Our Team in Action!

Josh Newman SD29 RE-ELECTED 2020-2024

Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez re-elected to AD52 2021-2025

 

Governor Newsom with New State Party Chair Rusty Hicks!

Our Dream Team!

Encounter at Governor’s annual party.

Former President Barack Obama, center, waves to the crowd after speaking at a campaign rally to support Democratic California congressional candidates, Josh Harder, T.J. Cox, Gil Cisneros, Katie Porter, Harley Rouda, Mike Levin, from left, at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim on Saturday, Sept. 8, 2018. (Photo by Kevin Sullivan, Orange County Register/SCNG)

 

 

The reason our School Board is so dysfunctional.

Welcome

Progressives, Independents, and Democrats!

Congratulations Governor Newsom!

Come to our monthly meetings.

 

We support Chino, Chino Hills, and South Ontario in Assembly Districts 53 and 59, State Senate Districts 22 and 32, and Congressional Districts 35 and 40
Our Facebook for Chino Valley Democrats LINK

Don and Jan Bridge and ACT Union Pres and VP

Registering voters at the Summer Concerts in the Park

Congratulations Christina Gagnier, Chino Valley Unified School Dist. Board!

President of our Club, Marian Arguello receives a special CHINO Woman of the Year award from Assembly representative Freddie Rodriguez (AD52) !

https://sd22.senate.ca.gov/sites/sd22.senate.ca.gov/files/SusanRubio-300x300.jpg

CA State Senator Susan Rubio SD22

Our club in action!

The Arguellos posing for their fans!

 

American Cancer Society Relay for Life Volunteers in the Community- 2019

Rally demanding CD39 Republican Ed Royce address Healthcare!

 

We regfister voters and recruit club members at the Summer Concerts in the Park!

 

2024 Election Analysis from the NY Times

2024 Election: Live Updates (click on link)

https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/2024-election

REPOSTED IN HONOR OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH. Black Lives DO MATTER!

REPOSTED: Read on https://blacklivesmatter.com/

A new collaborative bipartisan deal to reign in Border chaos is “dead” thanks to Republican House

They haven’t even read it but will kill the bill in order to promote a “Trump” deal promised if he is elected.

From  Axios – Jan 29, 2024 at https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/trump-republicans-border-deal-senate-immigration

Trump, House Republicans plot to kill border deal

Republican and Democratic senators are taking to the airwaves, scrambling to pass severe restrictions on migrants flooding across the U.S.-Mexico border. There’s just one thing: Their plan is all but dead.

Why it matters: The Senate might pass the plan, which would be one of the harshest immigration bills of the century. President Biden is ready to sign it. But House Republicans — egged on by former President Trump — already are planning to shut it down.

State of play: Illegal immigration has rocketed to the top of voters’ concerns, and Biden has become increasingly desperate for a solution. Trump and conservative Republicans see a political opportunity to squeeze Biden and Democrats on the issue.

  • Trump, whose front-runner status in the Republican presidential race has solidified his leadership of the GOP, has loudly vowed to kill the bipartisan border deal.
  • “It’s not going to happen, and I’ll fight it all the way,” Trump said Saturday in Nevada.

Zoom in: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has fallen in line. He called the deal “dead on arrival” on Friday, then doubled down over the weekend, claiming it wouldn’t do enough to stop illegal border crossings.

  • He has said he talks frequently with Trump about the border.
  • Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned senators last week that Trump’s opposition would make it difficult to get a border plan through Congress.
  • A sign of Trump’s influence: Oklahoma’s GOP voted Saturday to censure Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) for being a lead negotiator in the border policy discussions.

The details: The text of the border bill is expected to drop soon. It will include a measure that effectively would block illegal border crossers from asylum once the number of migrant encounters hits a daily average of 5,000 in a week or 8,500 on a single day, as Axios has reported.

  • Those restrictions would remain until illegal crossings drop and remain low for an extended period of time.
  • The deal also would expedite the asylum process and limit the use of parole to release migrants into the U.S.

The big picture: The migrant crisis at the border and in major U.S. cities is one of the most jeopardizing issues for Biden and Democrats this November.

  • It’s also Trump’s marquee political issue. He has every incentive to keep it front and center as he heads toward a likely rematch against Biden.
  • Biden has doubled down on a tougher border image in recent months, and has signaled his willingness to “shut down the border” if he’s given new authority under the Senate agreement.

What they’re saying: The White House is accusing Republicans of flip-flopping for politics — first supporting their own strict immigration bill and now saying Biden already has the authority to close the border.

  • “If Speaker Johnson continues to believe — as President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in Congress do — that we have an imperative to act immediately on the border, he should give this administration the authority and funding we’re requesting,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
  • “Right now [the plan’s critics] are functioning off of internet rumors of what’s in the bill, and many of them are false,” Lankford said on “Face the Nation,” defending the plan he has been negotiating.
  • “I want to know how house R’s square their support for H.R. 2 with their position now that we should do nothing,” one senior GOP Senate aide told Axios, referring to a sweeping border bill passed by House Republicans last year.
  • Republicans “are redefining the terms of any debate for the future,” one former Biden official told Axios. “A very extreme, enforcement-heavy package is now being rejected as not tough enough.”

