UT is OK with 28% failing, standards for online education released, school choice advocates call for more parental options, …

Deseret Morning News, UT: Voters, approve vouchers in November - Because I’m a public school advocate, I’m also an enormous voucher supporter. I am absolutely convinced that by every measure Utah’s public schools, students, parents, teachers and taxpayers will be much better off if vouchers are approved by voters in November.

Deseret Morning News, UT: 28% of Utah schools ‘left behind’ - 18% failed AYP last year, 28% failed this year… can we expect 38% next year?

dBusiness News, OR: Aventa Learning Announces College Board Approval of 22 Advanced Placement® Courses - Aventa Learning, a leading provider of online learning content and services to K-12 educational institutions, announced today that the College Board has approved all 22 of Aventa Learning’s Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Now that the College Board must approve AP offerings due to the inconsistency of content and rigor across the nation’s high schools, some schools are turning to distance learning to ensure adequate coursework for students.

PR Newswire: NACOL Releases National Standards of Quality for Online Courses  - NACOL released National Standards of Quality for Online Courses, an important measuring tool to help policy leaders, schools, and parents across the nation evaluate course quality and implement best practices.

Emediawire, WA: School Choice Advocates Call for Effective Parental Options in No Child Left Behind - 18 State and National Groups Urge Congress, President Bush to Include Effective, Meaningful Choice in Reauthorization of No Child Left Behind.

Daily Camera, CO: Demanding unions - Denver’s school system is facing diminishing academic performance along with losing around 30,000 students. Critical infrastructure shortcomings have also forced it to consider closing up to 40 schools. f Denver’s school officials and union bosses paid a bit more attention to what was going on a hundred miles away in Pueblo, they might pick up a clue on how to achieve their primary goal of improved student performance - Cesar Chavez Academy, a charter school.

Denver Post, CO: Teachers want more red lights - More than 900 Denver third-graders earned "unsatisfactory" scores on state reading tests two years ago, yet only 39 repeated the grade, according to the district. Under an education reform plan offered by the Denver teachers union, however, hundreds of those students would have been held back.

Dallas Morning News: Sue Blanchette: Let’s get at the core issues of education reform - As the furor over American education increases, the demand for simple answers to complex issues escalates.

Worchester Telegram, MA: It’s working - In Massachusetts, scores improved across racial and ethnic lines. It’s working, but the 73% versus 90% achievement gap is a problem that state and local education officials must make a top priority.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, PA: The state of education - Members of Congress who adamantly deny Americans the right to choose their children’s schools still don’t walk the talk. If they did, school choice today would be the rule — not the exception.

EMedia, WA: School Choice Advocates Call for Effective Parental Options in No Child Left Behind - 18 State and National Groups Urge Congress, President Bush to Include Effective, Meaningful Choice in Reauthorization of No Child Left Behind.

Cornell Daily Sun, NY: Lawsuit questions credentials of Teach for America participants - Teach for America, a program that annually places 5,000 recently graduated college students in inner-city schools in an effort to improve the education system, may be stalled in its cause due to a lawsuit challenging a loophole in the No Child Left Behind Act. Lawyers from San Francisco-based Public Advocates claim that because NCLB allows teachers like those in TFA to gain teaching credentials through alternative certification programs, many teachers are mislabeled as ‘highly qualified’.

Embarassed legislators have backed down under charter parents’ and teachers’ show of strength. When the State played politics with charter laws, parents and teachers fought back—and won.

Fed up with special-interest politics masquerading as “local control,” hundreds of Los Angeles parents and teachers recently rallied against Sacramento’s latest assault on charter schools.

In recent years, opponents have sought to slow, if not stop, the expansion of charter schools in California. Leading the nation with more than 600 public charter schools, California charters are educating nearly a quarter of a million students. The Governor’s veto pen has thwarted them thus far, so now charter foes are playing brinkmanship … and charter school parents and teachers called them on it.

The California Assembly slashed facilities support for charter schools serving high-poverty students to less than half of full funding, but they didn’t stop there. Speaker Fabian Núñez (D-Los Angeles) then added a prohibition against the State Board of Education authorizing statewide charter schools, a move long-pushed by teachers’ union bosses, at a time when public demand for charters couldn’t be higher. That’s when the Fabian bill turned Faustian.

Under the cover of night, Núñez combined the charter ban and the funding cuts into a “trailer bill,” Senate Bill 92.  To preserve statewide charter schools—critical in areas like the Los Angeles Unified School District, where 300,000 students attend failing schools— Governor Schwarzenegger intended to veto the trailer bill, and with it the funding crumbs from the Assembly table.

This diabolical deal would have spelled disaster either way: Hurt thousands of poor charter schoolchildren now by limiting facilities money, or deny educational opportunities to hundreds of thousands of them later by making hostile district school boards the primary authorizers of new charter schools.

