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Whitmire: New data on how far boys are falling behind

Blog Entry by Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post

Published March 12, 2010

By Richard Whitmire, former president of the National Education Writers Association, who writes the Eduation Week blog, "Why Boys Fail."

A...

Single Parents, Around the World

By Catherine Rampell

Published March 10, 2010, New York Times

A sizable minority of children in rich countries live with just one parent — a parent who is likely to be female, and also likely to be working.Those are some of the takeaways from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and ...

William Diaz of the 462nd Transportation Battalion feels like he's fighting a war on two fronts. In April, the 39-year-old U.S. Army Reserve corporal is being deployed to Kuwait for a year-long tour. But for the past few months, Diaz has been fighting another very painful battle in his own backyard: American Servicing Corp., a division of Wells Fargo, is seeking a court order to foreclose on his two-family home in Elizabeth, N.J., a predominately Latino city. "I am being deployed. I can'...

For the first time, women have outnumbered men on the nation’s payrolls. The Labor Department revised on Friday its previous estimates of nonfarm payroll employees, the monthly aggregate employment series that gets the most media attention. The most recent jobs estimates by gender are for January. Before adjusting for seasonal changes, 64.2 million payroll employees last month were women, and only 63.4 million were men.

Fairfield, Ia. - It's almost easy to lose Julie Harvey, Fairfield's new police chief, in the big chair behind her desk. Easy, that is, until she breaks into a wide grin and laughs. Harvey, who spent six years in the Army and 16 years with the Fairfield Police Department before becoming chief, is not the kind of officer who feels the need to meet every visitor with a stone face.

In 10 years, our nation will mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. While winning this battle for suffrage was monumental, it wasn't just a step for women in the voting booths—it had a greater significance for social, economic, educational and political equality. Starting next fall, a group of women leaders in Philadelphia will make sure that this work continues in the future.

T.J. Utterback started out as a military police officer before a stint as a National Park ranger. The past 25 years, he's worked in the nursing field at Mercy Medical Center - first as a flight nurse and more recently as a house supervisor overseeing night shift operations at the main campus, Mercy Franklin Center and when needed, Mercy West Lakes. He also taps his skills in law enforcement and nursing in his role as a medical examiner investigator for Warren County.

Katherine used to be Miguel. Olin had a girl’s name. And in October, Robert Ira Schnur, 70, became Roberta Iris Schnur, a Manhattan retiree with magenta lipstick and, she noted the other day, chipped silver nail polish. “I wasn’t like other men,” she said.  Theirs are among hundreds of names a Manhattan court has changed over the last few years for transgender New Yorkers. That tally, specialists in the relatively new field of transgender law say, may make the bor...

Inside a red brick house in Falls Church, Bridget Mary Meehan placed a silver chalice of wine and a plate of flatbread on the coffee table in her living room and prepared to lead a sacred, forbidden ceremony. "As we gather around this table, this intimate little house church table, let us remember that God is raising us up, all of us," she said, smiling at the four worshipers who had come to hear her say Mass.

While students at an all-girls school in Montgomery County were laboring one day last month to build bridges out of popsicle sticks, their teachers were trying to build bridges for them into the male-dominated field of engineering. The popsicle-stick bridges shattered under 60 pounds of pressure. Teachers at the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda hope their seemingly unique engineering course will make girls' interest in the field last longer.