The vote totals have been growing.
The last report, published by the Secretary of State at 4:59 pm PST, shows a big increase for Tony Thurmond. His total is now nearly 160,000 more than Tuck’s.
https://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/superintendent-of-public-instruction
This is nearly a two-point lead.
The charter billionaires spent twice as much on Tuck’s campaign as Thurmond received, mostly from teachers and unions.
Passion beats money. Not always. But maybe in this race.
Wow!!
I have been watching the website of the California Secretary of State to follow the close contest between Tony Thurmond and Marshall Tuck. The polls and pundits predicted that Tuck would win.
When the polls first closed, Tuck had an early lead, but millions of votes had not been counted. In California, mail-in ballots postmarked on the day of the election must be counted, and they are still being counted.
After election day, Thurmond went into the lead, then Tuck came back, then Thurmond opened up a lead of 65,000-85,000 votes. That lead has held steady over the past couple of days as the vote total grows.
The vote is not final, and the numbers obviously could change in the days ahead.
Thurmond is winning heavily in Los Angeles (the city that should be Marshall Tuck’s base, where the most charters are located) and in San Francisco, which is Thurmond’s base.
On October 28, EdSource in California reported that at least $50 million had been raised for the race, and that Tuck had outraised Thurmond by 2-1.
When all the reports are in, the total amount of spending will surely be even more.
Thurmond was backed by the California Teachers Association and labor unions, meaning that his campaign was paid for by the dues of working people.
Here is a partial list of Tuck donors, a veritable Who’s Who of the school choice movement:
Bill Bloomfield: $6.761 million
Bloomfield is a billionaire Republican mega-donor who has become a charter school advocate.
The Walton Family: $5.138 million
Walmart billionaires
Eli Broad: $3.2 million
The Los Angeles billionaire who believes in closing public schools and privatizing them into charters.
Arthur Rock: $3.2 million
A California venture capitalist and billionaire who gives millions to Teach for America
Doris Fisher: $3.1 million
A billionaire, thanks to The Gap and Old Navy; the family gives heavily to KIPP
Richard Riordan: $2 million
The former Mayor of Los Angeles
These were the totals as of October 28. We will have to wait a few weeks for a complete accounting.
Undoubtedly these donors could have given twice or three times as much, but must have decided that it might embarrass Tuck to have three times as much money as Thurmond. Twice as much should have been enough.
One thing is certain. This is the most expensive contest in history for the job of State Superintendent of Public Instruction, a job that pays $175,000 and has limited authority.
The symbolic importance of this race, however, cannot be overstated. If the charter lobby prevails in a deep blue state, it can prevail in every state. It already owns Governor Cuomo in New York (but lost control of the State Legislature, when progressive candidates ousted fake Democrats in the State Senate). It tried and failed to lift the charter cap in Massachusetts in 2016, routed in a public referendum, even though the Governor and the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is in the hands of the charter industry.
So, we will continue to keep a close watch on California, where the teachers and the charter billionaires are in a face-off.
Last post on this race until there is a clear trend.
There was an update later than the one I just posted, which showed Tony Thurmond with a substantial lead.
Tuck is now ahead by about 13,000 votes.
Los Angeles County is supposed to report late tomorrow.
You can check too.
Fingers crossed.
The race for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction is dramatic!
Until now, Tuck has been in the lead.
Just moments ago, Tony Thurmond surged ahead by 65,000 votes.
Look here for the latest.
The link takes you to the official state website.
100% of districts have reported partially. The count is not finished. Sit tight.
The veil is beginning to fall away from the billionaire-funded charter activity. There are no grassroots in this billionaire-driven “movement.” It is all about money. Without the billionaires’ money, the demand and the supply would dry up.
Inside Philanthropy looks at the funding behind Marshall Tuck, and the article assumes he has won. But millions of votes remain uncounted in California and the contest is not yet decided. At last count, the candidates were less than one percentage point apart. We will have to wait to see who wins the contest between Big Money and teachers.
On the eve of the election, spending for this election had risen to $50 million. The total is likely to be even higher when final reporting is in.
The apparent winner of the contest, Marshall Tuck, is the former president of Green Dot, a charter school network. He wants to expand charters in a state that already leads the nation in the number of such schools. The other candidate, Tony Thurmond, argued for putting the brakes on charters to address issues of transparency and accountability.
