Quick Education Voter’s Guide to the California CD34 Race, April 4, 2017
There are twenty-three candidates running to fill former Congressman Xavier Bacerra’s seat in Congressional District 34 in Southern California. (Bacerra is currently the state’s Attorney General, replacing Kamala Harris, who, after November 8, 2016, became our US Senator.)
Election Day is Tuesday, April 4, 2017, 7:00 am to 8:00 pm. You can find your polling place by entering your address here.
The candidates were surveyed about their positions on charter schools, and as this is a handy litmus test for seeing where candidates fall in a post-DeVos public education world, I sorted them so voters can understand where the candidates fall.
I concede that a few paragraphs in answer to a survey about charter schools can be misleading, but it’s important to see how a potential Congressperson will quickly frame and identify her or his main priorities on the issue. What is their “elevator pitch,” so to speak, on public education? And given these rough classifications, voters can ask for deeper clarification of where a given candidate stands on the role federal government plays in guaranteeing equity internally within a state and across states, positions on federal civil rights legislation guaranteeing disabled children’s rights to a Free and Appropriate Public Education, and so forth.
Education voters can and should push more candidates to unequivocally prioritize public schools when they become members of Congress.
From the answers given, only three candidates said that they would put existing public schools first. They were: Alejandra Campoverdi, Arturo Carmona, and Kenneth Mejia. Voters are encouraged to Quick Education Voter’s Guide to the California CD34 Race, April 4, 2017:
