News Flash: Corporate Education Reformers Spend $563,000 and counting in Bridgeport loss - Wait, What?

News Flash: Corporate Education Reformers Spend $563,000 and counting in Bridgeport loss - Wait, What?:

News Flash: Corporate Education Reformers Spend $563,000 and counting in Bridgeport loss

by jonpelto

The final reports from Bridgeport’s November 2012 education reform referendum are in and it turns out that the corporate education reform industry and its supporters spent at least $562,955.16 in their effort to pass Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch’s anti-democracy initiative, a proposal that would have eliminated the City’s democratically elected board of education and replaced it with one appointed by the mayor.

In the end, Residents for a Better Bridgeport, the political action committee formed by Mayor Finch and his supporters, spent a total of $275,671.80 in the November 2012 referendum campaign that ended with Mayor Finch’s plan going down to defeat by a nearly 2 to 1 margin.

Excel Bridgeport, the corporate funded education reform group that has been lobbying for