Where do Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidates stand on school choice and other education issues?
Governors have a great deal to say about public education in the states they run, but voters don’t often cast their ballots with education as a prime issue. In Virginia, however, there are plenty of people interested in the education views of the two candidates in Virginia’s Democratic primary for governor — Ralph Northam, the lieutenant governor of the state, and Tom Perriello, a former one-term congressman and diplomat in President Barack Obama’s administration.
On a number of issues, the two have similar if not identical views. Both say they want to:
— focus their education policy efforts on improving traditional local school districts.
— implement state-funded universal prekindergarten programs.
— raise teacher salaries in a state where educators on average make less than the national average.
— improve the Standards of Learning, the state’s standards and series of standardized tests used for accountability purposes. Virginia is one of the handful of states that did not adopt the Common Core State Standards even when the Obama administration was dangling federal funds to persuade state authorities to do so.
— break the “school to prison” pipeline, given that one 2015 report showed Virginia leading Where do Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidates stand on school choice and other education issues? - The Washington Post:
