Heard this week's biggest viral education story? It has to do with the Eastern NY Correctional Facility in Napanoch... and how their debate team of maximum-security prison inmates defeated world champion Harvard last month, following similar victories of the US Military Academy at West Point and the University of Vermont in their first year debating.

The team trained under the auspices of the Bard College Initiative, which has been educating inmates in a variety of programs in recent years in six New York prisons.

"Students in the prison are held to the exact same standards, levels of rigor and expectation as students on Bard's main campus," said executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative, Max Kenner, tin a recent interview. "Those students are serious. They are not condescended to by their faculty."

The debate revolved around the issue of whether public schools should be able to turn away the children of those who entered the country illegally. The inmates defended the position against Harvard, and a panel of neutral judges had no choice but to give the three men from Eastern, all serving time for manslaughter, the victory.

"There are few teams we are prouder of having lost a debate to than the phenomenally intelligent and articulate team we faced this weekend," noted the Harvard team in a Facebook post. "And we are incredibly thankful to Bard and the Eastern New York Correctional Facility for the work they do and for organizing this event."

According to prison rules, inmates are forbidden from using the internet for research, and the Harvard team also expressed amazement at how well-prepared the inmates were for the event. Judge Mary Nugent took special note of that, while noting that the victory was won fair and square.

"We're all human," Nugent said. "I don't think we can ever judge devoid of context or where we are, but the idea they would win out of sympathy is playing into pretty misguided ideas about inmates. Their academic ability is impressive."

The judge also said that society tends to look down on prisoners, and that the victory disproved that condescending attitude.

The Bard Prison Initiative is run on roughly $2.5 million annually, all from private donors. Kenner has said that of the more than 300 alumni who earned their degrees behind bars, less than 2 percent returned to a life of crime within the next three years (the average time for recidivism). According to figures from the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, the figure in NY state as a whole, by comparison, is 40 percent.