Molly Munger donated $44.1 million to pass Proposition 38, a measure to raise taxes for public education. The initiative failed.

Multimillionaire activists, big labor unions and major corporations combined to pump more than $363 million into political fights over 11 propositions on Tuesday’s state ballot, a California Watch analysis shows.

Prop. 38 backer Molly Munger. (neontommy/flickr)

That’s about $20 in political spending for each of California’s 18.2 million registered voters.By law, state ballot initiatives are exempt from the tough donation limits that otherwise apply in California elections.

In contests over proposed tax increases, car insurance rates, criminal justice reforms and political spending by labor unions, donors with deep pockets took full advantage.

Forty-seven donors – individuals, companies and political committees – donated more than $1 million apiece on initiative campaigns, a review of campaign finance data provided by MapLight.org shows.

Seven donors each gave $11 million or more.

The unprecedented spending spree was a sign of just how far the 101-year-old California initiative process has strayed from its origins. In the beginning, initiatives were a Progressive-era reform devised to allow ordinary citizens to sidestep a legislative process controlled by monied special interests.

This year, combined spending over the two most hotly contested ballot measures – Gov. Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30, which sought a tax increase to fund public education, and Proposition 32, a conservative attempt to bar unions from making political donations – topped $195 million, with special interest donors paying much of the freight.

Here, from campaign finance data, are some winners and losers in California’s initiative battles:

The Winners

Big labor

The state’s unions went all in for their successful effort to stop Prop. 32, the anti-union measure pushed by the Lincoln Club of Orange County and other conservative groups. Unions spent more than $60 million to block it. Much of the union money went to committees also pushing Prop. 30, the successful Brown tax measure. In addition to the California Teachers Association ($32.5 million), big donations came from the Service Employees International Union ($21.6 million) and the California Labor Federation ($6 million).

A Facebook tycoon

Chris Kelly, former chief privacy officer of Facebook and an unsuccessful candidate for state attorney general in 2010, gave $2.3 million to Proposition 35, which would toughen prison sentences for human trafficking. Kelly’s donation was more than 60 percent of the measure’s total budget. It had no formal opposition and won easily.

Agroscience

Proposition 37 would have required special labels on genetically engineered food. The unsuccessful measure, pushed by the organic food industry, drew multimillion-dollar opposition from Monsanto Co. ($8.1 million) and DuPont ($5.4 million), in addition to Bayer CropScience, BASF Plant Science and Dow AgroSciences ($2 million apiece).

The police lobby

The Peace Officers Research Association of California was on the winning side of four measures Tuesday and had only one loss. The association spent $192,000 to oppose the repeal of the death penalty, Proposition 34. Proponents countered with about $8 million, but the measure failed. The group also put $1.5 million into opposing the anti-union Prop. 32, which lost; more than $150,000 to back Prop. 35, the human trafficking measure, which won; and $150,000 to support Prop. 30, Brown’s successful tax measure. The cops’ only bad bet: $100,000 to oppose Proposition 36, the measure to reform California’s three strikes law, which was enacted.

The Losers

The Mungers: The adult children of billionaire Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, emerged as California’s biggest donors – and losers – of all.

Molly Munger, a Los Angeles lawyer and liberal crusader, donated $44.1 million to her Proposition 38, to raise taxes for public education. The measure lost, while Prop. 30, Brown’s competing tax measure, was enacted.

Meanwhile, Charles Munger Jr., a Stanford physics professor, donated about $36 million, most of it to defeat Brown’s Prop. 30 tax increase and to boost Prop. 32, which sought to bar labor unions from making political donations. Prop. 32 also lost.

By way of contrast, each of the Mungers outspent one of California’s best-funded political operations, the California Teachers Association. It donated $32.5 million to support Brown’s Prop. 30 and defeat Prop. 32.

