Author: Kelsey Myers

Jalen Brunson once proposed to his high school sweetheart in a gymnasium in Lincolnshire, Illinois, a quiet, completely unremarkable suburb about 35 miles north of Chicago. On the same court where he had spent four years developing into something exceptional, he knelt down. It wasn’t a coincidental location. The story began in that gym at the Patriots’ home school, Adlai E. Stevenson High School, and Brunson seemed to know it. Before he scored 45 points to defeat the San Antonio Spurs in the 2026 NBA Finals, Brunson was performing in the IHSA at a level that most Illinois high school…

Imagine a group of three-year-olds on a Tuesday morning in January in a Norwegian barnehage. Even though the temperature is a few degrees below zero and there is snow on the ground, the kids are still outside carrying little backpacks, exploring the trees, and navigating icy areas without much help from adults. The instructors are not hovering, but they are close by. Letters are not being drilled. No one is being evaluated. According to Norwegian law, this is essentially what early childhood should entail. This is not up for interpretation under Norway’s Kindergarten Act. The national framework is clear: early…

The meeting takes place outside of a clinic. Usually on a Tuesday morning, it takes place in a living room with the family’s existing toys strewn all over the floor and a therapist sitting close by, observing. That’s where some of Minnesota’s most subtly successful early childhood behavioral health work takes place: a home visit, a camera running, and a parent learning in real time how to handle a distressed two-year-old instead of a waiting room with pamphlets. Programs such as the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up model, or ABC, work on the surprisingly straightforward premise that the adult in the…

The annual tuition for a child between the ages of three and six at a Montessori preschool in the northeast is almost $20,000, and that’s for a day that ends at five o’clock. Most likely, it’s a good school. The fact that the teachers in charge of those classrooms at that school and thousands of others around the nation make a median wage of about $14 per hour is what sticks out, though. The numbers don’t add up, and they haven’t for a while. The childcare market in America is currently estimated to be worth $50 billion, which sounds like…

When a government official stands up at an economic summit and tells the audience that the system she is in charge of is, in her own words, becoming outdated, there is something subtly startling about it. At the 2021 Ehingbeti Economic Summit, Folashade Adefisayo, the Lagos State Commissioner for Education, did just that, and it was difficult to discount his sincerity. The majority of officials in her position would have discussed advancements. She discussed dysfunction. Nigerian graduates are joining the workforce without the skills that their jobs actually require, according to Adefisayo’s direct argument. She said there is a significant…

The edge of the Streeterville neighborhood, where Chicago’s medical district begins to assert itself in glass and concrete, can be reached by walking east from Michigan Avenue toward the lake on Superior Street. It’s difficult to miss the 625,000-square-foot, twelve-story Louis A. Simpson and Kimberly K. Querrey Biomedical Research Center, which opened in 2019. It was built at a cost of $560 million, and the way it connects to the current Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center indicates that the school was considering scale long before that building was constructed. A large amount of the work at Northwestern University Feinberg…

On a weekday morning, if you drive down Laurel Canyon Boulevard, you’ll pass a campus that doesn’t make a big deal out of itself. No imposing gates. No billboard-style signage. It’s just a small school nestled into the hillside of Studio City that doesn’t reveal much about what goes on inside. That’s Campbell Hall, and the name carries a weight that the building’s exterior doesn’t really convey to anyone who has spent time in Los Angeles education circles. Initially operating out of a church building on Radford Avenue, the school was founded in 1944 by the Reverend Alexander Campbell and…

The series of events leading up to Austin Metcalf’s death on April 2, 2025, is extremely disturbing. Not because it was completely unpredictable, but rather because, looking back, a series of minor choices and institutional shortcomings came together in the worst way imaginable. In the middle of that chain was Karmelo Anthony, who had already received a suspension from Frisco Centennial High School prior to attending that track meet. Trial testimony revealed that the suspension had been imposed specifically for carrying a knife on campus. It’s not a footnote. It’s possibly one of the most crucial details in the whole…

It was meant to be a day of proud parents snapping pictures with their phones and tiny paper graduation caps. On the morning of June 11, the preschoolers at Commodore John Rodgers Elementary/Middle School in Southeast Baltimore were getting ready for their pre-K ceremony. Days later, parents and teachers are still struggling to comprehend what actually happened in the school’s parking lot off Fait Avenue. Around eight in the morning, a man identified as Jesus Acevedo-Sanchez drove into the school parking lot and was pursued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, according to witnesses and authorities. The subsequent events…

In the dark, Jaykob Knazur drove to school. The principal of Andrean High School in Merrillville, Indiana, arrived at the intersection of Broadway and East 59th Avenue at five in the morning on Friday, unsure of what he was going to enter. The previous evening, he had heard enough to know it was bad. That was not as bad as what he discovered. The Andrean campus appeared more like something from a weather service report than a school photo after the tornado that ripped through northwest Indiana on the evening of June 11. The building’s north side has significant roof…