Man, the game has been missing Chrisette Michele! After dropping her last album, Let Freedom Reign, in 2010, the singer disappeared out of the music scene for a while. But just a few months ago, she returned with a new look and an even stronger sound, dropping new music for her album Better, being released on June 11. We sat with the gorgeous singer to talk about everything from her hair, to being a bad girlfriend in the past, an addiction to food, why she has love for Beyoncé’s vocal abilities, who she would love to work with and her new music. We’re oh so glad that she’s back. How about you?

Alberto Reyes/WENN

It’s always a good thing when the possibility of good music is on the way.

Soul singer Chrisette Michele took the end of 2012 to give us a slight taste of what she’d be offering on her full length album when she released her mixtape, Audrey Hepburn: An Audiovisual Presentation. It gave a sort of different sound but as Chrisette stated, it showed insight to where she was in her artistic process.

Fast forward to February when Chrisette dropped “A Couple of Forever,” the song that is to be her first single from her album Better which should be out in April. ‘Forevers’ is the song that showcases the kind of singing her core fans have grown to know and love. While it is a very slow and mellow tune for a first single, it also shows Chrisette’s range. It also features a “Stairway to Heaven” sample.

In the video, released earlier this week, Chrisette continues to show off her new “Rich Hipster” look which includes a blond gumby haircut and a plethora of tattoos. In fact, she’s even showing herself being tatted again in the video (we’re not sure if she’s actually being inked again but it wouldn’t surprise us).

Her love interest in “A Couple of Forevers” is her guitarist Justin Lyons (also known as “Guitar Slayer”) and was directed by celebrity photographer Derek Blanks.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

Last Tuesday, while most folks were distracted by all the election day coverage, the School District of Philadelphia quietly announced its plan to restructure the city’s public school system, including closing 64 schools in the next five years.

Calling the plan an attempt to right size a district, which has been bleeding both seats and money, while making it competitive by offering parents more choices, Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen said that 40 schools would close by next year and six additional schools would be closed every year thereafter until 2017. The remaining schools would get distributed into “achievement networks” where public or private groups compete to manage them while the Central District headquarters would be reduced to a skeleton crew of about 200. The District chief also said that the ultimate goal is to have about 40 percent of students in Philly’s public school system moved to charter school management by 2017.

The announcement of basically the dissolution of the School District of Philadelphia, a city that’s the fifth largest city in the nation, has received minimum attention in the mainstream media. Even as the city of brotherly love becomes the latest city to weaken under the prospects of trying to balance budgets, while working with decreasing amounts of funding, meet the standards of federal No Child Left Behind guidelines and compete with the sudden rise in charter schools, which continues to pull necessary monies and resources from the already battered school districts. According to the Philadelphia Daily News, “across Pennsylvania, school boards are finding it increasingly difficult to manage tax dollars responsibly as the pressure to open more charter and cyber-charter schools builds, even as these schools show little evidence of performing better than regular public schools.”  And it is not just Pennsylvania.

In Detroit, which last year announced plans to close half of that city’s schools and increase high school class sizes to 60 students, the city has also embraced charter schools as the cornerstone of its “Renaissance 2012″ plan even as the performance of the district’s 14 authorized charters so far has been less than impressive.  In New York City, which has undergone a similar style restructuring plan similar in kind to Philadelphia, has too not seen the success as promised through its reduction of publicly held schools in favor of privately managed charter schools.

According to Diane Ravitch, former Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, New York City has not gotten the remarkable results it promised. She writes, “The city’s proficiency rates, which seemed to be flying up by leaps and bounds every year, got deflated in 2010 when the State Education Department admitted lowering the cut scores on state examinations. Overnight, the New York City miracle disappeared, as the percentage of students who reached proficiency fell to levels near where they had been years earlier. And the achievement gap was as large as it had been in 2002, when the mayor took charge.”