There has never been an election for State Superintendent of Public Instruction like the one recently concluded in California between Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond. Tom Ultican says that $61 Million was spent. It might eventually be even more.

This was an epic showdown between charter supports and charter skeptics.

The charter billionaires spent heavily on former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He didn’t get to the runoffs.

“When Villaraigosa lost badly in the June 6 primary, many of the same billionaires listed above turned their full attention toward electing Marshall Tuck SPI.

“Following a brief career in investment banking, Tuck took a job at the politically connected Green Dot charter schools. Steve Barr a former chair of the Democratic Party who had served on national campaigns for Bill Clinton, Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis founded Green Dot charter schools in 1999. He hired Tuck in 2002 to be…

This is an excellent essay at Medium that I learned about from Peter Greene of Curmudgucation. I copy and paste it in its entirety in case you don’t like signing into Medium.

Why New Educators Resent “Reformers”

Bard MAT in Los AngelesFollow

Let’s consider why so many young educators today are in open rebellion.

How did we lose patience with politicians and policymakers who dominated nearly every education reform debate for more than a generation?

Recall first that both political parties called us “a nation at risk,” fretted endlessly that we “leave no child behind,” and required us to compete in their “race to the top.”

They told us our problems could be solved if we “teach for America,” introduce “disruptive technology,” and ditch the textbook to become “real world,” 21st century, “college and career ready.”

They condemned community public schools for not letting parents “choose,” but promptly…

Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion at the Washington Post about national issues in education with Robert Pondiscio of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Dean Bridget Terry Long of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This followed a few other panels, including one in which Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his chosen school superintendent Janice Jackson lavished praise on their successful efforts to transform the public schools of Chicago, with nary a dissent.

Our panel did include dissent, since I was critical of school choice and the other two panelists supported it. I was critical of standardized testing, and Dean Long supported it.

Valerie Strauss did a great job moderating and keeping us on track.

In my opening statement, I argued that the key education issue of our time was the defunding of public schools by the federal and state governments. NCLB and Race to the Top had…

Tom Ultican has written several articles about the Destroy Public Education Movement; this installment examines a failing charter chain in San Diego that continues to rake in big bucks.

The Thrive charter chain, he says, is a masterpiece of marketing, but a failure at education.

When the chain was launched, the San Diego Unified School District staff said it was not ready to open; the founders appealed and were rejected by the staff of the County Board of Education. The founders appealed to the State Board of Education, where its defective application was rubberstamped by Governor Jerry Brown’s pro-Charter State Board.

Ultican says that charter schools are supposed to perform at least as well as similar public schools or show improvement over time.

Thrive charter schools did not meet either benchmark. But that did not deter funders or founders.

They were shameless and kept growing their failing charter chain. And…

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma, shares his thoughts about the Network for Public Education Conference in Indianapolis. He begins by trying to wrap his brain around my provocative claim that “We are winning.” After I received his post, I explained to him that everything the Reformers have tried has failed. Every promise they have made has been broken. They have run American education for a decade or a generation, depending on when you start counting, and they have nothing to show for it. I contend there is no “reform movement.” There is instead a significant number of incredibly rich men and women playing with the lives of others. The Billionaire Boys Club, plus Alice Walton, Laurene Powell Jobs, and a few other women. This is no social movement. A genuine movement has grassroots. The Reformers have none; they have only paid staff. If the money dried up…

Valerie Strauss summarizes the race between Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond.

Tuck has raised nearly $30 million from the billionaires who support charter schools; Thurmond has raised about $15 million, mostly from labor unions, teachers, and Democrats.

Tuck is supported by the Republican party. Although he claims to be a Democrat, he was booed at the state Democratic convention.

She writes:

One of the loudest and most expensive state races in the country is between two Democrats vying to win the nonpartisan position of superintendent of public instruction in California. More money is being spent on the race — for a position that has no independent policymaking power — than in most U.S. Senate campaigns.

The fight — the costliest in the state’s history for this post, with more than $43 million in campaign contributions, according to EdSource — is between state legislator Tony Thurmond and Marshall Tuck, a former…

The reason that voting has become a time-eating challenge is because of the tsunami of lies and half-truths that are designed to mislead voters. I have learned that none of the candidates can be trusted.

For that reason, I started each day by deleting all the campaign ads that arrived in my e-mail box without opening them.

I didn’t keep count of the hours spent reading and researching every candidate and all the Measures Submitted to Voters, but I do know that I spent more time making my decisions on this election than I have ever done before.

The first thing I did that probably cut the number of hours in half was to go through the “Contra Costa County Voter Information Guide with Sample Ballot” and cross out every Republican candidate before I started to do research. In previous elections, I gave every candidate a fair chance to gain…

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…

Earlier today, I posted about FUD, but I didn’t link to the article I wrote in Huffington Post in 2014.

The article was called “Understanding the Propaganda Campaign Against Public Education.”

Here it is.

Here is the Wikipedia history of FUD.

If you understand the purposeful uses of FUD, you can see the propaganda techniques employed by “reformers” to undermine public education.

The FUD campaign says “our public schools are failing,” “our public schools are obsolete,” “our public schools haven’t changed in a century,” but it is all disinformation.

It is FUD.

Our public schools are NOT failing. Our public schools are NOT obsolete. Our public schools have changed in many ways in the past century

The FUD purveyors will not tell you that charter schools do not get better test scores than public schools and usually get worse scores. They won’t tell you that more than 90% of charter…

You may have noticed that I have posted several times about the importance of electing Tony Thurmond to be the next Superintendent of Public Instruction in California. I do this because California is a very large, very important, very influential state. Even though California is a blue state, the privatizers have a strong Foothold there because there is a concentration of tech billionaires, p.us Eli Broad, who believe that public schools should operate like businesses. It worked for them, so naturally they think it’s right to impose their beliefs on education. These billionaires’ influence is increased by the huge money flow into the state from out-of-State billionaires like Michael Bloomberg of New York City. Currently, the billionaires have placed their bets on Marshall Tuck, a candidate who morphed from banker to charter leader.

Tony Thurmond is a social worker and a legislator. He identifies with the kids he wants to…