While Election Day results for teacher unions across the country are best described as mixed, the California Teachers Association celebrated victories in virtually all of its targeted races.

CTA’s unrelenting support of Tony Thurmond for Superintendent of Public Instruction was instrumental in putting him over the top. CTA-backed candidates won eight of nine state constitutional offices (the defeat of Ed Hernandez for lieutenant governor being the only loss). And union-backed candidates had a success rate of 84 percent in Assembly, Senate and congressional races.

It’s perhaps a little surprising that the union did not do quite as well in local school board races. As we reported last month, CTA devoted just short of $1 million to 312 school board races throughout the state, much of it spent in places where there was no countervailing organized opposition. Of those 312 candidates, 209 were victorious, for a success rate of 67 percent.

The amount of money CTA spent on each race does not seem to have been a determining factor in victory or defeat. Of the 22 school board candidates who received the most support, 14 were successful. I have labeled the winners with a W and the losers with an L.

CTA’s top 10 donations to November’s school board races and result:

1. San Francisco: Alison Collins (W), Li Lovett (L) and Faauuga Moliga (W) – $108,700

2. San Diego: Kevin Beiser (W) and Michael McQuary (W) – $54,500

3. Santa Clara County: Claudia Rossi (W) – $32,900

4. Southwestern Community College: Nicole Jones (L), Tim Nader (W) and Nora Vargas (W) – $32,900

5. Santa Clara County: Peter Ortiz (W) – $31,500

6. Saddleback Valley: Barbara Schulman (W) and Dan Walsh (L) – $25,000

7. Anaheim Union High: Al Jabbar (W), Anna Piercy (W) and Annemarie Randle-Trejo (W) – $24,500

8. Oakland: Clarissa Doutherd (L) – $23,900

9. East Side Union High: Frank Biehl (W), Manuel Herrera (L) and Kristin Rivers (L) – $22,200

10. San Dieguito Union High: Amy Flicker (L), Kristin Gibson (W) and Rhea Stewart (L) – $19,000

It is very likely that all of this spending will be easily eclipsed by the outlays for one school board seat in one district — LA Unified. The election for the open District 5 seat takes place on March 5, but the huge field of candidates virtually ensures a runoff on May 14.

Charter school groups will certainly spend big to re-establish a charter-friendly majority on the board. CTA and United Teachers Los Angeles, along with other public employee unions, will have no other elections competing for their attention and resources. They will devote considerable amounts to the race.

Eleven days after the election, Tony Thurmond accepted a concession call from Marshall Tuck and will become California’s state superintendent of public instruction.

A spokesman for Tuck’s campaign confirmed Sunday that the race was over and that Tuck had conceded Saturday morning in a phone call to Thurmond.

Thurmond tweeted out his thanks to voters on Saturday and said in a statement, “I intend to be a champion of public schools and a Superintendent for all California students. I ran for Superintendent of Public Instruction to deliver to all Californians the promise that public education delivered to me — that all students, no matter their background and no matter their challenges, can succeed with a great public education.”

I want to thank the voters of CA for electing me to serve the 6 million students of CA. I intend to be a champion of public schools & a Superintendent for all CA students. I want to thank Marshall Tuck for his gracious call to congratulate me & wish me well. Time to get to work!

— Tony Thurmond (@TonyThurmond) November 17, 2018

Thurmond, 50, is a state assemblyman and a former social worker and school board member in the San Francisco Bay area. He had the backing of the powerful teachers union and other organized labor groups throughout the state. Every state superintendent in the past 24 years has won with teacher union support.

Tuck, 45, had an 86,000-vote lead after Election Day, but as provisional and mail-in ballots were counted, that margin evaporated, and Thurmond’s lead is now nearly three times what Tuck’s was. Results will not be official until all votes are counted — about 2 million remain — and are certified in December.

About 9 million votes have been counted, and 3 million of those have come since Election Day.

The 325,000-member California Teachers Association, “phone-banked, texted, canvassed and volunteered for candidates like Tony who want quality public schools,” President Eric C. Heins wrote in a news release. “It’s clear that educators played a pivotal role in this election.”

The state superintendent job lacks partisan affiliation, carries little statutory power and has not historically set its occupants on a path to higher office. But the record $60 million spent on the race proved it was a sought-after bully pulpit. A win for Tuck would have given education reformers a public counterweight against Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, the new state board of education that he will appoint, and the Democratic majority in the state legislature — all of which were elected with union backing.

• Read more: California’s campaign for state superintendent costs more than most Senate races. Here’s why

The race centered on California’s debate over school choice, pitting Thurmond against Tuck, who was supported by the California Charter Schools Association Advocates and wealthy reformers. Both are Democrats, oppose for-profit charters, and called for more transparency measures. But Thurmond suggested that a “pause” on new charter schools might be necessary until new revenues are found to offset the dollars that districts lose when their students move to charters. Tuck argued that school districts should not be allowed to reject new charter petitions because of the financial hardship that might result.

Both candidates also agreed on adding more recognized subgroups of students who are underachieving — such as African Americans — to the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, which provides additional funding for English learners, low-income, homeless and foster students. They also agree on free preschool for all children across the state and additional mental health support for students.

But Tuck had vowed to fight for changes in how school districts are allowed to spend the extra funding. The current superintendent has said the money can be used for across-the-board raises for teachers. Tuck wanted to end that. Thurmond declined to say if he would continue it, CALmatters reported.

Bill Lucia, president and CEO of EdVoice, said by email Monday, “We wish Mr. Thurmond nothing but success in delivering on campaign promises made to parents with children being failed by the current system. The first test will be whether he follows through or reneges on the explicit promise to reverse Superintendent Torlakson’s ill-advised decision to redirect funds for across-the-board pay raises from extra help intended for English learners and kids in poverty. Fixing broken California public schools will require tough and unpopular decisions that will likely upset the special interests that funded his campaign.  Hopefully, he can find the courage to stand tall and do it.” EdVoice is a California education advocacy organization that supported Tuck’s campaign.

The heated contest featured disputes over negative advertising and became the most expensive race in the nation for a state superintendent — for the second time. Tuck narrowly lost in 2014 to Tom Torlakson, who served two four-year terms and is now termed out. That race cost $30 million. This time, the candidates raked in twice that — more than any House race this cycle and all but a handful of the most expensive Senate races. Tuck took in the lion’s share, outspending Thurmond roughly 2-1.

Tuck was president of Green Dot Public Schools, a nonprofit charter management organization started in 1999 in Los Angeles, as well as the founding CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a network created a decade ago by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa after his failed attempt to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Tuck wrote to his supporters Saturday, “I just spoke with Assemblymember Thurmond and congratulated him on his victory. I offered to help him be successful and wished him the best in his new role. Given it has become clear that we are not going to win this campaign, I felt it was in the best interest of California’s children for me to concede now so that Assemblymember Thurmond has as much time as possible to plan to take over as State Superintendent (all votes will still be counted but conceding allows candidates to move forward).”

He added, “I recognize that change is very hard and politics, particularly when you lose, can be disheartening. I remind myself that winning the election isn’t the end goal. The end goal is that all children in this state and country, regardless of background, get access to quality public schools. Reaching that goal is going to take a lot of work and absolutely requires us to get over this loss quickly. We must continue to be extremely determined to do our part to help our children.”

The Education Trust—West, an education advocacy organization, in a statement Monday pressed California’s newly elected leaders to “move urgently and aggressively to tackle the obstacles that limit student opportunity and achievement.”

“We cannot continue to be complacent with a system that provides more counselors, more computer science courses, and more A-G courses for affluent schools than schools in lower-income communities — to name just a few of the injustices impacting California students,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, Ed Trust—West’s interim co-executive director.

The organization congratulated Newsom and Thurmond and said it hopes “to see the same spirit of urgency and excitement we saw during the campaign season applied to building an outstanding school and college system … to usher in evidence-based, robust changes that will bring much-needed, long-awaited educational justice to California students and communities.”

Carrie Hahnel, interim co-executive director, added, “California schools can truly serve every student, but only if our elected officials work together strategically and collaboratively, in partnership with stakeholders on college campuses and in our school communities, to once and for all close our state’s unacceptable opportunity gaps.”

Susan Rubio, who worked as a teacher and administrator for 17 years, was elected to California’s state Senate in District 22 in east Los Angeles County. (Photo from Susan Rubio campaign video)

*Updated Nov. 18

Across the country, teachers ran for office this year, inspiring almost as many underdog campaign stories as Texas’s Beto O’Rourke and drawing widespread attention to state legislative races that otherwise wouldn’t break into national headlines.

When the votes were counted, educators scored some notable wins, but it was far from a sweep for teacher candidates. But even with mixed results, teachers are saying the fight isn’t over yet.

In some of the most high-profile races of the night, educators came out on top. 2016 National Teacher of the Year Jahana Hayes was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in Connecticut. Former teacher and state schools chief Tony Evers was elected governor of Wisconsin, defeating incumbent Scott Walker, who’s known for stripping the state’s teachers unions of collective bargaining rights.

At least 42 classroom teachers nationwide won state legislative seats this month, according to Education Week, which tallied 177 current classroom teachers who ran in primaries and general elections this year.

The National Education Association reported 1,081 educator-candidates won state legislative races out of nearly 1,800 who ran in November, according to the Huffington Post. Other watchers called those numbers exaggerated because they used a much broader definition of educator that included support staff, college professors and those who taught years earlier.

NEA President Lily Eskelsen-Garcia said at an Education Writers Association event after the election that the #RedforEd movement, which emerged during the teacher walkouts, was about bringing attention to schools and raising teachers’ voices, not just winning elections.

“The #redfored movement snowballed into this incredible effort we saw across the country. We had an unprecedented number (of teachers) who said ‘Yes, I will be a candidate.'” – @Lily_NEA #ewaELECTION18

— Emily Richmond (@EWAEmily) November 9, 2018

NEA Prez @Lily_NEA. The #RedForEd movement wasn’t about wins or loses. It’s about shining a spotlight on the chronic neglect of our schools and deciding to do something about it. This is our movement. #EWAelection18

— NEA Public Relations (@NEAMedia) November 9, 2018

Much of the media attention ahead of Election Day focused on teachers who ran on education-heavy platforms for state legislative seats in Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona, red states that saw widespread teacher walkouts in the spring.

In Oklahoma, 16 current or former educators were elected to the state House or Senate, of 65 who ran, CNN reports. That number includes Republican Sherrie Conley, a school administrator who defeated retired teacher and former teachers union organizer Steve Jarman to represent Oklahoma House District 20. The Oklahoma Education Association tweeted support for Conley when she won but did not endorse or donate to either candidate during the general election campaign.

Congratulations Sherrie Conley! New representative for House District 20! #oklaed #TogetherWeAreStronger #RedForEd pic.twitter.com/sma8V1o7P3

— OK Education Assoc. (@okea) November 7, 2018

Conley said she has been “thrilled” by the increased political engagement she saw from parents in her community throughout the campaign. That would have been a step forward whether she won or lost, she said.

“Parents … have engaged their children in the process, and I’m hoping that it will raise up a stronger group of voters that will be more engaged and more educated in the process in the future,” she told The 74 after her victory.

At least three other school administrators also won state legislative seats in Oklahoma.

In Kentucky, which also had statewide teacher walkouts, high school math teacher R. Travis Brenda won the Republican primary by opposing a controversial pension reform plan championed by the incumbent, House Republican leader Jonathan Shell. He easily won the general election against Democrat Mary Renfro, who also touted her support for teachers and opposition to the pension reform on her campaign website.

Brenda told The 74 before the election that he was running as “a conservative Republican in a Republican district.” For Brenda, his upset primary victory was much tougher — he won by just 121 votes — than the general election.

The last several months have been an exciting journey. First and foremost, the glory goes to God for leading me through this process. Second, thank you to everyone that helped knock on doors, share Facebook posts, tell their friends and neighbors, etc. We did this together.

— R. Travis Brenda (@RTravisBrenda) November 7, 2018

After his victory, Brenda said he thinks his profile as a Republican who had backing from labor unions, educators and a range of other groups helped him win.

One of the closest races was for superintendent of public instruction in Arizona, where teachers won a raise after a weeklong walkout this spring. School speech therapist and Democrat Kathy Hoffman ran against Republican Frank Riggs, formerly a congressman from California. During the campaign, Riggs criticized Hoffman for lacking the leadership experience to succeed in the job, while Hoffman stressed that an educator should oversee the school system.

Hoffman declared victory Sunday, and she was officially named the winner Monday evening. She will be the first Democratic superintendent since 1995. Meanwhile, Riggs declined to immediately concede, instead attacking journalists and political operatives in a Twitter meltdown Sunday night. He later deleted the tweets and temporarily deactivated his account; he also apologized in a statement sent to The Arizona Republic. He later conceded via Facebook.

In California, one teacher who came in a distant second in the primary won even without the support of teachers unions.

Even though Susan Rubio was a public school teacher and administrator for 17 years, the California Federation of Teachers and United Teachers Los Angeles endorsed her opponent, Mike Eng, in the race for a state Senate seat in east Los Angeles County. She won by about 5 percentage points.

Rubio told The 74 in an email that it was “heartbreaking” that she didn’t get those endorsements, but she believes voters elected her because she has more personal ties to the community, in part because of her teaching background.

“As a teacher and councilwoman, there wasn’t a life story I hadn’t heard or had personally experienced,” she wrote.

While ballots are still being counted, I’m confident that the results will show that I will be the next Senator from the SGV. Without your support, encouragement and engagement, we would never have won this race. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve. pic.twitter.com/BF2lhqQNbW

— Susan Rubio (@HonSusanRubio) November 8, 2018

However, while many educators lost their bids for public office, some have already indicated they’re not finished with politics just yet.

Aimy Steele, who lost a race for the North Carolina House of Representatives, also posted that she has her eyes set on 2020 “in some capacity.”

Jarman, who lost his bid for the Oklahoma House race that Conley won, posted to Facebook that “this is no time to whine and whimper. If anything it is time to regroup. It’s time to be smarter and plan ahead.”

Jennifer Samuels, a Democrat and middle school teacher who lost her race for an Arizona House of Representatives seat, pointed to the number of winning teacher-candidates in Oklahoma as a bright spot for education on Election Day, as well as Hayes’s victory in Connecticut. She also sees Arizona voters’ rejection of Proposition 305, which would have vastly expanded education savings accounts in the state, as a win for public education.

