Larry,
There's a back story (isn't there always) I didn't go into.

We've already raised my wife's two kids (and rather successfully in my opinion, though it was touch and go there for awhile with our daughter). A couple of years ago, my sister passed away suddenly and left us with my (then 11 yr old) nephew. There were some serious academic preparedness issues as my sister never participated in his schooling and he sort of slipped through the cracks at the old school. There were also some emotional and behavioral issues (as you can imagine) that we felt were more important to concentrate on than academics. So, 6th grade was largely an academic waste and he fell yet more behind his peers. Last year, we got him into an excellent magnate school and really for the first time, we started stressing academics. Since he was unprepared for the material and had no study habits, it was pretty grim at first, but progress is definitely being made.

His trimester GPAs starting at the beginning of 7th grade were:
1.1
1.3
1.7
1.7
2.8 (current GPA about 2/3 through the trimester).

As you can see, we are on the right track. What will be really interesting is that starting next August, were going cruising again so we'll be home schooling him on the boat (see, this does have a sailing tie-in).

Wish us luck.

As always, there's lots more to the story, but, after all, this is a sailing board, not a child rearing one so I won't boor everyone with all of it.