Free Republic

Speculation is running rampant about why House Majority Leader Eric Cantor walked out of debt ceiling talks with Democrats.

Perfect example of how the entitlemen crowd is infecting America. Notice how they huddle around Government looking for handouts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eiHXASgRTcA#at=75

The battle between the governor and teacher unions in Wisconsin is revealing the teacher and administrators in the government schools to be quite well compensated. The average full-time teacher gets salary and benefits worth about $90,000 while many principles and district administrators are paid salary and benefits worth between $160,000 to $200,000 annually. According to www.teacher-world.com, the average annual teacher salary in Kenosha is $68,400 while that of Green Bay is $55.110. The average salaries in other parts of the state are comparable. When you consider the benefits above those salaries is approximately $35,000 or more per teacher, you can...

Barely two months since Los Angeles Unified School District officials duped the area's generous voters into signing away an additional $7 billion of their money for a vague school-improvement plan, the officials are at it again. That's right. In the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, officials who have secured about $22 billion in construction bonds from property owners in the district in recent years are thinking of passing the hat again. So what's this new measure for? More buildings? Technology? Maintenance? School lunches for poor kids? Nope, the district wants a parcel tax to pay for operating expenses...

Firefighting pilots in Western Colorado have a new facility. The new Grand Junction Interagency Air Center will be dedicated Tuesday at Walker Field Airport. The 92-hundred-square-foot facility serves as headquarters for heavy air tankers, pilots, smokejumpers, dispatchers and administrators. The air center serves as a base for fighting fires in parts of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Mexico and Arizona. It has six full-time employees and 30 seasonal workers. Last year the center responded to about two-thousand incidents.

When Mark and Jenny Sanford moved from Charleston to Columbia, S.C., they had a big concern: Where would their kids go to school? They wanted to send their kids to public school, but the middle school near their new home was not particularly good. But it turned out that this wouldn't have been a problem for the Sanfords because the reason they had moved to Columbia was Mark had just been elected governor. While students are normally assigned to schools based on where their house is located, Gov. Sanford's family was offered special options: People from better school districts invited...

Enrollment drops, teachers leave, but administrators stay. That's the story at most of the 25 school districts with declining enrollment in the Sacramento region, according to a Bee analysis of state education data. Just eight of those districts reported to the state that they had cut administrators between the school years 1999-2000 and 2004-2005, even though the districts lost about 5,000 students during that period. Five of the 25 districts added administrators. And although most of those districts aren't cutting administrator positions, they are employing fewer teachers. Twenty-two of the 25 districts have fewer teachers today than they did five...

A high-level Prince George's County public schools administrator has been indicted for her role in a multi-million dollar, international drug ring out of the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. Pamela Yvette Hoffler-Riddick, regional assistant superintendent for the county's Region 3, was named in a 324-count indictment unsealed Monday by federal prosecutors. Three dozen persons were named in the indictment, which stated the ring handled more than $20 million worth of cocaine and marijuana from September 1996 to Jan. 14.

Perry proposes cash incentives to schools when students pass tests AUSTIN (AP) — A proposal by Gov. Rick Perry would give Texas high schools more money when at-risk students pass an algebra test and a standardized state assessment test. Perry rolled out the plan — the second in a series of three proposals that tie $500 million in state funds to student performance — at the Texas Association of School Administrators annual conference Tuesday. The proposal calls for schools to receive an extra $100 for each student passing an end-of-course Algebra I exam. At-risk students who pass the exam will...

Exams test educator integrity Emphasis on scores can lead to cheating, teacher survey finds By Aimee Edmondson edmondson@gomemphis.com September 21, 2003 The stories she'd heard about cheating started to make sense when Kim McCrary Marsh's eighth-graders asked for answers during annual achievement tests. "My students asked me, 'Are you going to help us on the test a little bit like So-and-So did?' " said Marsh, a former Trezevant High School history teacher. These days it's not just students who feel pressure to cheat. Marsh and other teachers in Memphis and Shelby County tell stories of adults taking shortcuts on the...

Parent Group Blows the Whistle on Delaware School District Parents allege discrimination of special education, minority and low-income white students Members of a parent watchdog group, Parents Advisory Council Team (P.A.C.T.) has reported the Appoquininink School District of Odessa, Delaware to the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, alleging noncompliance with special education IEPs, racial discrimination, and misuse of zero tolerance to target and expel low-income white students and minority students that school administrators do not like. The parents and children span racial, cultural, socioeconomic and political lines. The parents claim the school district is abusing their power...