Tag: teachers

Fixing America’s Schools

Posted on by robbie

Ted Dintersmith isn’t your typical philanthropist. The straight-talking venture capitalist and former Obama appointee to the 2012 U.N. General Assembly is also one of the nation’s foremost voices on education reform. Dintersmith has no problem calling out other education reformers, such as tech billionaire Bill Gates or Success Academy Charter Schools founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz, on what they’re doing wrong with their approach to improving public education.
“Eva Moskowitz gets called a hero by some, but would any of those people [who are] cutting big checks to her send their kids to those schools? Hell no!” says Dintersmith, adding that schools need to change their focus from test scores to more meaningful measurements of success. “So much of education’s decline is based on these eight words: ‘But we have to be able to measure.’ That’s false. We have to be able to assess.”
In his new book, What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America, Dintersmith visits schools in all 50 states and discovers teachers doing extraordinary things with limited resources. Instead of reminding us that our public school system is broken, his message is one of hope. NationSwell sat down with Dintersmith to discuss his top four education innovations and solutions that he encountered while venturing across the country.

SOLUTION 1: REIMAGINE THE HIGH SCHOOL TRANSCRIPT

In 2009, New Hampshire — along with a handful of cities across the nation — adopted a competency-based approach to grading students, as opposed to the typical A-to-F letter grades.
Students tend to forget information after they take a test, especially if they cram for it. But with a competency-based approach, high school transcripts look more like scorecards, reflecting student comprehension of classroom topics rather than just a GPA based on letter grades.
“If we are going to hold kids and teachers accountable [for what they learn in school], we should look to New Hampshire, with kids demonstrating real competency of standards that are driven by design and based on real performance,” Dintersmith says. “And I think it is really encouraging because it shows what can be done at scale.” After a pilot program in 27 New Hampshire schools, the competency-based approach was introduced as a statewide initiative.
“Legislatures, school boards, commissioners  — all trusted teachers to lead the way in how they could reinvent the high school transcript,” Dintersmith says. “They turned it into [something] confidence-based and performance-based, with kids demonstrating important accomplishments and skills instead of [focusing on] getting a 70 or higher on multiple-choice tests.”

SOLUTION 2: BE IN THE STUDENTS’ CHAIRS

In another competency-based curriculum, teachers in Iowa thought the best way to get students interested in learning was to have them tackle real-world business and community projects. The program came about after an educator-led experiment asked about 60 local business and community leaders to put themselves in the shoes of students for a day.
“They got movers and shakers from all over Cedar Rapids to come in for a full school day, to see what life is like as a student,” Dintersmith says. “And then at the end, the teachers asked [them], ‘Do you think we should just try to keep doing what we’ve always done, or should we be thinking big?’”
The resulting program, named Iowa BIG, pairs schools in Cedar Rapids with nonprofit, business and government agencies. Students solve for community needs, such as creating public data portals for local sports results that reporters can use and building robotic kayaks that use spectrometers to beam back data on water quality.
Dintersmith says he was blown away by the program. “Kids do just as well on standardized tests because they are really energized, and [teachers] tell me 98 percent get into first-choice colleges,” he says. “Kids are getting great summer jobs too.”

Dintersmith School 2
In his new book, Ted Dintersmith argues that schools need to change their focus from test scores to more meaningful measurements of success.

