Author: Nelson Rosario

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…

While some people are tired from the work itself, others are tired from feeling like the work doesn’t matter to anyone above them. That’s the quiet story that’s been buried in a growing body of research on early childhood educators in the US. These are the people who spend their days building toddlers’ mental and emotional skills but come home at night wondering how they’ll pay their rent. Many people in the field have known for years that the Mississippi Wages Survey from 2023 means what it says. The hourly rate for early childhood teachers is usually around $10.93. That…

In American academia, there’s a strange habit of celebrating international recognition when it comes and then putting the ideas that led to it on the back burner. A news story is sent out. An email of congratulations comes from the head of a department. After that, the work gets left at the door. I thought of that pattern when I read about the American university professor whose research earned her a spot on the OMEP International Award for Education for Sustainable Development. People in the United States don’t really know about the award that is given by the World Organization…

When people talk about AI in schools, they mostly talk about a few places: top universities, well-funded school districts in cities, and tech accelerators with fancy websites. What’s going on in small towns, farming communities, and parts of Ohio and Kansas where broadband is still a luxury and a computer science teacher is worth their weight in gold doesn’t make the news very often. That is the exact gap that Wright State University wants to fill. It was just given $2.5 million by the U.S. Department of Education to do this. The federal grant lasts for four years and comes…

There’s something about a high school hallway that sticks with you. The noise, the energy, and the feeling that there is still a long way to go. This was a place Maddox Graser knew very well. He was a sophomore at Wooster High School and wrestled in the winter and played baseball in the spring. He seemed like a kid who was still trying to figure out where his life could take him. He dreamed that he was in the major leagues. He was honest about it. It wasn’t just a wish. The people around him thought it was a…