#cory turner

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It's not just baby talk. Any kind of talk with young children — especially if they're too young to talk back — will do.

Because talk is vital to a child's brain development, says Dana Suskind, who found her passion for literacy in an unlikely place: the operating room.

As a surgeon, Suskind performed cochlear implants at the University of Chicago. The implant is a remarkable marriage of medicine and technology that can help even profoundly deaf children hear. But Suskind noticed that her young patients went on to develop language skills at wildly different rates. Some reached or surpassed grade level. Some didn't. Why?

The Surgeon Who Became An Activist For Baby Talk

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There is big news today for prospective college students and their parents. It comes from Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who is in Iowa with President Obama for his annual Back to School Bus Tour.

"Today, we're lending a hand to millions of high school students who want to go to college and who've worked hard," Duncan said. "We're announcing an easier, earlier FAFSA."

That's the Free Application For Federal Student Aid. With more than 100 questions, it's a gatekeeper for students hoping to get help paying for college.

"It's really a win-win for everybody," says Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. "Ultimately, this is gonna mean less work for [students] and less work for schools."

Obama Makes College Aid Application Earlier And Easier

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George Washington University recently announced it would no longer require applicants to submit SAT scores, hoping to improve campus diversity. 

Which sounds good. But, in a recent column in The Hechinger Report, Stephen Burd asks whether schools have "a less altruistic reason" for going test-optional.

"By going test-optional, they appear to be doing one thing but [are really] doing another," Burd told me in a recent interview from his office at New America, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Why Are Colleges Really Going Test-Optional?

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Imagine having to build a bridge — a strong bridge — out of nothing but epoxy and spaghetti.

Yeah, hard. Just ask one of the 160 high schoolers who recently finished Engineering Innovation, a rigorous, monthlong summer camp run by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a handful of other cities. They didn't just have to imagine it; they had to do it.

Students come from all over the world to get what is, for many, their first real taste of engineering in the classroom. The idea behind the program is simple: Give students a chance to explore complex ideas using remarkably simple tools.

Example: Measure the distance between two spires on the Hopkins campus using nothing but a few measuring sticks, string and tape.

Students also have to design a mousetrap out of nothing but paper, glue and rubber bands.

But the grand finale — the last big test for students — is the spaghetti bridge.

Teaching Students To Use Their Noodles

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Neurobiologist Nina Kraus believes she and her team at Northwestern University have found a way — a half-hour test — to predict kids' literacy skill long before they're old enough to begin reading.

When I first read the study in the journal PLOS Biology, two words came to mind: science fiction.

Because flagging some 3-year-olds as potentially troubled readers — before they've even tried reading — feels eerily like being handcuffed by Tom Cruise in Minority Report for a crime that hasn't happened yet.

Kraus herself says the test is nothing short of "a biological looking glass into a child's literacy potential."

To understand how the test works, she says, you need to understand that reading begins not with our eyes but with our ears, as we hear and catalog speech sounds. It's hard work. Everything we hear, our brains have to process, separating the stuff that's meaningful from pure noise. And they do it in microseconds.

The Test That Can Look Into A Child's (Reading) Future

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The national high school graduation rate is an impressive 81 percent. So impressive, President Obama highlighted it in his State of the Union address this year: "Our high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high."

The truth behind that record high graduation rate is complicated. States and school districts are using some powerful, long-term strategies to help potential dropouts stay in school. But many are also fudging their numbers and using quick fixes to make things look better than they are. 

Among the bigger surprises (to us, at least) was the state with the highest graduation rate in the nation — 90 percent: Iowa.

A good place to view a state's sincerity on graduation rates is in its largest city, where it's easy to find students living in poverty with solo parents. The more challenges they face, the more likely they are to drop out. Many cities even lump these teens together into special schools. And this is where you find out what a state is made of. Are these schools vibrant, caring spaces or dropout factories?

Guess Which State Has The Best High School Graduation Rate?

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