Author: Nelson Rosario

There is something almost routine about the way that legislative chambers talk about the welfare of children. Changes are being made. Members can speak. There are votes. Then, sometime between the Hansard transcripts and the Parliament TV recordings, something really important is decided, though it usually doesn’t get a lot of attention. The UK House of Lords looked at the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill during five days of report stage scrutiny, from the middle of January to the beginning of February 2026. The bill is very broad and covers a lot of different topics. It includes free breakfast clubs…

There’s something quietly important going on in Madrid’s education corridors, and it has nothing to do with fancy technology or reform packages worth billions of euros. That’s almost not true. The regional government of the Spanish capital has said that kids in primary schools will only be able to use screens for two hours a week. That’s it. For kids ages three to six, they’ll only get one hour of supervised time. For babies and kids younger than three, screens are not allowed at all. When the rules go into effect in September, they will affect about 500,000 kids in…

Another interesting thing about this group is that they were already holding international seminars on children and the environment before the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. That group is called OMEP, which stands for “Organisation Mondiale pour l’Education Préscolaire.” For decades, its UK chapter has done something that international policy documents don’t usually do: it has taken lofty language about children’s rights and turned it into something that nursery workers can use on a Monday morning. If you go back far enough, Article 29 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child from 1990 is where it all…

There was a third-grade class in Massachusetts where a child got a “Certificate of Completion” for playing a drag-and-drop computer game that had almost nothing to do with AI. The certificate, which was made in collaboration with Amazon, was written in language that people would understand. Most honest people would say it was a branding exercise. It was in a backpack on its way home before any parent had a chance to say anything. Something has been quietly building up in American public schools for a few years now. That moment, which was small and almost funny, shows it. Instead…

When you walk into a modern classroom and see thirty kids staring at thirty different screens, each one supposedly on their own personalized learning journey, it’s a little unsettling. It looks like the next day. It might not work like one. Over the past few years, there has been a slow but clear change in how people feel about educational technology. Parents have been antsy. The teachers have been angry. People in the public eye, lawmakers, and researchers have all come to the same unsettling conclusion: the digital tools that schools have spent tens of billions of dollars on may…

There’s a quiet significance to the moment when a local education project crosses a border. It’s not easy to move most frameworks. They are made for certain school systems, cultures, and ideas about what kids should know and when they should know it. The fact that OMEP UK’s Environmental Rating Scale for Sustainable Development in Early Childhood was adopted and tested in ten countries was something to pay attention to. The scale was based on British early years practice. It was OMEP’s job to make sure that the Environmental Rating Scale for Sustainable Development in Early Childhood (ERS-SDEC) was used…

There’s a certain kind of silence in a crowd when someone says something true. Not the kind of quiet that comes from being polite or bored, but the kind where people stop moving around in their seats and looking at their phones and just sit there, holding it. At the 78th OMEP World Conference in Poznań, Poland, that’s what was said to have settled over the plenary hall during what many attendees called one of the most moving keynotes they had seen in recent years. Educators, researchers, and policymakers from all over the world came to Adam Mickiewicz University from…

In Arizona, where summer temperatures regularly reach 110 degrees, Phoenix Modern started a crowdfunding campaign to replace a broken air conditioner. Parent Johanna Harris says something clicked. It wasn’t really frustration; more like slowly realizing that a small, embarrassing detail was a sign of something much bigger. “As we started digging,” she said, “it was like, OK, we have no options under this governance and our school’s going to close.” Phoenix Modern is a charter school for grades K–8 in the middle of Phoenix, close to Central Avenue and Indian School Road. With this idea in mind, it opened in…

There is a certain kind of weariness that comes from trying to change something inside out. It’s the principal who stays late not because the students need her, but because the district’s paperwork does. Anyone who has worked in a big public school district has seen this happen. The teacher who had a better plan for the day but couldn’t get three people to agree with it. The idea that was slowly and without much drama turned into something that looked a lot like everything else. That was meant to be fixed by charter schools and innovation schools. Give school…

Almost every child’s brain does something that is hard to understand around the time of their second birthday. Every second, more than a million new neural connections are made. This has been proven scientifically for years. But in the US, policymakers have dealt with it like a footnote—as something that was tucked into social spending bills and family benefit packages, and mostly talked about in terms of gender equality and the economy of the workforce. Now, researchers at the Baker Institute are making a stronger case: early childhood education isn’t just about social policy. It’s about health policy. And the…