Category: 2010 elections

Comcast Cable has reinstated the California Teachers Association’s ad attacking Republican gubernatorial candidate  Meg Whitman after the union tweaked the wording.  Her attorneys had threatened to sue stations that ran the ad  the campaign viewed as slanderous.

At issue was CTA’s assertion in the ad that Whitman proposes to cut K-12 schools by $7 billion, resulting in laying off  of 100,000 teachers and enlarging class sizes by a third. That’s not what Whitman has proposed; she is claiming that she will “ultimately” reduce $15 billion in state spending over three or four years by reworking public pensions, slashing the number of state employees, reforming welfare and bringing to bear her “real-world management skills.” K-12 and higher ed comprise about half of the budget, so  CTA said that Whitman will proportionally whack K12 schools. CTA isn’t alone in doubting that Whitman could possibly slash more than a third more out of non-education spending without eventually touching schools and universities.

According to the Sacramento Bee, the revised ad now says “Whitman’s plan could cut another seven billion dollars from our schools” instead of “Meg Whitman says we should cut another $7 billion from our schools.”

“Instead of threatening television stations and trying to silence teachers, perhaps Meg Whitman should explain to Californians just exactly how she is planning to protect our students and schools,” CTA said on its website.

The Bee reported that Comcast, with 2 million subscribers in Northern California, had received a letter from the Whitman campaign, claiming the CTA ad slandered the candidate. It was a pot-calling-the-kettle-black claim, considering how much the Whitman campaign has spent distorting Democrat Jerry Brown’s record. Nonetheless, in briefly pulling the ad earlier this week, a Comcast spokesman had told the Bee, “We received documentation from attorneys representing both sides. We reviewed the documentation and after review, our legal team determined the allegations made in the ad could not be substantiated and we pulled the ad.”

I’ll be looking at both Whitman’s and Brown’s education platform (Whitman’s is pretty thin). A good place to start is EdSource’s  side by side comparison of the two candidates’ positions.

A secret to Larry Aceves’ surprise win in the primary election race for superintendent of public instruction? Slate mailers, the pay-to-play election campaign mailings run by political operatives.

Senior reporter Louis Freedberg of California Watch cites an analysis by veteran Republican commentator Tony Quinn  in the California Morning Report (subscription-based) that Aceves’ name appeared in a key Democratic- and most Republican-targeted slate mailings. That was a smart move for a largely unknown, sharply outspent candidate running in the one non-partisan race for statewide office.

Continue reading “Key to Larry Aceves’ win is in the mail”

The Association of California School Administrators had to convince Larry Aceves, a retired superintendent from a small district in San Jose, to run for state superintendent as a long-shot candidate.

The bet on Aceves ­– ACSA’s first big foray into the campaign for superintendent of public instruction – is looking pretty smart today. Even with only 18.8 percent of the vote total in a 12-candidate race, Aceves was the top vote-getter Tuesday and, with Democratic Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, will be in the runoff election in November.

Aceves’ unexpected showing means there won’t be a knock-down, head-to-head, polarizing battle between surrogates for California Teachers Association, which spent amply on behalf of Torlakson, and the pro-charter school advocacy group  EdVoice, which threw its wealthy funders’ money behind Sen. Gloria Romero. While only 1.6 percentage points separated her and Aceves, she’s out of the running in third, with 17.2 percent, 0.8 percent behind Torlakson, though hundreds of thousands of ballots statewide have yet to be counted (see here for statewide and county totals).

Continue reading “Big showing by little-known Larry Aceves”

Meg Whitman’s gubernatorial campaign never got back to me to explain the candidate’s continued assertion that 40 percent of education dollars are squandered on “administration and overhead.” But a K-12 expert at the Legislative Analyst’s office did pass along a url that’s the likely basis of the claim. Sure enough, it’s in the ed-data section of the Dept. of Education’s website.

So call it up, and let’s go over what it says. Go midway down to “General Fund Expenditures by Activity.” What Whitman is calling money in the classroom is the 50 percent – $26 billion – spent on Instruction (defined as including teacher salaries and benefits, aides and books) and 12 percent on Special Education ($6 billion).

That leaves 38 percent.

Continue reading “Breaking down Meg’s ed numbers”