Tuck ran unsuccessfully for the same office in 2014 in a race that cost $30 million. In both cases, Tuck outspent his opponent. This year, his campaign had raised $28.5 million by election day.
The money has come from a who’s who of charter school backers and K-12 philanthropists, including Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Lynn Schusterman, Julian Robertson, Laurene Powell Jobs, Laura and John Arnold, Dan Loeb, Michael Bloomberg and his daughter Emma, and three Waltons: Carrie Walton Penner, Alice Walton, and Jim Walton.
Among Tuck’s biggest backers was Helen Schwab, wife of the finance billionaire Charles Schwab, who gave $2 million to EdVoice for the Kids PAC, which managed independent campaign committees for Tuck; Arthur Rock, the venture capitalist, gave $3 million to EdVoice, while Doris Fisher gave over $3 million. Along with the Schwabs, Fisher has been a huge backer of charter schools as a philanthropist and a consistent mega-donor for political campaigns in this space.
A less familiar name on the list of top backers to EdVoice is businessman Bill Bloomfield. In fact, Bloomfield was the single biggest supporter of the PAC this year, with $5.3 million in donations.
What is crucial in this article is that it recognizes that the push for charters depends on billionaires who have no direct interest in public schools other than to destroy them.
Elected school boards are accountable to the people. To whom are the billionaires accountable?
The most important line in the article is the last one, which recognizes an obvious fact:
Regardless of what you think of charter schools, this seems like no way to make policy on public education, long regarded as among the most democratic institutions in America.
On election night, the pollsters and pundits predicted that charter champion Marshall Tuck would beat teachers’ choice Tony Thurmond in the race for State Superintendent of Instruction in California.
Tuck’s campaign raised twice as much as Thurmond. The charter billionaires gave Tuck’s campaign at least $30 million.
On election night, Tuck had a sizable lead: 82,000 votes.
But millions of votes had not been counted.
As the counting continues, the gap between them continues to narrow.
In the count reported tonight, the difference between them was only 0.2%.
Of 7 million votes counted, the difference between them was fewer than 21,000 votes.
The counting is not finished.
This race is not over.
The New York Times spotted an important new trend: the new wave of Democratic elected officials are not in favor of charter schools. We knew this had to happen. Democrats could not be Democrats and remain in alliance with Wall Street, hedge fund managers, billionaires, the Walton family, the DeVos family, and the Koch brothers.
Eliza Shapiro writes:
Over the last decade, the charter school movement gained a significant foothold in New York, demonstrating along the way that it could build fruitful alliances with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other prominent Democrats. The movement hoped to set a national example — if charter schools could make it in a deep blue state like New York, they could make it anywhere.
But the election on Tuesday strongly suggested that the golden era of charter schools is over in New York. The insurgent Democrats who were at the forefront of the party’s successful effort to take over the State Senate have repeatedly expressed hostility to the movement.
John Liu, a newly elected Democratic state senator from Queens, has said New York City should “get rid of” large charter school networks. Robert Jackson, a Democrat who will represent a Manhattan district in the State Senate, promised during his campaign to support charter schools only if they have unionized teachers.
And another incoming Democratic state senator, Julia Salazar of Brooklyn, recently broadcast a simple message about charter schools: “I’m not interested in privatizing our public schools.”
No one is saying that existing charter schools will have to close. And in fact, New York City, which is the nation’s largest school system and home to the vast majority of the state’s charter schools, has many that are excelling.
Over 100,000 students in hundreds of the city’s charter schools are doing well on state tests, and tens of thousands of children are on waiting lists for spots. New York State has been mostly spared the scandals that have plagued states with weaker regulations.
But it seems highly likely that a New York Legislature entirely under Democratic control will restrict the number of new charter schools that can open, and tighten regulations on existing ones.
The defeat is magnified because Mr. Cuomo, a shrewd observer of national political trends with an eye toward a potential White House bid, recently softened his support for charter schools. Mayor Bill de Blasio is a longtime charter opponent with his own national aspirations.
And New York is not the only state where the charter school movement is facing fierce headwinds because of the election.
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, an enemy of public sector unions, was unseated by a Democrat, Tony Evers, a former teacher who ran on a promise to boost funding to traditional public schools.
In neighboring Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who promised to curb charter school growth, beat the incumbent Republican, Gov. Bruce Rauner, a supporter of charter schools. And in Michigan, a Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, promised to “put an end to the DeVos agenda.”
