Jeffco Recall Fight Reflects National Battle Over Future of Public Education
Source: Rocky Mountain PBS I-News
School board elections are usually sleepy affairs with miniscule budgets that don’t attract much of the electorate.
In fact, of the 178,000-some Jefferson County residents who went to the ballot box in 2013, only about 136,000 bothered to select a school board member in each of the three races. That’s compared to the more than 400,000 registered voters in the county.
But as federal and state governments become more polarized and gridlocked, local municipal and school board races are increasingly attractive to large national donors looking to make political points, said Jeff Henig, a professor of political science and education at the Teachers College at Columbia University.
“Most of the nation’s 15,000 school districts are pretty much untouched by the national money and attention,” he said. “But it’s happening a bit. And increasingly.”
Read more: http://inewsnetwork.org/2015/08/03/jeffco-recall-fight-reflects-national-battle-over-future-of-public-education/
