Rising opposition to the Common Core Standards (CCS) has undermined implementation throughout the country. Yet there has been no scholarly analysis of the predictors of CCS opposition in the populace. This analysis uses poll data from a statewide poll of California voters to explore the demographic and policy predictors of CCS opposition. We find opposition strongly associated with views about President Obama, several education policy issues (especially testing), and two mis/negative conceptions about the standards. We advocate future work using poll data to understand public opinion on education issues.

Policies governing the organization and timing of school elections affect democratic representation in school decision making. Some argue that school board elections should be consolidated with general municipal elections on the grounds that this will increase participation and representation, but little empirical work addresses the consequences of policy change. This article presents analyses of voter representation and school decision making in consolidated and special school elections in four Michigan cities. These analyses indicate that consolidating elections may lead to increased voter turnout and to changes in the composition of the voting population.THE GOVERNANCE OF AMERICA'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS has been transformed in the past generation. In response to an increasingly clamorous array of demands-for equity, excellence, accountability, and choice-the familiar traditions of local control and institutional autonomy have given way to court orders, state and mayoral takeovers, and reliance on markets to guide decisions and allocate resources in the education system. A growing body of

Schools are expected to accomplish a variety of goals in modern societies, ranging from enhancing economic competitiveness to ensuring equality of opportunity to protecting students from AIDS. Increasing numbers of education policy analysts of divergent political and scholarly persuasions agree that under present arrangements for educational governance schools have failed to achieve crucial public purposes. Agreement that present arrangements have failed is inevitably accompanied by intense disagreement about how schools should be governed, and it is therefore in the antipolitics of institutional choice that the main conflicts now emerge in the politics of education. Antipolitics is often associated with a willingness to dispense with democratic governance, in order to accomplish one or another of the public purposes to which schools are dedicated.

By the World Bank's reckoning, Mozambique is the poorest country in the world, with a gross domestic product per capita of approximately $80 in 1990, as well as one of the most dependent on foreign assistance, which accounts for two-thirds of measured G.D.P. Indeed, aid receipts per capita amounted to approximately $60 in 1990, almost double the figure for sub-Saharan Africa, as may be seen from Table I.

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