Arizona teachers have voted to walk off the job to demand increased school funding, marking a key step toward a first-ever statewide strike that builds on a movement for higher pay in other Republican-dominant states. A grassroots group and the state's largest teacher membership group said Thursday that teachers will walkout April 26. The vote was held following weeks of growing protests and an offer from Republican Gov. Doug Ducey to give teachers 20 percent raise by 2020. Many teachers kept up the pressure at schools and on social media, saying the plan failed to address much-needed funding for classrooms and support staff. view article

Three parents whose children were killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting have filed defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones, the controversial conspiracy theorist and Infowars host who has falsely claimed the 2012 massacre was faked. The two lawsuits were filed on Monday afternoon by Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of 6-year-old Noah Pozner, and by Neil Heslin, the father of 6-year-old Jesse Heslin. "The statements were a continuation and elaboration of a years-long campaign to falsely attack the honesty of the Sandy Hook parents, casting them as participants in a ghastly conspiracy and cover-up," the plaintiffs said in their suits. view article

Arizona teachers on Tuesday began weighing whether to walk out of their classrooms to demand more school funding after weeks of growing protests - a vote that's raising questions about how an unprecedented strike could play out across the state's education system. The walkout vote comes after Republican Gov. Doug Ducey offered teachers a 20 percent raise by 2020. Teachers in a grass-roots group that's mobilized tens of thousands of teachers say the plan doesn't address other needs, including raises for support staff and a return to pre-Great Recession school funding levels. view article

Arizona teachers who have pushed for big raises and an increase in school funding say Gov. Doug Ducey's teacher raise proposal falls short and they're moving to take a strike vote. The leaders of the grassroots group Arizona Educators United posted a video on Facebook Sunday night saying three days of voting begins Tuesday. The Republican governor last week proposed a 9 percent teacher pay raise this year and 10 percent more by 2020, on top of 1 percent they are getting this year. But he did not address teachers' other demands — including raises for support staff, a return to pre-Great Recession school funding levels and no more tax cuts until school spending reached the national average. view article

The most dramatic moment of George W. Bush’s presidency unfolded while he was sitting in an elementary school classroom. As a girl read aloud from the book The Pet Goat, then-White House chief of staff Andy Card delivered the news that two passenger jets had crashed into the World Trade Center. While the president didn’t know it yet, two other Boeing-757s were destined to crash into the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Within the span of a few minutes, Bush had become a wartime president. view article

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has given in to demands for pay raises for teachers, who have been conducting a month of protests at the state Capitol and at schools. He has proposed to boost teacher salaries 20 percent by 2020. The Associated Press notes that the educators "were also seeking increased pay for support professionals, a permanent raise structure, and a freeze on corporate tax cuts until per-pupil spending reaches the national average." Ducey's proposal didn't include more spending on those items. view article

When the New Mexico Public Education Department was handed plans meant to improve the four worst schools in the state, the department returned them all in March with the same response: not good enough. All the schools are chronically failing. Some have math and reading proficiency rates in the single digits. Two have been marked as failing for six years, and the other two for five years — or, as New Mexico Secretary of Education–designate Christopher Ruszkowski told The 74, “have underserved an entire generation of students.” Now the districts have until April 11 to come up with better plans, and the department has met with them both — Albuquerque Public Schools and Dulce Public Schools — to give feedback. view article

Phil Downs, superintendent of the Southwest Allen County schools in Indiana, explains here how the cumulative effect of vouchers reduces spending in every public school in the state. There are about 1,040,000 students in Indiana. There are 35,500 voucher students in the state, most attending religious schools. Most have never attended a public school in the past, and only 274 were issued to students leaving F-rated public schools. Each voucher is worth about $4,258. Basically, the state is using public dollars to subsidize tuition at religion schools (which the state constitution explicitly prohibits but which the state courts approved). view article

Federal officials gave final approval to a Texas plan for school improvement, which includes portions of the new system for grading schools on a scale from A to F. Texas education officials say it's not too late for the public to weigh in on the A-F system. Texas got final approval Monday from the U.S. Department of Education for its school improvement and accountability plan, including a portion of its new system for grading schools. view article

