Arizona schools chief says Tucson program violates law (Reuters)

TUCSON (Reuters) – Arizona's superintendent of schools said on Wednesday a controversial ethnic studies program in Tucson public schools violates new state law and he threatened to cut off $15 million in funds for the district.

Schools chief John Huppenthal gave the Tucson Unified School District 60 days to prove that it had followed the law -- which forbids promoting resentment of an ethnic group or advocating ethnic solidarity, or programs designed primarily for students of one ethnicity.

"The Tucson Unified School District Governing Board failed to comply not only to state statutes, but with its own adopted policies on curriculum development and its text and materials approval process," Huppenthal said in a written release.

The school board created the ethnic studies program 13 years ago during a 30-year federal desegregation order issued after minority students and staff claimed racial discrimination.

A judge lifted federal oversight in 2008.

The Mexican-American Studies Program, which offers alternatives to traditional history, literature, social justice and art classes, ensures those students will not be excluded again, said Deyanira Nevarez, director of Save Ethnic Studies, a group that has organized supporters of the program.

School board President Mark Stegeman had no comment Wednesday. The board will schedule a meeting in coming days to discuss the legal matter in closed session, he said.

Controversy erupted over the program in January, when the law went into effect.

On his last day in office, Tom Horne, the outgoing state superintendent who is now the state attorney general, deemed the program illegal. Huppenthal then hired a consultant to determine its legality.

Emotions have run hot over the issue.

In May, several students took over the board seats at a meeting and refused to leave until after midnight. There were no arrests.

A week later, at another board meeting, more than 100 police were in attendance, either inside or outside, and a police helicopter hovered overhead.

(Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Jerry Norton)

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Idaho voters to decide fate of education overhaul (Reuters)

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) – A group seeking to repeal Idaho's new education laws, including one stripping teachers of most collective bargaining rights, has enough signatures to place the measures before voters, state election officials said on Tuesday.

Idahoans for Responsible Education Reform needed the signatures of more than 47,000 Idaho voters for each of the three laws that made up an overhaul of education recently approved by Idaho's Republican leaders.

The Idaho Secretary of State's Office on Tuesday certified the signatures of 74,000 voters for each of the measures, which will be placed on the November 2012 ballot.

Backed by Republican Governor Butch Otter and Tom Luna, the state's elected schools chief, the GOP-dominated legislature this year passed the overhaul of public education despite statewide protests by the teachers union and some parents and students.

The overhaul was spelled out in a package of three laws, including one that ended tenure and removed from teacher contract negotiations issues like class size and workload.

Another tied pay raises and bonuses for educators to factors like student performance instead of seniority.

A third required high schools to equip students with mobile computing devices, forcing many districts to shift funds from teacher pay to technology.

Luna said in a written statement that the referendums threaten public education in Idaho, adding: "Repealing these laws would mean a return to status quo."

Luna said he was confident a majority of Idaho residents supported the overhaul.

Michael Lanza, head of the parent-led group pushing for the repeal, said the number of Idaho voters who signed petitions speaks for itself.

"The fact that we far surpassed our goals is a powerful statement about public dissatisfaction," he said.

Idaho was one of several states this year where Republican lawmakers sought to curtail the labor rights of school teachers and other unionized public employees.

(Editing by Dan Whitcomb)

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Arkansas legislators lag nation in college experience (Reuters)

LITTLE ROCK, Ark (Reuters) – The Arkansas legislature has the nation's highest percentage of state lawmakers who have not attended college at all, according to a new study by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

There are 135 legislators in Little Rock, 25 percent of whom do not have any college experience, according to the study. Comparatively, 8.7 percent of all state lawmakers nationwide have not attended college.

The five states with the highest percentage of legislators without any college are Arkansas, Montana, Kansas, South Dakota and Arizona.

The most formally educated state legislatures -- those with the highest percentage of lawmakers that have a bachelor's degree or higher -- are in California, Virginia, Nebraska, New York and Texas.

The Arkansas legislature mirrors its state's population, said Hal Bass, a political science professor at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

"It's in keeping with the notion of a representative institution, in that Arkansas is also below the college-educated norm for the (U.S.) population as a whole," Bass told Reuters.

He said that low pay and the fact that being an Arkansas legislator is a part-time job are also factors.

"Our rural, frontier political culture has not traditionally placed an especially high value on academic credentials for positions of leadership in society," Bass said.

According to numerous studies, Arkansas ranks 50th among the states in the percentage of residents older than 25 with a bachelor's degree. One in five Arkansas ninth-graders does not obtain a high school diploma, according to The Arkansas Department of Education.

That should be more of an issue than current legislators' diplomas, said Kathy Webb, a Democratic state legislator from Little Rock.

"I'm a lot more focused on our high school dropout rate than on my colleagues having a college degree," she said.

Webb, who holds a political science degree from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, said the education level of her statehouse colleagues isn't discussed among them.

No state has minimum educational standards for its legislators, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

"A lot of people bring world views based on their experiences as opposed to a degree," Webb said. "I think that diversity is what makes Arkansas a lot less polarized than Washington or other states and we work together regardless of party or degrees."

(Edited by Corrie MacLaggan and Jerry Norton)

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Court rules for students in Pennsylvania speech cases (Reuters)

PHILADELPHIA – A federal appeals court here has ruled in favor of two school students who were disciplined in different districts for creating what lawyers called parodies of their principals on the MySpace social network site.

"The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit made clear ... that schools cannot punish students for out-of-school speech that does not create a substantial and material disruption inside the school," said the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the students.

"I think the message is louder for school officials than it is for the kids," ACLU lawyer Witold Walczak, the organization's Pennsylvania legal director, said Tuesday.

And that message, he said, is that the authority of school officials is less for conduct outside the school than it is for conduct inside.

Terry Snyder, mother of one of the students who was referred to in the legal papers as only "JS," said she disciplined her daughter for her behavior while she was a student in the Blue Mountain School District, in central Pennsylvania north of Reading.

"I punished her for that," said Snyder Tuesday. "I'm the one who should have punished her."

But the school district insisted on a 10-day suspension, and that led to the lawsuit.

The court decision released Monday said Snyder's daughter created a MySpace profile that made fun of her middle school principal in 2007. The court said the profile contained adult language and sexually explicit references.

In an 8-6 decision, the Circuit Court said the district violated the girl's First Amendment rights. The girl graduated this year from the Blue Mountain high school, and is headed for college.

In a separate case, the court ruled 14-0 in favor of a student in the far western part of Pennsylvania, Hermitage, a suburb of Sharon.

"We hold," wrote the court in a case involving then high school student Justin Layshock, who is now in college, "that under these circumstances, the First Amendment prohibits the school from reaching beyond the school yard to impose what might otherwise be appropriate discipline."

The court said Layshock, in 2005, created what he called a parody profile of his high school principal on his grandmother's computer. In it, he posed such questions as "birthday" with the response "too drunk to remember."

The principal thought the remarks were demeaning, and Layshock was suspended for 10 days.

His parents were not able to be reached for comment, but in a 2006 statement attached to an ACLU news release Don and Cherie Layshock said their son was punished by them. They said he apologized to the principal, twice.

"He is sorry and embarrassed by what he calls a dumb mistake," that statement said.

Hermitage school officials could not be reached for comment, and the Blue Ridge Superintendent, Robert Urzillo, said he had not been in his current job at the time.

(Editing by Jerry Norton)

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