education

Mitt Romney would like you all to know that even though more teachers shouldn't be hired...HE LOVES TEACHERS!
This clip from the Majority Report, live M-F at 12 noon EST and via daily podcast at http://Majority.FM

Student debt jumped five percent for 2011 graduates compared to the debt load of 2010 graduates. It leaves young adults, typically just 22 years old, carrying an average debt of $26,600 before they even begin their first full-time job.
A rough job market is making things worse for them as 37.8 percent of recent graduates are working in jobs that do not require a college degree. These are low wage jobs and also likely to be part-time employment. The pre...

Today in the world of ignorance and pure stupidity we have the Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota. The school district is now in the process of forming a task force, following the national attention to a string of suicides by students and a federal investigation that revealed the school did not do enough to protect students from bullying.
This anti-bullying task force will have a bully who will try to push hateful rhetoric in the school district’s policy. Brian Lindquist, head of the Parents Action League,

Last time we heard from the Lunch Pail Republicans, they were taking on “Right-to-Work” and its Indianan proponents. Now, the SuperPAC that aims to boost pro-union Republicans has provided support for two members of the Pennsylvania House GOP hoping to keep their moderate voices in the state house.
Pat Meehan (R-Delaware) and Tim Murphy (R-Allegheny) represent working class sections of suburban Philadelphia and Pittsburgh respectively, where they have come under fire from fellow Republicans for refusing to vote against worker interests.

New Jersey Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf insisted during a meeting with residents last night that he did nothing improper when he met privately with Ward E Concilman Steven Fulop and a small group of residents and school board members last year to discuss issues related to finding a new superintendent, though he later refused the school board's invitation to do the same in a public meeting.
"If I am invited into a community, whether by elected officials or private citizens, I am happy to meet with them," Cerf said during a two-and-a-half hour meeting at New Jersey City University. "I've done it before. I'd be happy to do it again."

Mitt Romney went to NBC’s Education Nation Summit Tuesday to deliver his usual set of already-failed ideas on the subject: dump kids in giant classes to learn a curriculum entirely centered around standardized testing and taught by teachers paid according to said standardized test scores. But beyond his ideas about what should go on in the schools, he offered another classic for thee but not for me theory about how the political process should work:
“I don’t mean to be terribly partisan, but I kind of am,” he followed up, to laughs from the audience, before calling the donations from teachers’ unions to Democratic politicians an “extraordinary conflict of interest” because those politicians are then supposed to stand up to the unions and for students in negotiations.
Mitt Romney has gotten giant contributions from the financial sector and he’s running for president vowing to repeal Wall Street reform. Romney’s entire campaign is about his promise to govern on behalf of his biggest donors and assorted other rich people like himself.

Traditionally, public education has been a tough market for private firms to break into -- fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast. Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has been ushered in by the Christie Administration. They're pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.

California state law mandates that sexual health education in public schools be comprehensive, medically accurate, science-based, and bias-free. So why are Clovis Unified high schools teaching teens from a book that makes no mention of condoms, even in chapters about HIV/AIDS and on preventing STDs and unintended pregnancy?
Recent events, such as Representative Akin's ill-informed statements about reproductive biology and rape - put the issue in a stark light. The brand of sex ed that Clovis high schools are peddling is putting teens' health at risk - it's dangerous, unlawful, and could have serious consequences if it is not stopped.

Today, Senator Teresa Ruiz's tenure bill will most likely make it out of her committee; this follows on the heels of Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan's bill, which was approved by his committee last Thursday (despite the abstention

The Romney campaign is trying its hardest to frame this election as a choice between the job-creating businessman and the job-preventing bureaucrat.  But this week, Romney showed that he really only cares about creating certain kinds of jobs.