People ask me all the time, "But I don't get it...Why would they donate to these politicians, how does it help them if the money doesn't go to them directly?"

First, this is only hard because you probably still see schools as existing to serve students. That's your first mistake. Schools exist to serve the adults who work in them and as contractors with them. As such, public schools are a GIANT jobs or public works program that never ends.

You're compelled to use them.
Money is taken from your by force of law to pay for them.
The incentives are now double that you will use them.
Money is allocated to them from Federal and State coffers based on census counts (districts are set up that way too).
The money is now in a closed loop the government controls.

SO, if you're a person who wants a piece of that GIANT pot of cash, you want two things:
1. The pot to get big, and only get bigger year after year.
2. People to keep voting more and more money out of their own pockets into the pot because schools don't make money on their own.

But heres' the lie:
Standardizing education for millions of children is hard. I'd argue it's too hard, it's actually impossible. It can't be done WELL. All you can do is create a SYSTEM and call it "education," but to actually DO the job for the majority of the kids, given the range of needs you'll find in a single classroom, never mind building, is impossible.

So NOW you need a massive CYA. If you ever owned how hard it is, people would (correctly) question the premise that such as system should exist. If they did that, all the people who depend on it for a JOB would be shit out of luck.

How many people know it's crap, and work in it anyway? I'd say MOST. Of those, I'd say you have about 5% (I'm being generous) who do what they can anyway to reach individual kids, inside their classrooms or spheres of influence, but all the while knowing it's a losing battle overall, and corruption and incompetence rule the day.

About 25% are TRULY malevolent, exploitative, abusive, grifters using the system to make money while not being truly accountable to anyone. All they have to do is kiss ass to the right people, single out and help bully anyone who challenges the status quo (threatens to upset their gravy train), and they won't get fired.

The rest? Sheeple who are punching a clock, eating up the fact that the public thinks they're heroes, but on the whole, incapable of doing much less in life, and like the hours and benefits. These are the ones who are willingly keeping the system crap because they'd rather have a job than do the right thing. LOADS of status, for very little effort, if you can stomach doing the bare minimum, and can sleep at night knowing you've passed a kid forward who can't read, again.

So when the time comes to donate to politicians who are gonna consistently vote to keep the illusion going; who will oppose school choice, oppose homeschooling, support the fantasy that ALL teachers are heroes, and the even bigger fantasy that public schools "educate" most of their students well enough to prepare them adequately for adult life, it's an easy ask. They'll fork over some of their money, since there are over 1Mil AFT members alone (for example) to make a sizable donation to Democrat candidates, if it's gonna mean BILLIONS of your dollars coming back TO them.

Because you know what makes ditching public schools really really hard? Politicians who will never admit something they supported SO wholeheartedly, they voted to fund it with billions of taxpayer dollars, was a mistake.

https://www.rollcall.com/2021/04/28/donations-from-teachers-unions-spiked-as-congress-debated-school-reopening-virus-relief/