Out-of-state corporations

Thomas F. Steyer, a liberal activist and managing partner of San Francisco’s Farallon Capital Management, was a big winner with his Proposition 39, the measure to collect more income taxes from multistate corporations that do business in California. Steyer donated $29.5 million of the measure’s $31.4 million budget. General Motors, Kimberly-Clark and International Paper put up $45,000 before opposition to the measure collapsed. The state will collect an estimated $1 billion more in taxes as a result.

An insurance billionaire

Mercury Insurance founder George Joseph spent more than $16 million on Proposition 33, his latest attempt to reframe the state’s auto insurance laws to allow discounts for motorists changing insurance carriers. Opponents, including the Consumer Watchdog Campaign, said the measure would weaken consumer protections in present insurance law. Opponents spent only about $276,000 on their successful campaign.

Americans for Responsible Leadership

The Arizona political committee donated $11 million to boost the failed anti-union Prop. 32 and to oppose the governor’s successful tax measure, but those might not be the only losses for the group amid allegations that it illegally laundered the money to conceal its source.

Now, investigators are probing how the campaign cash moved to California from a Virginia-based nonprofit, Americans for Job Security, via a third political committee, the Center to Protect Patient Rights. An official with that committee, Sean Noble, is a Republican strategist with reported ties to Charles and David Koch, Kansas-based GOP megadonors.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris has vowed to continue investigating the affair.

Lance Williams is a senior investigative reporter focusing on money and politics for California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Through the studio glass: Michael Krasny hosts KQED's daily call-in show "Forum."

Here at KQED, we take elections pretty seriously. It’s a time when our mission of educating the public comes to a head — the messages coming from the campaigns are unrelenting and taken as a whole can present a confusing picture. So helping you cast an informed vote is our aim.

That was the philosophy behind our state proposition guide. Some people, however, prefer listening to reading. For those folks we present a complete archive of Forum’s 2012 state proposition shows. Some are an hour long, some are half an hour, but all present views from both sides and include community input we received via calls, emails, Facebook and Twitter. So sit back, turn up your speakers, and take a listen…

Prop. 30: Gov. Brown’s Tax Increase for Education, Public Safety

Prop. 31: Revises the State Budget Process

Prop. 32: Campaign Finance Reform or an Attack on Unions?

Prop. 33: Changes to Auto Insurance

Prop. 34: The Death Penalty in California

Prop. 35: Ban on Human Trafficking and Sex Slavery

Prop. 36: Should Three Strikes Be Changed?

Prop. 37: The Fight Over GMO Labeling

Prop. 38: Molly Munger’s Tax Initiative for Education

Prop 39: How We Tax Multi-State Businesses

Please note: Forum did not produce a show on Proposition 40. You can find more information on that here.

Teachers at Angeles Mesa Elementary School in Los Angeles review voter information on Proposition 38 during a recent teacher union meeting. (Ana Tintocalis: KQED)

Education advocates in California say public schools will either sink or swim based on the outcome of two competing tax initiatives on the November ballot — Proposition 30 and Proposition 38. While both aim to protect students from more devastating budget cuts, they go about it in very different ways.

To better understand what is at stake for California’s public schools, I started off by visiting the headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest district in the state.

LAUSD has had to cut about half a billion dollars from its budget every year for the past five years because of the state’s money problems. Class sizes have swollen to more than 40 students; the school year was cut by five instructional days, and teachers have lost their jobs.

The person behind every difficult financial decision is Megan Reilly, the district’s Chief Financial Officer.

Her office is perched on the 26th floor of a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles. Stacks of papers and financial reports are piled on and around her desk. Although she has a sweeping view of the city, she can’t take her eyes off of a series of large monthly calendars on the wall.

November 6th, Election Day, is circled, underlined and highlighted.

“I don’t think you can not think about it,” Reilly says. “We’re just in limbo because everything is critical about what is going to happen at the November election.”

