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Strategies for nuturing young activists.

In classrooms all over the country, posters hang on walls bearing the face of Martin Luther King, Jr. Libraries put out displays of books about his life. Bulletin boards are decorated with phrases from famous speeches. Many will remain up throughout the school year, not just for the federal observance of King’s birthday on Monday.

A legal settlement reached in Los Angeles Tuesday could reverberate through schools in low-income neighborhoods across the country. The Board of Education there approved a deal with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups that would radically limit the practice of laying off teachers based solely on seniority.

Hundreds of high school and college students gathered around the state capitol in Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday. They were there to convince Gov. Jan Brewer to veto Senate Bill 1070. These young protesters were disappointed though. Brewer signed the bill and instantly set back relations between whites and Latinos in Arizona and other parts of the country.

When I was in fifth grade and new to suburbia, my teacher introduced the concepts of racism, civil rights and fairness. And she began the task of helping 10-years olds—all of us white—learn how to talk about race in constructive ways. I’d moved from a gritty urban neighborhood where whites, blacks and Puerto Ricans lived together rather warily. My parents maintained a chilly silence on the issue of race, although they forbade racial epithets; on the street I heard plenty. In this place, the black kids came mostly from the projects, the Puerto Ricans lived in apartments and the better-off among the white families might have an entire house. I knew that race divided.

Mr. Franklin changed my son’s life. Alex used to hate school. He angrily questioned and resented every assignment, no matter how easy or fun it seemed. I dreaded the monumental struggle it took just getting him to do his work. Many parents fight this daily battle. Even those of us who are professional educators are not exempt from it. Then came Mr. Franklin.

Feast for 10, a children’s book by Cathryn Falwell, recently found its way into a lesson at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Cooperative Nursery School. The book, focusing on counting skills, follows a family through the

At my elementary school in Guatemala last year, soccer fields, basketball courts and baseball diamonds were dominated by boys and a handful of brave, tough girls.