Eric Payne is the author of “DAD: As Easy As A, B, C: 26 Dos & Don’ts For Fathers” and runs his own blog called MakesMeWannaHoller.com. He started doing his daughter’s hair out of necessity when his wife was out of town on business, and he admits it took a fair bit of time before he felt confident letting his daughter out of the house after he’d done her hair. “In the beginning I had my daughter looking like she had been in a cat fight,” Payne said in a story for the black mom-blog Manual Mocha, Daddy Talk: Doing My Daughter’s Hair. And even once he got better at it, Payne said he was often met with a skeptical eye at the fact that he’d been the one to do his daughter’s hair in the first place, and that it actually looked okay.

“More times these people are women who are surprised that I would do my daughter’s hair,” said Payne. “But she’s my daughter. If there’s anything I’m not going to allow, it’s for my daughter to go outside looking like ‘Who did it and ran?’”

In the same story for Manual Mocha, Fred J. Goodall likened his experience of managing his daughter’s hair to “bathing a cat.” Goodall, who also runs his own blog, MochaDad.com, said he has since discovered the secret to avoiding daughter-with-hot-mess-hair-by-dad: “The ponytail is the key to success.”

There are, though, a precious few dads out there who get it right. Filmmaker Emir Lewis has been the go-to hair-guy for his two daughters, ages 9 and 12, since day one. “Braids, fancy parts — straight and zig zag — twists and buns,” Lewis said. “The only ones I can’t do are French braids and cornrow, but once I get that, it’s on, playa!”

For Jimmie Briggs, who happily learned how to manage his 10-year-old daughter’s hair “by recalling the countless weekend nights sitting on the living room floor at home while my mother combed out and braided the heads of my brother and I,” the issue of hair is a bit more complicated. He shares custody of his daughter with his ex-wife, who is Latina and unused to dealing with black hair.

“When our daughter is with her mother, it’s blown out, straightened and pulled back,” said Briggs, the Executive Director of The Man Up Campaign. “With me, it’s an unrelenting back-and-forth over her hair being worn out, curls free flowing and unapologetic.”

And then there are those dads who are not even trying to get involved in the business of doing hair at all, even when there’s a need for it. “My wife doesn’t braid hair very well,” said Darrin Love, an executive chef in New Jersey who has a 21-month-old daughter. “She said, ‘Maybe you should learn to braid,’ and, you know, I don’t think that’s something that a man should be doing.” Love added that he would happily take his daughter to a salon if it comes down to a matter of him doing her hair or letting her go out looking a fright.

Whatever the case may be, the general consensus is that dads kind of stink at doing their daughters’ hair. So what’s the problem, fellas?

One theory is the age-old truism that hair is a subject that is super-fraught for black girls and women, and throwing men, perhaps especially dads, into the mix just makes it more so. “Like too many girls of color with kinky or curly hair, my daughter has been brainwashed by society and Nickolodeon to believe straight hair is neat, while hair worn curly or natural, is messy,” Briggs said. We’re sure his 10-year-old is really feeling that theory.

Or, as Lewis suggests, it may be a matter of getting easy with one’s girly side. “Either I’m secretly gay or just way in touch with my dominant-recessive feminine side.”

source

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The tribute may remind some of Staten Island’s PS 22 choir’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at the most recent Academy Awards.

This version of “Empire State of Mind” was conducted by James Davis Jr. The spot first appeared online several days ago. It then aired during Sunday’s Eagles-Rams NFL game. Now it is quickly going viral. Web searches for “empire state of mind lyrics” and “empire state of mind song” are starting to soar. Watch Now

Concrete jungle where dreams are made of,
There’s nothing you can’t do,
Now you’re in New York!
These streets will make you feel brand new,
The lights will inspire you,
Let’s hear it for New York, New York, New York.

Proceeds for the song, which you can buy on iTunes, go toward the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.

If these videos don’t make you feel soft inside, then your not human. This is so touching and very inspiring.

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Too many teachers, and students are just plain STUPID and it’s time we stop acting as if having tons of weapons and clout is all it takes for us to remain as a superpower. We need our youth to grow up and become smart, CRITICAL THINKERS, who can compete in science, math, and economics and against other countries like India and China who are pumping out mini-Einsteins every day. Read the full story below ..

By LIBBY QUAID, AP Education Writer Libby Quaid, Ap Education Writer

WASHINGTON – Students beware: The summer vacation you just enjoyed could be sharply curtailed if President Barack Obama gets his way.

Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe.

“Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,” the president said earlier this year. “Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.”

The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.

“Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Fifth-grader Nakany Camara is of two minds. She likes the four-week summer program at her school, Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville, Md. Nakany enjoys seeing her friends there and thinks summer school helped boost her grades from two Cs to the honor roll.

But she doesn’t want a longer school day. “I would walk straight out the door,” she said.

Domonique Toombs felt the same way when she learned she would stay for an extra three hours each day in sixth grade at Boston’s Clarence R. Edwards Middle School.

“I was like, `Wow, are you serious?’” she said. “That’s three more hours I won’t be able to chill with my friends after school.”

Her school is part of a 3-year-old state initiative to add 300 hours of school time in nearly two dozen schools. Early results are positive. Even reluctant Domonique, who just started ninth grade, feels differently now. “I’ve learned a lot,” she said.

