If you've been wondering when bears would finally wise up and partake in NJ's fine public school system, you can stop: WCBS 2 has video a little bear visiting Ogdensburg Elementary School on Friday. Watch how he crashes through the glass door! more ›

Taking tests has gotten even more soul-crushingly boring for city students. The Post reports that the Department of Education has banned topics like birthdays, poverty, and dinosaurs to avoid angering specific religious groups or making students feel "uncomfortable." No word on whether entire science units on magnets have been scrapped for fear of confusing young Juggalos. more ›

After a long legal battle, the NYC Education Department released individual performance rankings of 18,000 public school teachers yesterday. The data came with a particular caveat to media: “The purpose of these reports is not to look at any individual score in isolation ever,” said the DOE's chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky. “No principal would ever make a decision on this score alone and we would never invite anyone—parents, reporters, principals, teachers—to draw a conclusion based on this score alone.” And of course, that's exactly what the local dailies have been doing. But at least one fun piece of pop culture trivia was revisited because of it: one of those teachers was the inspiration for a character on The Simpsons! And based on the data, he's a terrible teacher. more ›

The Department of Education's Special Commissioner of Investigation found that Queens fifth-grade teacher Melissa Dean "used the students in her class to send handmade holiday greeting cards to her friend, John Coccarelli, who is a convicted felon serving time in the Groveland Correctional Facility in upstate New York." Coccarelli is serving time for a weapons charge and for violating an order of protection... and was once charged—though not convicted—with child pornography possession. Which leads to this finding from the Special Commisisoner: "Dean suggested that the students write personal information on the cards, including their names and addresses, and she printed the name of the student on the back of his or her card." more ›

The parents of a 5-year-old girl are outraged over their daughter's homework assignment, which included spelling exercises for the words as "GUN" and "ROB." NY1 reports that the Flushing family is "demanding answers" after seeing their daughter's lesson when she came home from school today. "She showed me her homework, I look at it and I see the word gun on it. The first thing I thought was oh no no no, I don't want you reading it, I don't want you spelling it. I don't even want you looking at the picture. Trying to keep her away from from violence and she is being drawn to it in her homework, and that's not something I want her to learn," Lawrence Gillman told NY1. more ›

Children: always with the pooping and the peeing, and often at inopportune times, like when Mrs. Warner is trying to educate the rotten bathroom-abusing fifth graders at P.S. 90 on Coney Island! According to an email obtained by Brooklyn Daily, Warner and the school's principal, Greta Hawkins, are fed up with students micturating and defecating whenever their indulgent little bodies want to cut loose. So they've implemented a rewards system where students who demonstrate the most self-control over the course of a week win an array of fabulous prizes, like stickers and pencils! The winners can then use these for fun activities while they recover from their bladder infections. more ›

Earlier this year, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that New York City public schools can prohibit religious worship services from its premises. The group representing the Bronx Household of Faith said it would appeal, and today the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, allowing the earlier ruling to stand. Jane Gordon of the NYC Law Department told the Daily News, "The Court of Appeals correctly upheld the Department of Education's policy not to allow the City's public schools to be used as houses of worship." more ›

After CBS 2 noticed an interesting quote Michael Bloomberg gave regarding education this week (in a hypothetical world, if he could—and he can't—he "would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones") the Mayor's office has been working hard to clarify just what he meant. Luckily, today at the announcement of a new Facebook office, Hizzoner got the chance and turned the tables, blaming the media, Capital reports. "Nothing I've said in Boston I haven't said for the last ten years," Bloomberg said. "I don't know why you have't paid attention." more ›

[Update below] Mayor Bloomberg was apparently full of interesting things to say while talking at MIT this week. Not only did he refer to the NYPD as "my own army" but he also apparently expressed a very, shall we say, interesting view on how he would fix the city's schools in a perfect world: "if I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones." more ›

A NJ mother is extremely unhappy about the hubbub over her middle schooler's suspension, which she believes is related to her child's Confederate Flag clothing. So the next step is obviously threatening a lawsuit: Jane West tells the Times of Trenton that she wants "the school to formally apologize to her daughter, rescind her suspension and grant the teen permission to attend school outside the district." West warns, "If I can’t get those things I’m suing." more ›

PS 361 in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn has been attacked by bedbugs for the 31st time in one year, further evidence that the Department of Education should start declaring "bedbug days" to clear the way for exterminators. more ›

Man, Occupy Wall Street is really going after the youth! Say you're a parent, not quite ready to sign off on a Camp Zuccotti kids sleepover, but you still want Sally to vive la revolution firsthand. No problem! Schools across the city are taking field trips to OWS, where your precious can learn about pepper spray under the watchful eye of a trained educator. more ›

Viki Knox, the Union Township, New Jersey teacher who referred to homosexuality as "a perverted spirit that has existed from the beginning of creation," and a "sin" that "breeds like cancer" on a Facebook thread about her school's LGBT pride month, is at the center of a serious battle over free speech. more ›

Further proof that teachers and Facebook don't mix: A Union Township, New Jersey teacher is being investigated over the homophobic comments she allegedly posted on her Facebook, calling homosexuality "perverted" and criticizing Union High School LGBT month events, reports the Star-Ledger today. more ›