Reilly views the election as a watershed moment for schools, because if voters do not approve Prop. 30 or Prop. 38, L.A. Unified — along with most other districts in California — will be pushed further down the road toward insolvency.

“I can’t face counselor ratios going even higher,” Reilly says. “I can’t face class sizes going even higher. It’s really hard for anyone to face the public saying, ‘I’m going to have to take more away from the schools.’ There’s nothing more to take.”

Reilly and other school administrators across the state believe Gov. Jerry Brown’s initiative, Prop. 30, offers the most immediate relief.

It would raise roughly $3 billion for public schools and community colleges by taxing the wealthiest Californians for seven years and it would increase the sales tax by a quarter-cent, a hike that everyone would have to pay. Overall, the measure would raise $6 billion for education and to balance the state budget.

However, should voters reject Prop. 30, schools will get hit with a $6 billion spending cut halfway through this school year. Many districts would be forced to lop off three full weeks of instruction.

“These are horrific cuts,” says Dan Schnur, director of the Jess Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.

Schnur says that given the constant cuts to public education, taxpayers may finally be ready for the first time in almost 20 years.to reach into their pockets to help schools.

“The biggest challenge for Governor Brown is convincing them that state government can be trusted to spend their tax dollars wisely and effectively.” The governor faces a trust issue because for the past five years, lawmakers have tapped into the state’s special pot of education funding to balance the budget.

The $3 billion raised annually by Prop. 30 would go back into that education pot, refilling it to the same level as before all of the cuts. This move would stabilize school funding and  eventually  even expand it. It would also free up existing general fund dollars for other needs because that is part of the governor’s larger plan to fix the state’s structural budget deficit.

One person who doesn’t trust the governor’s strategy is Molly Munger, the wealthy civil rights attorney who is bankrolling Proposition 38 — the competing education tax initiative. Munger’s name has been splashed across the news because she’s been criticizing the governor and Sacramento lawmakers for squandering education dollars.

“[Voters] are willing to pay the tax. But they insist, rightly, that the money not go to Sacramento, because they know if it goes there, bad things will happen to it,” Munger said in a recent interview with San Francisco’s KNBC Channel 3.

Unlike the governor’s initiative, Prop. 38 would tax the income of almost every Californian for 12 years. Under the initiative, public schools could receive as much as $10 billion the first year, which would be set apart from the state’s general fund. Some of the money would also go to preschools and to paying down bond debt.

Scott Kaplan has three children in the Redondo Beach Unified School District, just north of Long Beach. He’s backing Prop. 38 because he believes it would give communities more control of how the extra money is spent.

“It’s a huge amount of money for our district of 11 schools,” Kaplan said. “What we can do with those funds at the local level … is phenomenal.”

But the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office points out there is more to Prop. 38 than meets the eye. Because the money is earmarked for education, the initiative would do nothing to help California’s overall budget deficit. The measure also comes with a myriad of funding rules that school administrators say would be difficult to navigate.

And then there is the issue of timing. The Legislative Analyst states Prop. 38 tax dollars may not flow into schools until sometime during the next school year.

Erica Jones teaches 3rd grade at Angeles Mesa Elementary School near Inglewood. She backs the governor’s plan, Prop. 30, because she doesn’t want schools to get hit with that $6 billion spending cut should the initiative fail.

“I can’t wait for a great solution. We need help now,” Jones says.

Like many Californians, Jones feels the state’s wealthiest should kick in more to help the state and to get the school system back on track. “I’m all about shared responsibility,” she say,  “but there’s been a lot of responsibility put on the lower class and the middle class. So at this point we’re already struggling.”

Because the outcomes of these initiatives are so critical for education, a growing number of parents and educators are urging a yes vote on both.

However, only one can win — because Prop. 30 and 38 would increase the income tax on Californians. The state’s constitution views that as a conflict, so only the measure with the most votes can prevail.

