Dark money leads to dark actions.
The usual billionaires are funding a campaign to put pro-charter candidates on the Oakland school board.
Rather than openly debate the issues, they have attacked a school board member with negative ads and flyers.
Dark money is turning School Board races into ugly, partisan elections, not divided by party but by allegiance to either democratically controlled schools or privatization.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
But Rosie Torres, the school board member they’re “attacking” is a pro charter board member also. 4 years ago CCSA supported her. I ran for school in 2012 and I’m running again this year. I am the only pro public education candidate in the race. I am the only candidate who has never taken money from charters and their billionaire backers. In two elections I have had nearly $400,000 spent against my campaign. Please don’t be fooled what the narrative some are trying to create.
Mike Hutchinson for Oakland School Board District 5
https://m.facebook.com/MikeHutchinson4SchoolBoard/
Charter schools are not public schools
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Good luck, Mike. Keep fighting no matter what.
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I cannot speak to the qualifications of candidates, but this is clearly a smear campaign paid for by Republicans and the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), funded by pro-charter school billionaires. There would be no need for this negative mailer to have Hillary’s image part of this. This is a disgusting example of the misinformationcirculated by the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) and their funders.
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Dear Dr. Ravitch,
I have been following your blog since I learned that you had mentioned our tiny school district, Sausalito Marin City, and the “charter king” superintendent (Steve Van Zant) that the school board hired in 2013, despite the fact that information was available on the internet since 2010 regarding possible conflicts of interest related to his superintendency in the CA Mountain Empire School District, his authorization of charter schools in neighboring San Diego Unified School District, and his own charter school business Ed Hive. In the end Mr. Van Zant was convicted of felony conflict of interest in 2016 and, as part of a plea agreement, agreed to resign from our northern CA school district, from which he had been flying in and out a few days a week.
The Sausalito Marin City School District is a small microcosm of all that is going on across the country, with only one public school and one (growing) charter school. The school board was taken over by charter school partisans at a four to one margin in 2009. In 2008, the K-5 public school had been named a CA Distinguished School and was, as well, a Title One Academic Achievement Award School for the second year in a row. Test scores were rising (the Academic Performance Index was 817, with 800 being considered excellent).
Once the school board was taken over by charter school partisans, however, all that had been put in place to support students’ academic success began to be taken apart. In 2013, the elementary school was moved out of the Sausalito campus, which it had been sharing with the charter school since its inception in 2001, to allow the charter to take over the entire campus. Four new modular classrooms had to be built on the Marin City middle school campus to house these elementary school students, and the interest cost of more than $200,000 per year for these buildings is now added into the per student cost of these public school children. The school board constantly speaks of deficit spending and further cuts that will need to be made to the public school, while providing the charter school with essentially rent-free facilities, all grounds-keeping costs, most deferred maintenance costs, all special education costs, all nursing costs, all technology infrastructure and program costs, all after-school program costs, all utility costs, all world-language program costs (though the public school has had no world languages program for going on 3 years now and no plans to re-instate a program before 2019), and more. Meanwhile, the public school programs and student support systems have been systematically decimated.
I would be happy to send or upload information about what is happening in the district, including the fact that (finally) the CA Attorney General is looking into the situation. Please let me know if you would be interested in this and in what way it would be best to deliver this information. I only ask that you not yet send out information about this on your blog, or who I am (I will send you information about myself) until after you have seen background details, chronology, and context.
Thank you for all that you do. it is making a difference.
educationadvocate1066
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