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Arkansas Expands Educators Rising Initiative to Build Career Pathways for High School Students

Educators Rising, a national Grow Your Own career and technical education (CTE) program that inspires high school students to become educators, announced a partnership with the Arkansas Department of Education to expand to 30 schools across the state, with an emphasis on serving high-needs areas and recruiting diverse students into the profession. The partnership, partially funded through a generous grant from the Walton Family Foundation, more than doubles the potential footprint of the program in the state.

With chapters in all 50 states, Educators Rising offers students the opportunity to develop necessary classroom skills and experience teaching through co-curricular learning and supervised clinical experiences while still in high school. The program can be set up as an extra-curricular activity or as a co-curricular experience and offers a classroom-ready curriculum that can also be implemented at the school level. Educators Rising helps increase teacher diversity through tools and resources designed to address the needs of diverse students and broaden the types of students who explore teaching as a profession.

Majority of Americans Support Local Public Schools on Ongoing Pandemic Response

The 53rd annual PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools reveals that despite the challenges of the pandemic, Americans have high opinions of their local schools and teachers in particular. Similarly, respondents have an overall positive opinion on their local school’s ability to handle potential challenges in the new school year.

The poll found that about two-thirds of adults overall, and as many K-12 public school parents, give their community’s public school teachers an A or B grade for their pandemic response. More generally, 63% of the public give their community’s public schools overall an A or B grade. As is customarily the case, public schools nationally fare less well with about 4 in 10 adults giving the overall national public school pandemic response and A or B grade.