All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

>Don Teague is a CBS News Correspondent in the Dallas bureau.

There are three words that bring joy to the hearts of parents, and dread to their children. Three words that feel like freedom for grownups, and prison for kids. Three words, that seem to get more expensive every year:

Back to School

I have to admit, that even 25 plus years after graduating high school, I still get a little nervous adrenaline rush on the first day of a school year. I guess most of us never completely recover from high school.

In Texas, about 4.8 million public school students went back to school this morning after the long summer break, my two teenaged daughters among them. They joined millions of other kids around the country who are now trying to figure out if they got the hard history teacher or the easy one, a good locker location or a bad one, if this will finally be the year they keep that pledge to do their homework early.

I, on the other hand, am joining the millions of parents doing serious checkbook math today, trying to figure where all the money went.

I actually know where it went. I just can’t quite believe it.

One of the most striking things to me about the new national survey of students focusing on cheating by cell phone or using the Internet, which we are reporting for Thursday’s The Early Show, is how many kids don’t necessarily think it’s cheating at all.

Almost one in four middle and high school students surveyed said they didn’t think storing notes on a cell phone or texting during an exam constituted cheating. What? Cheating by any other name is still cheating, right?

Kyle Cohen, a senior at Ridgewood High School in New Jersey, tried to explain the conundrum to me this way: "I think just because you are not making the person to person contact (it's easier) to convince yourself that you are not doing something wrong."

Katherine Griffith, another Ridgewood High School senior, said she thinks kids think of it more as "helping each other out as opposed to I'm going to cheat on my test and look at someone else’s paper."

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Education is the engine that drives progress, and easy access to education gives a country a competitive advantage.

A recent study delivers the sobering news that America is continuing to lose it’s edge in that department.

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education reports that every state but one - California - flunked the college affordability test. At state colleges and universities, costs have climbed a whopping 440 percent since the 1980's, meaning young people today have more roadblocks to a degree than their parents had.

With state budgets already stretched and student loans harder to come by, you don't need a Ph.D. to figure out most Americans can't really afford college anymore.

But this nation can't afford the alternative, either: A generation lacking the skills and savvy to keep the engine of progress humming well into the new millennium.

Cynthia Bowers is a CBS News correspondent based in Chicago.

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For months now Illinois state senator and pastor James Meeks has fought for more funding for Chicago Public Schools. With several hundred thousand students the district is the nation’s third largest. The graduation rate for black and Latino students is generally less than 50 percent and in many schools there aren’t enough textbooks to give one to every student.

Over the years we’ve done stories about CPS, focusing primarily on failure and frustration. But when Rev. Meeks announced his intent to bus a bunch of kids from Chicago to a public school district just to the north, New Trier High School, the story became personal. I have two kids at New Trier this year. The school consists of two campuses, one strictly for freshman, the other for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. There is a football field, track, tennis courts, soccer field, and swimming pool used for PE and for athletics. Helping my kids decided what to take each year is like revisiting my college years. The courses offered include zoology, marine biology, advanced automotives, Hebrew, Chinese, sports and entertainment marketing, sequential art and animation. You get the idea.

What Rev. Meeks wanted to do ...

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For those of us with teenage children, the words "teen" and "sex" are scary when combined.

There's been a heated debate in America for a long time about the correct approach to sex education.

Do we accept that sex happens and teach kids to be safe? Or do we steer kids away from it?

To watch my Notebook, just click on the monitor.

Michelle Miller is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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From the outside, it looks like any other three-story pre-war brick building, the kind that harkens back to the little red school house where simplicity is the order of the day.

But walk in and what you feel is community, middle school girls who really get one another.

They have a lot in common, most are children of immigrants, most are from families struggling to earn a living, and most admit if not for the Esperanza Academy, they're not sure where they'd be.

They've gotten in by chance – there are just 80 slots, each won by lottery for the opportunity to attend class 11 hours a day, 11 months a year.

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Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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The way my parents put it to me when I was a kid: going to school was my job.

They put a roof over my head, put all the food I needed in my stomach, gave me clothes, protected me from wild animals and so forth. In return, I was supposed to do my best in every class, every year, no questions asked. For a whole host of reasons, that isn't the environment that many children grow up in around the country.

Whether it be due to peer pressure, lack of role models, absent parents, etc., there are a startling number of dropouts all around the country. Colin Powell's organization, America's Promise, produced a report recently, which painted a rather bleak picture of the dropout rate across the largest 50 school districts or zones in the country. In Dallas, which has one of the worst dropout rates in the country, one school; Bryan Adams (and no it is not named after the singer), has been trying an innovative idea blending technology and support that is producing some amazing results.

Last year a judge here enrolled some habitual truants, meaning students with not just bad but horrible attendance, into a trial program where they are required to wear a GPS device that tracks their movements to and from school. Every morning before the bell rings, truancy counselors check a computer that displays the location and speed of all the students every few minutes on a map. This way, they know if the student is making it to class, whether they are walking slowly or getting a lift. The judge also ordered a 9 p.m. curfew for these kids, which is monitored by a voice-recognition system – meaning a computer calls the home phone, and the kids have to be there to answer it. If they aren't they have a few minutes to call back and say why they didn't pick up the phone.

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Jill Jackson is a Capitol Hill field producer for CBS News.

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Evan Aanerud is an engineering student with two quarters of classes left at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He is also an Iraq War veteran who served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves.

At a rally today on Capitol Hill, Aanerud told his story and shared his struggles to about 100 veterans gathering to support legislation that would update the Montgomery GI Bill. Aanerud told the crowd that when he started school he received just $282 per month. And one year ago, his benefits completely ran out.

"I was proud of my service, but after putting my life on the line, it would have been nice to get the benefits we expected," Aanerud said.

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As much as I've heard and read about "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) — the landmark education bill President Bush signed into law five years ago, I had no idea that every state uses a different test and standard to determine whether its schools are making the required progress under the law.

It is an issue, we learned, that is debated sharply in education circles — with some states accusing others of lowering the bar by using easier tests and lower standards to make their schools look more successful.

Why would they do this? Well, the stakes couldn't be higher. A school that is identified as not meeting NCLB targets — the requirement is 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014 — could face sanctions or ultimately be shut down.

What we learned is that, like most subjects, this topic can't be broken down into right and wrong or black and white. It's much more complicated than that — and states, at least the ones we visited, appear to be trying to do the right thing, which is give their kids the best education they possibly can.

Consider the places we traveled: Georgia and neighboring South Carolina. The two states have nearly identical scores on a national reading test for fourth graders (around 26 percent proficiency) but dramatically different results on their state tests. South Carolina's fourth-graders had a 36 percent proficiency rating in reading, while Georgia's was 87 percent.

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Two of America's best-known philanthropists have just set up a $60 million program to put education on the front burner in the next election.

To find out more, just click the monitor.