The amount of crud that clogs up my e-mail inbox is discouraging, daunting, and disheartening. All those bogus alerts from banks I don't use; the sales pitches for things I'd rather not know about, let alone buy; the once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to enrich myself with ill-gotten billions from Nigeria; the endless hectoring warnings from PayPal.

The good news is, it's almost April. And April, as we all know, is National Poetry Month. And with National Poetry Month comes the wonderful "A Poem A Day" program from Writers in the Schools of Houston. If you sign up, you'll get a student-written poem delivered to your inbox every weekday in April. Absolutely free! No obligation! And, no deliberate misspellings, overwrought sales pitches, or off-color suggestions about how to make your man or woman happy.

To sign up, e-mail WITS at mail@writersintheschools.org. Your in-box will thank you.

There used to be an aging wooden sign outside my kids' elementary school. It identified the school as an "Early Primary School, Pre-K through Grade 3". Since the school actually goes through Grade 5, and had done so for years before my eldest enrolled, I saw the sign as one of the more benign examples of a school district not quite up to its task. Since then, the sign has rotted away and been removed.

So when I heard Gene Maeroff of Columbia University Teachers College making a fairly impassioned plea for what he was presenting as a powerful new model for effective school reform..."What many of us are calling Pre-K/Three," as Maeroff put it...I thought of that old sign.

Maeroff, who has just written a book on the subject, believes that these first years of semi-formal and formal schooling are where school reformers can get the most bang for the buck, as it were: "Unprecedented attention to the primary grades ought to occur," Maeroff said at a Brookings Institution panel discussion. He called for universal access to voluntary preschool starting at age 3, and for full-day kindergarten for all five-year-olds. Then, to solidify early gains, an effort is needed to put in place rigorous standards, curricula, and assessment tools in grades 1 to 3. Teachers need special training in working collaboratively to address the needs of these youngest students.

While I'm not enough of an expert to take exception to Maeroff's assumptions regarding the importance of the early years, and in fact I don't really want to, I do feel a certain fatigue at yet another effort to identify THE critical window for learning. My kids' school has been reincarnated a number of times -- at one time, it went up to fourth grade, then fifth, and even sixth. The changes have reflected changing neighborhood demographics, fluctuations in city finances, changing political forces. What they have not reflected, as far as I can tell, is changing ideas about childhood development and education. Those show up, if at all, in individual classrooms.

Another thing they haven't reflected is a community willingness to support some levels of elementary education over others. (There seems to be quite a high level of willingness to shortchange middle and high school students, but that's a different story.) I can't even begin to imagine how a board of education might make a realistic case for any effort to funnel additional resources towards the early primary grades at the expense of fourth and fifth graders. (And additional resources are always perceived as coming at someone else's expense.)

So, while a laser-like focus on early primary education might get the most bang for the actual buck, it would be pretty costly in political capital, and school reformers can't really afford to throw that currency around.

Last year, I paid a visit to the SEED public charter school here in Washington, DC.

SEED is the only publicly-funded urban boarding school in the nation. It starts in grade X, is co-ed, and serves a very low-income, very academically needy bunch of about 320 kids in grades 7 through 12 -- virtually all of them minorities. Started by Eric Adler and Rajiv Vinnakota, the school boasts a lovely campus, two dormitories (one for boys, one for girls), a pleasant gymnasium and cafeteria, a spacious well-stocked library.

I can't say it really reminded me too much of my own boarding school -- for one thing, we didn't have any boys, and for another, there's just no corner of Southeast DC that stacks up to rural New England for that leafy, Colonial feeling. And that being then, the number of African-American and Hispanic students was very small. But that beehive feeling of a buzzing adolescent community kept under rather strict control was very familiar.

In it's eight years of operation, SEED has demonstrated success on the measures that matter the most -- students, who typically enter two or more years behind, according to the founders, have been catching up, doing well, and going on to college. But it's small change in the big world of inadequate high school education.

Now, Adler and Vinnakota are hoping to expand, with new campuses in Maryland and California. Expense is a problem -- while the founders have been successful in raising private funds for major expenditures such as building facilities, they look to public school funding for per-pupil costs, and those are high -- about three times the cost for traditional day students.

But legislators in both states have expressed some support, and may move forward. SEED's big selling point is its success with a population of students that seems pre-programmed for failure. If the experiment expands, it will be interesting to see if it successfully makes the transition from small one-off success story to replicable model that works in different settings.

This year, Sen. Mary Landrieu -- Democrat of Louisiana -- plans to introduce the Proud Father Act. The law would address one aspect of the inequitable legal treatment of unmarried fathers seeking to fulfill their parental role, by creating a national registry of men who are (or believe they may be) the fathers of children born to single mothers. That would make it easier for these fathers to have their voices heard on critical issues, most particularly that of whether a child should be legally adopted by someone else.