SOLUTION 3: CONNECT KIDS TO THE WORLD

Every spring, Coachella Valley, California, experiences a massive boom in population when it hosts its annual music-and-arts festivals. But whereas millions of dollars pour in over the course of just a month, Coachella Valley’s schools are some of the poorest in the nation.
“There are a lot of homeless kids, a lot of kids living in trailer parks — which is luxury housing for these families,” says Dintersmith, who visited the city during his tour. “These are kids desperately trying to escape poverty, but they’re under-resourced, which is the story of education in America.”
Coachella Valley’s school superintendent, Darryl Adams, recognized that one of the biggest challenges for students was access to technology. So Adams, a former musician-turned-music teacher, got a $45 million bond voted on by residents to focus schools on reducing the so-called digital divide, where poor students have less internet access than their wealthier counterparts. The money paid for an iPad for every one of the 18,000 students in the district. The grant also provided for WiFi on eight school buses that then parked outside of the city’s trailer parks, providing internet access for everyone in the neighborhood.
“Adams focused the schools on teaching students to create and invent [things like websites and robotics], and to use technology to show that you can make things that will impress other people, will be valued by other people, will make your world better, and will help you escape poverty,” Dintersmith says. “So really hard-hit kids suddenly have a reason to come to school and are getting good at something that will give them multiple career options going forward.”

SOLUTION 4: TRY OUT TRADE SKILLS

In Waipahu, a suburb of Honolulu, the poverty rate is 2 percent higher than the state average and disability rates are almost double. That translates into little funding for local schools — especially for the expensive hardware that much of technology requires.
“We all think of Hawaii being luxury hotels, but Hawaii has these acute pockets of poverty, especially in Waipahu, one of the poorest areas outside of Honolulu,” says Dintersmith, who was intrigued by one school’s approach to integrate design thinking into their curriculum.
The school asked technology companies to partner with its students. The idea was to mix applied learning with classroom instruction. Students learned how to create products and build out technology-driven solutions to help other members of the community.
“These kids were so impressive,” Dintersmith says. “They’re mixing the applied with the academic, and they’re getting these great career paths, but they take such pride in their school and their community. Again, it’s that really clear understanding that the applied is a great way to develop academic perspective.”
Dintersmith also found out about another school not far from Waipahu that was using a similar applied-learning approach, but with marketing and journalism instead of tech.
“If you simply relegate these kids to an academic-only environment, many kids find it’s not interesting, and when you get them in high school, you only have one option, which is college,” Dintersmith says. “As they come through school, we owe it to these kids to give them as many possible career options outside of a more formal education. Because, at the end, all they’ll do is keep their fingers crossed and hope they can find a career.”

Ending the Revolving Door of Minority Teachers

Posted on by robbie

New York might be one of America’s most racially diverse cities, but its teacher pool is decidedly not.
In a city where 85 percent of the public school students are racial minorities, 60 percent of the teachers serving them are not. Only a quarter are male, and of that group, less than 8 percent are men of color — a concern because, as multiple studies have shown, the more diverse the teaching population, the better the outcome for minority students. In one such study, for example, black teachers were more likely to have higher expectations of black students compared to white teachers.
To help remedy that stark disparity in student-teacher demographics, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration launched the NYC Men Teach initiative in 2015, vowing to put an additional 1,000 men of color on course to become teachers over three years.
But the city may be focusing too much on recruitment rather than retention, some education advocates say.
On the surface, the initiative has come close to achieving its goal. According to WYNC, Men Teach has recruited some 900 non-white men to the profession, with 350 of them currently employed in the school system. The problem? There is little proof that they will remain in those jobs for the long haul.
“Historically, financing has gone to initiatives that focus on recruitment, and there has been little focus on keeping teachers of color in the field once we get them there,” says Cassandra Herring, executive director and CEO of BranchEd, a new organization that works with minority-serving institutions, or MSIs, on analyzing recruitment and retention practices.
Herring points to a landmark 1983 report by the U.S. Department of Education, called A Nation At Risk, that boldly outlined the problems within America’s school system, including the lack of diversity among teachers. In the wake of the report’s publication, programs that recruited minority candidates surged, resulting in a 104 percent increase in teachers of color between the 1987 and 2011 school years. Those numbers have since have dropped.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics

