The Right Wing, Anti-Gay Crusade Behind Marshall Tuck’s Campaign to Take Over California Schools
The privatizers’ ideal candidate for California State Superintendent, Marshall Tuck, recently suffered a serious blow to his credibility when he announced he was returning a contribution from a mysterious anti-gay zealot but keeping over $61,000 from a PAC. The situation revealed a campaign scrambling to maintain a narrative that appeals to California’s mostly progressive voters when the reality is much darker.
The race for this officially nonpartisan office pits two Democrats who are miles apart on education policy, underscoring how divisive the charter lobby’s influence is becoming for California’s governing party.
Tuck’s opponent Tony Thurmond is a social worker, former school board member, and current State Assemblymember. He has been endorsed by Senator Kamala Harris; U.S. Congressional Representatives Barbara Lee, Eric Swalwell, and Karen Bass; and the teachers’ union.
Tuck, on the other hand, has the same pro-privatizing platform that voters rejected when he was defeated for the position four years ago, and it’s the same education platform of Republican presidential candidates Jeb Bush and John Kasich, and Vice President Mike Pence: To deregulate public education, to outsource school services, to make it harder for teachers to gain tenure, and to expand the market of “school choice.”
Tuck’s bid to take over California public schools is being bankrolled by familiar names in the anti-public education Billionaire Boys Club, as former Deputy U.S. Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, calls them. Looked at through another lens, their support can be politically inconvenient: Doris Fisher (whose Gap retail company has faced numerous child labor scandals), Eli Broad (former top investor at AIG, and whose non-accredited Broad Academy trains privatizing “education leaders”), Alice Walton (heir to the anti-labor Walmart fortune), Reed Hastings (Silicon Valley billionaire who has tried for years to take away the right of local voters to elect their own school boards, and who Continue reading: The Right Wing, Anti-Gay Crusade Behind Marshall Tuck’s Campaign to Take Over California Schools - LA Progressive
Tuck’s bid to take over California public schools is being bankrolled by familiar names in the anti-public education Billionaire Boys Club, as former Deputy U.S. Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, calls them. Looked at through another lens, their support can be politically inconvenient: Doris Fisher (whose Gap retail company has faced numerous child labor scandals), Eli Broad (former top investor at AIG, and whose non-accredited Broad Academy trains privatizing “education leaders”), Alice Walton (heir to the anti-labor Walmart fortune), Reed Hastings (Silicon Valley billionaire who has tried for years to take away the right of local voters to elect their own school boards, and who Continue reading: The Right Wing, Anti-Gay Crusade Behind Marshall Tuck’s Campaign to Take Over California Schools - LA Progressive