 

The Republican Party will lose the 2024 presidential election

found in https://www.dailycardinal.com/article/2023/04/the-republican-party-will-lose-the-2024-presidential-election

An important disclaimer: the future is unpredictable. 

No matter the amount of research you gather, the trends you uncover or even your faith in personal intuition, you can never truly know what’s ahead. This piece is less a prediction of the future and more a reflection of the current state of the Republican Party.

Upon reflection, their current strategy is the impetus for which they will be defeated in the 2024 presidential election.

The Republican strategy can be divided into two main parts. 

First, bolstered by former President Donald J. Trump and his constituents, the GOP has taken a hardline on enabling the radical minority bloc within their own party. This was best demonstrated by the election of Republican Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, which was temporarily blocked by a group of right-wing dissidents.

After a historic 15 rounds of voting, McCarthy eventually won their support by making personal concessions, such as giving them leadership roles within powerful committees. This approach, however, incentivizes the broader Republican Party to shift further right, reaping the short-term political benefits.

The second element of the Republican strategy is a focus on social issues instead of traditional topics such as the economy, inflation, war and international relations. This is where the strategy falls flat, as hot-topic issues like abortion, transgender rights and gun control illustrate the party’s growing dissonance with the American people.

Republican efforts to roll back abortion infrastructure and LGBTQ+ rights, and defend against broad gun reforms and control — while brandished by their conservative base — is seen by the broader society as disingenuous and harmful. From young voters to the business community, the Republican party is distancing itself from representing our nation’s identity and interests.

These issues surrounding identity politics are summed up best through the Republican Party’s catch-all term of “wokeness.” According to recent polls, 69% of Americans consider themselves “woke” on the issue of accepting people who are gay, lesbian or bisexual, while 29% consider themselves “anti-woke.”

While the Republican Party’s stance on social issues becomes more rigid, the general public is increasingly more accepting and diverse. This widening contradiction shows the GOP is failing to adapt to a shifting socioeconomic landscape.

A major issue working against the Republican Party is gun control. Despite a clear majority in bipartisan support for sensible gun control measures, the party has maintained an absolutist stance for supporting pro-gun causes. This unwillingness to address the issue has ultimately backfired, as young voters are galvanized to take action. This is best shown through recent events in Tennessee, where the GOP expelled two Democratic lawmakers for leading a youth protest after a school shooting — a reminder of how the party’s approach is retaliatory and self-isolating.

Events like this have a devastating impact on the party’s chances. Polls indicate the Republican Party has radicalized young voters into being the most liberal bloc of the electorate. Unless the party change their stances, this trend is likely to continue. Furthermore, with each new mass shooting, the GOP’s resistance to gun control faces renewed scrutiny, making it difficult for them to win over voters on this issue.

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One of the most prominent shortcomings of this overreaching Republican strategy is the recent Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. With a majority on the bench at stake, both Democrats and Republicans came into this race understanding the influence the outcome could hold on issues like abortion, gerrymandering, identity rights and even pathways to influence the 2024 presidential election.

Janet Protasiewicz, the Democratic candidate, won what is now the most expensive judiciary race in American history, with over $40 million being spent on the election. Protasiewicz credited her success to the high turnout of young voters who were energized by her focus on key social issues during her campaign.

Besides young voters, the GOP appears to be losing support from the business community, too. Many corporations are now taking a public stance on the party’s position on social issues — a stark contrast from the past. 

For example, after Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled to federally block a popular abortion pill, more than 400 senior executives of pharmaceutical and biotech companies criticized the decision and requested it be repealed. The modern business community is more diverse and open-minded than ever before, and they recognize how any significant change against that would negatively disrupt their industries.

In conclusion, the Republican Party has taken on a losing edge. With their current strategy, they are becoming less favorable to the majority of Americans as they drift further to the right. They still have a chance of recovering provided they can reconsider their strategy and look for methods to engage a larger audience. 

Despite this, the GOP is doubling down on intra-party radicalization and a lack of sensitivity for a changing society. Consequently, it is likely Republicans will lose the election in 2024. People will not go backward — not in the long run.

Jason Li is a sophomore studying Finance, Investment and Banking at UW-Madison. Do you believe the Republican Party will win or lose the 2024 presidential election? Let us know at opinion@dailycardinal.com. 

3 winners and 1 loser from Election Day 2023

Democrats had a good night. So did abortion rights. Glenn Youngkin, not so much.

Found in VOX Nov 8, 2023 at https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/11/8/23951783/election-day-2023-results-analysis-winners-losers-beshear-cameron

Beshear and Biden sit at a table, and Biden is leaning over to grab Beshear’s arm while they talk.
President Joe Biden, right, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear at a briefing at a local elementary school, on response efforts to flooding in Kentucky, in August 2022.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

The 2023 general election on Tuesday, November 7, featured only a grab-bag group of contests, but there was one clear overall theme in the results: Democrats did well.

Gov. Andy Beshear (D) won reelection in deep-red Kentucky. Democrats held onto the Virginia state Senate and took over the Virginia state House, blocking Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s hopes of passing conservative policies (and perhaps his ambitions in national politics). Meanwhile, Ohio voters enshrined the protection of abortion rights in the state constitution and legalized recreational cannabis.

Strangely, all this happened while President Joe Biden has been getting some of his worst polling numbers yet. As in the 2022 midterms, though, national dissatisfaction with Biden did not lead to a red wave sweeping out Democrats across the country or to wins for conservative policy proposals in ballot initiatives.

