Best back to school video by a teacher I've seen

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Part 2:

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Wild, farcical story about lacrosse parents in Massachusetts trying to prevent a game forfeiture

Amazing news coming out of Massachusetts this week, I've been riveted to this incredibly stupid drama. A few seniors on the Ipswitch lacrosse team were photographed holding cigars at their graduation (they were 18yo seniors), which was a violation of the no tobacco policy for the…

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) June 12, 2026

CBS, ABC. (ABC posted photos of the students (maybe they're all adults?) and CBS names one of the parents)

Cal Poly SLO graduates will have their names read by Mortal Kombat's "Finish him" voice actor

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Funny paragraph way down in the article "The shocking budget disaster hitting one of L.A.'s ritziest school districts."

L.A. Material looks at the $6.5 million budget hole for Manhattan Beach's public schools. Here's a taste of the first several paragraphs:

The problem, according to parents and administrators: a change more than a decade ago in the way California allocates its state education money. The move was intended to help disadvantaged children but has inadvertently pummeled districts where families have more means

...

“We do understand the equity model,” said ... a parent and board member of the Manhattan Beach Education Fund. “And we do understand that we’re a very fortunate, privileged community and that we have the wherewithal to privately fundraise … But when we’re fundraising so hard and we can’t even pay to have enough math teachers and English teachers so that our kids won’t have 47 kids in a class?

Keep reading:

Mira Costa High School looks like a glimmering college campus. An $18 million Olympic-sized swimming pool is in the works to complement the school’s $39 million athletic center, opened in 2021. 

Universities are trying to keep secret how much money is being spent on sports

NYT:

One of the most common questions among college sports fans is also one of the hardest to answer.

How much are players getting paid?

The answer is unverifiable because programs treat revenue-sharing documents as literal state secrets.

...

Public schools that receive public money generally make their budgets public. Online databases can show you the salary of a janitor at UMass ($44,000) or a surgery professor at Florida ($1.35 million). A records request can get you the recruiting budget for North Carolina football ($2.6 million), food expenses for Houston men’s basketball ($504,000) or Lane Kiffin’s contract at LSU.

But player compensation has been a black box.

One school in the news:

The University of Kansas said "times have changed" and the university will now help financially support KU Athletics, according to a statement Tuesday from the chancellor's office.

...

After years of KU Athletics transferring roughly $15 million annually to the university's general fund, KU said it will now help fund student-athlete tuition, housing and scholarships.

Getting attention now because:

University of Kansas Chancellor ... and Provost ... addressed Kansas Athletics funding, employee salaries and campus facilities in a statement released Tuesday. 

...

Results showed that a majority of the 2,012 respondents, about 80%, expressed “no confidence” 

"The Water Polo Scandal That Rocked LA’s Most Elite Private School"

Repugnant facts about Harvard-Westlake, but Vanity Fair starts the article by describing the villain as having "big alpha energy." The Post has already written about it twice.

"Families are delaying high school so their sons can get bigger, stronger and more recruitable"

WSJ:

Families are turning to consultants like ... a Virginia private school counselor with a sideline as a “reclass specialist.”

...

“The interest in doing it for athletic reasons has gone vertical over the last decade,” said ... an administrator at the Cardigan Mountain School, an $80,000-a-year New Hampshire junior boarding school where boys repeating eighth grade make up the largest cohort of new students. 

...

Sixty other boys are repeating a grade at the same academy, The Togethership, where coursework includes throwing mechanics, game film review and nutrition along with traditional subjects such as Algebra and English.

...

In the prep sports mecca of Southern California, at least 15 schools and academies now advertise reclassification for eighth-graders. Orange County’s largest public school district, Capistrano Unified, is rolling out its own taxpayer-funded athletic holdback year this fall.

How a middle-school sports program called Core Prep Academy became a feeder to elite Los Angeles high schools

Town and Country:

Most parents have never heard of Core Prep Academy, which was founded in 2015 by Todd Wilson, an NBA trainer slash unofficial sports influencer whose Instagram handle is Toddhasaplan (19.2K followers). But it feeds into an uber-striving youth sports culture where just attending practice a few days a week no longer cuts it

After School:

Between 40-50% of Core Prep kids reclassify (i.e. repeat a grade) to gain an extra year of physical and competitive maturity before high school, a practice Wilson says has lost any stigma and now “signals a proactive flex by parents.”

"Florida State reports $437 million in athletics-related debt in 2025"

"All told, Florida State University reported $617 million in institutional debt."

The University of Alabama "allows its debit-style Bama Cash cards to be used at the local medspa for lip flips and filler"

From this grim article, highlighted in the After School newsletter. (A list of locations that accept the cash cards.) 

USC says its deficit is more than $200 million

LAT:

“experiencing significant shifts in federal support” for its research and other programs

...

USC’s expenses have “significantly outpaced” its revenue for several years.

...

In interviews, two university employees acknowledged how grave the federal funding losses could be — but they also cited several pricey projects that they believe have hurt USC’s finances. Those endeavors include the construction of the Bloom Football Performance Center, which broke ground in November; the installation of enhanced security measures in the aftermath of spring 2024 protests over Israel’s war in Gaza; and the opening of the university’s Capital Campus in Washington, D.C., in 2023.

Football team has gotten worse every season under Lincoln Riley:

7-6

8-5

11-3 (with terrible bowl loss) 

Allegations that there were years of warnings that the San Diego Unified School Superintendent had engaged in multiple acts of sexual misconduct

NBC has a long article on the blame game.

The following month, the district received another letter, this one signed by a group of anonymous school principals. They accused [the superintendent] of sexually harassing women he supervised and exchanging sex for promotions and job security.

The district neither investigated nor shared the hotline report, nor the principals’ letter, with the school board. 

...

