The focus of the save-our-school drama "Won't Back Down" practically assures it will fail to join the ranks of great, or even good, education tales.

About 40 years ago, the once segregated Booker T. Washington Elementary School in Mesa was closed.

Arizona lawmakers have brought a number of education bills to the Legislature this year.

An Valley school district feeling hard the effects of declining enrollment several years ago appointed a committee to examine the situation and make recommendations to the school board about how to deal with it.

Val Vista Academy, a public tuition-free charter school scheduled to open August 2012 in Gilbert, has started construction at the southwest corner of Germann and Val Vista roads.

Education leaders are raising questions about how a proposed plan to give Arizona parents the power to shut down or change a failing school would work — or if it would even make a difference.

State senators voted Monday to let parents of students in low-rated schools force the governing board to shut it down, convert it to a charter school or replace the principal.

This year, BASIS Schools opened a campus in Chandler, the first for the East Valley.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools on Tuesday announced the release of the third annual rankings of state charter school laws across the country - and Arizona's law fell from 11th to 15th.

Gov. Jan Brewer will propose a major revamp of how the state funds schools, a move that could make more cash available for private and parochial schools.

A hurricane swept through Gilbert's Edu-Prize Charter School earlier this month just after a tornado touched down, but students weren't afraid. Instead they sat safely in a Discovery Dome in the school's science lab watching up close as the homes and towns were devastated by the powerful forces of nature.

Has American public education failed Latino families?

State officials are questioning an arrangement in which a private school in Glendale and a Mesa-based public charter-school operator have teamed up to help finance the private school with taxpayer dollars.

The entire point of the charterschool movement is to give parents and students additional choices beyond not-quite-one-size-fits-all district campuses and expensive, fewand-far-between private schools.

No matter how you feel about Arizona’s charter school movement, it can be deemed at least somewhat successful, given the changes in the Mesa Unified School District being attributed to the competition the charters provide.

Monday's front-page story on the East Valley's “Ivy League Dreamers” is a welcome reminder that there is much right about today's younger generation. We can too easily lose sight of that amid the rest of the daily news — much of which isn't very reassuring.

In Arizona's choice-rich educational environment, about 10 percent of all public school students are now enrolled in the state's nearly 500 public charter schools. Yet the state constitution provides for no charter-school representation on the Arizona Board of Education.

Thanks to an excellent charter-school law, a private-school scholarship tax credit, and a renewed commitment by traditional public schools to excel, Arizona parents have many attractive educational options from which to choose.

If there is a clear lesson from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination to date, it is that it’s unwise to predict a final winner until the process is finally done — but hold on.