Samuels told The 74 that she is considering running for the seat again in 2020 and will work to hold her elected officials accountable in the meantime.

“We’ll be watching,” she said on Twitter, telling Education Week, “It’s about the long game for us.”

But she said teachers need to stay engaged in state politics. “We picked up more seats than we should have in this very red district,” she said. “It’s about the long game for us.” @ArizonaEA @PVEAmembers

— Jennifer Samuels, M.Ed (@SamuelsforAZ) November 9, 2018

The 74 talked to a dozen teachers running for office across the nation before the midterms. See how they fared:

Teachers who won in the general election:

• R. Travis Brenda is a high school math teacher and a Republican who successfully ran for state representative in Kentucky’s 71st District. During the Republican primary, he defeated an incumbent lawmaker who was seen as a key proponent of the controversial change to state teachers’ pensions earlier this year.
• Susan Rubio, a Democrat who worked as a teacher and administrator for 17 years, successfully ran to represent California’s District 22 in the state Senate. In addition to her work as an educator, Rubio is an advocate for women who have experienced domestic abuse.
• Sherrie Conley is a Republican who successfully ran to represent Oklahoma’s House District 20. She taught for 15 years and is currently in her second year as an administrator.
• Kathy Hoffman, projected to be Arizona’s next superintendent of public instruction, taught for two years and was a speech therapist in a school for five years.

Teachers who lost in the general election:

• Lynne Walz, a Democrat, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in Nebraska with gubernatorial candidate Bob Krist. Walz was elected to the state legislature in 2016 and is currently a real estate agent as well, but she taught for six years in the 1990s and early 2000s.
• Jennifer Samuels, a Democrat, lost her race for the Arizona state House of Representatives. Samuels is in her eighth year as a classroom teacher.
• Steve Jarman, a Democrat, opposed Conley for the Oklahoma House District 20 seat. Jarman retired 10 years ago after 31 years of teaching.
• Joe Bisaccia, a Democrat, lost his bid for a seat in the Arizona state House of Representatives. He is in his second year of teaching.
• Donna Lawlor, a Republican, is a retired teacher who lost her bid for a seat in the Kentucky House of Representatives.
• Aimy Steele, a Democrat, lost her bid for a seat in the North Carolina House of Representatives. Before resigning in the spring to focus on her campaign, she was a teacher for seven years and an administrator for six years. Steele lost in the general election.
• Cyndi Ralston, a Democrat, lost her bid for a seat in the Oklahoma House of Representatives.

One teacher in Arizona is in a race that is too close to call:

• Christine Porter Marsh was Arizona’s 2016 Teacher of the Year and is a Democrat running for state Senate to represent Legislative District 28. She was trailing opponent Kate Brophy McGee by 284 votes as of the latest results released Saturday evening.

This article is part of The 74’s ongoing coverage of the 2018 midterms; see the complete coast-to-coast “EDlection Cheat Sheet” of the 70 races with the broadest impact for education policy.

*Updated Nov. 18 with latest vote total in Arizona’s District 28 race. 

Last week, I expressed doubt that press outlets would revisit the assumptions made prior to the election about teacher candidates for office in the “uprising” states. I was wrong to be so pessimistic, as there were dozens of stories about how the results did not live up to the hype. Most of the stories were not by the same people who hyped it beforehand, but still.

Politico compiled results from many of the education-related races under the headline “How teacher unrest failed to shake up the states in the midterms.” The Washington Post story was “Midterms test the durability of the teacher uprising.” U.S. News went with “Poor Marks for Teachers in Midterms,” while The Atlantic called it “The Questionable Year of the Teacher Politician.”

Local media outlets in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky largely followed suit, noting that most of the candidates inspired by the walkouts in the spring lost their elections.

These stories were all a welcome acknowledgment of how things went, but most of them still missed the point.

It wasn’t a question of whether union-backed or education-related candidates won in some places and lost in others. That’s true of every election. Any fair reading of the 2018 results would yield a description of “mixed.” Teacher unions posted a big win in the Wisconsin governor race, flipped several statehouses and appear to have pulled out state superintendent wins in both Arizona and California (maybe). They were least successful in the states that prompted all those pre-election stories in the first place.

• Read more: Election-Day Final Sinks Teachers Running for Office in Three Education Battleground States

What hasn’t been adequately addressed is the extent to which the Year of the Teacher Politician was entirely a concoction of the National Education Association.

Even the stories about the failure of teacher candidates cited NEA’s claim of nearly 1,800 educators on state legislative ballots. But if NEA shared details of their identities, job titles and numbers in individual states, none of it made it into print. The NEA memo that formed the basis for most of the stories stated, “A large bulk of educators come from states that experienced historic #RedforEd walkouts this spring: West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina.”

NEA repeatedly called the numbers “unprecedented,” even though by its own admission 2018 was the first time it tracked the number of educator candidates running for state legislatures. In fact, the union told the Huffington Post in September that its original count of 554 educator candidates was “unprecedented.”

After the elections, the Huffington Post reported NEA’s claim that 1,081 educator candidates won their legislative races. But if “a large bulk” of the candidates came from the states where most educators lost, then how did a majority win, and where did they run?

The Huffington Post reported that “many” of the winners were actually incumbents, but didn’t say how many, and neither did NEA. This is a crucial missing detail, since no one has suggested that the main purpose of the #RedforEd movement was to re-elect the same people to public office.

The pre-election coverage was bad. The postelection coverage improved but was still lacking. Teachers are just as good as candidates for state legislatures as anyone else, if not better. But voters don’t elect legislators to represent specific job titles or public services. They are supposed to represent all the people in a geographic district. Most of those people are not teachers and don’t even have school-age children. They have an infinite variety of concerns, only one of which is how the public school system is run and funded.

After the 2018 election, some people might be shortsighted by suggesting teachers stay in their lane. I have the opposite view. I encourage teachers to become more familiar with issues wholly unrelated to public education. It will not only expand their horizons as candidates, but will certainly lead to more election victories.

(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Education reform, at least its most contentious elements, didn’t have a great night Tuesday.

In Arizona, nearly two-thirds of voters rejected a bid by lawmakers to provide education savings accounts to all students.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, a villain of teachers unions, lost his bid for a third term to state Superintendent Tony Evers, who wants to overturn limits on collective bargaining and the state’s voucher program.

In Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer won the governor’s contest pledging to “end the DeVos agenda in Michigan.”

But are those losses truly caused by voters rejecting specific education reform proposals, or are they the collateral damage of other political trends, including a repudiation of President Trump?

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that while very few people cited education as their top electoral concern, some of the results stand as a repudiation of what he called “the hard-edged definitions of school reform.”  

“Voters showed, and policymakers showed, a massive distaste for a lot of where school reform has brought us,” Hess said at a panel Wednesday.

An analysis he conducted this spring of gubernatorial primary candidates’ education platforms, in fact, showed most concentrated on a far more bipartisan issue: career and technical education. Few mentioned testing or accountability, and almost none did so positively.

There was a movement away from the reforms that have been “bitter and hostile and frustrating,” he added. “Folks in the education space would be well served by taking a big deep breath.”

Others, however, cautioned not to be too myopic about the importance of education. All elections are local, particularly when it comes to education, and to the extent the midterms were about any larger national themes, they centered on issues like health care and immigration.

In fairness, education reform did have some wins in the midterms, like Jared Polis’s primary win for Colorado governor, when he fended off a union-backed candidate on his way to winning the general election Tuesday.

“I think we have to be careful not to over-interpret any of this in terms of education, because it was such a peripheral issue,” said Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank.

Ed reform policies like tough standards and rigorous teacher evaluation, once considered more centrist and bipartisan, have lost some magic in our increasingly polarized political era.

“We are at a very low point in education policy. There hasn’t been this little activity — sort of new, big ideas — for 20 years. I think that period started two years ago, and we’re still in the middle of it, and there’s just not an appetite,” he said.

The bipartisan coalition that supported education reform through the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies has weakened, said Tom Loveless, an education researcher formerly with the Brookings Institution. He blamed that faltering coalition on disappointing results.

“I do think we’re at some kind of turning point, or we have already turned, and school reform does not have the same kind of political firepower that it had five, 10, 15 years ago,” he said.

That distaste for, or disinterest in, education reform may have some real consequences.

The void of voter and policymaker interest in the middle leaves a “Titanic battle at the top among the extremes,” said Sandy Kress, a senior education policy adviser to President George W. Bush. With no center, the combatants are teachers unions and their allies on the left, and extreme anti-tax and government control advocates on the right, he said.

New Mexico has been one of the exemplars of education reform, with well-known state chiefs driving hard on issues like test-based teacher evaluations, A-F school grades, and rigorous standards. Voters Tuesday elected Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham, who campaigned on overturning those reforms, particularly teacher evaluations.

What once was “one of the states that was really holding firm” to those initiatives, now “seems very likely it will not be in that camp in two years’ time,” Hess said.

• Read more: EDlection2018: Michelle Lujan Grisham Will Be New Mexico’s Next Governor, Promises a Rollback of Her Predecessor’s Education Reforms

In Nevada, the Democratic sweep of state government, the first time the party has held the governor’s mansion and state Assembly and Senate since 1992, almost assuredly means lawmakers won’t move to find a new funding source for their universal education savings account program, and could jeopardize the future of its state takeover district.

Rather than pushing for more big reforms, education advocates should build on initiatives already in the works, like implementing the Common Core or improving charter quality, Petrilli said.

“We’ve got to wait. To some degree, we’ve got to hunker down and wait for the politics to hopefully return to normal,” he said.  

Several advocates interviewed said the lack of political attention may actually be a good thing, allowing the work to continue out of the political fray.

If voters care more about issues like health care, the economy and LGBTQ rights, “if you can bring together a platform that does all those things as a Democrat, and education isn’t the top issue, you may be able to go farther than you could have otherwise,” on education reforms, said Charles Barone, chief policy officer at Democrats for Education Reform.  

He pointed to candidates like Polis, or Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut who was easily reelected Tuesday after pushing hard to put accountability provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Looking ahead, the results of this election could continue to impact whether and how campaigns deal with education in 2020.

Because white suburban voters were so key to Democrats’ big wins, they’ll be an important bloc in the 2020 presidential elections, said Joanne Weiss, former chief of staff to then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Those are the very voters who believe education is working and more reforms aren’t needed, setting up a counterweight to the black and Latino voters who traditionally vote Democrat and care a great deal about the issues, she said.

“That means that education reform…issues are going to be problematic because they’re going to play to black and Latino voters, but they’re not going to play well to the suburban white voters,” she said.

Trying to attract two groups of voters with competing priorities might mean the Democratic candidates for president just ignore it, she said: “It’s probably going to make it so that education is just going to fly under the radar and not matter at all.”

Gavin Newsom and family at his victory party Tuesday. (Photo: Gavin Newsom Twitter)

Gavin Newsom accepted his victory in California’s race for governor with a speech focused on immigrants, children and keeping families together.

Newsom, 51, will be the first governor in decades to hold office while raising young children. He has four children, ages 2 to 9, which, he has said, makes him “more righteous about public education.”

Newsom easily defeated Republican businessman John Cox in a race that in effect was a referendum on the state’s opposition to President Donald Trump and his policies regarding immigration, the environment and a host of other issues. Newsom got 59.3 percent of the vote to 40.7 percent for Cox in unofficial reporting.

Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, gave a brief speech, both in English and Spanish, before introducing him as the new governor on Tuesday night, only two hours after the polls closed. She called him to the stage as “the father to our four incredible young children and the next governor of the great state of California.”

“We all are a family and together we will rise,” she said. “You all are welcome in our California family.”

Now is the time for going far and going together. For facts. For trust. For truth. Now is the time for leaders to lead.

This is California’s moment. Incredibly honored and privileged to serve as this great state’s next Governor. pic.twitter.com/DGFcfZOS7d

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) November 7, 2018

Newsom followed the family tone during his speech.

“We don’t separate families and lock kids in cages,” he told supporters, referring to the undocumented families separated at the border earlier this year and taken to detention facilities where children reportedly were kept apart from their parents and held in cages.

He also vowed to make California “a state of results and of refuge” and to protect undocumented students known as Dreamers — such as Joshua, a young Californian he said he met at one of his campaign stops and became his supporter.

“Now is our turn to spend our waking days protecting that dream for every Californian,” Newsom said, referring to Joshua, who he said was an undocumented student protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program who couldn’t vote for him but gave him his support during the campaign.  

• Read more:

EDlection2018: Gavin Newsom easily wins governor’s race in California, which he vows to make ‘a state of results and of refuge’

A 2018 EDlection Cheat Sheet: Recapping the 70 Candidates, Races & Winners That Matter Most for American Education Policy

*Updated Nov. 19 — Marshall Tuck conceded Nov. 17,  and Tony Thurmond will be the next state superintendent. See new article here. 

After the costliest race ever for a state schools chief, education reformer Marshall Tuck appears to have narrowly won his second bid for California’s superintendent of public instruction, according to unofficial results from the state.

“I think the most important thing in our state is our public schools,” Tuck told NBC4 Tuesday night as early results were released in his favor. “You can’t have a good future in the 21st century without a good public school. We’re not getting the job done for our kids, particularly low-income kids.”

By midday Wednesday, 100 percent of precincts were reporting and results remained unofficial pending the counting of provisional and mail-in ballots. State Assemblyman Tony Thurmond had not yet conceded. Tuck had 50.7 percent of the vote, barely a percentage point over Thurmond’s 49.3 percent. Only about 86,000 votes separated them, out of about 6 million ballots cast.

“The election continues to be incredibly close, but so far we have held onto a small lead,” Tuck’s campaign manager, Andrew Blumenfeld, said in a Wednesday morning email. “At this point, 100% of precincts are reporting, and we have 50.7% of the counted vote. We are still waiting to hear from precincts in San Diego, and then provisional and later absentee ballots from all over the state. These outstanding ballots will continue to come in rather slowly.”

With millions of ballots left to be counted, we’re digging in & waiting for every vote. The kids of CA are in it for the long haul & we are too. I’m so proud of the coalition we built & I thank the thousands of educators, students & public ed advocates who supported our campaign.

