Investigative reporter Bill Raden of Capitol & Main exposes the political machinations of the billionaire-funded charter industry, which wants more kids, more schools, more market share. Enough is never enough.

Expenditures by charter school lobbying groups was near $24 million, pumped into 35 legislative races. The charter industry wants to buy influence to protect its market share.

Raden writes:

California’s “school choice” movement has always benefited from generous subsidies by a narrow spectrum of big-spending entrepreneurs, many of whom are billionaires. Their wealth has helped give the state the highest number of charter schools in the U.S., even as their election largess has left it with the nation’s most expensive school board elections.

Capital & Main’s analysis of the latest campaign-finance records for the five largest charter school IECs reveals that those same personal fortunes are at the center of the charters’ apparent attempt to buy some Sacramento political insurance against a growing resistance among both lawmakers and the public to the industry’s unbridled expansion in the state.
The amount spent by charter IECs represents about $40 for each of California’s 581,100 charter school students, and a 300 percent jump from 2014 charter election spending — about 570 percent over 2012.

Most of the charters’ IE spending (88 percent) was directed by three committees that served as the 501(c)(4) political arms of industry lobbyists California Charter School Association (CCSA) and EdVoice, the charter school advocacy nonprofit founded by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: CCSA’s California Charter Schools Association Advocates IE Committee, and the Parent Teacher Alliance (sponsored by the CCSA’s IEC); and the EdVoice Independent Expenditure Committee. (Neither EdVoice nor CCSA responded to requests to comment for this article.)

The remainder was distributed by the Govern for California Action Committee, a PAC controlled by anti-public-pension gadfly and neoliberal Democrat David Crane; and by Parents and Teachers for Student Success – StudentsFirst, the IEC of the national pro-charter group founded by Michelle Rhee.

“They’re investing heavily in maintaining a deregulated environment,” said United Teachers Los Angeles Secretary Daniel Barnhart before the election. “This really isn’t about kids. In their own words, they say it’s about market share.”
He may be right. Though the teachers union spent nearly $33 million on the election, the bulk of that (around $20 million) went to Proposition 55, the education-funding measure that aimed to benefit all California classrooms — both charter and public school students. The charter IECs spent solely on pro-charter legislative and school board candidates.

The unions spent money to support education, both for public schools and charter schools. The charter industry spent only to protect its future prospects for opening more charters and draining more resources from public schools.

Governor Jerry Brown is the ultimate protector of the charter industry. He vetoed a bill to block the educationally disastrous for-profit online charter industry. And he vetoed other bills to rein in charter abuses.

The industry may have become more aggressive this year because the public is growing wary of its promises, its scandals, and its propaganda. The ACLU issued a blistering report about charters in California, and the NAACP call for a moratorium on charters was a body blow to billionaires who think they are in the forefront of the civil rights movement. They are not.

This greedy, self-absorbed industry has overplayed its hand. The public is catching on. The billionaires will have to spend more to buy more legislative seats to stave off a public uprising against them.