In the US today there are nearly 5.4 million vending machines and almost seven percent of them are located in elementary, middle and high schools. Scary, but even scarier is the fact that until recently most of those machines were not even close to healthy. Not that it really matters? Though school districts across the country are trying to bring healthy vending machines to their hallways, they are finding the same thing that fast food companies have found: People don't go to vending machines for healthy food. more ›

The school year has started again, but classrooms may be lacking in essential supplies. With budget cuts hitting every possible part of city agencies (4,100 teachers jobs were threatened), the NY Times reports on how the "Teacher's Choice" program, which allowed teachers to get reimbursed for getting their classes ready, has been suspended for the foreseeable future. more ›

There's a new New York State education law that's now in effect, and it calls back the frog-freeing scene from E.T. (watch below!). Patrick Kwan at the Humane Society of the U.S. tells us that schools must now notify students of their right to refuse to dissect animals without being penalized. The HSUS and the Humane Society of New York are making sure that schools now abide by the new provision in the state’s humane education law. more ›

We're short on evidence, but a hunch tells us that middle school students aren't their sharpest during the days leading up till the last day of school on the 27th. This hasn't stopped a few parents of graduating 8th-graders from complaining that their children aren't learning anything, despite it legally being summer when listening to anyone over the age of 15 is 100% optional. "It's a system-wide problem," one Queens parent tells the Daily News, presumably referring to the innate human desire to be released from the fluorescent-lit bondage that they will endure long into adulthood. more ›

Though the school year ends on June 28th this year, probably not a single student is mentally there by this point. So what's the diff that officials at The School for International Studies told teachers to let their students skip the last week of classes? more ›

What if the real reason your kid hasn't had any art classes, or if his classroom has 40 people jammed into it, is just a big misunderstanding? City government just made an oopsie with $200 million that it received from the state, specifically for the purpose of backtracking on some dire education cuts, using it to replace part of its contribution to education funding instead of improving the classroom situation. Assemblywoman Cathleen Nolan is now trying to rectify the situation... with a stern letter to Mayor Bloomberg. more ›

It isn't just elementary and middle school students who need lots of remediation, the State Education Department has released a trove of data that paints a disturbing picture of our high school graduates. In New York City just 21 percent of the students who started high school in 2006 graduated last year with test scores which indicate they ready for higher education. more ›

Forget bake sales (they're illegal anyway), when you've got Madonna as a mom you can raise funds for your school in a much more fashionable (and low-calorie) way: by raiding her closet! Madonna has donated a pair of her Chanel boots to her daughter Lourdes's school, the LaGuardia Arts High School in Manhattan. They'll become part of an annual auction to raise money, joining about 100 other items (including a private "sex therapy session"—donated by someone's parent? Embarrassing!). more ›

The 8-year-old boy who brought a loaded gun to his Queens school and sold it to a classmate for $3.50 faces charges of weapons possession. So is his father, Ignacio Galvan, who kept the gun for protection and hid it on a top shelf. According to court papers, Galvan said, "I can't believe my son took it to school. Thank God no one was hurt. It's all my fault." Many agree with him. more ›

An 8-year-old boy took a loaded 9mm pistol to his school in Flushing yesterday and sold it to a third-grade classmate. The deal went down at P.S. 107, and sources tell the Post the gun had its serial numbers scratched off. Everything about the transaction went swimmingly until the buyer, age 9, went home and bragged about the amazing deal to his mother. He reportedly paid just $3 for it! What is going on with the NYC school system; don't they teach kids basic economics anymore? more ›

Homeless woman Tanya McDowell is due in court in Norwalk this morning to facing charges that she illegally enrolled her son in a local elementary school. Educational lobbying groups are planning a news conference in support of McDowell, a single mother with past criminal convictions, for enrolling her five-year-old son in the Norwalk school system under her friend's public housing address, when authorities claim he should have gone to a school in Bridgeport. more ›

The NYPD has a zero-tolerance policy toward students, and hasn't hesitated to cart kids out of school in handcuffs for such offenses as doodling on their desks. But one Queens mother thinks the NYPD went too far when they dragged her 7-year-old son out of his special-ed class in handcuffs. The Daily News reports that Joseph Anderson, a first-grader at P.S. 153 in Maspeth, had been wetting himself throughout the morning on April 13th, and then became upset when he was dyeing Easter eggs and "the color on the egg he was painting didn't look the way he wanted." Yes, it's a sad story. more ›

It seems pretty obvious to us that there are certain professions where one shouldn't under any circumstance try to casually watch or share porn, like say, pediatricians, or school workers. This is what .XXX is for! And yet, it seems like some people just can't help themselves. more ›

Sometimes, we just don't know how good we have it. Even though our new Schools Chancellor has abysmal ratings, our elite public schools aren't diverse and our principals can't remember that students need gym to graduate, the city's public schools are still so hot right now. This school year 298 of public school students weren't city residents, something Bloomberg calls, "one of those problems of success." Maybe the kids just have stage parents. more ›