There wasn’t much press coverage statewide of a recent big decision by the state Senate – all but one of its 62 members voted for a bill to eliminate school property taxes.

What?! Isn’t this a huge deal? School property taxes are the bane of many a homeowner, and the Senate wants to get rid of them. Shouldn’t that be front-page news from Buffalo to Long Island?

It seems many in the Capitol press corps chose to let this story go by because the legislation is what’s known in Albany parlance as a “one-house bill.” That is, it doesn’t have a sponsor in the other house (the Assembly, in this case), and it’s not going anywhere, practically speaking.

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Nearly half of schools in New York were recently recognized by the state Education Department as high performers. Why that was so was not immediately clear from the news coverage of the event.

Most of the stories repeated the language from the Ed Department’s news release. The schools were designated, they said, “for meeting all applicable state standards and showing adequate yearly progress in English and math for two years.”

OK, but what are the state standards, and what constitutes “adequate yearly progress”? I decided to find out. Now I understand why the reporters didn’t bother trying to explain the answers in the space allotted by their newspapers.

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