Where the Vice-Presidential Nominees Stand on Education Issues

Supporters of career and technical education have reason to be pleased with the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.

Kaine, who served as Virginia’s governor from 2006 to 2010, gave CTE new prominence in the Every Student Succeeds Act. He introduced an amendment to a Senate version of the bill that eventually became ESSA that would have designated CTE as a “core subject.”

ESSA does away with the term “core subject,” but the list of disciplines that now make up a “well rounded education” under the law includes CTE, along with 16 other subjects. In his first official appearance as Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s running mate on July 23, Kaine, the son of a welder, talked about his own experience as a career-tech educator. While serving as a Catholic missionary in Honduras, Kaine taught carpentry skills to children there. (They, in turn, taught him to speak Spanish, he said.) Introducing himself with Clinton, Kaine gave many shoutouts to education. He talked about how his father-in-law, former Virginia Gov. Abner Lindwood Holton, a Republican, integrated schools in the Commonwealth, and how his wife was among the first to attend them. He spoke about how he and his wife sent their own children to those same, integrated public schools.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/08/03/where-the-vice-presidential-nominees-stand-on-education.html