Peter Dreier, a professor of political science at Occidental College, gives his political analysis of the Los Angeles school board election.
He writes:
[Nick] Melvoin and his billionaire backers dramatically outspent school board president Steve Zimmer’s campaign, making the District 4 race the most expensive in LAUSD history.
Political pundits will spend the next few days and weeks analyzing the Los Angeles school board election, examining exit polls, spilling lots of ink over how different demographic groups — income, race, religious, union membership, gender, party affiliation, and others — voted on Tuesday.
But the real winner in the race was not Nick Melvoin, but Big Money. And the real loser was not Steve Zimmer, but democracy – and LA’s children.
Who backed Melvoin?
Billionaires, many of whom live far from Los Angeles, bought this election for Melvoin. Their money paid for non-stop TV and radio ads, as well as phone calls, mailers and newspaper ads (including a huge wrap-around ad on the front of Sunday’s LA Times). Melvoin’s billionaire backers paid for 44 mailers and at least $1 million on negative TV ads against Zimmer.
The so-called “Independent” campaign for Melvoin was funded by big oil, big tobacco, Enron and Walmart, and other out-of-town corporations and billionaires. They paid for Melvoin’s ugly, deceptive, and false attack ads against Zimmer, a former teacher and current school board president. Melvoin is so devoted to the corporate agenda for our schools that during the campaign he said that the school district needed a “hostile takeover.”
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who lives in Santa Cruz, donated close to $5 million since last September to the California Charter School Associaton’s political action committee, which poured big bucks into Melvoin’s campaign.
Among the big donors behind Melvoin and the CCSA were members of the Walton family (Alice Walton, Jim Walton, and Carrie Walton Penner) ― heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune from Arkansas, who’ve donated over $2 million to CCSA. Alice Walton (net worth: $36.9 billion), who lives in Texas, was one of the biggest funders behind Melvoin’s campaign. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflicks (net worth: $1.9 billion), who lives in Santa Cruz, donated close to $5 million since last September to the CCSA’s political action committee, including $1 million a week before the election.
Other moguls behind Melvoin and the CCSA include Doris Fisher (net worth: $2.7 billion), co-founder of The Gap, who lives in San Francisco: Texas resident John Arnold (net worth: $2.9 billion), who made a fortune at Enron before the company collapsed, leaving its employees and stockholders in the lurch, then made another fortune as a hedge fund manager; Jeff Yass, who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, and runs the Susquahanna group, a hedge fund; Frank Baxter, former CEO of the global investment bank Jefferies and Company that specialized in “junk” bonds; and Michael Bloomberg (net worth: $48.5 billion), the former New York City mayor and charter champion. Eli Broad (net worth: $7.7 billion), who hatched a plan to put half of all LAUSD students in charter schools by 2023 — an idea that Zimmer fought — donated $400,000 to CCSA last Friday, on top of $50,000 he gave in November. He made his money in real estate and life insurance.
Not surprisingly, most of these billionaires are big backers of conservative Republican candidates and right-wing causes. Several are on the boards of charter school chains.
Citizens United strikes again. Until there are campaign finance limits, big money will win more elections and corrupt our democracy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What percentage of teachers were going door to door to bring out their vote. What percentage of teachers were manning phone banks to target Parents of public school children, to target and enlist them in this effort. There are two ways to do battle with these people one way we haven’t seen since the thirties , we may yet again see it in the future.
The other way is political activism on steroids.
So here in NY would Cuomo still be governor if the Teachers and other public workers had bothered to vote in a lightly participated in primary. That election actually draged him a little left. It could have elected a true progressive.
I have had Union members (not teachers) turn to me and ask; isn’t it the unions job to call their congressman. Americas workers just don’t get it one day they will and it will look like the early 20th century once again. At that point the oligarchs may run for cover .
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How exhausted are teachers? That has to enter into the discussion of why they aren’t knocking on doors and making phone calls.
I remember coming home from an exhausting day of work with barely enough energy left to heat up some food in my microwave. Forget going out and doing political work.
Also. Don’t teachers have to be aware that being involved in political work could jeopardize their jobs? Who knows what their administrators want? I believe that fear keeps many teachers from speaking out too loudly.
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I am not here to pick on teachers or any other workers. All workers are tired after a hard days work. The harder part is fighting the battles that make that work satisfying and sustainable. Now I am sure teachers are not allowed to politic on school property nor pressure parents unless of course you are in a charter. But I doubt they leave their constitutional rights locked in the school room. Been to many demonstrations over the years. Conspicuously lacking from almost all of these has been teachers in any significant numbers. Whether it was the fight for 15 or something as mundane as a labor day parade. I was at a rather large demonstration today in support of Time Warner Cable workers on strike to save their pensions from the corporate vultures at Spectrum cable who took over TWC, in a classic vulture capital scheme. There were members of the CUNY faculty union but as usual no teachers.
