timothy Ranzetta.”
The local newspaper endorsed her opponent.
The president of the school board endorsed her and said she was the “policy wonk” of the board and a consistent advocate for teachers and the neediest students.
Anna Song raised less than $10,000.
Anna Song won. It wasn’t even close.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We need a “Like” button on this blog!
So great to see good conquer evil.
I’m really impressed with America that money isn’t completely ruining our democratic process (any more than it already has.)
They are just regrouping for the next assault.
Wait! This just got interesting. What’s the rest of the story? Why did she win?
I hope someone from Santa Clara writes to explain why she won. My guess: the community knows her.
@Diane – Anna Song has represented us as our county board of education trustee in area 5 for 10 years. Yes, we know her. She does her homework and asks good questions at the county board meetings. She deserved to be re-elected. She votes independently and that’s what we need.
In addition, the money that went into trying to elect her opponent (between $200,000 and $250,000) was used to run an incredibly negative campaign of 7 or more expensive glossy hit pieces that flooded our mailboxes. Plus they paid big money to campaign consultants, unheard of in school board races prior to this election.
People here felt that the negative campaigning diminished our community. When the campaign finance reports were filed showing that big money from outside of our area was funding the negative campaign in order to unseat our incumbent trustee, then the newspapers covered the story and people started paying attention to what was going on. People weren’t happy to have outsiders with big money essentially try to buy our
county board of education seat. Her opponent feigned ignorance of the negative campaigning. His name is now well known here, and
not in a good way. Ms. Song ran only a positive campaign.
Also, check out the Los Altos Patch, an online newspaper. Type in Anna Song’s name, and you’ll find the first article which described who was funding the negative campaign against Anna.
There was simultaneously another highly negative campaign going on for a local school board seat which was also unsuccessful. The people here had a very high voter turnout for school board races, in part because of the attention that the negative campaigning brought to the races. Fortunately, the attention resulted in the voters rejecting the negative campaigning and voting for both candidates who were the targets of the mean spirited campaigns.
You have to imagine this story is very inspiring for me, and something we’re hoping to emulate here in LAUSD.
Why is every newspaper in America bought out?? Do any of them support public ed? I’m glad you keep telling who the financial backers are of charters because I plan on not buying as little as possible from them-starting with Netflix.
There are only about 6 media conglomerates that own everything. We don’t have an elected school board in Chicago and we want one. However, while the idea that meagbucks can control these races is a daunting prospect, this story warms my heart. We crave real diversity in our school board. The appointed one votes in lockstep. Congrats to Anna Song!
Anna Song told me about this blog and so I checked it out. I’m writing to provide some updated information, fresh off the SCC ROV’s presses, because the numerical information posted here did not reflect the final amounts spent, and also because it looked like you’d be interested in more background.
Updated Info:
According to the 12/31/2012 Forms 460’s the various Committees filed with the Santa Clara ROV, here are the amounts raised and spent by pro-Song and the anti-Song/pro-Neighbors campaigns. [NB: Anna Song and her supporters all ran clean campaigns, i.e., there was no “anti-Neighbors” campaign.]
– Santa Clara County Schools PAC raised $296,250, of which $100,000 was raised after 10/20/2012 (i.e., in the two weeks leading up to the election). Of this amount, they spent $264,116.02 through 12/31/2012 including $713 of accrued not-yet-paid expenses, so at year’s end they still had over $32,000 cash in the bank to spend on future political ventures. [NB: Though it’s possible I missed something, the lowest contribution I saw was for $1,000, and I could not find any contribution from a resident of the Trustee Area represented by this SCCOE seat.]
– Neighbors For School Board 2012 raised $41,020 and spent all of it except $921.02, which was transferred to “Neighbors for School Board 2014.” [NB: Neighbors resigned his position on Berryessa Union School District Board to which he’d been elected in 2010 — it looks like he plans to use his County Board election contributors’ money to fund a 2014 bid to regain his seat — but, then again, who knows?]
Thus, assuming no other PACs or campaign entities spent anything on pro-Neighbors or anti-Song campaigning, the anti-Song/pro-Neighbors forces expended over $304,000 in their unsuccessful effort to unseat Anna Song ($41,020-$921+$264,116=$304,215).
– Anna Song’s campaign spent $11,079.48. [NB: I am proud to say that I helped Anna with loans, with contributions from my own campaign “Bendis for School Board 2010,” and with fundraising outreach.]
Mathematically, this means that the anti-Song/pro-Neighbors forces outspent Song by more than $293,000 (i.e., the information originally posted of “almost $250K” vs. “under $10K”, yielding a spending difference of around $240K), underestimated the final actual difference by over $50,000. Or, putting it another way, the anti-Song/pro-Neighbors forces outspent Song by a ratio of greater than 27:1 (as opposed to the 24:1 original estimate). … But wait, there’s more!!!
