Join YTFG’s Safe Passage Conference Calls
The Youth Transition Funders Group is hosting two conference calls this fall to share how funders and communities are working together to help all of America s youth connect by age 25. Panelists will discuss pathways to college and careers, reform and alternatives to incarceration, and programs that help youth become financially independent after foster care .

Are you going to the Fourth of July parade? Well, Congress has already rained on it. Here's how:

As of July 1 students starting out for college, and many of those still paying off those college loans, will have to pay much higher interest rates, thanks to the budget deal Congress made to cut spending for student aid while expanding tax cuts for investments.

The National PTA is urging Sen. Thad Cochran, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee to uphold the promise they made in March to direct $7.1 billion above the president's budget request to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.

The No Child Left Behind law is supposed to address "the soft bigotry of low expectations," by holding schools and teachers accountable for teaching all children, regardless of their race, home language, learning style, gender, economic status, etc.

A high school math teacher in Florida has discovered that uncertainty is a great motivator for students.

According to a story in eSchool News online, teacher Paige Allison, who is also a University of Florida graduate student in educational anthropology (latest entry in my list of "majors I never knew existed"), came across this new technique for keeping students on their toes while researching another question: how to avoid calling on certain students, or types of students, more often than others.

As a parent, I will be breathing a big sigh of relief in a couple of weeks when my older son leaves middle school behind. And the parents of his classmates tell me they will be doing the same. I'm almost expecting that the entire neighborhood will feel the breeze emanating from the middle school auditorium next Wednesday when the whole ordeal finally ends for the lucky 8th graders and their parents.

When I was applying to college three long decades ago, it seemed like there was a relative handful of schools that most students at my high school applied to. It was a list that was heavy on the Ivies, heavy on the liberal arts, and sprinkled with "safeties" that included some state schools and small single-sex institutions.

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi delivered a sharp lesson this week to the students of Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill. -- which was, being right is no guarantee you'll be treated right.

Recently, I've seen a few widening cracks in the stubborn resistance of many teachers I know to the use of electronic communications technology. One in particular, who used to almost boast of her inability to send, receive, open or otherwise connect with e-mail, now is in regular touch through her school-based e-mail account.

So it's come to this.

Omaha's troubled urban school district is now poised, with the blessing of Nebraska's legislature and governor, to divide itself into three separate districts -- one mostly black, one mostly hispanic, and one mostly white. And the man behind it is the state's one-and-only black lawmaker, State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha.