NBA legend and star of the 1996 film Kazaam Shaquille O'Neal received his doctoral degree in education this weekend from Barry University, a private Catholic school located in Miami.

It's School Board meeting time in Duval County, Florida, and you know what that means: a chance to review the disciplinary infractions of teachers in Jacksonville's public school system. This story brings you all of the amazing highlights. What sort of educational rogue's gallery do we have this month, Duval County School Board?

Nerd Coachella TED is bringing its trademark 18-minute Condensed Idea Nuggets™ to schools around the nation, with its new TED-ed platform. They may not know how to do math, but goddamn it our kids are going to learn how to beat a patent troll.

Kids these days don't know about money. The problem, as laid out in this USA Today story, is devastatingly simple: today's high school students can't pass simple tests of financial literacy, even though they will most likely be heavily in debt and facing poor job prospects within a decade. Furthermore, most states don't teach kids anything about the topic.

Teachers have been responding to our request yesterday for more examples of queer questions from New York's English Language Arts test, which was administered last week to third- through eighth-graders across the state. As a follow-up to the infamous talking pineapple, we have a gardening dog.

On Friday, we heard about the nonsensical question involving a talking pineapple that was featured on the New York State English Language Arts test, which was recently administered to grades three through eight. But according to a letter that one angry New York City principal sent to the state education commissioner last week, the whole ELA test is chock full of weird questions that no one understands. Maybe a teacher will leak it to us?

A question about a pineapple and a hare on the New York State eighth-grade reading exam has "stumped even educators" and left students "scratching their heads." State-mandated standardized testing, flawed? Nahhh. I bet Gawker readers could solve this question easy.

¡Hola! That is what the state of Arizona says to its Mexican friends and residents, to distract them from the knife being plunged into their backs at the same moment. The primary problem facing the foreclosure-wracked drought-plagued desert state of Arizona: Mexicans learning things. Arizona will put a stop to that—¡muy rapido!

Could it be that all of the facile Republican rhetoric about college being for snobbish elites who don't want to connect with real, moral America is absolutely true? Yes. Well. In the sense that college makes you more racist. Though Republicans should support that! So much cognitive dissonance today.

The whole field of philosophy is currently engaged in a self-referential argument over whether or not it is a "science," entirely because philosophers believe that being a "science" would get them more respect. Much of academia suffers from the same competitive affliction. Until now.

Now look, before all of you undergrad business majors get all hot under your golf shirt collars and start angrily pounding on your cubicle walls and throwing around your fraternity-branded shot glasses: this is not from me, okay? This is from "The Wall Street Journal," a newspaper that you may have heard of at some point in one of your business classes. (If you haven't, that's okay.) It's not that business majors are bad. Not at all. You're just not as sharp as the other kids.

This qualifies as a bit of a vague, not totally well-established-in-a-statistical-way trend; but the fact that it exists at all for one single person in America is, I believe, newsworthy. Families are taking out tens of thousands of dollars worth of loans in order to pay for private kindergarten for their whelps. That is some fucked up shit.

Add up all the time you spent doing homework. What would you say: a million billion hours? Roughly a trillion bazillion hours doing homework, over the course of your life? Well, as it turns out, it was a complete waste of your time:

The New York Post reports that the New York City department of Education has advised testmakers of 50 not very controversial "controversial" words to avoid when creating city-wide standardized tests. Among those singled out: dancing (except ballet – guess someone hasn't seen Black Swan), death, and politics.

On the same day that we learn that student loan debt in America has passed the $1 trillion mark—meaning that student debt is even worse than we thought just weeks ago—it's reassuring to also learn that this massive, shaky bubble is perched on a firm foundation of complete financial ignorance.

One of the most delightful products of our industrial farming system is "pink slime," aka "lean, finely textured beef," a slurry of ammonia-treated cow byproducts mixed into ground beef as a filler. It's widely used in school lunches because growing children should get three servings of slime-based food per day. But now schools are ridding their cafeterias of pink slime.

We must admit that we will never ever tire of directing your attention to the accumulation of evidence that "law school" is, by and large, a massive fraud perpetrated upon society's most overacquisitive young driftabouts, and one whose effect is to turn out a massive class of highly indebted functionaries whose skill set is not only undeveloped to the point of worthlessness, but that, when developed, is, for the most part, detrimental to the function of justice. The fact that law school's popularity is crumbling away as the magnitude of the systemic scam becomes ever more apparent can only be taken as a redeeming ray of hope for the future of our nation's collective critical thinking skills.

A new study by University College London shows a correlation between literacy problems and health problems. Adults with trouble reading are twice as likely to die within five years as adults with no trouble reading. To be fair, what the study actually focused on was the ability of senior citizens to read and comprehend aspirin instructions.

Not long ago, getting into college involved nothing more than a fair-to-middling G.P.A., an essay about reading to the blind, and your parents' checkbook. Things are a bit more complicated now. College budgets are being slashed. Competition is intense. So intense that kids are starting the "college hunt" in ninth grade. Are you really prepared? You're about to be.

The official fourth grade curriculum in the Los Angeles school system includes one exercise in which students pair up, one of them puts on a blindfold, and the other hands them things, and they describe the things, in order to learn about using all of their senses and whatnot. PERFECTLY REASONABLE. But administrators have now cancelled that exercise for good. Why?