Early education ballot initiatives won easy approval in St. Louis, San Antonio, Colorado, and Multnomah County, Oregon, last night with wide margins of victory — demonstrating that even in a pandemic, voters will spend on the nation’s youngest learners.

The diverse funding mechanisms in the two cities, one state and one county — majority Democratic areas — offered a glimpse at the many paths forward for cities, counties and states looking to do the same in the future as consensus grows on the benefits of pre-k.

Colorado is now on its way to universal pre-k for all of the state’s 67,000 4-year-olds, with the biggest ballot item of the night, Proposition EE. Funded by a sales tax on tobacco products, the measure is to generate $180 million per year by 2023-24 when those funds begin to be disbursed by the state legislature for pre-k programs.

The tax continues to incrementally increase until 2027, when a carton of cigarettes will be taxed at about 62% and revenue from the tax tops out at $280 million per year.

In San Antonio, voters opted to continue funding PreK 4 SA, the city-run pre-k program, with an existing sales tax. Since it was first approved in 2012, the program has graduated over 12,000 4-year-olds from its four brick-and-mortar centers and given out $21 million in grants to help other pre-k providers expand to full day, high quality programming.

In St. Louis, voters approved Proposition R (for “Ready by Five”) which will raise the property tax rate by $0.06 to generate $2.3 million per year dedicated to improving services in early childhood learning centers.

Proposition R Il not create extra seats, but will be distributed by the Mental Health Board, which operates the city’s Children’s Services Fund and Mental Health Fund to award grants to nonprofit service providers for services like developmental screening and home visits.

Finally in Multnomah County, Oregon, home to the city of Portland, an income tax on the top 10 percent of earners will fund 7,000 free pre-k seats for the county, where what few childcare options do exist are the fourth most expensive in the country.

2020’s KEY EDUCATION VOTES: See our full coverage of the 46 races that could reshape America’s schools following Election Day — and get the latest updates on state policies and students’ challenges during the pandemic by signing up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter.Ìę

With 20 out of 20 precincts reporting, Hurtado tallied 20,264 votes versus Ross’s 19,869: a difference of just 395, only 97 more than the narrow margin by which Ross beat his Democratic opponent two years ago.

“We are really excited at tonight’s strong results,” Hurtado told while also expressing caution. “We’ve seen a strong showing in support of our campaign, but still recognize it’s a bit close to call. There’s still votes out there from mail-in ballots and provisional ballots, and we want to be sure we see democracy play out and make sure that everyone’s voice is heard in this election.”

Thirty-one-year-old Hurtado, a Princeton graduate who is the son of Salvadoran immigrants, was running against the longtime politician to represent North Carolina House District 63. The Tar Heel State has 1 million Latino residents, two-thirds of whom aren’t eligible to vote because they are younger than 18 or not U.S. citizens.

The Trump administration has targeted Latinos over the last four years, and the coronavirus pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on Latino families, making a of them sick than any other race. Hurtado himself became ill with COVID-19 over the summer, interfering with his campaign efforts.

In recent months, grassroots organizers have been working to those Latino voting numbers into political power. Hurtado’s election to the state Assembly would be a product of that effort.

“I want the 21,000 Latinos in Alamance County to know they’re very much part of the conversation here,” he the AP in September.

Hurtado, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has promised voters that once in office, he’ll fight for higher teacher salaries, increased access to early childhood education and a more diverse educator workforce. He supports a moratorium on the state’s voucher program and said he would consider a cap on charter schools.

2020’s KEY EDUCATION VOTES: See our full coverage of the 46 races that could reshape America’s schools following Election Day — and get the latest updates on state policies and students’ challenges during the pandemic by signing up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter.Ìę

What’s the promise of the American Dream? If you work hard and follow the rules, you’ll get access to a life of relative dignity, stability and self-determination. You’ll have some say in where you work, what you do and how you spend your time. You’ll have a relatively wide path to the basic goods of middle-class life: safe and affordable housing, health care and retirement.

Has the country always delivered those things? No. Has it ever delivered them equitably to people of all races, ethnicities and genders? Again, no. But they are still our ideals, the basic pieces of our national story. An America that isn’t working on expanding more opportunities for more people to work and earn better lives isn’t an America worthy of its history and creed.

If we recognize mobility as the United States’ dominant public narrative, and inequality as the United States’ great public problem, then it’s clear that teachers sit at  of American mythology. It’s why they occupy a special place in our public discourse, and .

Presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris agrees. The California Democrat announced a proposal at the end of March to raise average teacher pay by $13,500, at a total cost of $315 billion in additional federal spending over a decade. This would be new federal education spending, paid for, , “by strengthening the estate tax and cracking down on loopholes that let the very wealthiest, with estates worth multiple millions or billions of dollars, avoid paying their fair share.”

“Let’s look at it as an investment,” . “We can judge a society, I think, always, by the way it treats its children. And one of the greatest expressions of love of our children is that we invest in their education. The people who are going to educate our children are our teachers. And for too long, they have been paid substandard wages and certainly not been paid their value to us as a society and to our children.”

Much of the coverage of Harris’s teacher pay proposal focused on politics. Was it a giveaway to a key Democratic constituency that would help raise the senator’s profile in the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential primaries? Sure. It’s no accident that Harris with school visits and an address to the local American Federation of Teachers chapter where she told members, “We are not paying you your value.”

But it’s also a policy that could meaningfully shift the labor market around teaching. If teachers become one of the better-paid positions for college graduates, that could boost the profession’s relative appeal for young credentialed workers. That could help schools and districts attract and retain ambitious, talented new teachers.

The idea, according to Harris’s campaign, is that increased pay will reduce teacher turnover. Research generally supports . Given that teacher turnover , it’s fair to use it as a proxy variable: increase teacher pay, which reduces teacher turnover, which — in turn — raises student achievement.

There are caveats, of course. First: Teacher attrition is not currently a comprehensive problem in the United States. As Bellwether Education Partners’ Chad Aldeman noted in a 2018 article, “The public education sector has far less employee churn than practically all other sectors of our economy.”

Second, not all teacher turnover is created equal. Research has suggested that systems that encourage less-effective teachers to leave the classroom — and reward more-effective teachers — can improve student achievement, even if they increase turnover. This was certainly the case in Washington, D.C., where a citywide focus on raising teacher quality . However, there is some evidence that turnover is a more significant challenge for schools enrolling high percentages of historically underserved students. To that end, Harris’s plan does include a promise to provide additional funding to “America’s high-need schools.”

Paying American teachers better is a good thing — a Very Good Thing — particularly in a moment when middle-class frustration with inequality and wage stagnation is one of the country’s most powerful political currents. And yet, if the cost of Harris’s proposal stays steady at about $31 billion per year, that’s a lot of new education spending that isn’t going to other possible programs. That would be enough, for instance,  (with billions to spare). We could expand the Child Tax Credit and . It would be just about enough  — the federal government’s core investment in K-12 educational equity.

Each of these programs is backed by significant research.  that early education investments, including the federal Head Start program, are some of the most effective ways to close achievement gaps and support better outcomes for historically underserved children.  that boosting family income in children’s early years drives better developmental and academic outcomes. The research on expanding Title I funding to high-poverty schools is not as clear, but .

So: Should we give the country’s teachers a raise? Maybe. Policymaking is the science of codifying our priorities into law. Politics is the art of weighing them. Do we care more about supporting working families with universal early education programs like  and pre-K … or about shoring up the teaching profession’s wages? Or maybe we should prioritize and pay for both of those things 
 but bail on funding free college for all? Or maybe we slightly increase Title I funding for schools serving large numbers of low-income students and only raise teacher pay for hard-to-staff positions like bilingual or STEM teachers?

These questions won’t answer themselves. Trouble is (as ±ő’v±đ noted before), when it comes to presidential campaigns, our national habit is to leave education out. At present, Harris’s teacher pay proposal is the most substantive K-12 policy idea from the 2020 candidates. It would be good for us — and the country — to hear some alternative options from her competitors, and work out whether it’s the best one.

Ever since ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ launched in 2015, we’ve been keeping a close eye on the education reforms in Newark, New Jersey. From innovative schools to enrollment systems, student scores, and the district’s return to local control, we’ve covered Newark’s education system more than that of just about any other city.

With Sen. Cory Booker now officially running for president, we’re dusting off some of our key Newark articles and essays from the archive, to provide details and context surrounding Mayor Booker’s education legacy. Also now live on the site, an exclusive interview with the senator conducted in 2018 in which he went deeper than ever before on his education philosophy, his views on teacher quality, and why he thinks many people have misconceptions surrounding the long-term success of his school reform efforts. You can read that full interview here.

