TIME: How Michael Bloomberg Undermines Democracy by Big Spending in Local School Board Races
One of the themes of my new book SLAYING GOLIATH is that billionaires are disrupting education by buying control of school districts and states. That, in conjunction with the federal government’s mean-spirited and useless mandate for annual standardized testing (no high-performing nation tests every child every year in grades 3-8), has posed a mortal threat to public schools.
TIME magazine published an article showing how one of our best known billionaires, Michael Bloomberg, has undermined democracy by buying local school board races and making it impossible for local people to compete with his spending.
The article begins:
School board elections are usually local affairs, with candidates soliciting money from neighbors at pizza parties and dragging along friends to knock on doors and ask for votes.
That’s what Chris Jackson expected when he decided to run for the school board in Oakland, Calif., in 2016. He’d previously been elected to the board of the City College of San Francisco and thought he knew how to build the ground game to win in Oakland. He started gathering CONTINUE READING: TIME: How Michael Bloomberg Undermines Democracy by Big Spending in Local School Board Races | Diane Ravitch's blog