And state taxpayer groups, of course, don’t want either one to succeed. They believe that giving more money to government simply encourages out-of-control spending. Here’s a chart of how much more Californians would pay under Prop 30 and Prop 38, respectively. The data is from the LAO; the dollar amounts represent the marginal tax rate for single-file taxpayers…

Listen to Ana Tintocalis’ story:

Update Oct 30: Here’s a great infographic comparing the two propositions, from EdSource. Click on the image to see the full graphic.

(Tina Barseghian/KQED)

Gov. Jerry Brown has been emphatic that if Proposition 30 fails in November, billions of dollars in cuts to public education are coming. He’s made that linkage so hard, in fact, that KXTV political editor and longtime Sacto observer John Myers once likened his Yes on 30 efforts to the famous National Lampoon cover in which the magazine threatened to shoot a dog if you didn’t buy the issue.

So is the public buying it?

On that front, a poll released Thursday shows mixed results.

Support for the measure is roughly the same since the last poll in July — 51 percent of voters in favor, 36 percent opposed. Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo told KQED’s Scott Shafer this morning that “They’re treading water, but at a rate that is not all that comfortable. But still there’s not a lot of evidence that their ‘yes’ side vote is deteriorating over time.”

However, an increasing number of undecided voters could turn out to be bad news for the measure. In July, 8 percent of voters were undecided; today’s poll shows 13 percent unsure.

“It’s our experience that if you don’t convince undecided voters, especially in the late going, to whatever it is you’re trying to get them to do, they tend to vote no more often than yes,”  said DiCamillo.

The Field Poll also shows another tax initiative, Prop. 38 — which would also finance education — at 41 percent of voters in favor, 44 percent opposed and 15 percent undecided. That’s up 8 percent since July.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that DiCamillo says voters are beginning to assess the two competing measures:

“I think people are starting to hear campaign claims and they’re getting the fact that there are two different things,” he said. “If I’m for the schools, which one do I go with? I think that’s really what’s happening.”

He said the poll results are still an early measure of voters’ attitudes.

“Once voters get the actual ballot pamphlets from the registrar of voters … that’s really when the rubber is meeting the road. We’re still not there yet,” he said.

Another poll, from the Public Policy Institute of California, found similar support for Prop. 30. It also found less than 50 percent support for Prop. 38.

If Prop. 30 fails, trigger cuts totaling $6 billion to education will kick in, with most of those coming out of K-12.

The governor has consistently pounded home the message that he has no other choice about what to do if Prop. 30 fails. When the Merc’s editorial board editor Barbara Marshall tried to question him on his tactics, she was cut off.

“Some critics feel as though you’ve skewed the trigger cuts to education to increase pressure to pass … ” Marshall started off.

“And that’s absolutely untrue!” Brown said, “This is the only place left.” He went on to detail still more cuts the state has already enacted — to In-Home Supportive Services, moving children from Healthy Families to Medi-Cal (“no one likes that” he said), fewer fish and game wardens, his list went on.

In his report this morning, Scott Shafer cited DiCamillo’s analysis that younger voters could be a driver for the education props. But while young voters, along with Latinos and African-Americans, are big backers of Prop. 30, they’re all less likely to vote. “And so the fate of both Props. 30 and 38 could rest on whether the presidential election motivates minorities and younger voters to cast their ballots,” Shafer said.

The Ten Commandments of Arithmetic: no place here for fuzzy math like you see in politics. (Credit: KQED/Rachael Myrow)

This November, California voters will be asked to weigh in on two ballot measures that affect education funding. Proposition 38 promises to raise money for K-12 schools with a broad-based income tax hike. Proposition 30, backed by Gov. Brown, would also raise taxes, but to a slightly different end: bolstering the state budget and avoiding massive education cuts.

Of course, lots and lots of funding has already been slashed. The distance between where we are and where we want to be in education is profoundly troubling to many voters in California – not just parents hoping to get their kids into a top university.

During Olympics season, the group StudentsFirst has generated a lot of buzz with a series of ads pointing up our nation’s less-than- competitive academic profile.

