Amy Frogge is a member of the Metro Nashville School board. She is a lawyer and a parent of children in the Nashville public schools. When she was first elected four years ago, the charter industry spent $125,000 in an effort to defeat her. At the time, she was running as a concerned parent who thought there was too much testing, and she was unaware of the battles behind the scene between privatizers and supporters of public schools. She was outspent 5-1, and yet she won. For the past four years, she has been an intrepid supporter of public schools and has helped to repel the rapacious charter movement. For her courage and dedication to children, she is on the honor roll of this blog.
In the election this past week, the “reformers” spent $150,000 to taker her out, and she won again, overwhelmingly.
She was attacked by the local newspaper and by mailers that smeared and defamed her. There were even “push polls,” in which voters were falsely told that Amy defended child molesters and pornographers. Amy has never had criminal clients, and she is not currently practicing law (her husband was a public defender). Other pro-public school candidates were targets of similar smear tactics. It was an amazingly dirty campaign, funded by the usual corporate types, which funneled their money through Stand for Children.
The people of Nashville gave a sound thrashing to Stand for Children and its dirty politics and dark money.
How did Amy do it? She mobilized parents to work as volunteers in her campaign. Stand for Children dubbed them “an army of moms.” Great name!
To see a picture of Amy and some of her “Army of Moms,” look at her Facebook page.
I made an error in reporting the Nashville election results. One of Stand’s pro-charter candidates, incumbent Sharon Gentry, was re-elected. However, another pro-charter incumbent, Elissa Kim, stepped down and her seat was won by former teacher Christiane Buggs. (Kim was until recently head of recruitment for TFA nationwide.) Buggs will be an ally of the pro-public school members. There are nine board members. Only three are strongly pro-charter.
A great night for Nashville public schools, and a great lesson about how parents can beat Dark Money.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is always a good day when democracy works, and citizens win. ALEC and cronies are inserting themselves into local elections to buy all the players to force their privatization agenda on local communities. This is not how democracy or a free market should operate. This is a creepy, underhanded strategy to hijack a local community in order to turn local, democratic, transparent schools into corporate entities in which the local communities cede all their rights to have a voice in their child’s education. Nashville should be proud of its accomplishment, but remain ever vigilente.
vigilant
Stand on Children lost handily in WA State too, though this was just a primary, and not the general election, so it will continue. I think most voters, when presented with the facts of dark money contributions to a candidate, will vote against that candidate. In our case, we found out about it just a few days before the election, whereas Nashville voters knew about this earlier and had more time to educate voters & fight back. They did a great job of education & outreach, and their victories are wirth celebrating!
My hope for WA is that Stand on Children wastes all $725K of that money on their anti-tax, anti-public school judicial candidate and that he loses by an even larger margin in the general election once we spread the info about the charter lovers buying a judicial candidate. Ironically they tried to deflect & say those evil teacher unions had contributed as well & were trying to buy candidates. WEA contributed $2000 to the incumbent’s campaign. $2000 (from a fund contributed to by hundreds of members). Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of dollars Stand On Children is wielding, contributed primarily by 3 major donors.
worth
I wrote the following as a comment on Living IN Dialogue when he reported how the NAACP was standing up to the ‘deformers.’ It is applicable here.
I began: ” Things are not static. We have seen how the charters throw out ethnic minorities, something public schools, for all their failures never did. The NAACP is saying ‘ENOUGH!”
This week, in the news we are witnessing the DEFEAT of some people who support charter schools! They have LOST in elections… wow! Yes.
The ‘reform’ movement failed to do anything but cause catastrophic failure, as that con-artist Trump would cause if he ever got close to top-management. Perish the thought. We saw what happens in the microcosm, the bureaucracy which is a school system; when failed human beings create and ‘administer’ the policies; how they dictate the rules. that THE PROFESSIONAL must follow, and then blame them when everything goes south.
Ok.NOW, WHAT? Well, PEOPLE GETTING ORGANIZED is what!
The testing mania will end as EVERYONE OPTS OUT It will happen, but the battle will be fierce. In nY the corruption is rampant in Albany, and the same goes for Christie’s New Jersey.
THIS fight to win back our schools, is ONGOING AS more and more parents WAKE UP, THANKS TO BLOGS LIKE THIS WHERE THE TRUTH IS AVAILABLE!
