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Telecommunications giant AT&T said it will contribute $250 million to help reverse what many see as a nationwide student dropout crisis.

The initiative, AT&T Aspire, is the company’s response to calls for more corporate philanthropy directed at fixing the nation’s ills, said company officials.

Ken McNeely, president of AT&T California, said the company chose to target student dropouts, because the problem has become a national crisis.

“What this is and what we hope it to be is a real wake-up call,” he said.

AT&T’s investment is one of the largest corporate investments in education in history and expands on a smaller program the company launched in 2008. Grant applicants will find few strings attached: only that they have a dropout-prevention program with a successful track record and, for nonprofits, that they have strong ties to school districts.

Applications that include efforts connected to science, technology, math or engineering will be rated higher, company officials said.

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A late-night, no-contest legislative agreement has brought changes to the states teacher evaluation system a crucial step closer to becoming law.

The deal also heads off protest by the evaluation systems critics, including principals from across the state who had planned to ask legislators to make changes.

Under the agreement, the State Senate and Assembly agreed to approve revisions to the states 2010 teacher evaluation law proposed last month by Gov. Andrew Cuomos office and the states main teachers union, NYSUT. The agreement came during a spree of deals that lawmakers tore through all night and well into this morning, on issues as wide-ranging as the states pension system, congressional redistricting, and a database to store most convicted criminals DNA.

In large part because NYSUT had signed on to the framework, the evaluations legislation was among the least controversial issues before the lawmakers.

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It’s been a few days since the Pasadena High School boys basketball team won the CIF-Southern Section Division 3AAA championship, the fifth in school history, and coach Tim Tucker reflects on the team’s celebration at Anaheim Arena, or lack thereof.

“I thought about it and I was happy, but more relieved,” Tucker said. “It’s hard when people just come out and say you’re supposed to win it or that you shouldn’t be in that division based on your talent. But we don’t have a say in any of that.

“People know that this program doesn’t run from anywhere or from anyone. But to be in that division and expected to win, that was a heavy burden on us because anything short of winning on Saturday would have been a failure.”

Pasadena, which beat teams by an average of a 15-point margin in the playoffs, didn’t jump up and down in or raise their arms in celebration.

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ST. PAUL, Minn. Two legal opinions released by the University of Minnesota Wednesday conclude that regent Steve Sviggum faces a conflict of interest if he continues to hold both his regent’s position and his staff job with the state Senate GOP caucus.

The non-binding opinions come from the university’s general counsel and an outside attorney. They say Sviggum’s job as spokesman for Republican lawmakers creates a clash of interests that can’t be managed. A regents committee will discuss the case Friday.

Sviggum, a Republican, is a former member of the Minnesota Legislature. He has said previously that he does not believe his two positions present a conflict of interest, and has resisted calls for him to step down from one of them. Sviggum said he sees little if any overlap with the two jobs, and that he can recuse himself when necessary.

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An ad campaign for a certain textbook publisher will appear on California State University campuses this spring in the form of memos to faculty, notices in student newspapers, and posters at bookstore counters.

But the promotional messages won’t come from the publisher, Cengage Learning, which sells nearly a quarter million textbooks to CSU students each year. They’ll come from the university itself.

The odd new role for CSU administrators – promoting a company’s products over the next three years – turns out to be the university’s perhaps innovative way of addressing one of higher education’s most vexing dilemmas: sky-high textbook prices.

In exchange for putting the name “Cengage” in front of textbook consumers at the nation’s largest university system, the company will rent its electronic textbooks for 60 percent off the hard-copy price – about a 10 percent drop from what students are now charged for temporary access to e-books.

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