Andrea Gabor surveys the election and reminds us that while Trump has dominated the coverage of the election, school issues will be front and center in many states.
“National issues are getting most of the attention in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm election, including health care, immigration and President Donald Trump.
“Yet from Arizona to Kentucky to Wisconsin, politics also remains fiercely local. Especially in states that cut school budgets as a result of the 2008 recession and Republican-sponsored tax cuts, public school funding has become a hot-button issue in many state legislative and gubernatorial races, often scrambling party loyalties. Six years after the Great Recession, most states were still spending less on schools than they were before 2008, according to a 2016 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“Teachers in several Republican-dominated states led a political groundswell earlier this year, with walkouts that closed schools. Over 300 teachers are running for political office in the midterms, more than double the number that did so in 2014. While many of the teacher candidates are Democrats hoping to unseat Republicans who cut school funding and promoted privatization in the form of charter schools and private-school voucher programs, educational activism cuts across party lines.
“In Arizona, a small group of mothers and teachers organized to oppose a 2017 law that expanded the state’s voucher program, which steers taxpayer dollars from the state’s public schools to private and religious schools. More than 100,000 people signed a petition to put their referendum on the ballot, provoking a counterattack from Americans for Prosperity, an organization backed by the conservative activists David and Charles Koch. It sued, unsuccessfully, to have it taken off of the ballot. Both sides have identified the referendum on the voucher law as a top priority.”
After years of budget cuts, some districts and states are likely to increase investment in education. And in a sign of the times, the anti-public school Governor Scott Walker claims to be “the education Governor.” Hopefully, voters will not be fooled.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Crucial summation: “Hopefully, voters will not be fooled.”
“The [KY] Republican legislature also faced a backlash when it tacked a measure onto sewer legislation that would change the state’s public pension system, one of the most underfunded in the country with $43 billion in liabilities. The plan would give future teachers and other state employees retirement accounts similar to 401(k) programs instead of the previous system’s defined-benefit plans. A lawsuit challenging the law is before the state supreme court.”
Hate to say it, but look right here for why so many taxpayers have been bashing teachers for so long. My husband has worked for the same engrg corp for 45 yrs: we had to give up defined-benefit pension in favor of 401(k) in 1995 . Granted, his salary has been consistently double that of a pubsch teacher over those decades. But my younger sis– 13 yrs younger– a longtime teacher/ now admin [whose med bennies were always double ours & will continue upon retirement] will soon retire on a pension equivalent to her current salary , while my husb soldiers on past retirement age, knowing his income will be halved as soon as he quits.
AZ soundly defeated the voucher proposal