Education : Buzz

The nine-part series -- which chronicles talented high school seniors being mentored by arts luminaries -- premiered on HBO on Sunday, April 18. Abigail Adkins, a sophomore dance major at Point Park University, appears in an episode that airs May 9. Michael O'Brien of Greenfield, a playwright and poet who graduated from CAPA, is mentored by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee in the May 2 installment. The footage was filmed in 2007 and 2008 by producers and directors Kirk Simon and Karen Goodman.

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Thanks to is rising AYP scores and improving student performance, Pittsburgh made GreatSchools.com's rankings for the best public schools for places with populations above 300,000.

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Because of the Pittsburgh Promise, 22 more black male graduates went to college in 2009 than the year before--113 compared with 91.

Ghubril contemplates, "At the end of the day, 'failure' for the Pittsburgh Promise will be, 10 years will have passed, and 15,000 kids will have gone to college. So if the worst thing we can do is send 15,000 kids to college, I can live with that."

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Correspondent Morley Safer interviews Dr. Stephen Badylak, deputy director at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, as well as Dr. Blair Jobe, associate professor of surgery in the Heart, Lung and Esophageal Surgery Institute at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC.

Dr. Badylak explains his work, with a chuckle as, "I make body parts," and describes how a material called Extra Cellular Matrix can regrow virtually every tissue in the body.

In Pittsburgh, regenerative techniques have been used to regrow esophageal lining of 76-year-old cancer patient Erwin Schmidt, and to successfully transplant a hand from a cadaver onto the arm of Marine Josh Maloney, who lost his right hand working with dynamite.

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"Pittsburgh would be a much smaller city and economically worse off if the students weren't here, and increasing the cost of attending school in the city won't encourage them to stay," he writes.

"The city is proposing a tax on students not because it's a good idea, but because the commonwealth of Pennsylvania has forced the city to try to support public services that benefit a region of more than 2.4 million people with a tax base dependent on 310,000 residents. If we're going to continue to have a region composed of more than 500 small municipalities and a small central city, we need a different way of funding them. The only way to avoid such things as city tuition taxes and county drink taxes is for the governor and Pennsylvania General Assembly to modernize local government tax structures and create revenue-sharing programs that enable regional public services to be supported by everyone who benefits from them."

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The universities that occupy that corridor certainly shape the entire Oakland neighborhood.

Marton describes Oakland as a hub of student living, the heart of UPMC and an eating, shopping and cultural destination, with plenty of green space thanks to Schenley Park and Phipps Conservatory.

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"It is just truly an honor for Jason and for the school and for our district. We tell our students all the time that the arts will take them anywhere, and this is especially true for Jason," CAPA principal Melissa Pearlman told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Click here to read the complete Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article on Jason Yoder.