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According to the report, 71 percent of fourth-grade teachers surveyed said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers grouped students by ability in 2011, a 40 percent increase since 1996.

Teachers using the practice say it's a necessary strategy to manage large classrooms with varying academic strengths and weaknesses represented among students. They also report that these ability clusters are dynamic and change throughout the year to accomodate students' evolving strengths and struggles, as the New York Times reports:

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It’s as if an entire branch of the federal  government — the branch that’s supposed to deal directly with the nation’s problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law — has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called “sequester” that’s cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation’s poor, and national defense.

The window of opportunity for the President to get anything done is closing rapidly. Even in less partisan times, new initiatives rarely occur after the first year of a second term, when a president inexorably slides toward lame duck status.

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After all, it was illegal even to teach an enslaved person to read in many states; under Jim Crow, literacy tests were used for decades to deny black voters their rights. So no surprise that from Reconstruction to the first black president, the consensus has been clear. The key to "winning the future," in one of President Obama's favorite phrases, is to get educated. "There is no surer path to success in the middle class than a good education," the president declared in his much-discussed speech on the roots of gun violence in black Chicago.

Rarely has that message resounded so much as now, with nearly one in seven black workers still jobless. Those who've found work have moved out of the manufacturing and public sectors, where good jobs were once available without a higher ed degree, and into the low-wage service sector, to which the uncredentialed are now relegated. So while it has become fashionable lately to speculate about middle-class kids abandoning elite colleges for adventures in entrepreneurship, an entirely different trend has been unfolding in black America — people are going back to school in droves.

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As Salon previously reported, Ragan was the sponsor of Tennessee's "Don't Say Gay" bill, a measure that would have banned teachers from discussing sexuality that is not “related to natural human reproduction” in the classroom and would have forced educators and school therapists to “out” students they suspected of being gay to parents or guardians.

StudentsFirst selected Ragan as its 2012 "Reformer of the Year" despite his notorious legislative track record, and stood by him in the face of criticism from education and gay rights advocates once the honor became public. But the group seems to have changed its position thanks to a petition from 11-year-old activist Marcel Neergaard, who shared his own experience of growing up as a gay kid to show Rhee and StudentsFirst why bills like Ragan's hurt students like him.

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In an act of piousness, I did to him only what I would have had him do to me: I Googled his name.

I was met with dozens of pictures: grinning in Confederate flag T-shirts, grinning in “Straight Pride” T-shirts, grinning in mid-interview stills excerpted from the evening news.

He was the founder of the White Student Union. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he would be in my fiction writing class.

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Bryant quickly noted that his remark about working mothers was "controversial" and would get him "a lot of emails," and attempted to clarify that he meant working parents in general: "In today’s society parents are so challenged. They’re working overtime.”

But, contrary to what Bryant may believe, working mothers don't seem to be a problem in Finland, the top-rated country for education. According to 2013 data, more than 70 percent of mothers in Finland work, which is right on par with numbers in the United States. So the problem may have more to do with, say, the American education system, than with women's increasing role as breadwinners, as a report from Stanford University notes:

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What's that, you say? That sounds like a crap idea? Well, too late, folks. They're already in your offspring's hands. This year, children across the country received – often with little discussion or explanation — a cheerfully named FitnessGram telling them the results of a physical fitness assessment test, including a judgment of whether "You have a healthy weight," or you're "underweight," "overweight" or "obese." Surprise, middle-schoolers! Here's a little something else to make your life just that much more awesome.

The current test affects roughly 65,000 public schools in at least 19 states. In New York City alone, over 850,000 students get a FitnessGram every year. My family is lucky – at my seventh-grade daughter's progressive, stick-it-to-the-man school, their teacher recently told the students point-blank the scores were dumb and to feel free to rip them up. And many of the students – at least to outside appearances – dutifully proceeded to simply shrug off the paperwork. "A lot of them laughed," my daughter told me later, "but a few of them were upset, saying, 'It says I'm faaaaaat.'"

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Before getting to the big news, let's review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City's major education announcement this weekend, the "reform" fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher "accountability" is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key -- and deliberate -- omission serves myriad political interests.

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According to NBC12, Herb DeGroft forwarded his colleagues emails featuring images of topless African women and racially loaded references to first lady Michelle Obama. Board members have reported receiving other offensive emails from DeGroft beginning in January 2012.