This race wasn’t even close. Anna Song earned 35,401 votes, while Neighbors got only 26,215. Mathematically, this means that each vote cost Song’s winning campaign all of 31 cents, while Neighbors paid $11.60 per vote to lose — a per-vote ratio of more 37-times as much spent by Neighbors compared to Song.
How did Anna Song and her supporters pull this off? Well, I know the answer, but until such time as I and those I support stop running for office, I’m not sharing any secrets in a public venue like this. But, if any prospective candidates who I might support want to contact me privately, I’ll set you in the right direction …
Additional background & comments
One piece of advice I will give here, to anyone who cares to listen. Smear tactics may work in big State or National races, but they’ll tend to boomerang in local elections — at least in Santa Clara County, and especially when used against a popular incumbent. The local press (both the SJ Mercury and the Santa Clara Weekly) and the “establishment” came out guns blasting against me in 2010 when I ran for reelection, and my fellow Incumbent got a friend to run with her on a campaign whose emphasis was the importance of unseating me (though not as openly attacking as the 2012 anti-Song effort) rather than asserting any positive qualities either of them may have had. I recruited a dynamic positive-campaigning fellow-doctoral-educated woman to run in the race — Dr. Christine Koltermann — and we both ran clean, positive, informative campaigns. The result? The negatively-campaigning incumbent lost her seat to Dr. Koltermann (who is now our Board President), and I retained my seat.
A similar story played out in SCUSD’s 2012 race, when Christopher Stampolis (who happens to be Song’s husband and had been serving on the West Valley/Mission Community College Board) ran for an SCUSD open seat. The affluent-and-empowered locals who wanted to keep him off the Board formed an Independent Committee named “Save Santa Clara Unified (SCU) Schools by Opposing Stampolis and Supporting De Young, Gonzalez & VanPernis for Governing Board 2012”. Yeah, that’s the Committee’s name, I kid you not. This Committee along spent over $28,000 to smear Stampolis, which was addition to what the $10-to-$20,000 spent on mostly-clean campaigns by his opponents’ individual Committees and by the Teachers’ Union PAC (I don’t have the 12/31/2012 figures on me). I;m reasonably sure “the opposition” out-spent Stampolis by at least 3-fold and likely more. Ultimately, Stampolis not only won the empty seat but in fact got more votes than the Board Vice-President incumbent for Trustee Area 2, and the Board President (the “De Young” in the anti-Stampolis crowd) got defeated soundly for her seat in Trustee Area 3 by Michelle Ryan, an ultra-low-spending doctorate-educated teacher challenger, who had earned the suppoet of Stampolis, Koltermann, Song and me.
Getting back to the anti-Song campaign, the only ads or mail-pieces I saw from the Santa Clara County Schools PAC were of the “smear-Anna” variety. Amusingly, though their Committee claimed in its filings that their purpose was threefold — to support incumbent Grace Mah, to support Neighbors, and to oppose Song — their main smear-theme against Anna Song attacked the way she’d voted on a Superintendent contract issue, on which issue Grace Mah had voted THE SAME WAY as Song! Anyone whose interest got piqued enough by the venom of the smear pieces inundating them, to bother the Google the issue, would immediately have found this fact out (this is, you know, the Silly-Con Valley). The Song-smearing PAC also went overly nasty in attacking “the person not the issue,” by apparently searching frame-by-frame through YouTube videos to find the most physically unattractive shot of Song — who is an attractive and professionally comported woman — which they then darkened and upped the contrast on, so as to make her look as old and visually unappealing as possible. Voters — especially woman (a strong voting force especially here in The Valley) — who spoke to me about this overtly mean-spirited, hurtful tactic found it “over-the-top” offensive, to the point that it made them affirmatively sympathetic toward Anna.
So, I am firmly convinced that the obnoxious, mean-spirited, unrelenting hate mail and robocalls that the anti-Song and anti-Stampolis “big time spenders” kept inundating us with, actually helped The Good Guys win.
Finally, how did the Press play into this? All I can say is that with few exceptions, getting endorsed by the Santa Clara Weekly and the San Jose Mercury News amounts to “the kiss of death”, LOL. Some parting food for thought: Miles Barber, the owner of the SC Weekly, contributed hundreds of dollars to the SCUSD anti-Stampolis forces, who — Surprise! Surprise! — spent their funds on ads in the SC Weekly …
Dr. Ina K. Bendis, Esq., Trustee (Area 2) SCUSD
ikbendis @ aol . com