"Superintendents rock! I've never started a column like this before, certainly not one about school administrators—the people whom youth workers frequently butt heads with over money, building space, bus schedules and even permission slips. But at a forum hosted by the American Association of School Administrators, I recently spent two days with 25 of the most enthusiastic public leaders I've ever met." In her March 2008 Youth Today column, Karen Pittman explores what it takes to shift from superintendents of schools to superintendents of new, student-focused learning systems.

To be poor "is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child's brain," Paul Krugman wrote in a 2008 New York Times op-ed. Here, Hershel Sarbin wrestles with the often-daunting task of communicating about child poverty—and why a renewed, solutions-based focus on child poverty may be around the corner.

Hershel Sarbin writes: "It is my habit each month to search the sites devoted to child advocacy and child well-being in order to discover and report on Who’s Doing What That Works to make a difference in the lives of disadvantaged children. Whatever the organizational focus, I am always looking for 'The Scorecard'—concrete, specific data on outcomes." In this column, Hershel offers an excellent example of The Scorecard, from the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York, and why tracking performance can bring real results for organizations.

Karen examines the connections between two seemingly divergent articles in the October 2007 issue of Youth Today—and offers this recommendation to the youth development field: "Seize the day. Let's claim powerful words like 'creativity' and 'spirituality' and make them our own. Let's define them in ways that reflect and respect diversity and capture the essence of what makes us human: the desire to find the spark, the spirit, the connection to something bigger than ourselves or something deep within ourselves. Let's acknowledge the central role that youth workers can play and are playing to help young people find themselves."

I was somewhat surprised when I recently came across the following paragraph on the Voices for America’s Children Website: “As a society we pay a steep price for allowing one in five of our nation’s children to live in poverty. Economists estimate the annual national cost of persistent childhood poverty due to lost adult productivity and wages, increased crime, and higher health expenditures is massive: approximately $500 billion or four percent of the nation’s gross domestic product”...

In keeping with our promise to track the responses the New York Times had to its “A History of Neglect” series on foster care in New York, we selected a core question from the fourth and final week of responses.

Because, on so many occasions during my Child Advocacy work in recent years—most recently as the founder and editor of the non profit Child Advocacy 360 News Network—I have witnessed such good research on children’s rights and child well-being, and such poor communication of the results, and such miserable follow up in leveraging the findings for the benefit of children that I have pledged to do my own “ What ever happened to….” research on this major area of underachievement, and report it in these blog-like writings. My challenge to Child advocacy researchers : Show us your battle plan post-press release and press notices. Show us the return on investment for children. It’s time for true accountability.

One of my great pleasures as an editor is to periodically "surf the sites" in child advocacy. I often find what to me, at least, are fresh stories of good works and good results that serve as an inspiration for my work at Child Advocacy 360 and Connect for Kids. RuralSuccess.org has several winning examples.