Against all odds: Educating Nigeria's Fulani children amidst adversity

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.

Volunteers with the Annual Status of Education Report test children's math and reading skills in villages across India. While 96 percent of Indian children are in school, ASER reveals that many of them are not receiving a real education. "Learning camps", an initiative called Read India, and grouping children by ability, not age, are helping bridge the gap.

As school poverty rates goes up, learning and test scores fall. At Gildo Ray elementary school in Washington state uses a teaching method called director or explicit instruction, in which children learn from a structured approach to teaching with teacher-guided practice. Gildo Ray’s test scores in math and reading are among the highest in the state.

Alleys in Seattle were once places of illicit, illegal, and unsanitary activity. The International Sustainability Institute in Seattle began organizing music and art events to bring in people, which, in turn, cleaned-up the crime and garbage. As an urban development strategy, adjacent vacant storefronts re-opened for business and beautification could be seen in new gardens.

A panoply of responses to poverty has emerged to address poverty in the United States and abroad. The responses share in three key tactics: Measuring impact, paying for success, and collaboration.