One day after voters overwhelmingly rejected a $500 million-a-year parcel tax, Los Angeles city and school leaders sent a message to voters: We’ve heard your concerns. And we’re going to keep fighting to fund our schools.  “This is just the beginning of our fight,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said as he launched into Wednesday’s news conference. “When I took on this challenge just about a year ago, I knew it would not be easy. Decades of underfunding, strained relationships with those who work in schools, not enough progress in helping all students succeed and a lack of trust by many in the community. view article

PINE BLUFF, Ark. (AP) — A city in Arkansas is offering to pay for teachers' master's degree tuition in an effort to lure them to school districts experiencing shortages in Pine Bluff.  Ryan Whatley is the director of the organization Go Forward Pine Bluff . He told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that teachers can obtain their master's degree in teaching free of charge if they meet certain requirements.  Recommended Video  The Teach Pine Bluff Initiative would allow certified teachers with bachelor's degrees to attend University of  view article

When the gunfire began, sixth grader Nate Holley said he immediately froze. Other students in his classroom burst into tears, he said on CNN. A siren came on and his teacher moved the students behind her desk. Then the shots got closer, and they were in a closet. view article

Members of the Indiana State Teachers Association testified Wednesday before a state education committee that elementary school teachers had been shot “execution style” with pellet guns as part of an active shooter training conducted by the local sheriff’s office, according to the Indianapolis Star. 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