When you were in college, how many times did you call home for comfort, advice, a recipe -- and maybe some help paying that long-distance bill you ran up while breaking up with your boy/girlfriend? Or, say you went to work after high school. Did your folks lend you a hand with that first month's security deposit on a new apartment? Bring you a meal and a care package of pots, pans, and laundry detergent?

I don't remember any of my friends waking up on their 18th birthday and being told, "We've really enjoyed being your parents. Now, pack your stuff, we're changing the locks and getting an unlisted number. Have a nice life." But, in effect, that's what most state child welfare bureaucracies say to their children -- the thousands of young men and women who reach the age of 18 while in foster care.

While middle class kids are enjoying a cushy new stage of life sometimes referred to by the truly horrible name of "adultolescence" well into their mid-twenties, the ones who most need support are basically being ushered to the curb.

This isn't true in every state. A few enlightened localities -- among them, Illinois and the District of Columbia -- allow children in care to remain in state custody until the age of 21. It is the right thing to do -- not just because it is fair, but because it makes a difference.

Mark Courtney, director of the Chapin Hall Center for Children, is doing research into how young people leaving foster care as adults fare in the real world. Working with a longitudinal study that includes children in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, he's been able to look at what happens to kids who are "emancipated" at 18 (in Iowa and Wisconsin) and those who choose to remain in the system longer (in Illinois).

Here's what he's found: at age 19, fully 72 percent of foster youth in Illinois have chosen to remain in custody of the state.

Among these older youth, over 60 percent of those still in care are receiving educational support or job training...compared to only 44 percent of those who left care. Those in care are three times to be in community or four-year college, and in fact their college participation rates are close to those of kids their age who have never been in foster care. Those who leave care are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated; more likely to suffer from an untreated mental health disorder; more likely to be both unemployed and not in school.

"It calls into question the idea that these young people are ready to be on their own at 18," Courtney remarked at a recent panel discussion.

Well, are any young people ready to be on their own -- really, truly, on their own -- at 18? Were you? I wasn't.

Courtney says that the young people he studied are optimistic about their futures, and often do have supportive relationships with adults and family members. What they don't have is health insurance, they don't have a diploma, and they don't have what they need to turn their optimism into a solid grounding for adulthood.

Someone could probably do -- has probably done -- an economic analysis proving that allowing children to stay in state custody until they turn 21 or finish college or job training is a long-term money-saver that keeps kids out of jail and turns more of them into taxpayers. But we don't need to know that, to know what is right: when the state decides to step into a family and remove a child, it assumes a moral responsibility that can't be terminated with the turning of a calendar page.

Just yesterday I was whining about how Tuesday night's State of the Union speech lacked substance. Turns out the substance, in this case, was the sideshow.

I'm talking, of course, about the T-shirts. Talk about your teachable moments!

Two women, sitting in the House Gallery audience for the Big Speech, each wearing T-shirts with messages. One, anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, who's soldier son died in Iraq, is wearing a black shirt with the message: "2,245 Dead. How Many More?" The other, wife of Congressman C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.), is wearing a grey shirt with the message "Support Our Troops." Before the speech begins, Capitol police hustle Sheehan out of the gallery, cuff her, take her off for booking and fingerprinting. About 45 minutes into the speech, Beverly Young is also removed by the police and told her shirt amounts to "protesting"...though she is not arrested. Next day,Young's shirt gets an encore on the House floor, as her irrate husband waves it in the air while condemning her removal from the gallery. "Shame! Shame!" cries Young. A contrite Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer apologizes. He also drops charges against Sheehan.

Not that Congressman Young is any kind of a free speech absolutist. According to the Washington Post, Young was pretty clear that he wouldn't have had much to say against the cuffing, printing and booking of Sheehan. "I totally disagree with everything she stands for," he said.

This little political morality play has it all: two women of strong convictions, on opposite sides of what may be the most divisive issue of our time, both treated like criminals for words not even spoken, but worn. The police force that guards the hallowed halls of our vaunted democracy showing themselves just a tiny bit unclear on the concept. And an elected representative of this great democracy demonstrating that he believes the First Amendment comes with an upgrade for members of Congress and their families, not available to ordinary citizens with unwelcome views.

