Corporate Titans throw Millions into Tuck Campaign

Corporate school  “reformers” have raised over $4 million from the very rich during the last week to contribute to the campaign to elect Marshall Tuck as Superintendent of Public Instruction.  According the Sacramento Bee The fund includes $1 million each from Los Angeles businessmen Bill Bloomfield and Eli Broad, a major financier of efforts to overhaul public education. The Gap co-founder Doris Fisher and Laurene Powell Jobs, philanthropist and widow of Steve Jobs, have each contributed $500,000.

This anti union efforts raised in just one week  dwarfs the $2 million raised by teachers’ unions in favor of Torlakson.

Corporate advocates want Tuck in office to  support the anti tenure decisions and anti teacher due process  procedures of the Vergara case.

A handful of ultra-wealthy donors who support school privatization and cutting public pension systems are behind a flood of spending supporting former Wall Street Banker Marshall Tuck's campaign for state schools superintendent, campaign disclosure records show.

Far from "Parents and Teachers for Tuck," the $4.7 million collected so far comes instead from sources that support school vouchers, privatization of public pension systems and using disruptive business tactics to overhaul public schools.

Major funders include:

$500,000 from Carrie Walton Penner, whose family made its fortune running anti-union, low-wage paying Wal-Mart. The Walmart 1% website reports that Penner's biography includes serving on the board of the Alliance for School Choice - a school voucher advocacy group.

$300,000 from John D. Arnold, a former Enron trader and funder of efforts to persuade governments to cut public employee pensions. In February, the New York Times reported that a public television station returned $3.5 million Arnold's foundation had paid to underwrite a series examining the economic sustainability of public pensions.

$1 million from corporate CEO Eli Broad. He drew statewide attention when it was revealed he had donated $500,000 to a group with ties to the Koch Brothers to defeat Proposition 30 and pass Proposition 32.

Here's how Parents Across America, a public school advocacy group, described Broad's approach: "Broad and his foundation believe that public schools should be run like a business. One of the tenets of his philosophy is to produce system change by 'investing in disruptive force.' Continual reorganizations, firings of staff, and experimentation to create chaos or 'churn' is believed to be productive and beneficial, as it weakens the ability of communities to resist change."

For background on the financing of the corporate “reform” crowd see  http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2014/10/profits-for-corporate-school-reformers.html

and, http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2014/09/corporate-educational-reformers.html

 Incumbent Torlakson supports extension of Prop. 30 taxes that have restored funding to California schools after the devastation of the economic crisis when over 30,000 teachers were dismissed.  Marshall Tuck does not yet know if he supports extending this funding.  States following the austerity approach continue to severely  cut their school funding, see Texas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and others. 

See additional posts on this race here on the blog.