Bright and Early: The Education Newsblitz

The newsblitz cometh. Stand back:

• Hundreds of Vista teachers flooded a school board meeting, angry about their district’s proposals to cut their pay and work year, the North County Times reports. Vista Unified is already at impasse with its union.
• The Union-Tribune zooms in on fashion design, one of the after-school activities that Clairemont High was able to fund with a federal grant. It also pays for buses to get kids home afterwards.
• California ranks 46th in the nation in education spending, according an annual Education Week survey, which is adjusted for regional costs of living. Educated Guess explains some of the factors in its low score. But a school finance blogger argues that the EdWeek rankings are misleading.”Please STOP!” he writes. Education Next agrees.
• OBRag writes that education funding is “a four dimensional shell game” and describes how San Diego Unified is going about its budgeting.
• The Sacramento Bee writes that applications for the University of California schools are at a record high. That includes UCSD, which saw a 2 percent bump, the Union-Tribune reports. And the Associated Press writes about what this and other trends add up to: Tighter competition for college spots nationwide.
• Yet there’s an interesting trend: UC applicants are brainier, more diverse and less well-to-do this year, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. That could help reverse a trend noted in a recent report that found that diversity at flagship public universities like Berkeley is lagging.
• A school district within San Jose may ask voters to approve a parcel tax to boost its funding, the Mercury News reports. San Diego Unified has tossed this idea around, too.
• The Daily Censored argues that the Los Angeles Times is presenting a biased picture of charter schools based too heavily on standardized tests.
• Should U.S. kids learn the same things at the same time from state to state? Education Week explains the push for national education standards and why the idea is so controversial.
• The battle over Texas history standards is on! And it’s way more interesting than you might think it is. The Associated Press reports on the debate over whether to teach the Sikh new year alongside Christmas, whether first graders are ready to learn about holding public officials accountable, and the merits of teaching Aesop’s Fables.
• The U.S. News and World Report looks at what’s next for No Child Left Behind. It highlights some different views on what lessons should be learned from the original law. (Hat tip to Eduwonk for the link!)
• And the Educated Reporter has an interesting post about the third rail in No Child Left Behind: The idealistic, but probably unrealistic goal that all kids meet academic standards by 2014.

— EMILY ALPERT