ESPECIAL El trabajo comunitario hace maravillas: Organizaciones que ayudan con el cuidado infantil

Michael Hobbes details the rise and fall of small learning communities in the early 2000s to tell the story of a larger trend in American education reform. "The decisive factor isn't the Big Idea itself--splitting up dropout factories floor by floor--but the millions of little ideas that hold it together," Hobbes notes. He uses this one trend to discuss common denominators for student success and why schools have repeatedly failed to effectively scale promising solutions: "Every successive Big Idea in education reform has ended up in the same place. It works for one school and doesn't for another."

Washington state boasts one of the country's most established and successful dual-credit programs, allowing students to earn college credits while still in high school (at no cost). Some participants even graduate high school with an associates degree, significantly cutting potential student loans. Now the nationally recognized program is turning to face its own limitations - how can it increase access for low-income students, who only made up 5 percent of the 2016-2017 cohort?

Teachers for Teachers, is a US program that is educating untrained teachers in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Around 550 refugee primary-school teachers have been trained through the program. Refugees form about 85 percent of the teachers in the camp. They have to deal with little resources, no training, and can teach up to 300 students. “I know how to prepare schemes of work and interact with my students. I can see results. Our students here are now performing well in national exams.”

In 2012, Megan Marcus founded FuelEd, an organization that trains teachers in emotional and social health so that they can be adequately prepared for their role as a mentor to children. Their practices are based in traditional therapy education, and their 10,000 alumni go on to spread what they've learned through their own classroom or through administrative positions. In this podcast Megan talks about the inspiration behind FuelEd, the duties of running such an organization, and her hopes for their future.

The pandemic of 2020 bears a heavy resemblance to the pandemic of 1918, and the U.S. can learn from the successes of the past. Investing heavily in school nurses, fostering cross-sector and public/private partnerships, and creating “large, clean, airy school buildings” to continue serving families and children—decisions made over a hundred years ago that are still just as relevant today.

An ed-tech researcher continues to investigate the success of a study that looked into the effectiveness of "crowdsourcing homework tips." In the study, the homework tips were pre-written by teachers for students to access during homework time, and the results of the study saw that students who used the tips were 58% likelier to solve the next problem with no help.

Rochester School District previously used hotspots on buses to help students traveling to extracurricular events, but once the pandemic showed how many families were struggling to stay virtually connected, the buses were turned into traveling hotspots for different neighborhoods. The district was able to get all but 20% of its student population connected and is looking for more ways to minimize the digital divide.

The Student View is a program helping youth from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to learn more about misinformation and navigating the media landscape. The program has been able to expand to 20 cities in the United Kingdom to provide 72 pop-up school newsrooms.

Mujeres rurales han trabajado en alianza con organiciones públicas y privadas para convertirse en promotras de salud comunitaria durante la pandemia. Cuando plantas avícolas y otras industrias no presentaron ningún plan para vacunar a sus trabajadores, y barreras culturales y de idioma complicaron la vacunación de poblaciones latinas y Negras, el activismo directo de estas mujeres ha tenido un impacto positivo, y ahora las mujeres desean continuar para buscar mejoras en las condiciones laborales de los trabajadores en general.

Utiliser le numérique pour réduire les inégalités d’accès à une éducation de qualité. Telle est l’ambition de l’Ecole au Sénégal, School in Senegal (EAS), une plateforme de cours disponible en ligne gratuitement visant à aider élèves et enseignants. Aujourd'hui, elle compte 103 000 anciens élèves, 54 professeurs et plus de 3 000 cours en ligne.