education

Some 3,000 Texas American Federation of Teachers (AFT) members converged on the state capitol Tuesday from all across Texas to lobby their legislators to restore school funding.

Let’s pretend you’re a scholar. Even in the world of rampant grade inflation, you’re running an “A” average and are in the top 5 percent of your class. You just aced the SATs and are heading to a Division I university. You probably won’t get your picture in the paper.

On Saturday afternoon, about 3,500 people (according to the Texas Tribune) from around the state marched up Congress Avenue for a rally in support of Texas’ children, its schools, its economy, and its future.

President Obama spent some time playing with four-year-olds on the day he announced a plan pushing preschool for all. He visited the Decatur Community Recreation Center in Decatur, Georgia to make his announcement.

The report, released on Tuesday, lays out more than 30 recommendations for fixing the nation’s increasingly strained system of paying for college, chief among them a more substantial and permanent investment in direct aid to students through Pell grants.

Texas AFT, the Dallas ISD chief of police, and a spokeswoman for the Texas PTA argued that arming teachers and administrators with guns and expecting them to serve as adequate substitutes for trained officers is bad policy.

This year, Christie is trying to change the school funding formula in a way that will take as much as $50 million from Newark schools. It actually lowers per-student funding for poor students and English language learners throughout the state - the very students Zuckerberg said he is trying to help. In other words, Christie wants to take away half of what Zuckerberg offered Newark in the first place.

When it comes to making money, it’s instructive to listen to those who have a lot of it. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch says education is “a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.” That’s why he spent $360 for Wireless Generation, a company that, the Wall Street Journal says, makes “software and other tools to help schools evaluate and monitor student performance and devise instruction accordingly.”

While the analysis found a link between race and lack of access to advanced courses, poverty was the strongest factor in determining the proportion of students in a school who were enrolled in higher-level instruction and test-passing rates.

Starting this fall Texas will no longer exclude upper-middle class white kids from the gravy train of school choice, traditionally only targeting kids from poor families. You know, the lucky ones who get those free lunches.