If you’re looking for tea leaves about how 2024 will go, don’t get carried away. Many of these outcomes were driven by local personalities, issues, and circumstances. And they took place in so few states that the results hardly present a clear picture of where opinion in the country is, or where it will be next year. But wins are wins, and Democrats got some significant ones on Tuesday.

Winner: Democrats

Beshear surrounded by reporters and cameras with banners promoting voting behind him.
Incumbent Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear speaks to the press and supporters on his last campaign stop before the election, on November 6, 2023, in Louisville, Kentucky.
Michael Swensen/Getty Images

Democrats had about as good a night on Tuesday as they could have reasonably expected.

Gov. Beshear’s reelection in Kentucky proves that Democrats can still win in Trump country, especially if they happen to be the son of a popular former governor. Though Republicans won the other statewide races on the ballot in Kentucky, Beshear beat back the candidacy of Daniel Cameron, who had been hyped as a Republican rising star, to win a second term.

The other governor’s race on the ballot was in Mississippi, where Brandon Presley (D) put forth a surprisingly strong challenge to Gov. Tate Reeves (R) in this red state but ultimately conceded the race late Tuesday night.

Then, in Virginia, Democrats swept into control of both sides of the state’s General Assembly, prevailing in an expensive contest against Gov. Youngkin and Virginia Republicans. Legislative races in the other states on the ballot this year — New Jersey, Louisiana, and Mississippi — appeared to show little change. A Democrat won in Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court race as well, preserving the party’s 5-2 majority in a court that heard many election-related challenges in 2020.

This wasn’t a blue wave sweeping the nation, exactly. And the margins of key Virginia races looked more similar to 2021’s than 2020’s (when Biden won the state big). But considering how the incumbent president’s party usually suffers in off-year elections, and how bad Biden’s national numbers have been, Democrats should be pretty pleased with these outcomes.

Winner: Abortion rights

Stacks of pamphlets of voter information on Ohio’s Issue 1 ballot initiative. They read, in part, “Stop Ohio’s abortion ban, vote yes on issue 1.” Megan Jelinger/AFP via Getty Images

Tuesday was an excellent night for supporters of abortion rights — again.

Their biggest victory was in the ballot referendum in Ohio, which both codified abortion access up to the point when a fetus is viable and made clear abortions would be permitted even after viability if a doctor deems it necessary to protect a patient’s health. Ohio Republicans had previously passed a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, but it had been blocked in court, with the state Supreme Court hearing arguments about it in September. Now that’s off the table.

But abortion rights were a major theme in Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky and Youngkin’s attempt to flip the state legislature in Virginia, as well as in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court race. In election after election and referendum after referendum in the post-Dobbs era, voters have made clear — even in many red states — that they are not enthusiastic about major abortion restrictions.

Yet Republicans remain beholden to right-wing voters and activists demanding such restrictions — and it keeps backfiring on them in elections.

Loser: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin

A close-up of Youngkin’s face. He is a white man in middle age with short sandy hair peppered with gray.
Glenn Youngkin, governor of Virginia, speaks during a “Get Out the Vote” rally in Richmond, Virginia, on November 5, 2023.
Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Every so often this year, a story would pop up claiming that Youngkin was considering challenging Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primary. However, these stories usually claimed Youngkin would wait to make up his mind until after his state’s legislative elections, in which he was hoping to wrest control of the state Senate from Democrats. Big wins for Virginia Republicans, the theory went, would prove Youngkin was a political powerhouse who could win nationally too.

This never made a ton of sense, both because there are such things as ballot deadlines that would make the timing extremely difficult, and because national GOP voters have been quite loyal to Trump. More likely, Youngkin hoped that full control of Virginia’s government could let him pass laws like a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, making himself a champion of the right and positioning him well for the 2028 presidential race. He made no secret of his abortion policy — hoping that he could show Republicans how to run on the issue and win.

But he didn’t win. Republicans fell short of retaking the state Senate and they lost control of the House of Delegates, likely in part because Democrats campaigned on abortion. Those wins will prevent Youngkin from using the legislature to cozy up to the national right. And Youngkin won’t get another shot — Virginia governors can’t run for reelection. So while it may be too sweeping to say his presidential ambitions have been squashed, they’ve certainly taken a serious hit.

Winner: Joe Biden

Biden speaks at a podium while wearing sunglasses.
President Joe Biden speaks at Tioga Marine Terminal on October 13, 2023, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Mark Makela/Getty Images

Biden was not on the ballot in any state this year, and it would be a mistake to think that Tuesday’s results have any real connection to how he’ll do in 2024.

But, as mentioned above, the president has been dogged by a series of brutal polls of late showing him trailing Donald Trump nationally and in most battleground states.

Democrats and political analysts have hotly debated what to make of these polls, with some arguing that they show Biden is a badly flawed candidate who might put Trump back into the White House if he persists in running again. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod tweeted this weekend that Biden needed to consider whether it would be “wise” for him to run again. Recent news reports spoke of some Democrats’ “worry,” “frustrations,” and “panic.”

