The Charter School Initiative has passed in Washington State, but we should still inform ourselves about them, just as we need to keep informed about what is happening in the regular public schools.

A Kindergarten Career Test! This is wrong on so many levels–and also very revealing. Read more.

Reward good teachers and get rid of bad teachers–sounds like a good idea right? But in this era of re-defined terms nothing is as it seems. The problem is how “good” and “bad” teaching are defined. Read this commentary by Kyle Olson who examines just one of the many problems with teacher evaluations.

Bar-coding and data-archiving information on your children in a free country? In the USA? Don’t say it couldn’t happen. It already is happening. Read J.R. Wilson’s article from Education News .

“This is important because the endless back-and-forth about whether charter schools “work” – whether there is something about “charterness” that usually leads to fantastic results – has become a massive distraction in our education debates. The evidence makes it abundantly clear that that is not the case, and the goal at this point should be to look at the schools of both types that do well, figure out why, and use that information to improve all schools.” – Matthew Di Carlo

“In the ‘you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff’ category, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending about $1.1 million to develop a way to physiologically measure how engaged students are by their teachers’ lessons.”

Make way for the techno-educrats. Diane Ravitch’s blog reveals their plans for “galvanic skin response” monitoring.

How far will government schools go in collecting data on our students? In this case, St. Louis County parents were able to have this activity-monitoring project to shelved.

San Antonio is doing this in the name of school “safety”. Like all other questionable programs, parents are coaxed into accepting them because it’s for the “good of their children.”

The United Nations has declared the years 2005 to 2014 to be the decade for Education for Sustainable Development.

According to the UN Bruntland Commission: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

In reality, it is a philosophy of redistributing wealth and destroying freedom.