Jersey Jazzman has been digging and discovering a small number of people who are dropping large sums of money into local school board races. The catch is that these are not races where the donors reside.
Somehow, they are finding relatively obscure races where a gift of $10,000 or $25,000 makes a huge difference.
Why are out-of-towners and out-of-staters so eager to affect school board races distant from where they live?
Yesterday I had a call from a Seattle reporter at KUOW, the NPR station, who asked some of the same questions. She noticed that local school board candidate Sue Peters (whom I endorsed because of her activism in Parents Across America) was being outspent 4-1. She also said that a PAC had been created to defeat Peters. I don’t know who is giving money to block Peters. Nor do I know why.
What I do know is that our democracy is subverted when super-rich people can drop big campaign contributions into races where they don’t live and have no obvious interest or connection.
Who is directing the contributions? Who is coordinating the giving? What are their goals? Why do they want “their” candidates to take control? What is their agenda?
We should know the answers to these questions. Otherwise, we might well conclude that some unknown group is buying control of local school boards. We should know why.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
At one point in his interview at Harvard (with Rubenstein), Bill Gates mentions that we won’t know for about ten years if this education plan will work. One of the obstacles he makes reference to is local control of school boards. Food for thought….
Stop doing business with Exxon and Wallmart and tell other parents to do the same. Spread the word. A Nation-wide boycott will get their stockholders attention! Start today. It is the only answer! I stopped two months ago and I am telling everyone to do the same. We need to hurt them in the place they understand.
Good Luck.
I strongly second your comments and heartily endorse your recommendation of boycotts.
Walmart and Exxon—as if there weren’t ALREADY multiple reasons to boycott them—are just the tip of the iceberg, but we have to start somewhere. I think pointed, clear, professional letters to their senior management, where we are very specific about WHY we will no longer patronize them, and how we intend to advise our friends, co-workers and family to do the same—and make those letters public—will have some effect if enough of us do this and urge our friends to do the same.
Copy local and national reporters who write about education. Spread the word in any way you can. It all helps. And it all makes a difference and moves us in the right direction.
Sorry Bill, we already know your ideas are “ineffective”. Please stop wasting money and ruining education in America.
Wendy Kopp announces that all public schools are “failing” low-income kids and all public schools are doing a “mediocre” job with all other kids:
“Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp warned Thursday that “we’re boring our kids to death” in public schools – and argued that higher standards are the key to lifting U.S. educational achievement.
“We’re failing our low-income kids and doing a mediocre job at best with our other kids,” she said. “This is reality. We need to get our act together.” But she added that she would give the education community and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan high marks for effort in seeking to drive change.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/teach-for-america-wendy-kopp-97786.html#ixzz2i4l7Sa4J
Got that? All public schools are either “failing” or “mediocre at best” according to America’s unelected but politically connected schools’ chief. If she says “this is reality” that means it’s true. No supporting evidence for her claims required!
The next time public school advocates are accused of blanket statements and over-the-top indictments I suggest we quote Kopp or any number of reformers who seem to spend their entire careers disparaging ALL public schools.
From what I can tell, our “Reformers in Chief” are doing their best to make sure kids are bored to death. Wendy is basically indicting them. They have been at it for a long time. Perhaps she added the mediocre category realizing that the public schools in higher socioeconomic communities were not targeted as early, so they haven’t had the chance to feel the full adverse effects.
School reformers “bore me to death”. The same tired mantra of privatization, anti-union rhetoric, standardized testing and spending billions of public dollars on expensive fads and gimmicks, for more than a decade now.
My 11 year old is using a cheap computer program to do test prep at home now, another reform “innovation”. The thing cost nothing to develop and God knows what it cost the district. Since about half of our kids in this rural district don’t have internet access, my son tells me “the poor people” have to stay in at recess to get their test prep done at school, so that’s a great and innovative reform- “the poor kids” don’t get recess and all the kids know who the poor kids are because they’re huddled at computers doing math drills at recess.
I watch him do these drills. He sits at the computer with a paper and pencil and does the math problem by hand, then enters the answer. I’m so glad we spent money that could have been going to human beings on this crappy, commercial test prep product, let me tell you. Thanks, reformers. You’re a real gift to local public schools.
The worst part is, when parents find out about this (and they will) they will blame our local school leaders and teachers, who have absolutely nothing to do with putting these mandates in. Wendy Kopp won’t be blamed. My son’s 5th grade teacher will be blamed.