But others have argued that these polls tell us little of value. After all, they’re being taken a year in advance of the election at a time when Biden’s likely opponent, Trump, has had a relatively minor (for him) role in the news cycle. Such a panic occurred before the 2022 midterms, they point out, and yet Democrats did better than expected there. Biden’s numbers will likely recover once the choice is clearly framed for voters as Biden or Trump, the argument goes.

Democrats’ wins Tuesday will likely ease some of the pressure on Biden, feeding a sense in the party that, regardless of what the polls say, Democrats’ strategy and coalition turn out to be solid when people actually vote.

Now, it’s not clear whether that inference would actually be correct. I said just a few paragraphs ago that it would be a mistake to connect these races to 2024, which will feature a very different electorate. (It’s possible that Democrats are now the party that is structurally advantaged in non-presidential-year elections, since they now do so well among college-educated voters, who are more likely to vote consistently.) And even if Biden’s party does well now, it’s still possible that he himself is a uniquely vulnerable candidate, either due to his age or his record in office.

Still, winning is better than losing. So regardless of what the future holds, Biden has good reason to be happy about Tuesday’s results.

Update, November 8, 9 am ET: This post has been updated to reflect the Virginia House of Delegates results.

In interview, Biden says 2024 elections could be ‘last gasp’ of MAGA Republicans

In an interview that aired Sunday, President Joe Biden warned that the MAGA faction of the Republican Party — short for “Make America Great Again,” the now-infamous slogan of former President Donald Trump — poses a threat to democracy, and the 2024 election could be pivotal for the movement.

“I think that this is sort of the last gasp — or maybe the first big gasp — of the MAGA Republicans,” Biden told former CNN journalist John Harwood in an interview for ProPublica. “I think Trump has concluded that he has to win, and they’ll pull out all the stops.”

Biden went on to condemn Trump’s rhetoric — “I never thought I’d hear a president say some of the stuff he says — and drew a parallel to the state of affairs in the House of Representatives, which saw an uprising of far-right members nearly forcing a government shutdown by “bringing everything to a screeching halt.”

The president has defending American democracy a central focus of both his presidency and his 2024 presidential campaign. In Arizona last week, the president delivered his fourth such speech on the subject since taking office in 2021, warning that “there’s something dangerous happening in America right now.”

“There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy — the MAGA movement,” he said last week, later adding: “We should all remember, democracies don’t have to die at the end of a rifle. They can die when people are silent, when they fail to stand up or condemn threats to democracy, when people are willing to give away that which is most precious to them because they feel frustrated, disillusioned, tired, alienated.”

He also took umbrage with his predecessor’s rhetoric in that address, saying: “Trump says the Constitution gave him quote ‘the right to do whatever he wants as president. I’ve never even heard a president say that in jest.”

In the interview which aired Sunday, Biden similarly attacked Trump’s comments about what he says he’ll do should he regain the Oval Office.

“The things Trump says he will do are a threat to American democracy,” Biden said. “As I travel the world, I have heads of state asking me, conservative heads of state, ‘Look, what’s going to happen?’ Because democracy is in jeopardy in other parts of the world as well.

Referencing former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s comments that the U.S. is “the indispensable nation,” Biden said that “if [democracy] fails here, Katy bar the door.”

Biden told Harwood that part of his desire to “focus on the fundamentals that our democracy is at stake” comes from his worry that the majority of Republicans are not taking the party back from the MAGA faction. The president has repeatedly stated that he does not believe that MAGA Republicans represent the majority of the party.

“I’m convinced that part of it is communicating to the American people that this is bigger than a political disagreement, it’s beyond it,” Biden said, adding that he believes it’s a reason why the 2020 and 2022 elections turned out the way that they did. Polling data shows that democracy was a major motivating factor for voters in last year’s midterms, which saw Democrats outperform expectations.

Harwood pressed Biden on whether he thinks threats to democracy means refusal to accept election results and blocking the transfer of power, or larger concepts like gerrymandering, the Senate filibuster rule, which has stymied some Democratic priorities in recent years, and the Electoral College, which has picked two Republican presidents that have lost the popular vote in the last decade.

“We should never, ever condone violence in a democracy,” Biden fired back, before discussing the underpinnings of American democracy — the Constitution, namely — and condemning some of Trump’s priorities that he has stated should he become president again.

“For example, he wants to change the way the civil service works, he wants a whole new category that is not answerable to the civil service rules, but only answerable to the president,” Biden said.

When asked by if he was confident that the Supreme Court could be relied on to uphold the rule of law, Biden replied that he worries.

“Because I know that if the other team, the MAGA Republicans, win, they don’t want to uphold the rule of law,” Biden said. “They want to get rid of the FBI — the things they say … somehow we’ve got to communicate to the American people that this is for real. This is real.”

But at the end of the day, Biden said he believes the high court, which he called “extreme,” would “sustain the rule of law.”

Attorney General Bonta Announces Lawsuit Challenging Chino Valley Unified School District’s Forced Outing Policy

Monday, August 28, 2023
Contact: (916) 210-6000, agpressoffice@doj.ca.gov

LOS ANGELES — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today announced a lawsuit to immediately halt the enforcement of the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education’s (Board) mandatory gender identity disclosure policy. The policy, adopted in July, requires schools to inform parents, with minimal exceptions, whenever a student requests to use a name or pronoun different from that on their birth certificate or official records, even without the student’s permission. The policy also requires notification if a student requests to use facilities or participates in programs that don’t align with their sex on official records. In today’s lawsuit, Attorney General Bonta challenges the policy, which violates the California Constitution and state laws safeguarding civil rights, and has already caused and is threatening to cause LGBTQ+ students with further mental, emotional, psychological and potential physical harm.

