Stacking Boards: Seating the "Reform Majority"
Guest Post by John Harris Loflin of the Education-Community Action Team, Indianapolis
National agenda to seat "reform majority" school boards in key cities
“Lead the effort to seat ‘reform majority’ school boards in several key cities.”
~ Democrats for Education Reform, “A Year of Impact” 2012 DfER accomplishment
It looks like the January 7, 2013 Stand for Children (SfC) “celebration” for their 3 endorsed IPS school board commissioners (Arnold, Cosby, and Hannon) is one more of many this national lobbyist group conducts.
SfC also “celebrated” the August 2012 election of 4 of the 7 candidates they endorsed in the Memphis, TN school board race. Two from the newly selected board are SfC members and 2 appointees were directly supported by SfC due to their alignment with SfC’s “core values.”
According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal reporter Jane Roberts, SfC raised more than $300,000: $200,000 from a single out-of-town source and including $30,000 from local sources. SfC spent $154,000 on the seven school board races, including $60,000 in direct mail. The bigger expense ($90,000) was for training and dispatching hundreds of students that SfC paid $10/hour for a door-to-door campaign.
Memphis reporter John Branston (The City Magazine) in his article “Stand for Something” pointed out that although the various media were confused as how to describe the SfC organization, he noted the, “One thing we [the Memphis media] agreed on is that Stand For Children is unusually well funded and spent more than $150,000 on the school board races, which is a huge amount.”
SfC and DfER franchises are electing school boards elsewhere
Evidently what happened in Memphis and Indianapolis is part of the national SfC/DfER organization efforts to