Browsing social media during back-to-school time, one frequently encounters pleas from teachers to help purchase classroom supplies through #clearthelist campaigns or to support their class' DonorsChoose projects. At a time of historically high levels of education spending, why do teachers require additional assistance to meet basic classroom…

The Legislature established the Graduation: A Team Effort (GATE) Advisory (originally known as Building Bridges Workgroup) in 2007 to keep all students visible and on track to graduate from high school. The state's ongoing engagement and reengagement efforts are based on the three major recommendations of the original Building Bridges Workgroup:…

Although embedded in a traditional middle school, STREAM takes a nontraditional approach by connecting students to the outdoors through project-based learning.

Hyde Park Neighborhood Club (HPNC) is a small, hyper-local community-based organization that, before the pandemic, provided after-school care and enrichment to children living on the South Side of Chicago. During the pandemic, HPNC created a learning pod for children in grades K-8 to provide parents in the community with childcare and students…

In this paper, we report on our experience as rookies organizing, funding, and running a summer computing camp for middle school girls. The focus of the camp was building mobile applications using App Inventor. The three day/two night camp targeted girls in rural, high poverty school districts and was funded through an award from the National…

When Principal Natasha Moore saw the application for Community School funding from Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) during her first year as principal at REACH Academy, she jumped on the opportunity to apply. East Oakland's REACH Academy serves a student body of just under 400, and is co-located with Cox Academy, a charter school.…

Early awareness strategies, from outreach campaigns to cohort-based learning groups to scholarships, are a group of efforts that help middle school students stay on the path to college and understand how to fund their education. These strategies become part of early awareness programs, which seek to put students on a college-going path by…

Schools throughout the United States provide instruction on democracy, voting, and major institutions of government, but often excluded from the curriculum is a central reality of our political system: the role of money in elections. This article provides background information and pedagogical strategies to help teachers foster productive…

Can reading a book about a boy and a hen in Ghana make a difference to fifth graders in their Michigan community? Indeed, it can, and in myriad ways. At a suburban elementary school in Michigan, the authors introduced fifth graders to economic concepts in a project-based learning (PBL) unit. They began by reading aloud and discussing the picture…

In 2008, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) produced a series of papers documenting promising practices identified throughout the field of K-12 online learning. Since then, we have witnessed a tremendous acceleration of transformative policy and practice driving personalized learning in the K-12 education space. State,…

The conditions required for a reform of the educational finance system as the foundation of compulsory education are 1) devolution to schools and introduction of national standards in order to deal with "individual equality" while compensating for the insufficiency of "aspectual equality," and 2) dealing with educational needs…

During the Great Recession, 2008 to 2010, school systems scrambled to balance budgets, and the ratio of counselors to students became even larger. To make matters worse, the Great Recession had a major impact on cuts in educational funding. Budget cutbacks tend to occur where the public will be least likely to notice. The loss of teachers and the…

This report includes a high-level overview of student outcome data and how Kansas measures up to the other 49 states. It is meant to complement the other reporting that the Kansas Association of School Boards has released and will be releasing related to improving student outcomes for all Kansas public schools. The following are key findings…

This article describes Bill Ferriter's efforts to incorporate cause-driven learning into his 6th-grade grade language arts and social studies classroom starting with Kiva (http://www.kiva.org), a microlending website that pairs interested lenders in the developed world with people in the developing world who are working to improve the quality…

The New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) primary and intermediate schools national survey was carried out in July-August 2013. NZCER questioned principals, teachers and trustees at a representative sample of schools, and sought the views of a random sample of 1 in 4 parents in 36 of these schools. In all, the survey gathered data…