Author: Nelson Rosario

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…

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…