Long before he became a Hollywood star, Denzel Washington was a Mount Vernon, N.Y., schoolboy who spent after-school hours and weekends at his local Boys & Girls Club. For 18 years, Washington has been national spokesman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. On Wednesday, he’s in Washington to help launch a new national program, called Be Great: Graduate, to identify kids who are at risk of dropping out of school and give them the help they need to stay and finish. “Our goal is simple to state but hard to achieve,” Washington said in a statement. “We want to help every Boys & Girls Club member advance to the next grade level every year and graduate from high school on time, prepared with the attitude, knowledge and confidence to succeed and achieve.” DIPLOMAS NOW: To fight ‘dropout factories,’ school program starts young FIRST TO GO TO COLLEGE: Students stay the course When he was a child, he says, “the club staff motivated us to dream big and take our education seriously. Kids today need that … more than ever.” About a third of U.S. students don’t graduate from high school, says a 2010 report by Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center; for Latino and black boys, the rate jumps to nearly 50%. Many of the 4 million children and teens who participate in Boys & Girls Clubs “have the least and need the most to achieve a great future,” says organization president Roxanne Spillett.

An estimated 2.6 million American college freshmen are about to head off to campus. USA TODAY book critic Deirdre Donahue examines four new books about this rite of passage for American teenagers and their parents. Excuse her if she’s a bit wistful: Her own son is part of the departing horde. The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up Are cellphones, Facebook and e-mail morphing into the campus equivalents of baby monitors? And are these digital tethers healthy for college students and their parents? That’s the question posed by The iConnected Parent , a thoughtful and accessible guide that examines a new reality in which going off to college no longer means a weekly phone call home on Sunday night. Thanks to technology, many parents and children are in constant, daily communication. (The authors, Middlebury professor Barbara Hofer and journalist Abigail Sullivan Moore, provide compelling statistics to back up their point.) They also offer sensible guidelines about how to navigate this unprecedented access to your child’s life in college. They point out why certain behaviors — providing a last-minute edit on a term paper, intervening with a dean because your child says her roommate is mean — can damage your college kid’s ability to solve problems without you, a key element in becoming an adult. Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It Don’t read this book the night before you drive the little darling to that pricey private college, because you might cancel the trip. Queens College sociology professor Andrew Hacker, author of the best-selling Two Nations , and New York Times reporter Claudia Dreifus take no prisoners in their blistering attack on American colleges and universities, particularly the Ivy League. They compare the $420 billion per year higher education business to American health care, saying it’s a bloated bureaucracy that costs an astronomical amount of money yet fails to achieve its core mission: teaching undergraduates to think, to question, to be inspired. Their claim: This failure is going on at the nation’s 4,352 colleges and universities, from the biggest sports powerhouse to the most elite private enclave. Money doesn’t solve the problem. The authors argue provocatively that Ivy League students are among the least well-served in terms of teaching, despite parents writing those $37,000 tuition checks. Star professors have never had much interest in teaching undergrads, leaving it to overworked, underpaid grad students. But with that price tag? Ouch. The authors propose dramatic solutions: abolish tenure, stop paid sabbaticals, spin off medical schools. Most of all, they want parents, students, politicians, professors and taxpayers to ask themselves, what is the purpose of college? A real education isn’t about job training or establishing a “Best and the Brightest” elite. Because Higher E ducation? wrestles with all sorts of big-picture, philosophical questions, it’s a thought-provoking book. Perhaps a touch too intense for parents writing tuition checks. Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents At age 21, Zac Bissonnette, an AOL finance blogger and University of Massachusetts senior, delivers a real mule kick to the higher educational status quo with his impassioned Debt-Free U . In an admiring foreword, Andrew Tobias gets it right when he says the author is “Doogie Howser meets the boys from Facebook.” Mincing no words, Bissonnette argues that students and their parents must stop taking out loans to pay for college. In 2006-2007, he points out, the average student graduated owing almost $23,000 (with some owing as much as $120,000), while strapped parents took out home-equity loans. This debt will hurt parents approaching retirement and handicap kids entering adulthood. The author writes out of his own experience of growing up with financially improvident parents. (His father’s house is in foreclosure, and his mother lives with her mother.) His advice is old school. Consider community college. Live at home. Save money. Get a part-time job. And parents who want to help? Get a second job. The Happiest Kid on Campus: A Parent’s Guide to the Very Best College Experience (for You and Your Child) By Harlan Cohen Sourcebooks, 618 pp., $14.99, paperback original Taking a cue from the ever-popular What to Expect When You’re Expecting series, Harlan Cohen uses a similar perky approach in his user-friendly The Happiest Kid on Campus. The funny part, despite the “happiest kid” title, is Cohen gently reminding parents and kids that most college students probably won’t be happy at first. Most freshmen are painfully homesick their first semester, and often longer. Not to mention anxious, stressed-out, confused and lonely. But he has a lot of sensible ways to get to happy, if not happiest. Cohen, author of The Naked Roommate , offers advice on how parents should handle move-in day (remember, it’s the kid’s room, not yours), how much digital communication is too much (the roommate she-devil of yesterday’s text might be the BFF of tomorrow, so don’t intervene), and warns against contacting professors about a failed quiz. Some of his tips are stunningly sensible. If your child is shy, encourage him to get a job in the cafeteria or library so he has to leave his room and talk to people. The funniest advice? Mom, no cougar-ing, and Dad, quit leering.