— Tony Thurmond (@TonyThurmond) November 7, 2018

The race centered on California’s debate over school choice, pitting union-backed Thurmond against Tuck, who was supported by the California Charter Schools Association Advocates and wealthy reformers. Both are Democrats, but the race also highlighted a north-south divide. Both were raised in the Bay Area, but Tuck has led independent charter and traditional public school organizations in Los Angeles, and Thurmond is a state legislator in Richmond, just north of Berkeley on the San Francisco Bay.

The heated campaign featured disputes over negative advertising and became the most expensive race in the nation for a state superintendent — for the second time. Tuck narrowly lost in 2014 to Tom Torlakson, who served two four-year terms and is now termed out. That race cost $30 million. This time, the candidates raked in more than $54 million as of Monday — more than any House race this cycle and all but a handful of the most expensive Senate races. Tuck took in the lion’s share, outspending Thurmond roughly 2-1.

Thurmond, 50, is a former social worker, school board member and council member in the Bay Area. He is ending his second term in the state Assembly, where he serves on the Education and Human Services committees. He was backed by the powerful 325,000-member California Teachers Association.

Tuck, 45, was president of Green Dot Public Schools, a nonprofit charter management organization started in 1999 in Los Angeles, as well as the founding CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a network created a decade ago by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa after his failed attempt to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The Partnership focuses on turning around the lowest-scoring schools with the highest dropout rates in the toughest neighborhoods of Los Angeles — Boyle Heights, Watts, and South Los Angeles. One of its 18 schools, 20th Street Elementary, has posted more than 20-point gains in state test scores since it joined the network two years ago, putting it in the top 5 percent of all Los Angeles Unified elementary schools in terms of growth. Just two years ago, 20th Street Elementary was considered such a failing school that the parents moved to take it over from LA Unified using a state law called a “parent trigger.”

The state superintendent job lacks partisan affiliation, carries little statutory power and has not historically set its occupants on a path to higher office. But a Tuck win would represent a symbolic victory for the charter movement.

“I’m about every kid in the state. We’ve got to have great public schools in every neighborhood. Charters schools play a role, but ultimately the focus has to be in our traditional public schools,” said Tuck, who had the support of the education reform movement’s philanthropists including Eli Broad and Bill Bloomfield.

Of the state’s 6.2 million K-12 students, about 10 percent are enrolled in some 1,275 charter schools. Though its charter sector is the nation’s largest in overall student enrollment, and has been one of the fastest-growing, expansion has stalled amid loud political opposition.

The two candidates differed in their support for charters. In a candidate forum recorded shortly before the primary, both agreed that for-profit operators have no place in California. But Thurmond went further, suggesting that a “pause” on new openings might be necessary until new revenues are found to offset the dollars that districts lose when their students move to charter schools. Tuck argued instead that school districts should not be allowed to reject new charter petitions because of the financial hardship that might result.

The state’s public schools rank 44th in the nation based on national assessment scores for reading and math. State test scores have risen a bare 1 percent in the last three years despite a significant increase in state funding. Fewer than 4 in 10 students can do math on grade level, and only half are proficient in English language arts.

“We’ve got a lot to do to improve our schools,” Tuck said.

It’s #electionday and the Tucks have voted! Have you? #ivoted #govote pic.twitter.com/TeXA5fTiG3

— Marshall Tuck (@MarshallTuck) November 6, 2018

The state’s Local Control Funding Formula over the last three years has funneled more than $27 billion in extra funding to school districts that serve large numbers of disadvantaged students, but the achievement gap persists between white students and blacks and Latinos, and 11th-graders this year lost ground. English learners, who were supposed to benefit from the extra funding, continued to perform at the bottom of all subgroups of students. Over 20 percent of the students in California’s public schools — or 1.3 million children — are English learners.

Both candidates agree on adding more subgroups of students who are underachieving so students such as African Americans can also receive additional funding under the Local Control Funding Formula, which currently provides additional funding for English learners, low-income, homeless and foster students. They also agree on free preschool for all children across the state and additional mental health support for students.

For updated election results, follow the Election Liveblog here.

EDlection2018: This is one of dozens of races we’ve analyzed for the 2018 midterms that could go on to influence state or federal education policy. Get the latest headlines delivered straight to your inbox; sign up for The 74 Newsletter and the LA School Report Newsletter.

]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/edlection2018-gavin-newsom-easily-wins-governors-race-in-california-which-he-vows-to-make-a-state-of-results-and-of-refuge/ Wed, 07 Nov 2018 19:23:01 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=52659

Gavin Newsom is California’s new governor. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

*Updated Nov. 7 with new poll results

Gavin Newsom easily defeated John Cox to become governor of California in a race that in effect was a referendum on President Donald Trump and his policies.

“Too many Californians are priced out of housing, healthcare and higher education. Too many children are growing up in poverty and starting school from behind,” he said in his victory speech Tuesday night.

Newsom, 51, vowed to make California “a state of results and of refuge” and to protect undocumented students known as Dreamers. He has called for universal preschool and increased funding for higher education and pledged to fight Trump administration policies, including those on education.

With 100 percent reporting midday Wednesday, unofficial results showed Newsom with 59.3 percent of the vote to 40.7 percent for Republican businessman Cox.

Turnout was high after voter registration in the state reached an all-time record of more than 19.7 million people; that’s 1.9 million more than in the 2014 midterm elections. On Nov. 2, California’s Secretary of State Alex Padilla reported that an “almost unprecedented” 78 percent of Californians eligible to vote had registered, the largest share in September since the 1996 presidential election, which had 77 percent.

• For updated election results, follow the Election Liveblog here.

The two candidates both called for improving school accountability and data transparency, as well as attracting and retaining high-quality teachers. But they differ on charter schools: Newsom proposed a moratorium on all new charters, while Cox’s educational vision favored school choice and competition.

“I’ve supported high-quality nonprofit charter schools, but I believe in accountability with taxpayer dollars,” Newsom said in a television interview during his campaign, according to the Sacramento Bee. He supports community schools, which provide basic healthcare and other services to disadvantaged students and their families. But his main educational focus during his campaign was early education and child welfare.

Cox, 63, pledged strong support for charter schools. He also vowed to reduce the power of teachers unions and special interest groups. “I want to put the parents in charge. I want to make it a consumer effort again,” Cox said before June’s primary.

Before entering the gubernatorial race, Cox, an attorney and accountant, ran unsuccessfully for Congress twice in his home state of Illinois and conducted a brief presidential campaign in 2008 that didn’t make it to the primaries. He now lives in San Diego County.

Cox also called for better pay for teachers and basing their salaries and bonuses in part on students’ performance. “I want to see our teachers paid like rock stars and baseball players,” he said while campaigning. He laid out a vision on education aligned with U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s support for school choice by expanding charter schools and homeschooling.

California public schools rank 44th in the nation, based on the national assessment scores for reading and math among 4th and 8th graders. And for the third year in a row, California students’ scores were mostly stagnant on state standardized tests. Only half met standards in reading this year; 39 percent did so in math. High schoolers in 11th grade lost ground, and a stubborn achievement gap persisted between white students and their black and Latino peers. English learners performed at the bottom of all subgroups of students. Over 20 percent of the students in California’s public schools — or 1.3 million children — are English learners.

The disappointing test scores come despite more than $27 billion in extra funding that has gone to schools with large concentrations of disadvantaged students over the last three years through the state’s Local Control Funding Formula.

Newsom had the backing of the powerful California Teachers Association, which also helped him in last spring’s primary to defeat former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, an education reformer. Villaraigosa ended up in third place in the June race, which many saw as the demise of education as a significant issue in the governor’s race.

In the only debate between Newsom and Cox, education was barely mentioned, despite poll results released the previous week showing that 9 out of 10 parents who are Latino, black or Asian Pacific Islander said improving K-12 education should be a high priority for the next governor. More than half said it should be an extremely high priority.

In that debate, Cox emphasized that the state’s schools are failing children. “We didn’t talk about education, but the schools are failing our children. That is a future that we are giving up.” Newsom brought up schools as part of his defense of sanctuary cities. “We need to make sure that California leads the way on education, on affordability, on water,” he said. He included prenatal care, early Head Start and preschool in his “most important thing for the next governor.”

Ahead of the primary election, Newsom’s spokesman told the Sacramento Bee that the candidate was a past charter school supporter but had indicated to the CTA while aiming for its endorsement that he was against expanding charters in California “until there is real oversight and stricter enforcement,” the spokesman said.

During his campaign, Newsom highlighted his “California Promise,” a cradle-to-career vision for public education. “Our role begins when babies are still in the womb, and it doesn’t end until we’ve done all we can to prepare them for a quality job and successful career,” he told EdSource after winning the primary. However, he did not address how he would fund that.

Newsom raised three times more money than Cox, at $58.2 million. Cox raised $16.8 million, much of it his own money; the Los Angeles Times reported late last month that $5.7 million came out from his personal bank account.

Newsom is a former San Francisco mayor and served two terms as California’s lieutenant governor. In that role, he also served as a University of California Regent and California State University Trustee. He authored the “Report on the State of Higher Education in California” and introduced the “California College Promise,” a statewide program to increase college access, offering a free first year at community colleges. Gov. Jerry Brown, who is termed out, approved the initiative this year.

As San Francisco’s mayor, Newsom launched preschool and after-school for all students in San Francisco Unified. And he has kept a broad focus on combating poverty in California, which has the largest number of children and the highest percentage of them living in poverty of any other state in the country.

Protesters march through San Francisco on May Day last year. (Photo: Pax Ahimsa Gethen / Wikimedia Commons)

San Francisco on Tuesday will become the largest U.S. city to allow non-citizens to vote in a citywide election. But only a few dozen have registered as anti-immigrant rhetoric has intensified leading into the midterms.

City voters two years ago approved the change, but for school board elections only, making it the first California city and one of only a few nationwide to enfranchise non-citizens. Parents, including those who are undocumented, with a child in the school district can vote. They must be “residents of San Francisco who are of legal voting age, not in prison or on parole for a felony conviction,” according to the local Board of Elections. Non-citizens cannot vote in state or federal races.

The move reflects the Golden City’s progressive history of empowering minority groups. San Francisco in 1989 became one of the first U.S. cities to declare sanctuary status for undocumented immigrants. In 2004, it issued the country’s first same-sex marriage licenses. It’s also become a leader of the resistance against contentious federal policies, suing President Donald Trump in 2017 when he threatened funding to sanctuary cities. And the liberal Democrat who is expected to become California’s next governor, Gavin Newsom, is a former San Francisco mayor now casting himself as a modern-day Abe Lincoln.

Letting non-citizens vote benefits school districts because it “provides an avenue for all parents to hold the school board members accountable to community needs,” said Norma García, director of policy and advocacy at the San Francisco-based Mission Economic Development Agency, which advocates for immigrant rights.

This year’s race in particular is shaping up to be “a historic moment,” García said. It’s attracting attention because of its crowded field — 18 people are vying for three open spots — the diversity of the candidates and sizable donations from the California Teachers Association.

Yet as of Friday, only 52 non-citizens had registered to vote, John Arntz, director of San Francisco’s Department of Elections, told LA School Report. About one-third of the school district’s 54,000 students are believed to have an immigrant parent, and two-thirds are either Latino or Asian-American.

• Read more: San Francisco Failing to Serve Low-Income Students of Color, Report Says

“The level of unpredictability with respect to national policy on immigration has created fears that may be are unwarranted, but it’s up to individuals to decide what they’re comfortable with,” García said.

Registering to vote as a non-citizen comes with warnings: Personal information, such as one’s name and address, could be “obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies,” according to a notice on the Department of Elections’s website. Those applying for citizenship would also “be asked whether you have ever registered or voted” in an election.

(Warnings in 50 languages, via the city’s Department of Elections website.)

These warnings likely resonated with non-citizens in light of recent headlines. As of Wednesday, Trump said as many as 15,000 troops could be deployed to the southern U.S. border to block the arrival of thousands of migrants. This follows revelations mid-year of immigrant parent and children separations and threats by the president to deport undocumented immigrants without due process.

Trump has also targeted immigrants who are in the U.S. legally, such as skilled foreign workers and those who were previously protected, such as undocumented students. Just one week before Election Day, he proposed ending birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.

We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2018

Every time you see a Caravan, or people illegally coming, or attempting to come, into our Country illegally, think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws! Remember the Midterms! So unfair to those who come in legally.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2018

“Families are in fear; this week it’s birthright citizenship, before that it was family separations,” said Nick Melvoin, vice president of the Los Angeles Unified school board, who’s been following the voting milestone in San Francisco. “I’m not surprised that undocumented families especially don’t want to come forward.”

Many D.C. lawmakers have denounced San Francisco’s decision to allow undocumented immigrants to vote. The U.S. House of Representatives, including nearly 50 Democrats, overwhelmingly approved a resolution in late September stating that, “Allowing illegal immigrants the right to vote devalues the franchise and diminishes the voting power of United States citizens.” There are at least 40,000 undocumented immigrants in San Francisco.

Despite low registration numbers, the city is spending a projected $285,000 to both develop a registration system for non-citizens and conduct outreach, according to estimates Arntz provided. There were “no set number of expected voters,” he wrote in an email.

Even though non-citizen parents aren’t swarming the polls this year, García emphasized that it’s “not reflective of the will of the parents to be as involved as possible” in their kids’ educations.

There are other things parents can do even if they don’t vote, García said. They can stay in touch with their children’s teachers and principals, attend school board meetings to “speak out on issues [they] care about” and contact the district supervisor with concerns. They can team up with other parents.

And many do, she said. “Their level of civic engagement is really notable.”

Melvoin, from the Los Angeles Unified school board, considers “actively engaged parents” essential to improving schools. And despite San Francisco’s election drawing so few non-citizens, he told LA School Report he’d like to see Los Angeles give it a try too.

“Given that there are few more important public services than public schools, those families should have a voice,” he said. “California has always been in the vanguard of progressive politics … and [L.A. is] a city that has embraced our immigrant heritage and immigrant population.”

Formal board discussions on the topic are on the back-burner, he noted, as L.A. Unified’s tense labor negotiations continue with United Teachers Los Angeles.

Non-citizen voting wasn’t always an anomaly. About 40 states let non-citizens vote at some point in local, state or even federal elections between the country’s founding and the 1920s. Anti-foreigner sentiment inspired by rising immigrant populations ended the practice.