An outpouring of support from charter parents and teachers at a late-August rally in Speaker Núñez’s own district speaks volumes to the power of parents and teachers who demand choice. Without facilities funds “we can’t pay for the best teachers,” said Los Angeles charter school parent Corri Ravere. She was fortunate enough to get her child into View Park Preparatory Charter High School, which is so successful at educating inner-city children its waiting list has swelled to 5,000, “We will fight to the end.”  And fight they did.

Although the battle has subsided for now, the power of midnight legislation remains a force to be reckoned with in the future. Without charter schools, thousands of schoolchildren and their teachers would have no alternative to district-run schools that don’t work for them. Students would have to return, but many of their teachers would likely quit. Given the growing concern about teacher shortages, those who purportedly represent California educators should be fostering more attractive teaching environments, not snuffing them out.

California’s district-run schooling monopoly is an increasingly unattractive prospect for teachers. It is the relic of a bygone era that held few employment opportunities for women, historically three-quarters of the teaching workforce. The times, and employment opportunities, have changed, but California’s schooling system founders in a time warp.

A 2005 California Charter Schools Association survey of Los Angeles charter school teachers showed 42 percent of respondents came from LAUSD. Former LAUSD employees represent more than half of charter school staffs at 10 percent of the district’s charter campuses, and eight percent of teachers surveyed came out of retirement specifically to teach at Los Angeles charter schools.

More than one in four charter teachers surveyed nationwide said they would do something else entirely if they could not teach at a charter school. Among non-retiring California teachers, more than half who leave blame job dissatisfaction, compared to only one in three of their peers nationwide. Inadequate support, excessive bureaucracy, a lack of collegiality, and insufficient input under the current district-managed schooling system are the top reasons that California teachers quit.

More than three out of four former California teachers would consider returning to the profession if working conditions were better. Independent, educator-directed schools like charter schools hold great promise for winning such teachers back, as well as improving teacher retention and recruitment rates.

At 82 percent, overall satisfaction rates among teachers in charters across the country are more than three times as high as their district-managed counterparts. An average of two-thirds of U.S. charter school teachers, compared to just one-third of teachers in district-run schools, report high levels of satisfaction with the influence they have over curricula, student discipline, and professional development, as well as school safety, collaboration with colleagues, and their schools’ learning environments.

Fortunately, Speaker Núñez’s Faustian gambit backfired. Instead of embarrassing the Governor, he embarrassed himself and enraged charter school parents and teachers who won’t tolerate dysfunctional, district-run schools without a fight.

Vicki E. Murray, Ph.D., is the Education Studies Senior Policy Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in Sacramento. She is also Visiting Fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum in Washington, D.C., and author of the new IWF study Empowering Teachers with Choice: How a Diversified Education System Benefits, Teachers, Students, and America.

USA Today: Our view on education: Merit pay for teachers begins to earn high grades - Objecting to merit pay today amounts to opposing a proven tool for making teachers more effective.

National Review Online, NY: Educational Freedom by Every Means Available - While millions of children are denied a quality education daily, we ought not to recklessly dismiss good solutions.  It is gross hyperbole to conclude, as Schaeffer does, that “school choice opponents have thrown everything at education tax credits to no avail.” Vouchers and tax credit programs have both opened educational doors once closed to children nationwide. Relying exclusively on tax-credit school choice programs would unnecessarily restrict the range of policy options reform-minded legislators could pursue. Such a premature narrowing of options is unwise for a reform movement that needs to maximize choice and develop a variety of models for differing environments.

To mark the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, Congress is requiring public schools across America to dedicate one day to teach students about the U.S. Constitution. If schools don’t, they can lose federal funding. Just one day to teach the Constitution? Imagine a school saying they are just going to teach multiplication one day out of the whole school year! Both subjects are important and both subjects require much more than one day to learn. The same is true for other core subjects.

From Jay Leno’s TV segment “Jay Walking” (where Americans routinely show their ignorance on elementary-level questions) to the much-publicized ramblings on the runway of the Miss Teen USA pageant, American students’ lack of knowledge about essential knowledge has been a source of great humor to the rest of us. Indeed, many adults are embarrassed as they lose on the new TV Game show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” Lot’s of fun to watch but it’s no joke when you realize that American education is failing in many respects.

No wonder more and more parents are choosing to send their children to charter schools or applying for vouchers. School choice gives parents more control over what and how their children learn. So they can spend more time involved in their children’s education and less time dealing with the red tape and bureaucracy of traditional public schools.

So, let’s celebrate the choice the framers of the Constitution made 220 years ago by celebrating and speaking out for school choice. And as many American school children simultaneously say the pledge of allegiance on September 17 during the “Pledge Across America," let’s  also pledge as a country to support school choice so parents can decide what and how their children learn best.

For more information on how your school can participate visit www.celebrationusa.org.