How You Can Get Involved In Local Education

I just stumbled across this site, www.donorschoose.org. It's a way teachers can post the cost of specific material needs they have in the classroom, for potential donors to search for projects they want to support. All entries are indexed by state, so you can look for something close by. Most of the needs are basic things like art supplies, dictionaries, or school supplies for kids who can't buy their own, and usually cost only a couple hundred dollars total. All entries include pictures of the teacher or students, and once all the money is collected, each donor to a specific project will get personalized thank-you notes from the kids in the classroom and a photo of all of them with the materials your donation helped to buy.
I'm really excited about it because it's local, and it's direct. There's no money wasted in overblown bureaucracy, and you know exactly where every cent of your donation is going. A small percentage of the total cost of each project, which is listed up front, and which you have a choice in contributing to or not, goes to donorschoose.org for their work in screening project proposals, sending materials to the schools, and organizing thank-you notes. It's highly efficient, transparent, personal, and beneficial.
One troubling question that this brings up though, is why teachers have to go searching for private funds to buy books, like this teacher from Maryland who wants to buy age-appropriate books for her students. Or even dry erase markers, in this case in New York City. Why don't our school districts have money for these things? Why do teachers need to beg strangers for funding for basic educational materials for their classrooms instead of receiving it from the state?
There's several needy projects listed for my state, but I decided to give some bucks to this one, which needs only $66 more in order to complete funding for a classroom microscope in a high-poverty elementary school in Maryland. The microscope comes with prepared slides, and will be the first microscope that any of the students have ever used. The first time I ever used a microscope, it was astounding. It opened up an entirely new way of thinking about living things, and it would be great to help some less-fortunate kids around here have the same experience.

Educational Support in Mozambique

When I was in the Peace Corps, I served as a secondary school biology teacher in rural Mozambique. There, I encountered a whole lotta kids and a whole nottalotta teachers, crammed into school buildings with few supplies. In some cases roofs were even threatening to fall down on students' heads; they had never been replaced after being bombed out by RENAMO during the civil war, the contractor having absconded with the donated repair funds. The kids were like kids everywhere, sometimes curious, sometimes bored, sometimes awesome, sometimes little shits. There were a number of generally undereducated yet dedicated teachers, working from 7am with the beginning of 1st period of the first school shift, until past 10pm when the sixth period of the 3rd shift ended, five days a week, three trimesters a year. And then there were a whole bunch of corrupt jerks who were only still there because there was such a desperate teacher shortage. I read now about how the Mozambican government is putting in place a new program to support and supervise teachers and schools. I hope it stops those corrupt jerks I knew from deliberately lowering students' grades after barely teaching at all for a whole trimester in order to extort money and sex from them to pass. I can't wait to see the day when Mozambique has enough trained teachers to kick the predators and the thieves out of their school system.