Similarly in New York, which counts 75,000 teachers and 1.1 million students in the district, the number of male minority teachers had been steadily ticking upward until recently. By 2015, the number of black male teachers had shrunk to less than 4 percent, a drop of one percentage point since 2004. The ranks of male Asian and Latino teachers, meanwhile, have held steady at around 3 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. But during the same period the city has seen a surge in the city’s Hispanic population, according to data collected by the Research Alliance for New York City Schools.
“I remember I asked a principal, ‘What is your graduation rate?’ and she answered, ‘Well, a lot of our students come from the housing projects,’” said former U.S. Secretary of Education John King in a panel discussion last year at the University of Southern California. “People just give up on these kids because of their backgrounds.”
In October of 2016, the Obama administration tried to address the issue by revising federal regulations to make it easier to be accepted into teacher preparedness programs. The hope was that doing so would attract more diverse talent, but to critics it was a slap in the face.
“It’s such a tremendously insulting move to African Americans and Latinos to say, ‘We want you to come into the profession so badly, and the only way we can make that happen is if we have no standards.’ I can’t imagine what that does to someone’s psyche,” Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, told the Hechinger Report. “We do a tremendous disservice to think that the way to diversify the teaching profession is to lower the bar.”
By focusing solely on attracting minorities to teaching, the government and outside organizations do a disservice to the ones who are already in the classroom, argue critics. The numbers bear this out: Black and Latino teachers leave their jobs at higher rates than their white coworkers.
One reason could be the conditions in which minority teachers find themselves. A report by the Brookings Institution found that these teachers are siphoned into schools with more curriculum problems and poor funding, resulting in longer hours compared to white teachers in more well-funded schools. Take Teach for America, for example; turnover among its participants has been a consistent problem for the nonprofit, which trains and places high-performing college graduates into some of America’s most problematic schools.
The good news is that some programs, like BranchEd where Herring works, are starting to direct efforts at keeping minorities in the profession by exposing prospective teachers to other aspects of the job, such as what it’s like working with poverty-stricken kids in underfunded schools. In addition, BranchEd partners with educator-training programs that enroll the most non-white candidates, such as historically black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions.
The black, Latino and Asian teachers that graduate from MSIs, says Herring, are staying in their jobs longer than their traditionally educated peers. She credits the success of these institutions to a “special sauce” that emphasizes student outcomes and supporting students’ emotional integrity rather than focusing solely on course and curriculum development. Through BranchEd, Herring is sharing that recipe of success with other organizations, which includes giving candidates a trial-by-fire lesson in teaching a class and then getting feedback — a model she calls “learning by doing.”
“The problem [of hiring and retaining minority teachers] is a bit gargantuan, and every program and school is trying to address it by taking different approaches, but we need to become more unified,” she says. “We see success in what we’re doing at BranchEd, which is hoping to simplify the MSI model for other institutions to learn from.”
But despite the efforts of organizations like NYC Men Teach and BranchEd, advocates are worried that the progress that’s being made won’t be enough, at least in the immediate future.
“We think of the work of transforming the field of education as generational; it’s not a shift that happens within a year or five years,” says Peter Fishman, vice president of strategy with Deans for Impact. “It takes 10, 15, 30 years before you see the true impact.”
Nonetheless, he says, there is hope that current teachers of color will at least spark aspiring students to continue in the career path of their favorite teacher. “When you achieve [teacher diversity], you’re impacting one student of color and then inspiring them to do the same, and so forth. It becomes a bit of a virtuous cycle.”

Learning to Code Is Vital for Today’s Students. This Nonprofit Helps Schools Teach It

