Most cities in Texas — from Galveston to Lubbock — moved their May elections to November under a pandemic-era decree by Gov. Greg Abbott.  But the choices facing voters will remain limited to candidates who filed for office months ago — at least for now.  State Rep. Mayes Middleton, a Galveston County Republican, wants to reopen the filing period for candidates to lead cities and other political jurisdictions, including school boards. He believes voters may have soured on incumbents facing little or no competition. view article

Resisting pressure from President Donald Trump, three of the nation's largest school districts said Monday that they will begin the new school year with all students learning from home. Schools in Los Angeles, San Diego and Atlanta will begin entirely online, officials said Monday. Schools in Nashville plan to do the same, at least through Labor Day.  Several other big cities were considering similar plans, while others have adopted hybrid plans through which students would be in school on certain days and at home on others. Some have announced plans to open five days a week, as the White House has demanded, but they appear to be in the minority. view article

The State of New Mexico was the first of what will likely be many states to postpone football and other contact sports in the upcoming fall semester. A statement released yesterday by the NMAA Executive Director Sally Marquez the postponement was made official, "The New Mexico Activities Association will be postponing both the 2020 football and soccer seasons to the spring semester."   view article

The San Diego Unified School District has come up with a plan for the fall: It will reopen school buildings for all students who want to come, full time, five days a week. But, its leaders say, the district needs more emergency funding from Congress to promise this for the entire 2020-21 academic year.  If that money doesn’t come — and soon — in-school learning would last for only half of the school year, said John Evans, president of the San Diego school board.  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