How to Rewrite a Region's Story

For-profit companies are making good private schools available even to Africa’s poor. They can do it – and can do it on an enormous scale – by hiring neighborhood residents to teach, and scripting out every word of every lesson on an e-reader.

Blue Engine, which places recent college grads as full-time teaching assistants in New York City public schools, is helping poor students thrive in college. They focus on small teacher-student ratios, frequent feedback for teachers, and a concentration on 'gateway' courses associated with success in college.

54 million people in the United States, and 4.5 billion globally, have no credit to their name - making it nearly impossible for them to buy homes, apply for jobs and receive loans. Investors and lenders make an effort to help those with 'invisible credit' scores in financing essentials like homes or cars.

Adolescent smoking remains a challenging health problem because of the allure of cigarette branding. Australia is piloting the transformation of cigarette packaging with a generic look that reduces the appeal of smoking. In Florida, the Truth campaign has exposed that cigarette companies targeted teenage consumers and, in response, created a set of new advertisements that presented the cigarette industry with transparency.

Kepler University in Rwanda reduces the cost of a university education by hiring teachers based on their willingness to innovate — not necessarily their expertise — and by blending online and in-classroom learning. Students receive the equivalent of a college diploma and job training in order to facilitate a possible rise out of poverty.

Huge numbers of students were getting suspension as punishment - until there was a nationwide push to rollback zero-tolerance policies instituted after the deadly Columbine High School shootings that emphasize harsh discipline for even minor misbehavior in favor of support-focused alternatives. The idea: Cultivate communication between teachers and students by gathering in weekly circles to discuss concerns and form one-on-one “harm circles” between students, parents and counselors when conflicts arise.

Fewer than one in four high-school graduates in the Sedro-Woolley and Meridian school districts, for example, go to four-year colleges. Just a little over half of all graduates in surrounding districts go to college at all. Now, the schools have begun to send college students into middle schools and high schools to mentor them and excite them to go to college.

Currently, women make up only 20% of computing jobs - in 2012, only 18% of computer science (CS) graduates were women , a figure that has been cut in half since 1984 when women made up 37% of CS majors. Now, girls are taught coding and computer programing in an after school program built to inspire girls to become more involved in computer science, a predominantly male job market.

African American boys were being treated less-than-equally by the Oakland Unified School District – a change of culture was implemented and the playing field leveled. Now, Minnesota is looking to adopt the same system that was started in Oakland by creating schools that are exclusively for African American males in hopes to help them reach higher standards of achievement.

Well-trained teachers cannot be replaced solely by technology, as has been increasingly apparent at Carpe Diem schools, where students learn largely via computers enabled with educational software.