Whatever you think of the group and its leader Michelle Rhee (who garnered her national profile in Washington DC but is now living in Sacramento), it’s hard to ignore the feeling that there’s a great gulf between the amazing, explosive growth of Silicon Valley and the way we’re preparing our children to work in it — or not. To be fair, there have been impressive improvements in California in recent years, but there’s a lot more work to do by just about all accounts.

These are the kinds of questions the Silicon Valley Leadership Group spends a lot of time thinking about. The nonprofit hasn’t yet taken a position on either measure — those opinions are due out sometime in October. But Dennis Cima, VP of Education and Public Policy for the group, says funding is just one piece of the education conversation he’d like to see the state engaged in.

“We need to think more broadly about who we are and want to be in the next 20 years,” he says. “With the measures on the ballot, it comes down to this binary decision. Do we support the ballot measure or not? As opposed to really seeing the larger sustainability issues in education. Are we really putting in the inputs that we need to get the outputs that we want? My sense is no. We’re not.”

“The state of California could be and should be providing teacher professional development funding,” he says ruefully. “But it doesn’t.”

Math teacher Susan Tappero brims with genuine love for math. She helps elementary school teachers drop their fear of the subject and develop a sense of adventure instead. (Credit: KQED/Rachael Myrow)

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group, however, does. Last month in San Jose, I visited a teachers’ math clinic that the organization provides. The instructor, Susan Tappero, teaches math at Cabrillo College in Aptos during the school year. In the summer, she helps elementary school teachers brush up — and expand — their skills in the subject.

“It’s beyond most of what these teachers will ever teach their own students,” she said with a mischievous grin, referring to the mathematical concept of inverse functions — which she was challenging her teacher-students to tackle. “But it builds lots of math structure – and encourages discovery and exploration.”

Tappero hopes these teachers will bring a new flush of enthusiasm to their classrooms when they return in the fall. What she doesn’t say is that a fair number at the clinic were English and poli-sci majors in college. They can teach elementary level math, just not particularly well.

She says her classroom is a safe place to play catch-up. “They grow their math power and they just feel differently about tackling a math problem that’s hard. They look at it as more of an adventure rather than something to avoid.”

The clinic is in its fifth year, and while most seats are reserved for teachers from low-performing schools in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, classes are also open to people who really do excel at numbers.

Take Heidi Shimamoto, who’s been teaching sixth graders for 11 years, mostly in math. Shimamoto struggles to understand why some students don’t get basic concepts. And she comes across kids who’ve simply memorized the right answers, which is an approach she says works until it doesn’t. “They get so confused, but when they understand the underpinnings, which is what we’re doing, the foundations of math, then it’s so much easier. It makes so much more sense.”

California public schools – like schools all across the country – will soon be implementing new academic standards, called Common Core Standards. The stated hope is that all students will be encouraged to develop “adaptive reasoning,” “strategic competence” and “conceptual understanding” in math and science. But it’s one thing to tell teachers that’s what the state wants, and another entirely to help them deliver on the promise.

The program costs $3,000-3,500 per teacher, including 80 hours of instruction plus optional follow-up to help teachers analyze their students’ work. Cima says this was not a hard sell to corporate funder Intel, or for education officials at the county level.

It’s part of Cima’s job description to lobby for math and science education in Sacramento. He says every politician, Republican and Democrat alike, nods sagely when reminded that Silicon Valley’s future is tied to math and science education. But in an era of budget cuts, funding for schools is getting slashed. Rich communities can compensate somewhat at the state level. Poor communities? Not so much.

But Cima, a poli-sci major himself, acknowledges that in politics, things don’t always progress in a linear fashion – the way they do in math.

“We could sit back and wait for that money to come,” he says. “Or we could be innovative, work with partners like Intel, work with educators, work with schools, and create something here that can be replicated anywhere.”