San Diego is famous for Comic-Con, the celebration each July of comic book and geek culture, but the rest of the year the city's vibrant comic book scene goes virtually underground.

Alonso Nu�ez is busy trying to change all that, a panel at a time. Comic book art is one of the great loves of his life, a love that he hopes to pass along to others.

"I grew up loving comics," said Nu�ez, 33. "I got my bachelor's of fine arts in comic book illustration from the School of Visual Arts." His diploma the New York university hangs on a wall at Little Fish Comic Studio, where he teaches all levels of comic book and manga art to students of all ages.

The school is almost hidden on a leafy tree-lined street in Ocean Beach. Inside, the place is lined with bookshelves and chalkboards, and there is art on every wall. The restroom is plastered, floor to ceiling, with comic strips.

Little Fish is the only place in San Diego that teaches exclusively comic book and manga art. Nu�ez got the idea after mentoring an after-school program at High Tech High in Chula Vista.

"I had so much fun doing it that I decided, you know, I think this needs to be a full-time thing," he said. He and co-founder Patrick Yurick opened Little Fish in 2012, and since then he has been the school's year-round instructor.    >>READ MORE 

"I'm a level 11 in math, and a level 9 in English, but I'm trying really hard to move up," I heard from a student who I believed to be a 5th grader. Huh?

In July 2013, Matchbook Learning, a national K-12 school turnaround nonprofit, partnered with Burns to bring up scores and graduation rates by using a student-centered learning approach. And one major facet of that? Individualized learning that brought an end to K-8 grade levels in mathematics and English language arts.

It's a tough situation: a 2013 NAEP report shows that urban students in Detroit performed the worst out of 24 U.S. cities on the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), and within that Detroit community is Burns Elementary-Middle School. According to the school's teachers and administrators, Burns has traditionally been known as a low-performing school in Detroit, with a history of low enrollment, low scores, and violent behavior. Burns currently serves 482 students, and all of them qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Back in 2009, the state of Michigan passed a district takeover in Detroit (similar to the TN ASD). The reform turned a number of Detroit's lowest-performing schools--the bottom 5% in academic achievement--into The Education Achievement Authority (EAA), a public district that currently operates 12 schools in Detroit, including Burns. However, despite high hopes and an extended school year, Burns continued to flounder for the next four years.   

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In the Obama administration's new ConnectED initiative, an effort to redirect $2 billion in federal funding to put high-speed broadband in all American schools, the goal is for schools to have Internet speeds of at least 1 gigabit per second by 2017. Philadelphia schools already have 2 gigabits, and will have 20 in 18 months, says Melanie Harris, the district's chief information officer. "We call it laying the highway," she said. "We've put our schools in a great position."

It's a major accomplishment, but one that also highlights the difficulties of bringing technology to the nation's neediest kids. When President Obama announced the ConnectED plan last year, he said "there's no reason we can't do all this."

Yet in Philadelphia, where 87 percent of students are economically disadvantaged and school resources are scarce, the city's schools still have far to travel before they reach the president's goal "that virtually every child in America's classrooms has access to the fastest Internet and the most cutting-edge learning tools."

The speedy Internet does students and teachers little good in many Philadelphia schools. The district paid for its Internet upgrades using the federal e-rate program, a subsidy that is key to achieving the president's goal and that can only be used for networking and telecommunications - not to buy the actual devices teachers and students use to go online. (The ConnectED initiative will not allocate new government funds, but companies recently donated $750 million in goods and services to the cause.)   >> READ MORE