Etc.

"Reformers" are trying to come up with a scheme to "evaluate" special education teachers even though that would be virtually impossible to implement given the diversity of learners and the fact those with the most profound disabilities actually can't meet anything approaching a benchmark and can easily regress.
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Maybe it will happen in my lifetime the death penalty will be abolished once and for all. Our politicians still support it for fear of being "soft" on crime, but the fact there are just too many wrongful convictions means our system of justice cannot be made foolproof. Once an innocent person is executed, and a few have been, there is no way to right it:

In Texas, Dallas County alone has uncovered 30 wrongful convictions since 2001, the most of any county in the country. Former Texas governor Mark White, a Democrat, said he continues to support the death penalty "only in a select number of cases," yet he believes that a "national reassessment" is now warranted given the stream of recent exonerations.

"I have been a proponent of the death penalty, but convicting people who didn't commit the crime has to stop," White said.

"There is an inherent unfairness in the system," said former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, adding that he was "especially troubled" by mounting numbers of wrongful convictions.

A recent convert to the California anti-death penalty campaign, Garcetti said the current system has become "obscenely expensive" and forces victims to often wait years for death row appeals to run their course. In the past 34 years in California, just 13 people have been executed as part of a system that costs $184 million per year to maintain.
"Replacing capital punishment will give victims legal finality," Garcetti said.

This is a good piece from somebody whose family was involved in expanding the death penalty in California. All it did was create a monstrous boondoggle in taxpayer money.

Look no further than that damned Rodney Alcala. He has had three goddamned trials, all resulting in the death penalty, with the first two convictions overturned on technicalities. If he had just gotten life without parole from the beginning, that would have been the end of it, and his victims' families wouldn't have to face him in court ever again. He's going to die in prison anyway, with no chance of ever getting out. He has been there since 1979.

What a waste of money.

I cannot think of a single turning point in my thinking on the death penalty. My Catholicism teaches me that all life is precious, and that's certainly part of my viewpoint these days. But what resonates more in my mind is Dad's fondness for saying "facts are stubborn things." With hindsight's 20-20 vision and three decades of obstinate data, it's clear to my family that we created a fiscal monster that's taking a human toll on the very people we wanted to protect.

The ineffective legal beast created by California's death penalty laws costs taxpayers more than $100 million annually and ties up the lives of prosecutors and victims who could be moving on to other things.

We thought our 1978 initiative created a system to support victims' families. It didn't. The only people benefiting today are the lawyers who handle expensive appeals and the criminals who are able to keep their cases alive interminably.

The Briggs death penalty law in California simply does not work.

Here is a list of wrongful convictions in death penalty cases.