Who among us hasn’t said more than once that the media never reports any good news?

Well, not today.

Here’s a tip of The Skinny’s WRAL News cap to SAS for its continuing commitment to the improvement of education to the tune of $75 million.

Teachers celebrated “Digital Learning Day” on Wednesday, the same day SAS announced registering its 100,000th educator for free use of its educational software tools.

That’s a remarkable increase of some 30,000 in a mere four months.

SAS Curriculum Pathways now offers more than 1,100 interactive tools and lessons.

Just last October, SAS launched a free Algebra 1 course that provides teachers and students with all the required content to address the Common Core State Standards for Algebra.

Talk about research and development paying dividends: Better teaching tools plus better-equipped instructors plus smarter students equals a better future.

Few if any companies spend more on R&D than SAS, which is en route to $3 billion in revenue this year. SAS upped its R&D spending to 25 percent in revenue in 2012 from 24 percent the previous year despite a continuing tough global economy.

To the credit of co-founders Jim Goodnight and John Sall, the privately held global software firm devotes significant resources and personnel to development of tools for use in classrooms. SAS also provides support.

And a glance at what SAS offers through some products at iTunes shows a variety of resources that cover multiple disciplines while linking them to state standards.

iPad apps, digital flash cards, teacher online notebooks for tracking progress – and much more.

Maybe The Skinny is a bit prejudiced when it comes to the subject of teachers. My wife is a technology instructor who spends hours online teaching and learning every day. I went to university wanting to be a teacher.

The SAS Commitment 

Here’s how SAS sums up its commitment to education:

“Rooted in education with an ongoing commitment. Throughout its history, SAS has been committed to serving education by delivering software and academic programs that spark innovation and expand educational opportunities. Investing 14 years and $75 million in SAS Curriculum Pathways, SAS will continue to fully fund product development and offer the software at no cost to US educators.

“Our focus on content. Teachers, developers, artists and specialists clarify content. For content difficult to convey with conventional methods, SAS provides an innovative approach where doing and seeing provide information and encourage insights in ways that textbooks cannot.

“Our approach to technology. SAS products make learning more profound and efficient, not simply more entertaining. Audio, visual and interactive components all reinforce the teachers’ educational objectives.”

With teacher registrations jumping by 30 percent in just a few months, SAS must be helping educators and students big, big time.

I wonder how many teachers would give SAS an A? Probably quite a few.

[SAS ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of SAS stories as reported in WRAL Tech Wire.]