The Campaign for an American Dream (CAD) is starting to make some buzz on the West Coast, as four young undocumented residents prepare to walk from San Francisco to Washington D.C., in an attempt to raise awareness along the way about the DREAM Act and Immigration rights.

The DREAM Act is a piece of legislation that would allow undocumented youth to get on a track to citizenship by going to college or being in the military. Many young people find out that they are undocumented years after they have moved to the U.S., and then realize that their pathways to becoming employed or continuing their education are blocked. Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who revealed that he was undocumented, and became a spokesperson for the undocumented population. You can watch his statement of support for the Campaign for an American Dream on their website.

The four walkers are between 22 - 26 years old, and from different parts of the U.S. They are converging in California in the next couple of weeks where they will participate in a day of lobbying in Sacramento and a protest at Travis Air Force base. Then they will make their way across the country for an estimated seven months.  The walkers depart on March 10 and plan to arrive in D.C. in late October.

Last month, the California State Senate approved a bill to develop a Creativity and Innovation Education Index, designed to measure how schools are fostering creativity among their students. California is just one of several states to implement a law like this, Massachusetts being the first, according to Education Week.

It might seem like a shock that California is concerned with measuring creativity opportunities when the budget for arts classes and music programs has been cut in school districts all over the state in recent years. However, employers and business owners are saying that new applicants to the workforce are not equipped with the creativity and critical-thinking skills required to get hired.

The California Alliance for Arts Education describes the index:

A creativity and innovation index would provide a way for schools to rate their progress in teaching, encouraging and fostering creativity in students. Index scores would be voluntarily compiled by school and district staff from a survey of curricula and teacher reports. It would quantify the opportunities in each school as measured by the availability of classes and before and after-school programs offered by and through school districts that nurture creativity and innovation in students. Examples might include visual and performing arts education classes, debate clubs, science fairs, theatre and dance performances, music concerts, film-making, creative writing, and independent research.

We spoke with Mary Wright, Associate Director for The Conference Board, a business membership and research association, who specializes in the intersection of business and education. She was a leader on a report called, “Are They Really Ready To Work?” in 2006, which identified key skill sets that employers thought were important for their employees to have, and creativity / innovation were among the top five.

We spoke with Wright about the concept of a Creativity Index and how she thinks it could affect the workforce readiness of young people today.

Youth Radio: Explain in a nutshell, the findings of your workforce readiness research with regards to the need for non-academic skills.

Wright: We wanted to understand what business really meant by--new entrants are not workforce ready. We looked at both basic skills, which we took from No Child Left Behind-- the reading, writing, and arithmetic skills, and also asked about the applied skills, like 21st century skills. The applied skills are things around critical thinking, information technology application, teamwork and collaboration, and creativity and innovation. There are about 13 or 14 skill sets we looked at.

It was clear to us that the applied skills were the ones that were considered most important. Certainly, people would argue that math and science develop significantly critical thinking skills. They give you tools to figure out problems. But if you can’t communicate what you just learned or what you just did, you’re not as valuable in the workplace.

It was interesting given the emphasis that people have on STEM [science, mathematics, technology and engineering] skills, and yet, what employers were saying, it wasn’t the math skill that was important, it was the critical thinking skill. That would be true regardless of whether someone was in a STEM career or a retail career.

Teenagers in 2011 are taking fewer risks than their parents did with regard to drugs and alcohol, reports the New York Times Magazine. In 2011, 6.6 percent of high school seniors--as opposed to 9 percent in 1980-- frequently used marijuana. In addition, 72 percent of high school seniors in 1980 had recently consumed alcohol, while only 40 percent responded they had done so in 2011.

The data comes from the Monitoring the Future survey funded by the National Institutes of Health, and conducted at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. It surveyed 47,000 students.

The press release for the study states that in 2011, 50% of high school seniors reported trying an illicit drug at some time in their life. Among 10th graders, 38 % have tried an illicit drug, 31% did so in the past 12 months and 19 % in the prior 30 days.

According to the study, “synthetic marijuana” often called “spice” or “K2” was very popular among teenagers this past year, as well as easy to get. For a while, it was sold legally as herbal incense, until the Drug Enforcement Administration declared some of the chemicals in it dangerous and banned it for a year. One in nine high school seniors reported using it this past year.

Meanwhile, alcohol use among teenagers has fallen over the past ten years. “Over the past 20 years, from 1991 to 2011, the proportion of 8th graders reporting any use of alcohol in the prior 30 days has fallen by about half (from 25% to 13%), among 10th graders by more than one third (from 43% to 27%), and among 12th graders by about one fourth (from 54% to 40%)," reports the study.

Youth Radio took a look at how the legalization of marijuana impacts teen drug use back in 2010. Check out Sayre Quevedo's story on NPR.

The following originally aired on KCBS

By: Dereke Williams  

Some days when my knees are giving me a lot of pain I’ll look over at my shadow doing a slow pigeon toed wobble down the street, and I just think to myself how gross and unhealthy I look.

My mom taught me how to love me for me. I remember she once told me, “You’re fat simple as that, and until you’re ready to put in the hard work to change, you might as well be the cutest fat boy in the game.”

Some people in my life worry that if I accept myself the way I am, that it means I don’t want to change, but what they don’t understand is that the only way I can lose weight is to do it from a place of strength, not shame.

I’m accepting myself for who I am now, not what I wish to be or who I may become in the future, keeping in mind that wherever I go, my shadow will be there. Except now when see it, my shadow doesn’t have a negative hold on me. Instead I smile to myself and think, what a fat black beautiful bowlegged young man.