Posted on by robbie

Acerlia Bennet, a 17-year-old New Yorker from the Bronx, likes to read heady political news, often twice, from top to bottom, to make sure she’s fully comprehending the story. But she knows she’s unique: Her peers spend more time sharing memes. So at a local hackathon sponsored by Code/Interactive last summer, Bennet and three other high schoolers built a preliminary website that could translate hard news into more entertaining teen-speak. The algorithm, written with the programming language Python over a 72-hour weekend, extracts text from newspapers and replaces big, confusing words with simpler terms. “That way, they read it and know what’s going on,” Bennet says.
That type of out-of-the-box thinking — and the deep understanding of code to make it a reality — is the end goal of Code/Interactive (C/I), a nonprofit based in New York City. Since 2010, C/I has helped public schools better teach computer science. The program, which currently counts about 5,000 students in six states, is comprehensive: As early as third grade, kids begin experimenting with simple, block-based coding. By the time they reach high school, C/I is preparing them to excel on the Advance Placement (AP) computer science exam.
Besides equipping students with invaluable coding and web development skills, C/I provides teacher training and curricula for the classroom; hosts hackathons and arranges office tours at tech companies for students; and provides a select number of full-ride college scholarships, attracting those teens who otherwise wouldn’t apply for, or couldn’t afford to earn, a computer science degree.
“These computer skills are as fundamental to this generation of students as carpentry was to my father. Back then, not everyone built a home, but they all knew how to hang a picture and how to assemble a table,” says Mike Denton, C/I’s executive director. “The knowledge about tech you interact with is invaluable, and it’s necessary as these technologies become ubiquitous in every industry.”
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C/I got its start in 2001 as an arts organization in the Bronx. Back then, the nonprofit was providing basic technology like video cameras, color printers and online-accessible computers to at-risk youth. By 2010, though, as more and more people gained internet access through smartphones, the mission felt outdated. Denton, then a board member, left his consulting work to revamp the agency. Under his leadership, C/I began offering an after-school coding class on JavaScript at a local community center. “We recognized pretty quickly that teaching 20 kids would not solve the problems we knew existed,” Denton says. To scale their vision, C/I turned its focus to integrating programming lessons into the school day.
C/I first works with teachers who don’t have a background in computer science or engineering, offering seminars during professional development days. Over the course of anywhere from six days to six weeks throughout the year, educators come together to talk through the coding coursework, asking questions ranging from the simple, like what HTML stands for (that would be HyperText Markup Language), to wondering if there is a way to learn coding without a computer on hand (there is).
They also learn that C/I’s pedagogical method derives from an unexpected source: foreign language classes. After all, says Denton, “Computer science, more than anything else, is a language.” So like in Spanish or German classes, the teachers coach students in “grammar,” showing how individual units must be strung together, line by line. The new coders then, in turn, put those lessons into practice as they work to build a website or design a mobile app. Later on in their instruction, students participate in the equivalent of an all-immersive study-abroad trip, diving in to collaborative projects at weekend hackathons.
As students master the new language, like Bennet has done, C/I organizes office tours to show the multiplicity of careers in tech. In Austin, Texas, for example, students might visit a cloud-storage company’s offices or an architectural firm, all of which can use the language of coding in different ways. In New York, Bennet has dropped in at Google, BuzzFeed, FourSquare and so many small startups that she can’t remember all of the names.
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“A lot of times students say they want to be a lawyer or doctor because they know those are professions where you can make money more easily. But they might not be aware of the other positions that are available to them,” says Julia Barraford-Temel, C/I’s program manager for its Texas program, Coding4TX. “We bring them there so they can visualize their future.”
To be sure, C/I is not a workforce-development program. Students aren’t funneled into entry-level software testing jobs as soon as they complete their coursework. (About 70 percent of graduating seniors from C/I do choose computer science as a major or minor in college.) As a student at an arts high school focused on film, Bennet, for example, likes the idea of pursuing animation at a company like Pixar. But whichever career path she chooses, she credits C/I with strengthening her creative approach to problem-solving. “Computer science is not just a bunch of code,” she says. “It’s more about connecting through software and tech, with everyone building and creating and being more innovative.”
Denton echoes her point. To him, the main goal of C/I is for young people to understand the technology that now dictates so much of our lives. “We’re only at the beginning of the tech revolution,” he says. “By 2025, these kids are genuinely going to make a massive difference in the world.”

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
 
 

The Newspaper That Tells Tales of Homelessness, How to Help the Poor Build Credit and More

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On the Streets with a Newspaper Vendor Trying to Sell His Story, CityLab

It can be uncomfortable shelling out change to a beggar living on the street, but would you be willing to pay $2 for a newspaper about homelessness and poverty? Robert Williams, a Marine Corps veteran who writes for Street Sense, a biweekly broadsheet in Washington, D.C., hopes so. For every copy he sells, he keeps 75 percent, his only source of income.

