There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school.

For 15 years, Cascade College in Portland, Ore., struggled to find the fuels that any college needs: students to pay tuition, and donors to help build an endowment.

Then came the global economic meltdown, and suddenly that struggle became an impossibility.

Late last month, the small Christian college with just 280 students and $4 million in debt announced it would have to shut down at the end of the current academic year.

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate.

Arlo "updates" Tom Paxton's "I'm Changing My Name To Chrysler" for these times.

Somehow I missed this news item, and maybe you did, too. Then again, perhaps the mainstream media took pains to keep this one quiet, hoping the fire wouldn’t hit the fan.

It seems that in 2003 an honor student in Arizona at Safford Middle School named Savana Redding, an eighth-grader with no disciplinary record, was strip-searched — and I mean really strip-searched, down to the crotch of her panties — in pursuit of nonprescription ibuprofen tablets.

Across the nation, far more schools failed to meet the federal law’s testing targets than in any previous year, according to new state-by-state data. And in California and some other states, the problem traces in part to the fact that officials chose to require only minimal gains in the first years after the law passed and then very rapid annual gains later. One researcher likens it to the balloon payments that can sink homebuyers.

A California appeals court has ruled that homeschooling of children is illegal unless their parents have teaching credentials from the state.

"California is now on the path to being the only state to deny the vast majority of homeschooling parents their fundamental right to teach their own children at home," said Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association.

The court overturned a lower court's finding that homeschooling did not constitute a violation of child welfare laws.

It's a tough lesson for millions of students just now arriving on campus: even if you have a high school diploma, you may not be ready for college.

In fact, a new study calculates, one-third of American college students have to enroll in remedial classes. The bill to colleges and taxpayers for trying to bring them up to speed on material they were supposed to learn in high school comes to between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually.

California schools, required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act to lift more students over a higher academic hurdle this year, instead stumbled and slipped back, as nearly 1,400 fewer schools met test-score targets.

The number of schools making "adequate yearly progress" plunged from 6,488 to 5,113 since last year, according to state educators who released school progress reports Thursday.

The folks responsible for the first Education Olympics are the policy wonks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, D.C. Michael Petrilli, who oversees national education research projects at the institute, apparently caught the Olympic bug and decided to see what would happen if, instead of competing in pole vaulting or in the 400-meter swim relay, Americans competed in academic challenges.

As America's mines, mills, oilfields, and farms become more 'high tech' they will have difficulty with personnel. More than 20% of American workers cannot understand the instructions written in a medical prescription. A further consequence of the skills problem is a slowdown in growth of productivity of the workforce.

At least one group is worried the ankle bracelets will infringe on students’ privacy.

Linda Penn, a Bexar County justice of the peace, said she anticipates that about 50 students from four San Antonio-area school districts — likely to be mostly high schoolers — will wear the anklets during the six-month pilot program announced Friday.

“We are at a critical point in our time where we can either educate or incarcerate,” Penn said, linking truancy with juvenile delinquency and later criminal activity.

American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes "the jury is still out" on evolution.

Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on "The Colbert Report." Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn't actually list the commandments.

This stuff would be funny if it weren't so dangerous.

A school in Texas will force students who don't follow the rules to wear prison-like jumpsuits in a controversial move this coming school year.