AM News: DREAM Realities, Tax Credit Debate

Coalition Aims to Link Romney to Backers of Bloomberg’s Education Agenda NYT: The coalition of labor unions and liberal advocacy groups planned to highlight ties between supporters of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education agenda and Mitt Romney.

For Undocumented Youth, New Policy Carries Risks NPR:  The government began accepting applications Wednesday for "deferred action for childhood arrivals." The program allows qualified undocumented young people brought to the U.S. as children to study and work legally in the U.S. Many are applying, but the process is not without risk for some.

Tax Credit Scholarships Reignite Voucher Debate NPR: Several states have embraced a new way to fund school choice: tax credits that pay for scholarships to private schools. The scholarships are popular with school choice advocates, but even some supporters say the program may be open to abuse.

LAUSD, teachers union spar over voluntary evaluation system Los Angeles Times: Los Angeles schools chief John Deasy expressed disappointment Wednesday over a robo-call sent this week by the teachers union, urging members not to participate in the district's voluntary performance review system that for the first time includes student test scores in evaluations.

Using Video to Teach Washington Teachers NYT: The Washington school system has begun using videos of the best teachers to help other teachers navigate the evaluation process.

Comments

[Bruce William Smith]

With regard to the tax credit scholarship and LAUSD stories, a truly liberal response would be to support teachers' freedoms to serve their students as they think best in all kinds of classrooms, including tax-supported, voluntarily attended religion classes in private schools in Georgia as well as in voluntarily attended secular classes in traditional public schools in Los Angeles. In each case the opponents of such freedoms are fellow citizens who suspect that if their neighbours enjoy such rights freely, children will be harmed, and so they feel self-righteous and justified in their opposition in the spirit of child protection laws; but their efforts amount to oppression based in distrust. The American left is commonly called "liberal", but being comfortable with state regulation, is in these instances more accurately labelled statist, using ideology to oppress and control their fellow citizens in a manner descended from the Puritans' early attempts to enforce attendance at officially sanctioned state churches.

[Sarah]

Bruce is right, and I think the policy of giving teachers freedom to tackle religion in education as a volunteer process would be reasonably easy to pass as a concrete legality in the current congress. State rights being put into play would be a smart compromise for liberals. It both allows to maintain religious freedom in every sense of the word, and gives more power to the state; in theory, at least, everyone should be happy with it. So the fact that that’s not what’s happening is a little confusing, and disheartening, honestly.

[Sarah]

I had to roll my eyes at this from the NPR article about undocumented youth: “Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a nonprofit that advocates for lower immigration levels, says the program puts Americans at a disadvantage.”

The problem has never been, and will never be, an invasion of foreigners into the workplace. The problem is that something about our culture has changed, we’ve lost something, and other countries simply produce better workers than we can. And this kind of “STOP IMMIGRATION NOW” policy isn’t going to change that.