Education Action Group

PHILADELPHIA – A high school sophomore says her geometry teacher bullied her for wearing a Mitt Romney t-shirt to class last Friday. Sixteen-year-old Samantha Pawlucy used “dress-down” day at Charles Carroll High School to show support for the Republican presidential

CALIFON, N.J. – It’s bad enough that school children across the nation are going hungry on the skimpy portions offered through the Michelle Obama lunch menu. At the Tewksbury school district in New Jersey, children who fall $3.10 behind on their

PORTLAND, Ore. – Dr. Verenice Gutierrez, a principal with Oregon’s Portland Public Schools, has become convinced that America’s “white culture” negatively influences educators’ world view and the manner in which they teach their students. For instance, last year a teacher

Some believe the long-anticipated Chicago teachers strike, which began this morning, represents an inevitable showdown in the spiraling war between the education reform movement and the nation’s teachers unions.We think it’s more specific than that. We believe it’s more of

WESTERVILLE, Ohio – Parents and taxpayers in the Westerville City School District want to force school spending reform in a very interesting way. Their plan is to take away approximately $16 million from the district’s budget by repealing a portion

For a school district facing possible bankruptcy, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District was very generous with its employees during the 2010-11 school year.  For example, taxpayers may be surprised to learn they paid the pension contributions for the district and

CHICAGO – An education expert from Stanford University told the presidents of the nation’s two largest teachers unions Thursday that they could help increase compensation for educators throughout the nation if they would agree to reward the best teachers and

PITTSBURGH – Should public school teachers who are caught with child pornography be able to draw a pension from the state?We believe the answer should be a resounding ‘no,’ but that’s currently not the case. The question is at the

The school year keeps getting shorter in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Yet teachers still get free health insurance coverage while the district spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year to cover the cost of the premiums. That’s much

There’s no “free” when it comes to “freedom of information” requests in Virginia’s Prince William County school district. Quite the opposite, in fact. On behalf of EAGnews.org, Americans for Prosperity-Virginia recently filed a freedom of information request with the district, seeking checking account

Need more proof that Wisconsin public employee union leaders and the radicals in the Occupy movement are close allies who share a common agenda? Check out the video we shot of the Occupy Milwaukee rally and march that occurred last

MILWAUKEE – Last week EAGnews published a video featuring Milwaukee teachers union president Bob Peterson tut-tutting about putting union political flyers in the backpacks of students and bussing parents and students to vote in the Wisconsin recall election. Of course that strategy didn’t work.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The public school establishment has tried a lot of dirty tricks over the years to stop the spread of charter schools. Charter schools attract many of their students, and siphon away some of the state money attached

JANESVILLE, Wis. – Education officials in a rural Wisconsin school district find it “disturbing” and “upsetting” that someone had the nerve to spread public information to the public. A flier distributed last weekend reportedly contained salary figures for hundreds of teachers in

SAN DIEGO – By the end of June, one in five San Diego public school teachers might be out of a job. That grim reality has educators scared for their economic futures. That explains why the San Diego teachers union voted in March to

LOS ANGELES – When it comes to education reform, California has become the land of litigation. That’s because state lawmakers and local school board members are often financed and controlled by powerful teachers unions, which selfishly oppose logical reform efforts. If union

WAUSAUKEE, Wis. – To more fully appreciate the destructive influence Big Labor has on public schools, consider the case of former Wausaukee teacher Kurt Kostelecky. Kostelecky was convicted last summer of having sexual contact with a freshman female student during the

DETROIT – It’s no secret that Detroit Public Schools have been a financial mess for several years. Rising costs, large-scale theft and fraud, dwindling enrollment and poor management have led to budget deficits reportedly as high as $327 million. In the summer

MADISON, Wis. – We thought the Wisconsin recall was all about restoring collective bargaining for public employees. But the Democrats of Wisconsin obviously don’t agree. They made that clear Tuesday when they overwhelmingly rejected Kathleen Falk, the anointed candidate of the public sector unions, in

MADISON – The demonstrations and chaos that followed Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s introduction of budget reforms – later known as Act 10 – were a preview of what was to come from the orchestrated Occupy Wall Street protests. The protests in Madison had many of the same elements,

CARSON CITY, Nev. – Is teacher tenure a “human right”? That’s what the head of the Nevada State Education Association seemed to suggest in a television interview last weekend. Appearing on a local news show, NSEA President Lynn Warne said the Silver State’s new education reforms

RACINE, Wis. – Former Racine Unified school district board member Brian Deyhas had his fair share of run-ins with the district’s teachers union. He proposed Act 10-style cuts when he served on the board between 2005 and 2008. More recently, he pressed school officials

LANSING, Mich. — The nation’s teacher unions have been warning Americans that education reform is really a war against the middle class. The unions say powerful corporations are behind the movement to hold public schools accountable for how much students

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The memo has gone out, the date has been saved. This coming Tuesday, radicals of all stripes will descend upon the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington D.C. to rally in support of convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Organizers are hoping to

RACINE – Wisconsin’s radical left-wing teachers are at it again. And this time, they’ve incited their students to draw up a “Student Bill of Rights” and encouraged them to pack recent school board meetings in Racine and Milwaukee to insist that school officials adopt the

When Congress passed the “edujobs” stimulus in the summer of 2010, the nation’s teacher union leaders must have made champagne toasts to celebrate their clever way of preserving union jobs while so many public schools were facing budget problems. Union leaders figured

NEW YORK – What are parents to do when their child comes home from school with stories about “this creepy guy in my class” – and it turns out to be the teacher? That’s a very real concern for parents

RAMSEY, N.J. – In February, Ramsey (New Jersey) school board members did something so outrageous, so beyond the bounds of decency and sacred tradition that the local teachers’ union president says it has poisoned relations between the district and union “for decades

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Allen Osborn is a special education teacher at the Riverside Unified School District in California, where he teaches severely handicapped students in kindergarten through third grade. It’s a job he loves, and he hasn’t looked back since leaving the business world six years

MILWAUKEE – The average Milwaukee Public Schools teacher was absent from the classroom over 9 percent of the time during the 2010-11 school year. The district’s 5,241 teachers took a whopping 92,691 days off last year – in the form of sick days,

DETROIT – According to students at Detroit Public Schools’ Frederick Douglass Academy, it’s become commonplace for large numbers of teachers to be absent at the same time, resulting in a teacher shortage. When that occurs, students are forced to spend their

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – A day after hosting a pro-education reform rally at the state capitol, the president of the Connecticut Parents Union was fired from her job as a workshop presenter with New Haven Public Schools’ Head Start Program. CTPU President Gwen

MADISON – Wisconsin’s public sector unions and their allies are hailing a recent court decision on Act 10 as a victory heading into the summer recall season. But the most important part of the new law – that collective bargaining is not a legal right -survived the

Here’s a story straight out of the “strange but true” file: The Las Vegas teachers’ union is upset with an arbitrator’s decision that will save the jobs of 134 teachers. Last week, an arbitrator ruled that under state law, members of the Clark

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – For the first time ever, Tennessee is basing a portion of a teacher’s evaluation on student test data. Test scores will be combined with a principal’s classroom observations to create an overall score for teachers, ranging from 1 (significantly

BOISE, Idaho – Millions of voters will go to the polls this year to choose between a more performance-based, accountable approach to public education, and the failed system supported by Big Labor. In Michigan, North Dakota and Idaho, state teachers unions are working to convince