Arizona State University's Open Door continued at the West campus in Glendale on Saturday, where visitors learned about forensics, toured the biomedical research lab, played games, hung out with Sparky and more.

From the crime scene lab to the science of neurons, the event gave hundreds of attendees a look at the colleges, schools, programs and student groups that help make ASU the most innovative university in the country.

It’s a bold thing for an education dean of a major university to admit: The education system doesn’t work well enough for enough people and communities, and colleges of education have to change in order to be part of the solution.  

Colleges must respond more urgently and creatively to the fact that the teacher shortage is at crisis levels, and the pipeline is thinning. 

The absence of Black women in STEM is not unique to South Africa. The U.S. and U.K. face the same challenge but, Yeukai Angela Mlambo, postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College says, “In South Africa it’s particularly curious given Black women are the majority of the population, hold more engineering graduate degrees than white women and the country is more than 20 years post-apartheid.”

How do you get 1,500 school supplies from Arizona to an island nearly 3,000 miles away?

As faculty, staff and students at Arizona State University discovered, the answer is: “with a great deal of effort and support.”

In the end, 12 large boxes, some weighing as much as 94 pounds, packed with books, backpacks, pencils and other essentials arrived at four elementary schools in Puerto Rico that had been in woeful need of supplies since Hurricane Maria’s plundering of the island in September.

Hans van der Mars, MLFTC professor and program coordinator of Physical Education, knows it will take a lot of time for the U.S. education system to really embrace physical education again, but it’s making progress.

Unfortunately, it took a significant rise in obesity among children and youth for PE to get increased attention. Van der Mars says policymakers continue to define education almost entirely by “what goes on just above the neck.” The body is seen as an appendix, he comments.

ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College placed No. 15 among 385 institutions surveyed in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of America’s graduate schools of education. Among public universities, the college was ranked No. 7. This year’s U.S. News & World Report survey solidifies ASU’s ascent to the top tier of colleges of education since 2012, when it ranked No. 35 in the survey.

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