Author: Nelson Rosario

Sweden has always taken pride in the way it manages its educational system. High levels of trust, qualified educators, and robust digital infrastructure are characteristics of a system that other nations observe and sometimes envy. The fact that Swedish OMEP, the national branch of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, recently felt obliged to formally demand that the Swedish National Agency for Education reduce class sizes is all the more startling. Not as a recommendation. as a request. It’s worth taking a moment to consider that. This is not a fringe organization making noise from the periphery. OMEP is…

A picture of a conference room full of adults wearing suits and lanyards, rows of name placards, simultaneous translation headsets, and not a single child in the frame has been quietly circulating among early childhood education circles. It comes from no specific summit. Almost any of them could be the source. That ordinary, unremarkable image is exactly what gives the events in Poznan this July a sense of importance. For an organization that has spent more than 70 years defending children’s rights from birth to age eight, the fact that OMEP 2026 is the first global conference to require children’s…

There is something quietly unsettling about walking past a school in a conflict-affected neighborhood—anywhere from Beirut to Baltimore—and realizing that the child stepping over rubble or through a metal detector shares the same legal status under international law as one walking into a classroom in Helsinki or Wellington. At least in theory. In reality, the gap between those kids is huge and continues to widen. 2024 marked both the 35th anniversary of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child and the centenary of the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child. Two milestones that should have felt…

Asking a chatbot to solve a problem that Plato penned in 385 BCE has a subtle peculiarity. Not in a dramatic sense, but rather in a way that causes you to stop in the middle of your thoughts and wonder what precisely is going on inside these systems that millions of people use on a daily basis. That’s basically what two Cambridge University researchers did. The “doubling the square” problem, one of philosophy’s earliest teaching tools, was fed into ChatGPT by Andreas Stylianides, a professor of mathematics education at Cambridge, and Dr. Nadav Marco, a visiting scholar from the Hebrew…

A month ago, there was no drum kit in a classroom at San Jacinto Elementary. Kids are using a set of 3D literacy tools down the hall to make connections between letters and tangible objects. A student journalism studio at Liberty High School is beginning to take shape, complete with cameras and equipment—a setup more appropriate for a college program than a small Texas high school. This was not an accident. The Liberty ISD Education Foundation made a $115,000 donation to the Liberty Independent School District Board of Trustees in April, which the Foundation describes as a record-breaking year. Every…

There are conferences where things are felt and conferences where things are said. The majority of international education events fit neatly into the first category, with well-meaning panels, meticulously gathered data, and courteous but fleeting applause. What transpired at one specific OMEP International Conference session was completely different. It was a mid-sized room with flickering projector light and stackable chairs. Coffee cups in hand, half-distracted, researchers and policy delegates had been riding in and out all morning. Then a teacher from an Indigenous community, a woman who had taught kids whose mother tongue wasn’t the one used in their textbooks…

A four-year-old boy has been hurling chairs in a preschool classroom in northern Virginia. Not in a symbolic sense. real chairs. Redirecting, absorbing, and hoping the phase passes is how his teacher, who is underpaid and overworked in a classroom of fifteen, has been handling it mostly on her own. Usually, it doesn’t. And in far too many instances across the nation, the next step is a suspension or something similar: a phone call requesting that a parent pick up the child early, repeatedly, until the child simply stops returning. Virginia made an alternative attempt. The state Department of Education…

Headlines quickly followed the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on youth mental health and social media. It was cited by legislators. In school Facebook groups, parents shared it. It was printed by pediatricians and taped to the walls of waiting rooms. The document, which connected teens’ excessive use of social media to depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, negative body image, and even suicidal thoughts, was comprehensive, well-written, and at times genuinely frightening. It was the type of public health statement that truly hits home by almost all measures. Even so, there’s something that keeps bothering me as I sit with it.…

When a new technology is introduced into schools, Silicon Valley experiences a certain level of confidence. Transformation, personalization, equity, and efficiency are all quickly promised. The slidedecks appear tidy. The pilot programs seem promising. Almost without hesitation, the money follows. Therefore, it didn’t make headlines the way it probably should have when Stanford University researchers discreetly published a report this spring that suggested much of the evidence behind today’s AI classroom tools is thinner than the industry lets on. Over 800 scholarly articles on AI in K–12 education were evaluated by the Stanford AI Hub for Education. Only 20 studies…

The structure doesn’t appear to be revolutionary. There isn’t a grand campus or a photo opportunity with governors and venture capitalists wearing hard hats to cut the ribbon. Arizona’s newest AI-powered charter school, Unbound Academy, is virtually entirely online, which in some ways makes it seem more surreal rather than less. A startup in a desert state has determined that a child can learn artificial intelligence for two hours, with the remainder of the day being dedicated to “life skills.” The educational establishment isn’t exactly overjoyed. Traditional educators would recoil at the model’s simplification. Fourth through eighth graders log on,…