Author: Nelson Rosario

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…

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…