At least two states, Utah and Texas, are seeking a federal waiver of the law that requires school districts to promptly enroll homeless students, so that Hurricane Katrina evacuees can legally be schooled in shelters, on closed military bases, and in other settings where they are being housed.

According to an article "Separate But Equal? Schooling of Evacuees Provokes Debate" in the Wall Street Journal, the states are getting a sympathetic hearing from the Department of Education.

Thousands of young evacuees are already enrolled in public schools across the country, thanks in large part to the McKinney-Vento Act, landmark federal legislation barring the segregation of homeless children. And, after nearly 600 evacuees landed at Camp Williams in Utah, schools in nearby Jordan were ready to do their bit.

But the Journal reports that Pamela Atkinson, a special consultant to Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., had other ideas. The displaced families had experienced "so much trauma, anxiety and separation" that the parents "wanted their children close by," said Ms. Atkinson. "Since we had classrooms at Camp Williams, it made more sense to keep them there."

Not surprisingly, given the way Katrina roiled the waters on issues of class and race, civil rights groups aren't taking such expressions of concern at face value, wondering if this has more to do with keeping minority students out of overwhelmingly white Utah schools. From afar, it's hard to tell, but Atkinson's argument would carry more weight if I were to hear the parents of these youngsters, or even better from the students themselves, that they would really prefer temporary schools in shelters.

On the face of it, it's hard to see why it would be healthier for children to be in makeshift facilities, all traumatized together, with teachers hired on the fly, rather than in operating schools with active social, athletic and cultural activities and with real ties to the community where they find themselves for what could be quite a long time.

There's no doubt that absorbing large numbers of displaced students will be very tough, especially on states like Texas, which have taken in large numbers. But it seems like the federal government could find other ways to ease the burden on the states than by increasing the isolation of children who have lost so much. Interestingly, Mississippi, which has also taken in large numbers of evacuees, has not asked for McKinney-Vento to be relaxed in any way.

I wish someone would figure out the mathematical equation for the rapid decline in a parent's perceived intelligence as a function of a child's height. Because now that my oldest is taller than me, I am a whole lot stupider than I used to be, and I'd like to know, since he's shaping to be a tall one, how much time I have left before he starts offering to cut my steak for me.

He's not due to leave for college for another five years, so it's important that I figure this out.

Not that it isn't a relief in some ways. He is unlikely now to ask me some of puzzlers that I struggled with not many years ago: how much does the earth weigh? What are atoms made of? How does electricity work?

On the other hand, I'm irked by his frank skepticism when I state something which I know to be true, like who wrote Shakespeare's plays or where the Number 32 bus goes. It irritates me that he seems to have forgotten that I was the one who introduced him to the Clash. It hurts not to be cool anymore.

My irritation got me thinking that there must be support groups out there for parents of teens, it seems like that's one of the best byproducts of the Web, this spawning of groups and communities of interest. So I turned to good old Google and typed in "parent support groups adolescents."

I did not find what I was looking for, at least not in the first rank of results. And what I did find worried me. Top of the pops: TOUGHLOVE (I'm always interested when an organization decides to go all caps, sort of the visual equivalent of shouting). Next up: Because I Love You: The Parent Support Group (a name that instantly got me thinking about ways to complete the sentence: "Because I love you, I am grounding you for the rest of your life. Because I love you, I am sending you to military school.")

(I was thrilled to find a wealth of resources for parents of children facing particular issues: cancer, terminal illness, epilepsy, autism, add/adhd, etc.)

But is there anything out there for the moderately well-adjusted parents of moderately un-extreme adolescents who just want to swap stories and vent a little bit? Get some tips on keeping them organized, de-fusing those dicey discussions about homework and chores while still getting the dog walked and the trash carried out, keeping appropriately informed about their social lives, and trying to keep them off the Internet porn sites?

Last year's indie movie hit Napoleon Dynamite continues to be a force to be reckoned with in popular culture, not to mention my house. How did a teen movie deeply rooted in Mormon culture and set in a rural Idaho community make millions, spawn hundreds of web sites, and change the way kids talk? Clearly, we're in the grip of the liger.

(Main character Napoleon Dynamite says in the movie that his favorite animal is a liger, a cross between a lion and a tiger. Oddly enough, he was not making this up, as Wikipedia explains.)

If you haven't seen it, and there are high school or middle school students in your life, you might want to get hold of the DVD. It could help you understand why you keep hearing odd phrases like, "I see you're drinking 1 percent, is that because you think you're fat?," "Give me some of your tots!", and "Do those chickens have large talons?"

It's set in the surreally isolated town of Preston, Idaho. A lot happens, but it's not too clear what matters. Napoleon is pestered by bullies. His grandmother is hurt in a four-wheeler accident and his uncle Rico, an embittered former college football player, comes to stay. Tina the Llama refuses to eat ham casserole. Napoleon and his friends survive their prom. Napoleon's older brother meets with and marries a woman he first dated online. Pedro runs for student body president.

