JacksonHeraldTODAY

NEW YORK -- Education is controversial everywhere, but perhaps no more so than in New York where powerful public teacher unions chafe at any proposal to hold them accountable.

Public officials in New York are often seen here trying to outdo each other to gain favor with teacher unions because of their bloc voting power. And there is little pretense that teachers here care very much about students; the focus is mainly on their own pay, benefits and job security.

New York teachers are currently in an uproar over a recently released listing that evaluated every teacher in the system. The New York Post published the evaluation results, a move that led several teachers to protest outside the Post office Friday. [Full Story »] 

By the early 1990s, there was a lot of fatigue over discussions of school system merger in Jackson County. The years of complicated contracts and court involvement were over between the county’s three school systems. Each school system was now independent of each other and free to pursue their own destiny without courts or contracts.

Talks of school merger had begun in the 1950s, and had waxed and waned over the years. Literally hundreds of meetings had been held on the issue; numerous studies and assessments by both citizens and professionals had been done. At least a dozen citizens’ civic groups had been formed on the issue. And once, every voter in the county got a chance to vote on school system merger, but that effort was defeated in 1982. [Full Story »]