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As discussed at Pine Tree ISD School Board Meeting on July 12, 2010…
No decisions were made tonight as to the issue of Pirate Stadium. Pretty good crowd went home with nothing decided. There is a big push to reopen the stadium for this football season. It seems they will decide at a meeting next Tuesday whether to do the repairs to the pressbox only. Any other repairs to anything dealing with the 5 major functions of the stadium, seating, parking, ingress/egress, restrooms, or water fountains would kick in mandatory ADA repairs costing over $4 million. There is a feeling on the board that too much money is being spent to hold all the football games at other area stadiums. Also discussed was trying to identify sites for a new stadium for their consulting firm so that a better picture of what can be done come next bond election. It was mentioned that any other site than the current location will cost several million in construction.Several million for dirt work on property already owned by the district. This is going to be an ugly issue for some time because the issue has been ignored for so long(dating back to excavation for a stadium behind the current high school field house when the new high school was built).
Robert Bailey
In one of the most outrageous displays of arrogance by Washington in recent memory – which is saying a lot, of course – the House Democrats have inserted specific language on top of $10 Billion in funding for education included in a War Supplemental bill targeted directly and solely at Texas – language that demands the money be spent in certain ways.
According to the Houston Chronicle, “The proposal would allow the federal government to give money directly to school districts, provided Perry certifies that the federal support will not replace the state money. Perry must also agree not to proportionally cut education funding more than any other item in the next budget. While the measure includes $10 billion in education funding nationally, Texas is the only state that must make such a certification before receiving the federal funding.” Continue reading…
In perhaps the President Obama’s most stealth campaign to date, the federal government has been slowly tightening its grip on the education sector to little fanfare. Rather than working through the democratic legislative process, this Administration has circumvented Congress to enact an ill-conceived education agenda that will weaken accountability, reduce transparency and minimize choice while only adding to the national deficit.
Continue reading…
American education needs to be fixed, but national standards and testing are not the way to do it. The problems that need fixing are too deeply ingrained in the power and incentive structure of the public education system, and the renewed focus on national standards threatens to distract from the fundamental issues. Besides, federal control over education has been growing since the 1960s as both standards and achievement have deteriorated. Heritage Foundation education policy experts Lindsey Burke and Jennifer Marshall explain why centralized standard-setting will likely result in the standardization of mediocrity, not excellence. Continue reading…
President Obama’s proposed overhaul of No Child Left Behind is long overdue. Over the past decade the regime’s rigid metrics and penalties transformed schools into testing factories. Unfortunately, the White House proposal — which replaces NCLB’s legal sticks with new legal carrots — won’t come close to fixing America’s schools, says Philip K. Howard, chair of legal reform organization Common Good.
According to Howard:
- A 2004 study of the rules in one New York City school by Common Good found that the daily decisions made by teachers and principals are dictated by thousands of regulations.
- Over 60 steps and legal considerations are required to suspend a disruptive student.
- Manuals of 200 pages describe the “rights” of students.
Continue Reading article from NCPA.
“Don’t Mess with Texas” is a popular slogan in our most prosperous state. By a 10-to-5 margin, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) just told liberals to stop “messing” with social studies textbooks. Continue Reading article from Eagle Forum.
On February 17, President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (known as the Stimulus). Only three Republican senators voted for the bill. It passed the House without any Republican votes. The bill designates a total of $128.2 billion for education and job training. About $91 billion of that amount goes toward K-12 education, including $53.6 billion in aid for K-12 for states that are in a deficit, $13 billion for schools serving low-income children, and $12 billion for special education. Another $2.1 billion goes toward Head Start and Early Head Start, the federal programs for children from birth to age five.
Continue reading article from Education Reporter
President Barack Obama’s $787 trillion failed stimulus included a $4.3 billion set aside for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” fund. States that jump through the right Obama Administration hoops can win up to $750 million in stimulus cash.
But Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) announced that the Lone Star State will become the first state not to participate in this next step toward the creation of national education standards. Brooke Dollens Terry of the Texas Public Policy Foundation explains why. Continue reading artcle from NCPA.
When Obama takes to the podium for the State of the Union, one of the things he is allegedly going to push is a wholesale federal take over of the student loan industry.
Already, his plans are causing a lot of students, particularly of private higher ed colleges and universities, problems with getting financing for education. Obama intends to shut out the usual third party lenders and put everything within the federal government — under a program that has been shown repeatedly to be highly inefficient and burdensome for academic institutions. Continue reading article from Redstate.com.
The challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom, President Obama said earlier this year. He and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, have since reaffirmed that a longer school day and year-round school are among their policy goals for American children. To continue reading article from Eagle Forum click here.
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