Not only is this fodder for some great classroom discussions, it seems to call out for a broader response -- maybe a SWAT team of civics teachers to give lessons to the Capitol police and members of Congress on that pesky Constitution we keep hearing about.

(Then maybe an intervention from Miss Manners dealing with proper attire for solemn occasions on the federal stage. I know I wasn't the only person who wished the U.S. Women's Soccer Team hadn't worn flip-flops to the White House.)

Pity the poor headline writers. Last night's State of the Union speech was a snoozer -- President Bush didn't just bury the lead, he eliminated it altogether.

"Bush calls for an optimistic America" -- the Washington Times.
"Bush warns against shrinking global role" -- the Washington Post
"Bush calls for cuts in oil reliance" -- LA Times
"Bush: US 'addicted to oil'" -- Boston Globe

I don't know how many school teachers required their classes to watch it. I'm just glad I don't have to read their students' efforts to remember what it was about. It's my guess that the experience didn't galvanize a new generation of social activists. "What do we want? Optimism! When do want it? Whenever!"

I don't think this is Bush's fault, either. Though he's never been one of our great orators, the President has shown the ability to speak from the heart, especially in the days just after 9/11. And it's not like the past year didn't offer a wide array of things that, as a nation, we really need to talk about: the war in Iraq, the future of New Orleans, how we'll manage to pay for both health care AND education as we boomers continue to get older.

I just think the the day of the Big Speech is over. No more Gettysburg addresses, no more "I have a dream". (The president's opening statements, in memory of Coretta Scott King, only served to remind us all of a day when public speaking really soared.) Now, when a president, candidate, or leader of a movement speaks, the words seem to have been put through some kind of pasteurization process, scrubbed of anything too challenging, too objectionable, too stirring. And the State of the Union is the worst, with its ritualized applause by supporters, the smirking refusal to stand by opponents, the required "ordinary heros" singled out from the crowd.

This could be a problem for social studies teachers everywhere. The Big Speech is one of the wonders and mysteries of our form of democracy, and it seems to be going the way of whistle-stop tours and political conventions.

Thank you, DC Board of Education.

That's not something you hear me say very often. But the Board moved recently (finally!) to correct a misguided policy that has been damaging the educational prospects of the city's homeless children for the past decade.

I wrote some time ago about DC's position as the only "state" (as it is considered for some federal funding purposes) in the nation to decline to accept federal funds under the McKinney Vento Act to help homeless children stay in school. DC moved back in 1995 to pass emergency legislation allowing it to decline the federal funds, so it would not have to abide by a court order that it provide bus tokens to homeless children so that they could continue to attend school in their former neighborhoods.

DC officials said it would cost more to administer the program and hand out the tokens than the amount of the federal funding, a position that was generally considered to be ridiculous. The real reason seemed to be more one of pique at having lost a lawsuit. Pique that has cost our most vulnerable kids about $1.5 million in services and support.

Now comes word that the DC Board of Ed has directed Superintendent Clifford Janey to apply for funding under McKinney-Vento. That should mean about $250,000 in federal funding for the next school year to help homeless kids with transportation, tutoring, enrichment activities, and better access to after school and other programs. Better late than never....

Vincent Schiraldi seems like a great guy, and that's one reason he makes me so nervous. I really want the new director of Youth Rehabilitation Services in DC to succeed at the supremely difficult job of turning around the city's juvenile justice system -- a system described by Schiraldi himself as "typically miserable".

Yet I've spent enough time watching highly regarded reformers tilting at municipal bureaucracies to fear that the whole enterprise is doomed, and that Schiraldi's strengths -- which include a quick mind, a ready tongue, acerbic humor and impatience -- will quickly turn into weaknesses. Anyone so quotable and so ready to point out the shortcomings of the organization he or she leads is eventually going to have trouble getting the troops fired up for battle.

Schiraldi spoke recently at a panel discussion hosted by the Chapin Hall Center for Children and the Urban Institute, earnestly titled "Can Positive Youth Development Improve Juvenile Justice?" Noting that he is the 23rd person in 20 years to head Washington DC's DYRS, Schiraldi seemed to harbor a certain healthy cynicism about his own chances for success -- which gave me a small flicker of hope that he does know what he's up against.

