Our focus is on education and that has generally meant for us at the Seattle Education website sticking to the school board races during election season but with the mayor and City Council member Tim Burgess insinuating themselves into the Seattle Public School district with the city’s preschool program (more on that later) and attempting to control the school board, we have begun to look at the city council races more closely.
Because of this, we will be publishing posts about the City Council and school board candidates during the campaign.
To start things off, here is a great video that a Seattleite made about the City Council race in District 3 between the incumbent Kshawma Sawant and Pamela Banks.
You know how we like to follow the money so the first thing we did after viewing the video was check out Pamela Banks’ donors and it is a rather telling list. It is similar to the same donor list as Tim Burgess’. Coincidence? I think not.
Donors on the real estate development side of things:
Matt Griffin: A developer in Seattle who is a big supporter of charter schools. He also contributed money to the Seattle Foundation to bring Teach for America, Inc. to Seattle.
Real estate companies including CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) and Vulcan
Tim Burgess: No surprise there
Development companies including Trilogy and Vulcan
Microsoft Corp
Title companies
Real Estate brokers including NAI
Construction companies, the big ones, GLY, Glumac, McKinstry and Sellen
And donors related to a push for privatization of our public schools:
Community Center for Education Results (CCER) : See CCER, the Road Map Project and the loss of student privacy.
Sara Morris- Alliance for Education: See The Lines of Influence in Education Reform
Paul Hill-UW: Founder of CRPE. See The Gates owned Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) right here in Seattle.
Ben Bridge: Jonathan Bridge is on the Board of Directors of the Alliance for Education which brought Seattle the NCTQ report and has supported all things ed reform for the last several years.
Sharon Santos: The odd one. Initially against charter schools but then co-sponsored a bill with Representative Eric Pettigrew to break up the school district into north and south, low-income on the south side, middle and high income on the other, creating the south end ripe for the taking by privatizers of public schools.
This race is far more than meets the eye.
Dora Taylor
Seattle Education 