Our team is always seeking the latest news in the field of education. As advocates for a quality education for ALL students, we know we have to stay up-to-date on everything that’s going on in the education spheres of our nation…from the White House to the local public school district, from new legislation to the small acts of bravery and kindness made by a single teacher, from the milestones and celebrations to the hazardous injustices affecting many of our nations students.

Here’s the best stories we came across last week…because we believe you should stay up-to-date, too!

As Charter Schools Turn 25, Five Ways to Share Their Success With Traditional Schools via The 74

Nina Rees and Catherine Brown discuss charter schools and the fact that even the most high-performing schools will never be able to help all the students who need them. They give 5 ways that these schools can increase their impact and spread their success, including creating opportunities for school leaders to learn from high-performing charter and even creating incentives for high-performing schools to collaborate with lower-performing schools.

“The best charter schools are often transformative for the students who attend them. The national charter management organization (CMO) Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), for example, sends four times as many students to and through college than the rate for disadvantaged students nationally. One-hundred percent of seniors at IDEA public schools, a CMO in Texas, have been accepted to college for nine consecutive years.”

Desperate for Bilingual Teachers? New Paper Says You Should Start With Your Classroom Aides via The 74

Conor Williams explains why allowing more languages in U.S. schools just isn’t enough. If we are going to have bilingual classrooms, we need to find, train, and equip more bilingual teachers. Williams believes that one of the smartest ways to fill the bilingual teacher shortage may be to help bilingual classroom aides get licensed.

“While it’s a good thing to change laws to allow more languages into U.S. classrooms, that’s just a start. We also need to recruit, prepare, and retain more multilingual teachers. These teachers are a scarce resource. While more than 1-in-5 U.S. students speaks a non-English language at home, fewer than 1-in-10 U.S. teachers say the same. If only we had a pool of multilingual adults with instructional experience and the language skills necessary to support DLLs’ native language development! If only…”

Did any of these articles particularly speak to you? We would love to know your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below: