A close ally of Betsy DeVos just made a $2 million contribution to the campaign of Antonio Villarigosa for Governor of California.
The former Los Angeles Mayor is running solely on the charter issue, which is the source of his biggest campaign contributions.
Who knew that the California governor’s race would be determined by a single issue: Do you support public schools or charter schools?
The gubernatorial campaign of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa got another big boost this week when William Oberndorf, a San Francisco philanthropist and ally of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, contributed $2 million to a committee set up by charter school advocates to promote the former Los Angeles mayor’s bid to be the next governor of California.
Oberndorf, a Republican and major GOP donor, replaced DeVos as chairperson of American Federation for Children in 2016 when she was named by Donald Trump to join his cabinet.
The goal of the organization which DeVos co-founded is to promote greater “school choice” for parents, especially low-income ones, by providing taxpayer supported subsidies to offset the cost of private school tuition. That could include vouchers, tax credits, education savings accounts and other strategies.
Oberndorf’s contribution went to Families and Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa, an independent expenditure committee established by the Charter School Association of California Advocates. Under state law, the committee can promote a candidate but can not coordinate their activities with the candidate’s campaign.
Also this week former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg contributed another $1 million to the pro-Villaraigosa committee, to supplement the $1.5 million he had already contributed earlier this month.
Their contributions bring the total amount raised by the committee to just over $16 million over the past month, mostly contributed by a handful of high-wealth individuals. With these funds, the committee has been running television ads and sending out colorful materials to boost Villaraigosa’s odds in the June 5 primary.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Cory Booker is paying close attention. A Villaraigosa win would write Cory’s playbook for 2020.
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“Oberndorf, a Republican and major GOP donor, replaced DeVos as chairperson of American Federation for Children in 2016 when she was named by Donald Trump to join his cabinet.”
Did DeVos pay him back ?????????
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The group “Families and Teachers for Villaraigosa” into which all these billionaires have been depositing this multi-milllion-dollar checks has …
EXACTLY ZERO FAMILIES
and
EXACTLY ZERO TEACHERS
on its membership list.
It’s pure astroturf.
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Here are some of the education suggestions that he has made. And he has lots of points about other issues too. Perhaps he has other ideas and insights besides chartering?
The California Students’ Bill of Rights
The Right to Demand that Decision-Makers Put Students First.
Every stakeholder in our public schools matters and everyone deserves respect and consideration. But students must always come first. A student-focused lens should be applied to all decisions made in our education system: how is this decision helping our students succeed?
The Right to Economic Equality.
The facts are clear, students who come from families where parents have middle-class jobs do better than students whose parents are struggling economically. Economic equality creates educational equality – because it gives parents more time to engage with their children, puts children under less stress AND when we grow together fairly we grow our tax base, meaning more money for schools.
The Right to Appropriate School Funding.
Proposition 98 is the floor, not the ceiling. We are still far, far behind other states in educational spending. The Proposition 98 spending formulas are being used as a maximum allotment. That was never the intent. Proposition 98 created a minimum of spending, not a maximum.
The Right to Equity Money Being Used in the Classroom, not the Bureaucracy.
New funding rules that require more equality in our schools are only a help if the money is spent on kids, not bureaucracy. We need to invest these new funds in better trained and better compensated teachers and other ways that impact the students who need the most help to succeed.
The Right to Access High-Quality Schools.
Wealthy families can choose to move to high-performing school districts, or pay for private school tuition. Poor families also deserve the right to access high-quality schools and publicly chartered schools often provide that access. High-performing public charters playing by the same set of rules as other public schools are laboratories for innovation and creativity; our low-income families should be empowered to be able to choose the school that makes sense for their children.
The Right to Teachers Who Get More Pay and More Professional Training.
Teachers are not the problem – well-paid and professionally-trained teachers are a solution. We need to invest in more professional training, continuing professional development and tenure reform. Providing opportunities for our teachers to work at least three years under training and supervision and other common-sense reforms will make our teachers better trained and better supported.