(In case you think Idaho is not a place that appreciates quirky, the State Legislature unanimously passed a resolution this spring praising the movie because, among other things, "Tater tots figure prominently in this film thus promoting Idaho's most famous export," and "any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!" and run the risk of having the "Worst Day of Their Lives!")

It's one of those "love it or hate it" movies. I'm in the "love it" camp, partly because I always enjoy a new twist on the "underdog runs for student body president" plot line. How can Pedro, the quiet Mexican transfer student, beat out the snippy blonde head cheerleader? Through a bravura dance performance by geeky Napoleon in his tattered Moon Boots, of course. (Maybe John Kerry would have benefitted from having his running mate Edwards study the Learn to Dance with Napoleon Dynamite website.)

I also love the way the movie embraces awkwardness and celebrates eccentricity. We worry a lot about kids being too concerned with being popular and going along with the popular crowd or their clique, and I think the affection many kids show for the movie's oddball characters is a sign that they get it, the know that there is something profoundly cool about being true to yourself, even if your self is a hopeless nerd.

When I was a very young child, my family lived in New Orleans. My dad worked for Jack Frost Sugar, and we moved down to Louisiana from New York for his job. Aside from some striking family snapshots (my parents dressed up for Mardi Gras, how scary is that?) the only really clear memory I have of New Orleans is of the day after a hurricane, when the palm trees were all lying down in the street.

Still I have this funny feeling that New Orleans, if not my home, was a place I carried with me. I've been trying over the past few days to remember more about it, to make my personal childhood New Orleans come into focus. Along the way, I've been thinking about what a watershed memory Hurricane Katrina will be for all the many thousands of young children who have lived through the wind and water and chaos in the Gulf states.

It's only when you are young, I think, that you really grasp in your gut how your whole world can change in one day or one night or one long string of scary hours. Just as I believe that my own kids, because they live in Washington DC and have family roots in New York City, are part of a cohort whose sense of time and place is forever marked by 9/11, the children who survived Katrina are going to find themselves in their own big club of kids for whom time divides into Before Katrina and After Katrina.

Though we say, and it is certainly true, that the loss of places and things doesn't compare to the loss of people we love, that seems to me to be a fundamentally adult view. We are always in danger of forgetting and of minimizing how important familiar places and beloved objects are to children. Which is why, along with our attention to helping displaced families find shelter, jobs, and schools, I hope we can also find time to listen to children's stories and help them capture their memories of the places they love that may never be the same.

When a friend bought a house in a new subdivision in California, she got to make a lot of choices: floor finish, wall color, kitchen cabinet style. Oddly, for a mother of two and owner of two dogs and four guinea pigs, she went for the white wall-to-wall in the living room.

But hey, that was her choice -- and choice is good, right?

Now, it looks like new-home buyers in Aurora, Colorado, near Denver, may get another element added to their menu of choices: schools for their kids. Developers who own thousands of acres in Aurora have developed a plan to create a network of specialized schools, perhaps even to create an all-charter district, to lure homebuyers to the developments they'd like to build on the property.

According to an article in the Denver Post, the developers have enlisted local education foundations, hired consultants, and rounded up support from local business interests for their plan. They've had conversations with the folks at Edison. What they haven't done is invited the Aurora Public School District into their planning process.

The developers learned through market research that many potential buyers are wary of the Aurora schools -- the district has fared poorly on the state School Accountability Reports. And these would-be buyers are "not too anxious to get involved" in the district, developer Norm Stuard told the Post. "Why not develop a new district to go with a new housing development? These communities are going to be much nicer than things you see built in Aurora in recent years."

Wow, great idea! Nice schools for the nice kids whose parents can afford the nice houses in the nice new subdivision. Why not go one logical step further, and develop different schools for houses with different price points? Plywood Primary for the little bitty houses on the little awkward lots, Cherrywood Academy for the nice center-hall Colonials on an acre, Marble Tower Ivy Prep for the McMansions.

Yes, this may suck the oxygen out of the struggling Aurora Public School District, but hey, it's a new era. No more fairy tales about a community taking responsibility to improve its schools for all the children, no more quaint notions about public education leveling any playing fields.

Nope, now it's clear -- whether the school your children attend is nominally public or private, you get the education you can afford. It's pretty much been that way all along, but we did have some illusions of aiming higher.

Will that be synthetic carpeting or Italian marble in the foyer, ma'am?

I love simple solutions to complicated problems.

So thanks to the Scottish researchers who recently did a study comparing physical activity levels among teens who walk to school, versus those who rode a car, bus or train.

