Author: Nola Jones

The fact that one of America’s most influential advocates for early literacy was raised in a household with very little reading material is particularly ironic. Dolly Parton was born in 1946 in a one-room cabin near the Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center, Tennessee. She was the fourth of twelve children born into a family that her father characteristically described as “dirt poor.” Her dad couldn’t read or write. There weren’t exactly many books. However, for some reason, that origin story is exactly what makes what she later created feel so different from the typical celebrity philanthropist playbook. After graduating…

Most people are familiar with one version of the Bruce Willis story, which includes the action scenes, the smirk, and the witty police officer. However, if you go back far enough to a Carneys Point, New Jersey, high school hallway, the scene is very different. A child who struggles academically, stutters, and lacks a clear plan. The extent to which that environment influenced everything that followed is easy to overlook. In Carneys Point Township, a small, blue-collar town in Salem County with about 8,000 residents, Willis went to Penns Grove High School. His classmates referred to him as “Buck-Buck,” which…

Most parents probably didn’t give Edline much thought when Montgomery County Public Schools quietly phased it out in 2017 and replaced it with something called myMCPS Classroom. a fresh login page. a fresh dashboard. It’s just another issue with the educational system. However, in retrospect, that change represented more than just a software update. Not everyone has been persuaded that MCPS’s calculated wager on a specific vision of what digital learning ought to look like paid off. Canvas, a learning management system developed by Instructure, is the foundation of myMCPS Classroom. It appears sufficiently polished from the outside. After logging…

A small detail on Lindbergh Early Childhood Education’s enrollment page says more than any brochure could. The tuition-based classroom spots are filled by the time the majority of families learn about the program. Only children who qualify through special education services are able to use the application portal. For everyone else, word-of-mouth and timing are crucial. It is challenging to produce that kind of quiet demand. Usually, it indicates that something is actually working. Located on South Lindbergh Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri, Lindbergh Early Childhood Education is nestled on the Lindbergh High School campus. A preschool and a high…

It’s not always a glamorous campus. There isn’t an expansive quad with students relaxing in between classes at some famous university, nor is there ivy. However, when you enter practically any community college in California on a Tuesday morning, you can tell right away that the place is vibrant. People are at work. After years away, some are going back to school. Others are eighteen and trying to figure out what to do next. Some are already working and obtaining a certificate that may increase their pay. No four-year institution can quite match this combination. Over 2.2 million students are…

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was quietly uploading music to SoundCloud in between shifts while bagging groceries at an Econo supermarket in Puerto Rico before he was selling out stadiums or performing at Super Bowl halftime. It’s worth pondering that picture of a young man silently constructing something massive while working a checkout line. Compared to most biographies, it provides more information about his journey. Growing up, Bad Bunny lived in Vega Baja, a small town that he has said is definitely not a city. He enrolled in the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo’s audiovisual communications program after graduating from…

By all measures, Felicia Childress’s classroom at Garrett Elementary in Gary, Indiana, was unremarkable. Worn desks, half-clean windows letting in midwestern light, and the typical sound of kids discovering their identities. Michael Jackson, a quiet and perceptive boy, was one of those kids. Years later, Childress recalled him with fondness as a child who showed up, paid attention, and possessed something more difficult to describe than talent. Looking back, it seems odd that one of the most well-known people of the 20th century once sat in a kindergarten classroom with everyone else. On August 29, 1958, Michael Joseph Jackson was…

There’s a version of Caitlin Clark’s story that gets told constantly — the deep three-pointers, the sold-out arenas, the WNBA draft night in 2024. What gets mentioned far less often is that while she was breaking NCAA scoring records at the University of Iowa, she was also earning a Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing. That detail tends to get buried beneath the highlights. It probably shouldn’t. Clark grew up in West Des Moines, Iowa, attending Dowling Catholic High School — a school her own grandfather had deep ties to, having served as football coach and school administrator there. That…

Observing a group of first-year students kneel in the mud of an east Leicestershire field and extract coins that haven’t been touched since the Middle Ages is subtly amazing. There are no coins on display. Not copies. Real ones, small and corroded, bearing the burden of a life no one can recall. At Loddington, where the University of Leicester has returned for its second year of active excavation at what was once a thriving medieval settlement, that has been the reality this summer. The site is being worked by fifty students from the School of Heritage and Culture and University…

Driving through Clayton, a Melbourne suburb in the southeast that doesn’t really stand out, has a subtle yet striking quality. The type of neighborhood that most people pass through rather than actively seek out has flat streets and modest housing. Then, almost out of nowhere, a vast, verdant, and unexpectedly magnificent campus appears. Monash University is that. It doesn’t yell. However, for almost 70 years, it has been constructing something important. Monash opened its doors to just 357 students in 1961. It was founded in 1958 on about 100 hectares of former farmland, some of which was once part of…