“[The superintendent] served this district for 30 years … and it was important to the board to recognize that service,” [the Board president] told us. “And we also needed to communicate that he was no longer fit to serve, and that it was no longer in the best interest of the district to move forward with him as superintendent. Both of those things were true to the board.”

Southern California high school students marched off campus for the second time this week demanding answers as to why their principal and vice principal are missing

High school students in Boyle Heights marched off campus today -- demanding answers on why their principal hasn't been at the school for about a month.https://t.co/tfRp9m5SbB pic.twitter.com/yojkLGWJ0S

— KCAL News (@kcalnews) May 31, 2024

CBS (the articles I've seen don't hint as to what's going on, but uniformly indicate the students like the principal):

Students say it's been about a month since Principal ... has inexplicably been gone, and they want to know what happened, and they want him back in time for graduation to sign diplomas.

In a student-written official list of demands, they say the vice principal has also not been at the school.

Whistleblower learns NBC's voice-masking technique could be defeated

Embedded in my book excerpt today, there's a cautionary tale for journalists about the lengths some people will go to unmask and punish your confidential sources.

Even when the source is a fourth-grade teacher saying we shouldn't bothsides the Holocaust. https://t.co/vhfRH4LpFC pic.twitter.com/TUtwXtn38G

— Mike Hixenbaugh (@Mike_Hixenbaugh) May 9, 2024

Great story about going to trucking school in Texas

By Emily Gogolak for Harper's. Packed with stark numbers and colorful details:

It has also opened the doors to deep managerial surveillance, like cameras that face not only out toward the road but in toward the driver, monitoring their eye movements, and baseball caps that monitor their brain waves.

....

The shortage is, in fact, a retention problem: annual turnover at large fleets in recent years has exceeded 90 percent. ... The median annual pay for a trucker today is just shy of $50,000, which, according to Belzer, is less than half of what truckers were earning in 1980 when adjusting for inflation.

...

Later that day, during lunch, someone dropped off three pit-bull-mix puppies, and Yanis claimed one and carried it around like a baby. She named him Bonito. There was one more up for grabs, dark gray with blue eyes and a white spot on its chest, and it clung to me when I picked it up. Rey looked at us. “Pit bulls make good truck dogs,” he said.

...

To explain my nervousness, I told a few guys about the time in high school when I accidentally drove my mother’s car into our house, pressing on the gas instead of the brakes while trying to ease into the garage and putting a giant crack in the living room wall.

“Oh, that’s your name, that’s your CB handle!” one of them shouted, referring to nicknames truckers use on citizens band radio, a service for short-range communication. “Thru-the-Wall!”

Immediately, Rey came up with an alternative: House Hunter.

University of Arizona president says they wildly miscalculated their budget

From the most detailed write-up I saw about a confrontational meeting with incredulous staff:

The university had initially projected having 156 days of cash on hand for this fiscal year. As it turned out, their model was off by $240 million dollars. Instead, the UA has just 97 days of cash on hand, the new model estimates.

“I did know we were spending money, but I thought we had reserves to spend money on,” [the university president] said. “But this is a big miscalculation.”

...

[The university president] told faculty members that the university is losing money on students who in high school had a GPA between a 3.75 and 4.0 because of the amount of merit money and financial aid they are awarded.

“If you look at the band from 3.75 GPA to 4.0, there are a lot of students here that pay nothing,” he said. “We lose money on every one.”

Athletics has also been a drain on the financial resources of the university, [the university president] told the faculty, most of whom spoke out against the $55 million loan made by the university to the athletic department during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. That money, [the university president] said, has not been paid back “fast enough.”

The deeply strange reason Berkeley students disrupted the game against USC today

I assumed it had to do with the middle east, but not at all--this article goes into salacious detail:

A growing group of UC Berkeley students has been staging a months-long protest campaign demanding that the university bring a suspended Spanish and Portuguese professor back to campus. They’ve shared testimonies highlighting how influential [she] has been both as a mentor and as a leading scholar at a school with few Latinx faculty.

...

But records obtained by KQED paint a troubling picture of what led to [her] suspension. Over three investigations, which looked into behavior that began in 2018 and continued through 2022, the university found [she] had repeatedly harassed, stalked and retaliated against ... an English and Comparative Literature professor at UC Davis, and then violated orders not to contact him.

......

[The Davis professor] has stirred his own share of controversy.

The Chronicle also has a write-up.

Three suicides in seven months at probably L.A.'s most prestigious private high school

A terse write-up, noting the third death. The school had enacted various policy changes after the second, including that grades couldn't drop fourth quarter. Tuition starts at $46,900, not counting substantial fees.

Texas A&M suspended a professor for criticizing the lieutenant governor after the professor was reported by a politically-connected student

Texas Tribune:

The Texas A&M system confirmed the series of phone calls and text messages that led to [the professor]’s investigation was kicked off by [the] Texas Land Commissioner ..., a graduate of UTMB’s medical school. The Tribune confirmed her daughter, a first-year medical student at the time, attended [the professor's] lecture. [The Texas Land Commissioner] served six years in the Texas Senate with [the Lieutenant Governor], who endorsed her run for land commissioner last year, and she recently attended [the Texas A&M Chancellor]’s wedding in May.

...

[The professor] has spent more than two decades as a pharmacist in Japan, Missouri and elsewhere, and has taught college students in Texas for more than a decade. She now teaches at Texas A&M while working as an ambulatory care pharmacy director at a free health clinic in Bryan.

She has helped bring millions of federal research dollars to the university, and last year Texas A&M’s pharmacy school named her the early career researcher of the year.

Philadelphia charter school allegedly manipulated its admission lottery to exclude entire zip codes

Inquirer:

It previously was named a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education.

...

The lottery particularly disadvantaged Black residents.