Author: Kelsey Myers

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…

A small piece of land was given to a group of elementary school students in Aberdeen, Scotland, and they were instructed to take care of it. They sowed seeds. They observed the ground. They were genuinely concerned about plants when they were struggling, not just as a biology assignment. By the project’s conclusion, those kids had a better understanding of food security than any chapter in a textbook had ever been able to provide. Additionally, they were posing queries that had never come up in their science classes: what happens when there is insufficient space? Who chooses who gets to…

A researcher named Rachel Moseley sat with data from over 2,500 autistic people in a quiet seminar room somewhere in Cambridge. She read, one after another, stories of lives that had come to a single, intolerable point. There was no crisis at the beginning of the stories. They began in classrooms. That is the main conclusion of one of the most important studies on autism and suicide ever carried out in the United Kingdom. The study, which was led by Moseley and Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre, was published this year in eClinicalMedicine.…

Horse farms, tobacco fields, and the expansive stone campus of the University of Kentucky are all visible when driving through Lexington, Kentucky on a Tuesday morning. The area doesn’t immediately evoke the historic courts and cycling colleges of Cambridge, England. However, educational pipelines are rarely what they appear to be, and the tale of how Kentucky undergraduates wind up conducting research at one of the most prestigious universities in the world is, in a sense, a tale about the true purpose of cross-border education. Ruschman, a UK alumnus, has given a direct account of the encounter. She claimed that at…

In the middle of the sandstone buildings and eucalyptus trees on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto on a summer afternoon, about 140 high school students are engaging in an activity that most of them have never done in a classroom: openly discussing how their brains function and being taken seriously for it. The number that sticks in your mind long after you’ve read about the program itself is how they got here—roughly 400 applications were submitted for those 140 spots. Three times as many teenagers applied for admission as were admitted. Demand for a summer program is not the…

A student named Willow Miller raises the American flag outside her elementary school to begin the day on a Wednesday morning in Goodsprings, Nevada, a town so small that the church, the gas station, and the school occupy the majority of the area. Four days a week, the building is operational. For years, it has. The four-day school week isn’t a fad or an experiment here in the high desert outside of Las Vegas. It’s just the way things are. What began as a few isolated rural outposts has grown into something much bigger. Over 2,100 public schools in 26…