“Every student has the right to learn and thrive in a school environment that promotes safety, privacy, and inclusivity – regardless of their gender identity,” said Attorney General Bonta. “We’re in court challenging Chino Valley Unified’s forced outing policy for wrongfully and unconstitutionally discriminating against and violating the privacy rights of LGBTQ+ students. The forced outing policy wrongfully endangers the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of non-conforming students who lack an accepting environment in the classroom and at home. Our message to Chino Valley Unified and all school districts in California is loud and clear: We will never stop fighting for the civil rights of LGBTQ+ students.”

In today’s lawsuit, Attorney General Bonta argues that the policy infringes on several state protections safeguarding students’ civil and constitutional rights, including:

  • California’s Equal Protection Clause: The policy unlawfully discriminates and singles out students who request to identify with or use names or pronouns different from those on their birth certificates, or who access programs or facilities that, in the view of the Board, are not “aligned” with the student’s gender.
  • California’s Education and Government Code: Education is a fundamental right in California, and California Education Code Sections 200 and 220 and Government Code section 11135 also ensure equal rights and opportunities for every student and prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression. The policy violates these fundamental anti-discrimination protections.
  • California’s constitutional right to privacy: California’s constitution expressly protects the right to “privacy,” including both “informational privacy,” and “autonomy privacy,” and the policy’s mandate to out transgender and gender-nonconforming students against their wishes or without their consent violates that right.

Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that the Board’s policy has already placed transgender and gender-nonconforming students in danger of imminent, irreparable harm from the consequences of forced disclosures. These students are currently under threat of being outed to their parents against their will, and many fear that the District’s policy will force them to make a choice: either “walk back” their constitutionally and statutorily protected rights to gender identity and gender expression, or face the risk of emotional, physical, and psychological harm. The Board’s policy thus unlawfully discriminates against transgender and gender nonbinary students, subjecting them to disparate treatment and harassment, including mental, emotional, and even physical abuse.

The lawsuit also asserts this the Board’s plain motivations in adopting the policy were to create and harbor animosity, discrimination, and prejudice towards transgender and gender-nonconforming students, without any compelling reason to do so, as evidenced by statements made during the Board’s hearing. In discussing the policy before its passage, board members made a number of statements describing students who are transgender or gender-nonconforming as suffering from a “mental illness” or “perversion”, or as being a threat to the integrity of the nation and the family. The Board President went so far as to state that transgender and gender nonbinary individuals needed “non-affirming” parental actions so that they could “get better.”

Attorney General Bonta has a substantial interest in protecting the legal rights, physical safety, and mental health of children in California schools, and in protecting them from trauma, harassment, bullying, and exposure to violence and threats of violence. Research shows that protecting a transgender student’s ability to make choices about how and when to inform others is critical to their well-being, as transgender students are exposed to high levels of harassment and mistreatment at school and in their communities.

  • In the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, 10% of respondents said that an immediate family member had been violent toward them because they were transgender, and 15% ran away from home or were kicked out of their home because they were transgender. And fewer than one-in-three transgender and gender nonbinary youth found their home to be gender-affirming.
  • Seventy-seven percent of students known or perceived as transgender reported negative experiences such as harassment and assault, and over half of transgender and nonbinary youth reported seriously considering suicide in the past year.
  • Nearly 46% of transgender students reported missing at least one day of school in the preceding month because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable there and 17% of transgender students reported that they left a K-12 school due to the severity of the harassment they experienced at school.

Attorney General Bonta is committed to defending the rights and safety of our LGBTQ+ youth. Prior to filing a lawsuit, Attorney General Bonta announced opening a civil rights investigation into the legality of Chino Valley Unified School District’s adoption of its mandatory gender identity disclosure policy. Prior to opening the investigation, Attorney General Bonta in July sent a letter to Superintendent Norman Enfield and the Board of Education cautioning them of the dangers of adopting its forced outing policy, emphasizing the potential infringements on students’ privacy rights and educational opportunities. Just days ago, Attorney General Bonta issued a statement following Anderson Union High School District, and Temecula and Murrieta Valley Unified School District Boards’ decisions to implement copy-cat mandatory gender identity disclosure policy targeting transgender and gender nonconforming students.

A copy of the lawsuit is available here. A copy of the motion for temporary restraining order is available here.

Spotlight on State Superintendent of Public Instruction

Tony Thurmond

California State Superintendent of Public Instruction

Tony Thurmond is State Superintendent of Public Instruction, responsible for the largest public school system in the nation, with nearly 6 million students and over 10,000 schools. Since taking office in 2019, he has created and championed historic initiatives to close the achievement gap, support student mental health, and improve equity, access, and opportunity for all of California’s public school students. He has integrated new programs and strategies into K-12 public schools, including securing a historic $4.13 billion investment in community schools to ensure an equity-driven approach to public education; supporting teachers through a $1.5 billion investment in professional learning for educators; championing the $2.7 billion Universal Transitional Kindergarten program to expand quality preschool; and fighting to increase Expanded Learning funding to $4 billion ongoing to add opportunities for students throughout the summer. He is a graduate of Temple University, and he holds dual master’s degrees in law and social policy and social work from Bryn Mawr College.

from https://www.ppic.org/person/tony-thurmond/

 

Investing in America

 

For decades, the U.S. exported jobs and imported products, while other countries surpassed us in critical sectors like infrastructure, clean energy, semiconductors, and biotechnology. Thanks to President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda – including historic legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden such as the American Rescue Plan, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act – that is changing.

