UPDATE: Tom Steyer ended his campaign Feb. 29, 2020. Pete Buttigieg ended his campaign March 1, 2020. Amy Klobuchar ended her campaign March 2, 2020.

Trying to decide who to vote for in the presidential primary on March 3? To help those of you for whom a candidate’s positions on education are important — as they are to us — EdSource has summarized key education positions on eight Democratic candidates on the ballot. For more detailed explanations, we encourage you to make use of the links provided below. 

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  1. Kareem Weaver 4 years ago4 years ago

    Gabbard, as the only candidate that has a different view of charter schools and the education of Indigenous people, should be on this list. Ridiculous.

    Replies

    • Karen Flores 4 years ago4 years ago

      You have to select the candidate to find Gabbard on the list. It has her views on all though some are unspecified.

  2. Jennifer Bestor 4 years ago4 years ago

    This is an excellent chart but begs a major question -- how much would each element of their plans cost and how would they pay for it? California (and every other state) has been bitten badly by the federal government's unfunded special education mandates. Another set of federal commitments unmatched by federal funding would be deadly in this state – which has the highest number of school-aged children combined with extremely high proportions … Read More

    This is an excellent chart but begs a major question — how much would each element of their plans cost and how would they pay for it? California (and every other state) has been bitten badly by the federal government’s unfunded special education mandates. Another set of federal commitments unmatched by federal funding would be deadly in this state – which has the highest number of school-aged children combined with extremely high proportions of children in poverty and English learners.

    As Sacramento inches its way towards many of these plans, it’s evident that (a) the cost is substantial and (b) staged preparation will be crucial (e.g., pre-K teacher recruitment and training, appropriate pre-K facilities development).

    A rule of thumb is $10 billion a year to provide a new cohort of students one year of education (500,000 students, $20,000/year – since both pre-K and college are more expensive to provide than K-12). So extending pre-school to 2-, 3- and 4- year olds would be roughly $30 billion a year in California. Two years of free college, $20 billion. Total: $50 billion in California. (The K-12 LCFF portion of the CA budget is about $60 billion/year.)

    To handle this nationally, it’s $50 billion x 8 (since we educate 12% of the nation’s students) = $400 billion or about 10% of the total federal budget and a full 30% of the discretionary budget. The existing budget is already in deficit and major Medicare and Social Security deficits are looming as the Baby Boom retires. I realize these are airy campaign promises, but would have a lot of respect for a candidate who wasn’t going to pay for them with the same pool as s/he is planning to use to pay for universal Medicare and/or climate change mitigation and/or other programs.