As it now stands, and as vividly described in a recent New York Times article,, a single mother can easily thwart a father's desire to have a say in the adoption decision simply by moving across state lines. And most often, even that isn't necessary, as many single dads don't sign up for state registries because they a) don't know they exist b) don't know they have become fathers c) miss the filing deadline.

This is tricky territory. The cultural cliche of the feckless male carelessly fathering multiple children with multiple women and then failing to support them either financially or emotionally is built upon too many sad but true stories. And our long history of legally giving unwed mothers, rather than fathers, the right to make these critical decisions is grounded in some harsh realities: it is mothers who undergo pregnancy and childbirth and the risks that go with them; who in most cases will bear the primary burdens of caring for a child; and it is always certain who the mother is, whereas establishing paternity is a process many men have resisted.

Nevertheless, it does seem fundamental that a father who wants to have a relationship with his own child should have some voice in the adoption decision, and some right to establish a relationship with his offspring. Making that somewhat more likely is the ultimate goal of the registry.

I do believe that anything we can do as a society to encourage more unmarried men to embrace fatherhood and its responsibilities is ultimately good for kids. And fathers. And communities. Because, let's face it, marriage doesn't look poised for a comeback right now. So we need to work with what we've got.

While improved child support enforcement has helped many mothers and children achieve economic stability, it also has created a huge disincentive to regular work for many non-custodial fathers. Maybe those men would be more likely to work hard and try to get ahead if they saw their efforts going towards a better future for a child with whom they have an ongoing relationship; and that in itself seems more likely if the role of fatherhood was not so deeply discounted that a man's child can be adopted out of his reach without warning or recourse.

Six years ago, Congress authorized the National Children's Study, an ambitious plan to follow 100,000 children from before birth to the age of 21. It's intended to provide high-quality longitudinal data on how environmental factors affect children's health and development, and to look at why conditions like asthma, autism, obesity, and childhood cancers are on the rise.

Last fall, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development announced that the study would be launched in seven sites.

This spring, President Bush has proposed eliminating the study to save money. It's expected that the 2007 launch would cost about $69 billion.

Study director Peter Scheidt says the work would be cost-effective, because childhood illnesses cost the nation so much -- in emergency room visits, special education costs, diabetes treatment, etc.

This national study would provide us with exactly the kind of solid data we need to get a handle on how our rapidly changing environment is affecting our children's prospects and health. Here's hoping that when the dust from the budget battle settles, it will go forward.

Every school day, all around the country, nearly 8 million students are watching Channel One's daily public affairs program, a 12-minute mix of news, features and advertisements.

Did I say watching? It might be more accurate to say, "existing in the same general vicinity as," or "dimly aware of." It turns out many of these students are paying even less attention to Channel One than they are to their parents' suggestions about what to wear to the next mixer.

I find this very comforting. Channel One, owned by Primedia, has weaseled its way into our educational institutions by offering schools free satellite dishes and television sets. To get the goodies, schools have to promise to air the morning show on 90 percent of school days. Each show has about 10 minutes of news and 2 minutes of advertisements. It's an arrangement that is easy to deplore, and has generated a lot of hand-wringing about selling out a captive audience of teens to the purveyors of fast food, video games, and other empty calories of consumerism.

But a new study from Washington State in the current issue of Pediatrics reveals that while Channel One is marginally more effective at shilling products to our kids than informing them about the key issues of the day, its performance on both fronts is pretty dismal -- with students remembering only about 11 percent of the ads and 13 percent of the news stories that aired during a week.

As one high school student explained, "When Channel One is on, I do my homework or I talk with my friends." In other words, this multi-tasking generation is nobody's captive audience.

In a paper provocatively titled "Does Television Rot Your Brain?", two University of Chicago economists present what they call "strong evidence against the prevailing wisdom that childhood television viewing causes harm to cognitive or educational development."

Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro looked at children's test scores from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, a period when television was rapidly being introduced across the country. Because some communities weren't wired for television right away, they were able to compare how children in homes with televisions performed compared to those without televisions. They found no negative effects, and some positive effects, on test scores.

I love this study, but probably for all the wrong reasons. It's truly beyond me how one can compare the impact on a growing young brain of singing along with the Mouseketeers (Em-Eye-Cee...See you real soon! Kay-Ee-Why...Why? Because we like you...) to that of watching grown people eat insects (Fear Factor). So I leave that to the Phd's.

Instead, jumping nimbly over the abstruse discussions of "controlling for area fixed effects", "within-area, cross-cohort variation in television exposure," and "observable covariates of exam performance," my attention is grabbed by an admirably simple chart on the very last page of this 51-page paper, listing the top five television programs watched by kids, 1953 and 2003.

The boob tube sure has changed in 50 years.

