Author: Nelson Rosario

When a solution is available but no one uses it, a certain kind of frustration develops. If you were to walk down any school hallway right now, you would probably see students hunched over worksheets, the class moving at the same pace, and the same problems, regardless of who has already figured it out and who is quietly lost. Ironically, schools have had software for years that could solve this exact issue, and the most recent Stanford data makes it more difficult than ever to ignore it. Stanford researchers and Khan Academy examined data from over 200,000 students and discovered…

The conversation began quite simply at Gunderson High School in South San José. A student requested additional practical work experience. Another idea was that more counselors were needed at the school. A third brought up the topic of more comfortable desks, which was so unremarkable it nearly felt awkward to bring up in a formal research setting. Nevertheless, those modest, sincere requests served as the basis for something that could genuinely alter how California schools listen—or, more accurately, whether they listen at all. The study, named Roses Talk, was created by the Law and Policy Lab at Stanford Law School…

In tech circles, there is a version of this story that is frequently told: the one in which artificial intelligence shows up, fixes everything, and we all move on. Anyone who has actually attempted to push a large language model beyond its comfort zone will attest to the messier and far more fascinating reality. For a long time, MIT researchers have had to deal with that mess. Their most recent work, which will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, targets one of the more persistent drawbacks of contemporary AI: these systems, despite their apparent intelligence and fluency,…

People spend their days monitoring how the world learns in a building at Tecnológico de Monterrey. Not in a dramatic, attention-grabbing manner. Silently. methodically. with a level of patience that is uncomfortable for most institutions. The team there started the Observatory of Educational Innovation seven years ago. At first, it was merely a weekly report designed to keep their own academic community focused in a changing global environment. No one could have imagined it would develop into what it is today. It turned out to be more important than anyone could have predicted that early instinct to share, to open…

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…