Can five overlooked kids make one big difference? There's George: the brain Sara: the loner Dayara: the tough kid Nico: the rich kid And Miguel: the athlete And they're stuck together when they're forced to complete their school's community service hours. Although they're sure they have nothing in common with one another, some people see them as all the same... just five Spanish-speaking kids. Then they meet someone who truly needs their help,...

For two years, beginning in 1988, Jonathan Kozol visited schools in neighborhoods across the country, from Illinois to Washington D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. He spoke with teachers, principals, superintendents, and, most important, children. What he found was devastating. Not only were schools for rich and poor blatantly unequal, the gulf between the two extremes was widening--and it has widened since. The urban schools he visited were...

As public schools become increasingly embattled by budget shortfalls, crowded buildings, and ever-more-rigid curricula, the burden of these restrictions has drastically changed the way children are expected to learn. Nowhere is this more obvious or more devastating than classrooms in high-need urban areas. Drawing upon teachers' firsthand experiences in some of today's most demanding schools, leading education experts Beverly Falk and Megan Blumenreich...

It began well, an experiment in techniques to teach high-risk children, poor, minority, children, the life-strategies that will allow them to succeed in life. And, not just succeed, but overcome the odds and become wildly successful. They chose as their model a man who had done it all, Alexander Marcus, a black man who raised himself up from poverty to become one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in America. The imprinting is effective. The children...

The number of African Americans and Latino/as receiving undergraduate and advanced degrees in computer science is disproportionately low. And relatively few African American and Latino/a high school students receive the kind of institutional encouragement, educational opportunities, and preparation needed for them to choose computer science as a field of study and profession. In Stuck in the Shallow End, Jane Margolis and coauthors look at the daily...