To summarize: What should schools focus on first? Food, health care, and books. Not on new standards and tests.

we can protect our children from poverty by feeding them, providing them with health care, a clean environment and school classrooms and libraries filled with books.

Almost anything you read about men in teaching talks about how there is an assumption that women are more nurturing and therefore better suited to teaching. Horace Mann would be so proud.

, Bill Gates says that state budgets are riddled with accounting tricks that disguise the true cost of health care and pensions and weighted with worsening deficits -- with the financing of education at the losing end.

The report suggested that Wal-Mart saves about $3 million annually from challenging property tax bills, a small sum compared with the company’s revenue, nearly $1 billion a day.

Schools as we know them were never designed to level the playing field—but at their best to raise the floor for all. Public schooling wasn't until recently even designed to include people of color or most women and poor people beyond grammar school.

There is no “better” gender. Any variation between genders is far outweighed by variation within genders. So women are not better suited to modeling moral behavior.

It should not be the goal of schooling, because were we to actually succeed at graduating a generation that all passed their No Child Left Behind tests and were all employed, we would find that most of them would perpetuate, and perhaps even escalate, the systemic problems we face.

An African-American single mother of two from Akron, Ohio, was sentenced to two concurrent five-year prison sentences for a felony conviction of "falsifying documents" so that her two daughters could attend public school in the mostly white Copley Township outside Akron. The five-year sentences were suspended, but Kelley Williams-Bolar was ordered to spend 10 days in prison and perform 80 hours of community service afterward for the "crime" of sending her children to the Copley schools by using her the address of her father, a resident of Copley. Williams-Bolar and her father Edward Williams were also charged with grand theft for "stealing" $30,500, the cost of "out of district" tuition for the two children for two years. The jury couldn't agree that the two engaged in theft, but they did convict Williams-Bolar on the fraud charge. Judge Patricia Cosgrove reduced the sentence, but insisted that Williams-Bolar serve some time so as not to "demean the seriousness" of the "crime." But what exactly is the crime?

A new study says that self-control makes the difference between getting a good job or going to jail — and we learn it in preschool.

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

Having 25 or 28 kids in a high school to a class maybe we'll have to have 35," Veilleux said.

In an effort to help reduce the city of Detroit’s $327 million budget deficit, half of its public schools will close, resulting in classrooms bursting with as many as 60 students.