The contests for state school superintendent continue to be overlooked in the midst of a primary election cycle that is packed with Senate races, governor’s contests, and the usual din of national politics. When you consider it, that’s a peculiar thing. These individuals will decide on curricula, establish testing guidelines, oversee billions of dollars in education funding, and react when educators or parents object. They are not well-known. However, the decisions made by voters in these elections often end up in classrooms for years to come. Lydia Powell emerged victorious in Georgia’s Democratic primary on Tuesday night, garnering more than…
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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This week at Arnold High School in Panama City Beach, Florida, there was a specific type of Tuesday morning that nobody anticipated. On May 19, at around 11 a.m., rumors circulated throughout the building that a student had allegedly threatened to shoot up the school. In a matter of minutes, police arrived, the lockdown was announced, and dozens of parents started congregating outside on Alf Coleman Road, waiting for something beyond their control while standing in the Florida heat with their phones in hand. Unfortunately, this scene has become commonplace in high schools all over the nation. However, what transpired…
A version of Donovan Mitchell’s story exists in which he plays baseball. At Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, Mitchell is chasing down a pop-up in the infield when he collides with the catcher, breaking his jaw. Mitchell leaves with a broken wrist and, unbeknownst to him, an entirely different future. His baseball career as a sophomore is over. His planned AAU run has been canceled. His route to the NBA was unintentionally opened. The career stat lines and highlight reels tend to overlook this kind of information, but it is important. There are many of these subtle turning points…
Children are the future, which is where most discussions about children and sustainability begin. The planet will pass to them. We have to keep it safe for them. Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson has spent the better part of four decades meticulously and tenaciously outlining why this framing—which sounds generous and progressive—is precisely the wrong way to think about it. In addition to holding a UNESCO Chair in Early Childhood Education and Sustainable Development, Samuelsson is a senior professor at Gothenburg University in Sweden. From 2008 to 2014, he was the World President of OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education.…
Silicon Valley has perfected a certain kind of hypocrisy into a kind of art. The same engineers and executives who have dedicated their careers to creating products that are specifically made to draw and hold people’s attention—to make the swipe feel good, the notification irresistible, the autoplay seamless—have been discreetly and for years keeping those same products away from their own kids. Steve Jobs forbade his children from using iPads. Up until his kids were teenagers, Bill Gates answered the phone. Tim Cook forbids his nephew from using social media. No one knows what these devices actually do better than…
A certain type of story travels the world and, for some reason, misplaces its passport at the border with the United States. One such tale is the OMEP World Assembly resolution on the education of refugee children. Adopted at the 68th World Assembly and bearing the burden of a real humanitarian crisis—more than half of the world’s school-age refugee children are not attending school, with millions of them under the age of eight—it received significant coverage in forty countries and hardly made an appearance in domestic U.S. media. Not because it wasn’t a true story. Because there were other things…
Imagine a Tuesday morning in late May in a classroom in Wayne, New Jersey. The windows are as far open as they will go. Warm air is pushed from one side of the room to the other by a box fan that hums in the corner. As the outside temperature rises into the upper 90s, children sit at their desks in shorts and t-shirts, clearly uncomfortable as they attempt to concentrate on a lesson. The district has called it by midmorning. The school day ends early. Once more. At least a dozen districts in New Jersey sent students home early…
In New York State, a quiet civic event takes place every third Tuesday in May. Voters with strong opinions about capital reserve funds, diesel buses, and tax levies swarm gymnasiums and school lobbies. On their way to work, the majority of people probably don’t give those “Vote Here” signs a second thought. However, it’s one of the most important days of the year for the parents, educators, and administrators who watch the tallies roll in that evening. It occurred once more on May 19, 2026. Overall, the results revealed a well-known pattern: voters approved bus purchases, school boards updated their…
A seventeen-year-old is attempting to figure out how to write a thousand words that matter somewhere, be it a kitchen table in Mexico City, a dormitory in Shanghai, or a school library in Seoul. Not an essay for a college application. It’s not a history test. Something more akin to what you’d read in a policy journal—analytically supported, globally minded, and persuasive enough to withstand a fifteen-minute oral defense in front of judges from one of the most prestigious publications in the world. Every cycle, thousands of students attempt to meet the standards set by the Harvard International Review Academic…
Watching one of the most influential universities in the world battle the federal government in court, in public remarks, and in the media over the issue of who gets to control American higher education is almost cinematic. Harvard says that the White House is not the solution. Federal judges appear to have agreed, at least in part, thus far. For more than a year, the conflict has been intensifying. Citing concerns about campus culture, antisemitism, and what officials described as violations of federal civil rights law, the Trump administration withdrew approximately two billion dollars in research grants and froze federal…