School boards typ­i­cal­ly con­trol mas­sive amounts of mon­ey and assets that can be dished out through con­tracts for ser­vices, pur­chas­es of land, and divert­ed into char­ter schools and vouch­er pro­grams. Despite school boards’ pow­er, how­ev­er, until now board elec­tions around the coun­try have typ­i­cal­ly been fueled by door-to-door can­vass­ing rather than high dol­lar fundrais­ing. But increas­ing­ly, large dona­tions from wealthy indi­vid­u­als and cor­po­ra­tions are pour­ing into schools board races around the coun­try to enact an agen­da that attacks col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing rights of teach­ers unions and increas­es the pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic edu­ca­tion through char­ter schools and vouchers.

The Denver board election was seen as a pivotal battle for those seeking to privatize education as well as crack down on teachers' unions.

The Den­ver Pub­lic School Board race, which took place yes­ter­day, is a prime exam­ple of out­side mon­ey from wealthy indi­vid­u­als and cor­po­rate fund­ed groups flood­ing elec­tions. That mon­ey proved to have a sig­nif­i­cant effect on last night’s elec­tion for the union-back can­di­dates opposed to the so-called ​“reform slate.”

After being out-fundraised more than two to one, union-backed can­di­date Emi­ly Siro­ta lost to invest­ment banker Anne Rowe by 30 per­cent­age points. Anoth­er union-backed can­di­date, incum­bent school board mem­ber Arturo Jimenez nar­row­ly won re-elec­tion to the school board by a mar­gin of only 73 votes over reform can­di­date Drap­er Car­son. Final­ly, ​“reform” chal­lenger can­di­date Alle­gra Haynes eas­i­ly won elec­tion to the board’s at-large seat, tak­ing 59 per­cent of the vote. (Full dis­clo­sure: Emily’s hus­band David Siro­ta is an In These Times senior edi­tor and par­tic­i­pat­ed in inter­views for this story.)

The Den­ver board elec­tion was seen as a piv­otal bat­tle for those seek­ing to pri­va­tize edu­ca­tion as well as crack down on teach­ers’ unions. In addi­tion to increas­ing the num­ber of char­ter schools in Den­ver, the school board has already imple­ment­ed the con­tro­ver­sial ​“inno­va­tion schools” pro­gram, in which pub­lic schools can receive out­side fund­ing from groups like the Wal­ton Foun­da­tion (fund­ed by the heirs of Wal­mart) if teach­ers approve votes for cer­tain changes to be made to the school.

“They first dan­gle the bot­tle of inno­va­tion and reform by promis­ing mon­ey for schools, but the inno­va­tion they are talk­ing has noth­ing to do with instruc­tion. It has to do with waivers from unions con­tracts,” says Den­ver Class­room Teach­ers Asso­ci­a­tion Pres­i­dent Hen­ry Roman. ​“The teach­ers basi­cal­ly have no rights now. They are union mem­bers in name only.”

Now, so-called ​“reform­ers” in the Den­ver Pub­lic School are talk­ing about expand­ing char­ter schools and the pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic edu­ca­tion through vouch­ers. The pres­i­dent of the Den­ver School Board was recent­ly spot­ted at a fundrais­er for vouch­ers in a near­by coun­ty and the Demo­c­ra­t­ic May­or of Den­ver has sig­naled an open­ness to vouchers.

Those kind of edu­ca­tion­al changes can hap­pen eas­i­ly because last night’s elec­tion results mean the ​“reform slate” con­tin­ues to enjoy a 4 – 3 mar­gin on the Board. This has led to a mas­sive influx of mon­ey from an unusu­al alliance of wealthy indi­vid­u­als and cor­po­rate executives.

Rowe, Car­son and Haynes each received exact­ly $92,000 from a total of six donors: Dan Ritchie, CEO of the Den­ver Cen­ter for the Per­form­ing Arts, $26,000; oil exec­u­tive Hen­ry Gor­don, pres­i­dent of Stra­ta Cap­i­tal, $25,000; Michael Fries, of Lib­er­ty Media, $20,000; Kent Thiry, CEO of DaVi­ta Inc., $11,000; Richard Sap­kin, Edge­mark Devel­op­ment, $10,000; Bruce Ben­son, founder of Ben­son Min­er­al Group, $10,000. Sirota’s oppo­nent also received $10,000 from finan­cial exec­u­tive Scott Reiman.

In con­trast, the only group to give more than $10,000 to either of the union backed can­di­date was the small donor com­mit­tee of the Den­ver Class­room Teach­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, which con­tributed $24,000 to the Jimenez cam­paign and $46,580 to Sirota’s cam­paign. (All cam­paign con­tri­bu­tion details are here.)

Gor­don and Reiman are both mem­bers of the nation­al orga­ni­za­tion Alliance for Choice in Edu­ca­tion, which works with state and local elect­ed offi­cials across the coun­try to pro­mote ant – teacher tenure, pro-char­ters and vouch­er leg­is­la­tion. Inter­est­ing­ly, oil com­pa­ny exec­u­tive Hen­ry Gor­don, who has pumped near­ly $100,000 into the Den­ver School Board races, admit­ted to the Col­orado States­man that he was not even famil­iar with the can­di­dates, but con­tributed to the can­di­dates after being asked by a friend.