Silly me. I would have thought Kopp was referring to her husband’s unregulated boot camp KIPP charter schools and all the other boring no-excuses test prep factories where so many TFAers are placed and NO standards are required.
I read Milton Friedman 20 years ago. I don’t need a decade-long primer on Friedman’s principles delivered by ed reformers who seem to think it’s “new!” and “innovative!”
That bores me to death.
Stop doing business with Exxon and Wallmart and tell other parents to do the same. Spread the word. A Nation-wide boycott will get their stockholders attention! Start today. It is the only answer! I stopped two months ago and I am telling everyone to do the same. We need to hurt them in the place they understand.
Good Luck.
Big bucks were donated to Kira Orange Jones (New York) to defeat the local (New Orleans) incumbent for the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE BOARD), which is an unpaid position! Ms. Jones is also HEAD of TFA for Louisiana, pro charter schools and Common Core! This past week, a great local Research group, Research on Reforms, lost a lawsuit against the Louisiana School Superintendent John White (also imported from New York). The lawsuit was to end the exporting of massive data collection results on Louisiana students by InBloom!
Stop doing business with Exxon and Wallmart and tell other parents to do the same. Spread the word. A Nation-wide boycott will get their stockholders attention! Start today. It is the only answer! I stopped two months ago and I am telling everyone to do the same. We need to hurt them in the place they understand.
Good Luck.
Here in Seattle, it’s the usual player$ lining up at the reform/deform trough: DFER, Nick Hanauer, Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), the Bezos, Matt Griffin – that’s where the bulk of the money to defeat Peters is coming from. We already know we’re going to end up with one new deform candidate on the board (Blanford) simply because the other candidate is completely unviable. But I’m hopeful that Peters wil be able to defeat Estey – the monied candidate whose supporters are also trying to find dirt on Peters by requesting public disclosure of email exchanges between her and her child’s teacher – otherwise Seattle will be fully headed down the same deform road so many other cities and public school systems have now been forced down.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but here’s info on one of the funders attempting to destroy public education – and I haven’t seen them mentioned here: http://www.susanohanian.org/show_research.php?id=416
Great article. These people are nuts!!! What is sickening is that our political system is so toxic that a few super wealthy people have the power to buy legislators. I can’t believe how far these kooks have gotten in harming public ed.
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution freed the slaves. Here we are in the 21st century and what we have is NOW CORPORATE SLAVERY. Slavery is slavery at the behest of BIG money…just like before.
Here are the main contributors to Sue Peters opponent’s PAC: Matt Griffin, Christopher Larson and Nick Hanauer.
Matt Griffin is a real estate developer that is probably the person coordinating the giving. Twenty people essentially control Seattle’s elections:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/who-wants-to-keep-big-money-in-local-politics/Content?oid=17780106&show=comments&sort=asc&display=
Nick Hanauer desperately tried to get legislators to pass charter legislation in 2011. When legislators failed to pass charter legislation, Hanauer sent out a famous letter and called the legislators “stooges”. The following year, charter schools were put on the ballot and Hanauer contributed $1M to pass this initiative.
SO: What else is new. In the Wisconsin bid to recall their illustrious governor, the Koch brothers and other OUTSIDE interests poured in huge amounts or money, Fox “news” made sure they covered the small contingent of people brought in to support the governor rather than the huge anti governor groups and the governor prevailed. HE prevailed, not the people of Wisconsin.
Face it, you buy and sell this place like a cheap suit. If you do not declare war on them like we have in L.A. you are finished. How do you think we stopped the only time in this countries history a $90 billion, $300 billion with interest, tax with only one paragraph of controlling language with less than $22,000 in under 3 weeks? We organized and did what they thought was politically impossible. For two years I worked to join the black and brown communities against the common enemy the Metropolitan Transit Agency (MTA). Then we were at an MTA meeting and Beverly Hills was there. We saw them total Beverly Hills and immediately I and our leader on the Crenshaw Subway Coalition, Damien Goodman, immediately went to Lisa Korbatov of the Beverly Hills School District and a Board Member and asked to talk about joining forces together against MTA and out of that came a coalition never seen before. When myself, Celes King IV and Damien Goodman went to a Beverly Hills City Council Meeting to support the city council’s support for a new resolution to not put the subway under the Beverly Hills High School I was shocked when the new mayor John Mirish, yes, the grandson of that Mirish, asked me to open the meeting with the Pledge. I was shccked at the request as I am not a citizen of Beverly Hills. Close, 1 house away, but not there. This was a signal to all that this coalition was not going away at the top of the Beverly Hills political structure. No one believes this happened yet it has. All working together as one against a common enemy. Divide and conquer failed and they do not know what to do. As a result all 12 bills to lower bond passages in California from 2/3 to 55% this year were dropped because of the public outcry after they saw us beat them.
