Author: Nelson Rosario

The first thing you notice when you walk into a preschool in one of the wealthiest zip codes in America, like the leafier parts of Marin County or the coastline of Connecticut, is the silence. Not the quiet of disregard, but the serenity of a place with ample room, personnel, and other resources. Instead of plastic toys, there are wooden ones. windows that let light in. classrooms that seem purposeful in some way. The contrast becomes nearly uncomfortable to sit with after forty minutes of driving in the wrong direction. It’s not exactly a novel observation. But now that Jeff…

One statistic that frequently comes up in public health research circles is the kind that ought to be featured on the front page of all of the nation’s major newspapers. The estimated yearly economic cost of adverse childhood experiences in North America alone is close to $748 billion. The largest portion of that is carried by the United States. However, it is completely avoided in the majority of policy discussions concerning workforce decline, healthcare spending, and productivity. Growing up in homes characterized by substance abuse, mental illness, or incarceration, as well as exposure to domestic violence, emotional, physical, and sexual…

The soft glow of tablets on tables, a teacher guiding four-year-olds through an interactive letter-recognition app, and a projector projecting bright animals onto the wall during story time are all instantly noticeable when you walk into a well-funded preschool in a suburban area outside of Austin or Seattle. You’ll discover something different if you take a forty-minute drive into a lower-class neighborhood outside of that same city. older chairs. There is a single, occasionally broken desktop computer in the corner. Using laminated flashcards and whatever supplies she was able to purchase on her own last weekend, a teacher is doing…

When kids don’t fully comprehend what is being said to them, a certain kind of silence descends upon the classroom. Not the quiet of focus. A child sitting in a room that technically contains them, but hardly so, is more akin to the quiet of distance. That silence was a recurring theme for researchers who spent three years touring Pakistani schools, recording conversations, listening in on classes, and interviewing students long after they had completed their formal education. And in the end, they came to a precise and subtly devastating conclusion. The study looked at how language policy in multilingual…

A samosa has an almost ridiculously modest quality. It is a triangle of fried dough that is warm to the touch, smells of green chili and cumin, and fits in one hand. It can be found for almost nothing on a street corner in Delhi or Karachi, but it contains a history spanning over a millennium. The majority of people would accurately describe a samosa as “that Indian snack.” However, they would be lacking nearly all of its fascinating aspects. A samosa is essentially a fried pastry with a savory filling, typically spiced potatoes, peas, or onions, that is deep-fried…

It turns out that sugar has always appealed to bears. Long before any of us began to worry about our own diets, it was a deeply biological, survival-driven process that dates back millions of years, not in the cartoonish, honey-jar-raiding way we tend to imagine. The word “ursine,” which refers to or is associated with bears, has more significance than most people realize. It’s more than just a word from a biology textbook. It makes surprisingly timely connections between language, evolution, and diet. The word itself, ursus, which means bear in Latin, first appeared in English usage at some point…

A certain kind of pride quietly and unobtrusively permeates a community. It’s not always visible on billboards or banners. You can sense it in the way parents discuss the schools at the grocery store and in the way former students speak of their elementary school years as a crucial period they never fully moved on from. The schools are a major factor in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania’s sense of pride. The Mt. Lebanon School District serves about 34,000 people and is located in Allegheny County, a six-square-mile suburb of Pittsburgh in the southwest. Those figures don’t seem particularly noteworthy on paper.…

What transpired at Clayton High School on May 28 was almost inevitable. A principal approaches a podium. A microphone stops working. In a matter of hours, the very words that the school appeared to wish to keep contained were quoted in statements from civil rights organizations, read aloud by strangers in different states, and discussed on cable news. It didn’t work if the intention was to keep things quiet. Leen Hijaz, the valedictorian of Clayton High School in Johnston County, North Carolina, which is located in a suburban sprawl area just outside of Raleigh, had dedicated six months to a…

There is a certain type of college that never quite makes the national news—no glamorous controversy, no famous alumni mentioning it in interviews—but manages to continue turning out individuals who are capable of doing things. It seems like one of those places at North Herts College. With an administrative base in Letchworth Garden City and campuses in Stevenage and Hitchin, it operates with the quiet confidence of an organization that has figured something out, even if it hasn’t made that fact clear enough. There was no single founding vision for the college. As a result of Hertfordshire’s larger restructuring of…

Accounting students are familiar with a specific type of frustration: carefully typing into a spreadsheet cell while sitting in front of exam software that seems to be from a different era, only to watch the text vanish off the edge because nothing wraps. It’s a minor issue. However, little things add up when they are repeated under duress. Rebecca Gosden has vivid memories of it. She is employed by the forensic accounting firm FTI Consulting, and she previously took the Tax Compliance and Audit and Assurance exams on the previous system. She immediately agreed to test the new platform when…