Author: Nelson Rosario

When you pull up to Ratcliffe College for the first time, it’s kind of shocking. The Gothic stonework rises out of 200 acres of parkland in Leicestershire. It looks like it has always been there, because it is right next to the Roman Fosse Way. The Catholic boarding and day school near the village of Ratcliffe on the Wreake has been around since 1847. It has that special weight that only very old institutions seem to have: history isn’t just on the walls, it’s there. And it turns out that someone important designed those walls. The first school buildings were…

On an open day morning, there is a calm confidence that seems to settle over Exeter’s Streatham Campus. The paths go through real parkland and the lakes reflect whatever light the Devon sky gives them. Somewhere between the welcome talk and the first department tour, you start to feel less like a potential student and more like someone deciding if this place could become home. When people are picking a college, that difference is more important than most people think. There are three different campuses that Exeter uses for its open days, and each one has its own story to…

Lamar University seems to be more than a little stubborn. They are in Beaumont, Texas, not Austin, Houston, or Dallas. They started out by taking over the floor of a high school in 1923 and have been building up from there. That beginning story tells us a lot. Louis Pietzsch didn’t begin with a school or a fund. He started with an empty third floor, permission from the school district, and what seemed like a lot of nerve. Lamar University has been around for more than 100 years and now has about 18,000 students. It is accredited by the Southern…

When the pandemic hit in March 2020 and shut down everything, most businesses had to scramble for weeks to figure out how to work from home. The national chapter of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP) in Argentina moved faster and more smoothly than anyone thought possible for a nonprofit that is based on early childhood work done at the community level. What came out of those crazy first few months wasn’t just a way to stay alive. It turned into something more like a model. Seeing how this went from the outside makes you think that the…

Something changes when a teen leaves an Oxford summer program with an MIT certificate for the first time. Not in a dramatic way—there’s no ceremony or podium moment worth taking pictures of. But in the background, something has been set up. A certificate. An alert. A sneak peek at the kind of thing that parents in Mumbai, São Paulo, and Seoul will be spending a lot of money on in just a few years. That’s pretty much what the new partnership between Oxford Royale Academy and MIT’s RAISE initiative sets in motion. Secondary school students at Oxford Royale’s programs will…

You get a certain kind of tiredness when you don’t know where you’ll sleep next week. It sounds like stress to most adults. It doesn’t feel like worry to a two-year-old; it feels like noise in the nervous system. Constant, low-level, unnoticeable noise that gets in the way of becoming a person. Every year, more than 2.5 million children in the United States are homeless or have very unstable housing. They are mostly kids younger than six. These aren’t just numbers; they show the years when a child’s brain grows faster than it ever will again, and when safety and…

The nurseries and pre-schools in Britain are slowly becoming emergency rooms. It’s not often on the front page. It doesn’t come with sirens. But right now, if you go into almost any early years setting in England, you can feel it. The over-stretched schedules, tired faces, and empty desks where coworkers used to sit show it. The people who take care of the youngest kids in the country are leaving. And they’re not going to be changed. The Early Education and Childcare Coalition and the University of Leeds have done new research that backs up what many people in the…

In most stories about city reform, there’s a point where the one person who made it all happen emerges. This could be a charismatic mayor, a visionary minister, or a well-funded NGO. The story of how Addis Ababa changed how it helps young children grow and learn isn’t quite that simple. It began with two learning trips, which were a bit of a surprise. When top city officials returned from trips to Denmark and Brazil, they brought back something harder to measure than a policy memo: a real change in how they thought about what a city owed its youngest…

There is something quietly unsettling about sitting in a conference hall in Bangkok listening to early childhood experts describe the state of the world. Not because what they are saying is radical — but because it isn’t. It’s logical, careful, evidence-based. And somehow, most governments still aren’t listening. In July 2024, the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education, known as OMEP, held its 76th World Assembly and International Conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Nearly 400 participants from across the globe gathered under one theme: Right from the Start for ECCE: Step Beyond All Together. The message running beneath every keynote, every…

There is a big number that keeps coming up in the field of education research. It stops people in the middle of their sentences. 17.8 quadrillion dollars. As a direct result of COVID-19 school closings, this generation of kids is expected to lose that much in living wages over the course of their lives. It’s not just a guess made out of thin air. It comes from a report that the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF put together together. It is a lot worse than the $10 trillion estimate that those same groups made in 2020. The space between those…