Yahoo! News: Education News

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• Entrepreneur's kids inspired battle with California teachers
• California bill makes egregious misconduct fireable offense for teachers
• Op-Ed: College Degrees for a Million Low-Income Students by 2025
• The Government's Next Big Health Care Experiment

Entrepreneur's kids inspired battle with California teachers Posted: 13 Jun 2014 03:15 PM PDT Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch says it was his three children who motivated him to spend almost $2 million challenging California's teacher tenure laws.     Welch, an engineer with at least 130 patents, is the force behind Students Matter, the non-profit organization whose lawsuit against the state succeeded this week when a California judge struck down rules protecting teacher jobs.     "My two older kids had this incredibly inspiring middle school science teacher, from the first day of school they were coming home and doing experiments in the back yard," the 53-year-old Welch said in an interview with Reuters. "But one child had a horrible experience and didn't learn to read on time, which hurt him academically and hurt him emotionally."   Welch declined to say whether his son's negative experience, or his other children's positive experience, happened at a public school or a private school. They have attended both.

California bill makes egregious misconduct fireable offense for teachers Posted: 13 Jun 2014 01:43 PM PDT By Sharon Bernstein SACRAMENTO Calif. (Reuters) - Days after a Los Angeles judge ruled unconstitutional five California laws granting tenure and other job protections for public school teachers, lawmakers passed a measure adding "egregious misconduct" to the list of fireable offenses. "We all agree that the current dismissal appeal process takes too long and costs too much money," said Democratic assembly member Joan Buchanan, the bill's author. "The public demands a process that is fair and efficient and responds to the needs of school districts to efficiently manage their workforce." Buchanan's bill, which passed Thursday and now heads to the desk of Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, stops short, however, of addressing the issue of incompetent teachers. Inspired by the case of a Los Angeles Unified School District teacher sent to prison after pleading no contest to charges including feeding students cookies laced with his own semen, the bill instead adds "egregious misconduct" to the existing list of fireable offenses for tenured teachers in the state, which already includes immoral or unprofessional behavior.

Op-Ed: College Degrees for a Million Low-Income Students by 2025 Posted: 13 Jun 2014 10:32 AM PDT A college degree is the new finish line in education—the credential in today's job market that a high school diploma held a generation ago. Though the finish line has been set, not nearly enough young people, particularly low-income students, are even starting the race.  The global higher education system is plagued with uncertainty and challenges. In 2012, researchers at the University of Melbourne ranked the U.S. higher education system No. 1 in the world despite its broken funding formula and other flaws.

The Government's Next Big Health Care Experiment Posted: 13 Jun 2014 03:00 AM PDT The Senate version, negotiated by the mismatched pair of Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and John McCain (R-AZ), spends $500 million on more doctors for the VA and authorizes leases for 26 new medical facilities. But until the expansion gets up and running, between now and 2016, VA recipients who run into long delays or live more than 40 miles from a clinic would be able to access private care facilities like community health centers or private hospitals. The Senate approved the measure 93-3 on Wednesday. There are other pieces to the bills (like removing the counter-productive wait time bonus system that led to staffers cooking the books, improvements to the post-9/11 GI Bill for higher education, and greater flexibility to fire senior VA leadership), but this is the main feature — a stopgap to eliminate long wait times at the VA by allowing private access.

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