How One Teacher Achieved Insane Reading Growth Last Year

As demand for career and technical education grows among high schoolers looking for alternatives to costly college degrees, companies like Stride Inc. have expanded online career training programs across the country, offering virtual career academies, hands-on practice kits, job shadowing, and live instruction in career tracks ranging from business to agriculture.

Teach For Nigeria works to eliminate educational inequity in Nigeria and recruits young graduates and education enthusiasts to teach in rural schools. With the help of the Aid for Rural Education Access Initiative, Teach for Nigeria recruits can bring innovative, digital tools — like talking, audio books — to help enhance learning in and out of the classroom.

Despite the evidence of early interventions when children are failing academic, a now-defunct Israeli remedial high school program had long lasting effects on the participants. The teens that participated in the program attended college at higher rates, rose on the income ladder and even had higher marriage rates as adults. “I don’t think that we have evidence to give up on students who are older.”

Engaging parents during the pandemic is crucial for student learning. This story takes a look at methods undertaken by an organization in U.S. and another in Botswana. In the U.S., Springboard, has a five-week summer program that helps parents assist their children with book reading. The group also trained 3,000 new Teach for America members and went from working with 62 schools to 667. In Bostwana, the organization Young 1ove launched the Low-Tech Remote Education program, which gives student math classes through text or calls.

After her experience arriving woefully unprepared at Dartmouth, Alex Bernadotte started Beyond 12, a tech nonprofit that provides virtual coaching to graduating high school seniors and college students. Beyond 12 has a special focus on first-generation college students and immigrants to help coach them through problems big and small. Beyond 12 now works with 120 high schools nationwide with more than 100,000 undergrad participants.

In 2011, the Colorado Education Initiative (CEI), an education advocacy and research organization, launched the Colorado Legacy Schools project. The program funded innovative ways to increase the number and diversity of students taking AP classes. Instead of applying for funds to train teachers and subsidize test fees, Paonia High teamed up with two nearby schools to more than triple their collective AP offerings. It’s a promising model for rural, resource-limited schools trying to bring more college-prep opportunities to their few students.

Many families in rural New Mexico still do not have high speed internet access at home. In Farmington, the public school district, a local college, and nonprofits are working to close the gap in the digital divide for students by addressing access to technology and the internet.

The ecosystem of D.C. charter schools that has evolved over the last two decades represents a cornucopia of creative and nontraditional approaches to education, in addition to fairly traditional college-prep schools, and is now producing some of the highest graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and average test scores in public schools in the nation.

Low budget schools across the U.S. are having students use their smartphones as learning tools inside and outside the classroom. At no extra cost they can incorporate technology into the curriculum through a myriad of applications, from homework reminder apps to free cloud document platforms like Google Docs.

Student organizers across the US are developing peer-led programs (including phone-free campus events, student-designed phone policies, and digital wellness education advocacy) to address the root causes of screen addiction that school phone bans alone fail to tackle.