How Rhode Island's charter schools succeeded where Minnesota's failed

Bangladesh schools had very low attendance because children were kept home to work and conditions were unsafe for girls, ethnic minorities, and those with disabilities. BRAC, one of the world's largest and most comprehensive NGOs, has built new schools addressing all the reasons, at home and school, that were preventing children from attending.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans gave control of its schools to a Recovery School District that replaced the majority of the city’s existing schools with public charter schools. Following the reforms, research showed improvements in student achievement, graduation rates, and college matriculation, though the gains have slowed in recent years.

Too often people use standardized test scores as the only measure of how good a school system is. A new measure looks at the growth and proficiency of the students as a measure of performance and may be more accurate in comparing public schools across the USA.

With support from Kansas City Public Schools, a group has built an innovative new charter school that incorporates family services and social services into the fabric of the school. Kansas City Neighborhood Academy follows in the successful footsteps of a charter in Georgia and serves as a pilot project and important learning experience for the rest of Kansas City's schools.

Young people are graduating from high schools and not ready for college level work. Liz Willen describes different initiatives around the United States that have provided solutions for improving secondary education. She addresses the importance of STEM, role models for students, and project-based learning.

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.

When students take ownership over their own learning, they are more likely to be successful, the executive director of Redmond Proficiency Academy in Oregon, believes. He has used this philosphy to develop a charter school where students choose their own classes and are assessed based on their proficiency in the related content and skills.

Belmont Charter School offers a year-round program that includes camp-style activities, work-study programs, job training, and classroom learning in small groups during the summer. Teachers still receive several weeks off before summer programming starts, and students say the summer options help them build real-world skills and explore topics that aren’t always covered during the regular school year.

Reforms that improved learning at Denver schools included easier paperwork for school of choice applications, an increased number of charter schools, and the closing of schools with low test scores.

Over 200 teenage girls in northwestern Nigeria have been trained to produce reusable sanitary napkins and tampons, which they can use for personal use and sell to make extra money. In fact, they have sold over 15,000 packs of reusable menstrual hygiene products worth 3.5 million naira, both improving the lives of users and becoming a viable livelihood for communities. The kits contain three cotton-based reusable products, each of which last three to six months. The project was supported as part of the United Nations’ COVID-19 response in Nigeria.