The Right to Hold Every One of Us Accountable.
Principals, parents, teachers, elected leaders, the entire community and students are all responsible for success. We can’t point fingers at each other. We need to understand we are ALL responsible for educational equality and student success.
The Right to Support from the Beginning.
The reality is that succeeding in schools is dramatically affected by neo-natal care, childhood nutrition, childhood healthcare and other basic services. Access to quality child care and early education can ensure that every student has a healthy start in life.
The Right to Be Free from the Worry of Being Homeless or Housing Insecure.
Housing is a recognized educational rights issue. We have too many homeless kids in our schools and too many parents who must work two and three jobs to pay for skyrocketing housing costs, meaning they don’t have enough time to support their children. Affordable housing creates opportunities for greater student achievement.
The Right to Nutritional Food.
Nutrition programs must extend beyond the school day and school year. Children who are hungry at night or over the summer can’t keep up.
The Right to Safe Schools and Neighborhoods.
To give our kids a chance to succeed in public school, they need to be secure and safe in school, and coming and going to school. A focus on safety does not need to, and should not, criminalize students. They must be free to think and learn without fear and trauma.
The Right to Advance to College or Career Training.
Graduating from high school is a start – not a finish. We need to make sure our schools lay out a clear path for higher education or other post-secondary career and technical education as a part of our curriculum, requirements and culture.
https://antonioforcalifornia.com/education-op-ed/
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You forgot The Right To Baseball ⚾️ Mom 🧓🏼 And Apple Pie 🥧 …
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And a chicken in every pot!
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Standing 👏!
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I’d like to see him pledge not to veto any bills regulating charters passed by both houses of the Legislature. We are done with Brown’s excuses.
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Joseph Nathan,
What a bunch of meaningless platitudes.
The bottom line — should charters be subject to oversight or should they be given free reign — tells you whether the politician cares about kids or cares about the people getting rich from the privatization movement.
The bottom line — will you lie or will you tell the truth? — tells you the most about a candidate. And with almost every single charter promoting politician, I see that the answer is “I will lie.”
Which is why the parallels with Trump are astonishing and why the same people who adore Betsy DeVos are supporting charters and politicians greedy enough to do their bidding to keep the money flowing.
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“Oberndorf, a Republican and major GOP donor, replaced DeVos as chairperson of American Federation for Children in 2016 when she was named by Donald Trump to join his cabinet.
The goal of the organization which DeVos co-founded is to promote greater “school choice” for parents, especially low-income ones, by providing taxpayer supported subsidies to offset the cost of private school tuition. That could include vouchers, tax credits, education savings accounts and other strategies.”
So does he admit he supports vouchers or is he playing the same bait and switch game we’ve seen over and over from “liberal” ed reformers? Where they tell voters they don’t support vouchers and then quietly back them, behind closed doors?
Because DeVos wouldn’t be backing him if he hadn’t already promised her vouchers.
Someone should ask him. Ask him during a televised debate, so there’s a record.
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Yes, Chiara, I agree he should be asked. Many people who support chartering oppose vouchers. That includes me. It also includes a number of Democratic legislators who support district and charter public school choice and oppose vouchers.
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Many people who support charters say they oppose vouchers but are financially beholden to the pro-voucher pro-charter billionaires who give them an inordinate amount of money that no union could ever match.
Then they work double time to endorse Betsy DeVos and spend their time fighting to make sure she is confirmed, while the supposedly “not pro-voucher” charter folks give their complicit consent.
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Former Mn US Senator was a great example of a Democrat who was pro public school choice and vigorously anti voucher and anti DeVos. The late Senator Paul Wellstone was another example.
Wellstone also was very anti allowing public schools to use admissions tests (like “public” schools in NYC that use admissions tests)
For many folks around the country, using admissions tests is not consistent with the principles of public education.
I realize there are many who post here who are fine with that. But one of the reasons we have charters is that a bunch of us oppose that.
