Andrew Blumenfeld
Marshall Tuck is a candidate for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
School privatizers’ favored candidate for California state superintendent of public instruction, Marshall Tuck, recently announced that he was returning a $5,000 contribution from an anti-gay activist. 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. The primary election will be held on June 5, with the general election this November.
Tuck’s opponent, Tony Thurmond, is a social worker, former school board member, and current member of the state assembly. 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 ran for the position four years ago. It’s the same education platform of Republican presidential candidates Jeb Bush and John Kasich, and Vice President Mike Pence: Deregulate public education, outsource school services, make it harder for teachers to gain tenure, and 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.
Tuck’s bid to take over California public schools is being bankrolled by familiar names in the anti-public education Billionaire Boys Club,
Tuck’s donors include Doris Fisher (whose Gap retail company has faced numerous child labor scandals), Eli Broad (a former top investor at AIG whose non-accredited Broad Academy trains privatizing “education leaders”), Alice Walton (the anti-labor heir to the Walmart fortune), Reed Hastings (a Silicon Valley billionaire who has tried for years to take away the right of local voters to elect their own school boards.)
Tuck’s campaign is also apparently being funded by political action committees, despite its pledge last August that it “has not accepted—and will not accept—contributions from companies or PACs.”
On January 11, Tuck’s campaign reported receiving $23,725 and $37,430 from a group called Govern for California, chaired by George Penner, husband of Walmart heir Carrie Walton Penner, as well as $5,000 from Fieldstead & Co.
Contributions from PACs are legally limited to $7,300, far less than what Tuck’s campaign received from Govern for California.
Tuck’s opponent Thurmond filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission and called Tuck out for reneging on his promise, saying his campaign is “claiming to take clean money while in fact being funded by PACs and pro-privatizing billionaires.”
The Tuck campaign responded that Govern for California was “only acting as an intermediary” and denying that it was taking money from PACs. It filed amended reports to list individual contributors, revealing that the Fieldstead & Co. contribution was actually from Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson Jr.
Ahmanson’s name set off alarm bells with LGBTQ groups because of his association with a dark chapter in California politics.
In 2008, in the same election that made Barack Obama the first black President, the California ballot included Proposition 8, a measure to ban gay marriage. The Prop 8 campaign succeeded following massive funding from the religious right. This included $1.4 million in contributions from Ahmanson, through Fieldstead & Co. He has been called “The Man Behind Proposition 8.”
Ahmanson was a close follower and funder of the now-deceased Rousas John Rushdoony, described by the Daily Beast as “a radical evangelical theologian who advocated placing the United States under the control of a Christian theocracy that would mandate the stoning to death of homosexuals.” Ahmanson once told the Orange County Register, “My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives.”
Ahmanson attends meetings of The Gathering, a “shadowy, powerful network” of hard-right Christian funders, according to an investigation by Jay Michaelson published in the Daily Beast.
In 2008, in the same election that made Barack Obama the first black President, the California ballot included Proposition 8, a measure to ban gay marriage.
“The Gathering is as close to a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ as you’re likely to find,” Michaelson reported. Attendees are the “wealthiest conservative to hard-right evangelical philanthropists in America, and have led the campaigns to privatize public schools, redefine ‘religious liberty,’ fight same-sex marriage, [and] fight evolution,” he wrote.
It was at The Gathering where Betsy DeVos, now Trump’s Secretary of Education, said she wants to “advance God’s Kingdom” through public schools. It was there that she and her husband said that school choice was a way to reverse the history of public schools displacing the Church as the center of communities.
Since her appointment, DeVos has been attacking the barrier that historically separated American public education from religion. She has promoted school vouchers to pay for religious schools, withdrawn Obama Administration guidance that protected transgender students, and is giving churches the chance to reclaim their place as the center of communities by expanding school choice.
Ahmanson is doing his part by contributing to candidates like Marshall Tuck who seek to make this extreme agenda seem palatable, even to California progressives.