Pilot Program
A first-of-its-kind Pilot Program in Mississippi
In 2017, the Global Teaching Project launched a first-of-its-kind Pilot Program in Mississippi, bringing together rural, high-poverty public school districts from across the state to form the Mississippi Public School Consortium for Educational Access, and providing blended AP® STEM coursework to talented, but underserved, Mississippi public high school students.
Partnering with flagship universities including Mississippi State University, Jackson State University, the University of Mississippi, and Millsaps College, the Global Teaching Project’s Pilot Program supports schools that are faced with limited resources and a chronic, and worsening, shortage of qualified teachers.
The Pilot Program also helps to develop and prepare a pipeline of talented, high-achieving students from the State’s most rural and impoverished districts to enter post-secondary study and, ultimately, the workforce.
Mississippi’s worsening teacher shortage crisis
In 2018 in Mississippi, there were more than 2,100 teaching vacancies and 2,256 uncertified teachers.
The trend is rapidly declining. In 2013, MDE licensed 3,447 teachers;
in 2018, it licensed 1,624.
This lack of teachers leads to devastating consequences for Mississippi’s students.
Nationally, over 1.5 million AP® exams were administered in 2017 in 12 math and science subjects compared to 4,000 in Mississippi.
In 9 of these 12 subjects, the average score of Mississippi students was below a 3.
The Consortium and GTP are proud to partner with the following entities: U.S. Department of Education, The Walton Family Foundation, The Woodward Hines Foundation, The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, The Todd Wagner Foundation, The Phil Hardin Foundation, The Chisholm Foundation, FedEx and the Community Foundation of NW Mississippi.
Courses
AP® Physics 1
Rural schools across Mississippi are eager to teach advanced Physics in their classrooms. But prospective teachers are scarce. In a typical year, Mississippi’s public colleges and universities produce one Physics teacher, total, for the state’s over 130,000 public high school students. In addition, Physics was named a “Critical Subject Shortage Area” by the Mississippi Department of Education.
The Global Teaching Project currently offers blended AP® Physics 1 curricula in 26 rural, high-poverty high schools across Mississippi. Since the Pilot Program launched just 5 years ago (2017-18 school year), over 650 students have participated in the AP® Physics 1 course or related university-based programs.
The AP® Physics 1 course offers the full range of components included in our blended model:
- Dr. Meg Urry, Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, serves as the lead instructor, providing instruction via asynchronous video as well as through periodic live sessions;
- 2 Mississippi-based AP® Physics 1 Supervisory Instructors oversee the course, create weekly lesson plans and offer support to on-site teachers;
- Students have access to an extensive library of online resources as well as physical copies of leading Physics textbooks and workbooks;
- College student STEM majors from Yale, Harvard, Virginia, Georgia Tech, Ole Miss and more serve as tutors to participating AP® Physics 1 students;
University-based residential, preparatory programs at flagship state institutions
Immersive, residential preparatory programs are held in the Summer, Winter, and Spring at Mississippi State University, Jackson State University, Millsaps College, and the University of Mississippi, to build substantive foundation for the course and to help prepare students for the AP exam.
AP® Biology
The Global Teaching Project offers AP® Biology as a blended course in select Mississippi Consortium schools.
Coming this Fall: AP® Statistics
Starting in the 2023-24 school year, the Global Teaching Project will offer AP® Statistics as a blended course in select Mississippi Consortium schools.
Mississippi Public School Consortium
Bringing blended AP STEM coursework to Mississippi’s most talented students
We are a coalition of rural public school districts throughout the state that provides comprehensive, blended AP STEM courses to talented Mississippi high school students.
Since our Founding
Impact by the numbers
Coming Soon
Central Appalachia
The Global Teaching Project plans to replicate its Pilot Program in Central Appalachia by 2021-22.
Like the Mississippi Delta, Central Appalachia faces extreme educational disparities and economic hardship. In fact, of the 435 U.S. Congressional districts, five of the six most economically distressed are two districts in the Mississippi Delta and the three contiguous districts of Southwest Virginia, southern West Virginia, and Eastern Kentucky.
Leveraging our existing partnerships in the region, our scalable template will enable us to bring blended, advanced STEM courses to underserved students across Central Appalachia, helping to develop a pipeline of high-achieving, low-income students who are prepared for college and the workforce.
Global Focus
India
As part of our global focus, we are committed to providing students from rural and low-income backgrounds across the world access to great teachers and other academic resources. In particular, we have begun work India, which is home to the largest student population in the world—600 million young people under the age of 25, and over 260 million students across 1.5 million schools. Yet India’s educational challenges are considerable: teacher absenteeism, underpaid and underqualified teachers, and high student-to-teacher ratios, are among the many hurdles students face.
To help address some of these challenges, we have partnered with Meghshala, an Indian non-profit organization that provides multimedia lessons to teachers in high-poverty rural schools, including in last-mile and remote locations, to help them facilitate and lead classrooms effectively. In 2019, the Global Teaching Project began working with Meghshala to create lesson plans in STEM subjects, providing STEM-major tutors from Yale University to develop and prepare original course content.
We also aim to introduce students to great teachers from around the world. To that end, we have produced a comprehensive AP® Biology course, taught by a female biochemist and filmed on location in New Delhi, India. We plan to introduce this course into rural high schools both in India and in the U.S. as part of our AP® STEM Pilot Program.