Obviously, the walkers were guaranteed to get a certain amount more exercise -- whatever it took for them to amble from home to school, lugging the obligatory 25 pounds of textbooks, plus whatever it takes to be cool in a Scottish high school. But that isn't what the researchers were after. They looked at how active the two groups of kids were during other times in their day -- morning break, lunchtime, and after school.

The kids, 13- and 14-year-olds from schools near Edinburgh, each had a device to record the time and distance of vertical movement throughout the day. The devices were worn all day except during bathing and swimming.

It turned out by every measure, the walkers were more active than the riders throughout the day. They got 8.9 percent more exercise during school hours, 4.2 percent more exercise during break, 18.4 percent more exercise during lunch, and 17 percent more exercise outside of school.

Of course, depending on your perspective, the results might seem a little unnerving -- whoever supervises the lunchroom might not be too thrilled to see an 18.4 percent increase in milling around, bread-roll tossing, jostling in line, etc.

But in general, it's heartening to know that getting off on the right foot in the morning can help a teen stay active all day.

A few months ago, I toured three charter schools in Washington, D.C. as part of an event sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute. It was a great opportunity to take at least a quick glimpse inside the mysterious world of charters, and it was like visiting three different planets -- that's how different the schools were. One was gritty, urban and caring. One was like a prep school on steroids. And one had a vibe between maternal and boot camp.

I was impressed by all of them, for different reasons. But I ended my day feeling strongly that if any of them were really on to something that could make a difference in a troubled urban system like ours, it was the KIPP: DC-Key Academy. (The maternal boot camp one.)

One of the reasons I felt that way was also one of the things I didn't really like about the school: standardization. In their khakis and color-coordinated tee-shirts (tucked in!), with their memorized cheers and inspirational phrases, there was a whiff of the kind of conformist enthusiasm that we like to sneer at in movies about Japanese factory workers.

But the fact was, the KIPP (for Knowledge Is Power Progam) kids were organized. The classrooms were orderly. You could hear a pin drop in the hallways. And the principal and the teachers had a plan. They all knew the plan, they believed in the plan, and they were implementing the plan. It was not a particularly visionary plan -- it was a roadmap to literacy and numeracy, good study habits and good manners. And in this setitng, that may not be visionary, but it is revolutionary.

So I wasn't too surprised to read in the Washington Post today about the results of new research into academic achievement at the KIPP schools. It shows that kids in 27 KIPP middle schools across the country, including KIPP: DC-Key, seem to making great gains in their basic academic skills. It's this kind of replicability that is KIPP's most exciting contribution to the urban education landscape.

You go, KIPP kids. There's something to build an inspirational slogan around.

Here's a phrase I'm retiring from my lexicon: "There are no stupid questions."

As Alice Ginsberg reveals in her recent commentary "No Child Left Behind" in Urban Education: Solving a Crisis or Creating One? in Perspectives on Urban Education, there are in fact stupid questions. You can find some on the tests states are having our kids take to determine winners and losers in the annual yearly progress sweepstakes mandated by No Child Left Behind.

Pity the California 3rd graders faced with this puzzler:

1) Is a raindrop hitting one's head more like the hit in:

A) a dart hitting a target

B) a storm hitting a region

This is the kind of multiple-choice question that leads to all kinds of unproductive woolgathering about the twisted mind that would come up with such a meaningless measuring stick. I'm guessing the answer is probably A, but if my 3rd grader knew that, I'd be more worried than proud.

Some tests include "open-ended" essay questions to allow their students to stretch their writing muscles and show that they can do more than fill in the bubbles on an answer sheet. Here's a question faced by Delaware fifth graders: Presented with a recipe for making Bacon-Tomato Sandwiches, they were told that the recipe indicates the need for a serrated knife and a table knife, and are asked to write an account explaining why two different knives are used.

Now that's certainly going to get the creative juices flowing.(On the other hand, I do know some kids who get excited about, say, the difference between a battle ax and a broadsword when attacked by an Orc.)

While I'm taking cheap shots here, Ginsberg's commentary is a serious critique of the price our kids are paying to dance to NCLB's "If I Can't Measure It, It Doesn't Matter" tune.

In the same issue of the journal, Paul Socolar takes on another little-understood aspect of NCLB. In Education Law is Tougher on Diverse Schools Socolar looks at the evidence that measures of adequate yearly progress stack the deck against large urban "melting pot" schools. In order to "make AYP", schools receiving federal funds must meet all of their targets for test scores and test participation for the overall student population and for demographic subgroups -- such as racial and ethnic groups, students with limited English skills, economically disadvantaged student, and special education students.

Socolar looked at AYP results for schools in Pennsylvania. While some schools had no subgroups at all -- in part because in Pennsylvania a school must have 40 students in a particular group before being required to break out the results for that group -- several large Philadelphia schools had six or seven subgroups. Any school with four or more subgroups would have to meet all of 21 or more targets to "make AYP", while a school with one or none would have nine or fewer targets to hit.

