Jackie Goldberg easily led the race for what may be the deciding vote on the Los Angeles school board with 47%. The final tally is not yet in, but if current numbers hold, Jackie will be in a run-off with a Runner up who received about 13% of the vote.
Jackie is a firebrand for equity and public schools. She is the billiinaires’ nightmare.
The Billionaire Boys Club was waiting for a run-off before jumping in the race.
For the future of public schools in LA, Jackie must win outright.
It’s about time. A story in the Los Angeles Times notes that those Democratic candidates who supported charters (and still do) are facing a backlash by their party’s voters. The wave of teachers’ strikes have brought into sharp relief the fact that most families enroll their children in public schools, not charter schools; that charter schools are a priority for Republicans, Wall Street, and far-right libertarians like Betsy DeVos; and that support for public schools is a bedrock principle of the Democratic Party.
The candidate who was most outspoken as a supporter of both charters and vouchers was Cory Booker. He worked in alliancewith anti-union Governor Chris Christie to bring chartersto Newark. He worked closely with Betsy Dezvos and gave a speech to her organization. He was honored by the rightwing Manhattan Institute for supporting school choice. He wanted to turn Newark into the New Orleans of the North, with no public schools and no teachers’ union. He still defends that record.
Michael Bloomberg was a big supporter of charters in New York City and favored them over the public schools he took control of. He’s now out of the race, so no need to worry other than that he will find a Democratic DeVos to fund. He despises public schools.
Michael Bennett of Colorado supported charters when he was superintendent of schools in Denver. Governor Hickenlooper appointed Bennett to the Senate.
Governor Jay Inslee of Washington State did not stand up to Bill Gates after the Washington State Supreme Court decided that charter schools and not entitled to receive public money. Gates persuaded his friends in the legislature to give lottery money to charters, and Gov. Inslee neither signed nor vetoed the law, allowing Gates to get state funding. Not a profilein courage.
The election of 2020 will be a deciding moment, when Democratic candidates are asked to declare whether they support the public schools, or the privately-managed, scandal-ridden charters that enroll 6% of the nation’s students.
Dr. Rocio Rivas dropped out of the race for District 5 school board member and endorsed Jackie Goldberg.
The election is tomorrow.
She reminds us that thiselection is a fight for our democracy.
We cannot let the billionaires buy another seat on the board.
Dr. Rivas writes:
As a candidate in tomorrow’s election, I am asking you to read this post before you go to the polls. Our nation’s Democracy is at stake. We are at a very critical moment in Los Angeles’ political and social history. City Hall’s pay-to-play, corrupt culture has been publicly exposed by the FBI’s raid of a former LAUSD School Board President and the current City Councilman Jose Huizar. Although charges have not been filed, the raids have given light to the overt corruption and fraud that many suspected but was rarely covered by the press.
Overt corruption and fraud also entered our public school system with the election of Dr. Refugio Rodriguez. His indictment and conviction on felony charges exposed more of what we knew about the charter school privatizing industry and the individuals behind his rise to power, Eli Broad and his billionaire posse, including Betsy DeVos. Our city’s public institutions are supposed to work towards the best interests of Angelenos from all races, creeds, religions, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, but they have lost their way and are failing us. The Angelenos that represent the 99% have been left behind. Democracy was put up for sale and We, the people, are on the losing end of reality. It has been clear to me for quite some time that We, the people, must take back our democracy from special interests, corporate ideologues and all the billionaire money that has been buying its way into democracy one elected official at a time. We can stop this now with our vote! I am a true believer in that our vote is our democracy!
In order for our democracy to work, our vote must be an informed one. We must be aware of where every candidate has taken money from and who they are directly or indirectly connected to. We cannot be impressed by the amount of money they have raised or swayed by the number of mailers they used to fill the mailbox. The pictures and words they use are carefully tested marketing messages. We must demand that they back those messages up with policy that benefits our children.
We need to see the conflict of interest now! We must be vigilant of the red flags now before it is too late. Once these compromised candidates are elected, they are virtually untouchable. Your needs will no longer matter to them. The only voices they will listen to are the billionaire investors who purchased their services.
Tomorrow, March 05, 2019, is an important election — I cannot stress that enough. Your vote in this Special Election for the LAUSD School Board to represent District 5 is a critical one, Your vote will help to determine the future of our public education system which is the very foundation of our Democracy — the Los Angeles Unified School District that will not be unified if Superintendent Austin Beutner and company get away with their plan to dismantle it.
