Imagine a pediatric waiting room in Salt Lake City, or really anywhere. In a parent’s lap, a nine-month-old is beginning to fuss. In a matter of seconds, a phone shows up, a video begins, and the infant becomes silent, motionless, and fixated on the screen. A moment of calm is granted to the parent. Observing from the other side of the room, the pediatrician experiences something more akin to discomfort. In her clinical practice, Dr. Cindy Gellner of the University of Utah has repeatedly described this exact situation. It’s typical. It is present everywhere. Additionally, it may be causing harm…
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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The scene is usually the same when you walk into a public pre-K classroom in a low-income neighborhood: students are arranged in rows, teachers are speaking to them, worksheets are on the tables, and the schedule is so jam-packed with hall walks and transitions that actual learning takes up less of the day than most parents would think. It’s not malevolent. It is a systemic issue. And it’s one of the things that the World Organization for Early Childhood Education has been quietly but tenaciously recording for years: the extent to which early childhood education in much of America deviates…
No one in Washington seems to want to take a close look at a number that keeps rising. Researchers calculated that 473 million children, or about one in six children globally, lived close to an active armed conflict in 2023. That number had risen above 520 million by 2024. over one in five kids worldwide. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program recorded the highest number of active state-based conflicts since 1946 in a single year. The Peace Research Institute Oslo, which has been mapping this data every year since the 1990s, put it simply: a record high, reached in the worst…
When governments stall, budgets vanish, or international organizations make cautious statements that say very little and commit to even less, there is a certain kind of patience that only comes from conviction. For 75 years, OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, has been patient. Finally, something changed at the Palais des Nations in Geneva in September 2025. There is weight in the setting itself. With its high ceilings, heavy diplomacy, and subtle institutional odor of documents and consequence, the Palais des Nations is the kind of building where the air feels older than most living people. Here, from…
Lila Shroff’s April essay in The Atlantic contains a detail that is hard to ignore near the middle. In order to test a bot named Einstein, a researcher signs up for a free online statistics course and releases the AI. Einstein completes all eight modules and seven tests in less than an hour. One quiz is required fifteen times. In the end, it receives a perfect score. According to the researcher, she “hardly so much as read the course website.” Presumably, the course website still thought that someone had studied statistics that day. Shroff’s essay, “Is Schoolwork Optional Now?” has…
Almost every American school has a teacher who has figured something out somewhere in the building. Perhaps it’s the way she arranges math ideas to help the students who are having trouble. Perhaps it’s the way he leads the conversation that makes the quiet kids talk. These things are effective. The principal who stops by for observations is probably aware of it, as are the students and the teacher. Then, remarkably consistently, it does nothing at all. For years, Rebecca Wolfe has been observing this. She is a researcher who has worked at Stanford, Harvard, and organizations like Jobs for…
One of the upSTART participants’ testimonials has a particularly memorable moment. “I realized that I wasn’t being the best model for her,” a mother says, summarizing the lessons she learned about controlling her own emotions around her older daughter. She frequently uses me as a trigger. The phrase “modest, honest, arrived at through months of support” probably sums up upSTART’s true goals more accurately than any program brochure could. The Division of Public Health Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital launched the upSTART Community Programs in 2022. Based in Houston, the program serves families in 238…
It’s worth taking a moment to focus on just one number. Over $20 billion was invested in educational technology by venture capital in 2021. The idea that software could do what schools had failed to do—reach every student, in every country, regardless of geography, income, or the caliber of the person in front of the room—was pursued with twenty billion dollars in a single year. The pitch was spotless. As it happened, the math was not. EdTech investment fell to about $3 billion by 2024. It’s not a correction. It’s a reckoning. In one of the most spectacular corporate collapses…
The idea of hosting a conference on global education in Poland in the summer of 2026 seems subtly rebellious. Poznań carries a lot of weight—historical, moral, and nearly intolerable—and the OMEP 2026 organizers are well aware of this. This location was chosen for its airport connections rather than being a generic conference venue. It is an intentional act of memory. The 78th World Assembly and Conference of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education will take place in a city close to the locations where Janusz Korczak spent a significant portion of his life developing the notion that children are…
Two of the most well-known members of Congress entered a preschool classroom on a recent morning in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, which has received less than its fair share of the city’s investment and more than its fair share of concentrated poverty. After touring the rooms of Horizons for Homeless Children, a facility that serves some of the city’s most vulnerable young children, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who represents this district, made a straightforward and direct statement: early education is crucial infrastructure. It was a phrase with more historical significance than it first appeared to have. Horizons for Homeless Children has been…