#education-equity

#education-equity

One of my favorite movies is Good Will Hunting. Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon) is a 20-year-old janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although he works a blue-collar job, he is secretly a self-taught genius with an extraordinary gift for mathematics and an exceptional memory. One day, he anonymously solves a complex math problem left on a chalkboard by Professor Gerald Lambeau, astonishing the faculty.

Two Long Island high school juniors are transforming their academic experiences into a mission to help others. Jonah Aloni of St. Anthony's High School and Liel Agajan, a student at Wheatley High School, have founded LIFT - Lead. Inspire. Foster. Thrive., a student-run organization dedicated to ensuring that children struggling in school can receive the academic support they need, regardless of financial circumstances.

"More than 70 percent of employers say they'd rather hire someone with less experience but who understands AI than someone with more experience. That's a big change," said Lisa Gevelber, chief marketing officer for Gemini, Google's AI product.

One student could not write his name. Over three sessions, which turned out to be all the time they had together before he left the facility, they practiced reading and writing his first name, last name, date of birth, and address. "I don't know what's to come for him, but at least I know he walked out with those skills," said Leyva. For her, part of defining success includes "creating the possibility for them to believe that they can learn."

the decision was based on data collected over the past five years of test-optional admissions showing "that academic performance at Princeton was stronger for students who chose to submit test scores than for students who did not." Like other institutions that have switched back to requiring test scores in recent years, the university said the test scores would be considered among other admissions materials and that there was no specific minimum score needed to be admitted to Princeton.

Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she's operated in what she calls "a parallel universe" to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department's actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options - private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling.

Ministers must make access to language learning a national priority, after research showed that children from more deprived areas of England are disproportionately denied the opportunity to learn a foreign language.

"This gap should matter to us as it matters to the students who walk into the school every single day...how many stories our Latinx students and their families would be empowered to tell if there were more Latinx teachers to tell them to."

Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her groundbreaking work in gene-editing, continues to be recognized, now with a supercomputer named after her at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.