These Three Red States Are the Best Hope in Schooling

With the help of grant funding, Cape Cod Hill School provides a range of support services to help meet student needs, from pantries for food, toiletries, and supplies to child care and on-site dental clinics. The school’s before- and after-school programs serve 40 and 25 students per day, respectively, and its latest dental clinic helped 20 students get needed care.

As a stopgap solution to housing insecurity among students, Long Beach Community College launched the Safe Parking Program, which allows students to sleep in their cars in a designated lot that has Wi-Fi, bathrooms and showers, and security on duty. The pilot program started with 13 students and was later expanded to become a permanent offering.

Free school meal programs help improve students’ health, support better academic performance and combat hunger and food insecurity. Several states have passed legislation to keep free meal plans active after federal waivers ran out in 2022. In Michigan alone in October 2023, the 3,459 school meal sites across the state served 10,064,686 free breakfasts and 17,659,809 free lunches.

To help address chronic absenteeism, Project Rebuild works with families to determine the root cause of school absences and connect them to needed resources and services. In the 2022-23 school year, 81 percent of families referred to the nonprofit completed the program, with a total of 61 families participating. Only one percent of families who participate have to be referred again for continued truancy concerns.

Mat-Su Central is a hybrid homeschool that provides a flexible, personalized learning environment for both students and their families. Each student receives an individual learning plan that takes the student’s strengths and weaknesses into account, while still ensuring they’re meeting course requirements for graduation. As a result of the pandemic and increased rates of bullying and anxiety among students, enrollment in this hybrid homeschool option has quadrupled over the past 20 years.

Dallas College’s success coaches provide more hands-on advising for students, helping them not only navigate their coursework and degree trajectory but also connect with resources such as help with transportation and food aid. The college has nearly 240 success coaches serving more than 64,500 students.

In order to keep track of students and prevent them from dropping out, the Nashville district created “Navigators.” A corps of 5,600 school employees- teachers, lunchroom workers, and bookkeepers, who track students through weekly phone and video calls. The navigators have “completed roughly 220,000 calls to parents and students since school started in August,” each with a caseload of 6 to 12 students. Their conversations have led from everything to helping students complete assignments, to buying groceries, to finding out students are homeless.

In India, an intense gender disparity has continued to develop in the sphere of educational attainment. This article discusses new innovations, both public and private, seeking to bridge this attainment gap and increase female enrollment in schools.

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.