Mike Butrym believes school officials who oversee Montville High School, where he's a senior, are being too hard on him. The 18-year-old from Towaco, in the Morristown, N.J., area, told The Daily Record that all he did was organize this year's annual "May Madness" contest. The trouble is: the tradition that senior boys at the school invented a few years ago is not a contest between basketball teams. Instead, it's a competition that rates girls at the school based on their looks. Here's what Butrym, now finishing up a week-long suspension, had to say:

"They told me I was disrupting the school environment and crossing the lines of sexual harassment ... I don't think the punishment fit the crime."

In neighboring New York State, school officials are beaming. State Education Commissioner Richard Mills announces that 77% of New York's public school students in grades three through eight earned proficient scores or better on an English assessment test. That's a jump of 9 percentage points over the year before. In the state's second largest city, the jump was particularly striking. The Buffalo News reports kids' scores jumped more than 24 percentage points in three years.