The public (especially parents) have a right to know, aneed to know. Teachers with a criminal record have no right to keep that infoemation secret.

Crew pointed to Elevate Miami, a joint initiative designed to develop students' social and civic skills. For example, if third-graders within the city of Miami are well-mannered -- and if they come to school dressed appropriately and ready to learn -- they are rewarded with new laptop computers at the end of the school year.

when the child leaves home in the morning, will things get better or worse. Are they prepared or unprepared to make the most of what lays ahead. Every child is wired differently, every school an assembly of different talents. The education the child receives is ultimately the totality of influence the adult world has on the child. Should we interpret the Constitution as affording a family the right to homeschool their children? I think we have reason to do that...it's freedom of choice. Will it always work? Of course not. Freedom is not an insurance policy. It's an opportunity that should not be wasted.

If the main downside to making kids repeat grade 1 is social stigma, why not (not as a total solution, but a partial one) sort out a lot of the problems BEFORE grade 1? Have a test to enter grade 1, and give the people who aren't prepared for it an extra program before grade 1, so that when they enter grade 1 they seem like any other student and there's no social stigma and nobody need ever know. Most people seem to change schools for grade 1 (or start school at grade 1) -- why not just have kindergartens more separated from grade 1, with remedial education available before grade 1 and also separate from grade 1, and then nobody will know the difference when grade 1 arrives.

Kids don't drink enough in school and so we install vending machines with pop, juice and water. Then we decide that we want healthy kids so we ban junk food and pop and make them drink water only. Then it becomes politically incorrect to be seen with a plastic bottle in our hands, so we ban the water bottle. Kids still won't drink out of water fountains so what do they do now? Whats next? Lmiting the use of washrooms at school so that the school boards are accused of contributing to global warming (oops thats now out - replace with climate change) by releasing too much methane gas in the air.

National unions have tended to criticize merit pay in part because they support raises for all teachers and in part because the concept is often considered a threat to labor solidarity."

Result: Why should a teacher bust their butt to do something good if they are going to get the same paycheck as the a-hole teacher that sits in their class and just twiddles their thumbs, right?

If kids can't read enough to find the main idea in a passage, or the facts which support an argument or basic math facts, they cannot learn anything. Testing helps insure that kids are learning to read and write with national standards.

For parents, test scores are the most enpowering tool in a parent's arsenal. A school cannot fob a parent off with how well a child is doing within a school community. With national scores a parent can demand to know why their child is not doing better when measure against other children across the country.

If kids can't read enough to find the main idea in a passage, or the facts which support an argument or basic math facts, they cannot learn anything. Testing helps insure that kids are learning to read and write with national standards.

For parents, test scores are the most enpowering tool in a parent's arsenal. A school cannot fob a parent off with how well a child is doing within a school community. With national scores a parent can demand to know why their child is not doing better when measure against other children across the country.

Leaving the selective high schools off your list is a fine idea. It really does not take an exceptional school or exceptional teachers to teach the top tier of students. Perhaps the material they study is at a higher level but the ramping up of standards in schools has always amazed me. To what end is that done? About the only real benefit for students is the ability to skip some lower division college classes because they have covered in in AP high school classes.

Florida State University's CARE program sounds like it should be replicated across the country. I agree that college-bound students should be prepared for college; however, what I believe does not reflect reality. The fact is that someone/something has to step up to the plate to help children who (statistically and anecdotally speaking) are unlikely to succeed without intervention. It sounds like FSU's program was established by people who decided to stop pointing fingers, who stopped playing the blame game, and took matters into their own hands.