Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. In 2016, Indiana had a four-year, non-waiver high school graduation rate of 82.4%, and an adjusted graduation rate of 89.1%. This means that more than 10% of students – or a total of 8,626 students in 2016 – did not complete high school in four years. While some of these students may eventually graduate in five or more years, some portion has simply dropped out of high school. Given that most jobs in the 21st century economy require – at minimum – a high school diploma plus some form of post-secondary education or training, dropping out of […]

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. Can a young, 20-something who just walked off the stage, college diploma in hand, step into a classroom and, with relatively little training, effectively teach in one of our nation’s more challenging K-12 environments? Finding talented teachers for high-need schools is a perennial issue. While there are plenty of organizations working to address this problem, perhaps the most well known—and hotly debated—is Teach For America. Teach For America, or TFA, selectively recruits recent college graduates to teach in high-need public schools. TFA generally attracts graduates who did not major in education and provides several weeks […]