Jeff Bryant reviews the victories for public education in the last elections.

The big victories were the overwhelming defeat of voucher legislation in Arizona and the Tony Thurmond’s election over the charter lobby’s candidate Marshall Tuck in the Califotnia race for state school superintendent, despite Tuck’s more than 2-1 funding advantage.

And there were many more victories, especially in governors’ races.

In gubernatorial races across the Midwest, Democrats ran and won with strong oppositional messages against school privatization.

In Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer won a governor’s seat formerly occupied by Rick Snyder after campaigning to “end the [Betsy] DeVos agenda in Michigan,” close for-profit charter schools in the state, and propose additional oversights for charters.

In Minnesota, Democratic challenger for an open governor’s seat Tim Walz, a former public high school geography teacher and football coach, pledged to block any proposed voucher programs. He won decisively.

In Illinois, Democratic challenger J.B. Pritzker defeated incumbent Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, while pledging to end the state’s education tax credit voucher program, which already diverts public tax dollars to pay for private school tuition for 5,600 students….

In what is perhaps the most startling of charter school turnarounds, midterm elections in New York took down a longstanding coalition of Republicans and Democrats in the state Senate who colluded with charter advocate Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo to expand these schools and keep them relatively regulation-free.

As New York City public school art teacher and citizen journalist Jake Jacobs reports for the Progressive, a faction of eight Democratic state senators calling themselves the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) had for years shared power and donors with Senate Republicans to work with Governor Cuomo in maintaining a “favored status” for charter schools in the state.

In September primaries, six grassroots-backed Democratic candidates ousted IDC members, and then, in turn, handily beat their Republican opponents in November. Despite being vastly outspent by the Republicans, the insurgent Democrats pressed their cases to stop charter schools from taking over space in public school buildings and to block attempts to lift the cap on the numbers of charters that can operate in the state. Most supported a moratorium on new charter schools proposed by the NAACP.

Because of victories by these insurgent Democrats, who will insist on more scrutiny of charter schools, Jacobs foresees “a new landscape” in the state legislature “where evidence and research matter more than Albany’s rampant ‘pay-for-play’ arrangements” that have given charters the upper hand.

Similarly, in red states where teacher rebellions have begun to turn the tables on the school privatization industry, public school advocates are seeing a transformed political landscape where resistance is not only possible but winnable.

After midterm elections in Arizona, “we will have the most balanced state legislature since the 1980s,” says Beth Lewis, “with roughly half of the legislators having declared full support for fully funded public schools.”