Participating in democracy is the easy thing. No worker today is being asked to make the sacrifices of body or freedom that built the union movement and the middle class . You didn’t think the education wars had anything to do with education! Segregation , Union busting, profit, control of the masses perhaps but education ????????
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I do a lot of political protesting now because I’m RETIRED!! I have signs in my den about Trump and I have a pussy hat. I’ve stood on many corners and marched in many different protests over the last few years.
Maybe I am in the minority, but I couldn’t have done that while I was teaching.
I’ve seen teachers protest as a group once. That was when teachers from Gary, IN went on a bus to Indianapolis to protest against Right to Work (for less). Over 20,000 workers came from all over the state and protested but the bill was passed by our GOP controlled legislature and governor.
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carolmalaysia
I am not referring to you. Obviously you are an activist or you would not be on this blog,taking the positions you do . If the minimal activism we see as a result of Trump had been there prior to Trump, we would not have Trump,Pence or a right wing majority. The gerrymandering that we complain of, was not bought by billionaires. It was built on the apathy of voters who took the liberal policies of the New Deal through even Nixon for granted. Unfortunately when RTW is being voted on it is almost always too late.
Unfortunately teachers see themselves somewhere between workers and professionals .Therefore they seldom participate as workers with workers. The bad news you are not professionals, not because of lack of educational credentials. But because you were never treated as professionals. In the last 35 years the right, be it reactionary or neo liberal has sought to do the same to the University professorial ranks . The starving adjunct being the new model . Gates will take that further
with Certificates replacing degrees and MOCs replacing the lowly adjunct.
But teachers are not alone in this. Seventy percent of Union construction trades just voted for Trump. Market share of Union construction has gone from 87% in the fifties and sixties to a mere 17% today. Those that remain in markets or segments of markets, somewhat unaffected by the de-unionization do not see themselves as common laborers. They see themselves as “skilled tradesmen”. Unfortunately for them the developers no longer do and have been attacking in force. Even in Manhattan NY one of the strongest union towns . The residential high rise market has been dominated by the open shop non union model. The writing is on the wall.
There are only two ways to fight this assault, violence or political activism . Mass violence in this country has never worked well for the working class. Although a few bombs here and there may have.
“Workingmen to Arms!
War to the Palace, Peace to the Cottage, and Death to LUXURIOUS IDLENESS.
The wage system is the only cause of the World’s misery. It is supported by the rich classes, and to destroy it, they must be either made to work or DIE.
“One pound of DYNAMITE is better than a bushel of BALLOTS!
MAKE YOUR DEMAND FOR EIGHT HOURS with weapons in your hands to meet the capitalistic bloodhounds, police, and militia in proper manner.”
That national call to arms was May 1 1886. there was no violence that day . 1968 may not have been the first police riot. Hay Market Square 5/3/1886 may have been. Of course we do not celebrate international workers day born on the streets of America.
You do not think that our police forces resemble armored assault teams to control a few drug addicts here and there.
The only choice for Americas workers the 85-90% is political education and mass political activism. The failure of American labor is that since the disappearance of the Wobblies, it has not been a mass social movement . All too often pitting worker against worker for the scraps . How many Union households supported Walker when he attacked Public workers . By the way Cuomo started off the same way in NY. Attacking the Pensions of teachers and Public workers as if they were Wall Street executives, supporting Eva Moscowitz in her assault on union teachers. . It should have come as no surprise when Walker brought that assault on Private sector unions.
So again my criticism is not of you personally or even teachers. It is a call to action without which we may be doomed to a prolonged period of oligarchy that makes the last 40 years look like a cake walk.
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I agree with what you are saying.
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Why would any teacher in LAUSD go door to door to support Zimmer? He has approved numerous charters and dismissal of veterans teachers while UTLA spends members’ dues on campaign contributions and colludes with district administration in firing teachers.
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I suspect there is more to the story that you are telling.
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Time for teachers to stop being sheep and stand up for what is right. I am a teacher and I know what it is to be exhausted. But fighting for what is right will make their lives easier in the long run. The LAUSD race results is about to make their lives a living hell.
Better off to have made some phone calls.
