Timothy M. Kaine, the newly elected governor of Virginia, told a crowd of supporters during his election-night acceptance speech that one of his first plans is to carry out his campaign promise to start a universal prekindergarten program.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York won a chance to expand his makeover of the city’s schools last week, as voters overwhelmingly chose to keep him in office for a second term. In Detroit, schools moved from appointed to elected leadership. And the Los Angeles Unified School District won approval to raise billions of dollars to ease crowded classrooms.
San Francisco voters approved a nonbinding ballot measure last week that opposes, but doesn’t ban, military recruiting in the city’s public schools and colleges.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger needs to look for ways to join with his political opponents to improve California’s failing schools, observers in the state say, instead of pushing proposals like the ones state voters firmly rejected in a special election last week.
Supporters of a policy in Wake County, N.C., that seeks to integrate the district’s schools based on family income levels celebrated the outcome of school board elections last week.
The forces seeking to subject the theory of evolution to greater criticism tasted both victory and defeat last week. Kansas officials approved an overhaul of their state science standards to do just that, while voters in a rural Pennsylvania district ousted advocates of “intelligent design” from the school board the same day.
Detroit residents are voting this week for the city’s first elected school board in six years, but local observers said it was unclear how the change would affect the struggling school district.
Starting this week, Denver teachers will be able to sign up for a groundbreaking new pay plan that city voters endorsed Nov. 1 by accepting $25 million in new property taxes.
Denver voters go to the polls next week to decide the fate of a new pay plan for teachers, with only a small band of opponents challenging the property-tax hike that would finance the change.
Carol Stearman joins a phone bank at the Burlingame, Calif., headquarters of the California Teachers Association, where she and other teachers called residents urging them to vote against three measures backed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Nov. 8 special election. The union may spend as much as $50 million to defeat the school-related measures.
The campaign over California education measures pits a political superstar with sagging approval ratings against the state’s most powerful education group in a no-holds-barred bid for power that could leave the loser badly hobbled.
To some Colorado residents, Referendum C is the best chance to spare the state’s schools from deep budget cuts. To others, the ballot measure—which will go before voters Nov. 1—represents a steep tax increase and gives lawmakers too much power over how state revenues are spent.
Linda Jacobson, October 18, 2005
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4 min read
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