Dive Brief:
- The activist group California Hedge Clippers has released 76 names of wealthy Californians who they say were part of a dark-money effort to bring down a proposed school-funding tax on high-income earners and limit the power of unions.
- The Los Angeles Times reports the donations were made in 2012 when two propositions were on the ballot covering these two issues, and following an investigation by California regulators, activists have been able to cross-reference partially redacted files to find out who made the circuitous donations that, at first, were secret.
- Among those named are the heirs to the Gap fortune (the Fisher family), Silicon Valley executive John H. Scully and Hyatt Hotel heir Anthony Pritzker, who donated $18.3 million, $500,000, and $100,000, respectively, to a group called Americans for Job Security.
Dive Insight:
America’s wealthiest individuals have incredible power to influence elections by buying more attention on their issues and ensuring their talking points are the ones that get to voters. In a similar fashion, education policy has been significantly affected by the priorities of Bill and Melinda Gates, Eli and Edythe Broad, and the Walton family. Their foundations hold sway by offering millions of dollars in grants to individual districts and states that commit to testing out their educational priorities.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have become the next generation of such education donors, and their attempts to turn around the Newark schools with a $100 million donation was chronicled in Dale Russakoff’s “The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools.” Newark, it seems, was another example of how wealthy donors do not know what is best for schools. In a presidential election year, one wonders what these donors will be able to buy this time around.