Banking on Justice, YES! Magazine

In the impoverished Mississippi Delta region, most locals can’t borrow from large banks such as Citibank, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase because small loans don’t make enough interest to be worthwhile. Instead, residents are increasingly turning to Community Development Financial Institutions, known as CDFIs, which receive federal assistance in exchange for making capital available in low-income areas.

When Teachers Take A Breath, Students Can Bloom, NPR

Educators have it rough. If keeping up with children’s energy levels for six hours isn’t enough, they also need to help students cope with difficulties outside the classroom and meet the rigors of state testing and federal standards. That can lead to a lot of stress, which is why CARE for Teachers trains educators in meditation techniques proven to reduce anxiety and burnout.

MORE: Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation

How Do You Make Teachers Agents of Change?

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Educators 4 Excellence (E4E), a coalition of 20,000 teachers in six American communities, got its start in a pizza joint in New York City’s East Village. There, a group of young teachers, including Sydney Morris and Evan Stone, who taught second and sixth grades, respectively, at P.S. 86 in the North Bronx, shared their frustration with the public school system. Of all the complaints, the one that stood out the most was that the educators felt like opportunities for growth and transformation weren’t available, but that they couldn’t do anything about it. In 2010, Morris and Stone founded E4E to empower teachers to be changemakers. NationSwell spoke with the pair about the challenges and rewards of working with an entrenched education system at the green-apple-filled E4E headquarters in Lower Manhattan.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
Morris: We were coming to this work straight from the classroom, and I think one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve ever gotten was “People first, people second, people third.” It really is all about the people, the talent, the ideas they bring, the culture they help create.

Stone: Another piece of advice that we got early on was “Decide what your north star is, and keep your eye on it.” Because you’re going to get lots of ideas from lots of people that sound exciting and could pull you in lots of different directions. But stay true to why you launched this organization, why it’s important. That’s something we constantly check each other on.

Evan Stone joins New York City educators and E4E members in advocating for teacher-informed measures of performance in New York State’s teacher evaluation.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
Morris: One thing that our teachers are incredibly excited about, all across the country, is around school climate and student discipline reform. Certainly in today’s times, our membership and our team is incredibly driven by a lens of equity, and we see hugely disproportionate rates of suspensions, expulsions and discipline — particularly for boys of color. Thinking about how we transform our schools into the kinds of safe spaces in which all kids can truly learn really is very closely intertwined with how we discipline students. Moving from a more punitive discipline model to one that is more restorative is something that we’re doing a lot of work on supporting teachers, districts and school systems, because we think it is so directly linked to better outcomes and opportunities for all students.

Stone: Another huge shift that’s happened in our landscape that’s opening the space up for a ton of innovation is we have, for the first time in 16 years, a new federal education law: No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act. A lot of the systems under NCLB that were federally mandated have been loosened up to allow state and district flexibility. (This is distinct from Common Core; it’s much broader: how we hold districts accountable, how we fund schools, services that are provided for special populations of students — it’s the whole federal education code, essentially.) [Recently], we had a group of teachers in Albany, [N.Y.] meeting with state education officials, union leaders and others to try to think about what opportunities are available for innovation and how do we really make sure teachers are helping to drive those changes. This is going to be happening in every state, so it’s a real opportunity for our members to take ownership over the new structures that govern school and their profession can look like.

Through E4E, a group of teachers went to Albany, N.Y., to meet with state education officials to discuss the Every Student Succeed Act.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Stone: I’m glad that people didn’t tell us too much, because I think naïveté is sort of a blessing in a startup. As we launched this out of our classroom, I don’t think we had any idea about some of the challenges that we would face in building and running an organization. That allowed us to take each challenge as it came, one at a time, which was really necessary in the early days, when we were still working in school part-time, trying to run this organization part-time and figuring out the myriad things that you need to do to launch and run a nonprofit.

