Wall Street Financiers Can't Buy Love for "Education Reform:" Hedge Funders and DFER Crushed

Not only did the voters hand the Gates, Broad, and Walton, i. e., Obama, education plan a crushing defeat in DC on Tuesday, but in New York the casino capitalists were hammered even more convincingly.  None of the hedge fund supported candidates running on the Charterite ticket could move the voting needle past 30 percent. As the NYTimes notes:

They were the candidates of riches, flush with hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street investors who believed in the promise of charter schools.

But when the election results came in on Tuesday, all three State Senate candidates supporting education reform — Basil Smikle, Lynn Nunes and Mark H. Pollard — lost by huge margins, with none cracking 30 percent of the total vote in primary contests against union-backed rivals.. . .

From Crain's Insider:

Harsh lesson for charter school supporters

Tuesday's primary was a disaster for charter school proponents and their hedge fund backers. They funded three insurgent state Senate candidates, only to see them lose by huge margins to incumbents viewed as hostile to charter schools: Sen. Bill Perkins in Manhattan, Sen. Velmanette Montgomery in Brooklyn and Sen. Shirley Huntley in Queens.

“If you're going to make a statement, you have to either win or be competitive, because if you get crushed it sends the opposite message,” one legislator says. “People are going to believe that this is a paper tiger.”

Wall Street and the financial services industry made a similar gamble by investing in insurgent Reshma Saujani against Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who supported the sweeping financial regulation bill and won passage of credit card reforms that will curb banks' profits. Saujani raised more than $1.3 million but won only 19% of the vote in an Upper East Side district where support for Wall Street is thought to be greater than elsewhere.

“To send a message, you've got to have a candidate with some semblance of a decent performance,” the unnamed legislator says. “I didn't expect [Saujani] to win, but you can't get beat by 60 points.”

The United Federation of Teachers made the same mistake, running Gregory Lundahl against Assemblyman Jonathan Bing—payback for Bing's bill reforming teacher seniority. “An 84% victory is unlikely to deter me from doing anything other than fighting for my constituents,” Bing says.

Meanwhile, charter school backers largely ignored Robert Rodriguez, a Yale-educated, pro-charter Assembly candidate in the charter school mecca of Harlem. “If there was a race for charter school supporters to invest in, this was the one,” says the lawmaker. Rodriguez defeated labor-backed John Ruiz in the Democratic primary.

A spokesman for Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-charter school group, points to upstate Assemblyman Sam Hoyt's defeat of “an aggressive anti-reform challenger” Tuesday as a win for charters. Hoyt was also aided by the League of Conservation Voters' PAC and other forces.