Jackie Goldberg is the only clear choice to stop the plan between Eli Broad and the public officials he has purchased from making sure LAUSD fails and is broken apart.
I decided to run for the Board of Education to represent District 5 because as a mother I needed to protect my son’s civil right and human right to a free, quality public education that is democratically governed! I want our choice for his education, the local public school, to remain operating and thriving. As I fight for my son, I fight for all children in this city.
My campaign stood for ethical and moral public education institutions. I have had enough of the lies and manipulation from elected officials, the political machines and unions that want to control public institutions utilizing corporate ideologue’s dark cash. I needed to enter this race to relay a message of caution to all parents and voters to know the facts behind public education and the convoluted political system we have today.
As a Doctor of Education and education researcher, I have a strong sense of responsibility to stand up for public education and to fight for what I strongly believe in. Thanks to the sacrifices made by the teachers during their strike, more Angelenos learned of the factors and individuals aiming to dismantle public education and privatize our schools. However, our defenses must not come down with the end of this strike.
My campaign stands as resistance to political corruption and the lies that influence elections, campaigns, and votes. There are strong economic and political corporate forces within our democratic institutions, connected intimately within our school board, the overall administration of the District, and the city council. I am here to connect the dots that show the alliances between campaigns and corporate ideologues aiming to subjugate the District and its students.
Elected officials and aspiring politicians, including school board members and superintendents, have been bought by money from corporations and billionaires that achieve victory through aggressive networking schemes and marketing plans. This money comes with promises of support for political ascendancy, with strings attached that require loyalty to the interests of corporate ideologues and real estate developers.
The social, economic and political networks of billionaires and private investors, including charter school profiteers intersect hand in hand with the current political establishment and unions (sadly enough) — namely the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). They have been buying and politically maneuvering their way into our public education system for decades and working in conjunction with charter school industry organizations.
The California Charter School Association (CCSA) decided not to publicly endorse any candidates in this special election due in part to the negative atmosphere surrounding Ref Rodriguez felony conviction and other charter school scandals. Their endorsement would, therefore, place a target on their preferred candidate. However, rest assured that donations from charter school advocates are pouring into the campaign coffers of various candidates, namely those connected to city hall politics either in Los Angeles or in the Southeast. Many red flags loom over this election and we must vote carefully and mindfully.For instance, why did William Bloomfield, a billionaire who has made considerable financial contributions towards the charter school movement, to Parent Revolution, and Marshall Tuck’s education campaigns, give thousands of dollars to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) campaign fund for Heather Repenning? Why would a billionaire give to a union? The answer lies in who the candidate they are endorsing.
Bloomfield also gave to the charter school affiliated candidate Allison Bajracharya (who is a candidate with a conflict of interest due to her connections with Great Schools Foundation, which is directly linked to privatizing billionaire money and real estate developers.)
There has been a strong, long-standing relationship between the SEIU, Broad Foundation (Eli Broad), and Parent Revolution (formerly known as Los Angeles Parent Union, LAPU). They are now intimately connected to one of the candidates in this race, Heather Repenning. The Broad Foundation and the like-minded corporate ideologues, like Reed Hastings of Netflix, want to end the LAUSD and replace it with portfolio type schools, just like in New Orleans. For them, dismantling public education in Los Angeles is one of their main goals. This will most certainly happen if Heather Repenning is elected.
One way Eli Broad and company, accomplish their goals is to buy off elected officials, aspiring politicians and the unions that endorse them. In 2008, the Broad Foundation’s mission statement stated its goal was in “Transforming K-12 urban public education through better governance, management, labor relations, and competition.” There are many more SEIU labor leaders who have served on Broad Foundation and or affiliated networks and organizations. In July of 2012, Andy Stern, former President of the SEIU, joined the Board of Directors for the Broad Foundation and continues to serve to this day.
