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Take 5: “Whatever Happened to ‘We, The People…'” and more…

November 19, 2014

The New York Times: How Can Community Colleges Get a Piece of the Billions That Donors Give to Higher Education? “Educational institutions and services remain the second biggest beneficiaries of philanthropy in the country, after religious organizations, but little of the money flows to community colleges, the mostly public institutions that now enroll 45 percent of the country’s undergraduates, most of them poor or working-class and many of them requiring extensive remedial learning. When Gail O. Mellow became the president of LaGuardia 13 years ago, there was no mechanism in place for raising private money. ‘Because of who we are and who we serve, the likelihood of one of our students becoming Bill Gates or the C.E.O. of G.E. is, I’m not going to say zero, but much, much smaller than if you were at Williams,’ Dr. Mellow said recently. ‘We don’t have a tradition of giving to colleges in our communities, even though these colleges are so hugely important to their local economies’ — referring to the labor force they supply.”

Hearts on Fire: Whatever Happened to “We, The People…” “The numbers are in…and they’re shameful. In the recent midterm elections, only 36 percent of eligible Americans bothered to vote – that’s the worst turnout in 72 years. And it is just this kind of widespread apathy that motivated Scott Warren to co-found Generation Citizen in 2008 when he was a senior at Brown University.” Generation Citizen is an America Forward Coalition Member.

Fast Company: The Prison Coding Class That Might Have Inmates Making Six Figures On Their Release “Jones is going through a coding bootcamp, so he will soon have the skills necessary to start working on his app. But the 31-year-old has never actually used a smartphone, and his Internet experience is limited to casual web browsing. He’s an inmate at California’s San Quentin State Prison—incarcerated since 2006 for assault—who is participating in Code 7370, a six-month intensive computer programming class developed by The Last Mile, a nonprofit program that offers entrepreneurship training for inmates.”

New Classrooms Blog: Lesson Learned #2: Partnering for Student Success “New Classrooms partners with schools—traditional district-run, public charters, and independents schools—that choose to replace their traditional, textbook-based math program with Teach to One. Unlike a textbook publisher or technology vendor, we partner with schools throughout the school year, providing them with a combination of digital and live instructional content, student assessment, data analysis and reporting, operational consulting, technical support, and professional development to enable personalized learning for each student each day. Teach to One is not a product that gets dropped off at the schoolhouse door with a 10-point instruction manual. Rather, it requires serious commitment on the part of each school community to a meaningful change in how teaching happens.” New Profit and a proud funder and partner of New Classrooms.

The Washington Post: Your Children Deserve Better Than This, First-Grade Teachers Tell Parents “Karen Hendren and Nikki Jones are highly regarded first-grade teachers at Skelly Elementary School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They wrote an open letter to the parents of the children in their classes that explains why they have decided not to administer a standardized test known as the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) or student surveys that they believe violate students’ privacy.”

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