Take this as a lesson. You can do it if you try.
In Seattle, an “independent” PAC comprised of billionaires is trying to buy this race for their hand-picked candidate, Suzanne Dale Estey, who is running against Sue Peters, a founding member of Parents Across America.
This billionaire PAC is headed by real estate developer Matt Griffin, former Microsoft executive Chris Larson and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. These three have combined forces with the Civil Alliance for a Sound Economy, a political action committee sponsored by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.
This “independent” group, which heavily funded the odious and deceptive pro-charter schools Initiative 1240 last year already produced two mendacious and slanderous direct mail “Hit Pieces” against Sue Peters, candidate for the Seattle School Board, and a strong backer of public schools.
They’ve been putting in semi-daily deposits of $15,000 into the PAC bank account in the last two weeks, obviously preparing for “Hit Piece #3 on Sue Peters”.
Perhaps the Ultra-Rich Boy’s Club might tell us WHY they are mounting such an attack on Sue Peters to prevent her from being elected to the Seattle School Board?
But no. They’re remaining silent.
Why would this seat on the Seattle School Board mean so much to them? Why pour this amount of money into a personal smear campaign against Sue Peters?
Are these few wealthy individuals—NONE of whom send their own children to public schools—just obsessed with controlling our schools, as their counterparts have done in so many other cities?
Are they planning on privatizing our schools, in order to make money from them, as people like them have managed to do in other places?
I know some of them are relative newcomers to our city, but don’t they know that Seattle citizens are proudly independent, educated, knowledgeable and deeply offended by “independent” figurehead groups being established with the sole purpose of allowing very rich special interests to do an “end run” around established campaign contribution limits?
If these isolated Boy Billionaires want to have an open and civil public debate about public education, all of us would welcome such a discussion.
But if they’re just trying to “win” this election by remaining silent and hiding in the shadows, while they write checks for their next edition of a vicious, mendacious campaign against one of the school board candidates, that should raise the suspicions of all of us.
I hope every Seattle voter will think about the motives of this handful of very wealthy “independent” elitists trying to control our public education system by dumping a load of cash into an odious, shameful “Let’s Hate Sue Peters” propaganda campaign.
Seattle is a better place than this. And our campaigns for school board should be better than deceptive, scurrilous attack pieces from billionaire funded special interest groups issuing propaganda solely designed to scare and mislead voters.
In the meantime, we who support Sue Peters are struggling for every dime we can raise against these people who favor a corporate takeover of our public schools.
Please donate whatever you can to the Sue Peters for Seattle School Board campaign. Her struggle is the same struggle for public schools we’re engaged in everywhere. And a win for Sue Peters is a win for ALL defenders of public schools everywhere!
You can donate to Sue Peters for Seattle School Board at this link. Thanks for your support, in advance: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=pDongywTDeN5Smkn4HTT3VqVi8cx5YCa-Q0fDbfxPMq82OqzZ2Ru8arD_jC&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f8e263663d3faee8d0038486cd0d9a2f3f8e698d26650388a
In Georgia’s charter school amendment vote last year, the billionaires give lots of money to the campaign to support the amendment. Many people gave small contributions to the campaign against the amendment, and the amendment was passed with a relatively large margin. What I found to be rather disgusting in the days leading up to the election were the op-ed pieces decrying the “supporters of the status quo” because they had a vested interest. The articles singled out superintendents, principals, and other school personnel for the relatively small contributions to the vote no campaign. But the vote yes side had huge contributions from out of state interests such as the Waltons. Apparently in Georgia, it’s against the rules for school leaders to support a cause but it is perfectly okay for out-of-state interests to pour huge sums of cash into the other side.
Buying elections with huge sums of money from outside parties is wrong and our citizens need to recognize that.
In my race for local school board (Hillsborough County Fl), the millionaire opposition, hand-picked by our Gates-owned, common-core fanatic superintendent, broke all records for first quarter fund-raising. We don’t see the outside money yet, but in Florida, corporations can contribute as individuals. She received maximum contributions from two airplanes, each registered to an individual LLC; contributions from a half-dozen laundromats, one gentleman contributed under 20 different corporations.
This particular race could leave Hillsborough County, ground-zero for the Gates attack on teachers, firmly in his control for another four years. michaelweston.org