For now, San Francisco, Chicago and at least 10 towns in Maryland remain the few localities nationwide that are reviving non-citizen voting. Chicago only allows non-citizens to vote in local school council elections, which don’t require voter registration and are not citywide.

Boston is considering non-citizen voting in city elections, though only those with legal residency would be eligible and any change would require state legislative approval — something San Francisco didn’t need.

While this might not be the right moment in history to make substantial progress with non-citizen voting rights, it is just that, García said — a moment.

“Like other moments in history, it will run its course,” she said.

Non-citizen parents, like other voters, can visit City Hall to register and vote through Tuesday.

After watching a year’s worth of ugly fights over how to keep kids safe, how to value teachers, and how to get schools what they need, hundreds of educators across the country are running for office, many with the message that teachers are just what the nation needs because they know how to help people get along.

Many of the teacher candidates got their first taste of politics during this year’s walkouts and rallies, demanding more investment in education through higher pay, increased per-pupil funding and more support staff. In some cases, incumbent legislators were not happy to see them marching at state capitols. Now, many educators are on the ballot to replace those same lawmakers and others who they say have not prioritized education.

More than two-thirds of the teachers who are running for office are Democrats, but it’s a diverse group. R. Travis Brenda, a teacher and Republican candidate in Kentucky, called it “a purple wave.”

The 74 spoke to a dozen teachers running for state office, and despite intense polarization among voters and politicians this election season, the candidates had a lot in common. Teachers agreed they can inject a spirit of compromise into legislative chambers, and many are united in the belief that states need to take better care of their students’ mental health. They also shared a commitment to doing whatever it takes for their students to succeed, even if that means leaving the classroom to run for office.

The National Education Association cites an uptick in political activism among its members since 2016 and counts at least 1,455 educators on the ballot this year for state legislative seats —  1,022 Democrats and 433 Republicans — according to a memo from Carrie Pugh, the organization’s senior political director. At least 104 of those are currently classroom teachers, Education Week reports.

The union says that’s a new record for a single election season. But Wall Street Journal reporter Michelle Hackman noted on Twitter that more educators ran for state legislative seats in 2016 than this year, citing Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee data.

FWIW I requested baseline numbers from the DLCC. It turns out that slightly more teachers, both republicans and Democrats, ran for office in 2016. So I opted not to include in stories

— Michelle Hackman (@MHackman) October 30, 2018

And, as Mike Antonucci writes in The 74, the NEA’s list broadly defines “educator,” including lawmakers who taught decades ago, college professors and school district staff members. Antonucci also cautions that while many of the candidates’ messages revolve around education, their jobs will entail making decisions about issues from tax policy to environmental regulations, which they may be thinking about for the first time this year.

While teachers say their experience in schools will easily transfer to roles in government, critics aren’t so sure they have the expertise and knowledge required to govern.

Frank Riggs, a Republican candidate for superintendent of public instruction in Arizona and a former congressman from California, is running against Democrat Kathy Hoffman, a school speech therapist who also has worked as a teacher. Riggs has questioned whether Hoffman’s experience has prepared her to do the job well.

“The job involves high-level executive leadership. It requires a deep knowledge of education policies and practices at the local, state and federal level,” Riggs told Time. “And to be a credible advocate as our state’s chief K-12 officer, it requires a degree of legislative and political expertise, which I certainly feel I have as a former member of Congress.”

Hoffman says experience at the school level is what makes her the right candidate.

“We need an educator in this role,” she told The 74.

Collaboration and compromise

Reflecting on what traits teachers will bring to state legislatures if elected, many candidates pointed to a knack for collaborating with students and colleagues from a wide range of backgrounds, which they say will enable them to work across the aisle.

Brenda, the Republican running for Kentucky’s state House of Representatives, said teachers are adept at working with diverse groups, and he hopes they will use those skills in statehouses. A high school math teacher, Brenda made national news during primary season when he defeated fellow Republican and incumbent Jonathan Schell, who was backed by powerful U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and seen as a key architect of the pension reform bill that angered teachers across the state and sparked statewide walkouts.

“As a teacher, I do not pick the students that walk into my classroom,” Brenda said. “Regardless of their background, regardless of their personal beliefs, regardless of any of that, I still have a job to do to meet [students] where they are and to take them as far as they can go.”

“And I think that’s what all teachers have in common — is we have a desire to work with those that we have to, with those that we have in front of us, to do the best we can with what we have at the time,” he added.

Those skills could help teachers overcome the polarization characterizing politics this election cycle, said Democrat Jennifer Samuels, an Arizona teacher running for a state House seat.

“Teachers are natural collaborators. They have the natural tendency to collaborate and figure out how to get things done,” she said.

Sherrie Conley, a candidate for the state legislature in Oklahoma, said some people are surprised to hear she’s a teacher and a Republican. But in her nearly 20 years working in schools, she’s never seen political beliefs get in the way of teachers working together.

“We just all know that we stand together as a common voice.”

Getting kids what they need

A good deal of media coverage this year has focused on states where poor pay and a lack of resources have left some teachers working second and third jobs to both make ends meet and purchase their own supplies for classrooms.

For many, it’s this “whatever it takes” mentality that has propelled them to run for office.

Several educators who spoke to The 74 said they are running for office because they see it as the best way to help students, and many plan to use elected posts to boost mental health services.

In Nebraska, Democrat Lynne Walz, a former educator and state legislator since 2016, is on the ticket as lieutenant governor with gubernatorial candidate Bob Krist. Krist recently switched parties to challenge the Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts and has made education a central plank in his platform.

Walz told The 74 she decided to join Krist when Ricketts vetoed a bill she introduced that would have put a social worker in each of Nebraska’s 17 educational service units, an idea she called a “no-brainer.” The program would have been funded entirely by nonprofit organizations, costing taxpayers nothing, and had wide support in the legislature. The governor said the program was unnecessary, the Freemont Tribune reported.

The veto signaled to Walz that the state needed new leadership.

“If we can’t have leadership that will allow us to provide good legislation and move Nebraska and our kids and our education system forward, then we need to change that,” she said.

Many candidates share Walz’s frustration with incumbent lawmakers. In at least one race — for Oklahoma’s House District 20 — two educators are battling each other for a seat in the state legislature. Both Republican Sherrie Conley and Democrat Steve Jarman say a disparaging comment about teachers by incumbent Rep. Bobby Cleveland influenced their decision to run for the seat.

Jarman, who retired 10 years ago after 31 years in the classroom, and Conley, who has worked full time as a school administrator throughout the campaign, agree that Oklahoma needs to fully fund education, but they disagree on how to do it.

Jarman was a union leader when teachers walked off the job in 1990, and he was present at the walkouts again this year. One major benefit of better education funding would be fewer prison inmates, Jarman said, noting that he has a nephew in a private prison in the state who has struggled to get the services he needs.

“It costs a lot less to educate than to incarcerate,” he said.

Conley, who defeated Cleveland in a runoff in August, taught for 15 years before becoming a school administrator in 2017. Like Jarman, she’s concerned about the school-to-prison pipeline and thinks Oklahoma teachers need more training in trauma-informed care.

“By us not investing in the education system, it hurts those children that are disadvantaged even more and just kind of perpetuates that school-to-prison pipeline,” Conley said. “We need to make sure that we are taking care of children and educating them … so that when they graduate from high school, they’re able to find a career, whether they go into college or not, that they are trained to be able to take care of themselves and then eventually take care of their children.”

Teacher Susan Rubio, a Democratic candidate for state Senate in California, also pointed to investment in early education and mental health as a priority that she and other teachers will bring to state capitols. Investing early in mental health services prevents more serious problems later, such as incarceration and suicide attempts, she said.

“One of the things that I find that’s really hurting our children is not having resources in our schools,” said Rubio, who is currently a city councilmember in Baldwin Park, in east Los Angeles County. “For example, counselors are very much needed, especially in the early years, which is vital for our kids, in the sense that if we let something go on too long, it’s very difficult to either curb a behavior or help a child once they’re older.”

‘A heart to serve’

Teachers also said they share a strong commitment to serving their communities and many have a deep understanding of the issues facing them.

“I think that teachers are that bridge” that connects what’s happening in schools and communities with what happens in the statehouse, Rubio told The 74. “As teachers, we see it all, so there’s not a policy area that we are not faced with on a daily basis.”

Rubio also noted that she thinks voters trust her because of her background in education. They know if she were interested in money or fame, she would have entered a different profession, she said.

Oklahoma House candidate Jarman agreed that teachers aren’t interested in glory.

“For most of the teachers involved, it’s not an ego trip,” Jarman said. “Anybody running for public office, there’s an amount of servitude involved.”

Brenda, the teacher from Kentucky, said he felt called to run for office during a back-to-school prayer service last year, and he’s “always had a heart to serve.”

“I’m just an ordinary guy from here in Garrard County … I didn’t put my name out there so people could say, ‘Hey, look at him,’” Brenda said. “I’m just trying to do what I feel like I’ve been called to do — to make a difference.”

• Read more: Troubled Student, Teen Mom, Teacher of the Year: Is Connecticut Congressional Candidate Jahana Hayes the New Face of the Democratic Party? 

The 74 talked to a dozen teachers running for office across the nation. Learn more about them here:

• R. Travis Brenda is a high school math teacher and a Republican running for state representative in Kentucky’s 71st District. During the Republican primary, he defeated an incumbent lawmaker who was seen as a key proponent of the controversial change to state teachers’ pensions earlier this year.

• Lynne Walz is a Democrat running for lieutenant governor in Nebraska with gubernatorial candidate Bob Krist. Walz was elected to the state legislature in 2016 and is currently a real estate agent as well, but she taught for six years in the 1990s and early 2000s. She’s also worked with organizations that provide services for people with disabilities.

• Susan Rubio, a Democrat who worked as a teacher and administrator for 17 years, is running to represent California’s District 22 in the state Senate. In addition to her work as an educator, Rubio is an advocate for women who have experienced domestic abuse.

• Jennifer Samuels is running as a Democrat to represent District 15 in the Arizona state House of Representatives. Samuels is in her eighth year as a classroom teacher.

• Sherrie Conley is a Republican running to represent Oklahoma’s House District 20. She taught for 15 years and is currently in her second year as an administrator.

• Steve Jarman is the Democrat opposing Conley for the Oklahoma House District 20 seat. Jarman retired 10 years ago after 31 years of teaching. He owns a pest control business.

• Joe Bisaccia is a Democrat running to represent Arizona’s District 12 in the state House of Representatives. He is in his second year teaching. He said he realized within months of becoming a teacher that his school was severely underfunded.

• Donna Lawlor is a retired teacher and Republican running to represent Kentucky’s District 35 in the state House of Representatives. This is her fourth run for the seat. She has more than 20 years of classroom experience teaching Spanish and English as a second language as well as working as an American Sign Language interpreter in the classroom.

• Aimy Steele is a Democrat running to represent District 82 in North Carolina’s state House of Representatives. Before resigning in the spring to focus on her campaign, she was a teacher for seven years and an administrator for six years.

• Cyndi Ralston is a Democrat and an elementary school teacher running to represent Oklahoma’s District 12 in the state House of Representatives after teaching in public schools for more than 30 years. She told The 74 earlier this year she’s running because she is fed up with seeing the lack of funding affect her classrooms and her students.

• Kathy Hoffman, the Democratic candidate for Arizona superintendent of public instruction, pointed out that collaboration is one of many skills most teachers have honed that easily translates to the campaign trail. A speech pathologist, Hoffman decided to enter the race after watching Education Secretary Betsy DeVos flub questions about special education law during her confirmation hearing last year.

• Christine Porter Marsh was Arizona’s 2016 Teacher of the Year and is a Democrat running for state Senate to represent Legislative District 28. (Read more about Arizona’s key races here.)

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

It has been a whiplash two years in American politics, and that has trickled down to education policy, from the controversial appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary to heated debates about school safety that have arisen in the wake of several mass school shootings.

Now, with midterm elections only days away, it’s time for voters to weigh those policy choices and decide whether they’d like to make a change.

On many fronts, the nation remains as divided as when President Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 election. Politicos have for months predicted a “Blue Wave” that will elect Democrats to Congress, governor’s mansions and statehouses across the country, but many polls remain very close.

For edu-watchers, the midterms could signal a big change in federal education policy in at least one chamber of Congress. At the state level, a blue wave could impact the shape of everything from funding to education reform.

A change seems increasingly likely in Congress, as Democrats look to retake control of the House. They need to gain 23 seats to win the majority; the statisticians at the usually-reliable website FiveThirtyEight think they’ll net about 40.

An average of the so-called generic ballot, which asks voters broadly whether they prefer Democrats or Republicans without considering specific candidates, gives Democrats an 8.3 percentage point lead in the House as of Oct. 31. A Democratic majority would mean a 180-degree shift on education policy, starting with tough oversight of the Education Department.

Though the House looks good for the Democrats, their onetime hope of retaking the Senate have slipped, based on key battleground polls released in the last few days.

Democratic incumbents in three pivotal seats — Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Bill Nelson in Florida — got disappointing poll results. Democrats absolutely must keep these three seats to have any chance of retaking control.

The federal races are taking up most of the national media spotlight, but for the education world, state races will have a bigger impact on K-12 policy.

Here in California, Marshall Tuck, who narrowly lost his bid for state superintendent in 2014, is running 12 points ahead of competitor Tony Thurmond, according to an Oct. 31 poll from UC Berkeley. Tuck is a former charter school leader who has gotten financial backing from big donors in the education reform camp, while Thurmond has the support of unions and has said a pause on new charters might be needed. Both Tuck and Thurmond are Democrats; California’s primary system elevates the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation. The race, one of the most expensive in the country for any office, showcases the crack that has emerged among California Democrats on education policy, particularly charters. That same split was evident in the primary for the governor’s race, when union-backed Lt. Gov Gavin Newsom beat reform-aligned Antonio Villaraigosa, the former mayor of LA.

• Read more: California’s campaign for state superintendent costs more than most Senate races. Here’s why

In states like Colorado, Michigan and Nevada, the outcomes of the midterms could have ramifications for their education reform agendas; in others, like Iowa, Kansas and Oregon, it may signal big changes for school funding. And across the country, it’s an important election not just for education, but educators: scores of teachers are running for office, including a former National Teacher of the Year, up for a congressional race in Connecticut, and Wisconsin’s education chief, who is making a run at governor.

