55 million students are expected to be enrolled in the nation's elementary and high schools (grades K-12) this fall. Of these, 12% will be enrolled in private schools this fall.

1.1 million students are homeschooled. That is 2 percent of all students ages 5 to 17.

54 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds were enrolled in school in 2004, up from 10 percent in 1964, when these data were first collected.

"Suburbs revolve around schools. They are a big reason people forsake the city's clamorous pleasures. School-year rhythms - the lacrosse games, the spring concert, the senior musical - shape social life, offering the arena in which suburbanites meet their neighbors.

But suburban schools often don't live up to their urban legend. Even children of the well heeled struggle, and when they do, teachers don't have time to sit alongside and discover the idiosyncratic ways in which they think. Yet suburban parents can use the money saved by having dodged the city's private-school bullet to buy help.

... But when students and parents panic, Mr. Zoffness flies to the rescue.

...So he may start a private lesson on trapezoids by drawing a grotesque figure on a piece of paper and telling the student, 'That's a zoid,' then slamming his hand down hard on the paper and roaring, 'Now we trap-a-zoid.'

'It breaks the ice,' he said of his admittedly corny stabs. 'They're so scared and tense, and it relaxes them and they open up. They look forward to coming. I have kids with bubonic plague, they're so sick, but they come.'

They come in drained as well. In the frenzy to fatten up college applications, his students have spent hours after school dashing across soccer fields or rehearsing Shakespeare. Maybe having wolfed down a hamburger, they arrive at his cram course haunted by the homework they still must do.

Some Americans suppose that adolescents can learn their most important life lessons not at home from parents, but rather in sports from coaches.  But teens who spend a lot of time under the guidance of coaches rather than parents may be headed for trouble.  The risks of replacing parents with coaches stand out clearly in a study recently published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence by Professor Siu Kwong Wong of Brandon University.

By analyzing survey data for 578 public school students enrolled in grades 5 through 12, Wong has established that sports and family life have remarkably disparate effects on adolescents' lives.  "Family-related activities," Wong finds, "strengthen the social bond and reduce delinquent association and delinquency."  In marked contrast, "the amount of time playing sports increases delinquency and violent offenses in particular" (p<0.05). 

Why does "doing things with the family" reduce adolescent delinquency while participating in sports actually fosters such delinquency?  "Activities comprised of primarily peer participants," Wong reasons, "compared to those involving family members or conventional adults, tend to have less-positive effects on the social bond."

This new study should foster skepticism about proposals for reducing teen criminality by launching new tax-funded sports programs.  It appears that no one wins when teens spend more time learning how to pass a ball to a teammate than they do in learning how to plant a garden with parents and siblings.