St. Paul school district halts enrollment slide. The secret: listening to immigrant communities.

Due to recent brain development research, educators are working to add more math education into pre-school and kindergarten classes. Studies show that children of this age are actually extremely receptive to numbers and learning geometry.

Preschoolers in the U.S. who misbehave are increasingly being expelled. In Connecticut, trained counselors educated teachers about how to deal with emotionally traumatized kids which reduced expulsions.

In Utah, Goldman Sachs funded the education of preschoolers and was reimbursed by the state once it was shown that the kids would not need special education. Social impact investments, like this one in Utah, can help social programs in the U.S. which are often affected by government cuts.

Missing days at school, even when excusable, starts children on a pattern of falling behind. A new U.S. department of education initiative has districts tracking all absences, even in kindergarten, to identify and help kids with chronic absenteeism sooner.

Preparing the young for elementary education is a priority to nurture reading and social skills. For 16 years, Tulsa Oklahoma has instituted a state funded preschool, staffed with teachers trained in early education. Tulsa’s Pre-K initiative has shown that their children are more prepared for literacy skills and math; however, maintaining the positive results is a long-term challenge.

Alleys in Seattle were once places of illicit, illegal, and unsanitary activity. The International Sustainability Institute in Seattle began organizing music and art events to bring in people, which, in turn, cleaned-up the crime and garbage. As an urban development strategy, adjacent vacant storefronts re-opened for business and beautification could be seen in new gardens.

African American boys were being treated less-than-equally by the Oakland Unified School District – a change of culture was implemented and the playing field leveled. Now, Minnesota is looking to adopt the same system that was started in Oakland by creating schools that are exclusively for African American males in hopes to help them reach higher standards of achievement.

Children who experience neglect, severe stress or sudden separation at a young age can be traumatized - without appropriate adult support, trauma can interfere with healthy brain development, inhibiting children’s ability to make good decisions, use memory or use sequential thought processes to work through problems. Head Start Trauma Smart helps support traumatized and neglected children from acting out.

Boston professors visit countries and homes of foreign students to better understand their culture and gain insights about how to better teach them. The goal is to reach across cultural divides to help a big part of the student population — emigres from faraway lands — that is plagued with low standardized test scores and high dropout rates. Accompanying photojournalism: http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2015/09/12/seeking-cultural-connections/L3mIQAQM3v9YT9A2K4JliL/story.html

Universal preschool is a policy that is often hard to pass on voter referendums. But, as evidenced by examples in Detroit and New York, such an investment means that more children would do well in kindergarten, fewer would need special education or other extra help and down the line, fewer would drop out of high school, end up unemployed — or in jail.