Ms. Whitmer won her race for governor decisively against the state’s Republican attorney general, Bill Schuette, who is an ally of Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under President Trump. Ms. DeVos has been an outspoken proponent of charter schools in her home state of Michigan and nationally.
Voters on Tuesday gave Democrats control of the New York State Legislature. It seems likely that the body will restrict the number of new charter schools that can open.CreditHolly Pickett for The New York Times
Now charter school supporters are wrestling with the unpleasant reality that a supposedly bipartisan movement, intended to rescue students from failing public schools, has been effectively linked to Wall Street, Mr. Trump and Ms. DeVos by charter school opponents.
Derrell Bradford, the executive vice president of a national group that backs charters, 50CAN, acknowledged that the election results raised new challenges. He said the situation was especially fraught because Mr. Trump has championed charter schools, making the issue toxic for some Democrats.
“I find it frustrating that the president’s support is often used as the reason for people to abandon support of charters and low-income families,” Mr. Bradford said.
Where insurgent national Democrats support charter schools, they do so carefully: Representative Jared Polis, the Colorado Democrat whom voters sent to the governor’s mansion on Tuesday, founded two charter schools. But he has made sure to criticize Ms. DeVos’s vocal brand of school choice advocacy.
Tuesday’s results were compounded by other recent blows for charters in liberal states.
In 2016, Massachusetts voters rejected a referendum that would have expanded the state’s high-performing charter schools. Though backers poured $20 million into the race, it was no match for Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders, progressive stars who opposed the initiative.
Philanthropists tried again in California over the summer, when they spent $23 million to bolster the former Los Angeles mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, in the primary for governor. Mr. Villaraigosa, a Democrat, was easily beat by Gavin Newsom, the Democratic lieutenant governor, who has been vague about the role of charters as he seeks to make California an epicenter of opposition to the Trump administration.
Some advocates find a sliver of hope in the fact that even the most liberal Democrats acknowledge that charter schools are here to stay. Many opponents want to slow growth, not destroy charters.
“No matter how hostile some of the cities get to charters, the charters have endured,” said Jeanne Allen, the chief executive of the Center for Education Reform, a national school choice advocacy group.
In New York, the insurgent Democratic candidates’ criticism of charters was somewhat less central to their campaigns than their support for traditional public schools. And though most of those Democrats said they would reject any plan to expand charter schools, they are aware that charters are popular among some families in their own districts.
“You don’t want to alienate anybody,” said Alessandra Biaggi, who in the Democratic primary unseated one of the charter lobby’s most reliable allies, State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein, in a Bronx district. “I understand why charter schools exist, I understand why they have come to the Bronx, I really get it. But we’ve got to focus on improving our public schools.”
But even the best-case scenario — widespread political ambivalence, rather than animus, toward charters — would have significant consequences for charter school supporters in New York.
The Legislature may not even bother to take up charter advocates’ most pressing need: lifting the cap on the number of charter schools that can open statewide. Fewer than 10 new charter schools can open in New York City until the law is changed in Albany.
That means the city’s largest charter networks, including the widely known Success Academy, will be stymied in their ambitious goal of expanding enough to become parallel districts within the school system.
“I understand why charter schools exist,” said Alessandra Biaggi, who will represent part of the Bronx in the State Senate. “But we’ve got to focus on improving our public schools.”
But it is the smaller, more experimental charter schools that may have the most to lose.
“A new generation of schools will be thwarted,” said Steven Wilson, the founder of Ascend, a small network of Brooklyn charter schools.
And charters will now be partially regulated by the movement’s political foes. State Senate Democrats, with the lobbying support of teachers’ unions, are likely to push laws requiring charter schools to enroll a certain number of students with disabilities or students learning English. Previous proposals indicate that those politicians may force charters to divulge their finances, and could make it harder for charters to operate in public school buildings.
Those legislators could even impose a limit of about $200,000 on charter school executives’ salaries. At least two operators made over $700,000 in 2016.
Charter school advocates in Democratic states said defeat has made their political mission clear: Convince the holdouts of their liberal bona fides.
“What people don’t understand is that our previous politics obscured just how progressive the vast majority of people in the charter movement actually are,” James Merriman, C.E.O. of the New York City Charter School Center, said.
Still, some of the political wounds New York’s charter school sector has sustained appear self-inflicted, especially in light of the state’s eagerness to challenge Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Days after the 2016 election, Eva Moskowitz, the C.E.O. of Success Academy, interviewed with Mr. Trump for the role of education secretary. When she announced that she would not take the job, Ms. Moskowitz praised the president on the steps of City Hall.