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I’m not so sure knocking on doors was or could have been and effective way to overcome the multimillion dollar smear campaign, anyway. A lot of the feedback many of us received was along the lines of, “Stop bothering me so I can get back to watching my shows.” There were annoyed comments in the Times, annoyed by teachers. Not good! We need to think, perhaps, about other, more subtle ways to present ourselves in the future, at least when the voters have been so saturated with Trumpian elections. What made Bernie so miraculous?
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I suspect as the CTA has demonstrated it can be very effective . Especially in low voter turnout elections like for school board or a Mayoral primary . I would speculate had Karen Lewis not gotten sick Emanuel would have been eliminated or force to run as a Republican or independent.
Bernie was not extraordinary, his message was not revolutionary. He was simply a New Deal democrat He was what the party has been running from for 30 years. They sold out main-street for Wall Street cash as the country turned Republican one district followed by one state at a time.
Obama was elected because after an orgy of greed and corruption on Wall Street the Nation forgot that they were voting for a Black man. Unfortunately he was never who we thought he was. As the emails revealed his entire first administration was picked by Citi exec and Wall Street hack Michael Froman who goes on to be the chief negotiator of the TPP.
Bernie was running against Obama as much as Clinton. Had Obama not been a total failure he never would have ran.
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I’ve been using the term “the hostile takeover of public education” for a decade, but never thought the so-called reformers would actually use it themselves, but then again, we’re in an Age of Impunity, so why should they even try to hide what they’re doing?
The pigs are really going to feed at the trough now.
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OK, I’ll continue my boycott of Netflix.
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Such vast amounts of public tax money are being skimmed away by charter schools and funneled into corporate and private pockets that the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report that, because of their lack of accountability to the public, charter schools pose a risk to the Department of Education’s goals. The report finds that “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of financial fraud and the artful skimming of tax money into private pockets.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its favorable reporting on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax dollars that are intended to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets and to the bottom lines of hedge funds.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Court, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools at all because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. That’s common sense to any taxpayer: Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money but have virtually no public record accountability of what they do with the tax money they divert from genuine public schools.
There are many tactics used by many charter school operators to reap profit from their schools, even the so-called “non-profits”, such as private charter school boards paying exorbitant sums to lease building space for their school in buildings that are owned by corporations that are in turn owned or controlled by the charter school board members or are REIT investments that are part of a hedge fund’s portfolio. There are many other avenues of making a hidden profit from operating private charter schools.
In addition to the siphoning away of money from needy schools, reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children of color; and, very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students. Based on these and other findings of racial discrimination in charter schools, the NAACP Board of Directors has passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice.
Therefore, in order to assure that tax dollars are being spent wisely and that there is no racism in charter schools, charter schools should minimally (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that the charter schools are accountable to the public; (2) be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) be required to operate so that anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
Those aren’t unreasonable requirements. In fact, they are common sense to taxpayers and to anyone who seeks to assure that America’s children — especially her neediest children — are optimally benefiting from public tax dollars intended for their education. But, after the internal scams of charter schools become exposed to taxpayers through routine public reporting, the charter school industry will dry up and disappear, and the money that the charter school industry has been draining away from America’s neediest children will again flow to those in need.
If charter schools were required to file the same financial statements that public schools file, the skimming of tax money would stop and hedge funds would move on to their next target, leaving the charter school “movement” to dry up.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
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In tandem, universities are a target of Gates’ unrelenting education takeover. Financially weaker HBCU’s, which are more vulnerable to offers of “philanthropy” are disproportionately represented in the Frontier Set. Frontier identifies this goal at its site, “will implement business models for collaborative course development and delivery”.
The New America stink tank (funded by Gates), the Center for American Progress ($2.2 mil. from Gates 2013-2015), and Sen. Rubio are pushing student outcome measures in higher ed.
And, New America is fronting for the oligarch, to force state taxpayers to fund both, public universities, which will be cheapened by his efficiencies and, legacy admission schools. Same K-12 oligarch crap in higher ed.
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Neither Melvoin nor Zimmer talked about the real issues facing LAUSD specifically and public education in general. If their had been a choice “None of The Above” neither of them would have won. Zimmer stood by and watched the unjustified removal of thousands of senior teachers for the sole “crime” of them making too much. I offered Zimmer support, if he finally stood up and addressed the real issues like social promotion of students to assure failure and the targeting and removal of teachers on fabricated charges- he refused I have written about this extensively at the website below and City Watch L.A. Although I have gotten hundreds of thousands of hits on my articles that discuss the reality nowhere to be found in the media, most have become so cynical about this subject that they no longer vote, where their only choice is Twiddle Dee or Twiddle Dum.
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Democracy was nice while it lasted. Best government money can buy is now a fait accompli.
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Los Angeles is a strange place.
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