Here’s what the newest polling shows about some of the country’s top races:

Dems look to make gains in Midwest

WISCONSIN: Collectively, Midwestern states make up the most promising region in the country for Democrats, who could win as many as five governor’s races across Big 10 country. Wisconsin, where incumbent governor and liberal scourge Scott Walker is running for a rare third term, could provide Democrats their sweetest victory of all on Election night.

After dealing decisive blows against teachers unions and slashing public school funding in his first few years in office, Walker now finds himself locked in a tight race with State Superintendent Tony Evers.

• Read more from The 74: Scott Walker Crushed Wisconsin’s Teachers Union. Can He Win a Third Term Against Its Superintendent of Schools?

Some doubted that the genial Evers could keep pace with Walker, a fierce campaigner and past victor of three statewide races. But polls give the state’s top education authority a narrow edge heading into the final week. A Thompson/Reuters poll released Oct. 24 pointed to a three-point Evers advantage, while a Marist/NBC survey released earlier in the month found Evers leading by eight points. Local experts believe that the competition could be much closer, however.

“Frankly, I don’t buy that — this isn’t going to be an eight- or ten-point election,” Alan Borsuk, a longtime Wisconsin observer for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, told The 74 in an interview.

Initially a skeptic of Evers’s chances, Borsuk says that he has been impressed by the Democrat’s willingness to trade blows with Walker.

While the contest has elevated a statewide schools official in a year when education funding has loomed large as a campaign issue, Borsuk adds that the fate of Wisconsin schools hasn’t dominated debates between the candidates.

“It just doesn’t motivate too many people — but for the people it motivates, it is a really core divide between Walker being allied with the private schools and the voucher programs, and Evers being allied with public schools and the unions,” he said.“So for a fairly decent-sized group of voters, that’s a really easy identification tag.”

MICHIGAN: In neighboring Michigan, Democrats have long held an advantage in the governor’s race. They may even stand to flip one or both houses of the state legislature, which would allow them to undo some of the choice-oriented education reforms favored by native Michigander DeVos.

Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, a former state senator, leads Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette by an average of 8.2 points, according to polling aggregator RealClearPolitics. Recent surveys conducted by Michigan Information Research Service (MIRS) and the Detroit Free Press have narrowed that edge to five points, but leading forecaster Cook Political Report still rates the race as “Lean Democrat,” indicating a clear edge for Whitmer.

Though the race has largely been a referendum on Republicans like incumbent Governor Rick Snyder and President Donald Trump, a contentious debate over Michigan’s charter schools and education finance has also developed over the last few years. Whitmer has pledged to introduce new restrictions on the state’s lightly regulated charter sector, while Schuette has defended DeVos’s record as an education activist in the state.

OHIO: Ohio’s gubernatorial race might be the tightest in the country. Democrat and former state Attorney General Richard Cordray has spent months locked in a dead heat with Attorney General Mike DeWine, who unseated him in 2010. The ultimate bellwether state shifted from supporting George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 to Obama in 2008 and 2012, only to pivot back Trump two years ago. At the state level, however, it has been much more consistently Republican, electing just one Democratic governor since 1986.

As in Michigan, the state’s embattled charter sector has played an outsized role in the campaign. The January closure of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), a huge online charter school, amid allegations of fraud has turned a spotlight on Republicans like DeWine, who have accepted significant donations from the organization in the past.

Recent developments have done little to separate the candidates: A poll from Emerson College released on Monday gave Cordray a three-point lead, including a sizeable advantage among female voters. Baldwin Wallace University countered on Tuesday with its own survey pointing to a near tie, with DeWine leading Cordray by just .6 points.

SOUTH DAKOTA: South Dakota’s gubernatorial race showcases both the potential and the limits of elevated Democratic energy in 2018. While the state hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1974, Senate Minority Leader Billie Sutton is tied with Republican Congresswoman Kristi Noem in the most recent poll from the Argus Leader, the state’s largest newspaper.

Since small states like South Dakota are seldom polled, we may not have a truly accurate read on the race until Election Day. A Sutton victory would be a sign of one of the best Democratic midterms in years — but the newly-elected governor would still be hemmed in by the overwhelmingly conservative tilt of the state. Republicans will almost undoubtedly hold veto-proof majorities in both the state Senate and House.

“Republicans could govern without the guy,” David Wiltse, a professor of politics at South Dakota State University, said of Sutton. “I would be surprised if there was any huge, substantive difference in terms of legislative outcomes if Sutton does win. The legislature will still be in the driver’s seat in terms of the agenda.”

That means that Sutton won’t be able to create a state-funded pre-K option — South Dakota is one of just six states nationwide that has none — without serious buy-in from the state GOP. His proposals to refund tuition costs to teachers working in underserved areas and fund new college scholarships would likely sit idle as well.

IOWA: Democrat Fred Hubbell seems to have a small lead, just 2 points, over incumbent Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds in Iowa, though polling is sparse and the last one was conducted in mid-September, practically an eternity given the frequency of polling in other tight races across the country. Most independent handicappers call the race a toss-up.

Education is a top issue, with 47 percent citing it as one of the top two concerns for the next governor to address, according to that same poll.  The main issue is funding, with Democrats saying there isn’t enough, and Republicans saying funding is at record highs, the Des Moines Register reported.

Tossup races across the South

FLORIDA: In the South, Democrats are making solid runs at governor’s mansions they haven’t held in decades, though the races are widely considered tossups. Florida, for instance, could see its first Democratic governor this millennium, polls show, though the race is still close.

Democrat Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, was ahead by just one point against former Rep. Ron DeSantis in a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted Oct. 23 to 26, with five percent of those surveyed still undecided.

“We may not know on that one for a while on Tuesday night,” Carol Weissert, chair of civic education and political science at Florida State University, told The 74. (The last two governor’s races were decided by about a point each, as were the state’s 2012 and 2016 presidential contests.)

Another poll, conducted by the New York Times and Siena College around the same time, found Gillum with a larger lead, about 5 points. In both, Gillum holds sizeable leads with traditional Democratic constituencies: women, young people, and black and Hispanic voters.

Gillum needs African Americans, young people, and voters unaffiliated with either party to turn out, she said. Enthusiasm around Gillum’s campaign could also boost Nelson, the Senate incumbent, and down-ballot races, including state legislature.

• Read more: The Frontrunners for Florida Governor Are Still a Question Mark But The Many Education Issues That Will Play Big in the Race Are Not

It would be one of the taller orders for Democrats this cycle, but control over the Florida Senate is within reach if the party has a great night and captures five seats. That would certainly put him in better negotiating position as a newly elected governor.

Republicans have their own draw, with popular Republican Gov. Rick Scott running in a tight race for U.S. Senate. That should bring plenty of Republicans to the polls to support down-ballot candidates as well.

On education, Gillum wants to raise teacher salaries, with a minimum starting salary of $50,000, paid for by raising corporate income taxes and legalizing and taxing marijuana, the Miami Herald reported. He is skeptical of school choice, but said in a recent debate that he wouldn’t defund charter schools.

DeSantis has called for a mandate that 80 percent of education spending end up in the classroom, as well as a boost in spending for the state’s tax credit scholarship program.

GEORGIA: Democrat Stacey Abrams, the former House minority leader, lagged by just two points against Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, according to an NBC News/Marist poll released last week. But a Fox 5-Atlanta poll released Tuesday found Abrams narrowly leading.

Abrams, who would become the nation’s first black female governor if elected, has joined Texas Senate Candidate Beto O’Rourke and fellow gubernatorial nominee Gillum as one of the most buzzed-about Democratic newcomers this cycle. The national spotlight appears to have benefited her campaign, helping her raise millions of dollars both inside and outside the state.

Still, any Democrat would face an uphill battle in Georgia, which last elected a Democratic governor in 1998. Recently, the race has gained even more national headlines amid allegations that Kemp — Georgia’s top election official — has purged thousands of disproportionately black voters from the rolls in the months leading up to the election.

The candidates have both offered big-ticket education items that might be difficult to enact: Kemp has proposed a permanent, $5,000 raise in teacher salaries, while Abrams would allocate roughly $300 million for child care subsidies to needy families. Both have also clashed on whether to expand Georgia’s tax credit scholarship plan, which Abrams has dismissed as a “backdoor voucher program.”

Independents Shake Up Races

MAINE: In two governor’s contests, the sudden departure of independents has scrambled the races. The latest poll in Maine finds Democrat Janet Mills ahead of her GOP challenger, Shawn Moody, by eight and a half points as they vie to replace Republican Gov. Paul LePage.

The contours of the race changed Monday, when independent Alan Caron dropped out of the race, throwing his support to Mills. Caron didn’t have much support in the poll, just over 2 percent. Another independent, Terry Hayes, remains in the race, and 9.5 percent of voters were undecided.

On education issues, both Mills and Moody back raising teacher pay, with a minimum salary of $40,000. Both say the state’s school finance system needs a clean-up. Mills said she’d work to meet a voter-imposed mandate that the state fund 55 percent of K-12 education costs. Moody suggested looking at duplicative school programs and administrative costs, the Press Herald reported.

Mills has also said she wouldn’t lift the state’s current 10-charter cap, and doesn’t back a currently-stalled A-F school grading system. Moody supports lifting the cap and is a “maybe” on the school rating system, the Press Herald reported.

ALASKA: The race in Alaska, like Maine, was scrambled in mid-October when incumbent Gov. Bill Walker, an independent, dropped out of the race. Walker threw his support behind Mark Begich, the Democratic candidate and a former U.S. senator.

Walker’s name will still appear on the ballot. The latest poll, conducted Oct. 19-22, finds Republican Mike Dunleavy, a former state senator, ahead of Begich by 4.6 points. (Importantly, Walker hadn’t dropped out of the race when pollsters began calling voters; they were asked about the race given the likelihood that he’d throw his support to Begich, but it wasn’t yet official.)

After years of state coffers flush from robust taxes on oil production, the price of oil has dropped in recent years, forcing belt tightening in Alaska and several years of flat education spending. Walker and Begich also sparred over school choice in a recent debate.

Out West, Democrats look to hold their ground

COLORADO: In the Western part of the country, where Democrats have long held substantial electoral power, they’re looking to maintain their control of key offices. Colorado has become an exemplar of center-left education reform over the past few decades, embracing charter schools and overhauling teacher evaluations without turning to private school vouchers or anti-union measures. Rep. Jared Polis is favored to become the state’s third consecutive Democratic governor in his race against Republican Walker Stapleton.

“Nothing I’ve seen suggests his lead is really in danger,” said Seth Masket, a political science professor at the University of Denver.

A poll from the University of Colorado Boulder, conducted in mid-October, found Polis ahead 12 points. That’s in keeping with three other polls this fall that found Polis ahead by anywhere between 7 and 11 percentage points. Unlike some other polls, where women are skewing heavily Democratic, the UC Boulder poll doesn’t show a big gender gap.

Though Trump has loomed over many other races, the Colorado governor’s race has focused on local issues, including transportation, water issues and education funding, Masket said.

Polis’s education bona fides could help keep that center-left ed reform streak alive. He founded a charter school and backs many education reforms, and defeated a union-backed candidate in the Democratic primary. In the campaign, he has called for funding universal pre-K and full-day kindergarten and changes to the state’s school funding formula. Stapleton’s platform calls for cutting administrative spending and creating tax-free accounts for parents to save for educational expenses.

• Read more: ‘We Just Haven’t Seen a Race Like This’: How Education — and Differing Visions of School Reform — Has Become a Key Issue for Democrats in Colorado’s Governor Primary

Polis will have particular latitude over the education agenda if Democrats can regain control over the state Senate, currently held by Republicans with just a two-seat majority. Some Colorado education observers have said that divided government has forced the parties to pursue a moderate course, and that unified Democratic control could mean an end to the detente around charter-district cooperation.

OREGON: Democratic incumbent Kate Brown is in an unexpectedly tight race for re-election, given the liberal bent of her state. The latest poll, released Tuesday, gave her a 5 point lead, though surveys since the summer have bounced wildly, from giving her as much as a 10 point lead to showing her opponent, Republican Knute Buehler, ahead by 1 point.

The state’s pension system, including retirement for teachers, has become a top issue as costs spiral for school districts and local governments, the Oregonian reported. Buehler has listed specific changes he’d make, and vowed not to sign any legislation until lawmakers address the pension crisis. Brown has defended her record, and backed a small employee cost-sharing proposal earlier this year.

Keeping Tabs on New England

CONNECTICUT: Former National Teacher of the Year Jahana Hayes, the most prominent of a wave of educators running for office this fall, looks poised for victory in the race for Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District. A gifted candidate who defeated a vastly more experienced competitor in the Democratic primary, Hayes has attracted support from party luminaries like U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and former Vice President Joe Biden.

• Read more: Troubled Student, Teen Mom, Teacher of the Year: Is Connecticut Congressional Candidate Jahana Hayes the New Face of the Democratic Party?

Known locally as the Fightin’ Fifth, the district is considered somewhat competitive territory in cycles when Republicans are favored — but that’s not 2018. A recent poll from Sacred Heart University found that nearly 49 percent of Connecticut’s likely voters plan to support their Democratic congressional candidate, compared with just 34 percent who intend to support Republicans.

NEW HAMPSHIRE: In New Hampshire, incumbent Republican Gov. Chris Sununu — the latest scion of New England’s quietest political dynasty — has led Democrat Molly Kelly in the polls for months, though his lead seems to be narrowing as Election Day nears. And while he’s still favored for reelection, Sununu’s agenda may be hamstrung: Both Houses of the state legislature could flip from Republican to Democratic control, according to noted race handicapper Louis Jacobson.

The GOP currently holds a four-seat majority in the state Senate, and a whopping 44-seat edge in the House, but New Hampshire has seen some of wildest swings between party control in recent years, and disapproval of Trump is running high in the region.

Consequently, New Hampshire could be the rare state that flips from unified Republican control to unified Democratic control, depending on whether Kelly finishes strong. That could fundamentally alter the trajectory of school choice in the state, as the governor has given his backing to an education savings account initiative that has stalled in the legislature. Kelly is running hard against the proposal, while Sununu says he’ll give it another go if he wins a second term.

With Democrats and Republicans both ready to make their voices heard, one thing is certain: Voters throughout the nation will swamp the polls next week in numbers that have seldom been seen in a midterm election.

