Imagine a Thursday morning in May in a high school gymnasium. A few hundred students sitting down for an exam that will require them to read real Spanish journalism, listen to podcasts and interviews, write a persuasive essay based on three different sources, respond to emails in the appropriate register, hold a simulated conversation, and then give a brief cultural comparison presentation over the course of three hours and three minutes. There are rows of desks and the low hum of an air conditioner that is either too cold or not cold enough. Aloud. on a recording apparatus. The AP…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers is a Senior Editor at worldomep.org and a dedicated advocate for early childhood education whose work begins — and ends — with a simple belief: that the earliest years of a child's life matter more than almost anything else we can invest in. Based at a local school, Kelsey works daily alongside the children and families whose experiences inform everything she writes. She doesn't observe early education from a distance. She is inside it — in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, in the conversations between teachers and parents that shape how young children understand the world around them. That proximity gives her writing a warmth and specificity that purely policy-driven commentary rarely achieves. Through her writing at worldomep.org, Kelsey brings that same energy to readers — making the case, clearly and consistently, that early childhood education deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Kelsey shares her personal opinions on: https://x.com/Butterflyboule
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When students in New Zealand opened their laptops at some point in early May to access Canvas, the learning platform that the majority of them use on a daily basis to access lectures, turn in assignments, and message their professors, they discovered nothing. The system wasn’t working. Not momentarily, not in a restricted manner, but completely and unexpectedly offline, leaving thousands of students in the middle of the semester with impending deadlines and no idea when things would get back to normal. It’s the type of interruption that initially appears to be a technical annoyance. It wasn’t. The American technology…
Colin Jost is a prime example of the kind of person who enrolls at Harvard with the goal of studying economics and graduates with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov. And for some reason, that bizarre academic diversion from spreadsheets to Russian modernism proved to be the ideal prelude to one of the most brilliant comedic careers in American television. Jost enrolled at Harvard in the fall of 2000 after graduating from Manhattan’s Regis High School, a prestigious Jesuit school that typically produces individuals with very serious career goals. Economics made sense. It was a linear, practical major that leads to…
There is something illuminating about the expression “grip this up.” It’s not the language of thoughtful consideration. It is the language of someone who has examined a system, determined that it is ineffective, and made the decision to act swiftly, firmly, and with sufficient political will to overcome opposition. As she guided the Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill through Parliament, Education Minister Erica Stanford is credited with saying this, and it has come to represent how both supporters and detractors view the entire reform endeavor. Quick. structural. Not without controversy, either. On May 14, the bill passed its…
The colleges that most high school counselors talk about are far away from Walla Walla, Washington. The campus of Whitman College sits in a small city that is actually wine country, surrounded by wheat fields and the Blue Mountains. It is difficult to describe the campus’s quiet self-possession without going there. The structures are old and well-maintained. By the second week of classes, professors are familiar with your name due to the small student-teacher ratio. Furthermore, many applicants are unaware of how competitive the admissions process is until they are well into it, despite what the headline acceptance rate might…
From the outside, Drake Stadium appears unremarkable on a May morning. The bleachers fill slowly, the concession stands smell like burnt coffee, and the grass outside the infield still has the distinctive green of a Midwest spring that isn’t quite ready to fade. However, something changes by the middle of the morning on the first day of the Iowa High School Track and Field Championships. Whatever was quiet about the place vanishes completely when the sound of a starter’s pistol pierces the atmosphere. This is the state. And for several hundred high school athletes from all over Iowa, this week…
A more subdued form of acknowledgment occurs every spring in cafeterias, auditoriums, and gymnasiums across the nation. There is no buzzer. No banner of victory. Just a certificate with a gold or silver presidential seal given to a student who worked diligently for the majority of the academic year. You probably haven’t heard of the President’s Education Awards Program, which has been in existence since 1983. Given that thousands of schools take part each year and that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Education personally recognize them, that is a little unexpected. PEAP was created with…
Being informed that your state has the highest student achievement in the country while your child attends an underfunded school in one of its poorest cities is a unique kind of irony. Nine students and four community organizations from Springfield, Holyoke, Boston, Lawrence, Brockton, Lynn, and Worcester filed a lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court on Wednesday, focusing on this tension. Even though the legal route is complicated, the main point is straightforward: Black and Latino students are paying the price for Massachusetts’ continued racial segregation in schools. Lawyers for Civil Rights and Brown’s Promise filed the lawsuit, which challenges the…
Waiting has a certain cruelty to it. Particularly when you’ve done everything correctly, such as working the public service job, paying the bills, and submitting the necessary paperwork, only to watch the months pass and turn into something that begins to resemble its own type of debt. That wait is extremely real for the approximately 88,000 individuals who are presently in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Buyback program’s backlog. 464 days is the average wait time. It’s not a bug. That is a reality of policy. This month, the Education Department released new data that appears to be positive. The…
About 180 first- and second-graders from Eugene Sires Elementary School boarded buses on a Monday morning in Summerville, South Carolina, for what was meant to be a standard end-of-year field trip to the Cinemark on Ladson Road. By the time it was over, 32 of those kids were ill, parents throughout the district were receiving calls from unknown numbers, EMS had been contacted, and poison control had been alerted. It’s the kind of day that no one anticipates. The answers have also been slow to come in the days that have passed. Ashley Williams, whose daughter was one of the…