Author: Nelson Rosario

Together with the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports, the Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs finished a full framework two years ago to keep an eye on and rate the quality of early childhood education and care all over the country. More than 70 experts from more than 30 organizations—including ministries, universities, cities, service providers, and even parents—took part in the process. The end result is a single system based on five areas: admissions, staffing, curriculum, evaluation, and management. It was paid for by the European Union and carried out with UNICEF’s help. By most measures, this is…

Between learning to point at a dog and learning how to stack three blocks without them falling, there’s a moment when something important takes place. A lot of adults just walk right by it. It took policymakers longer than it should have to notice it. But research has been going on for decades and keeps coming to the same tense conclusion: the first few years are more important than almost everything else. Researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School and economists who work with them have put in a lot of work trying to figure this out. Estimates show that investing…

It starts with a little thing. During class, a teacher notices that a student is holding their phone at an odd angle. Someone else sees an app running on a laptop that they have never seen before. It might be called Otter.ai or a tool that they have never heard of. A third learns almost by accident that their recorded lecture from last semester has been summed up, reorganized, and shared on a platform they did not agree to. These aren’t one-off events. They are part of a pattern that has been slowly spreading through universities for a few years…

Something very interesting about the fact that a vote created the Special School District of St. Louis County stands out. People in St. Louis County who had disabled children in 1957 didn’t wait for the government to give them something. They pushed. They planned. People in the county voted for the district to exist at a time when it wasn’t even assumed that children with disabilities would be able to go to public school. That moment of founding was “bold,” as Holly K. Hacker of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put it, and it’s hard to disagree. That beginning story is…

Something interesting about Spurgeon College is the way it acts. It doesn’t yell. It doesn’t try to make the news. The college has built a steady, honest reputation one classroom discussion and one chapel service at a time, all while being part of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. That quiet seriousness is exactly what it’s for students who come with a real sense of calling. The college is named after Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a British preacher who lived in the 1800s and whose sermons are still talked about in theological circles like dog-eared books. The name of…

We have a building in McPherson, Kansas, that is named Templeton Hall. Motor oil, metal shavings, and old leather are probably what it smells like. It’s 33,000 square feet. Inside, students aren’t writing economics papers or watching marketing theory PowerPoints. Engines are being fixed up. Making shapes out of metal. Putting new upholstery on seats from cars that were made before the interstate highway system. It’s not something you normally see on a college campus, and it says an interesting thing about McPherson College, which has never quite done things the way everyone else does. McPherson College is a private…

Something really strange happened in American higher education on July 1, 2023. Twelve different community colleges in Connecticut stopped being twelve and became one. Most people now just call it “CT State.” When Connecticut State Community College opened, it wasn’t with a ribbon-cutting ceremony or a viral video. Instead, it was with paperwork, letters of accreditation, and the kind of institutional change that you can’t fully feel for years. The main office of the new college is at 185 Main Street in New Britain. This is a pretty ordinary address for the largest community college in New England. From Enfield…

There was a bad change in Mina Aganagic’s calculus classes. A math teacher at UC Berkeley noticed that some of his students couldn’t do basic multiplication, which is something most kids learn by the fourth grade. These weren’t students who were having trouble with difficult theorems. They were having trouble with math. That kind of information isn’t included in statistics on admissions. It shows up in a lecture hall with several hundred students when a teacher realizes she can’t teach calculus to people who don’t understand what they’ve already learned. As part of the open letter that thousands of UC…

There’s something slightly annoying about going to your student loan account and seeing a balance that, according to the rules, shouldn’t be there. Like a lot of people across the country, these people got official letters from the U.S. Department of Education saying their loans were approved for automatic discharge, but when they checked their accounts, the numbers hadn’t changed. The Department of Education has been asked to give answers but has been unwilling to do so because of a lawsuit filed by the Project on Predatory Student Lending. It’s not new forgiveness that’s being asked for. It’s records. The…

Something about seeing a legal settlement that took years to reach just not be honored is quietly frustrating. That’s where things stand now with Sweet v. McMahon, the federal lawsuit that sought to discharge student loans and gave real hope to thousands of scammed borrowers. It was told to do something by the Department of Education. There were due dates. Then, the due dates for more than a thousand people who were still waiting for loan cancellations and refunds just went by without being met. More than 1,000 people in the Sweet class are still sitting there with unresolved stress.…