To Our Readers

By Walter Isaacson, Managing Editor

By now, America's 53 million schoolchildren have been back in class for a month or so. Last spring, a sizable delegation from TIME began focusing its attention on them. More than a dozen of our reporters, writers and photographers have fanned out across the country to address a simple-sounding question that stays on the minds of parents: How can we make our kids better students? In a 16-page special report, TIME this week examines how and why certain kids manage to excel. This in-depth package offers parents the latest thinking, illustrated by vivid examples, on how to help their children lead successful and well-balanced lives.

Departing from most education reporting, which tends to focus on vouchers, budgets and teachers' salaries, we went right to the source: the students themselves. "We went about this from the ground up," says Claudia Wallis, the managing editor of TIME FOR KIDS and a mother of three who wrote our lead story on exceptional students. "We were interested in figuring out what made these kids tick. To do that, we spoke with the students, their parents, friends, teachers and coaches." Finding the kids featured in Wallis' article required a nationwide search, coordinated by the project's chief reporter, Megan Rutherford. Rutherford, who has two children, found the assignment rewarding: "I was talking to parents and educators about things that interest me."

Other stories in our package examine, in a commonsense manner, theories on multiple intelligences, gender stereotyping, and learning in the first few years of life. Says special-projects editor Barrett Seaman, who oversaw the report: "These stories are designed to reveal the truth amid the hype."