By Karen Pittman, March 2008

Superintendents rock! I’ve never started a column like this before, certainly not one about school administrators – the people whom youth workers frequently butt heads with over money, building space, bus schedules and even permission slips. But at a forum hosted by the American Association of School Administrators, I recently spent two days with 25 of the most enthusiastic public leaders I’ve ever met.

Summer is the time to "blur the lines" for learning. As the newest member of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Karen Pittman used July to take the Forum's message about the need for strong community learning partnerships on the road.

While the nation’s public systems continue to fall short of delivering equitable educational supports to children and youth, youth workers have spent the last several decades insulating and, in some cases, patching the leaks in the “education pipeline”– a term describing the route students follow from early childhood through post-secondary education. Staggering statistics in numerous reports reveal that this problem presents a much greater risk than federal dropout statistics generally convey, to the extent that it has reached what some researchers call crisis proportions. Read about this growing challenge in communities across the country and some promising strategies being developed to overcome it.

By Karen Pittman, December 2003

I'll admit it: I've got mixed feelings about character education classes — emphasis on "classes." My gut instinct, first as a parent, then as a youth worker, is that these kinds of lessons are best learned when they're embedded in other learning experiences and reinforced in life, particularly when the recipients are teens.

By Karen Pittman, March 2003

The Bush administration unveiled its request last month to cut funding for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (CLC) program by 40 percent for fiscal 2004. This is not good news. But it is not surprising.