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In January of 2006 Newsweek put four white boys on their cover with the headline ''The Boy Crisis.'' Inside they told the tale that was so shocking that the myth grew so fast that the factual evidence that quickly came out was ignored. What was this myth? That boys were being left behind. By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in ...

In case you haven't heard, the Chicago Public Schools will be opening a few new schools next year and they are magnets plus a gifted center. So you CPSers know what that means - LOTTERY TIME! More choices in that whole ''school choice'' thing. In reality we know it's more school luck than choice, but put as the commercials say, you can't win if ...

We all know that the Chicago Public Schools are in a state of um, flux. They are trying things that other school systems don't do or maybe even, don't need. One of the experiments that seem to work in some schools is the Local School Council:Local School Councils (LSCs) are elected bodies at nearly every Chicago Public Schools (CPS) elementary, ...

There are days when my husband & I joke around about shipping our sassy & (some days too) precocious daughter to boarding school. Thus it intrigued me to see the headline - No small plan: Public boarding schools for Chicago - in Friday's Chicago Tribune. Low and behold...the first time I've ever said ''Brilliant!'' about CPS. Yes, I know ...

Do you ever read headlines and you interpret them as your failure? That's what I did when I read yesterday that 1 in 4 teenaged girls have a STD.The overall STD rate among the 838 girls in the study was 26 percent, which translates to more than 3 million girls nationwide, researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ...

Saturday ushers in March and the hope that spring will overcome winter, some televised spring training games, Shamrock shakes, and of course, notification from the Chicago Public School lottery and all those privates & parochial schools on whether or not your child was selected. All of this is because Chicago Public Schools have school choice. ...

This action alert just popped into my inbox from MomsRising.com: Right now, more than 40,000 kindergarteners are home alone each day afterschool, with a total of more than 14,000,000 school-age kids on their own afterschool. Surprised? The reality is that most parents work now, and there are too few affordable and accessible afterschool ...

I haven't gotten my paczki yet, but we did vote this morning. There is a blurry photo of my daughter holding up our ''Thank you for voting'' receipt. We all got up extra early because I feared that with the snow coming in the evening others might wake early to connect the arrow and vote. But nope, no wait when we got there and it was quick & ...

My husband & I try our best to explain the world to our daughter without hiding behind ''angels bowling'' or ''storks'' so when she caught us watching the New Hampshire debate over the weekend, she turned into Helen Thomas. ''What are they doing? Does she really, really, really want to be President? Do all six of them want to be President? ...

A recent 'discussion' over homelessness on this site* has gripped me like a tick. It won't let go. Not that I'm not reminded of homelessness every day when I pass the McDonald's on Ashland & Fullerton (?) or after work at the expressway ramp. But the homeless population I never see are the families and there's a good reason for that. ...