Teaching Parents to Help Stop the 'Summer Slide'

YouthBuild focuses on a tough demographic: 18- to 21-year-old drop-outs who are eligible for neither regular high school nor adult education. The program mixes classroom learning and vocational education, qualifying them for entry-level jobs or college.

Arts education programs in the United States are subjected to cutting for maintaining tight school budgets. Technology sectors in Seattle seek professionals who have been trained in problem solving skills and innovative idea generation. In response, Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture collaborate to promote equity in students’ access to the arts.

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.

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.

More than half of the almost 70 million people who have migrated across borders or been forcibly displaced are children. The Lego Foundation and Sesame Workshop are teaming up with organizations in the countries surrounding Syria to offer play-based learning programs that teach resilience and respect of differences for refugee children six years old and younger.

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.

Programs like the American Association of Caregiving Youth (AACY) advocate for and provide support to youth caregivers who are responsible for caring for sick, elderly, or adults with disabilities at home. AACY’s Youth Caregiver Project provides support in school and at home by offering customized services based on each student’s needs, including tutoring, counseling and even connections to food resources or school supplies. AACY serves about 600 students in 30 schools each year. Since the Youth Caregiver Project began in the late 1990s, about 2,000 youth have completed the program.

Robotna provides free education programs in robotics, coding, and AI to the public and students at government-funded schools in Jordan with the goal of expanding access to careers in technology. One of its initiatives provides practical training to graduates of IT and engineering programs, and roughly 70 percent of participants obtain an interview or a full-time job within six months of completing the training.