Author: Nelson Rosario

When you walk into most schools, something doesn’t seem right. It had fluorescent lights, dry-erase boards, and the teacher looked around the room to see if anyone had raised their hand. The rhythm that the system is based on hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years. But a new school in Chicago thinks that will soon change everything, and it’s ready to pay $55,000 a year to show it. Alpha School is a private school for kids ages K–8 that began in 2014 in Austin, Texas and now has more than 20 locations across the US. Its most recent…

People don’t usually talk about San Antonio in the same breath as new ideas in education. The city has one of the highest rates of poverty in the United States. It also has a long history of economic segregation and a working-class population that has watched for decades as resources have gone to other places. But slowly but surely, it has been building something that other cities are starting to really admire. Since it started in 2013, Pre-K 4 SA, the city’s publicly funded early childhood program, has helped over 23,000 kids. It all began with a ⅛-cent city sales…

It makes me feel a little bad that about three billion disposable diapers are thrown away every year just in the UK. Not three million. 300 million. If you do the math, that number usually comes up with a different answer: about eight million nappies are thrown away every day, and each one will end up in a landfill or an incinerator, where it will sit, silently and stubbornly, for up to three hundred years. The Swedish OMEP, which is part of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, said this was not okay. Aside from that, they chose the…

A group of babies are learning their first words in Cherokee, not English, in a cabin tucked away in 260 acres of forest on the edge of an Oklahoma lake. There aren’t any plastic toys or tablets propped up on sippy cups here. There are only mothers, elders, wild onions, and a language that has been erased on purpose for hundreds of years. It’s hard not to think that something really important is happening when you watch this from afar. When Melissa Lewis, a new Cherokee mother with experience in child and family development, asked herself, “How do you raise…

In almost all tech debates, there is a point where the early adopter’s optimism meets something harder, like data, consequences, or real-life experience. It looks like that time has come for AI in schools. People in the EdTech industry have been secretly dreading a new study from the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education. It took a serious, methodical look at AI in K–12 classrooms, without the happy filter of a product launch. It’s hard to argue with the results, which come from focus groups, interviews, and reading hundreds of research papers with students, parents, teachers, and tech experts from…

Sometimes people give financial advice that seems almost too easy to be true. Get going early. Remember to save often. Time should do the work. This is something parents have heard for decades, but most of them still wait. They wait until the child can walk, then talk, and finally start kindergarten. By that time, several thousand dollars in growth potential has already been quietly lost. In the past few years, Vanguard’s financial advisors have been directly opposing this trend. Their reasoning is based less on philosophy and more on hard math. They have interesting data: if a parent opens…

The idea almost seems like it makes sense on its own. The kids didn’t go to school. Give them more school. With more hours, lessons, and time in the classroom, the gap might close on its own. It seems like a good idea. It might not be. A study from the University of Cambridge uses data from more than 2,800 schools in England over five years to quietly question what has become a common policy trend. The results show that even big increases in classroom time probably wouldn’t make a big difference in how well students do in school. Just…

There comes a time when people lose interest in almost every good medical idea. The prototype is real. There is a real need. But once they get to that point—through regulation, clinical adoption, and commercialization—most innovations quietly go away. Clinicians, researchers, and investors have been upset about this gap for years. It looks like Scotland has made up its mind to do something about it. The University of Glasgow is starting an MSc in MedTech Innovation in September. This program is designed to address the issue that good ideas don’t always turn into useful products. The 12-month program was created…

There is a type of persuasion that doesn’t make itself known. It isn’t talked about in speeches or press releases. It works slowly, with data and time, until the case is so clear that people who make decisions can’t ignore it any longer. That’s pretty much what happened in Argentina with preschool education over the last 30 years, and the effects are still being felt today. The World Bank gave Argentina two new projects worth a total of $1 billion in November 2024. Half of the money went to programs that help pregnant women and kids up to age four…

At any given time in the afternoon, a doctor might be sitting next to an engineer in a building on Stanford’s Palo Alto campus, and a data scientist might be in the next room running analytics on client outcomes. It’s not a tech company. It’s medicine, or more accurately, a new version of what medicine wants to become. DREAM stands for “Division for Research and Education in Academic Medicine.” It was officially launched by Stanford’s Department of Medicine on September 1, 2023. It put six centers and programs that were already in place under one administrative roof. On paper, that…