Schools

2014 was a watershed year for public education. While there were plenty of knuckle-headed 'reform' policies and decisions, there were also some big wins, a lot of small victories and the beginnings of a shift in public opinion. So, let's take a walk down memory lane and look back on the good, the bad and the 'reformy'.

Apartheid is alive and well in New Jersey and around the country, as scores of black and brown children living in high poverty are being discriminated against, their schools closed, their neighborhoods up-ended, and their voices silenced. And yet the mainstream media is perfectly content to ignore it.

Brown v. Board of Education ended the official policy of segregation, but that doesn't mean that we, as a country, aren't still living in a 2-tiered class system. Much more needs to be done before separate-but-equal is truly a thing of the past.

An upcoming lawsuit by the Kentucky Teachers Retirement System (KTRS) claims Kentucky Governor Steve Bashear and his right wing friends in the General Assembly are starving the state's teachers' pensions. The most recent state budget has about half of what the KTRS asked for to keep the pensions solvent.

Alabama lawmakers are proposing a multitude of school prayer and religious expression bills this session. Legislators say the bills are an effort to push efforts to squash all vestiges of religion from the public square. Opponents called the bills election-year pandering and said the proposals are either unnecessary or unconstitutional.

Los Angeles' school system, the second largest in the United States, is ordering iPads for all its students, handing Apple a major success in its quest to make the tablet computer a replacement for textbooks.

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.

In the weeks since the Newtown, Connecticut massacre, we’ve learned about what it will mean for America, if the NRA gets its wishes and school teachers, students and visitors to schools can carry concealed guns. We’ve learned how contemptuous of the rights of other citizens the gun nutters are.

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,