As it turns out, the eventual killer of Billy McKenna was lurking in the photographs he snapped in Iraq. Billy wrote captions beneath some of his photographs; typical day on patrol reads one. The photo is partially obscured by the blurred image of a soldier’s upraised hand. Brown desert unfurls away from a vehicle toward an empty horizon, and a wavering sky scorched white hovers above. Off to one side: Balad Air Base and the spreading umbrella of rising dank smoke from a burn pit.

In a field awash with academic treatises, jeremiads, and ideological harangues, Andre Perry has written an unusual book about New Orleans' school system: a fictionalized tale of broken schools, narrated by a young professor who moves to New Orleans to overhaul Lyndon Johnson High.

We hunted in colleges throughout the region to find influential educators admired by their students and colleagues, whose classrooms serve as forums for social change, whose homes become their classrooms, and, in some cases, whose assignments become homes.

We are living in an age of uncompromising ideological certainty. From the debt ceiling to Medicare to labor relations to most other hot-button issues, the major players choose a side and never give an inch, even if that means governments shut down, bills don’t get paid, or people lose their jobs and their health care.

I’m afraid we’ll have to start with a disappointing statistic: In two decades of teaching, I have slept with exactly one student.

Who profits from unpaid labor? The Intern and the Boss Go Head to Head.

A message in a bottle.

We asked academics, writers, education experts, journalists, and administrators: Without spending a single dollar, how can we improve education right now? Their responses follow.