Gor­don state­ments seem to fit with a nation­al trend where big nation­al orga­ni­za­tions work­ing with wealthy donors and cor­po­rate exec­u­tives pump huge amounts of mon­ey into elec­tions. Jon­ah Edel­man, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Stand for Chil­dren – which coor­di­nates ​“pro-reform” school board can­di­dates races across the coun­try and pumped more than $60,000 worth of inde­pen­dent expen­di­tures into the Den­ver School Board Elec­tions–said this about the Illi­nois legislature’s midterm elec­tions, in which Stand for Chil­dren was heav­i­ly involved:

“The indi­vid­ual can­di­dates were essen­tial­ly a vehi­cle to exe­cute a polit­i­cal objec­tive, which was to tilt toward Madi­gan. The press nev­er picked up on it. We endorsed nine indi­vid­u­als — and six of them were Democ­rats, three Repub­li­cans — and tilt­ed our mon­ey toward [Demo­c­ra­t­ic Illi­nois Speak­er of the House Michael] Madi­gan, who was expect­ing … that all our mon­ey was going to go to Repub­li­cans. That was real­ly a show of — indi­ca­tion to him that we could be a new part­ner to take the place of the Illi­nois Fed­er­a­tion of Teachers.”

The fin­ger­prints of nation­al cor­po­rate orga­ni­za­tions coor­di­nat­ing the mon­ey are all over the Den­ver School Board Race as well. A cor­po­rate reform group called A+ Den­ver hired a promi­nent sup­port­er of school vouch­ers named Van Scho­a­les to be its exec­u­tive direc­tor. Scho­a­les pre­vi­ous­ly worked for the nation­al pri­va­ti­za­tion reform group called Edu­ca­tion Reform Now, which push­es vouch­ers and which is fund­ed, in part, by Rupert Mur­doch and was run by Murdoch’s top aide for­mer NYC School Board Chan­cel­lor Joel Klein.

In addi­tion, the slate of pro-reform can­di­dates has also been endorsed by the nation­al orga­ni­za­tion Democ­rats for Edu­ca­tion Reform (DEFR). ​“DFER’s endgame has lit­tle to do with learn­ing and every­thing to do with mar­gin­al­iz­ing pub­lic-sec­tor union­ized work­ers and bring­ing down the cost of tax­es for social pro­grams,” notes the Unit­ed Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers. ​“It’s about cre­at­ing new busi­ness and invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties in areas that are still pub­licly run and serv­ing as a pre-emp­tive strike against any hope for pri­vate-sec­tor union renewal.”

Indeed, this point under­lines the scari­est part of many of those push­ing so-called reforms of pub­lic edu­ca­tion through pro-char­ter, pro-vouch­er, anti-teacher mea­sures. While some of the lib­er­al sup­port­ers of these mea­sure are gen­uine­ly con­cerned about reform­ing pub­lic edu­ca­tion to help chil­dren, oth­ers are involved in these pri­va­ti­za­tion anti-union schemes because there is a great deal of mon­ey to be made in pub­lic schools. Con­trol­ling votes on pub­lic school boards can be very impor­tant to big cor­po­ra­tions who stand to finan­cial­ly ben­e­fit from the var­i­ous con­tracts for ser­vices and finan­cial man­age­ment that school dis­tricts con­trol, as well as to devel­op­ers seek­ing to buy for­mer school land.

By way of high­light­ing the mas­sive amount of mon­ey school boards can give to pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions, con­sid­er the 2008 deal to lend Den­ver Pub­lic Schools sys­tem mon­ey cut by for­mer Den­ver School Super­in­ten­dent and cur­rent U.S. Sen­a­tor Michael Ben­net. It wound up cost­ing Den­ver Pub­lic Schools $25 mil­lion more than it was ini­tial­ly expect­ed to cost and the Den­ver School Board had to pay JPMor­gan Chase, Bank of Amer­i­ca and RBC (Roy­al Bank of Cana­da) Cap­i­tal Mar­kets. Ben­net would lat­er go on to col­lect $1.2 mil­lion from the finan­cial sec­tor as a can­di­date for U.S. Sen­ate. In addi­tion, RBC Cap­i­tal Mar­kets, which ser­viced the deal with the Den­ver School Boards and under­writes sim­i­lar deals with 40 school dis­tricts, funds the news pub­li­ca­tion Edu­ca­tion News Col­orado, which accord­ing to Den­ver Class­room Teach­ers Asso­ca­tion has run arti­cles and op-eds crit­i­cal of union-backed can­di­dates like Emi­ly Sirota.

Increas­ing­ly, it appears that out­side cor­po­rate groups are becom­ing involved in school board races across the coun­try from Illi­nois to Louisiana to Denver.

While the alliance of well-inten­tioned lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tive cor­po­rate exec­u­tive seek­ing to reform schools seems very well orga­nized on a nation­al lev­el, the left seems to have no nation­al response. Inter­views con­duct­ed with union offi­cials from both the Nation­al Edu­ca­tion Asso­ci­a­tion and the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers indi­cate that for now, school board elec­tions are some­thing that state and local teach­ers union deal with on a case-by-case basis. On the left, there seems to be no nation­al strat­e­gy to deal with the mas­sive amounts of mon­ey pour­ing into school board elec­tion. The lack of nation­al orga­niz­ing could lead to more lop­sided elec­tions like the one in Denver.

“I believe they are try­ing to make Den­ver a mod­el not just for the west, but to pri­va­tize edu­ca­tion nation­al­ly,” says cur­rent Den­ver School Board mem­ber Jean­nie Kaplan, who sup­port­ed Sirota’s cam­paign. ​“My hope is that we in Den­ver can say no to the big mon­ey cor­po­ra­tiz­ing, pri­va­tiz­ing and char­ter­i­za­tion of our schools.”