What inspires you?
Morris: The education space is incredibly complex. What helps me get up in the morning is that the positions that we take, the work we do and what our members stand for is a true, rational middle in an otherwise polarized space. One of the biggest myths that exists in the education space is that, if you are pro-reform or pro-change in education, then that must mean you are inherently anti-union. What our members are showing is that, in fact, they are pro-union and pro-change at the same time, calling for critical and significant shifts for the way our profession operates and the way we serve our students, while also believing in the power of teachers coming together to collectively create change.

What’s on your nightstand?
Morris: Do you want the honest answer? I am almost finished with “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Sometimes you go home, and you just need to clear your head. What could be better than wizards and magic and spells? I’ve never read it before, so I felt like I was missing out on a major cultural phenomenon here.

Stone: I am almost finished with “Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream,” Andy Stern’s new book. He’s a really inspirational labor leader that’s thinking about how do we ensure, as our world and our country continues to change, that the American Dream can still exist. It’s a pretty exciting book that pushes our thinking. Even if — when — we have a high-quality education serving all kids, what are the jobs of the future we’re preparing them for? How do make sure that our school system lines up with that and that our country supports opportunity for everyone?

What’s your favorite book of all-time?

Stone: My favorite book of all time is “The Brothers Karamazov,” and the reason is I read it my senior year in high school. It was probably year when I didn’t want to do much work, and my English teacher, with whom I spent three or four months on it because it was quite the tome, was just phenomenal. It made me want to see myself as an intellectual. That book and that teacher had a significant impact on me. One of the goals of the education system is to inspire learning, and that combination of those two did that for me.

Morris: The literature you read at defining moments in your life can be the books that stick out most vividly to you. One of those for me is a book that both played a role in my understanding and appreciation for spirituality and also for a woman’s journey: “The Red Tent.” I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of women, too, in our work, because teaching in many ways was one of the first careers open to women, and it is a profession where the majority are women, so I’ve been thinking about the role women have to play in leading that change.

What’s your perfect day?

Stone: Besides lying in bed all day eating a cheeseburger and french fries with a milkshake, which sounds pretty good to me sometimes, my perfect day is when I have the opportunity to see our work in action. That could be at a school with one of our outreach directors helping to facilitate a focus group of teachers, and seeing those teachers experience what it’s like to know that your voice matters and feel heard. Having that be a big piece of my day is really important.

Morris: One thing my mother always said to me was “Do good and do well.” A perfect day for me is when I feel like I’ve done something good, whether that’s a small act of kindness toward somebody else or a big win in our work, and also when I feel like I’ve brought my best self and best work towards that end.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: 3 Top Educators Share Their Secrets to Successful School Reform

Meet the School Chief Who’s Offering Double-Digit Raises to Teachers

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We all know that good teachers matter. It’s just common sense that a child learns more with an outstanding educator leading the classroom.
That’s why Antwan Wilson, Oakland Unified School District’s new superintendent, has come up with a bold move to retain and attract the best and the brightest teachers. As SFGate reports, Wilson’s “Pathway to Excellence” plan includes a 10 percent raise for teachers over three years.
“Paying teachers is extremely important,” Wilson said in a press conference. “We have a double-digit (pay raise) offer on the table right now. On salaries, we are behind, but in benefits, we’re way ahead. But when you add those together, we’re still behind.”
Oakland, Calif. district teachers make less than their counterparts in Alameda County, according to the Oakland Tribune. (The median salary for Oakland’s public teachers is $59,782). Funds for the raise will stem from an extra $12 million the Oakland district received thanks to California’s schools funding program, according to the publication. Counter proposals will be considered next month.
MORE: Paying it Forward: Why This University President Gave Up a Quarter of His Salary
“If I am a teacher, what’s going to attract me to this district is how I was made to feel special,” Wilson added. “When we recruit you, did we talk to you and were we excited about you, or did we hire you and just forget about you? We need to think about their best interests, the best fit for them and how we made them feel successful.”
It’s no secret that the men and women who are trusted with educating America’s youth don’t get paid very much. The average salary for public school teachers in the United States is $56,643 a year, with many teachers making much less than that. By raising salaries, it incentivizes teachers to stay, and it also attracts new teachers to come aboard.
You might be surprised how big of a difference a good teacher makes. According to a (controversial) 2011 study cited in TIME magazine’s recent cover story, replacing a poorly performing teacher with a good one could increase students’ lifetime earnings by $250,000 per classroom. And as we previously reported, the (rigorously screened and highly experienced) teachers at an experimental charter school in New York City called The Equity Project (TEP) have a stunning salary of $125,000 annually. The result of their Wall Street compensation? Students have higher test scores and are accelerating their education; a Mathematica Policy Research says that TEP students learned in four years what would’ve taken more than five and a half years at other schools.
It’s clear that a good teacher can make a big difference in a student’s life. If we want to put the best educators in America’s classrooms, it’s time they are given every penny they are worth.
DON’T MISS: The State That’s Actually Hiring Teachers and Paying Them More

