Mayor Bloomberg's announcement that he would reduce the number of parking permits for civil servants by 20% has annoyed yet another group. Joining police officers, fire fighters, and other emergency workers are teachers. Teachers union president Randi Weingarten sent Mayor Bloomberg a letter to call the permit limits"deeply disturbing." Weingarten complains that teachers actually have too few permits. United Federation of Teachers vice-president Michael Mulgrew told the Sun that teachers end up making "informal deals"......

While the jury is still out on whether Mayor Bloomberg's improvements to the public school system have really worked, he, along with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and School Chancellor Joel Klein, announced new initiatives to help middle schools improve academic performance and provide better resources for students, parents, and teachers alike - plus $5 million to fund them. The money will go to the 50 lowest-performing middle schools, so they can staff up with......

The police made middle schoolers cry! The NY Times has a great article about the mother lode of electronic gadgets that the cellphone police seized during a visit to Middle School 54 on the Upper West Side. While the police were probably more interested in weapons, since public schools prohibits cellphones and other electronic devices, the NYPD came up big. The Police Department was there to carry out a random sweep for prohibited items,......

City schoolkids are woeful underperformers when it comes to taking a statewide history exam. Just over a quarter proved capable of passing an 8th grade exam that covered the U.S. Constitution, major wars the U.S. has fought in, and native cultures. The passing average for the rest of the state was 55%, which is hardly impressive, but twice as good as city kids' scores. We sympathize with the 2006 test takers, because we tried......

Every once in a while, Gothamist comes across a news story that brings back fond memories. There was one pathological criminal kid in our rural upstate high school. One year we had the bad luck of being assigned a hall locker to which the criminal kid knew the lock combination. He would steal the cookies Gothamist and our lockermate would bring in with our lunches. Only the cookies --the nutritious parts of the lunch were......

Femme Generation is a hard band to describe. Indie-pop-rock-synth dance music is what we would say upon listening to their song "Semper Fi Little Guy". It's more complex than even that however, with listens to their entire catalog. With harmonies, chants and noises we don't even recognize, the music never stays at the same tempo or pace. They can slow it down just as fast as they speed it up. One thing is for sure......

I've just discovered that all the Brooklyn Papers, including my favorite, the Park Slope Paper, are available online as PDFs. Finally! Now I don't have to trudge all the way back into Brooklyn just to read the 78th Precinct's Police Blotter. BrooklynPapers.com. Other small circulation papers I try to read every week? The Columbia Spectator and The Stuyvesant Spectator (best article this week: Students Burnt by Bakesale Rules). Any one have any newspapers to add?......