Author: Nelson Rosario

On any given afternoon, strolling through the hallways of the majority of American high schools appears to be a fairly typical scene. The distant shriek of a lunch bell, children on phones, lockers slamming. However, there’s a tension that doesn’t always remain silent beneath that routine. And when it doesn’t—when it turns into a full-fledged altercation captured on camera or a shove in the hallway—the repercussions usually follow students for a very long time. Fights in high school are nothing new. They weren’t. However, the way they play out these days—spreading over social media in a matter of minutes, being…

When Janelle Bynum flipped Oregon’s 5th Congressional District and became the state’s first Black member of Congress in November 2024, most people who follow her career begin their journey. That’s the simple way in. It’s the one with the cameras, the AP call, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s concession statement. However, this story doesn’t really start there. According to most accounts, it starts in a folding chair at an OMEP regional meeting—the kind of space that early childhood educators are familiar with but hardly anyone else ever sees. These meetings are held by OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, in…

Before anyone made an announcement, it was obvious from the noise in the hallway. Behind the silent brick face of a building housing twenty-four classrooms, there are squeals, the sound of tiny chairs scraping against the walls, and someone laughing. On a Friday morning at Horizons for Homeless Children in Roxbury, that was the sound that greeted Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Michelle Wu. It wasn’t a sound from a press conference, but rather a sound from a school day, which appears to have been the exact intention. The three women did more than simply take a tour. They read…

Paychecks don’t reflect a certain type of tiredness. Anyone who has worked in a toddler classroom for ten years will describe the experience before discussing the pay. It manifests in the shoulders, in the dreadful way educators discuss Sundays, and in the silent choice to quit a career they once cherished. The National League of Cities has been gathering data on this topic for the past few years, and the conclusion is unquestionable: cities can no longer ignore the fact that the people raising America’s youngest children are struggling financially. Sitting with the numbers makes you uncomfortable. Depression rates among…

From the outside, a certain type of classroom doesn’t seem like much. A teacher is kneeling on the floor at a child’s eye level rather than standing over them, and there are a few low tables and some worn picture books. It doesn’t shout “economic policy.” However, an increasing amount of worldwide research continues to reach the same unsettling, nearly unyielding conclusion: what transpires in that room prior to a child turning five can reverberate for decades, sometimes dictating whether or not that child develops into a financially struggling adult. The number that has been circulating recently is startling. Children…

The length of time it took for anyone to notice is almost embarrassing. A group of researchers from MIT, Dartmouth, and Stony Brook created a computer model of the brain using known biological wiring rules rather than training it on animal data. They then used the model to perform a straightforward visual sorting task. It had trouble. It made uneven progress. It made the same errors that laboratory animals do. A pattern of neurons that no one had previously bothered to flag was discovered when someone went back and examined the old animal data that had been sitting in drawers…

This year, Rebecca Vukovic’s framework for fostering children’s success in the early years has become precisely the kind of report that educators read with a highlighter in hand. The deputy editor of Teacher Magazine, Vukovic, had no intention of writing a manifesto. Census data, which is far less glamorous, served as the foundation for her framework. In particular, the Australian Early Development Census, a survey that asks hundreds of thousands of kids if they’re prepared for school. Her refusal to summarize and move on is what sets her approach apart. Something unsettling was revealed by the 2024 AEDC data, which…

When someone brings up money going directly to parents rather than into a program, a certain silence falls over a Seattle DEEL community meeting. This spring, it happened once more in a room close to the Rainier Valley, where a few mothers were seated in folding chairs facing a city employee and describing how a new initiative would provide $1,000 annually for early education supplies to low-income households. No coupons. There is no provider network to traverse. Just money, intended for art supplies, books, educational toys, and perhaps a tablet with educational apps. It’s a minor but significant change. With…

In the late afternoon, between the last experiment of the day and the walk home, a certain kind of silence descends upon a research lab. More than in any seminar, something akin to genuine mentoring tends to occur in that silence. That concept is no longer merely a rumor among graduate students at MIT. It’s evolving into something more akin to a practical philosophy. Over the past two years, the university’s Committed to Caring program, which honors faculty members for mentoring that extends beyond research output, has shown a slight but significant change. Teachers like Nathan Wilmers at MIT Sloan…

Approximately 250 preschoolers in this nation are expelled every day, which is a statistic that should make people stop cold. not put on hold for an afternoon. banished. sent home permanently, sometimes from a classroom they had only been in for a few weeks. When researchers examine the identities of those kids, a pattern emerges that is difficult to ignore: Black kids, particularly Black boys, are expelled from preschool at a rate that is almost five times higher than that of their white and Asian-American peers. Considering how young these children really are, it’s worthwhile. We are referring to kids…