Populist school board candidate beats challenger's $250,000 worth of negative ads [View all]

[eridani]

http://dianeravitch.net/2013/10/20/who-is-funding-the-campaign-to-defeat-sue-peters-for-seattle-school-board/

I've noticed that in the past two or three years, a number of extremely rich people are bundling funds and pouring them into local school board races.

Often the people making the campaign contributions do not live in the state or local community.

I wrote about this strange and new phenomenon in my book Reign of Error.

It is a deliberate and coordinated campaign to seize control of education at the local level.

This turns out to be remarkably easy, as the people who run for school board usually are able to put up or raise $10,000-40,000 at best.

But the strangers can easily assemble (or “bundle”) many times that amount to elect their hand-picked candidate, who–if elected–will become a voice for privatization, charter schools, Teach for America, test-based evaluation of teachers, and every other policy that is guaranteed to demoralize teachers and hand public dollars over to nonpublic schools and entrepreneurs. This is a very small investment for corporate reformers in a very large prize.

We saw it in the state board elections in Louisiana, where millions flowed into the state to give Governor Bobby Jindal a compliant board. We saw it in Los Angeles, where Mayor Bloomberg sent a cool $1 million, and Michelle Rhee tossed in a quarter million dollars (thankfully, they lost).

We saw it in the Washington State charter campaign, where Bill Gates, the Bezos family (amazon.com), and the Walton (Walmart) family easily outspent the parent groups school boards, and civil rights groups to enact charter legislation, which had been turned down three times previously.

Now the target of big money is Sue Peters, a parent activist who is running for school board. She has antagonized the corporate reformers because she stands up for children, not for privatization. A PAC was created to defeat her.

https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/a-vote-for-sue-peters-is-a-vote-for-the-rest-of-us/

Suzanne Estey’s claim to fame, as she has stated during her campaign, is her involvement as a board member of Community Center for Education Results (CCER), an “organization” that was created out of thin air by Bill Gates to the tune of over $4M to go after Race to the Top funding. This was a three-year push for funds that allow any interested third party to access not only the basic information of name, address and social security number of our students, but now lots more, more than any parent would want to see made public. And all for a pittance. For more on the subject, see CCER, the Road Map Project and the loss of student privacy.

The accumulation of student information is a nationwide effort by Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and former New York Mayor Bloomberg to have a national database called inBloom.

Sue Peters, always tracking the school district’s actions, was the first to catch a leak of our students’ information three years ago during the same time that Estey was pushing to gain more information on our children, see Should the School District Be Allowed to Give Our Kids’ Phone numbers, Addresses and Photos to Every Tom, Dick and Pollster?

Sue has been an active parent in the Seattle Public School district for ten years, an education journalist, a member of the district’s Superintendent Search Community Focus Group and the Strategic Plan Stakeholder Task Force as well as a founding member of Parents Across America and the Seattle Math Coalition.

As with any campaign these days, though, we need to follow the money.

Estey has received $176,000 worth of campaign contributions from a relatively small group of people and yet doesn’t seem to know who her funders are or why anyone would be concerned. This is according to what Estey said in a candidate’s forum last month. Is this naiveté or a just little white lie? From what I’ve seen, she doesn’t seem to be the type to easily bold face lie to others…or is she? Check out the video of the 37th District Democrat’s Forum, go into the video to 10:36 and judge for yourself.