President Biden’s Investing in America agenda is mobilizing historic levels of private sector investments in the United States, bringing manufacturing back to America after decades of offshoring, and creating new, good-paying jobs, including union jobs and jobs that don’t require a college degree. His Investing in America agenda is rebuilding our roads and bridges using Made in America materials, built by American workers. And it’s transforming our country for the better – reaching communities in every corner of the United States, including those that have too often been left behind. This website provides an interactive map that illustrates the impact of these record-breaking levels of public and private investment across states and territories under the Biden Administration.

 

Locally Elected School Boards Are Failing

Locally Elected School Boards Are Failing

Pandemic stress-tested school governance, revealing many flaws

Vladimir Kogan

Illustration

Over the past two years, the nation’s school boards have had to grapple with one thorny controversy after another. Local news reports, op-ed pages, and viral social-media posts have featured outraged parents and advocates protesting the presence of armed police officers in schools, the use of entrance exams for selective programsmask mandates for in-person learning, and allegations that Critical Race Theory was infiltrating the K–12 curriculum.

These displays of activism and acrimony took place at a time when local school officials were tackling two of the weightiest policy questions in recent memory—how to make up learning lost during the most prolonged and widespread instance of school closures in American history and how best to spend an unprecedented infusion of federal relief dollars. The apparent disconnect between the issues that adults seemed most riled about and what was at stake for students did not escape notice. In January 2021, the San Francisco school board voted to remove the names of presidents Lincoln and Washington (among other historical figures) from district schools because of their supposed roles in perpetuating slavery and racism, even as those same buildings remained vacant and students were still learning remotely. San Francisco Mayor London Breed pleaded, “Let’s bring the same urgency and focus on getting our kids back in the classroom, and then we can have that longer conversation about the future of school names.”

The events of the past two years underscore a question that has long been a subject of debate among education-policy researchers and reformers: Is our school-governance model—featuring decentralized control and locally elected school boards—the most effective and efficient approach to educating America’s youth? In a seminal book published 30 years ago, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, John Chubb and Terry Moe argued that it is not. Presaging many of the dynamics on display recently, Chubb and Moe warned that institutions of democratic control—meaning locally elected school boards—often fail in carrying out their core missions, instead empowering vocal and well-organized adults at the expense of the educational needs and interests of students, who do not get a vote in local elections.

With three decades of additional evidence and the pandemic still disrupting business as usual in our schools, now is an opportune time to revisit their arguments. Much has changed in the education world over the past 30 years, and new data sources and research methods have revealed the inner workings of local democracy in much greater detail than was possible when the book was written. Nevertheless, Chubb and Moe’s conclusions have aged surprisingly well. Their central thesis—that local democracy fails to incentivize pivotal policymakers to give priority to students’ academic needs—has been confirmed by a growing body of research on school-board elections. Indeed, increasing partisan polarization over educational issues and the changing demographics of American society have only exacerbated these governance challenges. The pandemic served as a worrying stress test of school governance in America, bringing popular attention to many of the issues Chubb and Moe first highlighted in their work.

Satan and the Origins of “Local Control”

Cover of "Politics Markets & America's Schools" by John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe
Chubb and Moe’s central thesis has been confirmed by additional research.

Some critics of Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools attacked the book for being “openly antidemocratic.” Presumably, these detractors believed that local democracy is the default or preferred mechanism for running public schools, but in much of the developed world, schools are typically overseen by centralized national agencies. In fact, our model is largely a historical artifact, dating back to the first public-education law adopted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s. As evident from the law’s title, the Old Deluder Satan Act, it was the moral concerns of adults, rather than a desire to address the holistic educational needs of children, that mainly drove the public-school effort—not unlike some of today’s battles over sex education, intelligent design, and social-studies curricula.

The Massachusetts law, which charged local government with the responsibility for funding and operating local schools so kids would become literate enough to read the Bible, was copied across the country in one of the earliest examples of what political scientists now call policy diffusion. Over the course of the 20th century, this system underwent several important transformations. The shift from single-room schoolhouses to grade-banded schools necessitated consolidation into larger school systems, moving the locus of political control from boards overseeing individual schools to districtwide bodies. At least in theory, the emerging norm of appointing professionally trained superintendents to oversee day-to-day operations limited the influence of elected school-board members. Starting in the 1970s, lawsuits over funding inequities massively increased state-government investment in K–12 education, giving state lawmakers greater say in public-school policy. And over the past three decades, state and federal reforms greatly increased transparency over student outcomes and ratcheted up accountability pressures designed to improve student achievement.

