Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California, here describes the billionaires and bad policies behind Marshall Tuck’s campaign for State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
He sees the Tuck campaign as a new front in the “Destroy Public Education Movement,” which he has written about extensively.
Here are some of the Big Money contributors to Tuck’s campaign:
The Waltons control Walmart and have been spending heavily to privatize public schools for more than three decades.
Bill Bloomfield is a rich guy from LA who has also poured $7,000,000 into independent expenditures for Tuck.
The Rogers family is the main local force behind the privatization of Oakland’s school system.
Doris Fisher founded The Gap with her husband Don. They have spent extensively promoting charter schools and were the first significant benefactors for the KIPP franchise.
Eli Broad is the only person to found two fortune 500 companies. He announced plans to charterize half of Los Angeles’s schools and published a guide for closing public schools.
John Scully was the former CEO of Apple and consistently supports school privatization.
David Horowitz is a Republican activist who gained notoriety for his anti-affirmative action campaign.
Arthur Rock is Silicon Valley royalty who spends lavishly to support school privatization.
Peter Chernin was COO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. He is also a movie producer of some note.
Reed Hastings is possibly the most dedicated destroy public education billionaire. He sat on the board of the California Charter Schools Association for many years.
Richard Riordan is the billionaire former Mayor of Los Angeles who spends millions on public school privatization.
John Arnold is the ex-Enron executive who did not go to jail. He and Reed Hastings have each invested $100 million in a new national school privatizing organization called The City Fund.
Jonathan Sackler is the heir to the billionaire inventors of Oxycontin. Besides selling addictive drugs, Jonathan invests in the privatization of America’s schools.
Les Biller is a former CEO of Wells Fargo bank. He and his wife have a foundation in Seattle, Washington where they give heavily to charter schools.
Julian Robertson Jr. is a hedge fund manager in Chicago who thinks California really needs Marshal Tuck.
Stacy Schusterman is an energy industry heir from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been particularly active in California school board elections.
Michael Bloomberg is the billionaire former New York mayor who spawned Joel Klein, Eva Moskowitz and Michelle Rhee. He spends heavily on California school board elections.
The big money is not in direct contributions like those listed above. It is in the money for independent expenditure committees that do not have contribution limits. For example, the Ed Voice for the Kids Pac has already reported spending over $13,000,000 in support of Tuck (Id 1243091). There are many more of these PACs spending money to elect Tuck such as Education Reform Now Advocacy for Tuck and Charter Public Schools Political Action Committee.
Ultican contrasts the two candidates:
Tony Thurmond was born in Monterey, California. His father was stationed at the Fort Ord Army base. Tony’s father abandoned his family of four children. Thurmond’s Panamanian immigrant mother became a school teacher and moved the family to San Jose.
Tragedy struck six-years-old Tony when his mother died of cancer. Tony and a brother moved to Philadelphia where they were raised by a cousin.
After graduating from high school in Philadelphia, Tony matriculated to Temple University where he was elected student body president and received a BA in psychology. He attended graduate school at Bryn Mawr earning a dual masters in Law and Social Policy and Social work.
The most disgusting statement in the San Diego Union editorial read, “In his interview with us, Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, D-Richmond, who finished second to Tuck in the June primary, seemed just as affable but not nearly as ambitious as Tuck.” In case that was too subtle; Tony is a black man.
After rising above his traumatic childhood and becoming educated, Tony married and returned to California in 1998. For the 20 years preceding his election to the California State Assembly, Thurmond served in various positions at non-profit social service agencies. Tony says it was his public school education that helped him become at 20-year social worker and serve on a school board, a city council and now the California State Assembly.
Tony has two daughters in public school.
Marshall Tuck received an MBA from Harvard University in 2000 and a BA in Political Science from University of California Los Angeles in 1995. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and has a wife and son.
He spent some time as a consultant at Mitt Romney’s Bain & Co. He was an investment analyst at the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone. He moved to Los Angeles to work at Salomon Brothers as an investment banker focused on both mergers and acquisitions. After a brief stint in sales for a Software company, in 2002, Tuck was hired by Green Dot Charter Schools as Chief Operating Officer.
In 2007, Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa had been rebuffed in his efforts to take control of Los Angeles Unified School District. He did convince a few donors to underwrite the takeover of a small number of schools in areas which had suffered years of poor standardized test results. They created a non-profit called Partnership for LA and Villaraigosa tapped Marshall Tuck to lead the Partnership.
Tuck had by then become the CEO of Green Dot. The year he left for the Partnership, Green Dot schools posted nine of the fifty lowest SAT scores among Los Angeles schools.
Tuck was extremely unpopular at the Partnership. The Sacramento Bee reported, “Teachers passed a vote of no confidence at nine of the schools at the end of the first year, leading to independent mediation.” An online education news paper in Los Angeles, School Matters, reported, “Many of us hoped that when right-wing business banker Marshall Tuck was ignominiously forced to step down as the ‘CEO’ of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS), that we might have heard the last of Tuck altogether.”
Tuck’s authoritarianism and lack of education background has led to serial failures, however, those forces trying to privatize California’s public schools find his style to their liking.
In 2014, when Tuck lost the most expensive SPI race in California’s history, his allies were there to take care of him. Even though he has no training as an educator, he was made Educator-in-Residence at the New Teacher Center (NTC). Bill Gates has granted NTC $26,305,252 since 2009.
This Contest is Very Important If You Value American Democracy
Marshall Tuck is the representative of the Destroy Public Education billionaires who are spending massive amounts of money to get him elected. It is widely understood that elected school boards are the soil from which American democratic government rejuvenates itself. Dark “DPE” forces are undermining democracy in this country by destroying the people’s 200-years-old public education system. They must be stopped.
