A Peek into Silicon Valley's Newest Bet: AltSchool

Founded in 2011, the Brooklyn-based P-Tech school allows high school students to earn a secondary and associate's degree upon graduation. Born out of a partnership with the New York City Department of Education, New York City College of Technology and IBM, the dual enrollment-program pairs students with mentors and matches students with paid IBM internships. The cross-sector model is being scaled up internationally.

When students misbehave in school, teachers struggle to decide the right kind of intervention, with school suspension a common outcome. However, research has shown that school suspensions can increase the likelihood of dropouts and incarcerations so that there is pressure to decrease the rate of suspensions. Restorative justice has become a favorable alternative because misbehaving students can participate in a number of supportive activities such as peer meditation or collaborative negotiation to build community, trust, and confidence.

Minnesota schools began a comprehensive program aimed at assisting children of minority groups to successfully navigate the college application process and push them towards higher education.

Often social programs at schools fail because they are not implemented fully or over a long enough period. One school in Philadelphia attributes their success in decreasing violence to having a long-term principal, a stable teaching force, and formal training in anti-violence programs.

Under the Obama administration, the Promise Neighborhoods initiative was launched. It granted over $430 million in multiyear grants to nonprofits across 17 cities. The success of these grants have been difficult to measure. Two of the programs that were awarded grants highlight the differences in communities, and how success can’t be measured one way, but across a spectrum. “These first five years are like finding yourself,” said Lepore. “It’s an opportunity to find out what’s working, what isn’t and what we need to invest in.”

At Arizona State, retirees pay a fee to live on campus, take classes, and be a part of the college community. This setup offers a unique opportunity for intergenerational mixing and mentoring and a new revenue stream for institutions with declining enrollment.

The After School Activities Partnership (ASAP) in Philadelphia offers free and low-cost afterschool and summer activities to students in low-income areas that otherwise do not have access to extracurriculars. ASAP has served over 5,000 kids with over 351 different programs, which include drama, chess, Scrabble, and debate.

Since 2007, SIMBA and ASET have connected over 1,000 homeless students living in New York City with academic resources. All students in the 2018 class graduated from high school with multiple college acceptances.

The rate of students dropping out of college or failing to complete their degree in the allotted time has soared in the United States, and experts are discovering that one of the causes is simply that students feel isolated, discouraged, and overwhelmed. A study by Ideas42 across a number of universities revealed that fairly simple behavioral "nudging" - or the process of providing tiny but regular interventions and encouragement through systems like text messages - can have a drastic impact on a student's likelihood of success.

Students in today's technical world are now using blogging and other forms of social media, known as studyblrs, in order to help each other improve achievement through online homework help, communication, and encouragement.