Author: Nelson Rosario

On most keyboards, there is a key that receives very little attention. It is located in the upper-left corner, directly above the Tab key, and is almost never intentionally pressed—at least not by anyone who has learned to type in English. It appears to be a tiny, sideways wave. It is known as a tilde (~), and you would most likely guess too low if you had to guess how many different meanings it has in human languages, mathematics, computing, and internet slang. The word itself feels pleasantly archaic. Around 1864, the word “tilde” entered the English language. It was…

In lower Manhattan, there’s a building at 26 Broadway. It’s a grand, historic address in the financial district, the kind of street where there’s still a hint of ambition and money in the air. The Next Generation Technology High School was scheduled to open there this autumn. One hundred chairs. One thousand people applied. collaborations with Google and Carnegie Mellon University. eleventh-grade calculus. credentials in digital audio production, coding, and cybersecurity. On paper, it appeared to be exactly what a city attempting to prepare its kids for a world dominated by artificial intelligence would construct. It didn’t open. In late…

There is a specific type of institutional failure that doesn’t make a big impression. Budget spreadsheets, disregarded union emails, and school board meetings where difficult questions are sidestepped with bureaucratic rhetoric are just a few examples of how it quietly grows. One day, 94% of the teachers in a district vote to leave, and all of a sudden, everyone is taking notice. In the Little Lake City School District, a mid-size district that serves about 3,500 students in Santa Fe Springs, Norwalk, and a portion of Downey in Los Angeles County, that is essentially what took place. It was more…

There’s a small Head Start classroom in Frederick, Maryland where a three-year-old stacks Duplo blocks with the focused intensity of someone solving a serious problem. She doesn’t know she’s also navigating one of the most consequential periods of her entire life. But the researchers do. And increasingly, so do the policymakers who study what happens when the systems meant to support children like her actually fail to talk to each other. The Center for American Progress has spent years making the case that child wellbeing isn’t just a health issue, or just an education issue, or just an economic one.…

An empty chair in a kindergarten classroom has a subtly depressing quality. Not the typical absence on a Monday morning—a cold, a dentist appointment, a leisurely morning. This type of emptiness is distinct. thoughtful. motivated by fear. And in the Central Valley of California, those vacant chairs began to proliferate in quantities that scientists could measure at the beginning of 2025. Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford, did just that. Dee discovered that student absences in January and February 2025 were 22% higher than the same months in previous years after gathering three years’ worth of daily attendance…

Eighth graders are using generative AI tools in a suburban Morris County classroom to create fictitious business proposals, debate moral case studies, and truly understand what it means to collaborate with a machine. Teachers in a Camden district a short distance down the Turnpike, still struggling with antiquated technology and patchy internet, have received no AI training. same state. The same future. very different way of getting ready for it. The introduction of artificial intelligence into classrooms is poised to be the next unsettling chapter in New Jersey’s long-standing struggle with one of the most obvious disparities in school funding…

Seven hours were needed. Before New York City officials finally understood the message, the school board meeting went on for that long. A proposal that, on paper, sounded like progress—a selective, AI-focused high school in Manhattan’s financial district, a shining symbol of a city preparing its children for the future—was opposed by parents, teachers, and students, many of whom were holding hand-drawn signs and some of whom were wearing stickers demanding a moratorium. The proposal was dead by the end of the evening. Kamar Samuels, the chancellor of schools, completely withdrew it. He later acknowledged, “We missed the mark,” a…

Imagine a four-year-old learning to balance, stacking blocks, and being totally engrossed in a Head Start classroom in Frederick, Maryland. It appears to be play from the outside. However, everything that happens in that child’s life outside of the classroom—whether her father lost Medicaid coverage last month, whether her family’s apartment has mold on the walls, or whether dinner last night was uncertain—is already shaping the architecture of her brain in ways that no amount of later intervention can fully undo. This is what researchers and pediatricians have been saying for years, and policymakers have been reluctant to fully act…

When I first heard the term “wax poetic,” I was eighteen years old and sitting at a long wooden table at an upstate New York cousin’s wedding. I was watching a great-uncle get up with a folded piece of paper and a glass of red wine. For almost twelve minutes, he talked about the bride’s grandmother, the scent of her kitchen, the curtains in her parlor, and one afternoon in 1962 when she showed him how to fold napkins. With a whisper that sounded almost affectionate, my aunt leaned over and said, “He’s waxing poetic again.” Her voice carried a…

There was a certain buzz in the Bangkok conference hall in mid-July that comes only when people who have been emailing each other for years finally get together. There are lanyards everywhere. Delegates from seventy-five countries, give or take, exchanged business cards, gave each other hugs despite language barriers, and took out their phones to display pictures of their home children—the ones that this was supposedly all about. From the outside, events such as the OMEP World Assembly seem to be easily disregarded. Another resolution, another conference. However, after a week of sitting inside one, the dismissal begins to feel…