Author: Nelson Rosario

The public preschool debate has been circling the same exhausting drain for years. Children who participate in Head Start or another city-funded program make early progress, and by the time they reach the second or third grade, their peers who do not attend have mostly caught up. This “fade out” effect is a point of contention for critics. They speculate that perhaps these programs simply teach children to count a little earlier—skills they would have learned regardless. Budget committees give their approval. stalls in funding. The cycle is repeated. However, two recent studies are making it more difficult to overlook…

Around week ten of maternity leave, a certain kind of dread sets in; it’s quiet, persistent, and nearly impossible to discuss without someone giving the wrong kind of assurance. The daycare bag is filled. The pumping schedule is plotted. And in the back of a new mother’s mind, there’s a question she can’t bring herself to ask aloud: Am I going to break something that can never be fixed? American parents, particularly mothers, have been bearing a burden for decades that, according to researchers, was never entirely theirs to bear. The popular interpretation of attachment theory, which was first developed…

In rural Georgia, not Georgia as a state, but the nation, there is a road that hardly merits the name. It eventually arrives at a small settlement that most maps don’t bother to accurately mark after winding past steep mountain edges and through villages that are so silent they seem to have been forgotten in the middle of a sentence. It takes work to get there. It takes something completely different to stay there. A few parents decided they were tired of waiting in a village like this, where everyone knows which child belongs to which grandmother. No kindergarten had…

A three-year-old in a Nashville preschool classroom goes silent for a brief period of time, which is easy to miss if you’re not paying close attention. A patient assistant, who keeps a steadying hand close to her shoulder, has adjusted her headset twice because it is a little too big for her face. She is no longer in her classroom on the screen within that headset. She is maneuvering through a hallway that is too small for her wheelchair. There is no confusion in the silence that ensues. It’s more in line with comprehension. Early childhood education programs in Nashville…

At the core of American education policy is an odd contradiction that has existed long enough for the majority of people to become oblivious to it. The nation devotes a significant amount of energy to discussing school reform, including curriculum standards, standardized testing, and teacher tenure, while subtly ignoring the years that economists and neuroscientists have repeatedly determined to be the most important. the years prior to kindergarten. The years when the human brain’s architecture is still in its early stages of development, according to researchers. An old and unsettling claim that the US is essentially miscalculating its return on…

It doesn’t appear that the classroom is a laboratory. Little wooden chairs are pressed up against low tables, crayon drawings are taped to the walls, and there’s a faint buzz of kids bickering over building blocks in the corner. However, between finger painting and the afternoon snack break, these children are experiencing something quantifiable that, until recently, most educators would have claimed could not be taught at this age, at least not in a systematic way. A small experimental preschool in Reykjavík, Iceland, has been conducting a study that merits far more attention than it has gotten. Researchers integrated an…

Regardless of where they work or how long they have been in the classroom, many elementary school teachers use nearly the same words to describe a particular moment. When a child is asked to respond to a straightforward question that they obviously understand, they choose to go in a completely different direction instead of speaking. Keep your eyes down. Without actually writing anything, the pencil moves across the paper. The connection was intentionally broken. It used to happen once in a while. Teachers now claim that it occurs daily. Anxiety in childhood is nothing new. However, something about its current…

Sorting books is a remarkably unglamorous task that volunteers perform on Saturday mornings at a warehouse somewhere in Detroit. For neighborhoods that don’t often make the news for good reasons, they are stacked, labeled, and packaged. There are no press releases about it. There are no ceremonies to cut the ribbon. Just individuals working with paperback copies of science readers, picture books, and chapter books, getting them ready to go somewhere they are actually needed. Birdie’s Book Mobile is that. If you’re unfamiliar with it, that likely indicates which literacy initiatives in this city typically garner the most attention. Nearly…

Most elementary school teachers are aware of a certain moment. A child’s expression is halfway between bewildered and defeated as they gaze at a worksheet with their pencil frozen. The page has the numbers on it. Perhaps three times, the procedure has been described. Nothing clicks as of yet. It takes place quietly, dozens of times a day, in classrooms all over the world. It’s not a dramatic scene. Because of this, recent research from the University of Michigan is receiving a lot of attention because it raises the possibility that the child is not the issue at all. The…

Ana de Armas learned to be an actress in front of a mirror in a small Cuban home, mouthing other people’s words until they felt like her own, rather than in a posh conservatory in New York or London. This process has an almost cinematic quality. De Armas was born in Havana on April 30, 1988, and grew up in Santa Cruz del Norte, a small town east of the capital. His upbringing didn’t exactly portend future Oscar nominations. Blackouts of electricity were common. There was a food ration. Because her family didn’t have a VCR, she literally watched Hollywood…