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The Assembly Republican Caucus released this document providing statistics on "California Private Sector Job Loss vs. State Employee Job Cost." The key numbers are:

Real Facts: California Private Sector Job Loss vs. State Employee Job Cost

12.3%	California Unemployment Rate
2.24M	Californians currently listed as unemployed
-1,298,700	Private sector jobs lost in California since 2005
+38,100	State government jobs added since 2005
$55,000	Average California private sector job salary
$3,600	Average state taxes paid by each private sector employee
$90,000	Average cost to taxpayers to pay salary and benefits for each California government job
25	Private sector jobs it takes to support one government job

I'm on vacation in Colorado visiting some friends this week. While checking out a game store, my wife Grace found a new game Urban Myth and brought it home for us to play. We had a group of 13 people, ages from 12-46. I have to say we had a really fun time. I think what made the game were the "urban myths" that the players had to read. There were some pretty amazing facts/myths. The basic premise of the game is that you read the cards and guess whether situation or "fact" is truth or myth. If you guess right and you're on the right square on the board you get to keep the card, which has a letter on it. With the cards you spell "True" or "Myth" to win. We had to play on teams because the game is designed for up to 6 players and it isn't a short game by any means. It was definitely a fun family game. I'd recommend you take a look at it.

I've noticed that increasingly schools are touting their college-going rates as proof of their students' success. Unfortunately, the percentage of students going to college doesn't really tell you all that much. With a little effort, any student can get accepted into a California Community College, which are prevented by law from turning students away. Even if you limit the statistic to students going to 4-year colleges, it still comes down to whether the student and their parents were willing and able to make the effort to apply to enough institutions to get the student accepted.

I thought this USA Today opinion piece by Virginia high school teacher Patrick Walsh did a good job of explaining some of my concerns.

Three weeks ago, the school system in Alexandria, Va., announced that 80% of the students who were about to graduate from T.C. Williams High School would be going on to college. That's an impressive statistic for a school that is 79% minority, with more than half its kids on a free or reduced-cost lunch program. But when one looks at just what "going on to college" means nowadays — and what it will mean a couple of years from now — we might do well to restrain our applause.

I had great students in my senior English classes this year — kids accepted to Yale, Columbia, the University of Virginia, Wesleyan and other highly competitive colleges and universities. But I also had other seniors whom I still feel guilty about passing, and they, too, are among the 80% whom we boast about going to college.

In fact, it seemed to me that many of our staff beat the bushes to send as many warm bodies as they could on to higher education regardless of whether the students had the skills or motivation to do rudimentary high school work. T.C. Williams is not alone in this drive to move everyone on to college. A new study from the Pew Research Center reports that "freshman enrollment at the nation's 6,100 post-secondary institutions surged by 144,000 students from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008. This 6% increase was the largest in 40 years, and almost three-quarters of it came from minority freshman."

The trend is certainly a boon to the education establishment. High schools like mine, always eager for good press, can boast that they have prepared an ever greater percentage of their charges to move on to the halls of academe. And though colleges blame us in the high schools for sending them kids who are woefully unprepared, they blithely pocket the tuition from such students lest they have to downsize and lay off professors and administrators.

But how much students with low skills, little motivation and lousy study habits are going to profit from going to college is not so clear. Over the past five years, I have seen students who didn't have the skills one would expect of a ninth-grader going off to four-year colleges where fewer than 30% of entering freshman graduate.

That means that 70% of the freshman class is likely to end up not with a diploma but a pile of debt. In these days of tight budgets at every level of government, it's also hard to ignore that these schools are heavily subsidized by the federal government.

While T.C. Williams boasts about the 80% going on to college, it makes no effort to track what happens to these kids.

Somehow I missed this Washington Post opinion piece by first-year, second-career high school teacher Michelle Kerr. Fortunately, Coach Brown mentioned it and so I was able to read it.

I think one of the problems with teacher evaluations is that there is disagreement over whether teaching can actually be measured. I've heard educators insist that great teaching is like the Supreme Court's definition of pornography: It is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. I also think that a key question is whether you're measuring the inputs or the outputs. Is it good teaching if the teacher does and outstanding job of doing everything just right and yet students don't master the material? Is it good teaching if a teachers uses an unorthodox strategy which has great success in getting students to learn the material?

I believe you must look at the output... are the students mastering the material. Good teaching that doesn't achieve that is merely entertaining performance art.

Ms. Kerr's suggestion is that you use student performance to measure good teaching, but she includes four caveats:

1. Teachers be assessed based on only those students with 90 percent or higher attendance.
2. Teachers be allowed to remove disruptive students from their classroom on a day-to-day basis.
3. Students who don't achieve "basic" proficiency in a state test be prohibited from moving forward to the next class in the progression.
4. That teachers be assessed on student improvement, not an absolute standard -- the so-called value-added assessment.

I love this Washington Post story. Apparently, the National Pork Board (which is a government entity) threatened to sue the web site ThinkGeek, because one of their items for sale violated their trademarking of the phrase "the other white meat." It isn't actually a lawsuit... only a cease and desist letter, but it will undoubtably become an Internet classic.

There's just one problem: The meat in question comes from unicorns.

Let's let the lawyers from Faegre & Benson explain: "We are writing you in connection with your activities at the Web site www.thinkgeek.com, wherein you have been marketing a product called 'Radiant Farms Canned Unicorn Meat' using the slogan 'Unicorn -- the new white meat.' A copy of the Web site page is attached for your reference."

It goes on like that for 12 pages. The dry, legal response to an obvious joke has set off an Internet-wide case of the giggles, especially at the Web site targeted by the letter. The offending item was a prank "product launch" posted on April Fool's Day, complete with a picture of very unappealing, but fictional, canned meat.

"It was never our intention to cause a national crisis and misguide American citizens regarding the differences between the pig and the unicorn," deadpanned Scott Kauffman, president and chief executive of Geeknet, the site's parent company. "In fact, ThinkGeek's canned unicorn meat is sparkly, a bit red and not approved by any government entity."

In the end, ThinkGeek isn't afraid:

ThinkGeek says it's confident that its use of the slogan is protected as parody by fair-use laws. Either that, or by the unicorns.