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Today, Donny is in high school and a reader, Purcell-Gates said. To wonder what may have been the result if Jenny had not sought out Purcell-Gates, she points to a sobering statistic: a 78 percent drop out rate among urban Appalachians in many cities.

"One of the main conclusions in the book is that it is not just the presence of print for the child, it's the actual use of print that allows the learning to take place," she said. "Young children are paying attention to the people in their close circle or environment. They don't know in those very young ages that other people are reading and writing. To them, their world is what they experience where they live. And where the kids like Donny were living, no one read or wrote. So to them, reading and writing was not even something to reject. It didn't exist until they went to school.

"That is why it is so important to understand the worlds these children come from, so that you know what they are operating on.

Growing public concern about student-data privacy is prompting fresh scrutiny of the ways technology vendors handle children's educational information—and opening the gates for a flood of new questions and worries from advocates and school officials.

"We're just scratching the surface with our understanding of how the education sector is gathering and looking to monetize student information," said Joel R. Reidenberg, a law professor at Fordham University, in New York, and Princeton University. "We as a society need to have a very clear discussion about how we want to protect the privacy of our children in this environment."

But many are concerned that the horse is already out of the barn. Last month, for example, Education Week

I was charged with explaining my "innovative approach to open social networks for learning"

Access. In 1996, Sir John Daniel estimated we would need to create a major university every week to educate the 100 million students qualified to enter a university who have no place to go. Fifteen years later, universities have simply not kept pace with the staggering demand for college education

2007 Silent Epidemic study funded by the Gates Foundation, I had what my students would call (pardon their French) a WTF moment. Eighty-eight percent of high school dropouts have passing grades. Huh? Nearly half say they are bored and classes are not interesting.