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…
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.
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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…
Sydney Gill, a 19-year-old student at Rice University in Houston, is thinking about the same thing that has been following her everywhere lately as she scrolls through job postings on her laptop in a lecture hall. In high school, she had high hopes for AI. Choosing a college major has now caused the optimism to turn into something more akin to anxiety. “I feel like anything that I’m interested in has the potential of maybe getting replaced,” she stated, “even in the next few years.”Her conflicted feelings are not unusual. A recent Gallup poll claims that it is essentially the…
Carrie Giddings, a preschool teacher at Kruse Elementary School in northern Colorado, once told the story of a three-year-old boy who spent his early school days kicking, screaming, and scratching his face. His father had served time in and out of prison. Due to their inability to pay for a place of their own, the family had been living with relatives. According to Giddings, he was roughly a year and a half behind his expected developmental stage. The gap was there when he got to her classroom. From the perspective of a single child in a single room in a…
During the first few weeks of Year 8, a certain silence descends upon the hallways of any secondary school in Northern Ireland on a September morning. Kids who dreaded this change over the summer are navigating unfamiliar hallways, unfamiliar schedules, and unmapped social hierarchies. The lockers are brand-new. The instructors are unfamiliar. It’s possible that the friends from elementary school belong to completely different form groups. For many kids, it’s the first truly unsettling experience of their lives, and for many more, it’s the point at which anxiety ceases to be sporadic and becomes persistent. The Health and Education Ministers…
Children who are too young to articulate their desires are learning things in the courtyard of a creche in Montes Claros, a city in the arid interior of Minas Gerais state, that will have a lasting impact on their lives. The structure is modest. There aren’t many resources. However, what sets Brazil’s approach to early childhood apart from the disjointed, patchwork situation in the United States is the fact that these children are here at all—Brazil decided years ago that children this young needed structured, state-funded care and development. Brazil took it a step further in August 2025. The National…
A nine-year-old autistic boy in a suburb north of Houston has begun yelling that he no longer wants to attend school. Amber Knapek, his mother, has been witnessing this and experiencing a particular kind of helplessness—the kind that results from knowing that the system isn’t working for your child and not knowing what to do next. She submitted a voucher application. She didn’t fully understand the procedure. It was worth a shot, she reasoned. After COVID forced their two younger children out of traditional classrooms, R.D. and Julee Pierce enrolled them in a hybrid Montessori microschool in Spring, about forty…
A fifth-grade science class at Saddle Mountain Unified School District, located about fifty miles outside of Phoenix, had no teacher on the first day of the new school year. The instructor who was meant to be there had left the previous week to accept a higher-paying position in a nearby district. A paraprofessional intervened. Three more teachers had made threats to quit by the end of that first day. To put it simply, the district cannot afford raises. This is because Saddle Mountain incorporated the salaries of the mental health professionals it hired with federal pandemic relief funds—roughly $200,000 annually—into…