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By Sara Lahm.

Recently, a friend pointed me to an opinion piece she thought I’d like, because, she said, it reminded her of the article I recently wrote for the Nation’s Investigative Fund, about all of the outside money being spent on this year’s Minneapolis school board race.

The opinion piece is by one of my favorite writers, Tim Egan, and it’s a raw punch to the gut. The title, “The Disgust Election,” says a lot, and the whole piece could be lifted up, altered a bit, and applied directly to the Minneapolis school board race.

In “The Disgust Election,” Egan rips apart the post-Citizens United world, noting that this 2010 Supreme Court case has given “wealthy, secret donors unlimited power to manipulate American elections.” This we must face, says Egan, even though Justices such as Anthony Kennedy originally wanted us to believe that our democracy would be better off, thanks to all of the deregulation swept in by the Citizens United decision.

Instead, this is what we have before us, nationally: “Oligarchs hiding behind front groups—Citizens for Fluffy Pillows–…pulling the levers of the 2014 campaign, and overwhelmingly aiding Republicans.”

In Minneapolis, this is what we have: Secret, unnamed funders hiding behind groups such as the Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund (MPEF), attempting to pull the levers of the 2014 school board race, and overwhelmingly aiding those with an anti-public school agenda.

The Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund appears to be yet another project of Daniel Sellers, who also heads up both the 50CAN Action Fund’s Minnesota office and its education reform cousin, MinnCAN. In a recent article on this new “fund,” Sellers “declined to say how much the group may spend or where the funds are coming from.”

Brilliant. Those funds, which perhaps Sellers found at the end of a rainbow, are being thrown around like confetti at a Citizens United parade. In the last ten days, the MPEF has sent two glossy mailers (approximate cost, according to my calculations: $50,000 each) sailing into Minneapolis mailboxes, telling people to vote for at-large school board candidates Don Samuels and Iris Altamirano, and to avoid incumbent candidate Rebecca Gagnon like the plague.

They also paid for a Robocall that, again, told people to vote for Samuels and Altamirano. I don’t know how much a wide-ranging Robocall costs, but I hope it didn’t put the MPEF out too much; the call was hard to follow and easy to hang up on.

In “The Disgust Election,” Tim Egan makes this point: “You can argue that money doesn’t buy results…But you can’t argue with the corrosive and dispiriting effect, on the rest of us, of campaigns controlled by the rich, the secret, the few.”

This, in my estimation, will be the lasting legacy of our own version of Citizens for Fluffy Pillows. The ugliness of these MPEF mailers is loathsome and off-putting, no matter which candidate voters think best deserves a seat on the Minneapolis school board.

As I write this, I keep thinking of a question my nine-year old son posed to me today, as we went for a walk around our neighborhood. While walking, he suddenly turned to me and said, “How can you climb a barbed wire fence to the sky?”

To him, it was just a riddle that he made up. To me, it was an apt framework for this “Disgust Election.”

Sarah Lahm spent over ten years as a community college English Instructor and now works as a Minneapolis-based freelance writer. She is also director of ACT for Education, which advocates for play, creativity, and community voices in our classrooms. 

Author

Anthony Cody

Anthony Cody worked in the high poverty schools of Oakland, California, for 24 years, 18 of them as a middle school science teacher. He was one of the organizers of the Save Our Schools March in Washington, DC in 2011 and he is a founding member of The Network for Public Education. A graduate of UC Berkeley and San Jose State University, he now lives in Mendocino County, California.

Comments

  1. NShrubs    

    We have the same things going on in Seattle. Now they’re all hiding behind preschool legislation, pretending to be concerned about the well-being of 3 and 4 year olds. DFER, LEV, Great Seattle Schools PAC, etc.
    https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/anti-teachers-union-activity-in-the-state-of-washington/

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