Sixteen-year-old Kiera Wilmot is accused of mixing housing chemicals in a small water bottle at Bartow High School, causing the cap to fly off and produce a bit of smoke. The experiment was conducted outdoors, no property was damaged, and no one was injured.

Not long after Wilmot’s experiment, authorities arrested her and charged her with “possession/discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device,” according to WTSP-TV. The school district proceeded to expel Wilmot for handling the “dangerous weapon,” also known as a water bottle. She will have to complete her high school education through an expulsion program.

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It’s not just that rich kids do better in school than poor kids.  That’s an old problem.

What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.

Moreover, these growing differences show up in college access and completion.

…the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

…15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.

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And the next day, the faculty shepherded the entire student body into the gym to cheer for the students to "Do your best" and sing, to the tune of "Ghostbusters," that they were "test crushers."

The rally may have been a well-intentioned attempt to defuse students' pre-test jitters. A school administrator later told me, "It wasn't to further promote testing. It was just about increasing confidence." Our principal echoed the sentiment, saying, "We did a very intense test prep this year. We recognize that our kids were saturated and starting to feel overload. The kids seemed like they needed the let loose." And, she noted, "The idea of bringing a group together to garner enthusiasm is something we do all the time."

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In an interview on NBC, Jindal, a Republican, said: “Bottom line, at the end of the day, we want our kids to be exposed to the best facts. Let’s teach them about the big bang theory, let’s teach them about evolution - I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that people, some people, have these beliefs as well, let’s teach them about ‘intelligent design.’”

He added that students should be allowed to question “controversial issues” like climate change and global warming. “What are we scared of?”

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According to the Times Union:

Students were asked to watch and read Nazi propaganda, then pretend their teacher was a Nazi government official who needed to be convinced of their loyalty. In five paragraphs, they were required to prove that Jews were the source of Germany's problems.

The assignment upset a number of students and families, prompting an apology from Albany High School Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, who chalked the controversy up to a misunderstanding about academic intent.

"I would apologize to our families," she told the Times Union. "I don't believe there was malice or intent to cause any insensitivities to our families of Jewish faith."

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Awful. All of it.

But there are good stories out there, too. Young people who are doing amazing things in the world, supporting one another, challenging injustice and generally proving that the violent, hateful assholes grabbing headlines right now don't represent their generation. (Assholes rarely do.)

A roundup of some stories that more people should be talking about this week.

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My guess is that even the original Big Brother, "1984's" all-seeing dictator of Oceania, justified his surveillance as in service of the greater good. So it's not all that reassuring to hear that CourseSmart's product is made to be used with the best of intentions, even if it's entirely understandable that professors might be eager for better data measuring how students are "engaging" with their textbooks. In the context of our current digital lives, in which everything we do is measured and recorded and sliced and diced, CourseSmart seems like just one more brick in the panopticonic wall. One also has to wonder, how do such strategies fit into the larger trends remaking education?

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Unlike Scott Turow, I always wanted to be a lawyer. Once I entered law school in 1976, it never occurred to me that using my JD to earn a living would be a significant challenge, or that my student loans from college and law school—roughly $50,000 in 2012 dollars—would be anything other than a minor inconvenience. I’d heard stories about unemployed lawyers driving taxicabs, but they were irrelevant to the life I’d planned. In that respect, I was similar to most of today’s prelaw students, who are convinced that bad things happen only to someone else. The difference is that the current prospects for law graduates are far worse than my contemporaries’ and mine ever were. Over the past two decades, the situation has deteriorated as student enrollments have grown to outpace the number of available new legal jobs by almost two to one. Deans who are determined to fill their classrooms have exploited prospective students who depend on federal student loan money to pay tuition. The result has been an unsustainable bubble.

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As stunning new data from the Center for Disease Control this week reveals, 6.4 million children between the ages 4 through 17 has received a diagnosis of ADHD. That's nearly 11 percent of all school aged children, and one in five boys. A full two-thirds of them are on prescription medication. And if you think that sounds like a lot, just wait. The American Psychiatric Association is currently gearing up to broaden the definition of the condition, which will qualify even more kids for diagnosis. And with it, prepare for considerably more kids on meds. CDC director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden noted this week that "Unfortunately, [prescription] misuse appears to be growing at an alarming rate."

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According to a report from the Times-News, four parents complained to school officials after learning that McDaniel explained the biology of an orgasm and used the word "vagina" during a lesson on human reproduction in his sophomore science class.

