comments My colleague Molly Young reports today that Oregon’s per-capita person income grew at the eighth-fastest rate in the nation during 2012. For education, which is funded primarily by income taxes on Oregonians’ collective personal incomes, that growth is good news.
But as Young notes, the state’s per-capita income continued to seriously lag other states’, coming in at 10 percent below the national average.
Amy Vander Vliet, an economist for the Oregon Employment Department, called my attention to a study she and her colleagues did a couple years ago. In it, they trace Oregon’s per-capital personal income — pcpi, insiders call it — across decades.
I was surprised to learn that at one point, Oregon’s pcpi was a full 25 percent more than the national average. Yowza. Any guess when that was? 1943, the report shows.
Why might that be?
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DALLAS — For every finger tap, leg cross and persistent wiggle, doctors have prescribed a pill for 16-year-old Sophia Rodriguez.
“I really cannot sit still,” she mumbled. “I don’t like saying I have to take meds because it makes me feel weak in my own eyes.”
Since birth, Sophia has struggled to focus, and her grades have suffered as well.
“Sometimes I don’t understand why I can’t do it without,” Rodriguez wondered out loud.
Then the executive director of the Shelton School of Dallas suggested that Sophia attend class while sitting on a stationary bike instead of just sitting behind a desk.
Sophia’s father, Robert Rodriguez, was all for it.
“If we can learn of a better way to help children learn to get their homework done, to improve their grades, to make them better students, I think that not only is that a good thing for Shelton, but for all for all schools,” he said.
Over the next two years, 100 students will spend one period a day on stationary bikes during classroom instruction. Re
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Curry Todd
A bill to lift the prohibition on municipal school districts advanced Tuesday in the legislature as suburban Shelby County mayors watched in the House chambers.
The House Education committee passed the bill 10-5 with verbal assurances that municipalities would continue to serve all children in new districts, even if city finances change.
But when asked to put language in the bill that would require new school districts to serve all children, House sponsor Curry Todd, R-Collierville, said it was unnecessary.
“We intend to carry out our word without having to lock anything in legislation-wise,” he said. “ … We want to keep this as simple and clean as possible. The r
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State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson will deliver his annual “State of the State of California Education” address Thursday at the Centinela Valley Center for the Arts auditorium in Lawndale.
Torlakson’s noon address at the state-of-the-art theater will be part of an education forum to be attended by elected board members, school district superintendents, principals, and teachers from throughout Los Angeles County.
The education forum will be co-sponsored by the Los Angeles County Education Foundation, the Los Angeles County Office of Education and the Los Angeles County School Trustees Association.
- Rob Kuznia
Copyright 2012 Daily Breeze. All rights reserved.
A federal appeals court has upheld an injunction that sets aside a Pennsylvania school district’s rules that had barred a 5th grader from passing out invitations to a church youth party to her classmates.
In ruling on the party invitations, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, in Philadelphia, weighed in on an important issue that has divided other federal appeals courts: whether elementary school students have free-speech rights that are protected by the First Amendment. The panel agreed unanimously that they did.
The court said it agreed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans, which held in a 2011 decision that elementary school students are covered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1969 decision in Tinker v.
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Is Senate Bill 325 essentially a second try for Republicans to hold a majority on the Wake County school board?
As noted in today’s article, the stated main purpose of the new legislation is to give individual Wake County voters the ability to elect a second school board member. But the bill also lets state Republican lawmakers rewrite the boundaries for Wake’s school board districts.
This comes after the redistricting plan approved by the former Republican school board majority in 2011 didn’t turn out as some thought that it would in ensuring GOP control of the state’s largest school district.
Various reasons such as the way the Republicans governed the school board, the outside spending from state and national liberal advocacy groups and just not having a true appreciation of what the new lines would actually do have been cited as some reasons why the Democrats won in 2011 under the new maps.
This is not a hastily thought out bill.
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