Three to read which give some insight into the state of school governance

•  First up, do read Matt Barnum in the Wall Street Journal on the effort to desegregate districts. But don't call it busing (...sigh. Such a terrible understanding we have of busing)
  'Though it comes pretty far in, I thought this part was really key:
  

  Advocates now emphasize voluntary strategies to achieve integration, rather than mandatory cross-district busing, an approach that can “generate enormous amounts of public opposition,” said R. Shep Melnick, a political scientist at Boston College. 

  Gary Stein, a retired New Jersey Supreme Court justice who led the suit in that state, said plaintiffs are seeking to create new magnet schools to attract white families into urban districts and to allow students in urban areas to transfer to suburban school. 

  “We don’t think that forced busing and countywide school districts are options that at the moment are politically palatable,” he said.

• Turns out that those pushing for state funds to be available for homeschoolers may have just triggered a pushback on what has been a few decades long effort to dismantle state oversight.
  

  ...home-school advocates are also facing pressure from an unlikely source: the school-choice movement, which pushes for families’ access to tax dollars for private education. Although both movements believe public schools are failing America’s children, school-choice advocates are more open to accountability measures, such as standardized tests, in exchange for public funding.
  
  After years of pushing vouchers for private-school tuition, those advocates are now championing more flexible spending accounts that could be used by home-schoolers, too. But the proposals have divided America’s home educators, with many arguing that accepting government money and oversight is a surrender of the liberties the movement worked for 40 years to achieve.

• And speaking of school funding, the push to create a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma gets a close look in this Politico piece.
  

  Behind the effort to change the law are Christian conservative groups and legal teams who, over the past decade, have been beneficiaries of the billion-dollar network of nonprofits largely built by [Leonard] Leo, the Federalist Society co-chairman.