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Jacksonville public education advocate and freelance writer Julie Delegal has the lead letter today in the Florida Times Union. Delegal provides the numbers on what Florida's two voucher system cost taxpayers and ultimately take from public schools.

Buckle your seat belts and hold on for your life. Teachers and principals, welcome to APPR Airlines flight 2011. Your journey on the 'plane to be built in the air' just took off from New York's Albany airport. This description of the New York teacher and principal evaluation system known as APPR is not my critique of an incomplete and untested evaluation system. Rather, it is the description provided by the state Education Department itself. Across New York State, all of the school and district leaders who evaluate teachers are being pulled out of their schools for mandated, taxpayer-funded training in this APPR teacher and principal evaluation system.

Colorado taxpayers will spend $100 million this year on online schools that are largely failing their elementary and high school students, state education records and interviews with school officials show.

Given the challenges facing American public education today, identifying effective teachers is a more vital task than ever before. A wide body of research shows that teachers are the most important school-based factor related to student achievement. Policymakers and taxpayers want to know what factors create effective teachers-not only for the sake of their own children's educations but also because teacher salary and benefits represent the nation's single largest educational expenditure. And school administrators need to identify teachers who will be successful over the long term before those teachers earn the ironclad job protection of tenure.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has quietly launched an investigation into the school lunch industry, the Daily News has learned. Schneiderman's taxpayer protection bureau is probing food providers that are ripping off New York schools by illegally overcharging for the lunches.

A Philadelphia charter school fighting a unionizing effort is trying to break legal ground by contending that it is not a public school-even though it's funded entirely by taxpayers.

Taxpayers might soon be able to see how private management companies spend the millions they receive from the public to operate public charter schools and how much they profit. A Franklin County judge ruled that White Hat Management Co.-the for-profit firm of Akron businessman and GOP donor David L. Brennan-is a public official when acting as an authorized representative of a public charter school.

No, the headline is not a typo. It's the conclusion of a new study "Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers" by Jason Richwine, senior policy analyst in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation, and Andrew Biggs, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They attempt to show that public school teachers receive compensation far more generous than is widely believed. They cite summers off, job security, and fringe benefits (health insurance etc.) that make "total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels, equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year." Ordinarily, I wouldn't bother to comment about the study because none of it says anything that is really new. But because the media is giving it big play, I can't let the facts cited slide by.

For as long as I've been mayor of this township, I have been clear and absolute with regard to my feelings about charter schools in Cherry Hill. In 2006, when the Department of Education approved an application for a charter school in our community, I stood against its opening, which would have funneled local taxpayer dollars away from our award-winning public schools.

"Where can 12 billionaires turn if they want education laws changed? That's right, their checkbooks. Between late September and Election Day, a dozen hedge funders donated a combined $4.4 million to New York State politics, mainly to ensure that Governor Andrew Cuomo and his slimy associates will help publicly-funded, privately-run charter schools seep deeper into the state. Led by the likes Paul Tudor Jones II, who recently hosted an education "summit" featuring Cuomo and other corpses, the billionaires see charters as investment windfalls. After all, those pesky teachers unions and their due process rights won't be around to challenge every test and technology tonic sold to New York's taxpayers once the metastasis of charters quickens. "

"In the charter-school sector, this arrangement is known as a "sweeps" contract because nearly all of a school's public dollars 2013 anywhere from 95 to 100 percent 2013 is "swept" into a charter-management company. The contracts are an example of how the charter schools sometimes cede control of public dollars to private companies that have no legal obligation to act in the best interests of the schools or taxpayers."

"Laura Chapman investigated the charter investors' conference on March 10. And this is what she learned: The US Department of Education will be at the charter school "investors" conference, representing you, dear taxpayer, in a scheme to subsidize the financing of charter school facilities that LISC is marketing, along with the Gates and Walton Foundations and a long list of profit seekers investors who get tax credits for doing deals, among other perks."

It was only a few months ago that private school kids, some in ties and smart shirts, others in tartan skirts, filled the Capitol nearly every day to call on lawmakers to pass legislation that would radically reshape the way Pennsylvania delivers and regulates public education.