The next day, Ms. Moskowitz hugged Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, when she visited a Success Academy school. A few months later, Ms. Moskowitz welcomed the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, to the same school during the fight to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which Mr. Ryan helped lead.
Students peered out the windows of the Harlem school as angry protesters waited outside, playing bongos and waving signs.
After a backlash from her staff, Ms. Moskowitz said she “should have been more outspoken” against Mr. Trump.
The situation got worse when one of Ms. Moskowitz’s most prolific donors, the hedge fund billionaire Daniel S. Loeb, said last summer that a black state senator who has been skeptical of charter schools had done more damage to black people than the Ku Klux Klan.
His comment was met with fury from black supporters of charter schools, some of the movement’s most indispensable allies.
On Tuesday, that senator, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, became the next leader of the New York State Senate.
Reed Hastings, billionaire founder of Netflix, hates public schools. He wants to eliminate school boards and replace them with corporate management. He has spent more than $100 million promoting charter schools.
“Hastings’ lavish spending has raised concerns among critics who worry that the sort of technologies and efficiencies he used to build his Silicon Valley empire and is now applying to education might not work for the nation’s schoolchildren.
These concerns were raised in 2014, when Hastings, at a California Charter Schools Association meeting, asserted that public schools are hobbled by having elected schoolboards.
“Let’s think large-scale,” says Brett Bymaster, a Silicon Valley electrical engineer who broke the story about Hastings’ school board comments on his blog about Rocketship, a charter school chain supported by Hastings. “You have someone who is contributing millions and millions of dollars to local and statewide political races and who was the former president of the state school board — whose stated goal is to end democracy in education. That is deeply disturbing.”
When Hastings served as chair of the California State Board of Education, he opposed bilingual education, leading Democratic legislators to block his reappointment. While on The State Board, he led the charge to remove any limits on the number of charters in the state and to limit regulation or accountability.
“The fact that California Charter Academy, one of the country’s largest charter school operators, collapsed and left 6,000 California students without a school during his board tenure, did little to sway Hastings’ enthusiasm for publicly financed yet privately run schools. Along with helping to fund the Rocketship and Aspire charter programs, he’s served on the boards of the California Charter Schools Association and the KIPP Foundation, the largest network of charter schools in the country. And much of Hastings’ school reform efforts have focused on technological solutions. He helped launch NewSchools Venture Fund, which has invested $250 million in education entrepreneurs and “ed tech” products. He’s also been a major backer of DreamBox Learning, which develops the math software used in Rocketship schools, and the Khan Academy, an online teaching video clearinghouse.
“But so far, the outcomes of many of these ed tech ventures have been mixed. Khan Academy has been criticized for including fundamental math errors in some of its instructional videos. And while DreamBox once championed a Harvard University study that found that use of its math software was associated with test achievement gains in grades three through five, the study itself noted it could not be ruled out that the gains were “due to student motivation or teacher effectiveness, rather than to the availability of the software.” What’s more, the user data collected by programs developed at Khan Academy, DreamBox and other companies are fueling concerns over student privacy.
“More broadly, education experts are worried about the impact of minimally staffed, call center-like computer learning labs on the nation’s students and teachers, especially as this approach becomes more commonplace in the name of cost savings and innovation. (In a 2012 Washington Post article, former Rocketship CEO John Danner noted that “Rocketeers” could eventually spend 50 percent of their school day in front of computers.)”…
“When Netflix became the first major U.S. company to offer unlimited paid family leave for both male and female employees, it was criticized for extending the policy only to its white-collar employees, not blue-collar workers in charge of customer service and DVDs. And while Microsoft has required that many of its contractors and vendors provide their workers with sick days and vacation time and Google has demanded that its shuttle bus contractors pay better wages, so far Netflix has ignored calls for improved working conditions for its contract workers, says Derecka Mehrens, co-founder of Silicon Valley Rising, a campaign to raise pay and create affordable housing for low-wage workers in the tech industry.
“Mehrens sees a similar class bias in Hastings’ approach to public education. “We see profound consequences, both political and economic, when technology industry leaders take action from a position of privilege and isolation from the very communities they desire to help,” she says. “When tech industry leaders like Reed Hastings call for an elimination of school boards or for more privatization of public schools, they block low-income people from using the one instrument that the powerful can’t ignore – their vote.”
