Michigan education administrators by mid-­August usually are well prepared for public school openings right after Labor Day. Not this year.

Mike Burde, veteran assistant superintendent for western Michigan’s Kenowa Hills Public Schools, says in a two-week period he and his associates moved from planning a mix of school and home learning, to all classroom with strict social distancing, to all online: “It’s planning in the arena of the unknowns.”

The one-time U.S. coronavirus hot spot is ready to have students back in the classroom. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Friday said the state’s public schools can reopen if COVID-19 numbers stay low. In New York City, the nation’s largest school district is planning a hybrid model for September, with 1.1 million students rotating between in-person and at-home instruction each week. The city will require social distancing in the halls, masks, and nightly disinfecting of school buildings. Students will stay in one classroom and eat lunch at their desks while teachers rotate.

My father was the ultimate do-it-yourselfer. He wasn’t always an especially patient man—which prompted him fairly often to “get on with things.” He dropped out of college and seminary two or three times, and always had an appropriate skepticism for academia. Which was odd, because folks who knew him tended mostly to take seriously his views on the task of education. In many ways, Dad was, until his death in 1978, the quintessential self-educated man.

Do you really think it’s possible,” a visitor to my office last week asked, “that we might elect a self-professed socialist to our presidency before this year is out? How could that conceivably happen?”

Well, yes, I do think it could conceivably happen. Not likely, I add. But so many other unlikely things have happened in this topsy-turvy world in recent months that I’m reluctant to call anything impossible.

Starting in September, New Jersey public schools will be teaching children in grades five, six, eight, 10, and 12 about the great historical contributions of LGBTQ people to United States history. 

What are these great historical contributions, you ask? Well, for example, that Barbra “Babs” Siperstein was the first transgender person to serve on the Democratic National Committee. Yes, it’s true! You may have lived your whole life in deplorable ignorance, but your children will never again be deprived of this knowledge. 

Three Connecticut high school students and their families filed a lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday to keep boys from competing as girls in high school athletics. The plaintiffs are runners who say competing against male athletes has unfairly cost them championship titles, state records, and scholarship opportunities.

If you scan alarmist websites as I do, you may have run across the alarming news that the Seattle School Board is considering new guidelines for what might be called “social justice math.” Some culture watchers have taken this to mean that 2 plus 2 is no longer 4, but that’s not exactly the case. Math functions will remain the same, and there will still be such a thing as a right answer.