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Review and Preview of Tony Thurmond vs. Marshall Tuck

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By Thomas Ultican / Ultican

This year’s biggest election win in California was for the down-ballot office, Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI). Tony Thurmond defeated Marshall Tuck in a proxy battle between billionaires supporting public school privatization and teachers’ unions fighting for democratically run neighborhood schools. More than $61,000,000 was spent on the SPI office doubling the previous $30,000,000 spending record set in 2014 when Tuck lost to Tom Torlakson.

Director of research at California Target Book, Rob Pyers, reported this year’s total election spending in California realized a new level. Target Book publisher Darry Sragow commented, “If blowing through the billion-dollar campaign spending ceiling in California doesn’t give pause to everyone in politics, I don’t know what will.”

Of the eight state-wide constitutional offices on the ballot, the governor’s race topped spending at $108,221,028 and the SPI race came in second totaling $61,170,451. Spending in the governor’s race was also heavily impacted by billionaires supporting the charter school industry. California has an open primary in which the top two vote getters reach the general election ballot regardless of party. Before June’s voting, billionaires lavished Anthony Villaraigosa’s campaign unprecedented independent expenditure money trying to get him to the November ballot.   [Read more…]

Thrive Charter Schools All Hat and No Cattle

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Excellent public relations and marketing mask a substandard educational program at the inappropriately named Thrive Public Schools (TPS). The misleading name indicates that this private business is a public school. It is not. Four years of assessments confirm that both San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) and the County Office of Education (COE) were correct in 2014 when they denied TPS’s charter petition.

Jan. 7, 2014, SDUSD staff felt that TPS was not ready to open and reported to the board, “Staff recommends approval of the petition to establish Thrive Public School (Thrive) Charter School, for a five-year term beginning July 1, 2015, and ending June 30, 2020.” TPS leaders wanted a charter starting July 1, 2014. SDUSD board concluded TPS is “demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the program” and denied the petition.   [Read more…]

Lessons From the Continuing Assault on Kansas City Public Schools

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For three decades relentless harm has been visited upon public schools in Kansas City, Missouri. This city provides stark evidence for the fallacy of school choice and the folly of employing standardized testing results to gauge school quality.

Leaders from the Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS) presented at the recent Network for Public Education (NPE) conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. This article is in part based on that presentation.   [Read more…]

From the Network for Public Education Conference: “We Are Winning!”

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Diane Ravitch opened the fifth Network for Public Education (NPE) conference stating, “We are the resistance and we are winning!” She noted that “reformers” were envious of our domination of social media. When they hired mercenaries to staff their own multi-million dollar web-publications to counter us; they failed. We still dominate social media.

Diane concluded, “We’re winning. David is beating Goliath.”   [Read more…]

Big Spending on Privatizing San Antonio Public Schools

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Federal dollars are supplementing deep pocketed Destroy Public Education (DPE) forces in an effort to privatize schools in San Antonio, Texas. The total monetary support for the preferred charter school systems exceeds $200,000,000.

One “DPE” publication, The 74, published a lengthy piece glorifying the attack on San Antonio’s democratically run schools and praised local elites including the school superintendent trained by Arne Duncan and Eli Broad for leading the decimation of public schools in San Antonio’s poorest neighborhoods.   [Read more…]

Readers Write | Why I Support Nicole Jones for the Southwestern College Board of Trustees

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By Michael Flanders

I am proud to provide this endorsement of Nicole Jones for Seat 4 on the Southwestern College Board of Trustees. I’ve seen firsthand how she creates culturally sensitive programs at Cuyamaca College that both facilitate equal access and level the playing field for the college’s diverse population of students. She will be an exceptional Board Member for Southwestern College at a time when the future success of both the County and the State lies squarely in the hands of its community college leaders.

  [Read more…]

The How and Why of Measure YY, the San Diego Unified School District Bond Ask

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Back in the old days before Proposition 13, local schools were funded locally. School boards had the authority to raise property tax rates, constrained by the understanding that the electorate would vote them out come election time if they went too far.

In practice, this meant school districts with lower property values ended up with inferior education facilities and programs. Court cases in the 1970’s began the erosion of local control in the cause of rectifying these inequities; Prop 13 put the state in the driver’s seat.

School boards can no longer levy property taxes. They can, however, ask voters to support local funding for schools through parcel taxes and bond measures. And in the majority of cases, voters have agreed with this method of filling the holes blown through local education budgets.   [Read more…]

How the Wealthy Destroy Public Schools, One Gift at a Time

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By Jeff Bryant / Campaign for America’s Future

News about wealthy folks giving millions to education draw both praise and criticism. But two new reports by public education advocacy groups reveal the real impact rich people have on schools and how they’ve chosen to leverage their money to influence the system.

The first report, “Confronting the Education Debt” from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, examines the nation’s “education debt” – the historic funding shortfall for school systems that educate black and brown children. The authors find that through a combination of multiple factors – including funding rollbacks, tax cuts, and diversions of public money to private entities – the schools educating the nation’s poorest children have been shorted billions in funding.

