Uganda Attempts to Shut Down Controversial Silicon Valley-Funded Schools

Some social welfare programs may receive funding but have no evidence of success. By insisting that funds go primarily to programs with rigorous evidence of success, the federal government can make non-partisan decisions that will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of social programs and decrease spending waste. Obama administration evaluated programs based upon their successes and these programs are highlighted.

Companies like Gaggle are typically used by school districts to track student online behavior, but now they are tracking something else—self-harm. Machine learning flags words that might indicate a student is thinking of hurting themselves. “It gives us insight into what the student's thinking.” Gaggle identified 64,000 student references to suicide and self-harm. The company claims to have saved 927 student lives. In Mason City, districts receive alerts when a student’s search is flagged. “Nicole Pfirman says there have been a few times where she believes an alert saved a kid's life.”

Step Up is a pilot tutoring program that was launched to help students in the Los Angeles Unified School District navigate virtual learning during the pandemic. The program is only open to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, and pairs them up with tutors if their teachers opt into the program. So far, nine schools are part of the program, representing 402 students.

The National Education Association has launched a school-focused COVID-19 case tracker in the U.S., all thank to the efforts of a Kansas theater teacher. Alisha Morris started with an excel sheet and took to online searches to start logging the number of positive cases, first around her state, and later was tracking 48 U.S. states. By the time she handed off the data to the NEA, Morris, along with various volunteers "had logged over nearly 4,300 cases at more than 1,000 schools."

Using AI technology, home address data, and algorithms, the Metro21 Institute at Carnegie Mellon was able to find the best school bus routes to deliver school meals to students during the COVID-19 pandemic. The solution wouldn’t have worked with the help of a community of partners, leaders, and volunteers. “It truly has taken a village.”

A company called Gaggle works with school districts to screen their software and electronics for messages and text that are cause for concern – including threats against others, sexual content, or mentions of suicide and self-harm. In 2018, they identified over 700 students in danger of self-harm and alerted their biggest client, Texas’ Round Rock Independent School District, to nearly 9,000 potential dangers.

Reducing landfill waste takes a comprehensive approach. By implementing city-wide composting alongside trash collection and utilizing the sorting technology of Recology, the city’s municipal waste recovery company, San Francisco has significantly reduced the amount of waste residents send to landfills. Although it missed the ambitious target of achieving zero waste by 2020, the city aims to cut what it sends to landfills in half by 2030.

In order to increase teacher retention, the Minneapolis Public School District is asking whether machine learning might improve its hiring process. Researchers believe the tool could identify candidates more likely to stay on and diversify the workforce by reducing human biases.

At St. Vrain, a public school in Boulder County, Colorado's district, students work on projects for IBM and about 100 other industry partners, sometimes earning money and college credits in the process. Educators from across the country are flocking to the school to understand how its STEM curriculum and innovative partnerships are increasing the Latino graduation rate and dramatically decreasing the number of suspensions districtwide.

The collection and analysis of data is a crucial first step in revealing and addressing areas of racial inequality in cities. Using the methodology of a 2015 New York City program designed to study metrics of inequality, the St. Louis Equity Indicators Project has already filled large gaps in data by identifying 72 metrics of inequality in the heavily racially-divided city. Following the recommendations of the Ferguson Commission, the St. Louis’ Equity Indicators provide a baseline by which the city can track efforts to improve racial disparities across issues of health, education, and legal justice.