Author: Nelson Rosario

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…

There is a specific type of bad news that doesn’t make a big announcement. Beneath rankings and percentages in a spreadsheet, it appears and waits for someone to notice. That’s essentially how Ohio’s most recent early childhood dashboard arrived this year—not with warning signs, but rather with a steady, quiet drumbeat of numbers that don’t add up to anything positive. Groundwork Ohio and the Health Policy Institute of Ohio created the dashboard, which compiles two years’ worth of data on the true well-being of the state’s youngest citizens. The truth is that it’s not very good. When it comes to…

South San José’s Gunderson High School doesn’t appear to be the scene of a policy revolution. The campus is rather typical, with stucco buildings and a quickly filling parking lot. Most adults drive by it without giving it much thought. However, a small group of students sat down there last year to discuss what school could be if it truly worked for them. One desired practical work experience. Another requested additional counselors. More modestly, a third simply desired better desks. That last request can be easily written off as insignificant. Really, it isn’t. Desks are the kind of detail that…

A recent Stanford study contains a small, easily overlooked detail that is often overlooked in between budget hearings and policy memos. A child born a few weeks prior to a state’s preschool cutoff date has a much higher chance of receiving a diagnosis of ADHD, a speech disorder, or a vision or hearing issue than a child born shortly after. same family earnings. same area. The same challenges, frequently. Whether or not they entered a classroom a year earlier is the only real distinction. Researchers at Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research came to that conclusion after spending time reviewing…

Before snack time, something minor and a little out of the ordinary is taking place at a few nurseries in the UK. As part of a structured, multi-year credential system with its own passport and awards ceremony, Bronze, Silver, and Gold, three and four-year-olds are asked to name wild birds, sort recyclables, and discuss where their food comes from. This is not a one-time craft activity. OMEP, a child-rights organization founded in 1948, is the driving force behind it. Over the past fifteen years, it has developed what it refers to as Education for Sustainable Citizenship. The name is awkward.…

Every October, a well-known scene takes place in a conference room in Lagos or Abuja. A few schools’ worth of kids enter the stage wearing matching uniforms, say a few lines about kindness, safety, or peace, and then return to their seats to cheers. Warm remarks are made by representatives of the National Commission for Colleges of Education. A message of goodwill is sent by a member of OMEP’s Africa leadership. It’s easy to write off this type of event as ceremonial. However, OMEP Nigeria has been holding similar events for over 40 years, and beneath the pageantry is a…

It’s rare for Liberty, Texas, to make national news. However, the Liberty ISD Board of Trustees accepted a check on April 21—a move that is subtly becoming commonplace in school districts nationwide. Not from the state or a federal program, but from its own nonprofit organization, the Liberty ISD Education Foundation—$115,000 designated for 34 classroom grants dispersed throughout the district’s campuses. The materials began to appear in classrooms by the next week. Teachers had probably been asking for new equipment, supplies, and technology since August. District officials expressed gratitude to the Foundation for its “ongoing commitment.” Warm and somewhat formulaic,…

During testing week, a certain type of silence permeates a school gymnasium. Desk rows, tapping pencils, a proctor walking the aisles with a clipboard. In fifty years, not much has changed about that image. What happens to the paper when the pencil stops moving is what has changed, almost imperceptibly. The essay your child wrote last spring was not read by a teacher in an increasing number of states. A machine read it. An algorithm examined the sentence structure, identified specific phrases, compared the text to thousands of other samples, and produced a score—often in a matter of seconds, sometimes…

A recent study from MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication has a subtly unsettling quality that has nothing to do with robots taking over. In some ways, it’s more uncomfortable and smaller than that. In order to test GPT-4, Claude 3 Opus, and Llama 3 against thousands of questions, researchers attached brief biographical sketches to each question, characterizing the asker as less educated, non-native English speakers, or foreign nationals. The chatbots became worse. Not a little worse. In certain instances, significantly worse. The lead author of the paper, Elinor Poole-Dayan, stated that the team’s goal was to verify a promising possibility:…