Beyond that conversation, here are five other valuable reads to better understand Booker’s education priorities while the 36th mayor of Newark:

1. From 2017: “New research shows that driving students to better schools was biggest gain from $100 million Newark school reform.” In the first substantial study of results from the ambitious package of reforms implemented in the years that followed the announcement of Mark Zuckerberg’s donation, a team of researchers led by Tom Kane, a Harvard economist who has produced influential research on teacher quality, studied fourth-to-eighth-grade student performance in the district as the reforms rolled out between 2011 and 2016. Among the findings: Students in both traditional and charter schools made larger gains in English in 2016 than in 2011; math gains were flat. Nearly two-thirds of the gains derived from more students moving to better schools — “enrollment shares following school effectiveness,” as Kane put it in an interview — largely because their low-performing schools closed or they enrolled in a charter. Read the full piece.

2. From 2015: “The Unwritten Appendix to ‘The Prize,’ By Those Inside Newark’s Improving Schools.” Dale Russakoff’s “The Prize” is an unsparing chronicle of five controversial years in Newark that began in front of a cheering audience on Oprah and ended in 2015 with the resignation of Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson. It is an important, thoughtful, and well-researched book, containing meaningful lessons for anyone with even a passing interest in cities, politics, or education. I echo Conor Williams’s sentiment that “If you read Russakoff’s account and find your beliefs vindicated, you’re not trying hard enough.”

But even if you are trying, what you might miss in “The Prize” is that the past five years have brought real educational gains to Newark students — from a student achievement perspective, Newark’s reforms were anything but a misguided failure. Read the full analysis.

3. From 2016: “Impressive new scores for Newark charters raise an awkward question: Did city pick the wrong strategy?” If you Google these three words — Zuckerberg, Newark, and failure — you’ll discover scores of now-familiar articles: Philanthropist Mark Zuckerberg kicks in $100 million to rescue Newark schools, politicians and school leaders make fools of themselves, and the entire venture floats to the surface as a bloated failure. But a steady drip of recent data points to a very different story line: Not only did the reforms of traditional Newark Public Schools produce some real benefits, but the relatively small portion of the gift invested in Newark charter schools paid off big. Real big. The gains are so striking, in fact, that they raise a key question: Why didn’t the Newark reforms emphasize charters from the beginning? If you look across the Hudson River, where former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein produced striking gains by pulling in the region’s top charters with offers of $1-a-year rentals to use existing buildings, it’s reasonable to ask (with the admitted benefit of hindsight): Why didn’t Newark do the same? Read the full analysis.

4. From 2018: “Cory Booker could have run away from school reform. Instead, he’s doubling down on Newark’s education revival. That’s a smart move.” Booker, to all appearances, is focused on a 2020 presidential run, but one can detect no pivot from his progressive roots in school choice and equity that marked his mayoral tenure in Newark. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who went from charter school fan (“I favor promoting choice among public schools, much as the President’s Charter Schools Initiative encourages”) to charter opponent (“most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids”) in order to win endorsements, Booker isn’t cowering to special interests. Instead, he’s doubling down on his reform credentials, as well as attempting a reset of the distorted narrative of Newark Public Schools. Read the full essay.

5. From 2017: “Assessing 22 years of state control as Newark votes for the board to take back reins of city schools.” There’s an old saying that when you hit bottom, the only place left to go is up. Those depths aptly describe Newark’s old school system. A 1993 Comprehensive Compliance Investigation described the district as a miasma of “low student test scores, high dropout rates, questionable expenditures of public funds, and crumbling buildings with health and safety hazards.” That year, one out of every two Newark students didn’t graduate from high school, and average SAT scores were 311 in verbal and 363 in math. What lessons can we glean from the metamorphosis from what Judge Stephen G. Weiss called an “abysmal” school district to one imbued with rising student outcomes and newly empowered parents? And how will the newly configured school board balance parent demand for continued improvement with the district’s fiscal and infrastructural instability? Read the full analysis.

Get the latest updates on Sen. Booker’s presidential push, breaking news of Newark’s schools, as well as our complete EDlection2020 coverage of education on the campaign trail, by signing up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter.