In even the most innovative learning settings, there are things a student can expect: a curriculum, or assignments. A new course in Vermont does away with such pesky conventions.

Three sociologists in Baltimore spent a decade getting to know young people growing up in the city’s most impoverished communities. Their new book, “Coming of Age in the Other America,” chronicles the hardship in these neighborhoods—and how some adolescents manage to defy the odds. For many of the book’s subjects, the barriers they bumped up […]