Board – Los Angeles Education Examiner

Split Decision on Board Elections Reverses School Board Alignment – EdX News from Election 2020

Seventeen hours from the close of polls in LA County (LAC) leaves a mixed set of results – from polar opposite wins, to hopeful-anticipation.

While 100% of LAC’s precincts have reported partial results, VBM (Vote By Mail) ballots continue to be delivered to ballot counting facilities statewide, including LAC’s Norwalk, where the count is on-going. Updates to LAC counts will not come before the close of day and starting next week, only twice per week.

When registration for delivery of VBM ballots closed last month, 5,709,853 were registered to vote in LAC. Registrations at Vote Centers since that time, including right up through the close of election day, remain unreported.

Big money for pro-charter school board candidates, picks George Gascón for DA

Los Angeles’ school district used to have sleepy school board races. But those low budget, pedestrian races – like that for LA County’s District Attorney – are bygones. Between the SCOTUS Citizens United ruling codifying limitless lobbying and independent campaign support, and the ascendency of “school choice” as a stalking horse for privatization of the public sector within the education arena, LAUSD’s school boardroom has become a surrogate battlefield for neoliberalism, public-private partnerships and the leveraging of public goods for private gain.

So, too, it would seem might the race for LAC’s District Attorney (LAC-DA) signal a new incursion on privatization in criminal justice.

And given such a grand ideological tussle, it is little wonder that formerly obscure school board elections of local and narrow interest should have become worth astonishing amounts of money to a select few with special interest in (eg, profit, systemic change, ROI extracted from) the political insurgency. Such an influx could concern underlying motivations surrounding next Tuesday’s LAC-DA race.

Think your vote doesn’t matter? Uneven early voting across LAUSD Districts means it may count more than ever.

Are you wondering whether the vote is effectively all over. Whether so many early ballots have been returned there’s, say, little point still in advocating for Schools And Community First (prop 15)? For community college board members? For Schools local bond measure RR? For your LAUSD BD3 (Schmerelson v Koziatek) or LAUSD BD7 (Castellanos v Franklin) board member?

The TL;DR is Your vote is still needed! Your advocacy is crucial. At best 4 in 5 ballots have not yet been counted as returned. Students are needing their voters’ support.

Who’s already gotten their VBM in? Who votes in the districts electing a school board member?

“When you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows”

-Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, 10/13/20

Senator Whitehouse laid out beautifully on Tuesday the context surrounding Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings in Washington as the pushing and pulling of ‘actors inside the frame of a puppet theater.’ He argues that not only are outside forces controlling these actors in the main show but they are integral to the narrative of it. And some of the evidence for broadening focus beyond the proscenium is when characters in the drama adopt “the practice of claiming … moral standards or beliefs to which [their] own behavior does not conform”: hypocrisy.

Just so has Marilyn Koziatek – or the independent expenditure committee (IEC) from which she proudly accepts endorsement of her West San Fernando Valley campaign for school board in the LAUSD3 board district – swerved from insinuation of responsibility for scandals that occurred before his tenure, to antisemitism to anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice bigotry. Schmerelson’s defeated opponent who has endorsed Koziatek, has even hypocritically alluded to Scott Schmerelson’s former republican registration. Meanwhile, swearing brand new allegiance to a political party is precisely the maneuver employed by her endorsed-candidate, Koziatek. The hypocrisy is not without irony, because Koziatek’s unacknowledged switch is in suspicious temporal proximity to her bid for this non-partisan office. Schmerelson’s, on the other hand, is in sharp ethical contrast since in concealing nothing, he has redeemed his revision of four years’ resistance, as ideological repudiation of today’s GOP.

Individual’s campaign contributions reflect ideological, not candidate, loyalty

Table 1 shows contributions to and between these campaigns directly: from individuals, from PACS (union, individuals and political), and from commercial special interests, as well as government entities (and “unitemized” entries). Individuals with campaign contributions to this set of candidates that totals $500 or below is suppressed in the interest of space; available on request.

Immediate And Peripheral Vigilance: LAUSD’s Schoolboard Election … Then Covid19

A running section appears in the sidebar to the right with information and links about SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19. All articles for the foreseeable future will also feature these links at the bottom.

In the meantime a primary election was held less than three weeks ago in Los Angeles County that is still being actively counted. Results continue to be updated twice-weekly with (2,101,601) ballots comprising more than 38% of the over 5.5m registered voters counted. As of March 17, 2020, there are 64K ballots left to count. A small subset of these will include yet-outstanding ballots from LAUSD schoolboard voters.

Representation on the LAUSD schoolboard matters all the more now under threat of pandemic than ever, since the unusual circumstances expose enormous issues regarding Education policy. The protective closing of classrooms forces into a limelight matters of online learning, homeschooling, equity and teaching and the role of Big Tech vs human practitioners in guiding, mentoring, instructing and raising our young.

Election Analysis: Mixed Results and There’s a Lot of Work Ahead

As the election results rolled in last night, much of the media focused on the drama in the Democratic Presidential Primary. But a lot happened in local races as well. The battle over whether or not the Los Angeles Unified School Board is controlled by supporters of public education and the UTLA or “school choice” and unfettered charter school expansion remains up in the air.

But first, let’s discuss Proposition 13 and what its failure means for the Schools and Communities First Ballot Initiative this fall. While the two ballot initiatives are very different, the failure of Proposition 13 doesn’t bode well for supporters of robust funding for public education.

