The School Where Students Pay With Plastic Bags

Harsville, South Carolina is trying to better its educational program. But first it must change the standard of living in the town to provide greater examples of success for the children to follow.

Lack of reading material is not only a third-world problem – many poor families in the United States lack access to and funds for books. A program that helps get books to into the homes of low-income families can boost literacy, and help publishers, too.

How can rural African children learn to read when there are no books in their languages? Save the Children helps kids to create their own books, creating a homemade library for their village.

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.

Teaching reading skills to children early is crucial, especially with respect to their educational success later in life. School systems are switching reading programs to help underachieving students have one on one time with a tutor.

As kids and teachers head back to school, we wanted to turn away from questions about politics and unions and money and all the regular school stuff people argue about, and turn to something more optimistic — an emerging theory about what to teach kids.

Civic leaders in the U.S. struggle to effectively help their distressed neighborhoods. East Lake, Atlanta, created a replicable model that mixes residents of differing socio-economic status, and focuses on education and health in the area.

In Memphis, a creative blight-reduction initiative called 25 Square Blocks broke down the city into blocks. Inspectors were able to quickly identify all the violations and fix them, using the same amount of funding, but less time, as the old call-and-respond model.

Farmers in Vietnam face rising sea levels but rejected the city's water engineering projects. They prefer gradual measures to cope with climate change so scientists have allowed the farmers to steer the conversation.

Ecological toilets that use natural composting to break down waste are simple to construct, waterless and are easy to fix. But as philanthropists are finding, getting these to those that need it most is harder than anticipated.