A little over a week ago, we posted a story calling for submissions from teachers, administrators, and aides working in America's public schools. The post itself received over 1,000 comments and my inbox was backed up with hundreds of emails from teachers who wanted to share not just horror stories but successes, too. Many told me they found the job fulfilling but the system broken, that the misconceptions about what they do were not only tiring but prohibitive. The comments section of the post had a fair number of non-teaching dissenters.

A gym teacher has been put on leave and charged with causing injury to a child after he tried to drag a 14-year-old girl into a swimming pool while she screamed and struggled to keep her swimsuit top from falling off. Another student caught everything on video.

Last month, an issue of TIME magazine hit newsstands with the grabby cover headline "Rotten Apples." The article looks at Silicon Valley's controversial involvement in bringing down teacher tenure in California—another in the pile of articles written about privatizing funds for public schools, encouraging the growth of charters, and instituting proposed fixes for America's broken school system that require not only budget cuts in high-risk communities but private financing elsewhere.

A Spanish teacher at a Connecticut high school was pulled out of class in handcuffs with very little explanation last week, and a local news station is reporting he showed up to class visibly drunk and pissed his pants in front of students.

A teacher at an English secondary school downloaded a teenage student's bikini photo from Facebook and displayed it at an assembly to teach students about the dangers of social networking. Dangers like, apparently, one of your teachers finding your photos and using them to embarrass you in front of 100 classmates.

The student loan crisis in the U.S. would be bad enough without for-profit colleges whose entire business model relies on convincing the people most desperate for an education to sign up for lifelong debt. John Oliver picked apart some of their most horrendous practices on Sunday's Last Week Tonight.

Nathan Deal, the conservative Georgia governor who's in a tight re-election race against a grandson of Jimmy Carter, suffered a misstep Tuesday when he mistakenly assumed a Hispanic student speaking to him at the University of Georgia was an undocumented immigrant.

The American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends that middle and high schools begin their day no earlier than 8:30 a.m. to allow for adequate rest for teens. The correct answer to "What time should school start?" is "whenever the poor teachers want."

You may have noticed that we have a school shooting problem. Well, not according to the NRA. But if we did have a school shooting problem, the NRA has a plan: Create "gun-required zones" and gun-welfare programs, and make weapons training "necessary to advance to the next grade" for Sally and Timmy.

Has your child had trouble at school? Have you tried tutoring, extra homework time, and everything else you can think of, with little improvement? Relax. According to the latest research, your kid's fate is already sealed.

"[O]f course, most elites didn't go to state schools," writes Matt Phillips on Quartz. His subject is the debate over college debt and whether or not it's a big deal—in his estimation, the complaints about heavy individual educational debt demonstrate the narcissism of "a vocal, college-educated group" that "dominates the mediascape."

Sally Atwater is the widow of the Republican Party's most ferocious, hated political fixer. She's running to be in charge of South Carolina's education policy. If votes were awkward right-wing radio interviews on sex ed that turned adversarial, this woman would win in a landslide.

In fairness, the state's schools have been preparing for this day for a long time.

A new report finds that one in six teachers in big-city school districts are "chronically absent," missing more than 18 days of school per year. When you think about who they work with, it's hard to blame them.

With the close of the academic year, there are now no traditional public schools in New Orleans. The state-run school district is replacing them all with charter schools. That should fix everything.

At the same time as 20,000 students gathered for a vigil honoring the victims of last week's mass shooting, cops seized 7 guns and about 1,000 rounds of ammunition from a 21-year-old Santa Barbara student who nearly shot a neighbor through the wall of his apartment.

A Victoria, Australia mom is upset after a teacher shaved her teen daughter's armpits in class, in front of two other girls. The school says it's just part of the curriculum.

A senior at Duke University who was banned from graduating after a school panel found him responsible for raping an "emotional" classmate has filed suit to get his degree so he can accept a "prestigious position" offered to him by a firm on Wall Street.

Is getting a college degree "worth it?" Yes, economically speaking, statistics show that getting a college degree is "worth it." But is it "worth it" by other, less materialist measures?

The New York City Department of Education is sending "Fitnessgrams" home with 870,000 students, declaring where they fall on a scale from underweight to obese. Kids aren't supposed to look at the notes, which are based on BMI calculations from last November, but of course they're opening the letters and finding out the school district thinks they're fat.