Posted 08/19/2010 06:56 PM ET

Education: Public school teachers are unhappy with the growing campaign to grade their performance. They shouldn’t be. It’s almost impossible to fire a union teacher, even those who are profoundly incompetent.
From Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, the debate about teacher effectiveness has taken off.
In the nation’s capital, Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee [...]

By Motoko Rich

updated 8/18/2010 2:29:28 AM ET

As schools handed out pink slips to teachers this spring, states made a beeline to Washington to plead for money for their ravaged education budgets. But now that the federal government has come through with $10 billion, some of the nation’s biggest school districts are balking at [...]

By: Mark Hemingway
Commentary Staff Writer
08/16/10 3:30 PM EDT
On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times began publishing a hard-hitting analysis on teacher performance. Today, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that union leaders are threatening the paper as a result:
The Los Angeles teachers union president said Sunday he was organizing a “massive boycott” of The Times after [...]

By David Limbaugh (Archive) · Friday, August 13, 2010
As my friends’ kids leave the nest for their first year away at college, I think of the monolithic ideas with which they will surely be bombarded in an environment that is supposed to expose them to a variety of ideas. Are they prepared to resist [...]

By Mona Charen (Archive) · Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Do you associate dirt with great music? You might if you were the parent of kids attending the Interlochen summer music program in Michigan. For the third and second summer respectively, my teenage sons have plunged into six weeks of intensive music education, performance, and instruction. [...]

Phyllis Schlafly
Un-American American History Courses
Aug 10, 2010

Arizona’s new law that requires the police to ask people to show ID, which was just knocked out by a supremacist judge, may not be the most controversial Arizona law about illegal aliens. Gov. Jan Brewer signed another law this year that bans schools from teaching classes designed to [...]

By Thomas Sowell (Archive) · Tuesday, August 10, 2010
A graduating senior at Hunter College High School in New York gave a speech that brought a standing ovation from his teachers and got his picture in the New York Times. I hope it doesn’t go to his head, because what he said was so illogical [...]

By RYAN J. FOLEY, Associated Press Writer Ryan J. Foley, Associated Press Writer – Fri Aug 6, 10:31 am ET

MADISON, Wis. – With the district in a financial crisis and hundreds of its members facing layoffs, the Milwaukee teachers union is taking a peculiar stand: fighting to get its taxpayer-funded Viagra back.
The union has asked a judge to order [...]

Civil rights groups choose the teachers unions over black kids.
Aug 5, 2010
For the second time in recent weeks, the Obama Administration has been forced to defend its school reform agenda from its political left. The White House has been up to the task, but the episodes underscore liberalism’s vested interest in the tattered education status [...]

By Debra Saunders (Archive) · Sunday, August 1, 2010
I am a veteran of the math wars. I was there in 1995 when the shiny new California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) test told graders to award a higher score to a student who incorrectly answered a math problem about planting trees — but wrote an [...]