Amen. Somewhere along the line parents got the idea that school is a service they’ve purchased. But we don’t pay taxes so our kid can go to school; we pay taxes so all kids can go to school. Because our country is better off when it’s full of people educated enough to get jobs and make cool stuff and understand the…

They may be different from your garden variety my-kid-never-feels-consequences helicopter parent. But there is absolutely a liberal corollary to the conservative book banners. They’re the ones leading us to a sea of for-profit charter schools and over-tested kids. One side see schools as overstepping and doing too…

This. It’s not a liberal or conservative thing. It’s a generation of parents who see public education as a service they have purchased for their child, expecting the same level of input they’d have with a guy they hired to mow their lawn — and who often would rather force the world around their child into a false…

University of Oregon Admissions Office.

I purposely read the epilogue from Rot & Ruin to my 8th graders at the beginning of every year, and I always introduce it with, “Brace yourself: this is the zombie book that makes me cry.”

A) In a country that so values the rigors of certification that a bachelors in finance and a few weeks of “methods” courses is enough to qualify you to teacher 2nd grade for America? Yeah, they should have been able to get her an emergency cert. (Though ironically, that is harder because she has actual teaching…

Not to mention that the human will most likely be one of those little angels. School shooting are almost always committed by a student. So not only do your kids get to watch their teacher shoot someone, they also get to watch their teacher shoot a classmate.

Here’s my worst fear: if teachers are expected to shoot the intruder, it’s going to be one of my students.