Another connection between Heather Repenning and Eli Broad and his pro-public school privatizing advocates, like former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, lies with her intimate friendship and political relationship with Mayor Garcetti’s wife, Amy Wakeland. Mrs. Garcetti once worked as a spokesperson for Coalition for Kids, an organization founded to raise money for Mayor Riordan’s school board chosen candidates. Mrs. Garcetti is a powerful political player who works behind the scenes in various school board campaigns and is well connected politically and socially. Her political and social circles have influence on Ms. Repenning’s campaign
In addition, how much longer can we trust Mayor Garcetti with his political choices and appointees especially after he endorsed for charter school advocate Tamar Galatzan who helped bring us John Deasy and the iPad scandal. Let’s not forget that Joel F. Jacinto, Mayor Garcetti’s political appointee, is under FBI investigation as we speak. Yet another corruption link to Heather Repenning, as she sat as Vice President for the Public Works, with Joel F. Jacinto, which oversaw a vast majority of Councilman Huizar’s projects, also under investigation by the FBI. Ms. Repenning is also known to be “a friend of CD14” as some of his current and former staffers held fundraising events for her.
Heather Repenning’s campaign is not the only campaign that is throwing red flags. Graciela Ortiz has faced conflict of interest charges in Huntington Park and was once threatened with a recall by her constituents. Allison Bajracharya works in the charter school industry. Ana Cubas was once Jose Huizar’s Chief of Staff and is linked to charter school advocates. Like her mentor Monica Garcia, she has shown naked political ambitions for years. We need someone in office whose passion is our students and not someone who will do anything to get elected.
This is the reason why Jackie Goldberg is the only true answer for this election. March 05, 2019 vote Jackie Goldberg as our Democracy depends on it.
Dr. Rocio Rivas
Leonie Haimson, NYC Parent Activist, is blessed with a long memory and deep knowledge.
In this post, she explores the origins and evaluations of a blended learning program called Teach to One.
She writes:
Last week, two different studies came out about the results of the well-known blended learning program originally called “School of One” and now called “Teach to One”, created and sold to schools by an organization named New Classrooms. If you want to cut to the chase, you can read about the contrasting analyses in Education Week, Chalkbeat or the Hechinger Report. If you want to know about the history of this much-hyped program that was first developed for use in NYC public schools and uses software programs and algorithms to deliver instruction, read on here. It provides lessons in how insistent the promoters of online learning have hyped programs with little or no evidence behind them, how negative evaluations have been suppressed or discounted and how conflicts of interest have been ignored – all in the service of convincing schools to adopt these programs far and wide.
According to his Linked-in profile, Joel Rose was a Teach for America corps member for three years, until he was hired to work at the headquarters of Edison charter schools in New York City, a national for-profit chain of charters headquartered in NYC. By 2003, he was running a division of Edison called Newton Learning that provided tutoring to students through the supplementary services program (SES) that was included in No Child Left Behind. NCLB required public schools with low test scores to pay for their students to receive tutoring services from private companies. In 2003 alone, Newton Learning was paid more than $5 million by the NYC Department of Education for its tutoring services.
According to NCLB, parents of students at these schools were supposed to be provided with the choice of tutoring companies. Yet in 2005, the NY Post found that in some NYC schools, principals and parent coordinators were incentivized to recruit students for Newton. In one Bronx school, as a result, the school distributed flyers to parents saying “Newton Learning is your best SES choice. The Newton Learning Adventure offers FUN and EXCITING activity-based lessons.” Some parents were told by their schools that the only choice was for them to enroll their children in Newton Learning, or they would receive no tutoring at all.
In March 2006, the NYC Special Investigator of Schools Richard Condon released a report, revealing how several SES providers, including Newton Learning, had engaged in a number of “questionable business practices” in their dealings with DOE officials, parents and students. These companies had been involved in the “misappropriation and misuse of confidential student information and the offering of self- serving incentive programs”, and Newton staff had been improperly allowed entry into schools to directly solicit students. In one case, a principal permitted Newton reps to perform skits in front of students during class time to promote their services.
Newton staff had also improperly obtained student contact information from school staff and had offered financial incentives to principals and teachers if their students signed up. They had promised gifts to students in exchange for enrolling, including CD players and $100 gift cards. This sort of chicanery continued even after DOE told Newton to stop these practices, according to Condon’s report. Newton also had failed to carry out required fingerprinting and background checks for the staff they hired as tutors.
According to the DOE rules, Newton and other tutoring companies could use classroom space in the public schools free of charge, if granted a “permit” by the school’s principal. Yet in return, any company was also supposed to give students a 9% reduction in fees. Yet every company which had asked for a waiver from this discount was granted one by David Ross, the head of DOE’s Division of Contracts and Services. (Remember that name, David Ross; it will come up later.) Here’s an article in the NY Times, with more about the special investigator’s findings.
