Teaching Law in a Country Where Justice Hardly Exists

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,

Trauma training for police and community workers teaches them how to make tough situations, such as the arrest of a parent, easier on young children. Painful memories can alter perceptions of police for a lifetime.

A program in Baltimore bring youths together with volunteer second “families” to help guide them through turbulent times.

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.

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.

Almost 4 years ago, Opportunity Village was established in Eugene. It’s a community of tiny houses for people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.

Should police be law enforcers or social responders? Some leaders say "guardian" duty is at least important as purely law enforcement tasks, sometimes known as "warrior" work. That idea is rooted in centuries-old principles of policing.

Many undocumented students are often encumbered when seeking prosperous avenues to college affordability and DREAMer’s Roadmap app is changing that. The app, founded by Sarahi Espinoza Salamanca—an undocumented immigrant—works to help connect other undocumented students with scholarship opportunities by letting students search through a free database of scholarships, and sending users alerts via text, email or social media when new scholarships are added to the system.

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.

Community colleges were originally designed to be affordable and accessible, yet the myriad pressures on students means that the best intentions often don’t lead to positive results. But the University of Central Florida and its partners are proving a new model called DirectConnect—heavy on individual attention and clear academic goals—that paves a surer path.