The Battle Over School Funding: The View From Pasadena

Abstract

THE CALIFORNIA Journal of Politics & Policy Commentary The Battle over School Funding: The View from Pasadena Peter Dreier* Occidental College Tony Gordo, Ruth Strick, Cushon Bell, and George Brumder spent much of February, March, and April mak- ing phone calls several nights a week from a make-shift office on the second floor of the First United Methodist Church in Pasadena, California. Gordo was calling Spanish-speaking voters, urging them to vote “yes” on Measure CC, a $120 parcel tax for the Pasadena Unified School District. The 50-year old Gor- do has worked for PUSD for 16 years, first as a teacher’s aide and for the past 10 years as a painter with the district’s maintenance division. He has two children at PUSD’s John www.bepress.com/cjpp Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010 Muir High School and another at Pasadena Community College. His union, Teamsters Local 911, initially recruited Gordo to the CC phone bank, but he soon began showing up at the church on his own on a regular basis. Strick, 78, is a career counselor and silversmith who has been active in Pasadena’s arts community. She learned about the CC campaign from a local arts group and became one of its most effective volunteer phone-bankers. The 38-year-old Bell is a teacher in the Los Angeles schools who has two children in Pasadena’s public schools. She is a leader with Invest in PUSD Kids, a grassroots commu- nity group, which helped organize the CC campaign’s vol- unteers. Brumder, 72, is a retired corporate lawyer and a well-connected and energetic philanthropist whose grown children attended private schools. He serves as president Peter Dreier is the E. P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College. He is coauthor of several books on urban politics and policy, including Place Mat- ters: Metropolitics for the 21 st Century (University Press