Author: Nelson Rosario

Almost every public debate has a point where the argument stops being about the problem and starts being about the argument itself. The movement against racist education in Britain, and more and more in the rest of the Western world, is right now deep in that moment. As the controversy grows, it gets harder to talk about what’s really going on in classrooms without being judged for taking a side. It’s hard to believe how much stress English teachers are under these days. Reading lists used to be based on how well the writing was, how emotionally complex the stories…

When Aaron Anderson and Dana Armstrong Hughes hired someone to teach UC Davis’s new entrepreneurship class, they didn’t look for an experienced professor or someone who had already started a business. Alice Dien was brought in. She was working on her Ph.D. in biological systems engineering and had spent years working in the field on problems that most people don’t think about until they’re standing next to a broken dryer in a California farm. That little thing does matter more than it seems. “Innovation for Impact: Food Systems” is the newest course in UC Davis’s “Hacking 4” series. The series…

An interesting kind of tension settles over a discussion about child care in Britain. If you ask a working parent how they are doing, they will probably either laugh tiredly or give you a number. They will probably talk about monthly fees that are like a mortgage payment, waiting lists that began before the child was born, and the constant worry that the place they finally found might not be very good. That last worry has been on the minds of OMEP UK, the national committee of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, for a while now. The organization…

When humanitarian workers talk about what they saw, one scene keeps coming up near the Islam Qala border crossing on the western edge of Afghanistan. Mothers with children who have been traveling for days and don’t know where they are going next are waiting for someone to tell them what to do while sitting under temporary shade structures. The kids are quiet in the way that kids are quiet when they think their parents are scared. This scene has been seen before. But because of how big it is now, in 2025 and 2026, it’s in a whole different group.…

Some types of leadership don’t make themselves known very loudly. It’s seen in changed policy language, rooms where kids’ rights finally have a seat at the table, and international frameworks that now have words like “early childhood” where they didn’t have them before. That’s the kind of leadership Mercedes Mayol Lassalle brought to OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education. It’s the kind of leadership that doesn’t go away when someone changes their title. Depending on who you ask, her leaving office marks the end of a chapter that was either too short or just long enough. In either…

The building in Fremont, California, doesn’t look like any school you’ve been to. There are 390 beds in a dorm that can hold 600 people, computers that are always on, and no teachers standing in front of the class. The school has 250,000 square feet of open space. When you walk through it, it feels both exciting and a little unsettling. It’s more of a lab than a campus, and someone spent $100 million making sure it would work. It’s called 42. From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the name comes. In that book, 42 is the key to…

Walking into a pre-K center in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday is a little tiring. The demands are constant, the noise is constant, and by noon, the staff, many of whom are really good with kids, are completely worn out. It’s hard not to notice how much of their time and effort they put into keeping things in order instead of teaching. Every day it’s like that. Working in pre-K is a unique type of professional stress. It makes you feel strong emotions in a way that most other fields don’t. Caregivers of three- and four-year-olds have…

It began with a certificate. There was a note in a third-grader’s backpack that said he was good at “demonstrating an understanding of the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence.” The certificate was given after a drag-and-drop computer game with a cartoon dancer and songs that were easy to find on Amazon Music. The game was made in collaboration with Amazon Future Engineer. The parents weren’t asked. No one really talked about what the kids had learned. Almost no one even knew it happened. To put it another way, A.I. got into a lot of American classrooms without a vote, a…

Carlton Jenkins learned how to be a leader for 36 years. He flew OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopters on armed reconnaissance missions and taught other pilots at Fort Rucker. He also made lesson plans for soldiers who had to know enough about aerodynamics to stay alive. By the time he retired at age 52 in 2011, he no longer had to think about being a leader. It was how he always got around. What no one told him, and what veterans aren’t really prepared for, is that going from working in the military to working in a public school classroom can…

Sweden is going through a quiet but important change. It’s not the kind of news that stops the news or makes hashtags go viral right away, but it’s the kind of news that people who work in early childhood education will probably remember as a real turning point. The Swedish OMEP government committee, which is part of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, has made a YouTube channel. That seems like a normal thing to say at first. That’s not what it means in this case. OMEP has been around since 1948. The organization works in 67 countries, has…