Giving Compass' Take:

• Daphne Stanford, writing for Triple Pundit, details the strategies to improve public education equity which involve incorporating more dialogue about social change with students and promoting better nutritional standards for schools. 

• How difficult will these strategies be to implement in classrooms?

• Here are policy recommendations to improve educational equity for rural schools. 

As reported by NPR, Baltimore’s public schools closed in early January due to unusually low classroom temperatures that local teachers dubbed “inhumane” — dipping near 40 degrees. One student told her mother that she couldn’t feel her toes at one point; another student said, “As of now, I have on four shirts, two hoodies, and a jacket. If this isn’t illustrative of educational inequity and infrastructure funding problems on a major level, I’m not sure what is.

How can private enterprise and public education work together to promote sustainability and educational equity on a basic, structural level? Elizabeth Ferruelo is an educational entrepreneur: that is, she launched a digital learning program that utilizes AI to teach argumentative writing in a way that adapts to every student on an individual level. An outside-the-box solution like AI-based software might help with oversized classrooms in which teachers have 28 students per class.

Another strategy is having a productive dialogue about social change and equity with the students experiencing these problems. For instance, teachers can inspire social change in the classroom by not only discussing issues like school heating and curriculum supply budgets, but also putting these problems forth as part of a real-world curriculum that favors student voices, communication, empathy, creativity, and consensus-building.

Read the full article about strategies for educational equity by Daphne Stanford at Triple Pundit.