NJ Spotlight--Opinion: Heads They Win, Tails You Lose
Police and fire unions’ power grab sticks New Jersey’s taxpayers with the pension bill
In 1866, Surrogate Gideon J. Tucker wrote that "[n]o man's life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session." Over a hundred years later, the New Jersey Legislature is doing its very best to keep Surrogate Tucker’s warning pertinent by once again advancing special-interest legislation that reaches for a new low in bad public policy and stunning indifference to taxpayers.
The issue at hand is the state Senate’s recent unanimous approval of S-3040, a bipartisan bill to transfer “management” of the $26 billion Police and Firemen’s Retirement System (PFRS) from the Department of the Treasury’s Division of Investment and the State Investment Council to a union-controlled board of trustees.
http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/17/03/20/opinion-heads-they-win-tails-you-lose/
Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff | March 21, 2017
Philadelphia Inquirer--News Literacy Project: Teaching students to tell the true from the fake
News Literacy Project: Teaching students to tell the true from the fake
Web posts from sources of global news await reaction. A post from the International Rescue Committee shows an emaciated baby in a hospital bed. A picture of drooping, deformed daisies bears the headline “Fukushima Nuclear Flowers.” From Time.com, the headline is “Trump’s Budget Would Kill a Program That Feeds 2.4 Million Senior Citizens.”
Eighty-five miles north, a class of 30 high school students at Essex County Vocational Technical School in Newark, N.J., sits rapt as, on a big screen in front of the classroom, New York Times homeland security reporter Ron Nixon talks about bias. “I have opinions, just like everybody else … but it doesn’t get in the way of my job,” he tells the class.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/News-Literacy-Project-Teaching-students-to-tell-the-truth-from-the-fake.html
John Timpane, Staff Writer |Updated: March 21, 2017 — 5:00 AM EDT
The Atlantic--How Betsy DeVos Could End the School-Integration Comeback
Federal attention to classroom diversity made a resurgence in the final months of the Obama administration. Will the established programs peter out?
Under President Trump, the federal role in education is set to be drastically curtailed. Last Thursday, Trump proposed slashing federal spending on schools by $9 billion. His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has vowed to shrink her agency and return power to local officials, which could mean scaling back civil-rights enforcement. All of these signals may also foreshadow a retreat on school integration.
Integration made a brief return to the national stage last year when President Barack Obama, who had mostly avoided the issue before then, proposed a $120 million grant program in his final budget that would fund local socioeconomic school-integration plans. After that proposal died in Congress, Obama’s education secretary, John King, launched a much smaller version last December. He also used his brief tenure to trumpet the benefits of diversity. “He talked about school diversity in a way that federal officials had not in years and years and years,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a think tank that promotes socioeconomic school integration.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/how-betsy-devos-could-end-the-school-integration-comeback/520113/
Patrick Wall| Mar 20, 2017