Can Cuban Medicine Help Solve American Inequality?

Head Start, the biggest preschool program in the country (with roots in President Johnson's 1965 War on Poverty), is improving -- in the past decade, continued bipartisan support, new evaluation measures and periodic audits, and an increasingly educated teacher force have led to rising test scores.

Advocates are on a quest to improve the quality of life in Haiti through legal education.

Now Teach helps retrain older professionals for second careers in teaching, tapping candidates who might otherwise retire early to help fill staffing shortages in the education sector. The program has helped roughly 850 people earn a postgraduate certificate in education, and its trainees are more ethnically diverse than the national pool of teachers overall.

Alternative licensure programs such as the Mississippi Teacher Corps allow people with a bachelor’s degree to earn a teaching license in the classroom through a combination of hands-on experience, coursework, and mentorship. Since its founding in 1989, the corps has placed more than 600 teachers in districts designated as “critical-shortage areas.”

The School of Superheroes brings teachers into hospital wards to work with children being treated there. The individualized lessons give the children something to focus on besides their illness and help them build relationships with their teachers and other students.

A 42-day strike coordinated by the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association resulted in a new contract that raised wages and eliminated the previous wage system among other improvements to the student workers’ benefits.

Graduate student unions, like Oregon State University’s Coalition of Graduate Employees, use collective bargaining to allow student employees to successfully negotiate for fair wages, reasonable hours, and other terms of employment.

A relatively new approach to teaching elementary school students called "The Science of Reading," is upending the way teachers approach curriculum. This pedagogical system places equal emphasis on auditory learning as it does on visual. In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, kindergarten students went from 51% reading at grade level, to the next cohort in 2016 reaching 88% after the implementation of the program.

The "TA to BA" fellowship is Rhode Island program is helping veteran TAs become full-time teachers while diversifying the workforce. Through the program, fellows enroll in college classes and are able to present their lengthy classroom teaching experience and turn it into a certification, which will also allow them to be better compensated for their work. Equity Unbound, which developed the fellowship, is also looking to get approval as an alternative licensure program to decrease certification barriers for Teaching Assistants.

The Cherry Creek School district is using apprenticeships to create a more racially diverse pipeline of K-12 educators in Colorado. High school juniors and seniors are paid to participate in the apprenticeship, and are able to earn college credit as well. This is one of the ways the district is working on having its workforce reflect its student bodies more accurately. Currently 85% of teachers are white, and half of its student body is kids of color. Now in its second year, the program has grown from an initial cohort of 12 youth apprentices to 26,