As this history shows, our system of “local democratic control” was not intentionally designed with student academic outcomes in mind and has become less local (and perhaps less democratic) over time. Nevertheless, elected school-board members still occupy a central policymaking role, with final say over teacher contracts, curriculum choices, disciplinary policies, and many other important issues. Recent research shows that who serves in these positions is consequential for students. When voters elect more nonwhite school-board members, districts diversify their staffsincrease investment in facilities, and narrow racial achievement gaps. Similarly, school boards with more Democrats appear to decrease racial segregation, while greater teacher representation on these bodies leads to lower charter-school enrollments and higher teacher salaries.

Student Achievement and School-Board Elections

Although who wins a particular school-board contest can matter a great deal, there’s little indication that voters use elections to hold school boards accountable. A study by Christopher Berry and William Howell found that voters in South Carolina appeared to reward school-board incumbents for improvements in student test scores in 2000, when the scores first became public (see “Accountability Lost,” research, Winter 2008). However, media attention to test scores faded in 2002 and 2004, and so did electoral accountability. In an analysis focused on the introduction of “report cards” for schools in Ohio, which I conducted with Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz, we found little evidence that highly publicized performance indicators affected the outcome of school-board elections in the state. In California, voters do appear to hold school-board incumbents responsible for student learning—but only when school-board elections are held concurrently with presidential contests and turnout is high.

Even in the rare cases where student achievement does matter for school-board elections, the effects have been surprisingly modest, typically increasing or reducing the share of votes won by individual candidates by fewer than 5 percentage points. This differential is far lower than the margin of advantage enjoyed by incumbents in local races, and it appears to be a fraction of the electoral boost conferred by securing the teachers union endorsement. If school boards are asked to choose between a policy that improves student achievement and one that benefits teachers, the pressures of seeking reelection perversely encourage school-board members to prioritize adult employees over the education of students. These dynamics are likely amplified in large, urban districts, where teachers unions tend to enjoy stronger organization and access to greater political resources.

Some might argue that the interests of teachers and students are necessarily aligned, and perhaps this is true in many cases. However, the pandemic provided a clear counterexample. Fortunately, Covid-19 resulted in relatively mild infections for most school-aged children who contracted the disease—on par with seasonal influenza—but it was far more dangerous for school employees. Although few school-board members publicly acknowledged it, the decision about whether to resume in-person instruction in fall 2020 involved a difficult tradeoff between providing the best learning opportunities for students and minimizing the health risks for workers. There is little doubt that in cities including ChicagoLos AngelesSan Francisco, and Washington, D.C., organized opposition from teachers unions delayed the return of students to their classrooms, although it is less clear how much of this was attributable to union political influence rather than the obstruction opportunities built into the collective-bargaining process.

Are Voter and Student Interests Aligned?

Parents account for a larger share of the electorate in even years, when high-profile national races appear on the ballot, which could be why school-board members seem to face more pressure to improve student outcomes in those years. The conventional wisdom is that off-cycle school-board elections—a practice established by Progressive reformers early in the 20th century—increase the influence of school employees and their unions because most other voters stay home. More recent research, which takes advantage of the growing availability of electronic voter-turnout records and big-data methods to link these records to other information (including teacher-licensure databases), suggests that such concern about off-cycle elections may be exaggerated. Even in exceptionally low-turnout elections, school employees account for a relatively small fraction of voters. Of course, unions influence election outcomes through mechanisms other than voting—including endorsements, campaign spending, and neighborhood door knocking. These strategies may well have a greater impact on lower-turnout elections, though there is no compelling empirical evidence that they do. But the research does suggest reasons other than union influence to doubt that the interests of school-board voters and students are likely to be aligned.

In several recent papers examining school-board elections in various large states, my coauthors and I found that voters who turn out in these elections typically do not have kids of their own and are generally much whiter as a group than the students that local schools educate. Indeed, we showed that most of the school districts with majority-nonwhite student bodies in these states were governed by school boards elected by majority-white electorates—in many cases, overwhelmingly white electorates. Particularly in low-turnout elections, elderly white voters without children appear to be the pivotal voting bloc, and there is little reason to believe that these voters are any more motivated to improve student outcomes than school-employee interest groups are.

The experience of the East Ramapo Central School District, which was profiled in an episode of the public-radio series This American Life, illustrates the downsides of a system in which education policy is dictated by voters who do not look like the students that the policies affect. The district is in a racially diverse suburb in New York state. While two thirds of its residents are white, Black and Hispanic students account for 92 percent of school-district enrollment. Orthodox Jews make up much of the population and tend to send their kids to private religious schools—which enroll far more students than the public district does.

According to recent litigation, white voters effectively control the East Ramapo school board, even though few of their kids attend the public schools. District court judge Cathy Seibel found in 2020 that the school district’s at-large election system was essentially “diluting” the Black vote. The district has advantaged the interests of white residents and the private schools their kids attend: keeping property taxes and instructional expenditures to a minimum, generously funding special-education services for private-school students, and selling off public-school buildings to private religious schools. Although this is an extreme example, the underlying representational problems and perverse incentives created by local democratic control in East Ramapo play out in a broad set of school districts—especially those serving mostly students of color—where the interests of voters and public-school students are likely to be out of sync.

