Sunday's Extra Credit Reading

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is giving props to the 250 public and private schools that were the first to be selected in the 2006 No Child Left Behind - Blue Ribbon Schools Program. See if a school near you was one of the lucky ones which received the award here.

The long-running teachers strike down in the Mexican state of Oaxaca looks as though its about to take a nasty turn for the worse with that state's governor threatening to get tough with the strikers. (Informative backstory here.)

Most public schools in America nowadays answer to a variety of non-teaching teaching experts political masters, which spawns quite a bit of confusion of both educators and the public. But the mandate to meet or exceed two different standards of what constitutes educational testing success is particularly frustrating.

News Flash! California's Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has sworn-off Hummers! But wait! Someone else says that he can't give-up his gas-guzzling addiction expensive thrill-ride... Our chief concern with Schwarzenegger is that he has done absolutely nothing to slow-down the runaway expansion of California's wasteful education bureaucracy, an example of which can be seen here. (The number of EduCrats has more than doubled in ten years, while the number of students and teachers has been about the same.)

A firestorm of controversy has broken out over certain inscriptions that have been carved into Arizona's memorial to victims of the September 11th terror attacks.

Gangs are so out of control in some British schools that administrators are closing the doors and sending students home early. (And one of them was a girls school!) ----------------------------See our latest EduPosts here and yesterday's Extra Credit Reading over there.