Author: Kelsey Myers

Depending on the length of the layover, the flight into Bangkok takes 20 to 22 hours. By the time the conference center—a sizable, climate-controlled structure in the sweltering July heat—comes into view, the majority of American attendees have already spent several hours wondering if the trip was worthwhile. Yes, it was. People who travel to an OMEP World Assembly for the first time seem to consistently report feeling a little sorry about the jet lag, which is quickly followed by the realization that nothing in their domestic professional lives had adequately prepared them for what a truly global conversation about…

Almost all American schools have parks close by. In the majority of them, kids spend twenty minutes outside each day; depending on the district, the time of year, and whether a standardized test is coming up, they may spend less or none at all. There is grass. There is the sky. There are trees. The American educational system has quietly decided that outdoor time is a reward for productivity rather than a developmental need in and of itself, so for a large portion of the school day, the kids are not. It turns out that this policy decision places the…

A four-year-old is currently being given a pencil in an American preschool classroom and asked to perform tasks that developmental science suggests she might not be neurologically prepared to perform. It will take about thirty minutes to complete the test. The results will be entered into a database. A number will appear next to her name somewhere in that database, and it will be used to make decisions regarding her placement, the assessment of her teacher, and, in certain situations, the funding for her school. She doesn’t know any of this. All she knows is that the person posing the…

Developmental neuroscientists use the number 1,000 to make a room quiet. In other words, during the first two years of life, a baby’s brain forms 1,000 new neural connections every second. Not every minute. every second. The architecture of the human mind is being constructed at that rate, which is unrepeatable and ends by the time a child turns three. Language, emotional control, the ability to trust, and the foundation of mental health are all shaped by what goes into the construction site during that window. What is missing—stimulation, safety, adequate nutrition, consistent, responsive caregiving, and freedom from chronic stress—leaves…

Imagine an eight-year-old boy showing up for school on a morning after a horrible incident occurred at home the previous evening. Perhaps he skipped meals. Perhaps he witnessed a family member being taken into custody. Perhaps because no one has given him the words to express it, he is carrying grief that is so heavy that it has no name yet. He takes a seat at his desk, fidgeting, preoccupied, and avoiding eye contact. Additionally, a teacher has quietly come to the conclusion that he doesn’t care about his work within the first hour. that he’s challenging. that he belongs…

Four months from graduation, a twelfth grader is sitting in a high school classroom somewhere in America right now, unable to demonstrate basic math skills. Not complex math. Not trigonometry or calculus. simple. 45% of American 12th graders fit that description, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Almost half. In a system where the nation as a whole spends more than $857 billion a year—a sum that recently surpassed the trillion-dollar threshold when all K–12 expenditures are taken into account—that figure is the kind of thing that should cause someone to stop whatever they’re doing…

A truck carrying a Mazak Optiplex 3015 CO₂ laser, which can cut through three-quarters of an inch of steel with precision measured in thousandths of an inch, arrived at the Regional Skills Center at Columbia Gorge Community College in The Dalles, Oregon, on a snowy Friday morning in February 2025. It is not the kind of equipment you would find at a community college serving a rural area of north-central Oregon where the Columbia River carves a broad, wind-carved route between Oregon and Washington, but rather in a serious aerospace or automotive facility. In many ways, the whole story lies…

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…

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…