DeGroft says the emails were meant to be "political" and not racist, and thinks that forwarding offensive emails isn't quite the same thing as originating an offensive email chain, apparently: "None of them I initiated, if you look at them. They were all initiated by somebody else," he told the Daily Press. DeGroft sent the emails in question to Vice Chairman Byron Bailey, who went on to share them with other county staff.

In addition to a 4-to-1 vote by school board members calling on DeGroft to resign, Isle of Wight NAACP Chapter president Dottie Harris and other community members have pressured him to give up his seat and threatened a recall effort against Bailey.

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“If Congress doesn’t act by July 1, federal student loan rates are set to double,” he said.

Obama also called on students to "make their voices heard" and pressure lawmakers to improve upon a House measure that he said fails to "lock in low rates for students next year” and “eliminates safeguards for low-income families.”

Interest rates are currently at 3.4 percent, but, come July 1st, are set to rise to 6.8 percent. The president's proposal would freeze rates as they are, which White House officials say would save more than 7 million young people with student loans thousands of dollars.

But some Republicans believe the president's bid to keep student loan rates low is an effort to "change the subject" from his "growing list of scandals," as the Washington Post reports:

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Until it was struck down in 1987, the state's "Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act" gave equal weight to the Christian creation story and evolutionary science, mandating that teachers "provide insight into both theories in view of the textbooks and other instructional materials available for use in his classroom."

“There’s no good reason to keep an unconstitutional law on the books,” Josh Rosenau, programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), told Eric Dolan at Raw Story. “But since a law which has been struck down is dead letter, the choice to remove it is symbolic, too.”

But the intent behind the legislature's decision to keep the law intact isn't all that symbolic, as NCSE goes on to note in a release on the vote:

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Growing poverty levels among families served by public schools is all the more troubling when considered alongside recent budget cuts for vital education programs, like Title I funding for teaching staff and services at high-poverty schools, after-school programs and summer lunch.

Schools in Topeka, Kan., are among many districts nationwide hurt by the sequestration, as the Associated Press recently reported:

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After noticing the questionnaire dealing with drug and alcohol use had come already printed with each of his student's names, social studies teacher John Dryden delivered a quick lecture on the Fifth Amendment.

"Somebody needs to remind them they have the ability not to incriminate themselves," Dryden told the Daily Herald.

"I made a judgment call. There was no time to ask anyone," he said, adding that he would have taken his concerns directly to school administrators if the survey had been handed out earlier, but that there was no time. Instead, he handed out the survey (and his attendant constitutional warning) to his students and spoke with school officials afterward.

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It’s 2023 -- and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect. They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

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My high school class and I moved like a school of fish: we graduates were capable of going off on our own, in whatever direction we chose, but something demanded we all swim as one, curving, cutting, sashaying together, wiggling our way to college. Except for a few miscreants, we all ended up in college.

In high school, if someone asked me what my “plans” were, I’d click into brainwashed robot mode: my body would become rigid, my pupils would dilate, and in a monotone, I’d recite, “I-will-go-to-the-best-college-I-can-get-into. No-matter-the-cost.” At some point, I’d convinced myself that going to college was what I really wanted to do. So I went to Alfred University, a pricey private college in southern New York. My first year at Alfred would cost me $18,450. Later, I would transfer to a cheaper state school, and my total price tag for higher education: $32,000.

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Semantic infiltration means one undermines one’s own position in negotiations by adopting unknowingly the terms which the adversary “infiltrates.”

As a conservative, Ikle drew most of his examples of semantic infiltration from liberal usages that became mainstream, like “affirmative action” for race- or gender-based preference policies. But in recent years, it is arguably the center-left that has suffered the most from the successful semantic infiltration of public discourse by loaded conservative terminology.

Witness the two terms “the welfare state” and “entitlements.” The right has managed to turn “welfare state,” once a neutral description for a modern system of economic security for individuals, into a pejorative phrase.

An even greater triumph of semantic infiltration by the right has been the universal use of the term “entitlements.” As used by conservatives and liberals alike, “entitlements” usually refers to three social insurance programs — two of them universal (Social Security and Medicare) and one means-tested (Medicaid).

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In Bartow, FL, Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old student was expelled from Bartow High School and arrested for conducting an unapproved chemistry experiment.  She combined some household chemicals in an 8-ounce water bottle and the top popped off, giving off a small explosion.  According to the school principal, Ron Pritchard, "she made a bad choice. ... She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did.”  She was charged with possession of and discharging a weapon on school property.

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