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"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

Are your Representatives working for you in Australia's Parliament?

OpenAustralia.org is a non-partisan website run by a charity, the OpenAustralia Foundation and volunteers. It aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their representatives in Parliament.

OpenAustralia.org is a non-partisan website run by a charity, the OpenAustralia Foundation and volunteers. It aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their representatives in Parliament.

"Ask A Biologist began in 1997 in the School of Life Sciences as a biology learning resource tool for students, teachers, parents, and life-long learners. The site continues to be developed, and maintained by a dedicated group of volunteers. Ask A Biologist is visited by over 15,000 people every day and has answered more than 34,000 biology questions. This is a SafeSurf site."

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Wikibooks began on July 10, 2003, since then Wikibooks has grown to include over 30,304 pages in a multitude of textbooks created by volunteers like you!

"If she hadn't been wearing a visitor tag, he'd have mistaken her for a fellow high school student. He'd been volunteered to fix the library's computers for extra credit. Fixing meant cleaning off spyware and gum, and popping the key letters back into their proper order. He didn't mind, though. It gave him a chance to use the computers alone. And he would have used them alone for the rest of his life, if Ms. Kelly hadn't shown up dragging a handcart overloaded with boxes of printer paper .."

Communities Start a community for your classroom, sports team or any other trusted group. Its fast, free and easy. Applications Take advantage of free built-in applications: Centralized calendar Volunteering organizer Homework panel File Upload/Download Photo sharing Discussion groups Potluck organizer Snack scheduler

826 National, TED, and Hot Studio worked together to create Once Upon a School