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Wait. We have charters because we don’t like public schools with admissions tests? So why do so many charters exclude kids with disabilities and ELLS? Why do the high-flying charters kick out kids who can’t get high scores or pass AP tests?
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Yes, one of the reasons charter laws were adopted and charter public schools were started in NYC, Chicago and other large cities was because people were frustrated elite “public schools” that required doing well on the standardized tests so often attacked here.
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Joe, that is absolutely not true.
The first charter law was passed in New York because conservative Republican Governor George Pataki told the legislature he would veto the pay raise they wanted unless they approved charters. I testified for the bill on behalf of the conservative Manhattan Institute. All the support for charters came from Republicans pushing choice.
The small school movement started by Deborah Meier was thriving. She did not testify on behalf of charters. No one on the left did.
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Actually, I worked with governors in 30 states, including NY. A number of legislators had heard complaints about the kind of magnet schools with admissions test. Why are standardized tests so awful except when they are used to keep out students who want to attend a school?
And I was at dinner with Pataki when this was being discussed. Yes, Pataki arranged a trade.
But a number of educators in NY and other cities started charters because they did not like test based admissions schools that exclude from the beginning students who can’t score very highly on the tests that are constantly (and wisely) criticized here.
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“No one on the left (in NY) supported charters?”
Sy Fliegel, a NYC liberal who was a District 4 adminstrator and arranged for Deborah Meier to start a public school option in District 4 has been a charter supporter from the beginning. So have a number of alternative school educators who were relentlessly criticized by the political right.
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Sy Fliegel worked for the Manhattan Institute at the time the charter legislation passed. We worked together. Deborah Meier did not support charters in 1998 and she does not support them now. She believes in working within the public school system, as she did in both New York City and Boston. We have spent many hours discussing the rightwing takeover of the charter movement. She is strongly opposed to charters because she sees them as privatization.
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Sy Fliegel was one of the most progressive educators ever in NYC – as were others working with him in District 4. After District 4, he was hired at the Manhattan Institute. But he and his district 4 colleagues left there in part because they did not support vouchers.
Deborah Meier has encouraged created of a new national coalition of independent charters and spoke at the founding conference of the group – last fall in NYC.
Here’s a link to a panel at that conference including Deborah Meier, Sy Fliegel and yours truly.
http://www.c3s.nyc/icss17
All over the country there are progressive liberal veterans of small district alternative schools who have helped start charters and have helped write charter laws.
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The single biggest supporters of charters in the US are the anti-union Walton Family Foundation and the DeVos family.
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The single biggest supporters of charters are
1. the families of several million youngsters who attend them,
2.students at some “2nd chance” charters who’ve been pushed/encouraged to leave traditional public schools.
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The Democrats like Duncan and Obama who support school choice paved the way for DeVos. They made school choice—a term long associated with southern segregationists—respectable. She ran with it.
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Name calling is common here. but the fact is that in the early 1970’s, well before chartering, there were several thousand district public school options.
They were created by educators (including this one) who recognized that there is no single best approach for all kids – and no single kind of school that every educator believes in.
So we had Montessori, open, Core Knowledge, project based, 2nd chance, language immersion, pilot schools, alternatives for youngsters with whom traditional schools were not working well and on and on.
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All of those options happened within the public school system. Charters have become the model used by the Waltons, the Koch brothers, the Heartland Institute, the Thomas B Fordham Foundation, the DeVos family, etc. John Chubb and Terry Moe wrote a book supporting vouchers 20 years ago. They said that charters were just as good as vouchers for eliminating democratic control of schools.
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Charters also have been praised by Rosa Parks, Paul Wellstone, Al Franken, President Obama and others who have opposed vouchers.
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“Why are standardized tests so awful except when they are used to keep out students who want to attend a school?”
Joe, you gotta know this would be coming from me-LOL 🙂
There are no exceptions to the fact that “standardized tests [are] so awful.” So awful, as a matter of fact, that using the results for anything whatsoever is COMPLETELY INVALID.
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Duane if they are so awful, why is there so much support in this discussion group for allowing some district schools to use them? Do you agree with me that is a really bad idea?
