Another Look at the Dale Estey/Peters School Board Race

Can’t remember ever linking to a parenting magazine, but Alison Krupnick at Parent Map has a short and interesting writeup on the school-board race between corporate-funded Suzanne Dale Estey and activist Sue Peters, which Peters—rather surprisingly—won. It includes this bit about negative campaigning by an outside PAC that favored Dale Estey:

Negative tactics used earlier by the Dale Estey campaign had been poorly received by the public, an ironic twist of events, because Peters entered the race with an abrasive reputation and Dale Estey portrayed herself as a peacemaker.

Dale Estey, who claimed not to be aware of or in control of some of her campaign P.R. machinery, also admitted to me on Election Night that such tactics are a calculated risk. She said experts had told her that the gains from negative publicity far outstrip the losses.

This blind faith in “experts” contradicts the image Dale Estey sought to portray, that of a homegrown girl in touch with the concerns of Seattle families. Had she listened to the people whose doorbells she rang, instead of experts, and followed her own instincts, she might have understood early on that negativity was a problem, especially when negative ads were purchased by wealthy donors.

Nationally, critics of corporate education reform cite arrogance as an ongoing concern, with too much reliance on the opinions of “experts,” who often come from the private sector, and not enough reliance on the opinions of educators.

That article also includes news that Garfield teacher Jesse Hagopian is “reportedly interested” in running for president of the Seattle teachers’ union (SEA) when current president Jonathan Knapp’s term expires in 2014. Hagopian, you may remember, led the organized boycott of the MAP standardized test last school year and once mic-checked the state house over budget cuts. Seeing him head up the union would sure be interesting.

UPDATE 3:57 p.m.: I reached out to Hagopian to confirm the rumor and he just got back to me to say he’d “have a lot of things in [his] personal life to weigh” before deciding to run for SEA president, noting that he has two kids at home, but that he has been asked by other teachers to consider it. “I’m still a ways off from being able to make that call,” he says.