One funding source alone, the federal dollars owed to states for educating low-income children and children with disabilities, shorted schools $580 billion, between 2005 and 2017, in what the government is lawfully required to fund schools through the provisions of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESSA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).   [Read more…]

The Union-Tribune’s False Narrative on Education and the Race for Superintendent of Public Instruction

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A recent editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune called for electing a former banker and charter school chief as Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI). Following a familiar destroy public education (DPE) script; the editor creates a false crisis as the predicate for an urgent need to elect charter school executive, Marshall Tuck, over California State Assemblyman, Tony Thurmond.

Another Phony Baloney Education Crisis.The piece opens by stating:

“The 21st century has been a transformative time in public education. While most educators were disappointed with the mixed results of the 2002 federal law that linked aid to improving test scores — the No Child Left Behind Act — some states have seen dramatic progress. In union strongholds like Massachusetts and New Jersey, and in nonunion states like Florida and Texas, reforms that emphasize accountability from students, parents, teachers and administrators alike — and that use evidence-based best practices to standardize and improve teaching tactics — have boosted student achievement. These four states’ 2017 scores in the massive National Assessment of Educational Progress confirm this success.”

Stunningly a group that cheered on the federal take-over of public education by the No Child Left Behind ACT (NCLB) admits the results were “mixed.” “Mixed” is a soft way of characterizing the abject and destructive failure that was NCLB. The editor implies that NCLB theory actually worked when citing the use of “evidence-based best practices to standardize and improve teaching tactics” as the reason for improved scores by the good schools on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing.   [Read more…]

Marshall Tuck: The Republicans’ Trojan Horse

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In last week’s column, I wrote that “the future of public education and the heart and soul of progressive California” were at stake in the Superintendent of Public Instruction race.  What makes this race so important is that it represents an attempt by moneyed interests and forces on the right to play in Democratic politics through the use of stealth and dishonesty.  Indeed, if you like the way the Lincoln Club intervenes in and tries to upset the Democratic apple cart in races here in San Diego, you’ll love how the right is trying to game California’s Democratic voters in this contest.

It’s so bad, that the state party came out with this extraordinary assertion last May leading up to the primary in response to Tuck’s refusal to disavow his Republican allies:

Tony Thurmond has won the overwhelming support of Democrats for Superintendent of Public Instruction because he champions our progressive values. Marshall Tuck’s support is limited to ultra-wealthy billionaires and right-wing thugs like Newt Gingrich and John Cox, who we see next to him in the latest independent mailer that Tuck has tacitly endorsed. It doesn’t matter how many pictures of President Obama he sends out to voters. We hear both sides of his mouth, and we know the conservative agenda he is part of.

  [Read more…]

A Texas-Sized Destroy Public Education IDEA

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First it was KIPP, then it was YES Prep and now IDEA has become the point of the destroy public education (DPE) spear in Texas. KIPP flourished because GAP founders Don and Doris Fisher gave them big money. YES Prep so excited Oprah that she presented them with a million dollar check during a TV interview. Now, John Arnold has given IDEA $10 million to expand into Houston and the El Paso based Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Educational Development has pledged another $10 million for IDEA to expand into El Paso.

The oddest DPE-inspired plan of all comes from Austin, Texas. In 2016, the Austin American Statesman reported that the relatively small KLE foundation is committing $16 million to IDEA. Odd because that represents more than half of the foundation’s assets and is 20 times greater than any previous grant. The Statesman article says, “The financial gift … will more than double IDEA Austin’s previous expansion plans by 2022, and the charter school says the donation will help it boost enrollment to 20,000 students, more than 12 times as many as it has now.”

A recent article in the Santa Fe New Mexican says about the IDEA growth initiative, “Those plans include expanding to 173 pre-K, elementary, middle and high schools from Texas to Louisiana and Florida by 2022 — a goal of serving 100,000 students compared to 35,595 today.”   [Read more…]

Why Electing Tony Thurmond as Superintendent of Public Instruction is the Most Important Race in California

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Here in California, we have seen that the Bloombergs, Waltons, Broads, and other self-proclaimed rich saviors of the world have not been satisfied just to meddle in the classroom through various forms of philanthrocapitalism, they have sought to impose their will by trying to buy elections.  Just last June an all-star crew of billionaires lost in their effort to turn California’s gubernatorial election into a proxy war over corporate education reform when Antonio Villaraigosa’s anti-union crusade for Governor fell flat with voters despite his donors’ considerable largesse.  

Unfortunately, while their millions were vanquished in that round, the bottomless wallet crowd still have one more key position that they are intent on purchasing this fall: the Superintendent of Public Instruction.  During the primary, I wrote two columns exposing the big money behind Marshall Tuck, which included not just the mega-rich corporate education crew, but also prominent Trump donors and other nefarious rightwing characters.  

Well, those folks are still funding Tuck and most knowledgeable political observers expect a race where Tuck’s money advantage over Assemblyman Tony Thurmond will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million to $3 million.  Thus, despite the support of the California Democratic Party, educators, labor, and a litany of community groups, it is essential that the grassroots mobilize to support Thurmond and spread the word about his candidacy in order to overcome this brazen attempt to buy the election.     [Read more…]

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