A disciplinary letter from the Idaho State Department of Education also accused McDaniels of showing a video clip in class depicting an infection of genital herpes and teaching about different forms of birth control. The letter also alleges that McDaniels told inappropriate jokes in class.

McDaniel also found himself in hot water for asking his students to write a critical response paper on climate change after showing them "An Inconvenient Truth."

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He frames the immigrant debate with what he calls the "Superman Question":"Superman comes, lands in America==he's one of these kids," he poses to Stephen Colbert. "He's illegal...and you've got to decide what we're going to do with Superman."

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Why do this? Easy: because so much research shows how important it is, especially for kids from less-advantaged households, to get the cognitive boost that quality early-learning programs provide.  For a readable review of a broad literature in support of that claim, see here.  But I can assure you that experts from left, right and middle agree on this.

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High school activists Sarah Noone and Adam Pratt think the law promotes anti-gay bullying, and a bipartisan team in the state legislature may help them in their effort to repeal it -- but for very different reasons.

State Rep. Patricia Todd, a Democrat and Alabama’s first openly gay state legislator, thinks the law is offensive and wants sex education requirements to be decided by educators. But State Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin, a Republican and social conservative who may co-sponsor the repeal effort, just doesn't want schools teaching students about sex, period.

As reported by the Anniston Star:

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“Overall,” the scholars wrote, “the Scandinavians emerged as the best informed, averaging 62–67 percent correct responses, the British were relatively close behind with 59 percent, and the Americans lagging in the rear with 40 percent.” We didn't fare much better when it came to domestic stories.

Widespread ignorance of objective reality poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance.

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To answer this question, one obvious place to start is school textbooks. I looked at several of them, and was happily surprised. The books present a fairly complex and balanced view of the war in Iraq, avoiding the falsehoods and sugarcoating that has so often marred American history instruction. But textbooks only tell part of the story.

Just as important is what is actually emphasized in the classrooms, and the ability of teachers to engage in real inquiry. Unfortunately, a combination of school policies and judicial decisions have made it so that many kids learn little or nothing about what we have done in Iraq, or why we have done it.

I’m a professor of education and history, and wrote a book examining conflicts over history in American public schools. But for me, this probe is more than theoretical: My daughter is an 11th grader in a suburban public high school, where she takes Advanced Placement U.S. History.

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The Civil War is like a mountain range that guards all roads into the South: you can’t go there without encountering it. Specifically, you can’t go there without addressing a question that may seem as if it shouldn’t even be a question—to wit: what caused the war? One hundred and fifty years after the event, Americans—at least the vast majority who toil outside academia—still can’t agree. Evidence of this crops up all the time, often in the form of a legal dispute over a display of the Confederate flag. (As I write, there are two such cases pending—one in Oregon and the other in Florida, making this an average news week.) Another common forum is the classroom. But it’s not always about the Stars and Bars. In 2010, for instance, Texas school officials made the news by insisting that Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address be given equal prominence with Abraham Lincoln’s in that state’s social studies curriculum. The following year, Virginia school officials were chagrined to learn that one of their state-adopted textbooks was teaching fourth graders that thousands of loyal slaves took up arms for the confederacy.

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Clinton and the Center for Green Schools urged a Government Accountability Office assessment on what it would take to get school buildings up to date to help students learn, keep teachers healthy and put workers back on the jobs. The last such report, issued in 1995 during the Clinton administration, estimated it would take $112 billion to bring the schools into good repair and did not include the need for new buildings to accommodate the growing number of students.

The Center for Green Schools' researchers reviewed spending and estimates schools spent $211 billion on upkeep between 1995 and 2008. During that same time, schools should have spent some $482 billion, the group calculated based on a formula included in the most recent GAO study.

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You know how it goes: The pervasive media mythology tells us that the fight over the schoolhouse is supposedly a battle between greedy self-interested teachers who don't care about children and benevolent billionaire "reformers" whose political activism is solely focused on the welfare of kids. Epitomizing the media narrative, the Wall Street Journal casts the latter in sanitized terms, reimagining the billionaires as philanthropic altruists "pushing for big changes they say will improve public schools."

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The pitch always seems so friendly and flattering. Someone out there on the Web has noticed that you are interested in a particular topic. It could be the digital divide, or climate change, or Elon Musk, or even the Oxford Comma. It could be pinned to the news of the day or something that you might have blogged about five years ago. It could seem completely random.

But the pitch itself rarely varies. "Allison" or "Alexandra" or "Tony" represents a team of designers and researchers that has created an "infographic" that they'd love to "share" with you. Score!

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