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Indianapolis charter schools are signing up students as fast as they can find them. Will reform spell the end of traditional public education?

The Naturalization Ceremony at the President Benjamin Harrison Home welcomed new American citizens from 37 different countries today.

“Anderson Cooper was hilarious. I was even shorter then, because I was 11. He bent down and talked to me face-to-face. He told me …”

Who’s who among Indianans on the fast track in NYC, from breakout designers to NBA bigwigs.

While some Indiana wildflowers can be quite showy, many of the blooms are more subtle than the hybrids bred to turn heads at The Home Depot; loving them is like looking past the prom queen and falling for the girl with glasses who reads poetry.

“I marveled at the evidence of Jacob’s precocity, but in truth, the new normal was still hard. In particular, we weren’t making much progress on real conversation. … Simply put, social skills are far more important than academics in kindergarten.”

Inside Crooked Creek Elementary School’s cafeteria, Glenda Ritz wielded a scalpel, in-structing about 100 fourth-graders in the art of dissecting a spiny dogfish shark. The smell of the dead specimens, spread out on metal trays on top of blue table covers, filled the air. It was a lesson she had delivered—and a procedure she’d performed—more than a dozen times throughout her 33-year teaching career.

With all the noise surrounding new Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz, will her agenda of slowing down reforms advance? Or is her voice—and those of her supporters—bound to get drowned out?

An unlikely but passionate rift has heated up in a Southern Indiana school district over the concept of prom events for opposite- and same-gender student pairs. First, Diana Medley, a special education teacher in the Northeast School Corporation in Sullivan County, made remarks to a WTWO-TV (Terre Haute) reporter that set the Internet and regional and even national media atwitter. Outside of a planning meeting for a strictly opposite-sex-dating prom in the school district, she said, in response to the interviewer’s question about whether she thinks gay people have “some purpose in life”: “I don’t. I personally don’t, I’m sorry. I don’t understand it.” In the same TV news report, Bill Phegley, a pastor at Carlisle Christian Church, makes statements considered incendiary by some and to be treasured by others, saying Christians are always “prepared for a fight” and that Jesus gives them “armor for the front, not the back” so as not to run away from that fight.

We’re already well into this droll, sporty, and yet downright painful 2013—St. Elmo and soccer and Lance, oh my—and so here, without further ado and based on pageviews, are the top 12 stories of 2012 at IndianapolisMonthly.com as determined by you, our readers:

Walking around downtown Washington, D.C., on Monday morning amidst the crowds of inauguration-goers, it was difficult to tell who hailed from where—and then there was the man in a Purdue hat who said “Boiler Up!” with a big smile in response to my companion who initiated that exchange. Yet I learned ahead of time that there would be more than a few other Hoosiers in attendance, including performers in the parade after the official swearing in of President Barack Obama:

Florida likes the way Tony Bennett, Indiana’s uprooted Superintendent of Public Instruction, thinks: teacher evaluations based on student performance, schools receiving grades on the same scale used for their charges, and the headline-grabbing push for more charter education and voucher programs. The Sunshine State apparently longed for his leadership and initiative, offering him the reins to clean up its education system in the midst of his term as the Hoosier State’s public schools czar. The Floridian version of the role boasted a salary that tripled his own in Indiana.

To understand the chasm currently separating Indiana’s political parties, all you need to do is picture their election-night celebrations. On November 6, the Democrats chose a sedate ballroom at the Downtown Marriott. The Republicans, who were marching toward supermajorities in the House and the Senate, chose the end zone at Lucas Oil Stadium.

With its wide bookshelves varying from dark aged wood to more modern circular cases, The Indianapolis Public Library—Central Library—writes the book on combining old with new. And now it has been chosen by MentalFloss.com as the fifth most beautiful library in the United States. With contenders among these Top 10 such as the Armstrong–Browning Library at Baylor University in Texas and the Morgan Library in New York, Indy should be flattered. Most of the edifices chosen are on the coasts, and Indy’s downtown main branch is the sole Midwest rep on this list.

Monday saw a windy late-summer evening on Purdue University’s campus as a crowd gathered to honor the legacy of Neil Armstrong. We all know him as the man who flew to the moon and back, but the students of Purdue University know a humble man.