University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, who keeps a meticulous database of U.S. election information, recently told NPR that he believes turnout could reach 50 percent of all eligible voters this year. That may sound unimpressive, especially in a news environment so saturated with election coverage, but it would be the highest rate in over 50 years.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

Whenever stories about the political spending of California’s teacher unions appear in the news, they focus on the major statewide races. This year is no different, with school employee unions devoting about $15 million in independent expenditures so far to elect Tony Thurmond as state superintendent of public instruction. The California Teachers Association also recently added $2 million to its allocation for ballot initiative campaigns.

What isn’t widely reported is the amount of money CTA spends on local school board campaigns and issues. The vast majority of union locals are too small to form political action committees or generate campaign cash. For that, they turn to CTA.

For the most part, local teacher union officials are still the ones making local school board endorsements, but they have to apply to CTA for contributions to candidates. While my list cannot be considered comprehensive, I have been able to track donations from CTA to 312 local school board candidates across California in the November elections, with contributions totaling $999,080.

The biggest beneficiaries of CTA’s largesse are three candidates running for seats on San Francisco’s school board. CTA allocated $108,700 to help elect Alison Collins, Li Lovett and Faauga Moliga.

CTA will spend $54,500 to keep Kevin Beiser and Michael McQuary on the San Diego school board. The state union is also keen on the Santa Clara County board, backing several candidates but contributing the most — $32,900 — to Claudia Rossi.

CTA’s top 10 donations to November’s school board races:

1. San Francisco: Alison Collins, Li Lovett and Faauuga Moliga – $108,700

2. San Diego: Kevin Beiser and Michael McQuary – $54,500

3. Santa Clara County: Claudia Rossi – $32,900

4. Southwestern Community College: Nicole Jones, Tim Nader and Nora Vargas – $32,900

5. Santa Clara County: Peter Ortiz – $31,500

6. Saddleback Valley: Barbara Schulman and Dan Walsh – $25,000

7. Anaheim Union High: Al Jabbar, Anna Piercy and Annemarie Randle-Trejo – $24,500

8. Oakland: Clarissa Doutherd – $23,900

9. East Side Union High: Frank Biehl, Manuel Herrera and Kristin Rivers – $22,200

10. San Dieguito Union High: Amy Flicker, Kristin Gibson and Rhea Stewart – $19,000

Large school districts draw large amounts of campaign cash, and opponents often are able to outspend school employee unions there. But no other group is willing or able to drop disproportionate amounts of money in so many small districts. A $3,000 contribution to a school board race may be more than enough to put a selected candidate over the top.

Other than parents of school-age children, the people with the largest stake in board elections are school employees. They are, in essence, electing their own bosses. Getting friendly candidates onto boards can end up paying bigger dividends than winning Assembly races or ballot initiatives, if it is done on a wide scale, as CTA is attempting.

Students march in support of gun reform legislation in February in Silver Spring, Maryland. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The February school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and subsequent student activism around school safety and gun control are fueling young people’s political engagement ahead of next week’s midterm elections.

“We can argue all we want, but the only way we win the argument [for more gun control] is when we go and we vote on these decisions,” Mei-Ling Ho-Shing, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said at a conference Friday.

Ho-Shing and eight other high school student activists from around the country spoke on a panel during the Council of the Great City Schools’ annual conference in Baltimore days ahead of a new poll confirming the strong link between the Parkland shooting and the civic engagement of students. A study released Monday from the Education Week Research Center found that 40 percent of the youngest eligible voters, those ages 18 and 19, cited the Florida shooting as having quite a lot or a great deal of influence on their political engagement. It tied with “reaching the voting age,” and edged out President Trump and his administration as drivers of engagement, the study found.

However, the Baltimore forum and a spate of youth-focused polls offered some mixed signals about whether students of voting age would show up to the polls next week in any large numbers.

Students have led a wave of activism in the eight months since the Parkland shooting, including a national school walkout and the March for Our Lives in Washington. Leaders of the movement from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School led a national bus tour this summer to register young voters, and a group of students last weekend wrote a School Safety Bill of Rights calling for better mental health care in schools and gun control reforms.

• Read more: Unleashing the youth vote: Power California’s Luis Sánchez is bringing 25 years’ experience mobilizing young people to the polls this November — along with thousands of new voters

On school safety questions, the students at the Baltimore conference were generally, though not universally, opposed to increasing the number of metal detectors, school safety officers, and other common security measures on campus.

“We should always be empowering our students, not disenfranchising them. More guns has never been the solution to any problem,” said Esther Ubadigbo, a junior at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa, said of arming teachers, another proposed solution to school shootings.

Beyond gun issues and school safety, they discussed their concerns with the environment, immigration, the MeToo movement, and lowering the voting age.

The student panelists’ concerns about school safety and gun control are also reflected in broader public opinion polls of young voters.

In the Education Week survey, which was funded by the Education Writers Association, 15 percent of young people cited either school safety (8 percent) or gun control (7 percent) as the most important social problem facing the country. They were the most cited concerns among a long list, above issues like terrorism (4 percent) or health care (3 percent).

A separate study released last week of a broader group of young people also found a high degree of concern about guns: two-thirds of voters ages 18 to 29 said school shootings are one of the most important issues facing America, and 70 percent said gun laws in America should be more strict.

That’s similar to the general population: 68 percent of people surveyed by Pew in September said gun policy was a “very important” issue affecting their votes this fall, close behind Supreme Court appointments (the poll was conducted in the midst of the confirmation fight for now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh), health care, and the economy.

Despite the walkouts and increased media presence of student activists, the leaders at the Baltimore conference, most of whom aren’t yet old enough to vote, weren’t particularly optimistic that their slightly older peers would turn up at the polls next week.

“We tend to represent a very small amount of students that are civically engaged,” Nick Paesler, a senior at Cleveland High School in Portland, Oregon, told the conference. “Students don’t really see how their voice and their vote can make a difference.”

Some of the students on the panel said there isn’t a larger youth voting movement because there isn’t one bipartisan issue that unites young people’s advocacy, like ending the Vietnam War or lowering the voting age did in the 1970s.

Others said it’s because those in power make decisions that ignore the voice of young people.

“We see everything in our country and we think, or I think, ‘Man, our country really doesn’t care about me,’” Kay Galarza, a student in New York City, said. “Our country either doesn’t see us, or hears us but decides to silence us even further.”

The Education Week study, which surveyed just the youngest eligible voters, found very different results: nearly two-thirds of respondents said they plan to vote.

But there is cause for a high degree of skepticism. If anywhere even close to the 63 percent of those young people actually vote, it would be a historic high. No more than 20 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 have turned out in any midterm election in the past 20 years, according to the U.S. Census. In 2014, the turnout was particularly low for that age group, just 15.9 percent.

Other surveys predict far less robust participation by young voters: a June poll found that just 28 percent of those 18 to 29 said they are “absolutely certain” they’ll vote next week.

• Read more from The 74: 

Students Ratify School Safety Bill of Rights Calling for New Gun Control, Mental Health Programs

David Hogg Wants to Knock NRA-Backed Candidates Out of Office. His Biggest Obstacle? The Lackluster Voting Habits of His Young Peers

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

The 2018 midterm elections, marked by a slate of tightly contested races and a furious backlash against President Trump, will be the most expensive in history. Both Democratic and Republican aspirants in large media markets like Florida and Illinois have smashed quarterly fundraising records, with outside groups vastly outspending the official campaigns.

In California, though, the biggest money bombs haven’t been dropped in the race for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat, or for any of the congressional seats that Democrats hope to pry away. Though Kamala Harris leaped from the state attorney general’s office to the U.S. Senate, the race to succeed her as California’s top prosecutor isn’t the big-dollar brawl one might expect.

That distinction goes to the race for state superintendent of schools — a job that lacks partisan affiliation, carries little statutory power and has not historically set its occupants on a path to higher office.

Candidates Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond — both Democrats, as California primaries elevate the two top vote-getters regardless of party — have raked in more than $50 million between them through the end of October. That’s more money than has been raised in any House race this cycle, and in all but a handful of the most expensive Senate races. Tuck, who narrowly lost his first bid for the office in 2014, has taken in the lion’s share. On Oct. 31, less than a week before the election, a UC Berkeley Institute for Governmental Studies poll was released showing Tuck with 48 percent of those surveyed and Thurmond with 36 percent.

The huge sums at play are a testament both to the stakes of the race and the impressive bankrolls of the players involved. Though both Democrats in a state where the GOP has essentially collapsed, the two men are standard bearers of opposing camps: organized labor, led principally by the 325,000-member California Teachers Association, and the education reform movement, powered by philanthropists like Eli Broad and Bill Bloomfield.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a professor of politics and communications at the University of Southern California, has spent years observing the state’s evolution from Reagan country to blue bulwark. She says that the Democratic split on charter schools is a recurring phenomenon that flared up most recently this spring, when the CTA’s endorsement helped Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom secure the Democratic nomination for governor against his charter-friendly rival, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

• Read more: How Education Could Shape the Governor’s Race in California: Funding, Accountability, Charter Schools

“It’s very definitely another round in the war between the teachers unions and the charter schools movement,” she told The 74 in an interview. “Just as the Democratic nomination was — with the proxies being Gavin Newsom, endorsed by the teachers unions, and Antonio Villaraigosa being funded mainly by millionaires who are attached to the charter schools movement. The charter schools lost that one. Now they’re back at it.”

Kevin Gordon, a longtime education advocate and president of the political consulting group Capitol Advisors, agreed that the school choice community was clearly placing its bets on Tuck this fall.

“It’s a proxy war,” he said in an interview. “There is no question that Marshall Tuck is decidedly more pro-charter, as the charter school advocates themselves would define it. He might think, ‘Well, I’m open to them; I’m balanced.’ But…[the charter school movement] would describe Marshall Tuck as their hero on charter school issues and Tony Thurmond as an enemy of charter schools.”

The Candidates

Each candidate brings a different resume, and a substantially distinct biography, to the job. Raised in a prosperous community outside San Francisco, Tuck initially pursued a career in finance before becoming president of Green Dot Public Schools, a charter network operating in several low-income neighborhoods of Los Angeles. After a stint as an education advisor to then-Mayor Villaraigosa, he was appointed the founding CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a joint enterprise between the city and the Los Angeles Unified School District to turn around low-performing schools.

The 2014 election for state superintendent, in which Tuck nearly defeated incumbent Tom Torlakson, occurred among another orgy of outside spending as issues of school choice and teacher tenure came to define the race. National players like the American Federation of Teachers helped bankroll the campaign against Tuck, whom they lampooned as a Wall Street stooge.

With Torlakson termed out this year, the unions have attached themselves to Thurmond, a state assemblyman from the Bay Area. Orphaned at 6, Thurmond was sent to live with relatives in Philadelphia. In an interview with LA School Report, he said he “could have fallen through the cracks. I didn’t because I was really in a public school system that really supported me and teachers who hung in there with me when I needed support or needed more help or enrichment.”

Before his election to the state Assembly, Thurmond was a board member for the West Contra Costa Unified School District between 2008 and 2012. In Sacramento, he has pushed legislation that offered subsidies to child care centers and directed millions of dollars to programs to reduce truancy.

Though Tuck won the most votes in the June primary, another eliminated candidate has since endorsed Thurmond. So has the state’s Democratic Party, which counts public sector unions like the CTA among its most critical allies.

The War

That sets up November’s race as yet another iteration of California’s debate over school choice. Of the state’s 6.2 million K-12 students, about 10 percent are enrolled in some 1,275 charter schools. Though its charter sector is the nation’s largest in overall student enrollment, and one of the fastest-growing, expansion has stalled amid loud political opposition.

With district schools often having to share funds, and even facilities, with upstart charters, the CTA and its allies have lobbied the legislature to constrain further growth. One unsuccessful bill sought to give local school boards much greater power to shoot down new charter petitions. Another, passed this summer and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, bans for-profit charter operators.

The question of charter schools has troubled the waters in local elections as well. Last year, the race for seats on the L.A. Unified School Board attracted over $17 million in campaign spending, as pro-charter donors succeeded in ousting a board president perceived as being opposed to school choice. The elections gained national attention, quickly becoming the most expensive in history.

• Read more: What’s Really Fueling the L.A. School Board Race — the Most Expensive Board Contest in U.S. History

And yet there’s something strange about all that donor money migrating to the superintendent’s race: The California Department of Education, of which the superintendent is the executive, has very little say in authorizing or overseeing charter schools.

“The irony … with the charter schools spending this crazy amount on this race, is that a state superintendent has little more than a bully pulpit on charter school issues,” said Capitol Advisors’ Gordon. “The superintendent of public instruction in California is not a decider. They merely make recommendations to the state board, along with the local districts and counties and district superintendents.”

It is the governor and the legislature, far more than the state superintendent, who call the tune on charter expansion, Gordon noted. But that doesn’t mean the race lacks significance to its combatants.

“What [the race] says is that the power of the podium itself is really important to both labor and the charter school community. They’re probably in this race as much for preventative politics as they are for offensive strategy. They don’t want a state superintendent who stands at the podium every day and bashes their interests.”

While the two candidates differ in their support for charters, it’s unclear just how energetically they will lobby for their respective positions. In a candidate forum recorded shortly before the primary, both agreed that for-profit operators have no place in California. But Thurmond went further, suggesting that a “pause” on new openings might be necessary until new revenues are found to offset the dollars that districts lose when their students move to charter schools. Tuck argued instead that school districts should not be allowed to reject new charter petitions because of the financial hardship that might result.

Questions like these won’t be answered by the superintendent alone. While acknowledging the superintendent’s influence as advocate and agenda setter, Bebitch Jeffe says that much of the fire around this race has to do with both unions and pro-charter activists signaling to their constituencies.

“It’s a question of status and position,” she said. “And that’s particularly true of the charter school movement, which lost a big one and needs to send a message that they still are an influence, they still do have some political power, they can fund politicians. The teachers union is far more reliably loyal to the Democratic Party, and they’re also going to want to send a message to the Democratic governor, the other Democratic constitutional office holders, and the Democratic legislators, that they’re to be reckoned with.”

*This article was updated on Oct. 31 with poll results and new campaign fundraising totals. 

EDlection2018: From coast to coast, The 74 is profiling a new education-oriented campaign each week. See all our recent profiles, previews, and reactions at The74Million.org/Election (and watch for our Election Night live blog Nov. 6).

