2020 Election Analysis

The Impact of Outside Spending on the 2020 County School Board Election

It’s important that all of us within the Los Altos School District and beyond understand the impact that outside pro-charter organizations and their dollars are having on our local and county school board elections. It’s worth asking whether this influence is having a positive effect on our schools and students.

As the research found throughout this site indicates, BCS and perhaps particularly its enrollment practices have had a major impact on the Los Altos School District and its students. This is an important governance issue for the Santa Clara Office of Education and its school board, which grants the charter for BCS and therefore must oversee BCS practices. To a large degree, the elections of county school board members determine what form that governance will take.

For an in-depth analysis of past county school board elections (2014, 2016 and 2018) click here.

This is a separate analysis of campaign contributions to candidates in the November 2020 county school board election for Area 1, which includes the Los Altos School District, as well as the Palo Alto Unified, Mountain View Whisman, Mountain View-Los Altos Union High school districts and a majority portion of Sunnyvale school district and the corresponding portions of Fremont Union High School district.

In the November 2020 county school board election, incumbent Grace Mah, who represents Area 1, ran against Melissa Baten Caswell. Mah has been a long-time proponent of charter schools and Bullis Charter School in particular. She was the 16th signer of the original 2003 BCS charter petition, which indicated she had a “meaningful interest in having his or her child, or ward, attend the school.”  She also played a role in trying to establish charter schools in both Palo Alto (2007 - not approved) and in Mountain View (2019 - not approved). 

 As the charts and graphs in the attached PDF demonstrate, Mah won the election with hundreds of thousands of dollars of contributions from pro-charter school Political Action Committees from outside of the election area. Mah’s campaign outspent Caswell by 2.2 times--$392,297 to $178,340. The vast majority of contributions to the Mah campaign ($303,062 or 77 percent of the total) came from out-of-area PACs. By comparison, the great majority of contributions to Caswell’s campaign ($134,225 or 75 percent of the total) came from local individuals within Area 1.

Altogether, 86 percent of Mah’s contributions came from outside of the area (both PACs and individuals). Just 25 percent of Caswell’s contribution came from outside Area 1. In fact, six times as many local individuals contributed to Caswell’s campaign as did to Mah’s campaign.

Mah won the election by 4 percent of the vote. Her campaign spent $7.40 per vote, twice that of the Caswell campaign.

As the analysis shows, the timing of contributions to the Mah campaign was also interesting. Contributions to the Mah campaign more than doubled by over $150,000, primarily from PACs, in mid-October in the last weeks leading up to the election.

Please click here for the tables and charts examining the 2020 election.