Condon’s report and news articles about his findings were apparently ignored by DOE, as shown by the fact that a few months later, in December 2006, Joel Klein hired Chris Cerf, to be his Deputy Chancellor, even though Cerf had led Edison schools during this period. In February 2007, Cerf brought Joel Rose to DOE to be his chief of staff.
Rose created the School of One pripogram, Which was hailed as the greatest, most revolutionary education program before it was ever implemented.
Read on to learn more about this remarkable job of marketing.
The story of hype and suppressed evaluations is fascinating and well worth reading.
Haimson concludes:
“Teach to One has been the most praised and promoted online learning program in the nation, aside from the Summit Learning platform, which has had its own serious problems. While Summit has refused to allow any independent evaluations of its efficacy, New Classrooms has suppressed studies with less than stellar results, with the help of the federal government.
“The most recent RAND analysis of schools that used personalized learning programs that received funding through the Next Generation Learning initiative, which have included both Summit and Teach to One, concluded there were small and mostly insignificant gains in achievement at these schools, and their students were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar schools. The overall results caused John Pane, the lead RAND researcher, to say to Ed Week that “the evidence base [for these schools] is very weak at this point. ”
“Yet both Summit and Teach to One, along with other online learning programs, continue to be generously funded and promoted by Gates, Chan-Zuckerberg LLC and other foundations. In April, the Dell Foundation gave New Classrooms another million to expand into high schools. On January 29, New Classrooms announced that Emma Bloomberg had joined its Board of Directors. How many negative evaluations have to be done before billionaires stop funding and helping these companies experiment on children?”
The Network for Public Education Action fund is developing a web-based score card for the 2020 presidential candidates.
We need YOUR help!
We want to keep score on where the candidates stand on issues that matter to students, teachers, parents, and public schools.
We want to know if they support public schools or if they support privatization.
We will keep the website updated based on the candidates’ public statements on television and at town halls.
We will check their funding reports to see if they are funded by the usual privatization-friendly billionaires and hedge-fund managers.
We urge you to attend their town halls and ask them questions about funding for public schools, about charters and vouchers, about testing, about federal policy requiring (unnecessary) annual testing, and about (unnecessary) federal funding for charter schools.
We need your help to keep our score care up to date once it is up and running.
We will not let education be forgotten in the 2020 race!
Climate change. Health care. Taxes. These are topics that 2020 Presidential hopefuls are happy to discuss. But as important as these topics are, we cannot let our public schools be ignored.
That is why we started The NPE Action 2020 Candidates Project.
In cities across this nation, public schools are disappearing. The city of New Orleans is now a system of privately run charter schools. Vouchers and voucher “workarounds” send taxpayer money from public schools to private and religious schools. Religious schools are flipping themselves into charter schools in order to get public funds. The Koch Brothers have promised to target five states in which they will work to make public education disappear.
Private “choice” is trumping public voice. Test scores are the rationale to shut and shutter community schools even though charter school test scores are not better than those of public schools, and studies show that students who leave public schools with vouchers often do worse.
The Network for Public Education Action’s 2020 Candidates Project will make sure that the issue of school privatization is not ignored. We will grade candidates on their positions regarding charter schools, vouchers, and high-stakes testing. We will grade them by how much they take from the billionaires who believe in the privatization of public schools and score each candidate on the company they keep. They can run for office but they can’t hide from the hard questions we will ask about school privatization.
Wake up, parents and teachers in New Jersey! The billionaires and Dark Money are launching a sneak attack on your children and students.
When he ran for office, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy promised to scrap the Common Core-aligned PARCC and end the state’s high-stakes exit exams.
But billionaires and hedge fund managers don’t want to stop high-stakes testing. They love PARCC because it makes public schools look bad. Making public schools look bad helps the privatization movement.
Dark money and billionaires are dumping money into the bank accounts of key legislators to keep the testing machine alive. Find out which billionaire education reformers are behind the push to keep high-stakes standardized testing alive in New Jersey, and which legislators are doing their bidding. #HijackedByBillionaires
“New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy campaigned on a promise to end PARCC and eliminate exit testing. Following his lead, the New Jersey Department of Education toured the state to get feedback on standardized assessments, wrote a report summarizing their findings, and proposed new regulations to replace ones passed during the Christie administration.
