The Tea Party's war on nasty teachers is spreading: Lawmakers in Idaho yesterday voted to take away collective bargaining rights for public school teachers. We might as well abolish public schools altogether. Privatize everything!

Tera Myers, a science teacher at Parkway North High School in Missouri, sought administrative leave after one of her students found out she'd been a porn actress some 15 years earlier. Sad! And sadder still that it's not the first time it's happened to her:

The Supreme Court yesterday declined to review a federal appeals court ruling against the University of Wisconsin, which said that the school is required to fund religious groups and activities with its student activities budget. You know what that means!

Everyone loved that Emma Watson, cute British pixie, had decided to hole herself up in Providence and spend a few years at Brown. But now the Harry Potter actress and blossoming starlet has announced on her website that she's taking some time off from school to focus on promoting the final Harry Potter movie and to work on other film projects.

Remember a few years back how all the people who care about children went on a whole kick about smaller class sizes? They were all, "Smaller class sizes are the key to educational success," blah blah, passing laws.

Texas is only the most stereotypical of the nine states currently debating whether to allow students to carry guns on college campuses. Students! With guns! At college! In Texas! This is what they are worried about, when it comes to education issues, in Texas. Why?

The School Board in Providence, Rhode Island last night voted to send out termination letters to all 1,926 of the city's public school teachers over a $40-million budget deficit. A Tea Party victory parade is forthcoming.

Each one of the 1,926 teachers working for the Providence School Department was sent a dismissal notice this week, in a move officials say was necessary to deal with a projected deficit of almost $40 million next year.

The Detroit public school system plans to close 70 schools to fill a $327 million budget gap while leaving 72 open. Can't you do something about this, Eminem? Maybe make a few phone calls...? Ugh.

A mother in Tampa put her 15-year-old son on a street corner wearing a sign that read "GPA 1.22...Honk if I need education." Apparently she tried everything to get the kid to get his grades up but nothing worked and shame, she realized, is a very powerful motivator. Maybe we should make this lady Secretary of Education or something.

A California elementary school is launching a six-week pilot program to track their young students like so many wild bobcats. Kids with a lot of absences will be able to volunteer to be tracked with GPS in order to make sure they are in school learning, instead of doing the sex and the gangs out on the street. From the Orange County Register:

Oprah Winfrey's opulent vanity project, the Leadership Academy for Girls in Johannesburg, continues its tragic slide from hope-filled dream-school to dysfunctional hellhole. First there were Winfrey's attempts to cut off her students from their families. Then there was the school matron accused of sexually molesting the girls. And now a 17-year-old student there has concealed her pregnancy and given birth to a child that was found dead "in a plastic bag filled with bloodied clothes."

In Texas, school districts are so low on money that they're selling ads on school buses, thanks to the "largest cuts to public education since World War II." In New York, many school districts are staring down 14% budget cuts, which educators fear will "widen the funding gap between wealthier and poorer school districts." Federal student aid programs are in for multibillion-dollar cuts of their own. And among the parents of children in Manhattan's most exclusive private elementary schools, a separate, but equally pressing, worry: is Emma beating her peers, enough?

Since the days of the Founding Fathers, the American promise to its students has been: we'll warehouse you in crappy schools for twelve years, and then send you to the local community college, to get an associate's degree in "business services" or some other synonym for secretarial work and/ or air conditioning repair work.

Do you care about children, the education of children, or the future of children, and our system for educating them? Then we have bad news for you. Lots of bad news.

James Franco grabs overexposure by the balls, then teabags it, in Columbia College Hollywood's Master Class: Editing James Franco… with James Franco, in which film students edit footage of James Franco under James Franco's tutelage while James Franco films them.

Heartbreaking news from America's schools: children are approaching their teachers to ask what they should do now that their parents are unemployed. How embarrassing. Parents, don't let your kids blow up your spot. Talk to them about their newfound poorness.

The mighty Bay State, home of the fightin' Red Sox and gay divorces, has the smartest, and thus best, kids in the nation. According to standardized test scores at least. And we all know those are always completely reliable!

A couple of second graders were somehow able to perform oral sex on each other while a teacher was in the room at an Oakland school. What industrial chemicals in Oakland's water have mutated seven-year-olds into 15-year-olds?

Poor Comic Sans! The favorite font of administrative assistants and H.R. representatives everywhere is deeply hated by so-called "design nerds." But guess what, design nerds? Poor unpopular Comic Sans might actually have a beneficial use. Because it's so horrifically ugly.