Dustin Dwyer

I've been spending a lot of time recently trying to figure out why girls perform better than boys on almost every measure of academic achievement. 

In 1998, Amy Valderas was a single mom with three kids, all under the age of seven. She stayed at home. She had no work experience. She lived with her sister.

So she goes into a Department of Human Services office (which was at that time called the Family Independence Agency), to apply for cash assistance. And, in the lobby of the office, there’s a man who says he’s from Cascade Engineering, a manufacturing company in Grand Rapids.

He asks Valderas if she wants a job.  

"And I was very hesitant at first," she says. "Because I was always with my kids, and I was worried about transportation, daycare, all kinds of stuff, you know."

But the man is very convincing, and Valderas decides to try it out. Before long, she’s working 12 hour shifts. She’s working weekends. She thinks about quitting.

"Because the work is so difficult," she says. "I’d never worked before, and then the long hours. So, I didn’t think I’d be here."

  A few weeks ago, we reported on research showing that children become aware of race at a very young age, and they seem particularly prone to developing stereotypes. The message from that research is simple enough: If parents don’t want their kids to develop racial biases, they need to talk to their kids about race. 

To quickly review: the reason parents need to talk to kids about race is that if they don’t talk to them about race, kids will come up with their own ideas. Those ideas will usually be wrong, sometimes be harmful and occasionally, they’ll be ridiculous.

Cherée Thomas has a story about that.

"Many years ago, my son was in a classroom and a kid licked his hand because he thought he was chocolate," Thomas says.

 As I was working on yesterday's story about charter schools, I came across a problem that must be frustrating for many parents: It is incredibly difficult to find the right information to compare schools in Michigan. The information is all out there. It's just really hard to put it together in a way that makes sense. 

The first problem is figuring out where to look. So, here are five resources to help start the search: 

If you think of the best of what the charter school movement was meant to accomplish – you might think of a school a lot like University Prep Science + Math Middle School in Detroit. It’s attached to the Michigan Science Center in Midtown.

Students fill the hallway, dressed in white shirts, and khaki pants.  The boys wear ties.

Based on state testing, these are some of the top performing students in Detroit.

UPrep Science + Math CEO Margaret Trimer-Hartley is eager to brag.

"Not only do we do well on the data, we are the number one performing free-standing charter middle school in the state of Michigan," she says.

So you might think U Prep Science + Math has a waiting list every year, full of families who want to enroll their kids.

Trimer-Hartley says it’s the opposite.

Yesterday, the White House released its budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, and we got our first detailed look at how the President intends to pay for his plan to make preschool available to all four year olds in the country. Basically, he's going to make smokers pay for it.

First, some bullet points: 

Grand Rapids endured a surge of violent crime involving teenagers this winter. Since then, there have been community meetings and plans put forward. Now, a group of local hip hop artists is getting involved, with a new song targeted at kids. They let me sit in on their first writing session. Click above to hear their thoughts on the song. 

Here are a few quotes from the artists: 

Ken Dill: 

"It's hard to escape the violence when you come up in the community that we come in because you might have a mom and dad that's doing drugs, or that's not really there. You might be raising yourself."

This chart comes from a report released yesterday by the Pew Economic Mobility Project. The report looked at the effects of unemployment on American families. Overall, the report says one third of families in America experienced some form of unemployment between 1999 - 2009. But minority families were far more likely to be affected. Forty-one percent of black families and 51 percent of Latino families experienced unemployment during the period, compared to 30 percent of whites.