The Real-Life Teachers of Spare Parts on What’s Wrong With US Schools

Fredi Lajvardi and Allan Cameron have 54 years of public school teaching experience between them. They are the celebrated creators of a student robotics program at Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix, where roughly 80 percent of the student population lives below the poverty line. Many are undocumented and speak limited English. Despite the odds, the two teachers turned the robotics team into a powerhouse, winning state and national championships and garnering more than $1 million in scholarships for students. http://www.matr.net/article-64142.html

Yet Lajvardi and Cameron are deeply concerned about the state of American secondary education. Teachers, they say, are stymied by bureaucracy and confounded by rigid curricula optimized to produce better test results, not better students.

By Joshua Davis

Full Story: http://www.wired.com/2015/01/spare-parts-teachers/