Does Obama want every kid to do these things? School until dinnertime? Summer school? And what about the idea that kids today are overscheduled and need more time to play?

___

Obama and Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school.

“Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,” Duncan told the AP. “I want to just level the playing field.”

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it’s not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).

___

Regardless, there is a strong case for adding time to the school day.

Researcher Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution looked at math scores in countries that added math instruction time. Scores rose significantly, especially in countries that added minutes to the day, rather than days to the year.

“Ten minutes sounds trivial to a school day, but don’t forget, these math periods in the U.S. average 45 minutes,” Loveless said. “Percentage-wise, that’s a pretty healthy increase.”

In the U.S., there are many examples of gains when time is added to the school day.

Charter schools are known for having longer school days or weeks or years. For example, kids in the KIPP network of 82 charter schools across the country go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., more than three hours longer than the typical day. They go to school every other Saturday and for three weeks in the summer. KIPP eighth-grade classes exceed their school district averages on state tests.

In Massachusetts’ expanded learning time initiative, early results indicate that kids in some schools do better on state tests than do kids at regular public schools. The extra time, which schools can add as hours or days, is for three things: core academics — kids struggling in English, for example, get an extra English class; more time for teachers; and enrichment time for kids.

Regular public schools are adding time, too, though it is optional and not usually part of the regular school day. Their calendar is pretty much set in stone. Most states set the minimum number of school days at 180 days, though a few require 175 to 179 days.

Several schools are going year-round by shortening summer vacation and lengthening other breaks.

Many schools are going beyond the traditional summer school model, in which schools give remedial help to kids who flunked or fell behind.

Summer is a crucial time for kids, especially poorer kids, because poverty is linked to problems that interfere with learning, such as hunger and less involvement by their parents.

That makes poor children almost totally dependent on their learning experience at school, said Karl Alexander, a sociology professor at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, home of the National Center for Summer Learning.

Disadvantaged kids, on the whole, make no progress in the summer, Alexander said. Some studies suggest they actually fall back. Wealthier kids have parents who read to them, have strong language skills and go to great lengths to give them learning opportunities such as computers, summer camp, vacations, music lessons, or playing on sports teams.

“If your parents are high school dropouts with low literacy levels and reading for pleasure is not hard-wired, it’s hard to be a good role model for your children, even if you really want to be,” Alexander said.

Extra time is not cheap. The Massachusetts program costs an extra $1,300 per student, or 12 percent to 15 percent more than regular per-student spending, said Jennifer Davis, a founder of the program. It received more than $17.5 million from the state Legislature last year.

The Montgomery County, Md., summer program, which includes Brookhaven, received $1.6 million in federal stimulus dollars to operate this year and next, but it runs for only 20 days.

Aside from improving academic performance, Education Secretary Duncan has a vision of schools as the heart of the community. Duncan, who was Chicago’s schools chief, grew up studying alongside poor kids on the city’s South Side as part of the tutoring program his mother still runs.

“Those hours from 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock are times of high anxiety for parents,” Duncan said. “They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table.”

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“Red Hook High” may be the antidote to all that. Instead of stick-thin blondes toting $3,500 Hermes bags, there are black boys toting bags of drugs. Instead of postcard-perfect mansions and cityscapes, there are cramped apartments and construction zones. Part drama, part documentary, “Red Hook High,” a new pilot that premiered at the New York Television Festival (NYTVF) this week, shows a high school experience few network and cable series touch on, one that unfolds in a gritty Brooklyn community among teens with the odds stacked against them. Forget prom queens and valedictorians. “Red Hook High’s” stars include a budding drug dealer, an emerging gay crusader and a possibly pregnant teen.

“It’s the opposite of ‘Gossip Girl,’” said director Trac Minh Vu. “It’s not a glossy Hollywood fashion show. There are probably people who actually live lives like what is portrayed on ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘The OC.’ But they’re fantasy shows. They’re about showcasing high fashion and the small population of people who can live like that.”

“But my own high school experience is not at all reflected in the current crop of teen dramas,” he continued. “Part of this is trying to show that the teen experience is far wider than what’s portrayed on TV, especially for kids of color.” Vu came to the United State from Vietnam at age 2. By day, he’s a video producer for an investment bank. Nights and weekends, he works on independent projects: Last year, his teen drama about the Upper East Side’s wannabe Ivy Leaguers, “Dear Harvard,” picked up three major awards from the NYTVF, which showcases independent pilots (those not backed by an established studio).

This year, Vu channeled his experience as a nonwhite student in an Oregon Catholic school, his time working as a teaching artist at South Brooklyn Community High Schoo and his affinity for classic coming-of-age dramas like “My So Called Life,” “Dawson’s Creek” and “Felicity,” into a pilot portraying teen life on the other side of the East River.

Beyond a basic story outline, Vu left the dialogue and development of “Red Hook High” up to his actors, students from Brooklyn high schools with an interest in performing arts. They rehearsed over the course of seven weeks and shot the pilot in four days, on a sub-$20,000 budget financed out of Vu’s pocket, pennies compared to the average $3 million budget networks allot for pilot production. For many of the stars, their story lines mirrored their real-life drama.

“They told us to write down what kind of characters we wanted to be. I said, I just want to be gay because it’s just going to be like, stupid if I’m trying to be straight,” said Michael Maldonado, who’s openly gay and plays a teen coming to terms with his homosexuality.

Read The Entire Story

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