A reader sent the following good news:
I would like to share some public education wins in New Mexico. There were twenty-two educators running for the NM State Legislature, fourteen were educators from AFT NM and eight from NEA NM. Unfortunately, not all of the twenty-two educators won their races. The good news is that nine of the AFT NM educators did win their seats and three of the NEA NM educators won their seats. We now have twelve educators in the NM State Legislature fighting for public education and labor along with other non-educators who are champions of both public education and labor.
Twelve of the 22 educators who ran for the state legislature won! Now, that is great news! The legislature will hear their voices when they make decisions about the schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wonderful. Congratulations to all. We need more of these courageous teachers. I hope the winners will mentor others who have the interest, savvy, and stamina to run for public office.
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Charter school supporters are “giddy” over Trump’s election:
“Donald Trump’s election as president will provide a boost to charter schools, a top adviser told The Post.
“President-elect Trump is going to be the best thing that ever happened for school choice and the charter school movement,” said Rudy Giuliani, a vice chairman of Trump’s transition team said.
“We’ve spoken about it. Donald is going to create incentives for that promote and open more charter schools. It’s a priority,” said Giuliani
Charter school advocates are giddy. Trump will clearly be much more supportive of charter schools than Hillary Clinton.”
Not one word about public schools, anywhere. Public schools are now completely and utterly gone from ed reform. It’s as if they’ve already privatized every US school.
The 93% of US children in public schools are completely excluded from any discussion now, which apparently makes ed reformers “giddy”
Dark days ahead for kids in public schools. They’ve lost funding and support from the last two US Presidents and this one plans on eradicating them completely.
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If you thought DC was ga-ga over charter schools and lockstep opposed to public schools under Bush/Obama. wait until you see Trump.
Our schools will be gone in a decade. They cannot wait to close them.
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On the other hand, maybe a Trump Administration won’t matter to public schools at all.
It’s not like anyone in DC was supporting public schools anyway. Maybe it will be good to be entirely off the ed reform agenda list.
Could be a wash. Less funding for public schools but fewer unfunded mandates. Right now we have less funding and more mandates.
Maybe they’ll be more irrelevant to existing public schools than they already are- and they were approaching complete irrelevancy before Trump.
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More teachers and former teachers need to run for office. Their perspective and experience would benefit all of us.
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It was a lot of work and took countless hours at the doors and on the phones but it was worth it. The educators who lost ran in districts where NM’s Koch-funded governor gave large amounts of money to their opponents who sent out hate-filled and untrue mailings against these heroes. They will run again and AFT NM along with its largest local, The Albuquerque Teachers Federation (ATF) will continue to recruit and train teachers to run. We are by no means finished! AFT NM and ATF believes that it is critical to walk for those teachers who run.
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Thank you for your courage and stamina. That’s what it takes to bring about change.
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I love it!
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It is time that the teachers unions groom and support their own candidates, taking a page from the TFA manual.
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