The Homework Assignment That’s Saving the Lives of Hungry Kids in New Mexico

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Marvin Callahan is no stranger to childhood hunger. As a kid living in a low-income neighborhood in Albuquerque, Callahan watched his parents do everything they could just to get by. For example, Callahan attended Catholic school, and while the tuition charge was $29 per month, his mom sent in whatever she could spare — be it $2, $3 or $4. Despite this, he always had something to eat.
Sadly, food is something that many of his students don’t have. For the past 29 years, Callahan has been working as a first grade teacher in Albuquerque public schools, and every day, he sees his students come into school without having had a meal.
This situation is typical for many children living in New Mexico. For the past two years, New Mexico has ranked number one in the U.S. for childhood hunger. Sixty percent of the students at Comanche Elementary (where Callahan works) are members of the federal free or reduced price lunch program, and 6,000 of the 87,000 students in the district are homeless.
While the federal programs provide lunch to kids from low-income households five days a week, oftentimes, the meal served at school is only one that these children receive. Which is why Callahan took matters into his own hands.
For Callahan’s students, class begins with breakfast. Every morning, he asks his students who has eaten breakfast, and those who haven’t are either sent to the cafeteria or given a snack from the classroom closet. The kicker, though, is that all the money for the food comes out of Callahan’s own pocket.
“I look into my kids’ eyes, and I can see that sadness and apprehension, and the discomfort of not being their powerful, strong, engaging little selves,” he tells the Huffington Post. “Kids are boundless, but the ones who aren’t being taken care of properly with proper nutrition and rest… you can tell.”
Daily breakfast isn’t the only way that Callahan helps out his hungry students. About two years ago, he also started the backpack program with school counselor Karin Medina and other community members. Every Friday, 37 students are sent home with a backpack containing two breakfasts, two lunches and two dinners — enough to feed them for the weekend.
It’s not much, but the breakfast bars, oatmeal, mac & cheese, beefaroni and sliced turkey is more than the kids would probably have otherwise.
“It’s hard for me to go home some weekends when the kids are saying, ‘I don’t want to go home because I don’t have anything at home,’” Callahan says. “I just hope that when I get home and open my refrigerator and there’s food in there, I hope that they have the same thing.”
Thanks to this special teacher, that hope is a reality.
MORE: This 14-Year-Old’s Homework Assignment Sparked A Mission to Feed America’s Hungry

When Their Coworker Fell Ill, These Selfless Teachers Used a Little-Known Policy to Help Her Out