THEY NOW realize how tests hurt the kids.
Now they want to restore real LEARNING, and great teachers… they need to be SHOWN how this is accomplished by GENUINE educators… NOT by the charlatans … Kleins, Rhee’s Cambells and big ‘Eva’s’.
People already see how charter schools fail the kids. Hey, most of the educated, working parents out there, were taught in a public school. They know. Now they are standing up. We need to encourage, and mobilize the grassroots, and INFORM THEM of what THEY CAN DO, what they can accomplish if they ELECT THE RIGHT PEOPLE!
Everything is local FYI.
Look… I retired in 2000, but began teaching in 1963, and I went to school in the forties, and fifties, college in the early sixties. I have a lofty perspective, LOOKING BACK at what was, and what is ongoing now. IE seen it happened before my eyes, like Diane has… we are of that age.
What YOU, [Anthony Cody] and the NPE and Diane are doing is keeping parents INFORMED AOBUT EVERYTHING…especially of their RIGHTS TO PROTECT their children from charlatans. Mercedes, Peter and all those who inform Diane have made THE FAILURE OF REFORM crystal clear, and NOW, are offering parents SUPPORT AND INFORMATION– EVEN as they fight the system.
THR SYSTEM created by billionaires thrived on ignorance. Teachers, like me and Lorna, did not know what hit them
Click to access eic-oct_11.pdf
Now we know that they had real PLAN, to make education A MARKETPLACE Efrom which THEY will not only profit, but will CONTROL.. as they did with health care!
https://dianeravitch.net/2014/12/05/north-carolina-plans-to-adopt-koch-funded-social-studies-curriculum
We activists, the grassroots people of the eighties and the nineties have fought back, and have REPORTED ON-LINE (FOR over A DECADE) the assault on teachers. NOW WE HAVE BEEN FOLLOWED by those activists WHO have reported THE WAR on PUBLIC EDUCATION that began with the NCLB act and VAM.
We activists saw the start in the 1980s..
Karen Horwitz, http://endteacherabuse.org/
Lenny isenberg who chronicled LAUSD’S TREACHEROUS ROAD FROM REED TO VERGARA-
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/06/lausds-treacherous-road-from-reed-to-vergara–its-never-been-about-students-just-money.html
Lorna Stremcha — who has written the must read : “Bravery, Bullies, and Blowhards: Lessons Learned in a Montana Classroom”: https://www.amazon.com/Bravery-Bullies-Blowhards-Lessons-Classroom/dp/0991309936/ref=cm_sw_em_r_dptop_dn1Avb040EW4Q_tt
Betsy Combier, http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2009/03/gotcha-squad-and-new-york-city-rubber.html
http://gemnyc.org/2012/05/20/the-inconvenient-truth-behind-waiting-for-superman-now-online/Rene Diedrich, Norm Scott and the Grassroots movement which made this movie:
http://gemnyc.org/2012/05/20/the-inconvenient-truth-behind-waiting-for-superman-now-online/
Now, we are witnessing strong leadership among teachers like — for example– Francesco Portellos, and Robert Rendo juts 2 of hundreds who are remaking the school workplace and fighting for the rights of the PROFESSIONAL TEACHER-PRACTITIONER. WONDERFUL ADMINISTRATORS like Carol Burris are standing up to support LEARNING and thus teachers.
. Parents look to us professionals for the SUPPORT nd the HOW-TO facilitate and enable LEARNERS… because as I have said for a decade now IT IS ALL ABOUT LEARNING. Facilitate and enable are the words of the Pew National Standards research.
That is all that teachers can do, when they SHARE WHAT THEY KNOW.
That is all ‘teaching’ is. It certainly IS NOT, teaching kids to take tests. UG!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Learning-not-Teacher-evalu-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-111001-956.html
And of course, there is Diane Ravitch , who is SO CRUCIAL to the growing public awareness of how our people have been bamboozled, a subject upon which I had a thing or two to say, years ago.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
It took an army of moms in Nashville to defeat the autocratic, often fraudulent and inferior publicly funded, private sector, corporate charter school industry.
Congrats. Very jealous.
Memphis is next on the hit list in Tennessee. Start organizing.