So says the governor of Wyoming. Governor Dave Freudenthal is threatening to sell off a chunk of [the Grand Teton national park]… unless the Obama administration comes up with more money to pay for education in the financially beleaguered state.
Writing at his NYTimes Your Money column, Rob Lieber implicitly ties together Peggy Noonan’s and Angelo M. Codevilla’s recent writings about the educated elite and the rest of us with problems with teachers pension funds and ends up predicting class warfare over how to make up the trillion dollar shortfall in funding pensions to state [...]
The Naked Capitalist says: I am in no position to say definitively, but Morgenson may have been spun in her report yesterday on a Denver public school financing that turned out worse than initially planned due to financial upheaval. Superficially (and the story presents quite a few general comments and analogies that encourage readers to [...]
President Obama’s favorite candidate for senator from Colorado – Michael Bennet – is facing big trouble from the days when he was superintendent of Denver Public Schools. Pointing to a king-sized mess surrounding the teachers pension fund there, the New York Times today dropped a front-page bombshell that seems to imply he was either financially [...]
Mike Antonucci at HotAir reports that at the same time that the $10 billion teacher jobs (Edujobs) bailout passed the Senate—and was expected to pass the House—lots of school districts were already hiring back the teachers they had pink-slipped last spring. You may recall that many folks have predicted that the fired teachers would be [...]
At the State of Ohio Education blog there’s a discussion of the Fordham report on the fiscal impact of increasing the student-teacher ratio. According to the report, Ohio could save $276 million on teacher salaries if each school increased its student-teacher ration by just one (say 17:1 instead of 16:1) and could save $1.38 billion [...]
We always tell kids that set-backs shouldn’t discourage them. If at first you don’t succeed– try harder. The State of Arizona did just that and found itself a finalist in the second round of the Race to the Top (RttT) grant competition. The Hechinger Report‘s Liz Willen reports: Ann-Eve Pedersen of the Arizona Education Network [...]
Emmy Partin at Flypaper uses Ohio figures to measure the fiscal impact of increasing class size, but similar savings could be expected elsewhere. Current Ohio law caps class size at 25 kids. But with the state, which invests about 40 percent of its revenue in K-12 education, looking for ways to plug an $8 billion [...]
The Hill’s Walter Alarkon reports today on the fight within the Democrat Party on education funding. The Obama administration’s Department of Education– in the person of Secretary Arne Duncan–is counting on the competitive grant program Race to the Top (RttT) to reform education. But not all the Dems in Congress are on board. The intra-party [...]
Michael Van Beek at Michigan Capitol Confidential makes a strong– irrefutable, it seems to me– argument that the idea that public schools are underfunded is a myth. He’s talking about the state of funding in Michigan, but most of what he says can be applied to schools in any state: The underfunding myth rests on [...]