Posted on by robbie

Our country’s hardworking teachers certainly deserve their vacations, but in the Los Angeles Unified School District, some educators decided to give up their days off to help a fellow coworker battle cancer.
Carol Clark, a much-loved sixth-grade elementary school teacher from Cudahy, Calif., was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. As ABC-7 reports, the 56-year-old quickly used up all her vacation days and the 120 sick days she had accumulated in her 17 years at Jaime Escalante Elementary School as she underwent chemotherapy and doctors visits. Due to her diagnosis, she missed all but two months of the school year.
“I lost pay, I lost my medical benefits,” she describes to the local television station. “I lost all that stuff.”
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Forced to miss more school for additional treatment, her husband Dave (who is also a teacher) decided to ask his coworkers for help by using a little-known Los Angeles plan called the Catastrophic Illness Donation program, the Los Angeles Times writes. The program allows teachers who have used up all their paid leave and are battling a severe illness to ask their fellow district employees to donate their own days off. Teachers can only use it once in their careers and must prove they are ill.
Although Dave was reluctant to ask his coworkers to donate their well-earned time off, it became necessary to do so. He left a sign-up sheet in the teachers’ lounge for anyone to donate up to 20 days and, incredibly, the community immediately rallied for one of their own.
Friends and even strangers across the whole school district stepped up and donated a total of 154 sick days — nearly an entire school year — to their colleague. According to the L.A. Times, one coworker who rarely spoke to Carol sacrificed 10 days.
“Carol has given a lot of love to a lot of people. She doesn’t realize it, but she has,” teacher Justine Gurrola tells ABC-7.
The Clarks were overwhelmed by the incredible generosity. With the donations, Carol was able to make up some of the pay she lost and even has extra sick days on reserve — should she need them.
“I was pretty blown away,” Carol, who returned to teaching this month, says. “It’s an indescribable feeling. It increases your faith in humanity.”
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These Students Look Beyond Books and Classrooms for the Future of Education

Posted on by robbie

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.
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Why This Fearless Teacher Risked Her Life for Her Special Needs Students

Posted on by robbie

Tricia Moses lives and breathes for teaching, so there’s no greater irony than the fact that an extremely rare autoimmune disease destroyed her lungs and nearly took her life.
The Brooklyn teacher, diagnosed with Scleroderma in 2009, was in urgent need of a double lung transplant after the incurable disease turned her lungs into scar tissue. Ever the fearless and devoted teacher, Moses went against doctors orders so she could see her third grade special needs class through state exams, as Yahoo Shine reports.
“We’d been preparing for the exams for so long,” Moses, a teacher of 14 years, told Yahoo. “Even though my students have special needs, they’re still held to the same standards as everyone else unfortunately. We’d worked so hard. I said please just give me another week, and then another week, and then another week. I wanted them to have a fair chance to succeed.”
MORE: Meet the Teacher Who’s Still Inspiring Students, Despite Retiring More Than Three Decades Ago
The 39-year-old, who teaches at P.S. 233 in Flatbush, is the epitome of selflessness by putting her own life in danger for the well-being of her students. While still working, her health got so bad she had to be placed on oxygen 24 hours a day, and she was so weak that she needed her students to help her get around.
Miraculously, as the New York Daily News reports, Moses was able to see her students through their exams on April 23 before flying to a hospital in Pittsburgh to receive her new lungs in an arduous eight-hour procedure. According to the publication, Moses is recovering but she is in danger of organ rejection — her body has already turned on her new lungs twice, sending her to the hospital both times.
She also faces a mountain of medical bills. While Moses’s insurance mostly covered the $900,000 transplant procedure, she is using her own money to pay for doctors’ visits and medication. To help with the costs, her loved ones plan to host a fundraiser in June.
Now in rehabilitation, the elementary school teacher has been instructed to stay in Pittsburgh to be near her doctors, but she’s already awaiting her return home to New York next January so she can go back to what she does best. She even told Yahoo that she wouldn’t hesitate to do it all over again.
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“They’re children with special needs, I didn’t consider it to be the job,” Moses said. “It was something I wanted to do. I wanted to be around them, and I had so much faith in them. I knew if I left them and they had a substitute teacher, it might not have gone as well. I knew that I needed to be there with them.”
Looks like we can all breathe a little easier now that this heroic teacher is on the road to recovery.