If Tuck wins look for him to put in a “portfolio system” – they’re putting them in all over.
They call them “portfolio” districts but it’s the same national charter promotion consultants and they all come in with the same goal- more charters.
“Shawnna Hayes-Tavares, president of Southwest and Northwest Atlanta Parents and Partners for Schools, fears officials want to bring in more charter schools or charter operators to run neighborhood schools, especially in those parts of the city.
“We’ve had the most change on this side of town. It’s like trauma,” she said. “The parents are just tired. They can’t take it anymore.”
Helping APS with the planning work is Denver-based Foxhall Consulting Services, whose fees are being paid by RedefinED Atlanta, a local, charter-friendly nonprofit, according to records obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through a public records request.”
Privatization was meeting local resistance so they had to change some of the branding and marketing but it’s exactly the same plan they always put it- close public schools and open charter schools. The additional benefit (and this is no small thing if you’re an anti-union billionaire funder) “portfolio” means fewer and fewer union members.
https://www.ajc.com/news/local-education/aps-considers-broad-changes-how-schools-are-run/dJUN0j6VqKtkKKJU0sL0FK/
truly depressing truth: they’re putting them in all over…
All the usual suspect billionaires mentioned above along with a few more from Silicon Valley are the reasons why “reform” won’t die a natural death. These wealthy people keep this fake movement afloat. If these people believe so strongly in the wonders of the “market,” they should stop injecting so much cash into this fake movement. Let the “market” decide, and we will see how long a life span privatization has.
California’s education is not a poor as these billionaires would lead us to believe. ELLs in the California schools performed in the same range in the 8th grade mathematics NAEP test even when comparing student performance in New Jersey and Massachusetts, two states that spend a lot more money per student. There is no academic crisis that justifies widespread privatization expansion.
The best person for the students of California is Tony Thurmond, a man trained to understand the needs of people, not hedge funds.
Here’s The City Fund, the ed reform lobbying group that pushes “portfolio districts”-
“Several big names in education reform are teaming up to start a new organization designed to change how schools are managed in cities across the U.S. — and they say they’ve already raised $200 million.
The City Fund, as the group is being called, will push cities to expand charter schools and district schools with charter-like autonomy. It represents a big increase in visibility and influence for advocates of the “portfolio model” of running schools, a strategy that’s been adopted by cities like New Orleans, Denver, and Indianapolis.
The group was announced Tuesday morning on the blog of Neerav Kingsland, who leads education giving at The Laura and John Arnold Foundation. According to a separate presentation created by the group and viewed by Chalkbeat, The City Fund has already raised over $200 million; Kingsland’s blog names the Arnold Foundation and the Hastings Fund as the group’s “anchor funders.” It’s unclear if the organization has raised additional funds.”
I’m sure this will be a very lively and diverse debate! After all, look at all the different opinions they solicited- it’s John and Laura Arnold, Reed Hastings, and one of Arnold’s and Hastings’ employees, Neerav Kingsland. Four people. Three billionaires and one employee of the three billionaires.
You’re probably wondering how the “portfolio model” is different than the “New Orleans model” but wonder no more- it’s identical, it’s just marketed and promoted differently.
https://chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/07/31/the-city-fund-portfolio-model-200-million/
Nobody voted for these billionaires. Why should billionaires be able to impose their vision on the rest of us? People need to vote against people like Tuck. He will clear a path for billionaires so they can control public money and undermine public schools.
retired teacher,
GOOD POINTS. I like your comments, retired teacher.
Here’s one of the employees of the billionaires laying out their vision for “public” schools:
“A system of great schools replaces the traditional school system, with families having access to an array of autonomous district schools, charter schools, magnet schools, and private schools – all of which have much more operational control. The lines between these types of schools begins to blur, and the political fights between these types of schools subsides.”
I don’t mind that Marshall Tuck wants to privatize public schools- all ed reformers do. I mind that he’s misleading the public and insisting he doesn’t.
If privatization is so popular who do they always hide it when they’re running for election? Is it fair to tell people with kids in public schools you “support public schools” when actually you don’t and instead plan to defund and close public schools?
Just run on charters and vouchers. Tell the truth. Tell them you’ll be backing privatization because privatization is better and you support it. That’s your position. Own it. Be proud of it. Drop the nonsense about “agnostic”- it isn’t true and it’s obvious to anyone who reads ed reform it isn’t true. You’re charter and voucher promoters. Run on that.
Please don’t be gulled into believing that “a system of great schools is a new idea.” Joel Klein arrived as chancellor of the NYC public schools in 2002, and he used exactly that phrase to describe his program of closing big schools, opening hundreds of small schools, and authorizing as many charters as possible.
“A system of great schools” means “I will create maximum disruption of your local public schools.”
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
In this election, California’s public school are on the auction block and many out-of-state, old, white billionaires are “investing” in Marshall Tuck’s election because they want to take over and profit from our public schools while controlling what and how our children are taught. Do NOT vote for Tuck.
I posted -at OEN, a link and an introduction to Tom’s site directly https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Who-Should-Be-the-Next-Lea-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Bankers_Billionaires_Democracy_Education-181028-732.html
Humperdinck.
Thank you for this. The list Thomas Ultican compiled of right-wing extremists and other billionaire plutocrats supporting Marshall Tuck is quite frightening.
I’ll be voting for Tony Thurmond on November 6, 2018.
Here’s some more information regarding Tuck that your readers might find interesting.
Marshall Tuck’s Legacy of Bigotry and Failure
Tuck’s Ethnocentrism Contradicts Californian Values
Marshall Tuck’s racist dog whistle