Who’s Giving In LAUSD5
There’s a school board race on; VBM ballots are out and LAUSD’s Board District 5 votes at the polls March 5, 2019.
This time the “out-of-state billionaires” are “sitting this one out”. And it’s true, there are no outsized, multi-million dollar Independent Expenditure Committees (IEC) overflowing with money from privatizers and the California Charter School Association (CCSA), bankrolling negative, deceitful, messaging-campaigns.
But there are very clear lines to be drawn in the sand by scrutinizing the pattern of giving in this race. The seat vacated by the disgraced Charter School operator, Ref Rodriguez, constitutes a swing vote on today’s school board. At stake is no less than the balance of power between representatives of the Charter School industry (e.g., CCSA, PUC, Alliance, PLAS, Magnolia, Green Dot, KIPP, etc, etc, etc.) {Garcia, Gonez and Melvoin}, and the board’s former-Superintendents {McKenna and Schmerelson, joined variously by Vladovic who has taken considerable money from the CCSA but likes to keep everyone jumping}.
In the void left by CCSA is a different kind of indebtedness. Political Patronageis a different if not new form of paymaster that three of the candidates are drafting.
Tables 1 and 2 show the distribution of donations reported to the CoLA Ethics Commission prior to 2/8/19 among 9 of the 10 qualified candidates running for LAUSD BD5 (Rivas has apparently reported no donations). Donations have been roughly categorized according to each donor’s character or affinity, e.g. as a charter school teacher or administrator; or, say, as a political consultant or Developer. These are not exhaustive categories and were assigned quickly without deep scrutiny or cross-checking; accuracy is not assured. Individual’s categorization may be requested via email for interest or the purpose of crowd-sourced corrections. “Other” means none-of-the-above, and includes, for CONTINUE READING: Who’s Giving In LAUSD5 – redqueeninla