Prop 13 (2020) was a bond measure that wouldn’t actually raise taxes, but was still opposed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer’s Association. We understand the Prop. 13 was complicated and that plenty of people reading this likely voted against it. But some of the opposition was based around mis-information that Prop 13 (the 1978 ballot measure that capped property taxes) was under attack.

Time To Vote

SuperCaliforniaisticexpialiTuesday is here; it’s finally here. Please don’t embarrass your country or family and fail to turn out. It seems hard to imagine turnout hasn’t been heavy already given the widespread availability of Vote Centers open now for weeks. It seems that everyone has received a postage-paid absentee ballot whether you asked for one or not. Click here to locate your new Vote Center regardless of past performance – don’t let it predict today’s. Come 8 p.m. tonight and it’s all over.

Just how embarrassing has been our recent turnout for LAUSD board elections? Pretty appalling. Approximately one in ten registered voters has deigned to vote since 2013 when really big-time money first suffused the LAUSD board races. That is, almost all our fellow citizens have let a tiny proportion elect the few who control a budget the size of the City of LA’s, and the weekday environment of our next generation citizens.

This really is no way to run a democracy. An informed and engaged electorate is the fuel which powers the republic; without it we have, well, what we have. Please be sure to contribute your 0.02 to the proceedings today. There’s still time….

Voter turnout for LAUSD Board of Education elections, 2014-2019

Bloomfield Devotes $3.7m Education Dollars Toward Elections, Not Schools

It’s been a week since last peek at the LAUSD board election spending. The rate of spending has slowed down a bit since over $1m was anted up by Bill Bloomfield and the California Charter School Association (CCSA, a charter school lobbying and service organization) between Thursday and Friday of one week ago. But the absolute spending in LAUSD school board elections since just last Friday has increased by nearly two and a half million dollars.

Across all four board races the total reported to the City of LA Ethics Commission is $8.2m. With almost half as much spent on negative campaigning as positive campaigning. In LAUSD7 one candidate (Gutierrez) registers no independent expenditures actually supporting the candidate, with all expenditures on her behalf spent in opposition.

The only candidate explicitly endorsed by the charter lobby is running in LAUSD3, recipient of an onslaught of resources both positive and deceptively negative. Expenditures favoring charter school public relations specialist Koziatek over incumbent former principal Schmerelson, run at 4 to 1. And in LAUSD5 where the expenditure imbalance is half again as great – 6:1 – the extravagantly-favored challenger didn’t even present herself at the only scheduled debate in that district. The incumbent, veteran teacher Goldberg, was the only one to show up to the charter-industry-sponsored event.

oppsup-comparison-update-022820-IEC

Figure 1 above is an updated visual representation of the relative distribution of independent expenditures across all four board district races. Boxes are proportional in size to the total; negative spending is below the line. These data broken out by donor are reported as of February 28, 2020. The total relative distribution can be readily compared with February 21, 2020 and February 20, 2020.

Bloomberg’s Autocracy In Flower: What His Political Spending Tells Us About His Candidacy

With billionaires circling the wagons on the debate stage and encircling our sensibilities in local municipal school board elections, it is reasonable to consider how moguls-turned-politicians influence politics. Michael Bloomberg is no stranger to California education politics; how has he been donating toward control in our California elections?

The good news from a local-autonomy standpoint is… not much, not this time. Like the lobby association for charter schools, CCSA, charter ideologues seem to be allowing a charter candidate to fall out of the primaries, at least in the open District 7 seat. Currently, several candidates are seriously vying for the seat, and most of the big money backing charter school candidates is waiting to see whether Tanya Franklin or Mike Lansing emerges as the challenger to the union-backed Patricia Castellanos, or Oakland-schools charter maven-regulator Silke Bradford.

Michael Bloomberg has not contributed to any Independent Expenditure Committees (IECs), where the really big bankroll lies in this year’s school board races. He has instead contributed maximally ($1200) only to candidate Franklin.

What Even One Day Bears: Charters Scrimmage For Majority Control Of The LAUSD Board

In reports downloaded from LA City Ethics Commission records posted between 2/20/20 and 2/21/20 – just 24 hours – the California Charter School Association (CCSA) lobby anted up nearly ¾ of a million more dollars in the LAUSD board District 3 race. Despite being one of the most visible forces in school board lobbying and elections, CCSA has endorsed in only one of four school board races this year.

In all, over one million new dollars was recorded, with more than 80% spent by partisans intent on reclaiming the majority board they lost when their candidate Ref Rodriguez plead guilty to felony money laundering and Jackie Goldberg was elected to his seat.

For comparison, in contrast with large contributions we reported previously, free market ideologue Bill Bloomfield contributed a modest $61,000 in the same time. Meanwhile CCSA spent nearly $500,000 dollars on their singular candidate Koziatek, and just shy of another one-third million smearing her opponent.

comparison-of-IE-donations-DL-0219-022120-to-all-Mar20-elections

Table 1 above compares independent expenditures reported in the past 24 hours (bottom), with those in the preceding five months (top) between 5/19/19 and 2/19/20.

An update of the chart published last week, 2/20/20, uses proportional squares to visually depict the pro and con independent expenditures in all LAUSD board elections.

oppsup-comparison-update-022220-IEC

Relative distribution reported 2/21/20 of all independent expenditures in all LAUSD board races, 5/19/19-2/21/20.