Free Republic

RESEDA, LOS ANGELES -- The scores are in for Southern California students who took the annual STAR exam. Despite cutbacks and layoffs, scores are up for the ninth straight year. They're at their highest levels since the testing began. At a 10th-grade physiology class at Reseda High School, reading and language skills are combined with mathematics, and there are improved results in the latest statewide Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) examinations given to nearly 5 million students in grades 2 through 11. "Despite the cuts we are seeing that kind of significant progress. It's been steady over the last nine...

Forget America’s spending crisis. Ignore America’s education crisis. The latest teaching tool to show up in America’s classrooms is the Apple iPad, a product that many educators seem to view as the magic potion that will ignite a lifetime of learning for our nation’s students. At Roslyn High School on Long Island where the first 47 iPads were handed out to students several weeks ago, the school district apparently aims to provide iPads to all 1,100 students, according to the New York Times. “It allows us to extend the classroom beyond these four walls,” noted English teach Larry Reiff, who...

On April 20, New Jersey voters backed Gov. Chris Christie in the first test of his drive to pull their state back from the fiscal brink -- producing record turnout as they rejected 58 percent of school budgets. But the war is far from over -- and must extend far beyond property taxes. Having successfully challenged the New Jersey Education Association's decades-long control over the public purse, the governor is now moving to tackle the issues that drove so many voters to the polls: crushing property taxes and out-of-control spending. Christie yesterday released a package of 33 bills -- which...

THE Garden State tax revolt is starting to bear fruit -- and it's about time, too. On Tuesday, voters nixed 315 of 537 school-district budgets, including many that sought tax hikes. That's a whopping 59 percent; usually, less than 30 percent fail. The state hasn't seen anything close to even 50 percent rejected since 1976. It all started with anti-tax GOP crusader Chris Christie's defeat last fall of then-Gov. Jon Corzine in this Democratic-leaning state. Faced with an $11 billion cash shortfall, Christie quickly sliced state aid to schools by $820 million -- and followed up with warnings that school...

State lawmakers will cut $8.4 billion from the $58.1 billion budget for public education, lowering per-pupil spending from $8,784 to $8,404 over the next two years. That's $11,400 less for a typical K-12 classroom of 30 kids.