His new slogan for the department: "Treat the young people like they're your own, but never forget they are someone elses." He explained that it means giving youngsters in juvenile detention opportunities for education, artistic expression, and more; creating as much of a home as possible within the confines of a youth detention facility, increasing opportunities for supported work, and bringing in parents and guardians as partners.

Juvenile justice traditionalists, said Schiraldi, see much of the above as "fluff" -- and his department employees, he added, tend to treat parents with little respect and less understanding. He's pushing to allow kids detained at Oak Hill, the District's notorious detention facility for juveniles, to tape pictures to their walls...a modest step towards giving juvie a touch of home. (Paging Martha Stewart!) But staff are resistant, says Schiraldi, saying it's too easy for kids to hide drugs behind the pictures. His reply? He says he challenges them to find one child in detention who doesn't already know how to score drugs.

Admirable candor -- but maybe not the kind of remark that goes down very well with employees. Schiraldi comes from the world of advocacy, and is clearly on the side of the kids. He may be just what DYRS needs. Or he may be just another in a long line of short-termers.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you!"
"Look me in the eye and tell me where you've been."
"Don't look away when I'm talking to you!"

Seems like we spend an awful lot of time telling kids what to do with their eyes...and most of the time, we're just getting in the way of good communication.

This adult insistence on steady eye contact -- which seems to have something to do with respect, something to do with wanting a guarantee we're being listened to, and something to do with ideas about how people pay attention -- may be causing kids to get flustered, lose their train of thought, and give wrong answers more often.

An experiment carried out by researchers in England, working with 20 five-year-old children, revealed that children who were instructed to look away from a questioner while considering their answer gave the correct answer 72 percent of the time. Children who weren't told to look away only answered correctly half the time. Other work by the same researchers suggests that by age 8, many children will automatically turn their gaze away from the human face while trying to concentrate, and that being able to do so was important to their thought process.

The researchers at Stirling University believe that it may be a matter of what my kids like to call "TMI", for "too much information." Human faces are so loaded with meaning that looking at them seems to be just too much for a brain hard at work on another task.

I find it to be nice scientific support for my own experience, which is that my kids come out with their best, weirdest ideas, and tell me the most interesting stuff, when we are driving around in the car, side by side, with eye contact not just rare but downright dangerous. It seems to get the wheels spinning and the sparks flying.

So, a new phrase for parents and teachers to practice: "Don't stop staring into space."

How much does it cost to deliver a unit of education -- say, a semester of Algebra I -- through a computer? How does that compare to the cost of doing the same by means of a teacher in a classroom? Is it essentially the same product? And if it is cheaper to explain to teens how to solve for X using the tools the computer age has given us, who should realize the savings?

These are pressing questions in Pennsylvania, where the state association of school boards has asked the state to put a moratorium on the formation of any new "cyber charter schools" while districts try to get a handle on the issue. Right now, Pennsylvania schools pay about 80 percent of their per-pupil costs to cyber schools as tuition for students that are registered in their district but enrolled in the online schools. But the bricks-and-mortar crowd isn't convinced that the online schools face anything like that amount in costs, given the lack of large school buildings to staff, maintain, and heat.

Pennsylvania districts paid about $368 million last year to the state's 144 charter schools, which enroll about 50,000 students, according to state records. But the state doesn't break down those payments between regular charter schools and the on-line variety.

With public education dollars always in high demand, the questions being asked in Pennsylvania are probably going to come up over and over again in other states as the on-line education industry matures. The key to getting answers will be requiring cyber schools to provide detailed, accurate accounts of their operating costs and procedures, and having those accounts analyzed by people with expertise in both education and learning technologies.

The payoff for students could be huge, as we learn the best way to combine on-line and traditional educational models to meet the needs of different kinds of learners.

Scientists, for some reason, never seem to rise to the top -- or even very far from the bottom -- of our society's list of role models. Which is odd, because what could be more exciting than trying to answer the really big questions? Today I read something about research coming from an Italian neuroscientist -- Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma -- that gave me a bad case of white-coat envy. (Rizzolatti's on-line faculty profile includes links to some of his work.)

This work by Rizzolatti and his colleagues provides new insight into special brain cells, called "mirror cells", that seem to play a critical role in how we learn new things, how we come to experience feelings of empathy, disgust, shame, embarrassment, and lust, even why we enjoy novels, scary movies, and video games. (At last, a scientific reason for the success of "Fear Factor".)

