Author: Nelson Rosario

There are some moments that you will always remember. When something clicked, usually because someone said the right thing at the right time. Not when you passed a test or finished a course. A teacher who saw that you were lost. A stranger in a web forum who went on and on about something they didn’t need to explain for ten minutes. This social, sometimes unpredictable way of learning is exactly what Caitlin Morris wants to take care of. Morris is a MAD Fellow and a doctoral student at MIT’s Media Lab. Her research is in the awkward area between…

When people talk about changing the way schools work, they often make the strange assumption that the answer is on a screen. New platform, new app, and a new AI teacher. It’s not often brought up in the debate whether students are missing something that code can’t make. Epic Theatre Ensemble, an arts group in New York City that has worked in public schools for 25 years, is making exactly that case—quietly, repeatedly, and with numbers to back it up. Epic didn’t start out with a plan. It began in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when a group of…

That there is a certain type of meeting that doesn’t say it’s historic. There was no fuss, no world leaders, and no cameras vying for a good spot at the door. The OMEP Regional Africa Conference was that kind of meeting—not very fancy, but very important in terms of what it meant. As of now, 14 African governments have officially adopted the framework that came out of it, making it harder to ignore what happened in that room. This work has been done by OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, since 1948, when it was founded in Prague.…

It seems a little strange for a 14-year-old to be working through an AI curriculum made at MIT while sitting in an old stone building in Oxford that smells a little like libraries and ambition. It’s not what you’d normally think of as a summer school. However, Oxford Royale Academy seems to be making the same point. In April 2026, the company said it had teamed up with MIT’s RAISE initiative (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) to give students in its summer program access to the FutureBuilders AI pathway. When students finish it, they get an official MIT…

It can be frustrating for pediatricians to hand a parent a checklist and hope that it tells them everything they need to know. This is something that pediatricians don’t discuss openly. For many years, that questionnaire has been the main way that toddlers with autism have been checked for during well-child visits. It’s easy, quick, and doesn’t cost much. But parents have to do all the observation, and many of them haven’t had any clinical training or a standard for what “normal” development looks like. Duke University researchers have been thinking about that issue for a while now. The results,…

When governments know they need to do something but aren’t sure how, they use a certain type of political language. The UK’s Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, gave a version of it on Tuesday morning. She told Times Radio that she is still “genuinely open-minded” about what new rules about social media for kids under 16 should look like. It seems like a good idea. It also sounds like the government is buying time. That’s not always a bad thing. The problem of how to control kids’ use of social media is really tough, and anyone who says it’s easy hasn’t…

The way that OMEP Argentina has been set up seems almost not to make sense. Now that digital campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and viral moments are all things that nonprofits try to get, this group has done something much less flashy that may last much longer. It created a membership model based on trust that is built over years in professional groups, institutions, and people. The OMEP (World Organization for Early Childhood Education) has had a national committee in Argentina for many years, which is how it works. It started out as a national presence, then spread to Latin America, and…

On a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn, you might find a sixth-grader showing her classmates a hand-drawn map of a local water system. She is talking about pipe infrastructure, fair housing in the neighborhood, and why the water pressure on her block is lower than on the block next door. She is ten years old. The talk is rough, but it’s real. On the other side of the hall, someone else is working hard on ELA practice books to get ready for the April state test. Almost everything you need to know about the tension in New York’s public schools right…

A career in early childhood education didn’t just happen for Aubrey Floyd. She had to work hard at it. She got there in part by chance—on the first day of class, she sat next to the right person. That stranger told me about an apprenticeship opening at KLA Schools. Floyd looked at it. She eventually graduated from Joliet Junior College on May 15 with an associate degree in applied science in child development, all thanks to that small talk. People talk about workforce development in a broad way, so this kind of detail is easy to miss. But it’s important…

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from seeing a problem clearly, documenting it carefully, and then watching it barely move. That’s where Ohio finds itself today. The 2025 Early Childhood Dashboard released by Groundwork Ohio — the second edition since its debut in 2023 — lays out the state of the state’s youngest residents with careful, painstaking detail. The picture it paints is not a crisis invented by advocates. It’s a slow-motion failure measured in data points, and in children. Groundwork Ohio spent two years building this updated report, and the organization has been transparent about what it’s…