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Daily Headlines for August 10, 2012

Rhee Is Wrong And Misinformed
CNN Blog, August 9, 2012

A few days ago, CNN interviewed former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee about American education. Rhee, predictably, said that American education is terrible, that test scores are flat, and that we are way behind other nations on international tests.

FROM THE STATES

ALABAMA

Alabama Shows Improvement On AYP
Montgomery Advertiser, AL, August 10, 2012

Thursday’s Adequate Yearly Progress numbers, the last Alabama will receive if it is successful in opting out of No Child Left Behind requirements, show modest statewide improvements in student proficiency and challenges for Montgomery County Public Schools.

CALIFORNIA

LAUSD Negotiate Revisions to Teacher Evaluations
Bell Gardens Sun, CA, August 9, 2012

By Dec. 4, teachers and principals in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) will face revised performance evaluation criteria to comply with the California Stull Act that requires student progress data be used as part of the evaluation process.

Assembly Democrats Too Cowardly To Vote
San Gabriel Valley Tribune, CA, August 9, 2012

But then it came before the Assembly Education Committee, which shamefully bowed to the state’s powerful teacher unions and rejected the bill. All this took place while teacher union lobbyists communicated to committee members that they “were watching.”

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Let Principals, Not Tests, Rate Teachers
Washington Post Blog, DC, August 9, 2012

The D.C. schools continue to be one of the worst places to learn and hardest places to teach in America , but its leaders are making sensible, if slow, changes in the right direction. The latest smart adjustments are in teacher evaluation.

FLORIDA

Polk Gets Approval For Six ‘Step Up Academy’ Charter Schools
The Ledger, FL, August 9, 2012

The Polk County School District got the go-ahead Thursday to open six charter schools for at-risk students.

Ormond Firm Elects To Redirect Taxes To Help Students
Daytona Beach News-Journal, FL, August 10,

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Fox Business: John Stossel's Take: Stupid in America

By John Stossel
Fox Business
September 15, 2011

School spending has gone through the roof and test scores are flat.

While most every other service in life has gotten faster, better, and cheaper, one of the most important things we buy — education — has remained completely stagnant, unchanged since we started measuring it in 1970.

Why no improvement?

Because K-12 education is a government monopoly and monopolies don’t improve.

The government-school monopoly claims: Education is too important to leave to the free market. At a teachers’ union rally, even actor Matt Damon showed up to deride market competition as “MBA style thinking.”

“Competition may be okay for selling movies and cell phones, but education is different,” says the establishment. Learning is complex. Parents aren’t real “customers” because they don’t have the expertise to know which school is best. They don’t know enough about curricula, teachers’ credentials, etc. That’s why public education must be centrally planned by government “experts”.

Those experts have been in charge for years. They are what school reformers call the “Blob.” Jeanne Allen from the Center for Education Reform says for years attempts at reform have run, “smack into federations, alliances, departments, councils, boards, commissions, panels, herds, flocks and convoys, that make up the education industrial complex, or the Blob. Taken individually they were frustrating enough, each with its own bureaucracy, but taken as a whole they were (and are) maddening in their resistance to change. Not really a wall — they always talk about change — but more like quicksand, or a tar pit where ideas slowly sink.

And the most powerful part of the Blob is the teachers’ union.

This Saturday, I interview Nathan Saunders, the President of the Washington DC Teachers’ Union, and Joseph Del Grosso, President of the Newark Teachers’ Union. They say things like, “the unions have a pretty strong history

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