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John Legend has written about his own high school education in a powerful op-ed about empowering teachers for HuffPost.
In the post—entitled “By Empowering Teachers, We Can Level The Playing Field For Every Student”—the singer urged greater support for teachers to “ensure that future generations” will have access to better quality education and, as a result, far greater opportunities in life.
“I still remember standing at the podium during my high school graduation, looking out over the crowd,” wrote Legend. He said that in that moment, it struck him that the number of students graduating was half what it had been at freshman orientation. “Nearly fifty percent of my peers had given up on their education and dropped out,” he noted. Read more…
More about Education, Teachers, John Legend, Teens, and Culture
Apple is taking its coding course international after it announced that 20 college and university partners worldwide will begin offering the Everyone Can Code initiative to students. Initially limited to the U.S., the course is designed by Apple engineers and educators to help students learn the basics to get into the “booming app economy” — Apple says iOS developers alone… 
Shernaz Daver, the chief marketing officer for Udacity, who company founder Sebastian Thrun credits with architecting the company’s dramatic revitalization four years ago, is stepping down from her position with the company. While Udacity has become a dominant force in online education, with over 53,000 students enrolled in the company’s nanodegree programs, over 18,000 graduates… 
Like many of the most compelling startups, littleBits began life as a side-hustle — no expectations, no early push for venture capital. Just a bit of tinkering to pass the time. Ayah Bdeir was a recent MIT grad with a fellowship at New York City architecture design firm I-Beam when the seeds of the company first sprouted. 
With one day left to go in the federal fiscal year, the department had renewed funding for a longstanding reading program for the disabled, and it had chosen Benetech for the third time to run the five-year, $42.5 million project. That meant Benetech could continue to operate BookShare, which provides digitally materials to 500,000 students with reading disabilities, including blindness and… /https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fcard%2Fimage%2F637711%2F5e35bcfb-46a5-4872-96af-946d66e370be.jpg)
The Bay Area-based Wonder Workshop announced today that it has closed a $41 million Series C round of funding. The team has built a number of very cool little robots that kids can program on their mobile phone in a manner that helps them grasp at some computer science basics. /https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fcard%2Fimage%2F232434%2FHispanic_Activists_Thumbnail_two.jpg)