Two of the United States’ fastest-growing counties are located in the San Antonio Metropolitan Statistical Area, according to the latest population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau Thursday. view article

The U.S. House today finally passed a long-overdue spending bill for fiscal year 2018 that thoroughly rejects the pro-voucher, budget-cutting agenda espoused by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration. The U.S. Senate is expected to vote the spending package through as well. view article

The Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday said it won't block a voter referendum on Arizona's massive new school voucher program, handing a major victory to the grassroots group of parents and teachers that collected signatures to block the 2017 law. The high court's decision was also a major loss for Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and school choice supporters in Arizona and nationally who backed the proposal, the largest expansion of school vouchers in the U.S. The law would allow all parents to use public money to send their children to private or religious school, with a cap on enrollment at 30,000 students. view article

Four cabinet secretaries — but no teachers or other interested school parties — will be part of President Donald Trump’s new federal school safety commission that will begin hearings sometime soon, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Tuesday, as she called for more federal funding for school safety. DeVos was testifying Tuesday morning to a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee just as news emerged of yet another school shooting, this one reportedly having injured two students at Great Mills High School in southern Maryland.  view article

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday unveiled some details of a federal commission on school safety that she will be chairing. The commission, formed after the Feb. 14 high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., will comprise herself as well as the heads of the Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and Justice departments. DeVos said the commission will, among other things, consider whether to ban gun sales to people under 21. view article

It’s hard to know if President Donald Trump’s plan to arm teachers is a real proposal or just noise to obscure his hapless response to the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. The idea of “firearms training for school personnel” is on a White House list of measures that patently falls short of being an actual policy to prevent shootings at schools or anywhere else. As if to confirm its pointlessness, the plan even includes that classic Washington side-step -- a blue-ribbon commission to look into it all. One can only hope that the idea does indeed come to nothing. view article

As you know, there has been a lot of discussion and news coverage about a teacher walk out beginning April 2, 2018. This walk out is a teacher-led initiative with backing from various teacher organizations to protest the continued inaction by the State Legislature to fund public education. Having said this, please keep in mind that there are many State lawmakers that have supported funding for public education over the years. Unfortunately, however, there are many who have not. If you have opinions on this topic, now is the time to share your thoughts with your State Legislators. read more

CNN)As thousands of West Virginia teachers raised their voices, it was 12-year-old Gideon Titus-Glover's message that stood out to the governor.  The 6th-grader's plea to invest in education echoed in the governor's mind. In a matter of hours, Gov. Jim Justice agreed to a 5% pay raise for teachers and other school employees, putting an end to a strike that kept thousands of students out of class for days.  "If you put money in schools you're making smart people, and if you have smart people you can make more smart investments," Gideon told Justice at a Monday town hall meeting in Wheeling. view article

Jesse Randall Davidson wasn't a stranger, some mysterious threat from the outside. He was a bearded, bespectacled, 53-year-old social studies teacher and the play-by-play announcer for the football games at Dalton High School in northwest Georgia. But when the teacher brought a gun to school, barricaded himself in his classroom Wednesday and fired a single shot, students quickly recognized that this wasn't just a sad local incident. view article

What is known about the Valentine’s Day slayings at a South Florida high school suggests the carnage was planned with chilling precision: The alleged shooter — armed with an assault-style weapon — pulled a fire alarm and waited as his victims began pouring into the halls. view article

Dallas ISD said Thursday, in an effort to ease the uncertainty that many families throughout the county, including those in Dallas ISD, face due to the recent changes to DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Dallas ISD launched a web page with resources and information for those who are impacted. view article

There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility. Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."  view article

A Mississippi school district has been ordered to desegregate its schools after what the Justice Department called a five-decade-long legal battle. The Cleveland School District, about two hours northwest of Jackson, was told that it must consolidate its schools in order to provide real desegregation for students in the city of about 12,000. view article