Long among the most powerful forces in American politics, the unions are contending with falling revenue and declining membership, damaging court cases, the defection of once-loyal Democratic allies - and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign portraying them as greedy and selfish.  They took a big hit Tuesday when a California judge struck down five laws they had championed to protect teachers' jobs.

 

  

 Fuzzy Math: The guesstimate that struck down California's teacher tenure law by  Jordan Weissmann  on the Slade Post.

This week Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu handed the education reform movement a stunning legal victory, when he struck down California's teacher tenure laws for discriminating against poor and minority students. The statutes made it so onerous to fire bad teachers, he wrote, that they all but guaranteed needy kids would be stuck in classrooms with incompetent instructors-rendering the laws unconstitutional.   As evidence, Treu cited a statistic that sounded damning: According to a state witness, between 1 and 3 percent of California's teachers could be considered "grossly ineffective."

  

 A silver lining in the Vergara decision?  by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post.

 A decision by a California judge on Tuesday to strike down - pending appeal - five state statutes that provide job protections to teachers has deeply troubled many teachers and teacher activists concerned about the effect on the profession should the ruling stand. Here is a detailed look on what might be a silver lining in the ruling for those concerned about equity in public education.  

On Tuesday, a California superior-court judge ruled that the state's teacher tenure system discriminates against kids from low-income families. Based on testimony that one to three percent of California teachers are likely "grossly ineffective"-thousands of people, who mostly teach at low-income schools-he reasoned that current tenure policies "impose a disproportionate burden on poor and minority students." The ruling, in Vergara v. California, has the potential to overturn five state laws governing how long it takes for a teacher to earn tenure; the legal maneuvers necessary to remove a tenured teacher; and which teachers are laid off first in the event of budget cuts or school closings.  

Tuesday's ruling by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu declaring all sorts of job protections for teachers "unconstitutional" is being hailed by a certain category of education activists. 

What's curious about this is that they seem to have a unanimous view about the reason California schools are supposedly so bad: It's the teachers unions. 

Not the imbalance of financial resources between rich districts and poor. Not the social pathologies--poverty, joblessness, racial discrimination, violence--that affect educational attainment in disadvantaged communities. 

Stop Holding Us Back  by Robert Balfanz in the New York Times

This month, more than three million high school students will receive their diplomas. At more than 80 percent, America's graduation rate is at a record high. More kids are going to college, too. But one-third of the nation's African-American and Latino young men will not graduate.  In an era when there is virtually no legal work for dropouts, these young men face a bleak future. It is not news that the students who don't make it out of high school largely come from our poorest neighborhoods, but the degree to which they are hyper-concentrated in a small set of schools is alarming.

Want to ruin a presentation in seconds? Just drop in one of these sentences.  While it's really hard to immediately win over a crowd, it's really easy for a speaker to lose the room within the first few minutes of a presentation.

To make sure you don't lose your audience, here are ten things you should never say during your presentations:  . . . .

 

What Unproductive Meetings Are Costing You (Infographic)  by Laura Montini  on the INC Post.

According to executives, most meetings are useless. The good news is that there's room for improvement.  Companies typically hold meetings with one goal in mind: to get things done. Why is it, then, that most meetings only serve as a time sink? Well, perhaps not so surprisingly, a major reason is because most people--up to 92 percent--multitask during meetings, making them far less efficient than they could be. 

 

 

 

Last Dance of the Lemons  on edushyster.com

Perhaps the biggest Vergara victor (other than the kids) was the public relations firm behind the case. Did I say public relations? I meant *issue advocacy that works at the intersection of strategic communications and public policy by collaborating with inspiring partners to create powerful movements that galvanize the public and leave a positive legacy of change.

 

 

 

Life in the Most Religious States   by Geoffery Stone on the Huffington Post

The ten most religious states in America are, in order: Mississippi, Utah, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Oklahoma.

One might assume that life in the most religious states in the nation would approximate the idealized "City upon a Hill" envisioned some four hundred years ago by John Winthrop, the Puritan colonist who served as first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

  

Common Core, in 9-Year-Old Eyes  by Javier Hernandez  in the New York Times

He could have written about the green toy truck he kept hidden in his room, a reminder of Haiti, a place he did not yet fully understand.

He might have mentioned the second-place trophy he had won for reciting a psalm in French at church - "le bonheur et la grâce m'accompagneront tous les jours de ma vie..." - his one and only award.