Over three days this week, Review-Journal reporter Trevon Milliard and photographer Jeff Scheid told the agonizing and maddening story of former Chaparral High School student James “Bubba” Dukes, a tragically normal boy within the walls of a campus bursting with hope and heartbreak.
The lack of “teacher equity” in education systems across the country — including the Clark County School District — is by design. School districts and teacher unions have long embraced contracts and policies that ensure a steady flow of exceptional, experienced teachers to stable, higher-achieveing, higher-income, less-violent campuses where parents are more involved. Meanwhile, lower-achieving, lower-income, more-violent schools with higher minority enrollment and less parental involvement serve as training grounds for the newly hired — and the last stops for poor teachers who should be fired.
The fate of a chicken-size bird carries huge economic and political stakes across the West. The sage grouse, long a threat to the thriving energy sector, is also a threat to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Americans are fed up with Washington. Poll after poll shows citizen confidence and trust in federal institutions plunging to historically low levels, a degree of unhappiness that threatens the vitality of our democracy.
Free speech, a cornerstone of our nation’s democracy, is supposed to thrive on college and university campuses. Students can best sharpen their critical thinking skills through open, robust debate on any and all ideas.
Spencer Collins is the kind of 9-year-old who’d make any parent proud. In the age of PlayStation and Xbox, he’s a voracious reader, a trait he attributes to his mother, an elementary school teacher. In fact, for Mother’s Day, Spencer, with help from his father and grandfather, built a small bookcase in his front yard, from which friends and neighbors could check out and share books — a gift his mom had said she wanted.
When did the First Amendment become so controversial? The centrist U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously on roughly two-thirds of the 67 cases it decided this term — the greatest share of 9-0 cases in at least 60 years — remains hopelessly divided on some of the country’s bedrock freedoms.
If it wasn’t already obvious that Clark County School District officials want teachers to remain in their union, it is now.
How are we doing, safeguarding those “unalienable Rights” with which we are “endowed by our Creator” — in support of which 56 patriots solemnly pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, 238 years ago?
