One solution to Minnesota's teacher shortage: alternative training

The Brazosport school district has a unique teacher apprenticeship program which covers the cost of aspiring teachers’ coursework and pays them to teach under a mentor educator for a full year. Twenty-five new teachers graduated from the program this year and will be required to work in the district for at least three years, and research shows that about 86 percent of educators who complete similar programs are still teaching in the same district after three years.

The Teaching at the Right Level program, or TaRL, provides tailored lessons in reading and math to primary students in Borno, grouping them by their level rather than their grade or age for engaging activities designed to build their literacy and numeracy skills. When it was first piloted, the number of students able to read a simple paragraph grew from 14 percent to 45 percent, while the number of students able to complete subtraction problems grew from 11 percent to 59 percent.

In an attempt to combat pandemic-era drops in enrollment, the City University of New York network sent personalized letters to seniors graduating from public high schools in the city and waived application fees for these students for the month of October. The network saw its number of applicants jump 386 percent compared to the same month last year.

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.

The KNOSK secondary school is working to reduce the number of out-of-school youth in Nigeria by providing students with a quality education for a daily fee much lower than other school options. The school offers various payment plan options and gives the students uniforms, lunch, and sanitary products.

Los Angeles Community Colleges are now offering subject-matter courses taught in students’ native languages, including Spanish, Russian, and Korean. The tuition-free vocational classes allow students to earn certificates in a trade or work toward a GED, all while learning in the language they’re most comfortable speaking.

After Brooklyn's District 15 replaced selective admissions with a lottery system, economic segregation in sixth grade decreased by 55 percent and racial segregation decreased by 38 percent compared with the previous year. Though challenges remain in creating truly inclusive school cultures, parents and educators say community attitudes are shifting around what makes for a "good" or desirable school.

In a country where less than 6% of public funding is allocated to education, under-resourced schools are able to hire quality teachers through Teach For Nigeria, a nonprofit that trains and deploys teaching fellows to communities in need. Fellows have been placed in 396 schools since 2018 and go on to complete personal projects that support the school system, such as a solar-powered computer hub developed by one alumnus.

In an attempt to provide ease of movement to girl students while playing, Valayanchirangara primary school introduced "gender-neutral" uniforms for all its 756 students that eliminated the earlier requirement for them to wear skirts. It has since inspired several other schools in Kerala to similarly change their uniforms and snowballed a movement, supported by the state's education minister no less, where more such measures to promote gender equality in schools are being encouraged and adapted.

Across the U.S. many colleges and universities adapted their courses and curriculum to meet Covid safety guidelines, but many are seeing the pandemic as a catalyst for the necessary innovation, acceleration, and changes. Unity College in Maine is shifting the traditional semester system into eight, five-week terms both online and in-person, at a much lower price for students. Over in Colorado, Metropolitan State University pivoted its approach by creating a free program to retrain people who lost jobs due to the pandemic.