FORT VALLEY, Ga. — During the school year, Mondays in this rural Georgia community are for video games, trips to grandma’s house and hanging out at the neighborhood community center. Don’t bother showing up for school. The doors are locked and the lights are off. Peach County is one of more than 120 school districts across the country where students attend school just four days a week, a cost-saving tactic gaining popularity among cash-strapped districts struggling to make ends meet. The 4,000-student district started shaving a day off its weekly school calendar last year to help fill a $1 million budget shortfall. It was that or lay off 39 teachers the week before school started, said Superintendent Susan Clark. “We’re treading water,” Clark said as she stood outside the headquarters of her seven-school district. “There was nothing else for us to do.” The results? Test scores went up. So did attendance — for both students and teachers. The district is spending one-third of what it once did on substitute teachers, Clark said. And the graduation rate likely will be more than 80% for the first time in years, Clark said. The four days that students are in school are slightly longer and more crowded with classes and activities. After school, students can get tutoring in subjects where they’re struggling. On their off day, students who don’t have other options attend “Monday care” at area churches and the local Boys & Girls Club, where tutors are also available to help with homework. The programs generally cost a few dollars a day per student. Experts say research is scant on the effect of a four-day school week on student performance. In fact, there is mostly just anecdotal evidence in reports on the trend with little scientific data to back up what many districts say, said University of Southern Maine researcher Christine Donis-Keller. “The broadest conclusion you can draw is that it doesn’t hurt academics,” said Donis-Keller, who is with the university’s Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Evaluation. Many districts that have the shortened schedule say they’ve seen students who are less tired and more focused, which has helped raise test scores and attendance. But others say that not only did they not save a substantial amount of money by being off an extra day, they also saw students struggle because they weren’t in class enough and didn’t have enough contact with teachers. The school district in Marlow, Okla., is switching back to a five-day week after administrators decided students were not being served well by attending school only four days. The 440-student district tried the shorter week the spring semester this year to save $25,000 in operation costs. “It was harder on the teachers. We were asking the kids to move at a quicker pace,” said district Superintendent Bennie Newton. “We’re hoping the four-day week won’t come into play next year.” The move by Peach County in Georgia gets mixed reviews. Parents like Heather Bradshaw worry that their children are getting shortchanged on time with teachers. “I don’t feel like they’re having the necessary time in the classroom,” said Bradshaw, a single mother with a fourth-grade son at one of the county’s three elementary schools. “The schedule has slowed him down.” Other parents prefer the shorter schedule and don’t mind the hassle of finding a babysitter one day a week. “It makes the children’s weekend a little better, so they get more rest,” said LaKeisha Johnson, who sends her fourth-grade daughter to the Boys & Girls Club on Mondays. The trend of four-day school weeks started in New Mexico during the oil crisis of the 1970s and has been popular in rural states where students have to commute a long way. Other districts have used it as a way to try to fix schools with a long history of poor student performance by shaking up the schedule and giving children more time to study outside of school. Georgia, Oklahoma and Maine have changed their laws in the last couple of years to allow districts to count their school year by hours rather than days, allowing for a four-day week if needed. Hawaii schools were off every other Friday this year for schools to save money, giving them the state with the shortest school year in the country. From California to Minnesota to New York, districts — mostly small, rural ones with less than 5,000 students — are following the trend, hoping to rescue their bleeding budgets. For Peach County, the four-day week was enough of a success that the school district is trying it again next year, Clark said. The move saves $400,000 annually and is popular among teachers and students because they get extra rest, she said “Teachers tell me they are much more focused because they’ve had time to prepare. They don’t have kids sleeping in class on Tuesday,” she said. “Everything has taken on a laser-light focus.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.