This just in: Sacramento City Unified School District has actually fired an administrator, but as Loretta Kalb notes in the Sacramento Bee, this rare dismissal is not an example of accountability. The administrator, Felisberto Cedros, is embroiled in a sexual harassment case against African American school worker Delecia Sydnor, whom he had threatened to…
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Politicians may bill it as “free”, but government monopoly in education is big business that racks up considerable public debt. As Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee observes, in recent decades California has issued $45 billion in school bonds now being repaid at a cost of nearly $3 billion a year. With interest the…
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Shirley Hufstedler, the nation’s first federal Education Secretary, has passed away at 90. That news might surprise some, and not just the younger set, who imagined that the first federal education secretary appeared way back in 1776. There wasn’t one, because the Constitution gives states, not the federal government, domain over education. Under these…
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The California State Controller, the state’s chief fiscal officer, has a mandate to “make sure the state’s $100 billion budget is spent properly.” In that cause, the Controller’s Office recently asked the state’s school districts to provide data on salaries. As Loretta Kalb notes in the Sacramento Bee, “about 70 percent of the public…
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Arne Duncan is stepping down as federal Education Secretary, but the Washington Post news story of almost 3,000 words left out some key details. Duncan, one of the president’s Chicago pals, has been the federal point man against school choice. As we noted, the current president, like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter before him,…
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In recent years California has raised per-pupil education spending about 50 percent, to $13,000 a year. As Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee shows, despite this increase, “national academic testing has found that California’s students rank near the bottom in achievement.” The response of the state’s education establishment is to attack the tests. As…
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As we recently noted, on July 1 the Twin Rivers Unified School District in the Sacramento area boosted the pay of superintendent Steven Martinez by $20,000, an 8.3 percent increase that raised his pay to $260,000. The district also double his retirement payment and allowed Martinez to convert a $10,000 car allowance into salary….
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As Loretta Kalb of the Sacramento Bee reports, Deborah Bettencourt, superintendent of the Folsom Cordova Unified School District, will receive a pay increase of $24,269 as of July 2. The increase of 7.5 percent boosts the superintendent’s pay from $221,500 to $245,769. Bettencourt’s salary is far beyond that of California’s governor ($173,000), the attorney…
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The new school year has kicked off but many students, particularly African Americans in the inner cities, remain interned in dysfunctional and dangerous schools. This is not an accident. Those are the very schools that legislators, bureaucrats, and government employee union bosses want for low-income students. In government education, money goes directly to the…
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For the third consecutive year, the National Basketball Association included U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in its celebrity game on all-star weekend. Duncan played basketball at Harvard where he was a first team academic all-American. In Black History Month some viewers might have thought that his real job is to dish out assists…
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