By Christopher Magan | Twin Cities Pioneer Press

“A Ramsey County District Court judge will hear initial arguments Thursday in a lawsuit aimed at dismantling Minnesota’s union protections for public school teachers.

State and local leaders want Judge Margaret M. Marrinan to dismiss the case, saying the lawsuit is an attempt to change long-standing state laws through the court system rather than the Legislature.

‘Plaintiffs’ pithy and dismissive rhetoric aside, the actual allegations in the (lawsuit) are nothing but an attempt by a handful of parents to get a court to do what the Legislature would not do,’ attorneys for the St. Paul Public Schools wrote recently in a legal brief supporting the dismissal request.”

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By Beena Raghavendran | StarTribune

“A class-action lawsuit that claims the state is failing to meet its responsibilities to poor and minority students will be moving to trial.

In a ruling Friday, Hennepin County District Judge Susan M. Robiner found that the November lawsuit from a group of Minneapolis and St. Paul school district parents and a community organization had enough legal grounds to continue and refused a move by the state and a group of charter schools and parents to dismiss the case.

The case should go to trial next September, said Dan Shulman, an attorney for the plaintiffs.”

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By Michael Petrilli | Education Next

“Helping lots more young Americans get ‘to and through’ four-year college degrees is a major goal of public policy and philanthropy. In 2009, President Obama set the target of leading the world in college completion by 2020. The Lumina Foundation aspires to increase the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates, and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent over seven years and half a billion dollars on strategies aimed at increasing college completion.”

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By Citizen Stewart

“A new national survey finds parents are happy with their schools, they believe their children are on track, and they feel the most important factor is their own accountability for their children doing well in school. Teachers and districts should rejoice.

Hart Research Associates, an opinion research firm that counts teachers’ unions among its clients, partnered with Learning Heroes (a nonprofit helping parents understand pathways to college success), the National PTA, the National Urban League, NCLR, and UNCF to pose questions online to 1,374 parents and guardians of K-8 public school students in Colorado, Illinois, and Louisiana.”

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By Keshia Clukey | Politico New York

“ALBANY — A majority of the state’s public school districts have put in place or have submitted their teacher and principal evaluation plans for approval, less than a month after lawmakers agreed to extend the deadline through December.

‘Districts and local unions have made significant progress over the last few months,’ said Carl Korn, spokesman for New York State United Teachers, the largest teachers union in the state. ‘The additional time is needed in some cases, but our understanding is that in many places what remains is the dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s on agreements.'”

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By Emily Deruy | The Atlantic

“Hillary Clinton used her address at the National Education Association’s annual meeting as an easy opportunity to criticize Trump for failing to support students. Her attempt to distance herself just enough from President Obama to attract teachers, but not so much as to alienate his supporters, proved a more challenging balancing act.

Speaking to more than 7,000 members of the largest labor union in the United States, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said, ‘It is time to stop focusing on, quote, failing schools. Let’s focus on all our great schools, too.’ Standardized testing, Clinton added, should go back to its “original purpose” of helping teachers and parents figure out which kids needs support.”

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By Lauren Camera | U.S. News & World Report

“It’s becoming more difficult for schools to accurately gauge the number of poor students they enroll – an important metric that’s used for everything from doling out federal aid to tracking academic performance and measuring achievement gaps.

For decades, schools have defined low-income students as those who enroll in the National School Lunch Program, which provides free- and reduced-priced lunch to eligible kids – those whose families below 185 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $45,000 for a family of four.”

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Ben Chapman | New York Daily News

“An impressive 45 city high schools managed above-average graduation rates in 2015, but still failed to prepare many students for college, a report by the reform group StudentsFirstNY shows.

The report employs city data to identify dozens of high schools that posted grad rates above the city’s record average of 70% set in 2015, but college readiness rates lower than 20%.

The city schools’ college readiness benchmarks are far more strenuous than the requirements for earning a diploma and are designed to set a standard of education to enable students to succeed in college.”

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Louis Freedberg | EdSource

“In one of the last acts of the current term, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition from plaintiffs in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association to rehear the case that the court had already ruled on in a 4-4-opinion in March.

The lawsuit sought to eliminate ‘agency fees’ that require teachers to pay a portion of union dues. If the plaintiffs – Rebecca Friedrichs and nine other California teachers – had won, it could have inflicted a potentially devastating financial blow against the CTA, and by extension all public employee unions.

The split opinion, which came about as a result of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, represented a major victory for the CTA and public employee unions. It kept the court’s earlier decision, requiring mandatory fees, intact.”

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