Investing in the Future

How do we connect youth who are struggling to the possibility of a brighter future? We meet them where they are with opportunity and compassion. Youth advocates from the spheres of education, non-profit, and health come together in this engaging conversation to talk about how they implement programs, how they navigate challenges, and how they found their career paths.

This panel is part of the Global Empowerment Summit that aims to activates changemakers around collaborative solutions in the areas of empowerment, education, sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and social impact.

Watch Guiding Lost Youth to a Better Future – Global Empowerment Summit 2019.

To watch more, please visit https://uctv.tv/global-empowerment-summit/

Why School Integration Works

They are some of the most ambitious education programs of the 20th century – school desegregation, school finance reform, and Head Start. Today, many view these initiatives as failures, but professor Rucker C. Johnson of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy disagrees. He and a team of researchers combed through data from over four decades to figure out the true impact of these programs. Their findings are detailed alongside compelling stories of real people in Johnson’s new book, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. Recently, Johnson sat down with Goldman School Dean Henry E. Brady to discuss the book and his research.

Johnson and his colleagues used big data and new techniques to look at the wide-ranging impacts of school desegregation. They tracked everything from high school graduation rates, to employment, wages and health. Thanks to the uneven implementation of desegregation, Johnson was able to compare children who grew up in similar environments, but experienced different levels of desegregation. He found a big part of the positive impact came from how desegregation affected access to class resources, after school programs, quality teachers, and smaller class sizes. And, the longer a student spent in desegregated schools, the greater the impact. In fact, the achievement gap between white and black students closed faster following desegregation than at any other time in American history.

Unfortunately, the United States has moved away from integration. Today, many schools and classrooms are heavily divided along racial lines. Opponents of desegregation appear to have won. But, Johnson says there is still hope. He lays out the case for making integration a priority once again, using data to prove its effectiveness. He also delves into school finance reform and Head Start, showing how sustained investment in education is the surest way to change children’s lives for the better.

Watch The Success of Integrating Schools with Rucker Johnson — In the Living Room with Henry E. Brady

New Careers in Education – Teaching, Research, and Beyond

“Any time two people are together and one is working with another, that is education. And what it requires today is for us to reconceive of education because opportunities are abundant but they may not be where you think they are.”

Traditionally, a career in education has meant becoming a classroom teacher. Though that is still an option, there are increasingly more and more ways to find an impactful career that helps others learn and thrive. Institutional research, support services, online instruction, administration, business development and more are all integral to today’s educational landscape.

Morgan Appel, director of the Department of Education and Behavioral Sciences at UC San Diego Extension, discusses how to find your niche in the world of learning and what new opportunities are available.

Watch Careers in Education with Morgan Appel – Job Won

Design Thinking and K-12 Education

8232“Design thinking” is a popular phrase in education circles and top companies are using it to develop new products and energize their staff. But what is it? As these designers explain, it’s about developing the skills to identify the source of problems correctly and then creating effective solutions centered around people’s needs. These skills are increasingly important in a knowledge-based economy as educators prepare students to succeed in the 21st century. And they make learning a whole lot more fun!

Watch Education By Design — Sally Ride Science STEAM Serieson The STEAM Channel.

Join us on Science Field Trips to Lawrence Livermore National Lab!

8232Join a group of science teachers and middle and high school students on a field trip to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for the annual Science on Saturday (SOS) lecture series. Presented by leading LLNL researchers and supported by master high school science teachers, each topic highlights cutting-edge science occurring at the lab.

Check out this year’s field trips:

82323D Printing: From Imagination to Realization
Revolutionary changes to materials and structures are now possible with 3D printing, bringing concepts that were previously only imagined into reality. This breakthrough technology fabricates components by adding material layer by layer from the bottom up allowing for the creation of highly complex and previously unrealizable structures.

8232Reconstructing a Rabies Epidemic: Byte by Byte
A vast majority of the newly discovered human pathogens are viruses that have jumped to humans from an animal host (“cross-species transmission”). Find out how biologists and computer scientists have collaborated and used cutting edge ultra-deep sequencing technology to study the dynamics of a 2009 rabies outbreak to better understand emergent viruses, such as Ebola and Zika.

8232Forensic Science in Crisis: How Proteins Can Help
In the last decade, the scientific foundations of a number of traditional forensic methods have come under increasing criticism by the scientific community, leading to their discontinuation or reduced effectiveness in criminal prosecutions. These challenges raise questions about the admissibility of certain type of evidence in current cases and the validity of previous convictions. We will discuss the basis of these issues and describe some of the work ongoing at LLNL to try and address some of them. In particular we will describe an entirely new science-based approach to human identification.

Browse Field Trip at the Lab: Science on Saturday to discover more from past field trips!