Author: Nelson Rosario

Every spring, universities host a certain type of luncheon, complete with pins, certificates, and courteous applause, and most of them blend together. The University of New England’s March 27 event didn’t, primarily due to the actual celebration. Twenty-four faculty members and professional staff members received the school’s Innovation in Education Award, and it’s difficult not to believe that other universities ought to take note of what they’ve actually accomplished in their classrooms. The award itself is not new; it is a collaborative effort between UNE’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and its Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. However,…

Zixia Zhou, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, spends her days creating something akin to a movie from brain scans in a tiny lab. It’s not quite a metaphor; rather, it’s a real-time moving image of neurons firing, changing, and moving throughout the brain. This type of activity could be recorded by fMRI and EEG for decades, but no one could actually read it. The information was too complex, too multidimensional, and too human to interpret with the naked eye. That is evolving. A deep learning model known as BCNE was developed by researchers under the direction of Lei Xing, a…

After reading too many case studies about disruption in business school, a certain kind of fatigue develops. The frameworks begin to become hazy. The language ceases to have any meaning. Finding a course that virtually completely eschews the slide decks in favor of sending students in their twenties to knock on the doors of food companies, farmers, and clinics and ask awkward questions until something helpful comes out is somewhat refreshing. That’s essentially what’s going on in UC Davis’s Hacking 4 Food course, which is taught through the Student Startup Center. Alice Dien, a PhD candidate in biological systems engineering,…

The way this occurred seems almost archaic. There was no national rollout, no press conference, just a school board meeting in Casper, Wyoming, where trustees considered public input before voting to approve a $55,000 contract that most people outside the district would never learn about. The Child Development Center and Natrona County School District 1 inked a contract for the screening of preschoolers, ages three to five, for developmental delays. It sounds humble. Most likely it isn’t. The screenings cover the fundamentals that are frequently overlooked until it’s too late, such as vision, hearing, motor skills, communication, and the kind…

Every time the word “education” is brought up, Silicon Valley exudes a certain confidence. Every child on the planet will receive individualized instruction thanks to a new platform, adaptive algorithm, and AI tutor. By now, the pitch is well-known, polished, and well-funded. Then there is Epic Theatre Ensemble, which operates out of a few classrooms in New York City with nothing more advanced than a circle of chairs and manages to produce outcomes that the venture-backed crowd would kill for. Epic was not an innovation play when it was founded in the days immediately following September 11, 2001. It began…

There is a certain type of conference that, although it never makes the evening news, manages to continue influencing policy decades after the cameras would have left, had any cameras been present at all. That’s precisely what OMEP’s World Conference is. It began in Prague in 1948, when Europe was still rebuilding itself. Since then, it has met in secret every three years, traveling to Mexico City, Tokyo, Warsaw, and any other host city that is willing to host it. It’s a stretch and a bit tongue-in-cheek to compare it to Davos. For a panel discussion on preschool curricula, no…

The bracket that started with sixty-four teams back in May has finally narrowed down to something almost intimate: two programs, one trophy, and a best-of-three series in Omaha that nobody outside Norman or Chapel Hill saw coming in March. On Wednesday night, North Carolina arrived first thanks to a less-than-relentless 12-7 victory over West Virginia. There’s something fitting about the Tar Heels breaking their own program scoring record in an MCWS game; throughout the tournament, this team has seemed more interested in burying opponents than just defeating them. This program hasn’t experienced a single defeat in Omaha since 2006. Twenty…

Michelle Robinson was traveling from Chicago’s South Side to a magnet school on the Near West Side for three hours every day on a city bus long before she was dubbed First Lady. The larger narrative often obscures that particular detail. It shouldn’t. It speaks to a child who, by the time she reached the sixth grade, had already made up her mind that her circumstances would not limit her potential. She was raised in a household that relied on routine and conversation at the dinner table, in a tiny apartment above her great-aunt’s home. Despite having multiple sclerosis, her…

Seeing a government agency run a marketing campaign that resembles a startup pitch is somewhat ironic. The Education Department posted last week, “The cycle of student loan debt ends,” addressing a number of grievances, such as uncontrollably high interest rates, ballooning balances, and unfulfilled payments, before announcing its solution, the Repayment Assistance Plan, or RAP, which will go into effect on July 1. It reads nicely. It’s made to be easy to read. However, anyone who has worked in federal loan servicing knows that the simple version of a story seldom makes it past the fine print. Following Washington’s dismantling…

There was no ribbon-cutting ceremony. It was just a Tuesday afternoon press release, the kind of bureaucratic memo that typically goes unnoticed by the majority of Americans. However, this one landed in a different way. Beneath its meticulous wording was a decision that will eventually affect millions of households: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services will take over special education oversight from the Department of Education. It’s worth taking a moment to consider that. Kennedy is now in a position to oversee programs that serve 7.5 million children under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, despite having spent…