Grannan: A little-noticed but triumphant victory for public education
Guest post by Caroline Grannan.
In what looks like a close race but was actually a crushing defeat on June 8, state Sen. Gloria Romero, thecandidate of the billionaires and privatizers, was shut out of the November runoff for California state Superintendent of Public Instruction. Two candidates who do not represent the charterizing “education reformers” – Larry Aceves and Tom Torlakson – split the non-Romero vote (along with a scattering of less visible hopefuls).It’s Aceves’ and Torlakson’s vote-splitting that makes the Romero smackdown significant, even though their numbers were close, with each of the three winning between 17 and 19 percent of the vote.
Torlakson, a state assemblyman and former public school classroom teacher (his website emphasizes that he’s still a “teacher-on-leave”), was supported by the California Teachers Association. Of course, with teachers’ unions ranking up there with Satan on the list of top villains to the pundit class, that endorsement was supposed to seal his fate.
And Aceves is a public school
