This week, NPR senior correspondent Juan Williams was fired, after saying on "The O'Reilly Factor" that he was fearful when seeing passengers dressed in Muslim garb aboard airplanes.

According to a 2009 Department of Education study, ten percent of black students and 22 percent of Hispanic students did not graduate from high school on time, compared to only six percent of white students.  A similar disparity in scores between white and minority students on national reading and math tests has remained largely the same since the mid-1990s.

Yesterday, we talked about high schools in eight states that are considering an initiative to let students place out of their senior year in high school and enter community college. It sparked a heated debate among listeners on the merits of the program, so we revisit the issue with a psychology professor and an expert in early graduation.

Experts say that the way siblings treat each other early in life can be a good predictor for how they'll relate to each other down the road. The relationship you start out with, though, doesn't have to be the one in which you wind up: Parents, it turns out, can take a more active role to help kids communicate better with their sisters and brothers. We speak with Takeaway contributor Lisa Belkin, who writes the "Motherlode" blog for The New York Times. We're also joined by psychology professors Laurie Kramer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, assistant psychology professor at Columbia University.

Getting a little positive reinforcement from the watchful eye of a good teacher can make a big difference in the educational life of a young child, especially for a kid that’s struggling in school. Now a new study published in the journal Science, shows that encouraging young black children to write about their own value systems can make a big and lasting effect on their future success. Oh my, Oprah had it right! But, according to this study, that finding only holds true for minority students, not white students. Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, a co-principle investigator in the two-year study and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Columbia University joins the The Takeaway to talk about her study.