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

*Updated Oct. 22

Luis Sánchez has spent 25 years mobilizing young people in Los Angeles and across California to fight for educational justice, from gaining equal access to a more rigorous curriculum to reducing suspension rates. But he has learned that to release their real power, they need to vote.

“If their generation doesn’t vote, if we lose them as voters for the next 15 years, we’re going to go in the wrong direction as a state and as a nation,” he said. “We want young people to fully embrace their power.”

Sánchez is working hard to make sure young Californians vote now, so their impact will be felt in the midterm elections.

The organization he founded, Power California, has been responsible in large part for the record number of 200,000 16- and 17-years-olds who have pre-registered to vote in the last two years. Power California, a civic engagement coalition of 25 organizations that mobilizes young voters of color, has pre-registered nearly a quarter of that total — 50,000 — including 25,000 in Los Angeles. Two-thirds of those high school-age youth will be able to vote this November.

The coalition’s goal this fall is to reach over 100,000 more young voters across the state, including 52,000 young adults in LA County, where Latinos make up 49 percent of the population.

Activating young voters for these midterm elections is urgent, Sánchez says, because studies show that if young people vote in two consecutive elections, they are more likely to become voters for life. “But if a young person does not register to vote and vote in that first election, they will actually disengage for over a decade.”

Direct contact with young people is a key strategy for Power California, which has found that youth need to be reached through the devices they use most: their phones.

“We were calling them on their cell phones, doing social media ads directed at them as voters, and we were texting them. Our model showed that we were actually able to increase, with first-time voters in the state, voting by 20 percent in the 2016 election,” he said.

If the Latino turnout in the midterm elections is disappointing, lack of direct contact could be a reason. The New York Times reported this week that 55 percent of Latinos nationwide say they have not yet been contacted by a political campaign this year, whether by email, mail, phone or in person, according to a recent survey by Latinos Decision, a polling firm.

Despite being the largest ethnic group in California and making up nearly half of the population in Los Angeles, Latinos have not yet proven to be the political force their numbers would suggest.

“Ninety-five percent of Latino children under 18 are citizens in California. We have to convert that into political power,” Sánchez said. “We need to focus on the next generation so that they actually get involved and begin to change the trend of (voter) turnout.”

Latina student members of Power California’s coalition working to reach young voters in Sonoma County last week. (Photo: Power California Facebook page)

EMPOWERING IMMIGRANTS

Part of Sánchez’s strategy is reaching the children of immigrants — like he was growing up in East Los Angeles.

Sánchez, 43, was born in LA, but his parents are immigrants from México. He and his siblings were the first in their family to go to college and the first voters in the family. He said that most young people who have registered to vote in these elections are first-generation voters.

He wants his children to start their civic engagement long before he did. He has two children with his wife María Brenes, the executive director of East Los Angeles-based InnerCity Struggle, which is also the first Latino-youth empowerment organization Sánchez founded.

Sánchez said that nearly 60 percent of all youth under 25 years old in California have at least one immigrant parent in their household, which is why immigration ranked as their top concern in a survey Power California commissioned over the summer.

“The future of California is both youth of color, and they are largely children of immigrants,” he said. “There’s not a tradition of voting for immigrant families. For many children of immigrants, these midterm elections will be the first time to vote. We have to educate them on things like you don’t need an ID to be able to vote and to remind them exactly where and how.”

LESSONS LEARNED IN LAUSD

Sánchez has spent a quarter-century working with the immigrant community in East Los Angeles, first through Innercity Struggle, then running the 2006 school board campaign for Mónica García, who is now board president.

After her win, he decided to leave InnerCity Struggle and join García’s office as her chief of staff, “partly because it was an opportunity to change policy at LAUSD from equal access to A-G (college-prep courses) to other equity issues.” He worked on decreasing suspension rates and opening access for all students to the A-G curriculum, a series of high school courses that are required for eligibility for the state’s four-year public universities.

But it was during his own run for office in 2011 that he learned how important it is to reach young voters. In fact, he co-founded Power California, along with Aparna Shah, in 2016 to put into practice the insights he gained when he narrowly lost to Bennett Kayser for the District 5 seat on LA Unified’s school board.

He learned that when young voters are engaged, historically low voter turnout can dramatically spike. That’s what happened in East LA, when partway through his campaign he began to target young voters.

“We realized young people’s vote (in the primary) was the lowest ever in a school board election in Los Angeles. Historically, turnout in East LA for every school board election going back 10 years had always been less than 1 percent.”

But when he started to engage East LA youth as he campaigned in the runoff election, the trend changed: “That election showed a 12 percent turnout.”

“No one was working with young voters of color” in 2011, “50 percent of whom were not even registered to vote. What I learned from what we did in East LA is that we can get young people involved in elections, especially when you talk to them about the issues that matter to them.”

Less than 21 DAYS until the one of the most critical elections of our time. Young ppl across CA are putting in work to make sure our voices&votes count. Register to vote TODAY @ https://t.co/WM6bGmA9au. Join the hundreds of thousands of young ppl #ReadyToVote on Nov. 6 pic.twitter.com/JfEarkVr3d

— Power California (@PowerCANow) October 16, 2018

WHAT MATTERS TO YOUNG CALIFORNIANS

To find out what mattered to the state’s youth, over the summer Power California commissioned a survey of 2,000 young people of color in the state between the ages of 16 and 24 about their civic engagement. Results of the survey, conducted with funding from the California Endowment, showed that 72 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say they will “definitely” vote in November, and 82 percent said that voting makes a difference.

Their top issues were immigration, housing, the environment and education. Half the respondents considered themselves part of the Black Lives Matter movement, LGBTQ Equality, and Undocumented and Unafraid social movements.  

“They are living in a time of racism that we haven’t seen since when I was growing up … and now we have Trump attacking our communities,”Sánchez said. “I hate that it is happening like this, but at the same time I think this is why we are reaching record numbers of people registering to vote in California.”

California’s voter registration last month reached an all-time record of more than 19 million people; that’s 1.5 million more than in the 2014 midterm election. As of Sept. 7, nearly 76 percent of Californians eligible to vote had registered, the largest share in September since the 1996 presidential election, which had 77 percent, according to the office of California’s Secretary of State Alex Padilla. The next report on voter registration will be released Nov. 2. Monday was the last day to register to vote in the state for the midterm elections.

Today. Is. The. Day. The California voter registration deadline is here! Register yourself and your friends to vote at https://t.co/t4XpQi2U9p and make sure you’re ready for the November General Election #VoteCalifornia pic.twitter.com/Ij4zLqSsqd

— CA SOS Vote (@CASOSvote) October 22, 2018

MOBILIZING STUDENTS IN LOS ANGELES

Part of Power California’s success in pre-registering so many teens has been its partnership with LA Unified, the largest school district in the state. Power California supported an LA Unified school board resolution unanimously approved in August that committed the district to promote civic engagement among its high school students. The resolution declared Sept. 25 as High School Voter Registration Day, which the district marked with an event at Polytechnic High School.

Sánchez said Polytechnic alone has pre-registered 1,300 students in the last year and a half. He said part of why the students there feel motivated is because they have been educated about why their vote is so important. “They know they will be voting for a new governor, for a new state superintendent, new sheriffs, and they now know how critical that is.”

“This is the school we have been working closely with for the last couple years, working with students and some teachers at the campus. We pushed for that resolution to pass, and now we are working to pass a similar resolution at other school districts” throughout California, said Sánchez, who was not an LA Unified student and attended Catholic schools. 

On Wednesday, Power California is hosting a “Ready To Vote Party” in partnership with LA Unified and the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office in Norwalk. Students from seven LA high schools will be part of about 400 young people who are already registered and pre-registered to vote in the upcoming elections who will cast their ballots at the event.

Hundreds of #LAUSD high schoolers to cast their first ballots at this week’s ‘Ready to Vote Party.’ https://t.co/Ff3wRoK9qa @LASchools @PowerCANow #EDlection2018 #youthvote

— LA School Report (@LASchoolReport) October 22, 2018

Sánchez said that ahead of the midterm elections, Power California aims to call every young person in Los Angeles and Orange counties, the Central Valley and Riverside and across the state to encourage them and help them vote.

Young people need to be mobilized and know what it means to vote, to be a voter, Sánchez said. “They need to know where to vote, what time, what are the rules and regulations.”

He feels optimistic about the numbers. The 200,000 16- and 17-year-olds who have pre-registered to vote in the last two years could very well bring home a bigger impact in November, compared to the last midterm election in 2014, when only 285,000 of all young voters 18 to 24 actually voted.

“There’s an amazing energy around all these movements that are happening, but we can’t take it for granted. It needs to translate into political power.”

• Read more:

Hundreds of LAUSD high schoolers to cast their first ballots at this week’s ‘Ready to Vote Party’

‘You do have a voice, and your voice matters’ — Latino parents and students in Los Angeles are encouraged to participate in upcoming elections

California’s only gubernatorial debate mostly ignores education, even though a new poll finds parents of color place a high priority on improving the state’s public schools

Education is a critical area for Latino voters to exert influence as immigration furor fuels newfound political activism, experts say

*This article has been updated to correct that Sánchez and his older brother and sisters were all first in their family to go to college and to vote. 

(Photo: Power California Facebook page)

This is the first year that early voting centers are open in California, and a group that is working to reach every young adult in Los Angeles County — and 100,000 throughout the state — is holding an early-vote party Wednesday that will draw hundreds of Los Angeles high schoolers.

Students from seven LA high schools will be part of about 400 young people who are already registered and pre-registered to vote in the upcoming elections who will cast their ballots at the event. Key races that will affect education in California are for governor and state superintendent of public instruction.

The “Ready To Vote Party” is hosted by Power California in partnership with LA Unified and the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office in Norwalk, where the event will take place. Students will hear from community leaders, including LA Unified’s board President Mónica García. There will also be mobile game centers, art-making stations and voter education activities for the students before and after they cast their ballots.

LA Unified is promoting civic engagement and get-out-the-vote efforts outlined in a school board resolution that also declared a High School Voter Registration Day last month when students were able to pre-register and register to vote in the midterms. Since 2015, 16- and 17-year-olds in California have been able to pre-register to vote, and a new law this year automatically registers teens 16 and up to vote when they get their driver’s license or state ID card.

The event is part of the efforts of Power California, a statewide civic engagement organization, to mobilize young voters of color ahead of the midterm elections. In partnership with other community organizations across the state, it aims to reach 100,000 youth in California this fall, including all 52,000 young people ages 18 to 24 in Los Angeles County.

“We’re pretty excited because almost two-thirds of them will vote for the first time this November. We will be calling every young person in LA and Orange County, the Central Valley and Riverside. And we’re going to do it!” said Luis Sanchez, co-founder of Power California.

This year, with funding from The California Endowment, Power California commissioned a survey of more than 2,000 young people of color in the state between the ages of 16 and 24 about their civic engagement. The survey results show that 72 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say they will “definitely” vote in November, and 82 percent said that voting makes a difference.

According to the organization, studies show that if young people vote in two consecutive elections, they are more likely to become voters for life.

The issues that matter the most to them are immigration, housing, the environment and education, the survey found. Half the respondents consider themselves part of the Black Lives Matter movement, LGBTQ Equality, and Undocumented and Unafraid social movements.  

LA County will open early vote centers at 10 locations for the next two weekends.

6 things to know about the early voting centers:

1. You don’t need to bring anything with you, but bringing your sample ballot booklet is recommended.
2. There is no restriction on where to go, you can visit any weekend early voting site.
3. These locations are also drop-off locations. If you already have your Vote by Mail ballot, you do not need to wait in line.
4. You will fill in your selections on a Vote by Mail ballot.
5. If you are in line before 4 p.m., you will be able to vote.
6. If you missed the registration deadline for this election, you will still be able to cast a provisional ballot.

About the Ready to Vote Party:

When: Wednesday, Oct. 24, 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Where: LA County Registrar’s Office, 12400 Imperial Hwy., Norwalk

• Read more: 

Unleashing the youth vote: Power California’s Luis Sanchez is bringing 25 years’ experience mobilizing young people to the polls this November — along with thousands of new voters

Education is a critical area for Latino voters to exert influence as immigration furor fuels newfound political activism, experts say

‘You do have a voice, and your voice matters’ — Latino parents and students in Los Angeles are encouraged to participate in upcoming elections

Gavin Newsom, left, and John Cox. (Photos: Getty Images)

Parents of color want California’s next governor to place a higher priority on improving public schools, a new poll finds. But as the two gubernatorial candidates held their first and perhaps only debate Monday, education barely came up.

Republican businessman John Cox three times mentioned that the state’s schools are failing children, but there was no follow-up discussion. Gavin Newsom, Democrat and lieutenant governor, brought up schools only as part of his defense of sanctuary cities, which he said offer protections that make parents “more likely to get their child an education and drop them off at school” and to get immunizations such as for the flu.

“We didn’t talk about education, but the schools are failing our children. That is a future that we are giving up,” Cox said in closing.

“We need to make sure that California leads the way on education, on affordability, on water,” Newsom said in his final statement. He included prenatal care, early Head Start and preschool in his “most important thing for the next governor.”

Even the moderator of the hour-long radio forum, KQED’s Scott Shafer, acknowledged important topics that weren’t addressed, listing first education, along with pension reform and health care.

But a new poll of the state’s Latino, black and Asian Pacific Islander parents revealed that 9 out of 10 say improving K-12 education should be a high priority for the next governor. More than half said it should be an extremely high priority.

• Read more: With education sidelined in a Newsom-Cox governor’s race, focus on California’s schools shifts to battle for state superintendent

The poll, released last week and conducted by Goodwin Simon for The Education Trust—West and UnidosUS, found that improving public schools ranked higher than expanding access to health care and addressing the lack of affordable housing on a list of priorities for the state’s next governor.

“Parents of color really want educational justice in California, and they expect the next governor to prioritize that,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, co-interim executive director of Education Trust—West, which released results from polling 600 parents of color, evenly split among black, Asian and Latino.

Three out of 4 black parents called improving K-12 education an extremely high priority, as did 2 out of 3 Latino parents. And more than half of black and Asian Pacific Islander parents, and about half of Latino parents, said K-12 schools are on the wrong track or they were unsure if they were on the right track.

