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The urge to meddle in public schools is especially egregious – bills would block use of the Common Core standards and require that slow readers repeat third grade, for example – given that Kansas already has a State Board of Education to make curriculum and policy decisions statewide and local school boards and superintendents to manage districts. Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/2013/02/24/2687025/eagle-editorial-lawmakers-gone.html#storylink=cpy...

Here’s some good news from Rep. Nancy Lusk’s Facebook page. Let’s hope HB 2306 and several other troubling bills stall in the education committee.   “I want to reassure everyone that I do not support HB 2306. I agree with the 99% of climatologists who tell us that climate change is a fact. We do not need to mandate that our high school teachers should teach otherwise. There has been a false impression that the House Education Committee passed HB 2306 out of committee, but that is not so. There has been no mention of any plans for...

“The people of Kansas, in their wisdom, in Amendment 6 to the Kansas Constitution, made clear that education is a fundamental right of all Kansans and charged the legislature with the ‘suitable provision of finance’… Amending the state constitution will never change what is right, and it will certainly not keep people across this state who believe in the fundamental right to a …quality education, who view education as a major economic driver, and who embrace the traditional separation of powers and adherence to constitutional law, from using the courts to fight for what is right for children,...

“Certainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature repugnant to the constitution is void.” Marbury v. Madison, 1803. Really, 1803. Judicial review is not new, nor is it activist. It serves to protect fundamental interests embedded in the constitution even when a temporary majority would choose to subvert them....