How Colleges Can Again Be Levelers of Society

For decades, no one at New Dorp public high school seemed to know how to help low-performing students, and unfortunately, this troubled population made up most of the school, which caters primarily to students from poor and working-class families. Now, New Dorp school district is seeing a huge change in test scores due to the new emphasis on writing skills, which is allowing students greater reading comprehension and ability to receive college acceptance.

In Prince George's County School system, two schools have offered international schools, which have a different curriculum for immigrants new to the USA. This has caused complaints and difficulties with the other students, the after school band program has helped bring the two groups together to socialize and form friendships.

An innovative school and architectural endeavor in Denmark offers 16 years of lessons for the increasingly popular personalized learning movement. At the Hellerup School, students check in with their teachers at the beginning of the lesson and then disperse throughout the open-plan building to work where they are most productive. While the school has found the model highly rewarding, in recent years, Hellerup has grappled with how to build more group interactions into the intensely individualized curriculum.

Georgia State University's predictive analytics system has helped students graduate by flagging at-risk students using a variety of factors, including college and high school grades, financial aid statuses, and more. While other universities attempt to scale the program to increase retention at their universities as well, serious concerns about privacy and surveillance persist, as do hesitations regarding the cost of expanding advisory services as Georgia State has done.

A school in Tel Aviv welcomes immigrant and refugee children with open arms, providing language classes, long school days, extracurricular activities, and more. Members of the community volunteer to tutor and lead after-school courses, allowing children to learn while their parents work late. Now, more schools are popping up in Tel Aviv with similar aspirations.

In several small rural towns in Texas, mental health professionals from Texas Tech are offering telemedicine counseling to make up for a lack of counselors available in local middle and high schools. The Governor's office has now asked the successful school districts to develop a training program for teachers in other Texas districts in order to scale the model.

Changing the culture in university Greek Life requires proactive collaboration between students and university staff. The University of Oregon’s Sexual Violence Prevention Leadership Board (SVPLB) is composed of representatives of each of the University’s Greek Life groups and managed with the assistance of a faculty liaison. In weekly meetings, members of the group discuss sexual violence prevention, consent, and setting boundaries. The faculty liaison, meanwhile, provides support and institutional memory for the group as students graduate.

At Capital City Public Charter School, students are graded based not only on academic skills but also social and emotional skills. The Washington D.C. school has a high graduation rate and college enrollment rate.

The Romani Education Fund in Slovakia is helping children from the Roma community, which has a history of social and economic disadvantages as well as being subject to ethnic discrimination, overcome challenges to finish high school and pursue higher education. The REF works by providing qualifying students with a stipend to pay for educational supplies, as well as providing school guidance and personal mentorship to help both students and parents overcome the social hurdles that impede the student's desire or ability to fulfill their potential.

Cooking to Share allows fifth- and sixth-grade students to cook meals for families in need. Since its inception, the program has served 78 families in the county, while teaching 2,000 students about cooking, food safety, foodborne illnesses, and cleanliness.