A court has found the state of Texas' school funding system unconstitutional.

Again.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced late last month that he will choose to appeal that ruling to the Texas Supreme Court.

Again.

Does this seem story seem familiar to you? It should, this dance between Texas' public schools, its state legislature, and its judicial system has been going on since about 1972. Here's how the Texas school funding tango works: schools find themselves inadequately and/or inequitably funded and sue the state of Texas; courts find the state's school funding system unconstitutional or otherwise unacceptable; the Texas legislature slaps a bandage on the system to stop the bleeding, but in most cases makes the system even less effective and more cumbersome; the legislature then watches haplessly as school districts sue them.

Again.

The Texas School Public Relations Association has named Pascual Gonzalez, Executive Director of Communications for Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, as the recipient of the association's 2014 Key Communicator Award.

In this video acceptance speech, Pascual shares an important message about the importance of standing up for public education.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni's latest attack on public school teachers ("It's time to address failures of underperforming teachers," Oct. 30, Oregonian e-edition) is nothing new. 

The profession has been under assault for over a decade by self-proclaimed education reformers. It is also nothing new from a cultural-historical perspective.

Blaming women for society's problems is as old as the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden, or Pandora and her box of woes, or every medieval witch hunt spurred on by crop failure or plague outbreak. Contemporary education reformers have launched a similar witch hunt to root out "rotten apples" from a profession still more than 75 percent female.

No similar reform movement targets doctors (65 percent male) for our nation's spiraling obesity epidemic. America's dentists (78 percent male) are not held responsible for their patients' tooth decay. Law enforcement officers (80 percent male) are not blamed for crime statistics. Nor are engineers (78 percent male) "held accountable" for the crumbling U.S. infrastructure.