The stigma around homeschooling is declining. A Gallup poll showed American disapproval of the practice has dropped from 73% in 1985 to 54% in 2001. But unschooling is still very taboo, and it's the topic of this article. An excerpt:

Our friends have no kids, but were curious about our decision not to send Benny to school. They're aware enough to know that homeschooling is no longer (and probably never was) just a bunch of Bible-thumping Seventh Day Adventists who teach their kids at home in order to avoid the heathens at public school. Our friends also understand that parents homeschool their kids in different ways and for different reasons.

Nonetheless, when I used the term "unschooling," they needed an explanation.

This interview with performer and essayist Sandra Tsing Loh asks some hard questions about the American public school system. Even she's in the "media elite" (heh), she couldn't afford to send her children to private school, so she started looking really hard at the public schools in her L.A. neighborhood.

What she discovered was that they were nowhere near as bad as the local news and ignorant horror stories suggested. Loh wrote a book about how she became a convert to public school education, Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting, and explains that if some rich families in every neighborhood would forgo the fancy private schools and pour resources into their corner P.S., it could go a long way to improving education for everyone.

In the new article "No Holding Back: Why I didn't 'redshirt' my kindergarten-age son," Holly Korbey writes about how when she moved to Texas she was pressured to hold her perfectly normal four-year-old back from starting school. Everyone's doing it, parents on the playground told her.

Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, says it's fine for teachers to bring concealed handguns to school, the AP reports. His justification: in the case of a school shooting, it might save lives. Texas isn't the only state struggling with the question of whether or not to let teachers bring guns to school.

Oregon, Nevada, Utah and other states have wrestled with the question of whether arming teachers would pose a risk to students or increase the likelihood that a Columbine-style shooter could be stopped more quickly, saving lives.

In our entire preschool and elementary education, we never had a male teacher, except for gym. So it was surprising to learn that, twenty years later, there are even less male teachers now. In fact, there are less male teachers in America now than there have been at any time in the past forty years.

Men are leaving the teaching profession in droves, and this great article on Babble called "Herland" (part of the Sex and Gender Issue) explains the shameful reasons why, and what an absence of male role models is doing to our kids.

Ask a group of teachers what they think about Bush's "No Child Left Behind" initiative and odds are they'll tell you it's hurt their school and their enjoyment of the job.

Political reporter Kim Mance interviewed a number of educators across the country about how the policy has changed American education, and the results are not pretty. In this informative article for Babble.com, Mance writes:

The many teachers I spoke with for this article unanimously agreed that NCLB's emphasis on testing makes their job harder, more stressful and more frustrating. The major problem? Creating one standard for all children is impossible. The teachers spoke of the limited individual attention they could give students due to the narrow objectives of the all-important federal test scores.

Not one but four teachers at the Helix High charter school in California have allegedly had inappropriate sexual relationships with teenage students in the last couple of years, reports KFMB News 8 in San Diego:

• Former music teacher Frank Palumbo was accused of having sex with a 17-year-old female student and was sentenced to five years probation.
• Ex-band director Jessica Kahal got three years probation after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a 17-year-old male student.

Seventeen girls are pregnant at Gloucester High School, and many of them got that way on purpose, Time magazine reports in a new, read-it-to-believe-it article.

The Time story says the school nurse was deluged with girls asking for pregnancy tests, and that: on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," [Principal] Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.

Well, looks like Port St. Lucie kindergarten teacher Wendy Portillo won't be named Teacher of the Year. According to the Treasure Coast Palm, she handled a difficult child, five-year-old Alex Barton (pictured at right), in what she probably thought was a creative manner:

She encouraged the other children in the class to tell him why they didn't like him (e.g.: he's "disgusting" and "annoying") and then to vote on whether or not he should stay in class (they voted to kick him out, 14-2). And so he was forced to leave!

Why in the world would a teacher hand over control to a classroom of five-year-olds? If she thought he needed to leave the room, why didn't she just take the authority upon herself to send him to the principal rather than handing the decision over to an army of PlayDoh-eaters?

Do you remember those students in high school that used to sit in the back of the class, pass notes, talk, disrupt, and simply not listen to the Chemistry teacher's details about the Periodic Table? The ones that thought Barium was the new chant aimed at opponents during football games? I know...corny, but you get the picture.

It's no mystery that a great number of our students aren't receiving the education they are sent to school for everyday and accordingly, only close to 70% are graduating nationwide. In the state of Georgia the number falls to an astounding 56%. Obviously, these children aren't purely dim-witted or don't have the capacity to learn, they simply don't have the motivation to find interest in school, specifically in math and science as they grow up.

In case you still don't care, the 2001 Hart-Rudman Commission identified the nation's failure in math and science education as the second-biggest threat to our national security. If we don't keep up with the world in education, we won't be participating in the decisions made.

The Learning Makes a Difference Foundation has created the "Learn and Earn" program that provides the kind of motivation that every human can relate to: cash. With its sights set on the Fulton County schools in Georgia, the program focuses on students underperforming in math and science classes by offering them to earn $8/hour in after-school sessions. Coupling the universal language of money with a smaller instructor-to-student ratio of 1 to 10, a majority of the students become tempted for the money, but stay for the teacher interaction so many of our high schools lack.

In its infant 'pilot program' state, the results to this possibly controversial approach to learning are promising, gaining praise from parents that say their child has turned a new leaf. Where some students were once failing a class they are now passing and are interested in the subject matter.

Sounds good for them, but if Joe Slacker gets $8/hour to come do some after school studying after spending the morning daydreaming in class, what motivation is there for the students that had the drive from the beginning? These rewards for bad behavior could create an environment that tells everyone studying is only worth it when it immediately stuffs your pockets. The urge that everyone has for instant gratification could soon be satisfied, taking some students' sights off of the more rewarding route they originally bought into.

The answer has to be discovered somewhere in the middle. In an effort to boost underachievers, the school cannot ignore self-motivated individuals. Obviously, the measly $8/hour for a couple of hours of work isn't going to get any adult concerns taken care of like paying off mortgages, but the goal that is actually achieved is igniting the pilot light in young people's brains that gets them interested in subject matter they were never really told they should or could understand with a little bit of work.

Motivation is the key, and sadly, money is the only factor left in high school students' minds that gets them going. As long as they are not written off and presumed to be lost cases incapable of learning, maybe we can discover the tactics that get them interested. It may take a few dollars to get them in, but once they realize they can succeed, the rest is on the house.

USA Today reports that an Ohio father, Brian Gegner, was sentenced to six months in jail after his daughter failed to get her GED. Two years ago, he was ordered by a judge to make sure his chronically truant daughter, Brittany, passed the exam. She still hasn't, so he's stuck in jail on grounds of contributing to the unruliness or delinquency of a minor.

You can watch a video of the teenager explaining why she should be punished, not her father, here on CBS.

Congress is voting this week on expanding the G.I. Bill dramatically, reports the AP. As you can see in this MTV News report, the costs of education have risen so sharply that a lot of soldiers wind up only getting a small portion of their tuition covered. One Marine reservist got just $282 a month toward his community college education when he returned from Iraq. According to MTV:

The Washington Post has picked up a fascinating little item in the typically rah-rah Harvard magazine 02138. According to the report (scroll down), some of Harvard's most famous professors use assistants to research and in some cases even write large portions of their books. The Post claims:

The funniest -- and most damning -- anecdote in this piece features Charles Ogletree, the Harvard law professor who admitted in 2004 that his book "All Deliberate Speed" contained six paragraphs taken verbatim from a book by a Yale professor named Jack Balkin. Here's how Ogletree explained this error: