Charles Best Quotes
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DonorsChoose was conceived at a Bronx public high school where I taught social studies for five years. In the teachers' lunch room, my colleagues and I often lamented a problem that drained learning from students and creativity from teachers: a lack of funding for essential materials and for the activities that bring subject matter to life.
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I founded DonorsChoose.org because I care about learning, and I believe every student in our country deserves a great education.
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America's best teachers are always looking for new ways to bring learning to life.
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Every day, teachers across the country excite their students with new opportunities and experiences.
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Whether you're raising money for a cause, a personal need, or a project, most crowdfunding sites center on you hitting up people you already know. These sites make it easier to tap your social network for funds, but only the most compelling cases inspire support from strangers.
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After 14 years of running DonorsChoose.org as someone who had never written a line of code, I did do a three-month night school course. After all these years, I could at least speak some of the same vocabulary and have a first-hand appreciation for what my colleagues on the engineering team are doing.
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Within a single school, teachers often encounter differences in poverty levels, parent involvement, and student readiness.
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We really are based on this idea that teachers have all this pent-up classroom expertise and that if we could just empower them to come up with micro-solutions, they're going to come up with smarter ideas than anybody would at the top.
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We think the ability to rattle off people you are grateful to and thankful to is often sort of a proxy for openness to learning from others.
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Learning is a critical part of our mission and organizational culture.
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If you track your organization's creativity by the number of brainstorms on your calendar, you're missing out. It's more important to capture those unplanned sparks of inspiration that so often come when we're cooking dinner, taking a shower, or commuting to work.
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If you just believe in our democracy, and you want an informed electorate, public schools are in your interest, and I think our country is dependent on public schools, whether or not you personally have a kid in the public school system.
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For my 9th birthday, my only wish was to eat like a farmer boy. I had devoured 'The Little House on the Prairie' book series and wanted to be like Almanzo Wilder, the protagonist of 'Farmer Boy,' one of the later installments in the 'Little House' series.
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Access to sports is an important part of a well-rounded education, and it takes committed communities and companies like Dick's to make a real difference in kids' lives.
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At DonorsChoose.org, we've seen what technology can do for a classroom. We make it easy for teachers to request the materials they need most for their classrooms and for donors to make a meaningful contribution to education.
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At DonorsChoose.org, we believe that classroom teachers often know their students better than anybody else in the system and that their front-line experience gives them a special kind of wisdom.
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We aren't prescribing anything. We're not claiming to be the experts. We aren't advocating for or against any program. We are going to create a platform that says very explicitly what it is that teachers experience in their classrooms.
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I've met with titans of Silicon Valley because they're investing in our national expansion. I've had lunch with Claire Danes because she sees DonorsChoose.org as the best way to help students in public schools. I would never, ever rub shoulders with such people if I had followed the typical career path in investment banking or whatever.
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To get DonorsChoose.org to scale, we first need to increase the viral appeal of our website.
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Hardworking, passionate teachers know their students' needs better than anyone else in the school environment. If we can tap into their needs, we can unleash smarter solutions and empower those people on the front lines.
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We will employ almost every strategy and hustle in any possible way to recruit top engineers to our team.
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I was lucky enough to go to boarding school for my high school years, and I had all the resources that I possibly could needed - squash courts and every book you ever would have wanted, every art supply.
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If anything, we hope that DonorsChoose.org is going to be a prompt, a nudge in the side of the public school system to improve and to start delivering these materials and experiences that students need and to make it easier for teachers to innovate.
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I'd listened to my colleagues in the teachers' lunchroom. I could tell they were passionate, fired-up people who had great ideas for strategies and projects to help kids learn better. They just didn't have the resources. I was frustrated, but I also knew it was a frustration felt by teachers all over the city.