As New York Times reporter Sandra Blakeslee wrote in her Jan. 10 article, "Cells That Read Minds," these new insights are changing the way scholars see the connection between culture and biology.

Mirror cells were first observed in the brains of monkeys in 1996. Since then, Rizzolatti and many others have worked to discover that humans have far more of them, organized into multiple systems that specialize in understanding not just the observed actions of others, but their intentions, the social meaning of their actions, and their emotions.

Simply put, these neurons "fire" in our brains in response to what we see, hear and observe, as if we were ourselves carrying out or experiencing what we are observing. So, when we watch a tennis player hit an overhead lob, mirror neurons in our brains react just as if we were hitting the shot. When we see someone trip and fall, mirror neurons in our brains react as if we were the ones tumbling to the ground.

This makes it clearer than ever that when we learn new things, we learn them not just, or even primarily, through conceptual thinking -- but through feeling. The implications for our understanding of how children learn and grow into effective social beings are huge.

Some scientists now believe, for instance, that autistic disorders, which are characterized by failure or difficulty in recognizing social cues, may be due in part to broken mirror neurons.

The growing understanding of our "mirror brains" also seems to support the idea that, for instance, a child who watches a lot of violence on screen and plays violent video games becomes more likely to act violently. That "hands-on" learning experiences will often be more powerful than pen-and-paper exercises. That there is as much nurture as nature in the phenomenon of "inherited" talent (think the Barrymores and acting, the Simms and throwing footballs).

Here's a selection of recent headlines from around the country:
"Charter schools see boom in sign-ups" (Detroit News, Dec. 19)
"DPS expects $22.5 million budget shortage" (Rocky Mountain News, Dec. 18)
"Charter schools sue over facilities" (San Diego Union Tribune, Dec. 15)
"Charter schools booming" (Deseret Morning News, Dec. 13)
"Ninth charter school called too much" (Times Union, Dec. 13)

And there you have the twin themes of the charter school movement today: vigorous growth, and considerable growing pains...particularly in terms of the relationship between charters and what now tend to be called "regular" or "traditional" public schools.

I'm a little bit nostalgic for the days when everyone knew what the words public school meant, no qualifiers required, but the headlines above make it pretty clear that those days are gone: charters are here to stay. And like an older sibling suddenly shoved aside by the arrival of an attention-grabbing new baby, plain-vanilla public schools are struggling with this new reality.

In San Diego, two charters are suing because the school district, they believe, is failing to live up to a voter-approved proposition that mandates school districts to share public school facilities fairly among all public school students, including those in charters. In Albany, school district officials are urging the SUNY Board of Trustees, the distric chartering authority, to turn down an application for the city's ninth charter school. The district argues that charters are crippling Albany schools by draining away millions of dollars each year.

And in Denver, school officials blame a projected $22.5 million budget gap on the rapid growth of charter schools in the city.

It may be too much to ask, but one of my New Year's wishes is for the emergence of a healthier sibling relationship between charters and regular public schools, where the expertise of long-established schools can inform the efforts of the upstarts, and where the experimental curricula and innovative approaches of the newcomers can help generate innovations across entire districts.

Dream on...

The first study to actually measure fitness levels in a representative sample of Americans is out, published in JAMA today. And there's no more room for denial: based on the results, about 20 percent of Americans aged 12 to 49 are out of shape and at greater risk of disease and early death. That's about 16 million people.

The worst of it is that adolescents are even more out of shape than adults -- close to a third of teens flunked the fitness test, which translates into 7.5 million adolescents wheezing their way through a treadmill test.

Given that the daily lives of most teens are seriously constricted within the framework of school, homework, and school-related activities, adults are going to have to accept a big share of the blame for the flabby condition of our young people. Parents and educators, unite! We've got to get these kids moving. Whatever it takes: pressure schools for a return to daily PE, and help them find the money to do it right...give kids some kind of reward (not candy!) for walking to school...get rid of the leaf-blower and the snow-blower, and hire kids to rake and shovel instead. Set and enforce limits on TV, computer and game system use, and don't let the whining get to you.

Some experts believe that we are on the verge of seeing lifespans in this country actually decline, pulled down by all that excess weight we're carrying around. Obesity and poor conditioning could outpace medical and scientific advances within the next few decades to shorten our children's lives.