Even before the Great Recession began, an alarming number of young adults in New York City between the ages of 18 and 24 were neither in school nor working. The employment challenges for these New Yorkers have only magnified in recent years. There are now an estimated 172,000 of these "disconnected youth" in the five boroughs. Though the…

Only 8 percent of children born into poverty graduate from college by the age of 25. Consider what that means for the estimated 500,000 New York City kids living in poverty. It is a fact: The better educated a person is, the better her chances of upward mobility. So when fewer than one in 10 children born into poverty reach their academic…

Detroit's Benjamin Carson Academy (BCA) is believed to be the nation's first charter school for juvenile offenders. Opened in 1999, BCA is housed in the newly built Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility, a state of the art, 89,300-square-foot building in downtown Detroit with half a dozen gymnasiums, two computer labs, a media center, mental…

People who read become absorbed in a process of discovery about the world around them; books open doors to otherwise inaccessible places and introduce readers to profound new ideas. Approximately 15 seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade members of the StreetSquash Book Club in Harlem meet on Friday afternoons to read, write, and discuss topics…