National Board Certified Teacher Sarah Kirby-Gonzalez won a hard-fought election to the school board in West Sacramento, beating a man who works for Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst. She got more than 50% of the vote, he got about 25%.
As we saw in Los Angeles and earlier in Louisiana, the corporate reformers have decided that they can use their huge funds to buy state and local school boards.
It worked in Louisiana, where their conquest of the state school board cleared the way for vouchers and charters and efforts to destroy the teaching profession (so far, the courts have ruled that the funding for vouchers is unconstitutional and struck down the law dismantling the teaching profession on procedural grounds).
But the billionaires failed miserably in Los Angeles, where their primary target was Steve Zimmer. Despite the millions of dollars of out of state money used to distribute scurrilous attacks on Steve, he won by a 52-48 margin.
Now, the Wall Street hedge fund managers (DFER) are crowing that they “won,” because the board president Monica Garcia (with $1 million) beat four unfunded candidates. Robert Skeels, who came in second, raised $20,000.
Goliath looks foolish.
Beaten by an NBCT.
Beaten by boots on the ground.
Give up, Goliath. Your day on the hill is coming to an end.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I hope that the corporate backed Politicians are paying attention to this and start to think twice!
LikeLike
I’m not surprise DFER is crowing. It’s exactly what an advertising mentality would do. Focus on the success/good and ignore the failure/bad. That’s been the backbone of so much of the billionaires club’s efforts at education reform.
LikeLike
I remain convinced that Goliath won’t be coming into local elections for long because there are too many of them and local folks can be awakened to fight off “outsiders” much more easily than State folks… But with a full court press by organizations like the one you launched earlier today is is possible we can sideline Goliaths even in State elections and make sure folks are aware of the effect innocent sounding ALEC legislation can have on public schools.
LikeLike
The DFER, led in California by Gloria Romero, is a joke on democrats. This is a right wing group from the word go. You can watch Gloria Romero and her cohorts choke when we ask them real questions at one of their press conferences on George1la on You Tube. There you can also see Marshall Tuck, CEO of PLAS, state that Roosevelt High School has $9,000/student when they took over and also had paid the maintainance and special ed for the school. I asked Tuck why we had a budget from one of his schools with $4,027/student and where was the rest of the $5,000 and he choked and did not answer. PLAS also had $2.933 million donated for computers for students and Tuck has bragged about spending $200,000 for computers and did not know what to do when I asked about the other $2.733 million. Money just seems to disappear under Villaraigosa, Tuck and Garcia. Where is the MONEY???????? while you ruin the lives of these students.
LikeLike
As a Los Angeles teacher who precinct walked and phone banked for Robert Skeels, just for the record, we could have done more (as a union) to defeat school board president Monica Garcia. I’m talking organizationally as a union; I want to be clear that I’m NOT referring to the amazing candidate, volunteers and those who ran Robert’s campaign. Im thrilled we beat back the billionaire boys and girls club in Board District 4 (Zimmer); I just wish David could have defeated Goliath in Board District 2 also.
LikeLike