Author: Kelsey Myers

The first 1,000 days are a single, nearly mythical figure that has dominated discussions about child development for years. from conception to two years of age. We were told that was the window. If you miss it, you will have lost something that is impossible to get back. In pediatric guidelines, funding proposals, and global health circles, it became a rallying cry. However, a new wave of research, spearheaded by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in partnership with OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, is subtly and rather urgently challenging the notion that everything important…

Imagine a conference room in Bangkok during the summer of 2024, complete with ceiling fans, long tables, and almost 400 academics, researchers, and policymakers who have come from all over the world with the somewhat stubborn belief that most governments spend the least amount of money on the most important years of a person’s life. There was something about the discussions at the 76th World Assembly of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP) that felt less like scholarly discourse and more like a group of people’s frustrations finding a formal outlet. OMEP is not a brand-new company. It…

Between a child’s first word and their first day of school, there is a time when something fundamental is either developed or overlooked. This has been known for decades by researchers. Most of the time, after nodding along at conferences, policymakers have returned home and taken very little action. However, there has been a gradual, nearly imperceptible change in the halls of education ministries on five continents. Additionally, it has its roots in an organization that the majority of parents are unaware of and that works in an area that most governments have historically undervalued and underfunded. Convincing world leaders…

The Harrison County Courthouse is located in Bethany, Missouri, a small county seat where the hardware store, diner, and local legal life all revolve around the courthouse square. For most people walking by, the building is unremarkable. However, that courthouse is now at the center of something far more serious than Morgan Michelle Smith, a 31-year-old from Ridgeway, may have thought when her kindergarten-age child began missing school days. A Class C Misdemeanor charge of Violation of Education Requirement of a Child has been brought against Smith. Her child had 47 unexcused absences throughout the academic year, according to the…

What’s going on in Seattle at the moment has an almost poetic quality. A growing number of parents now live in the city that created the cloud, trained the algorithms, and introduced AI into almost every aspect of the economy, but they do not want any of it near their kids’ desks. They’re not afraid of technology. Many of them work in Microsoft and Amazon buildings, designing the very systems that they are currently attempting to keep out of sixth-grade classrooms. More than anything else, that gives you a true sense of the direction this moment is taking. The movement…

The alphabet posters on the walls and the crayon drawings taped above the cubbies are not the first things you notice when you walk through a Head Start classroom on a Tuesday morning in a low-income neighborhood in rural Appalachia or Baltimore. It’s the noise, the focused, slightly chaotic energy of kids learning about the world at a speed that adults have largely forgotten. In a way, every game, question, and disagreement over a shared block is a neural event. During those early years, a child’s brain makes over a million new connections every second. When people hear that number,…

The most recent Gallup data on Gen Z and artificial intelligence contains a certain kind of irony. The generation that learned to navigate TikTok algorithms before learning to drive and grew up with smartphones strapped to their hips is becoming more and more afraid of artificial intelligence. Not contemptuous of it. Not apathetic. Fearful, doubtful, and, if the numbers are being interpreted honestly, subtly incensed about the direction things appear to be taking. According to the survey, which was carried out in collaboration with GSV Ventures and the Walton Family Foundation, 31% of Gen Z respondents said AI makes them…

Bright students, serious research, and impressive grant totals displayed on departmental walls can be found in any major American biomedical engineering department. A clear, manageable route from the concept developing in a lab to the product arriving in a hospital ward is something you won’t always find. The industry has a term for that gap, which is large, costly, and annoying. It is referred to as the “translational valley of death.” Apparently, Scotland chose to fill it. An MSc in MedTech Innovation, a 12-month program that reads more like a structured apprenticeship in the entire lifecycle of healthcare technology than…

Every time the topic of kids and screens comes up again, one image comes to mind. Sitting at eye level with a camera and speaking slowly and deliberately to a child he would never meet, Fred Rogers was wearing that cozy cardigan. There are no jump cuts. No warning noises. There’s no countdown to the following video. It was just a man, a fish tank, and a subdued belief that the child on the other side of the screen was worth waiting for. It is nearly impossible to reconcile that picture with what most kids see on screens these days.In…

By American public school standards, a small rural school district in Louisiana took an almost radical action in January of this year. LaSalle Parish superintendent Jonathan Garrett declared that all 2,500 students in the district—from kindergarteners still learning how to hold a pencil to seniors in high school—would no longer be expected to finish homework. In that exact manner. Parents in nearby towns flooded the district’s Facebook post announcing the decision with comments asking, “How do we get our schools to do this?” It became the district’s most liked and shared message of the year.Such a response conveys something. Not…