Access to sports is an important part of a well-rounded education, and it takes committed communities and companies like Dick's to make a real difference in kids' lives.
Laptops are important, but before you spend a million dollars per school providing one laptop per child... won't you please spend $5,000 per school equipping every classroom with a document camera?
No matter the circumstances, teachers show up each day ready to give their students every opportunity possible, and they never give up.
To take on the jobs of tomorrow, students must become more than good test takers. They need to become makers who design, sketch, build, and prototype. And their classrooms will need more than a chalkboard and a set of textbooks.
We aren't prescribing anything. We're not claiming to be the experts. We aren't advocating for or against any program. We are going to create a platform that says very explicitly what it is that teachers experience in their classrooms.
I had really good relationship with my students; it definitely took me a few months before I had my students' respect.
I've been a fan of bass fishing for as long as I can remember.
When I began teaching, my colleagues and I quickly realized that our students didn't have access to the same resources we had growing up. We knew there were supplies and resources that could help our students, but our school district simply couldn't afford them.
We've established a free marketplace of teacher ideas and donor interests.
We reflect on our successes and failures at monthly staff meetings.
I do not live off canned soup.
If anything, we hope that DonorsChoose.org is going to be a prompt, a nudge in the side of the public school system to improve and to start delivering these materials and experiences that students need and to make it easier for teachers to innovate.
To get DonorsChoose.org to scale, we first need to increase the viral appeal of our website.
Public school teachers from every corner of America post classroom project requests on DonorsChoose.org. Requests range from pencils for a poetry writing unit to violins for a school recital to microscope slides for a biology class.
At DonorsChoose.org, we believe that teachers are unsung heroes.
For my 9th birthday, my only wish was to eat like a farmer boy. I had devoured 'The Little House on the Prairie' book series and wanted to be like Almanzo Wilder, the protagonist of 'Farmer Boy,' one of the later installments in the 'Little House' series.
We think the ability to rattle off people you are grateful to and thankful to is often sort of a proxy for openness to learning from others.
Donors are sick of writing that $200 check to the Red Cross and not knowing whether it goes for the executive director's salary or the office rent.
An art project, a hands-on science experiment, or a special field trip can transcend textbooks and flash cards. No one knows this better than those teaching students with autism.
People on the front lines have the best ideas for how to improve things.
Whether you're saying 'thank you' to friends, family members, customers, or a hiring manager who interviewed you for a job, the case in favor of gratitude is both altruistic and pragmatic.
Teachers are heroes.
Our brains are designed to solve some of our most complex problems when we're distracted by routine habits.
We've long believed teachers know best what their students need to succeed, and that includes the creation of healthy, supportive school communities.
I was a social studies teacher at a high school in the Bronx for five years.
Well, just as in the quality of public schools, there is massive disparity and the compensation given to the public school teachers.
At DonorsChoose.org, we believe that classroom teachers often know their students better than anybody else in the system and that their front-line experience gives them a special kind of wisdom.
America's best teachers are always looking for new ways to bring learning to life.
I get my share of 'cold' requests via LinkedIn from people who are launching non-profit or for-profit ventures and who request a meeting to get my input or help. I wish I could say yes to all of them, but given limited bandwidth, I say yes to the subset who've written a compelling description of their work and who are underrepresented.
It's hard to enlist the support of people you don't know, but it's critical to growing your career, finding new customers, and building out your team.
Whenever there are changes to school budgets, we know teachers feel it first.
You have to wade through tons of 'no's' to get one 'yes,' and you can't let it go to your head when you get that yes.
I'm not tech savvy at all.
Students who learn to collaborate and negotiate - on Capitol Hill, in the board room, in everyday life - will outperform peers who have higher test scores.
Our ideological dilemmas won't ever be solved by machines.
I believe if we can crowdsource educational solutions to teachers on the front lines, who often know their kids better than anyone, we will unearth and generate better-targeted, smarter ideas.
Our name is not great. It doesn't evoke anything about school or teachers. It doesn't roll off the tongue or stick in your head.
We believe in the wisdom of the front lines.
We think there's nothing like sunlight to mobilize and energize citizens to demand change of their elected officials.
Teachers know how to improve education, but they are a voice that is consistently overlooked or ignored.
After 14 years of running DonorsChoose.org as someone who had never written a line of code, I did do a three-month night school course. After all these years, I could at least speak some of the same vocabulary and have a first-hand appreciation for what my colleagues on the engineering team are doing.
One question we'll ask is, 'Who are you grateful for,' and a surprising number of people can't name anyone beyond their mother.
Our partnership with Dick's Sports Matter program aligns perfectly with our mission to address inequity in schools nationwide.
I founded DonorsChoose.org because I care about learning, and I believe every student in our country deserves a great education.
A really large number of teachers contact us offline testifying how valuable iPads are for their students.
We want to use our site to galvanize people to give but also to take important steps toward real change.
We love that our platform allows people to give.
If you track your organization's creativity by the number of brainstorms on your calendar, you're missing out. It's more important to capture those unplanned sparks of inspiration that so often come when we're cooking dinner, taking a shower, or commuting to work.
My colleagues and I were always having the same conversation in the teachers lunchroom about books we wanted our students to read, a field trip we knew would really bring a subject matter to life... And most of us would go into our own pockets to buy just paper and pencils.