Revisiting Chubb and Moe

The worrying findings documented in the research—that school-board members face minimal electoral pressure to improve student outcomes, that they are often cross-pressured by employee interest groups, and that they do not prioritize the interests of minority-student populations—is largely confirmed by school-board members themselves. In one recent survey, nearly 40 percent of incumbent school-board members reported running unopposed in their last election. In other surveys, school-board candidates identified teachers unions as some of the most active and influential actors in school-board elections. Another recent survey, using a clever design meant to elicit honest responses to sensitive questions, asked California school-board members to identify considerations important to voters. Forty percent of respondents said they felt no electoral pressure from their constituents to close racial achievement gaps. One can think of no stronger endorsement for Chubb and Moe’s critique of local democratic control.

In several important respects, the challenges of education governance have evolved over the past three decades. In identifying the mechanisms through which electoral politics can impede the provision of high-quality education, Chubb and Moe focused primarily on entrenched employee interest groups and sclerotic bureaucracies. They put less emphasis on two other factors—partisan polarization and identity politics—that have become much more salient in education-policy debates today.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a high point of bipartisan consensus on education reform. Elites from both parties supported standardized testing, holding schools and educators accountable for student performance, increasing school-choice opportunities for families, and the need for dramatic turnaround of chronically underperforming schools. This consensus began to unravel during the highly partisan debates over the Common Core standards, and divisions over reform intensified during the Trump years. The impact of this polarization was seen clearly during the pandemic, when local partisanship—rather than Covid case counts or hospitalization rates—emerged as the strongest predictor of whether local schools resumed in-person learning in fall 2020.

Chubb and Moe also arguably underestimated the importance of race in local education politics. Members of minority groups, who have historically faced discrimination in the private labor market, have long relied on government jobs. Especially for Black Americans, such work has provided an important source of upward economic mobility. In cities such as Baltimore and Washington, D.C., local school systems supplied well-paying, middle-class jobs for Black families. Sometimes, well-intentioned school-improvement efforts put these jobs at risk, undermining support for reform among not only the affected school employees but also other prominent Black community leaders, including clergy.

Such dynamics have played out recently in New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina triggered a state takeover and a wholesale overhaul of local schools that created the nation’s first all-charter district. Rigorous evaluations have shown that these reforms dramatically improved student achievement and substantially increased rates of high-school graduation and college attendance and persistence, with the largest gains in educational attainment for low-income and Black students (see “Good News for New Orleans,” features, Fall 2015). However, the reforms also led to significant job losses for the city’s majority-Black teacher workforce, perhaps explaining why Black residents were ultimately less supportive of changes in school governance and were less likely than white residents to say that schools had improved as a result.

Public-opinion surveys during the pandemic documented similar racial polarization in opinion on schools, with parents of color far more likely to prefer keeping their children learning online and less likely to opt for in-person opportunities when schools did reopen in the largest cities. Although these racial gaps narrowed over time, some interest groups attempted to weaponize the racial disparities in the political battles over the pace and timing of decisions to reopen. When California lawmakers offered districts financial incentives to resume in-person learning, for example, the Los Angeles teachers union called the move “a recipe for propagating structural racism.” Race has also figured prominently in debates on issues related to school discipline, school resource officers, and selective-admissions schools.

On the other hand, Chubb and Moe arguably overestimated the extent to which market-based mechanisms could correct many of the school-governance problems they identified. Since the publication of their book, both private-school vouchers and charter schools have introduced important elements of market forces to the education ecosystems in many states. Particularly in urban areas, charter schools have posted substantial achievement gains, although charters continue to educate a relatively small share of students outside of a few cities such as New Orleans, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. Competition from charter schools and private-school choice has also led to modest improvements among public schools, although competition has hardly proved to be a panacea for most underperforming school systems.

Without Reform, Things Will Only Get Worse

As discouraging as recent trends may seem, the governance challenges are likely to grow worse in the absence of meaningful reform. The decline of local newspapers will further erode watchdog journalism and oversight, perhaps reducing voters’ access to independent information on student performance. The nationalization of local politics will continue, making partisan polarization over local education issues even more intense. The growing diversity of public-school students—a population that became majority nonwhite in 2014—will likely further increase the demographic disconnect between school-board electorates and students. The aging of the general population will bring intergenerational conflict—sometimes described as the coming “gray peril”—over school funding. Finally, the substantial enrollment losses seen during the pandemic will likely accelerate the decline in public-school enrollment, exacerbating local political battles over school closures and distracting attention away from academics.

Fortunately, the pandemic may also help open the door to transformative change. If history is any guide, substantial test-score declines in the coming years will push educational concerns higher on the national policy agenda and help mobilize support for reform. The infusion of federal funding will provide a welcome defense against the oft-repeated argument that lack of resources and disinvestment are the main barriers to boosting student achievement in the most-disadvantaged communities. When the policy window opens, reformers should remain laser focused on improving school governance—to ensure that the reform process prioritizes the interests of kids rather than the demands and political agendas of adults. Such reforms should include holding school-board elections on cycle, when participation among parents is highest; reworking accountability systems to ensure that district-performance ratings emphasize each school’s contribution to student learning rather than the demographic mix of students it serves; and timing the release of school ratings to coincide with school-board election campaigns. Every crisis brings an opportunity, and we cannot afford to let this one go to waste.

Vladimir Kogan is associate professor at The Ohio State University.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Kogan, V. (2022). Locally Elected School Boards Are Failing: Pandemic stress-tested school governance, revealing many flawsEducation Next, 22(3), 8-13.

 

Last updated May 3, 2022

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