“But on September 12, 2018, before the Board’s discussion began, Senator Teresa Ruiz crashed the New Jersey State Board of Education meeting and suddenly regulations that seemed like a slam dunk were tabled.”
B4K, Inc. gave Ruiz a direct contribution of $1,000.
B4K has been the bullhorn for Tepper and Fournier’s reform agenda for close to a decade.
Senate President Steve Sweeney, a Ruiz ally, has fast tracked the bill to be voted on by the full Senate.
Sweeney is no stranger to education reform billionaires either. In fact, in his last election, millions of dollars were spent to support Sweeney and fend off an attempt by the New Jersey Education Association to unseat him.
The New Jerseyans for a Better Tomorrow PAC, which is run by a former Sweeney aide, received over 2 and a half million dollars from General Majority PAC which is “widely seen” as being controlled by New Jersey political boss, George Norcross.
General Majority PAC brought in contributions from three of the nation’s biggest education reform champions.
The largest contribution of $500,000 came from Walmart heiress Alice Walton, followed by $200,000 from Texas billionaire and former Enron trader John Arnold, and $100,000 from California billionaire and Netflix founder Reed Hastings.
ERNA, the dark money 501 (c)(4) that was Ruiz’s largest campaign contributor, contributed $25,000 to General Majority PAC.
Sweeney also received direct maximum contributions of $2,600 from Alan and Jennifer Fournier, David Tepper and B4K, Inc..
Glen Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker, reviewed Bernie Sanders’ claim that the Walton family makes more money in one minute than their average Walmart employee in one year. He said that Senator Sanders was right.
The difference is that the average Walmart worker has to go to work to earn money. The Waltons just sit still and get richer by the minute.
Kessler writes:
“The Walton family makes more money in one minute than Walmart workers do in an entire year. This is what we mean when we talk about a rigged economy.”
— Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in a tweet, Feb. 14, 2019
This tweet from the campaign Twitter account of Sanders, a potential 2020 presidential candidate, caught our eye. Whether this is a definition of a rigged economy is a matter of opinion, but we were curious whether his factoid was right — does the Walton family make as much money in a minute as the company’s workers make in a year?
Let’s take a look.
The Sanders campaign acknowledged that the information in the tweet came from a union-backed website known as Making Change at Walmart. The math behind this factoid is pretty simple and easily confirmed with documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Though Walmart is a publicly traded company, more than 50 percent of its shares are in the hands of the Walton family — 51.11 percent, to be precise. These shares are controlled primarily through two entities: Walton Family Holdings Trust and a holding company, Walton Enterprises. Members of the Walton family also have shares they control individually.
The three most prominent members of the family are Jim, S. Robson (Rob) and Alice, each estimated to be worth about $46 billion. They are the surviving children of Sam Walton, co-founder of the company. Other members of the family include Ann Walton Kroenke and Nancy Walton Laurie, children of Bud Walton, the other co-founder; Christy Walton, the widow of one of Sam’s sons; and 10 grandchildren (such as Lukas, worth about $16 billion, and Steuart, who is on the company’s board of directors).
When you add it up, the Walton family controls 1,508,965,874 shares out of 2,952,478,528 total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 2018 proxy statement.
Walmart’s most recent quarterly dividend was 52 cents a share, or $2.08 a year.
In other words, the Walton family earns $3,138,649,017.92 just in dividends a year, before adding in income from salaries, director’s fees and so forth. Yep, that’s more than $3.1 billion.
We have no idea how many hours a week members of the Walton family work on business, but a standard workweek is 40 hours, or 2,080 hours a year. That works out to $1.51 million an hour — or more precisely, $25,149 a minute.
By contrast, the union-backed website says, “at $9/hour, Walmart workers make less than $16,000/year working 34 hours per week, which is Walmart’s definition of full-time.”
Payscale says the average Walmart wage is $12 an hour, including managers, with cashiers earning $9.97 and sales associates earning $10.40. Walmart has previously told The Fact Checker that an entry-level worker earns $11 an hour.
For the sake of argument, let’s give these workers a 40-hour week. Walmart considers 34 hours full-time, which means that’s when workers can qualify for extra benefits, but under the law it has to start paying overtime when work exceeds 40 hours in a week. During holiday seasons, Walmart has been giving extra hours to existing workers rather than hiring seasonal workers. So a 40-hour week seems reasonable as a baseline.
