Let's face it: Texting is here to stay. The average 13- to 17-year-old sends 2,900 texts a month, according to the market research firm Nielsen. And while it might be a punishable offense in most schools, some teachers say that texting has educational tie-ins and that it can teach positive language skills, the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina reports.

The general thinking is that the more teenagers text, the more likely it is that abbreviations such as OMG (for "Oh my God") or mangled or simplistic syntax will seep into their schoolwork. But educators say those concerns are without merit and are not based on research.

Forward-thinking teachers say the informal writing style that defines text messages can be incorporated into class lessons. And a new study from California State University researchers has found that texting can improve teens' writing in informal essays and many other writing assignments.

Parents might not know how to broach the topic of, say, cell mitosis, but they feel more at ease when talking to their kids about . . . drugs. A new survey from the Intel Corp. has found that parents feel more equipped to talk with their children about drug abuse than about math and science.

According to the nationwide online survey, which polled 561 adults with children ages 5 to 18, 75 percent of parents of teenagers felt comfortable discussing drugs, versus only 52 percent of parents of teenagers who felt comfortable discussing science.

New data in a report by the federal government assert that the approximately $100 billion in funds doled out to education under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 have filled budget gaps and saved 250,000 education jobs, but the nation's governors and school leaders contend that some states are still in dismal fiscal straits.

According to a report recently published by Education Week, states such as Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Michigan, and Florida have been forced to make often painful adjustments to cope with declining revenues, in spite of the nearly $40 billion in stimulus funds appropriated specifically for stabilizing state education budgets.

Last week, 6-year-old Zachary Christie, a student at Downes Elementary School in Newark, Del., decided to bring a camping utensil that can serve as a fork, spoon, bottle opener, and folding knife to school to use at lunch. He had recently joined the Cub Scouts and was excited to use the tool, but when it was handed over to the principal, he received a 45-day suspension in the district's reform school. The school board has since overturned the decision, the Associated Press reports, but the episode could lead the district—and other schools across the country with zero-tolerance policies—to re-evaluate such procedures.

The decision by school officials to suspend Zachary was based on the district's zero-tolerance policy on weapons. Despite protests from Zachary and his family, administrators at the Christina School District initially defended the punishment, saying they had no choice. Last night's unanimous school board vote let Zachary return to school today and reduced the punishment for kindergartners or first graders who take potential weapons to school or commit violent offenses to a suspension ranging from three to five days.

Finally, some good news when it comes to the educational prowess of America's public school students: The results of a recently released national study assert that the achievement gap—or the difference in achievement levels between various subgroups of students—is narrowing between advantaged and disadvantaged students on state reading and math tests.

The findings published in the study, which was conducted by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, show that achievement gaps for minority and low-income students have narrowed across all grade levels and subjects in 74 percent of cases between 2002 and 2008.

Students at more than 350 schools across the country will be working up quite a sweat tomorrow. They will be exercising for 10 hours straight.

But not all at once. In a unique attempt to fight childhood obesity and cuts being made to school physical education programs, elementary, middle, and high schools from New York to Hawaii and Alaska have signed on to a newfangled "fitness relay" event: Each school will have students exercise during a prearranged 15-minute time slot, beginning at 8 a.m. Standard Time. As each short exercise period ends, another school in a different location will pick up where the last school left off, and the pattern will continue for 10 hours, until 3 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. It's being called the first Exercise United States Day.

BusRadio, a controversial radio programming system for school buses that was investigated during the summer by the Federal Communications Commission, is ceasing operations, a company spokesman confirmed yesterday.

According to a report released by School Transportation News, an industry publication, the economy is largely responsible for the closure of the four-year-old media company, which broadcast music, contests, public service announcements, and commercials to approximately 10,000 school buses and 1 million students in 24 states.

In recent months, an alliance of the nation's governors and state education officials has led an initiative to develop common academic standards to which all public K-12 students would be held. In an early step toward that goal, experts convened by the group this week released a set of math and English skills they say students should master before high school graduation, the Washington Post reports.

The hefty standards envisioned in the proposal, which is posted at www.corestandards.org, leave little to be desired in terms of quantity. In math, they range from core practices such as constructing viable arguments and making sense of complex problems to modeling quantitative relationships and mastering probability and statistics. And the standards for English language arts focus on reading and writing skills as well as speaking and listening proficiencies, including presenting information and responding constructively to advance a discussion.

In an attempt to stem a brutal cycle of student shooting deaths, Chicago Public Schools officials have used a newfangled probability model to identify 1,200 high school students statistically at risk and will direct $30 million in support services and outreach initiatives to help protect them this school year.

District officials hope the new plan—which will assign personal advocates and social workers to the most at-risk students and also offer some of those students after-school jobs—will help "totally stop the youth violence problem" in the nation's third-largest school district, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Can you name this tune?

Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high,
Take a look, it's in a book—a reading rainbow....

If you guessed the theme song of Reading Rainbow—the PBS television show that has brought books to life for two generations of children—you would be right. But you might not hear it anymore. It recently was announced that the show is ending after a 26-year run. The show is the third-longest-running children's program in PBS history—behind only Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

Media reports say Reading Rainbow is ending because no one is stepping forward to put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the broadcasting rights—not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, not the show's home station of WNED in Buffalo.

In an NPR interview, John Grant, who is in charge of WNED's content, said the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow also can be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. That is, the Department of Education is now funding literacy programs that teach kids how to read, not why to read, as Reading Rainbow did.