What does ‘career readiness' look like in middle school?

Across the country, an improving economy has pulled teachers and potential teachers away from the profession, creating a growing national shortage. Leaders at Elmhurst Community Prep managed not only to completely staff the school by early June, but to avoid taking on anyone who was not fully certified.

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.

Half of U.S. farm workers are Hispanic, but few make it to leadership positions. A historically white non-profit, FFA, is creating equal education programs in California to increase leadership opportunities for minorities in agriculture.

Can we improve the methods we use to teach math in schools — so that everyone develops proficiency? A grade-school math program is changing how children learn based on the assumption that all children can achieve a high level of understanding.

A school in Brooklyn uses a lottery-based acceptance system to ensure a diverse class. And instead of sorting the struggling kids from the gifted, they embedded an honors program which kids can opt into without changing classrooms.

To decrease the chance of formerly incarcerated individuals relapsing and ending up back in the prison system, the J.F. Ingram State Technical College in Alabama offers correctional education and vocational programs. This training has aided those incarcerated with life skills for after their release, decreasing the likelihood that they will relapse and increasing the likelihood that they will better adjust to their community.

An Irish-based company, ALISON, provides free, high-quality e-courses to people around the globe in order to help close the gap between education and workplace skills. Particularly focused on providing access to areas where more traditional forms of education and job training are difficult to get, this approach is helping to change lives and the economy for the better.

When adults want to return to school, they face many challenges including the experience of long waitlists for classes, and poor relevance to the job skills they need for future employment. The Washington state community college system has started a program known as Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) that instead teaches in two parts: academic content and basic soft skills.

A private high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is mimicking a college campus as part of an effort to help kids succeed in college. By trusting the students and giving them autonomy they have also reduced bad behavior.

PowerMyLearning, a program that any student, parent, or teacher can use for free, helps students take ownership of their own learning. When most attention is being placed on teacher effectiveness, this program redirects those efforts toward students.