Currently in Houston, education experts are watching in a kind of awe as the state educational bureaucracy struggles to come to grips with Prepared Table, a very large and financially shaky charter school that appears to be educating children under conditions that very closely resemble a disaster relief center.
A populist step up in a working-class state with shaky public schools, the system is also a beckoning cash kitty that has seen scandal over the years.
Another is to supervise challenges to character: "As much as I might be exercised by an 18-year-old leaving this school shaky on confidence, I'm at least as exercised by the golden schoolboy who's found it too easy.
Teen brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch Co., American Eagle Outfitters Inc. and Aeropostale Inc. are staggering out of the shaky back-to-school season shunned by jobless youth and their cash-strapped parents, pummeled by unseasonably cold weather and perplexed by hazy fashion trends.
In education, it set out to systematize and stabilize a shaky and ill-supported school system and use it as a means of national regeneration.
As the choices increase and the money tightens, "the problem will become more shaky," said Robert Villanova, the school superintendent of Farmington.
Like school plays, shaky footage from the third balcony of a concert and home sex tapes, it's never as good on video as it is in person.
After a shaky start in parochial school kindergarten with the Sisters of Divine Providence (I had secretly rejoiced when I overheard my parents discussing how they could not afford to send me to parochial elementary school), I had blossomed in public school first grade.
I don't think I'm smart, and sometimes I feel that my academic "successes" (I use that term very, very lightly and under the shaky assumption that high school students can even have academic successes) have simply been a combination of elbow grease and luck.
We're watching the fruits of a shaky ethical empire, with schools like Kentucky serving as a waystation for N.B.A. talent who don't stay long enough to learn the school's zip code (as Gene Wojciechowski writes on ESPN.com, Kentucky just works the system best).
