These Students Look Beyond Books and Classrooms for the Future of Education

While lawmakers on Capitol Hill continue to debate teacher evaluation and preparedness, several potential educators are hitting the road — instead of books — as part of a month-long road trip to find inspiration.
The TEACH Roadtrip, which is sponsored by Participant Media and Roadtrip Nation, follows three twenty-something students as they travel from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., stopping along the way to interview teachers, activists, lawmakers and entrepreneurs who are shaping the education field.
Over the next 10 years, America will need to replace the 1.6 million teachers expected to enter retirement, according to the U.S. Department of Education. But in order to do that, future educators need to see past the exhaustive debates that plague the education space. And that’s exactly why Rafael Silva, Nadia Bercovich, and Grace Worm are looking for affirmation as they contemplate heading into education.
Inspired by Davis Guggenheim’s documentary, TEACH (which airs on Pivot TV this fall), the group will travel 4,000 miles to spotlight influential leaders like Robert Florio, a veteran and special education teacher with Troops to Teachers; Kelly Meyer, creator of American Heart Association’s Teaching Gardens; and Rahm Emanuel, mayor of Chicago.
Along the way, Bercovich, Silva and Grace hope to glean insight to inspire themselves, as well as the next generation of teachers.
“Every person has a responsibility to teach,” Worm says, “by being part of a world that kids can look to and learn from and, with our help, make it better.”
Worm graduated from the University of Texas at Austin this past summer and is hoping the journey will bridge her transition into a teaching role. Bercovich, who was born in Argentina, has spent the past year backpacking South America and teaching a combination of English, yoga and art therapy. She hopes to meet education innovators to inspire her goal to teach creatively.
University of California at Los Angeles junior Silva has been working toward a career in medicine. But he’s more interested in teaching and is looking to the road trip to convince him.

“I care about education because I have received such a great one, and it has made me who I am today,” Silva says. “I want to make sure other people have the opportunity to go through the same experience I did.”

Their journey may end on September 6 in the nation’s capital, but their potential to shape education is just starting.
MORE: Big Bets: How Teaching Entrepreneurship Can Keep Kids in School

How Chicago’s Community Colleges Are Training the Next Generation of Business Leaders

Undoubtedly, when highly-skilled graduates enter the work force, everyone benefits. And that’s the aim of The City Colleges of Chicago, which are charging themselves with the task of providing companies with, quite simply, the perfect candidates.
To change the face of its curriculum and to better prepare its students to meet employers’ needs, Chicago’s community college system is undergoing a makeover. Gabriel Barrington, an uncertified welder studying at Richard J. Daley College on Chicago’s South Side, is just one of the 115,000 students that hopes to benefit from the system’s “reinvention.”
Barrington enrolled as soon as he read about about the program’s promise to not only teach him complex machining, but also to smooth a transfer to Illinois Institute of Technology, a four-year institution, for a bachelor’s degree. “As a welder, you see the stuff that comes off the machines and think, ‘Wow, I’d rather be a part of that.’” he told Governing. “There’s just such a wealth of materials and possibility.” Barrington, along with all of City Colleges of Chicago’s students, may be part of a wave of Chicago’s most talented job force yet.
Barrington has former mayor Richard M. Daley to thank for the welding education — a subject his college didn’t even teach four years ago. Daley initiated the top-to-bottom curriculum overhaul in 2010, based on the award-winning Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, which graduates nearly half of its full-time students in three years.
Daley tapped investment bank founder Martin Cabrera and City Colleges graduate-cum-ComEd executive Cheryl Hyman to create a blueprint. Their plan reads almost like a job market hack: The City Colleges have formal partnerships with more than 100 corporations, which give input into course sequences and selection. Advisers use this information to help students spin their education forward. They present 10 focus areas including health care and information technology at the start of school, each of which includes a set of certifications and job types. Then, academics advance somewhat on autopilot — students are automatically enrolled in courses of increasing difficulty with each semester. This kind of “stackable credential” system, which City Colleges is unveiling this semester, systematically qualifies a student for a higher pay grade with each course and directs them to a distinct job.
With the groundwork in place and much of it in practice, The City Colleges of Chicago has lofty expectations. It expects to see degrees go up 37 percent a year by 2018, and wants 55 percent of its students to transfer to four-year schools. If achieved, the city-school relationship will become more symbiotic; the job market has a bigger pool of qualified candidates from which to pick, and previously untrained or uneducated Chicagoans will learn a marketable and valuable skill.
The program isn’t without its detractors, though. A student like Barrington will seemingly hit a goldmine when he graduates, receiving a welding degree linked to accrediting organizations so that it will acquire real industrial value, but Complete College America (a non-profit) said in 2010 that it had yet to find evidence that students “actually are stacking short-term certificates and building them into longer-term certificates or degree.” Other critics, including faculty members, are concerned that the program will result in too many qualified applicants for a limited number of higher-level jobs.
Only time will tell if they’re right. In the meantime, the reinvention’s biggest proponents make a good point: That career-based education with a focus on achievement is never a bad thing. The proof is in the short-term results. Since the overhaul began in 2010, the graduation rate has nearly doubled at the seven campuses. “It’s very hard to change entrenched public systems of any kind, to put a stake in the ground and say you’re really committed to it,” says Dr. Larry Goodman, Rush’s CEO told Governing. “But they’ve made it work.”