“Hastings’ end goal for California appears to be the near-total replacement of traditional public schools with charter schools. In his 2014 speech where he discussed abolishing elected school boards, Hastings pointed to New Orleans – whose school system was largely taken over by the State of Louisiana after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and converted to the country’s first predominantly charter public school system – as a model:
“So what we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily, and the work ahead is really hard because we’re at eight percent of students [in charters] in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90 percent, so we have a lot of catchup to do… So what we have to do is continue to grow and grow… It’s going to take 20-30 years to get to 90 percent of charter kids.”
For his contempt for public schools and his determination to remove democratic governance of education, I hereby place Reed Hastings on this blog’s Wall of Shame.
I have been watching the returns in California to see what happened in the race between Tony Thurmond and Marshall Tuck. As of early this morning, Tuck had a small lead. But a notice sent from the Thurmond campaign says it is “too close to call.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Madeline Franklin
209-210-8950
HISTORIC STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION RACE TOO CLOSE TO CALL
With nearly 4 million ballots left to be counted, Assemblymember Tony Thurmond thanked his supporters and the voters of California.
California – Wednesday, November 7, 2018 – Assemblymember Tony Thurmond is thanking his supporters and the voters of California as the State Superintendent of Public Instruction election remains too close to call with an estimated 4 million ballots left to be counted. The race was the most expensive education election in American history, with total spending topping $60 million. Thurmond was outspent two-to-one.
“With millions of ballots left to come in, we are digging in and waiting for every vote to be counted,” said Thurmond. “The kids of California are in it for the long haul and we are too. I’m so proud of the broad coalition we built, and I thank the thousands of educators, students, and public education advocates who communicated directly with voters until the polls closed yesterday.”
Thurmond was supported by Senator Kamala Harris, the California Democratic Party, and California’s teachers.
“I ran for Superintendent of Public Instruction because I want to deliver to all Californians the promise that public education delivered to me – that all students, no matter their background and no matter their obstacles, can succeed with a great public education,” Thurmond vowed.
“We talked to voters across the state, and told them what this election means for each of us: It means giving every kid the opportunity to succeed in the 21st century, not just the ones that show the most potential. It means funding our public schools at the levels they deserve, not pouring money into our jails and prisons. It means providing mental health treatment for kids, not arming them with guns. It means supporting our teachers, not demonizing them. And it means stopping Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos’s anti-education agenda from coming anywhere near California’s public schools.”
The United Teachers of Los Angeles have voted to authorize a strike. The union has been negotiating with Superintendent Austin Beutner, a former investment banker who has no experience in education.
I sent the following message to the teachers of Los Angeles.
I am writing to my friends who teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District to encourage you to stay strong in your demands for smaller classes and the resources your students need.
Your working conditions are your students’ learning conditions.
You should not be expected to pay out $1,000 or more from your salary for school supplies.
I am astonished that one of the cities with the greatest concentration of wealth in the world is unwilling to pay what it costs to educate its children.
John Dewey wrote more than a century ago: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his children, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.”
The billionaires who have declared war on public education and who are funding the California Charter School Association would not tolerate overcrowded classrooms, obsolete textbooks, and crumbling buildings in the schools their children attend. They should not tolerate such conditions in the public schools of Los Angeles that other people’s children attend, people without their wealth.
They want the best for their children, and they should demand the best for all children, and pay for it.
Please fight against “school choice,” an idea that was first launched by segregationists in the South to block the Brown decision in the late 1950s. It is now the favorite cause of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who wants to replace our nation’s democratically-controlled public schools with a menu of “choices,” none of which are as good as public schools.
In California, as elsewhere, charter advocates oppose accountability and transparency. Furthermore, charters have been characterized by scandals and fraudulent financial practices, a result of their lack of oversight and accountability.
Charter schools should be subject to the same laws, rules, and regulations as public schools if they want to give themselves the name of “public schools.”
Your superintendent Austin Beutner came to the job thanks to a takeover bankrolled by the charter lobby. He has never been an educator, and you will have to help him understand the importance of teacher professionalism, of reducing class sizes, and of public education in a democratic society. He just doesn’t get it.
Public schools are, have been, and will continue to be the foundation stone of our democratic society. If we lose it, we put our democracy at risk.
Fight for your students. Fight for public education. Fight for the teaching profession. Fight for a better future for the children and for our society.
Your friends across the nation are watching and will cheer you on!
Diane Ravitch
