Pick up almost any newspaper these days and you will find a headline sounding an alarm about a serious challenge facing young people today. Over the past year, dozens of articles have been published about excessive youth borrowing and spending (leading to high amounts of debt), new reactions to negative body image (such as plastic surgery), as well as more familiar risks like premarital sex and smoking. Many suggest that the media and marketing machine share much of the credit for creating or, at the least, exacerbating these problems among children and teens.

While the nation’s public systems continue to fall short of delivering equitable educational supports to children and youth, youth workers have spent the last several decades insulating and, in some cases, patching the leaks in the “education pipeline”– a term describing the route students follow from early childhood through post-secondary education. Staggering statistics in numerous reports reveal that this problem presents a much greater risk than federal dropout statistics generally convey, to the extent that it has reached what some researchers call crisis proportions. Read about this growing challenge in communities across the country and some promising strategies being developed to overcome it.

In July 2002, the Forum merged with Community IMPACT! USA, a national organization created to support a network of neighborhood-based affiliates dedicated to helping young people develop the skills, knowledge and connections needed to improve educational and economic opportunities in their neighborhoods.This issue of Forum Focus shares the story of the progress made toward helping one organization, CI! Nashville, live up to its name.

In this issue of Forum Focus, we focus on what researchers and policy makers are doing to help governments take stock of their efforts to make sure that every young person is “Ready by 21” — ready for work, ready for college, ready for life.

In this first issue of Forum Focus, we summarize emerging research and practical evidence that quality matters and push forward to ask the questions: Is quality measurable? Is it malleable? We bring a youth-centered lens to our review, looking for examples that define quality from the perspective of what young people need to heal, grow and contribute.