The Writing Revolution

Middle-class children don’t regress as readers during the summer, because they go to the library, do educational activities, take classes - poor children, however, lose between one and two months in reading achievement. Springboard trains teachers for a summer enrichment program, and has now started to help them coach parents to help their children during the school year.

Huge numbers of students lack the chance to go to college because of financial problems. Recently, Kalamazoo schools received more funding allowing them to have the chance to help and pay for students to then go to college and receive a higher education.

The United States has rising childhood obesity and schools deal with kids who are picky. Through innovative school gardens and kid taste testing food, entrepreneurs across the nation are getting children to eat vegetables at school and love it.

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.

Despite the looming competition from Amazon, independent bookstores in New York are finding ways to innovate and create bookstore experiences that go beyond the books. The Lit. Bar is a bookshop-wine bar in the Bronx that hopes to instill a love of reading while customers shop and drink. By selling non-book products, new iterations of bookstores can increase their profit margin to remain sustainable. Many even succeed with creative financing, from crowdfunding to finding local investors.

In a Ohio high school social studies class, U.S. Political Thought and Radicalism, the teacher invites representatives from the country's most extreme political groups, including the National Socialist Movement and the Weather Underground, to teach students how to hold a respectful discussion with others who hold differing perspectives. "Our teachers generally are like, 'You know what? Let's redirect to a different topic, because that one sounds like it's loaded with land mines. The idea of [the class] is let's explore all those land mines and talk about them."

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.

At one Boston public school, teachers are updating curricula to provide students with history lessons that contextualize current national debates about immigration policy.

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.

At one Texas high school, members of Students Organizing for Anti-Racism (SOAR) facilitate and participate in talking circles to address conflict, provide mental health support, rebuild relationships, and redevelop social skills they lost during the pandemic. The circles draw on Indigenous traditions to offer a safe, structured space for expression that focuses on addressing harm rather than administering punishment.