Cashiers: $20,738 a year
Sales associates: $21,632 a year
Entry-level worker (Walmart figure): $22,880 a year
Walmart average (Payscale): $24,960 year
Walton family: $25,149 a minute
Even under a 40-hour metric, the Walton family still earns more in a minute than Walmart employees do in a year.
While the Walmart workers making $20,000 to $25,000 a year may pay little in income taxes or even qualify for the earned income tax credit, we should note that dividend income is taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income. (This lower tax rate applies to “qualified dividends,” which would apply to the Walmart family holdings.)
The Waltons will have to pay only 20 percent tax on dividend income, compared with a 37 percent tax rate on annual income above $612,000 — so their taxes are almost cut in half. The workers will pay the 6.2 percent Social Security tax on all of their income, while the Waltons will stop paying any Social Security tax once their income exceeds $132,900. (There is no income limit on the 1.45 percent Medicare tax.)
In other words, dividend income is much more valuable on an after-tax basis than ordinary income.
A Walmart spokesman declined to comment.
Even assuming a 40-hour week, the average Walmart worker earns less in a year than the Walton family earns in a minute just from dividends paid on the family’s stock holdings. It’s an astonishing statistic, and it happens to be correct. Sanders thus earns the coveted Geppetto Checkmark. Regular readers know that we reserve this rating for claims that are unexpectedly true — and that’s certainly the case here.
On this site, we have often complained about the philanthropists who impose their bad ideas on schools, which this far have consistently failed.
This article in The New Yorker reviews the new world of philanthropy, where the rich pay as little as possible in taxes and use their foundations to reorder the world as they think it should be. When they give, they end up in control, undermining democratic institutions and as rich as ever.
I strongly recommend a book titled “The Spirit Level,” which demonstrates that the most equal societies are the happiest societies.
On this subject, I recommend a book discussed in this article, Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.
When people think of Los Angeles billionaires who want to take control of the schools , they tend to think of Eli Broad and Reed Hastings.
Sara Roos, who blogs as Red Queen in LA, has done a deep dive into the political contributions of billionaire Bill Bloomfield, who gives generously to rightwing politicians and school privatization.
Mr. Bloomfield and his wife have spent $36 million since 2005 to advance their conservative Republican agenda.
This is an impressive investigation of the usesof Big Money to undercut democracy.
When billionaires call, politicians pick up the phone.
Bill Raden of Capitol& Main reports here on the sources of the contributions for the March 5 LAUSD special election for the empty seat created by the resignation of Ref Rodriguez, who stepped down after being convicted of money laundering in his campaign for the board. He relies on the spade work of Sara Roos, who blogs as “Red Queen in LA.” Early vote by mail has started.
Raden writes:
“The latest update on the money race in Los Angeles Unified’s March 5 special election to fill out the term of disgraced Board District 5 member Ref Rodriguez comes courtesy of intrepid ed blogger Sara “Redqueeninla” Roos. In a must-read, granular analysis, Roos breaks down the race’s campaign donations by profession or “affinity.” The results? “An awesome display of the power of machine politics” reflected in the number and size of donations from city contractors, developers, commissioners, public employees and appointees, political consultants and public-private partners.
“Of the top four money recipients, Camino Nuevo Charter Academy executive Allison Bajracharya drew 75 percent of the charter-related donations in the race, which comprise 45 percent of her campaign’s receipts. Former Eric Garcetti aide Heather Repenning is second, with 15 percent of all charter donations (or seven percent of her campaign’s overall contributions). Though Repenning, who also leads the top four with a whopping .81 patronage rating, has pledged that she would refuse charter school money, the independent expenditure committee backing her candidacy has already banked a $5,000 check from millionaire businessman and charter super-patron Bill Bloomfield.”
To get the whole story, read Sara Roos’ investigative report here.
Full disclosure: I support Jackie Goldberg, former teacher, former member of the LAUSD board, who served three terms in the state legislature, where she was chair of the Assembly Education Committee. she is deeply knowledgeable about education. I contributed to her campaign.
As is clear in Sara Roos’s tables,Jackie is not #1 in fundraising.
Word is that the charter lobby is sitting out the special election,waiting to see if there is a runoff. Then they will pour millions into defeating Jackie Goldberg. She is their worst nightmare.
Which will win? Money or knowledge/wisdom/experience?
Diane Ravitch's blog 