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Joe,
I can’t figure out why there would be any support whatsoever. It’s beyond my understanding.
But if I may try. Ingrained cultural practices, especially educational ones, ones that almost everyone has experienced become a part of one’s “mental environment”-It’s the way things are. Standardized testing has been around for generations now, has had the (false) sheen of scientific/objective veracity. The various standardized tests have been marketed, and yes, that is the correct term, by their makers as “true” indicators of educational reality. Wilson, and others before and since, have destroyed that “truth”.
But the word of that destruction has not been allowed in the discourse of standardized testing. Perhaps “not allowed” is not the best phrase, but anytime a truth that destroys a concept and that threatens those who make a living off of it, that truth must be ignored, not given the time of day, allowed to be brought to light. Money, power, authority-the prestige of those whose personal (both mental and monetary) stake in such an enterprise must be maintained.
I’ve been asking for 20 years for a rebuttal to Wilson’s work-nothing, zilch nada. I’ve requested from Richard Phelps who pops up here every now and again and who has written two books defending the malpractices that are standardized tests to rebut/refute Wilson. Basically, his response has been “I don’t care what you think.” He has nothing but strawman arguments to fight against in his defense of those tests.
I’ve been reading and analyzing the testing bibles “Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing”, originally put out by the APA, NCME and AERA in 85 updated in 99 and now the newest in 2014. Wilson’s work came out in 2017 so I can understand why they might not have addressed his concerns in the 99 update. But there is nothing addressing any of the condemning arguments of Wilson’s work in the 2014.
Hmmm, wonder why?
See above explanation. Wilson’s work fundamentally destroys their gravy train. Can’t have that. Must ignore. APA, AERA, NCME-all lightweights in running and hiding from Wilson’s cogent critique. (And notice the bible is put out by the organizations and there are no “authors”, “editors”, etc. . . with whom to engage in dispute.)
Finally, of course I agree that using standardized tests as entrance exams to supposedly “elite” public schools is a complete bastardization of what the purpose of public education should be about-“The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry”. Falsely sorting, separating and ranking students with the completely invalid mechanism that is a standardized test, and rewarding some and castigating others is nothing more than state sponsored discrimination via mental capabilities over which the student has little to no control. That discrimination is abhorrent.
Well, Joe, you asked, and since I can’t get into the garden because of rain (much needed here), you got my thoughts. As my youngest son tells people “Don’t get my dad started on education, he’ll never shut up.”
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Thanks – very eloquent, powerful comments. Hope you are having a great Friday.
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Thanks for the kind words, Joe!
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Thank you, Duane for your relentless reminders & research reviews 🙂
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This quote is from the edsource.org article:
“The goal of the organization which DeVos co-founded is to promote greater ‘school choice’ for parents, especially low-income ones, by providing taxpayer supported subsidies to offset the cost of private school tuition.”
So, when a source is acting as a stenographer/writer for one side, it’s important that we not let them get away with their lies and deceptions as this quote does.
“The goal of the organization which DeVos co-founded is to promote [SUPPOSED] greater “school choice” [WHATEVER THAT MIGHT MEAN] for parents, [NOT LIMITED TO BUT SUPPOSEDLY especially low-income ones, by providing taxpayer supported subsidies [VOUCHERS] to offset the cost of private [ALMOST ALWAYS RELIGIOUS] school tuition.”
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California just surpassed the U.K. to become the world’s fifth largest governmental economy, a leader in environmentalism and cultural diversity, in agriculture, in film, in technology, and in just about everything from aircraft to surf boards. Just for example, if you haven’t driven up or down California, you would probably be surprised to find out how many heads of cattle live and die here. You’re right, though, Diane, according to a handful of greedy billionaires, the only responsibility the governor has is to help charter chains avoid transparency and accountability. If he who couldn’t pass the bar exam, adulterous Villainraigosa, wins a bed in the governor’s mansion, the death of public education here will just be the start of our problems.
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I’m supporting Gavin Newsom.
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