February 17, 2011
Eighteen months ago, the nine members of the Houston school board each heape d praised on Terry Grier, the San Diego transplant they had hired to transform Texas’ largest school district. "We are in for a tremendous ride," board member Greg Meyers said at the time. With Grier’s rapid rollout of changes, that ride at […]
February 17, 2011
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s budget director said Wednesday that the state may have to spend far more on special education programs to avoid a federal penalty, complicating budget negotiations that began with lawmakers split on whether to pay the public school costs. Three senators and three House members had their first talks over the final […]
February 17, 2011
Several educators appealed to the Mineral County Board of Education Tuesday evening to keep the county’s special education team intact for the sake of the children. It was the county’s director of psychological services, however, that brought the point home in an emotional and direct message in which he said the county’s special education program […]
February 16, 2011
Finding ways to help adolescent students do better in school is a dilemma that has dogged educators for decades. Now, city school officials hope a plan to expand elementary schools to the eighth grade will help those students succeed at an age when some research suggests they are most vulnerable to failure. "A lot of […]
February 16, 2011
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, convening a two-day labor-management conference here on Tuesday, argued that teachers’ unions can help solve many of the challenges facing public schools. But as the conference opened , that view was under challenge in a number of state capitals. Republicans in several states have proposed legislation in recent weeks that […]
February 16, 2011
In front of a friendly audience in his native Morris County, Gov. Chris Christie took his fight to the state Supreme Court today. At a town hall meeting in a Police Athletic League gymnasium, Christie blamed the court for tying his hands on changing the school funding formula and reforming the state’s affordable housing system. […]
February 16, 2011
Some parents of disabled children in the Bloom-Carroll school district gave state education officials an earful at a public hearing last night, saying that district officials are not providing the proper special education that federal law requires. But other parents of special-needs children said the Fairfield County district is doing a good job. The Ohio […]
February 16, 2011
Carrie Koenig of Algonquin came to Monday night’s Community Unit School District 300 Board of Education meeting holding her breath, she said. Next to “special education,” the dollar amount had been blank in the first version of the administrative proposal for 2011-12 budget reductions that the school board is considering. In the version brought before […]
February 16, 2011
Thousands of employees would lose jobs, children would face larger classes, and magnet and preschool programs would experience sharp reductions under a worst-case $5-billion budget plan approved Tuesday by the Los Angeles Board of Education. But 45 new and low-performing schools could be spared entirely from teacher layoffs as a result of a recent legal […]
February 15, 2011
The question of what it takes — and what it costs — to properly educate New Jersey’s nearly 1.4 million school children took center stage in a Bergen County courtroom Monday, as the state’s long-running Abbott vs. Burke school funding case returned to court. School superintendents from Piscataway and Woodbridge were called as the first […]