• Read more: Education is a critical area for Latino voters to exert influence as immigration furor fuels newfound political activism, experts say

“A lot of the research on parents and students doesn’t reflect the demographics of our state,” Smith Arrillaga said. “We wanted to make sure this poll reflected the parents of students that are in California’s K-12 schools, and right now, seven out of 10 students in our K-12 schools are Black, Latino or Asian American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.”

The poll also addressed parent engagement, which schools are held accountable for in order to receive federal funding. The new Every Student Succeeds Act requires outreach to all parents and meaningful involvement with parents.

Parents of color are giving feedback at schools and feel comfortable calling for changes, but they said they face barriers and are at times doubtful that they can prompt meaningful change.

“The schools only let parents participate so much,” said one mother in the poll’s news release. Another said, “I’m not sure who I could even offer feedback to. I know that there are school board meetings, but those occur during school nights around dinner time, so it’s extremely inconvenient for me to go.”

Among all groups, a strong majority — at least 8 in 10 — said they are likely to offer feedback to their children’s school. And 9 out of 10 black and Latino parents and 7 out of 10 Asian Pacific Islander parents feel comfortable pushing their child’s school to make changes.

But just over half of black and Latino parents, and just 1 out of 3 Asian Pacific Islander parents, think it’s very possible for parents to make a difference in improving school performance.

“Clearly parents are offering feedback to their children’s schools, but unfortunately they don’t always feel their input is making a difference,” Carrie Hahnel, EdTrust—West’s interim co-executive director, said in the news release. “Schools and districts must authentically engage parents as partners in improvement, and this is especially the case for schools serving primarily Black, Latino, and Asian Pacific Islander students whose parents are far too often ignored.”

• Read more on the California parent poll here.

]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/you-do-have-a-voice-and-your-voice-matters-latino-parents-and-students-in-los-angeles-are-encouraged-to-participate-in-upcoming-elections/ Wed, 26 Sep 2018 21:40:53 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=52074

Polytechnic High School students at Tuesday’s “LA Unified High School Voter Registration Day” that included LA Unified board members Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez and California Secretary of State Alex Padilla. (Photo: Nick Melvoin Twitter page)

*Updated Sept. 27

With critical elections in November for leaders in California who will affect children’s education, Latino parents need to know that their voice matters and that they can make a difference — even if they can’t vote.

That was the message from school and community organizers at a weekend workshop for dozens of Latino parents from South Los Angeles who have stepped up to become “parent ambassadors” for their children’s education.

They heard that their immigration status or the language they speak at home should not be barriers to participating in the Nov. 6 elections.

“There are three key positions that you should know will be up for election, and they will make major decisions affecting your child’s education,” Genesie Muñoz, a community representative for UnidosUS, a Latino advocacy group, said in Spanish at Saturday’s “Parent Ambassadors Induction” workshop organized by Synergy Academies charter schools.

Muñoz said the election of a new California governor matters to Latino parents because “he decides on the budget, the money that goes to our schools.” The state superintendent “decides on the instruction, what our kids learn in the classroom, and other major decisions for all public schools in the state.” Along with the lieutenant governor, “These three people who are elected will make decisions that will impact your kids’ education for the next four years or even longer, so you better vote for the ones you think best represent your interests,” she said.

Muñoz encouraged parents to exercise their influence on elections even if they cannot vote because of their undocumented status.

“Even if you cannot vote, you can talk to your friends and family about their options, get them informed. You can influence others to vote for the candidate that can best serve your community,” she said. “You do have a voice, and your voice matters. You can be advocates for your children’s education, and being politically involved is a very important way to do it.”

Parents can also influence their high school children to vote, she said.

“If you have a child who is 16 years old now, they are eligible to pre-register. They cannot vote yet until they are 18 years old, but by doing that you’re making sure the process is smooth for when they’re ready to vote.”

One mother questioned if it’s worth being politically involved because for parents in low-income neighborhoods and immigrants, “nothing really changes for us.”

Muñoz responded, “It does change! Look at what happened in 2016. Latinos did not turn out in high numbers compared to the number of Latino eligible voters.The Latino vote will play a significant role in the elections and we are currently underrepresented in the electoral process. Through UnidosUS’ Power of 18 campaign, our goal is to make sure all of us cast a ballot in November.”

The political involvement preparation is part of UnidosUS’s Padres Comprometidos program, which aims to empower Latino parents to play a leading role in their child’s educational success.

During the workshop, parents also learned how to reach local elected officials, including their school board members, and how to exercise their school choice rights as charter school parents.

On Tuesday, LA Unified launched a month-long campaign as part a resolution that declared Sept. 25 as “LA Unified High School Voter Registration Day,” aligned with National Voter Registration Day.

Exciting news: more than 200,000 16- and 17-year-olds have pre-registered to vote in California since the launch of our program. Equally powerful: more than 100,000 have turned 18 and are eligible to vote this November!

— Alex Padilla (@AlexPadilla4CA) September 26, 2018

The resolution by LA Unified board Vice President Nick Melvoin was unanimously approved last month by the school board to register and pre-register students to vote, in collaboration with the City of Los Angeles Mayor’s Office and the City Clerk’s Office. The City Clerk’s office started to deliver voter registration forms to all the district’s high schools on Tuesday and they will be collected beginning Oct. 19.

A spokesperson for the Office of the City Clerk said on Wednesday that approximately 25,000 voter registration forms were distributed to LAUSD high school campuses. The official number of students who have registered is not yet available.

“I am proud to see the record numbers of California students registering to vote and getting involved in the civic process however they can,” Melvoin said in a statement.

Today @LASchools kicked off #NationalVoterRegistrationDay @ Francis Poly HS w/ @LACityClerk, Sec @AlexPadilla4CA to remind our students how important it is to register & #VOTE in EVERY election! Inspired by the newest generation of voters who are ready to make their voices heard! pic.twitter.com/hxsq0hdvyW

— Nick Melvoin (@nickmelvoin) September 25, 2018

“Our youth are the leaders of today, and they will make their voices heard at the ballot box this November,” Monica García, school board president and co-sponsor of the resolution, said in the statement.

The citywide campaign is a result of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s commitment in July to student members of the March for Our Lives national movement to having voter registrations at every high school campus in Los Angeles, the mayor’s press secretary, Andrea García, said Wednesday.

“It was a citywide commitment, to make sure every high school in the city has enough voter registration forms for their eligible (voter) population,” García said. “Previously, outreach was done at two LAUSD high schools, but it was difficult to make it citywide, and that couldn’t have taken place without the resolution and the support of Melvoin’s office and the district board representatives. That was very helpful.”

The campaign allowed students to coordinate the events themselves at every school campus. “That resolution was important because it empowered students to do it (registration) themselves for their own peers,” she said.

On Wednesday, March For Our Lives announced it will continue their national tour to 20 states and to engage young people to register to vote and to vote in November. The students are launching a final series of nationwide events under the campaign name #TurnoutTuesday.

What parents need to know about the Nov. 6 elections:

• Oct. 22 is the deadline to register to vote.
• You can register to vote online at vote.gov.
• By law, you can take time off work to vote in person at the polls.
• If you have a child who is 16 years old, he or she is eligible to pre-register to vote. 
• To be able to vote, you need to be a U.S. citizen, at least 18 years old by Election Day, and able to meet any other requirements your state dictates. Convicted felons and non-citizens are ineligible.

@PowerCANow empowering young leaders of color on high school campuses across CA. More than 1,300 students registered/pre-registered @ Francis Polytech. 50k+ young ppl registered across the state. 42 days from the Nov. 6th election & young ppl are mobilizing and #ReadyToVote #NVRD pic.twitter.com/38VmKlem3b

— Power California (@PowerCANow) September 25, 2018

*The article has been updated to add the number of voter registrations that were delivered to LAUSD high school campuses. And to add a quote from Muñoz.

(Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

If you don’t count high school student body president, Aimy Steele has never held political office. But as a teacher and school administrator, she’s run classrooms and schools, and now she’s running to represent her district in North Carolina’s state house of representatives.

Steele and thousands of teachers around the country got a taste of politics this spring when they staged rallies and walkouts to demand higher pay and more funding for their classrooms. Many of those same teachers and their colleagues from around the state are now running for office, hoping to bring their energy, experience, and penchant for compromise to Congress, statehouses, and other political offices around the country.

These teachers represent both major parties and have a range of specialties and experiences. They’re worried about school safety, teacher pensions, equity for students from poor neighborhoods and those with disabilities, and adequate funding for classroom technology. Yet, they all seem to agree that teachers have something to bring to the legislative table that’s currently missing. Many, but not all, of the teachers on the ballot this election cycle are from red states that saw teacher walkouts this year, including Kentucky, Arizona, and Oklahoma.

The corps of teacher-candidates has seen some high-profile wins this year, such as R. Travis Brenda defeating a rising Republican star for a nomination in Kentucky, and also some defeats, notably in Nevada’s primary gubernatorial contest.

“I think you’re seeing teachers from across the country that are standing up and saying,  ‘No more. We’re not going to see our students getting taken advantage of and our budgets get slashed and our benefits get slashed,’” Joe Bisaccia, candidate for the state legislature in Arizona, told The 74.  “I’m proud to be a part of it and I think that we’re going to see some positive change in November, I really do.”

SUSAN RUBIO, California

Susan Rubio was inspired to run for a state Senate seat in the San Gabriel Valley after she worked on her sister’s winning campaign for the state Assembly in 2016.

Rubio, a Democrat, has been a teacher and administrator for 17 years and has also served as a clerk and city council member. She has several priorities for education in California: more school counselors, equitable access to technology for all students, smaller class sizes, and more support for teachers. One of the reasons Rubio decided to run for office was because of how much she and her colleagues were being run down as teachers, she said.

Teachers have been “screaming for help” the past few years and now they want to “be part of the solution,” Rubio told The 74.

Rubio will face Democrat Mike Eng in the general election. She is taking a leave of absence from her classroom from September to November; if she is elected, her temporary replacement will stay for the remainder of the year, but Rubio will take her job back if she does not win.

Rubio echoed the sentiments of many teachers-turned-candidates when she said she was tired of watching the same problems continue year after year in her community.

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to … sit back and just continue to watch the same things over and over again without having the ability to effect change,” she said.

JOE BISACCIA, Arizona

Bisaccia, 27, is a Democrat running to represent Arizona’s District 12 in the state House of Representatives. Although he has only been teaching for one year — he previously worked in broadcast news and technology sales — he decided to run for office shortly after the school year started. He realized right away that his school, Cooley Middle School, was short on materials his classroom needed.

“I was really fed up with the constant lack of resources that we had as teachers, and it was beyond just the really low salaries that we have out in Arizona,” he said. “I teach an applied technology and robotics class, and in order for me to even have enough equipment to even teach my class, I had to get lucky and apply for a $5,000 grant. … So that, to me, was a failure of our leaders at the state level to adequately fund the public education system.”

Bisaccia’s priority is to create a sustainable funding stream for Arizona education, which he said will require comprehensive tax reform and possibly a constitutional amendment to revamp the budget process.

Bisaccia will return to his classroom in the fall and will make a decision about the rest of the year after election day.

R. TRAVIS BRENDA, Kentucky

R. Travis Brenda, 43, is a high school math teacher and a Republican running for state representative in Kentucky’s 71st District. Brenda’s primary victory against Kentucky House Majority Floor Leader Jonathan Shell, who had the endorsement of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, garnered national attention in May.

Shell was seen as a key proponent of a change to Kentucky’s public employee pension system enacted earlier this year, which changes the pension framework for new teachers, giving them a hybrid pension-401K plan and requiring more years of work before they can retire. Brenda, whose mother is a retired state employee and whose sister is also a teacher in Kentucky, is concerned about the pension issue, which was a focus of this year’s teacher walkouts and which will now go to court. Brenda participated in the rallies in Frankfurt when his school was closed to accommodate them.

Brenda was planning to run for office before the teacher rallies and walkouts that rocked Kentucky this spring; he said he has felt called to represent his community in the legislature since a back to school prayer service at his church in August.

Brenda said the large number of teachers running for office is an indication that people are starting to pay more attention to the political process and what elected officials are doing.

“I think it’s exciting, I think people are finally waking up,” he said.

Brenda, who has taught high school math and engineering in Rockcastle County for 19 years, has not previously run for elected office. He plans to return to his classroom full time at the end of the summer. If he wins, he said, he will work out a plan with his principal and superintendent to be in class as much as he can and ensure students are receiving high-quality instruction when he cannot be in class.

DONNA LAWLOR, Kentucky

Donna Lawlor, 62, is a retired teacher who has taught Spanish and English as a second language, served as an American Sign Language interpreter in the classroom, and worked at the Illinois School for the Deaf. She’s also a Republican running to represent Kentucky’s District 35 in the state house of representatives.

Lawlor said she is running to represent minority groups and because she understands the budget and education issues at stake.

“Why not a woman who is fluent in two minority group languages, and then also an educator?” she asked, noting that there were too many “men of the caucasian kind” in the legislature.

This is Lawlor’s fourth run for the seat. She’s previously served as a district commissioner in Jefferson County, Kentucky, also an elected position. She did not participate in the teacher strikes this year and sees running for office as a more positive step toward solving problems.

Lawlor, who is hard of hearing herself, hopes if elected to advocate for deaf and hard of hearing adults and children.

In the general election, Lawlor will face Democrat Lisa Willner, a school board member, part-time college professor, and advocate for public education.

AIMY STEELE, North Carolina

Steele, 38, is an elementary school principal running as a Democrat to represent District 82 in North Carolina’s state House of Representatives. She previously taught middle and high school Spanish classes and served as an assistant principal. One of the reasons Steele’s running for office is to “restore order” to North Carolina’s public education system. She pointed to unfunded mandates, such as a maximum class size in the lower grades that she claims stretched schools and teachers beyond their means, as evidence that some of the state’s current policies negatively affect students and their schools. (The class size policy was enacted last year and later delayed to give schools more time to implement the change).

When she talks about participating in a teacher rally at the state capitol in May and running for office, Steele repeats a word seldom associated with politics: joy.

“Knowing that my fellow colleagues are choosing to take on this next step of our journey, the ability or the calling to run for office, just makes me feel very happy, very honored,” she said. “I’m elated to have the opportunity and to be able to be working with other teachers” during the campaign.

Steele will not return to her post as principal when school resumes. She ran uncontested for the Democratic nomination in North Carolina’s primary May 8.

This article was published in partnership with The 74.