Out of 25 Philadelphia schools with one or no subgroups, 24 made adequate yearly progress. Out of 20 with four or more subgroups, only four made all of their targets.

As Socolar points out, this gives school administrators powerful incentives to juggle their student populations in order to stay below the threshold for a particular subgroup. That might mean discouraging a borderline student from receiving special education services, for instance.

I'm not convinced that NCLB is without merit -- it's had a huge impact on our understanding of, and sense of urgency about, racial achievement gaps. But it may be time to start requiring NCLB to make adequate yearly progress too -- towards correcting serious problems that undermine its mission.

What is hidden in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink? The answers are in our blood and urine, and the latest information on our exposure to 138 chemicals is included in the recently released 3rd edition of the CDC's "National Report on Human Expsure to Environmental Chemicals.

The report gathers nationwide data on blood and urine test results for chemicals that reveal exposure to such things as tobacco smoke, lead, mercury, pesticides, plasticizers (these are compounds that make plastics more pliable), and other stuff we don't like to think about and can't see anyway.

The latest edition has some good news for kids. First, there's the finding that blood tests indicate we're all breathing in less second-hand smoke than we used to. Median levels of cotinine (a chemical produced by the metabolising of tobacco smoke) in the blood of non-smokers has declined 68 percent for children, 69 percent for adolescents, and about 75 percent for adults. (The report compares data from 1988-1991 with data from 1999-2002.) Still, children's levels of cotinine are more than twice those of adults.

Another bit of good news: the numbers of young children with elevated levels of lead in their blood has fallen sharply during the same period, with 1.6 percent of children aged 1 to 5 having elevated blood lead levels, compared to 4.4 percent in the early 1990s. Lead exposure can cause serious health and developmental problems in young children.

Along with the good news, the report raises some new questions. The new edition includes exposure information on 148 chemicals in all. Of these, 38 are being included for the first time. The new additions include five commonly used pyrethroid insecticides, among a host of other chemicals. According to the report, exposure to these insecticides is widespread throughout the population.

Unfortunately, we don't know yet if that's something we should be worried about. Pyrethroid insecticides came into widespread use in part because they are considered less toxic and less persistent than earlier compounds. We don't yet have a good handle on what level of exposure might be dangerous, especially to the developing bodies and brains of children. However, the finding that so many of us are exposed to pyrethroids should spur some research into the question.

"Children First - Their future is now!" Vaguely uplifting, on the verge of ungrammatical, oddly punctuated, but at least not definitively misspelled. Such is the slogan of the District of Columbia Public Schools as it appears on their web site.

However uncertain their approach to the English language, the folks at DCPS appear to be desperately in need of remedial math. That's my conclusion after learning from a Washington Post article that the district has, for the last 10 years, declined federal funding to supporting the educational needs of homeless children.

Over that time, DC has lost more than $1.5 million in federal funding to help children who become homeless continue their schooling. It is the only state education agency (DC is considered a state for some federal funding purposes) in the nation to decline the funds, which are provided through the McKinney Vento Act.

So, why does a school system in which test scores are lousy and the students and teachers are subjected to crumbling schools, old or missing textbooks and constant upheaval feel it just doesn't need that money?

Here's where the math comes in. Beverly Wallace, director of transitory services for DC Public Schools, is quoted to the effect that complying with federal regulations and court orders with regard to properly serving homeless students would cost more than the federal funds.

Wallace, whose office is now budgeted at $300,000 a year, would see her budget almost double with the new funds. But Wallace argues that staffing up enough to verify that homeless families really are homeless, before providing them with things like bus tokens and school uniforms, would eat up the added money.

Excuse me, but how much does she pay her people? And how many thousands of bus tokens does she expect to have to hand out? Why not just give the kids the darn tokens and hope they aren't lying about being homeless just to rip the system off for busfare?

Of course, there is some history here. Back in 1995, a federal court ruled that local officials had violated the law by "failing to address the educational needs of children in a timely fashion." The court order called on the city to provide homeless students and their adult escorts with bus tokens if they lived more than a mile and a half from school.

Proving that Wallace is not the first DC official with a math impairment, city officials argued the cost of the tokens would exceed the federal grant, using estimates that homeless advocates labelled "preposterous", and took the drastic step of passing emergency legislation that allowed the city to reject the federal funding so it could continue in its ferocious determination not to help homeless kids get to school.

That city officials would take such a slap at homeless kids is mind-boggling. That in the decade since no one has had the guts or the math skills to correct it is disheartening. DC's new school superintendent, Clifford Janey, has the power to fix it, but hasn't yet made up his mind.

Mr. Janey, just do the math -- the kids deserve that much.