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…
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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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…
Before the summer of 2022, most people outside of Cuyahoga County were unaware of Progress Drive, a section of road in Strongsville, Ohio. It’s a typical residential street with brick buildings on either side and little activity at five in the morning. A Toyota Camry turned onto it on July 31 of that year and accelerated to 100 miles per hour. The vehicle collided with a structure. Before the paramedics could do much, two people inside were dead. Strongsville is still changing as a result of that morning. When Mackenzie Shirilla drove that vehicle, she was seventeen years old. Her…
The media frequently ignores the version of Bettina Anderson that existed prior to the White House holiday party, before Donald Trump made the engagement announcement at a podium, and before the Daily Mail published pictures of her and Trump Jr. holding hands. It is worthwhile to devote some time to that previous version. Because the details of what she studied, where she studied it, and what she did with it provide a more comprehensive narrative than most coverage tries to uncover. Palm Beach, Florida, where Anderson grew up, sounds like a postcard and is for the most part—wide streets lined…
The version of Josh Hart’s story in which he fails to survive is one that is never shared. When a school in Washington, D.C. removes a struggling student from its student body after threatening to do so. Where a young man from Silver Spring, Maryland, struggles to get his bearings. Although that version didn’t come to pass, it nearly did, and knowing that near-miss reveals nearly everything about Josh Hart’s personality. Hart was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is situated near enough to the nation’s capital to sense its vibrancy without actually being a part of it. He may…
Robert Harward, the retired admiral who declined Donald Trump’s offer to become National Security Advisor in February 2017, a few days after Michael Flynn’s resignation, is the name most people are familiar with from a single news cycle. The moment was dramatic. However, the refusal isn’t the more fascinating tale. The man who was able to turn down that room and leave without turning around was the result of decades of training and education. The fact that Harward was born into a Navy family in Newport, Rhode Island, speaks volumes about the environment in which he was raised. However, the…
The story of Vanessa Trump, the model who married into one of America’s most scrutinized families before discreetly leaving, is one that is primarily told in tabloid shorthand. However, if you take a closer look, you’ll see a woman whose early life was actually very specific, based on the unique topography and social structure of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She was raised in a townhouse in that area, which has its own unwritten expectations about where you’ll attend school, how you’ll behave, and what kind of future is expected of you. After that, she went to The Dwight School, a…