The American Pediatrics Association released results of a study today that seems to indicate that when students are ostracized, they are less inclined to participate in physical activities.

The study included 19 children between the ages of 8 and 12 years old. The first part of the study involved a computer game called Cyberball. Each child was told that they were playing with two other children on the Internet, but the computer actually controlled the other two “players.” One group of students was tossed the ball regularly, but the other group of students was intentionally ignored and not thrown the ball.

After the Cyberball sessions, the children were given the option of using physical activity equipment or doing stationary activities like word searches and reading. The ostracized students spent 41 percent more time on the stationary activities, reports Education Week. In addition, these children reported greater negative feelings, less emotional-control, and without a sense of belonging.

This story was originally published on L.A. Youth. 

Distractions are all around us—Facebook, YouTube, texting, TV. It’s sometimes so overwhelming that it can be hard to focus on homework. So we challenged these teens to do their homework without distractions for three days. They were allowed to take breaks to do things like check their Facebook, go on YouTube, talk to their friends or watch TV, but they couldn’t do those things while doing their homework.

By Moviz Dar 18, Hawthorne HS

I usually come home after school and eat, sleep for one to three hours and then watch videos on YouTube. I promise myself that I’ll start my homework the next hour but it never happens. I do my homework from 9 p.m. until midnight. I knew that starting my homework at 9 was bad because I wasn’t getting all my work done.

On the first day of the challenge, I deactivated my Facebook account and put my phone on silent. My brain was telling me every second that I had to log onto Facebook and reply to text messages I assumed I had. But I was able to resist. I finished my economics homework in half an hour. I usually take two hours. And I finished all of my homework one hour earlier than normal and got eight hours of sleep. Even though I got homework done faster, I felt like I was stuck in a cage and being forced to do it.

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A group of sixth graders shared their stories with Youth Radio about getting suspended from school, and whether they thought it was a fair and a meaningful punishment. They Skyped with us from their classroom in Oakland, CA.

Listen to their stories above.

Their teacher Ms. M., who preferred her name not be mentioned, shared some thoughts after listening to her students speak. “I’m just surprised at some of the situations that my students have gotten themselves into... I feel like in my classroom these students are very respectful to me, they’re generally not behavior problems. None of these students have been sent to the office by me this year,” she said.

In general, she senses from students that suspension is not seen as a punishment. It’s the opposite. “That definitely is the feeling among kids - suspension is a time to take off or play around, a break from school... It depends on what is going on at home. If you have a parent that cares a lot about their child getting suspended, then the kid is going to be at home doing chores, and doing their homework. Other kids come back to school and say, ‘I was at Six Flags when I was suspended,’ or ‘I was watching tv,’ or ‘I was playing video games when I was suspended,’” she said.

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In last week’s State of the Union address, President Obama proposed something radical, that dropping out of high school no longer be allowed. But that might be complicated. Every school district has tried numerous solutions to the dropout dilemma without success. The problem prompted Russell Rumberger to write a book called Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It.

Rumberger is director of the California Dropout Research Project, and he currently serves as provost in the Office of the President at the University of California. He recently talked about his theory that high schools need to promote alternatives to college – and that some people might be better served not getting a higher education at all. KALW's Ben Trefny sat down with Youth Radio’s Robyn Gee to discuss this idea of education.

This story was produced by Youth Radio with support from the New Options Project and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Suspension Stories, a youth-led project by the Young Women's Action Team and Project NIA, produced a series of written, audio, and video testimonies about students getting suspended. The project intends to highlight the school-to-prison pipeline and show how school discipline policies often seem premature, too extreme, or unfair to students. 

Below, Adeola M. shares her story of getting suspended. If she had been guided to talk out her conflict with her classmate, she says, she would not have missed a week of school, including a test.

Over the past thirty years, school discipline tactics have hanged drastically. According to a study out of Texas called, Breaking School Rules, the number of student suspensions in the U.S. increased from 1.7 million in 1974 to 3.3 million in 2006. 

Part of the increase is due to legislation, like the Drug Free Schools and Communities Act, and the Gun Free School Zones Act. Both went into effect in the 90's, and schools saw a rise of zero-tolerance discipline policies in schools. However, researchers, educators, and policymakers are looking at the current suspension numbers and seeing problems with the population of students that is hit the hardest by these suspensions.

According to the Texas study, the rate of black students suspended at least once rose from 6 to 15 percent, while the rate of white students suspended rose from 3 to 5 percent.

A recent Washington Post article reports that more than 35,000 students in the Washington suburbs were suspended or expelled from school last year, and more than half of them were black students. In addition, 71 percent of all suspensions for insubordination were given to black students, which means the offenses were more likely to be subjective, as opposed to offenses like being caught with a firearm on campus.

The federal government recently announced the “Supportive School Discipline Initiative” to address the high numbers of suspensions and the “school to prison pipeline,” by ensuring that discipline practices in schools maintain students’ civil rights and keep students in school as much as possible.

Danny Whittaker is a school counselor at Lovonya DeJean Middle School in Richmond, CA who sees the problem first hand. In 2008, DeJean had a violence-suspension rate of 41 percent. When Whittaker accepted the position, he thought he would be doing academic counseling, but has accepted his role as school disciplinarian. “Honestly, I don’t have time to do both... If kids need to talk to me about personal stuff, sorry I don’t have time.” said Whittaker. At the beginning of this school year, there was at least one fight per week, he said.