Topping the charts in 1953: I Love Lucy. In 2003: The Simpsons. Hmm. Would you rather have Little Ricky or Homer Simpson over for a sleepover? Number two in 1953: Superman. In 2003: American Idol. Superpowers in tights, vs uneven talents in the spotlights... Numbers three, four and five in 1953: The Red Buttons Show, Dragnet (you go, Joe Friday!), and The Roy Rogers Show. In 2003: Malcolm in the Middle, Fear Factor, and Survivor, Amazon.

Gentzkow and Shapiro argue that this list shows that "the popular children's shows of 2003 do not seem obviously less cognitively demanding than those of 1953." But they sure are different. The humor is meaner. Humiliation is big. And who knows what the impact of all that ersatz reality is going to be on this group of kids as they try to make sense of the world. Will it breed healthy skepticism or cynicism, help them dream big and take chances or convince them that it's all rigged? We'll have to wait and see.

It's hard to say an intriguing piece of research is being ignored by the media when it generates a story in that paragon of the MSM, The New York Times. Still, I was surprised by what seemed to me to be a rather paltry number of news stories covering recent findings from a large-scale, government-funded, peer-reviewed study showing that public school students score as well or better than their peers in private, religious and charter schools in math.

Is it because findings like those of Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski of the University of Illinois just don't fit our hypothesis of how the world works, so we discount them?

The Lubienskis compared how 340,000 students in 4th and 8th grades in 13,000 schools -- regular public, public charter, and private -- did on the math portion of the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Just looking at the raw scores, the private school students seemed to do better. But using sophisticated statistical techniques to adjust for out-of-school factors such as income, the researchers found that in fact, public school students outperformed or held their own with peers in other types of schools.

Obviously, how kids do on one test on one day is not a comprehensive measure of effective education. But given the pounding our public schools are taking in the media, it is pretty heartening news for those who believe true public schools are getting something of a bad rap. So I expected a bit more noise when the study came out in late January. I'm still waiting.

Every day, it seems, technology opens up a fertile new market that never existed before. Take online gamers. Certainly a diverse crew, weighted a bit towards the male, but representing a wide range of ages and interests. But three-year-olds? Just never occured to me. That's one of the many ways that I am not like Disney, which is launching a new $50-a-year subscription service for preschoolers.

Parents who download the program can customize it for use by as many as five children on their home computer. The service, Playhouse Disney Preschool Time Online, includes Web features such as the automatic delivery of learning games and a feature that tracks kids' progress, along with larger automatic downloads of games and animation.

It's an interesting concept. I guess that Disney, the epitome of safe, wholesome family fare, hopes to cash in on two somewhat contradictory trends: parents' desire to make sure their kids are ready for school and plugged in to the technologies that are becoming so important to how we work and play; and their justified fears of the kind of trouble that can find a kid out on the Wild Wild Web.

For the past couple of years, my husband and I have been trying to strike the right balance in our approach to video games. Prohibition, in this day and age, seems impossible. Mindless adherence to a rating system designed by the very same techno-mad geeks who create the games themselves seems, well, mindless. And leaving it up to the kids themselves seems like child neglect, putting it mildly.

So, we've been coasting along with a kind of compromise, which puts most of our parental effort into limiting the amount of time the boys play, and adds a conscious, but not hyper-vigilant, element of censorship in terms of what they play.

Today, though, I'm not feeling so balanced. In fact, I'm thinking it's time to strap on a couple of automatic weapons and a few belts of ammo, grab a big old bag of grenades, and head on over to the Pentagon and ask those dudes, "WHAT are you THINKING?"

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only parent whose feeling just a little bit irked that some fraction, no matter how miniscule, of our tax dollars have gone to the military's efforts to help the video gaming industry come up with games that will more efficiently turn our boys into soldiers who can pull a trigger without hesitation, compunction, or even a fully developed grasp of the difference between first-person-shooter mayhem in the basement rec room and the killing of actual human beings.

Here's Sgt. Sinque Swales, discussing a recent encounter in Iraq, only his second time firing his weapon at a real enemy: "It felt like I was in a big video game. It didn't even faze me, shooting back. It was just natural instinct. Boom! Boom! Boom!"

Swales was talking to a Washington Post reporter. The article, "Virtual Reality Prepares Soldiers for War," also noted how military personnel created "Marine Doom," the military version of the original first-person shooter, "Doom." And it explained how "America's Army," a free online game with more than 6 million registered users, is being used as a recruiting tool.

What's particularly creepy about this is the possibility that by gaming, young adolescent boys are essentially training themselves to be soldiers through the repeated imaginary experience of shooting and being shot at. Today's young soldiers, raised on video games, "probably feel less inhibited, down in their primal level, pointing their weapons at somebody," noted a Marine officer. That "provides a better foundation for us to work with."

Truth is, there's no clear research to support that view, just anecdotes and the reports of soldiers themselves. Still, seems like it's time to get back in the trenches and launch a fresh offensive against video games, especially first-person shooters.