Author: paige laevy

Ozzy Osbourne’s educational background has an almost unyieldingly ordinary quality. Rock gods did not come from Birchfield Road School in Aston, a working-class area of Birmingham that smelled of damp brick and factory smoke. It produced men who clocked in, machinists, and apprentices. And young John Michael Osbourne appeared to be headed in that direction for the majority of his time there. He was not a bright student in the traditional sense. He struggled to keep up, was teased because he couldn’t read fluently. Years later, he would talk candidly about his dyslexia and the fact that he was only…

Around dismissal, the scene at a dual language elementary school in Austin, Brooklyn, or suburban Denver is usually the same. Parents congregate on the sidewalk, some conversing in Spanish, some in English, and some switching between the two with ease. With their backpacks partially zipped, kids pour out, yelling at one another in whatever language comes out first. On the surface, it appears to be the future that many people have been promised. two languages. Two societies. One classroom. Everyone is triumphant. However, the more you examine, the more intricate it becomes. Three main objectives served as the foundation for…

When you drive west on State Highway 107 in McAllen, the scenery changes in a manner typical of Valley landscapes: strip malls thinning into open lots, palm trees leaning where the wind has had its way with them, and somewhere along that stretch, a small building where kids spend most of their waking hours learning to think in two languages at once. You might drive by Mommyland Bilingual Academy a hundred times before you realize what’s really going on inside. It’s located in that peacefully bustling area of the Rio Grande Valley. On its own, the academy is unique in…

A certain type of WordPress plugin is silent. It doesn’t sponsor conferences, purchase advertisements on developer podcasts, or bombard your inbox with onboarding emails as soon as you install it. Among them is Polylang. However, if you walk into practically any WordPress agency in Paris, Madrid, or Buenos Aires, you’ll find someone who has been using it for years and probably has a quiet opinion about why it’s superior to the alternatives. A portion of the story is revealed by the numbers. There are more than 800,000 active installations, a 4.7 rating, and fifty built-in languages. However, in an ecosystem…

When you pass a dual language immersion classroom, the first thing you notice is the silence—not the lack of sound, but the lack of English. In Mandarin, a kindergartener requests a pencil. In Spanish, a second-grader corrects another. It has a serene quality that you wouldn’t anticipate from a Tuesday morning in a public school hallway. Though many districts are still unsure of what to make of it, it’s possible that this is how American education will actually develop in the future. Compared to other states, North Carolina has been conducting this experiment for the longest. In 1990, when bilingual…

The way Maria Montessori’s name keeps coming up over a century after she first opened that dusty classroom in a Roman tenement has an almost stubborn quality. Today, whether you enter a well-run Montessori classroom in Connecticut or Karachi, you will notice the same peculiar silence. Kids moving with intention. wooden trays. A four-year-old frowning intently as he pours water from one tiny pitcher into another, as though the act itself were a question worth answering. Montessori had no intention of becoming a teacher. Teaching was one of the few doors a woman could enter in late nineteenth-century Italy, and…

January saw the arrival of the first letter. Another about former Louise Dean students followed in March. Then, on a Wednesday afternoon, May brought the kind of news that no parent wants to read: a threat actor was attempting to use the same data that PowerSchool claimed had been erased to extort school boards. Families in Calgary now perceive the breach as a slow leak that is never fully fixed rather than an event. The Calgary Board of Education has been using PowerSchool, the student information system, for years if you haven’t been paying attention to the back-end software that…

I can’t stop thinking about a small, somewhat disorganized classroom in a Lahore primary school annex where a teacher is kneeling on the ground with a tray of wooden blocks and seven four-year-olds. There are no worksheets. Don’t practice the alphabet. It’s just blocks, and she keeps asking in Urdu, “What do you think will happen if we put this one on top?” The world is still debating whether or not this type of scene qualifies as education, despite Friedrich Froebel sketching it out nearly 200 years ago. The years from birth to roughly eight, or third grade in most…

The first thing you notice when you walk into a bilingual preschool isn’t the noise, though there is plenty of it. It’s the small switch. A four-year-old asks for milk in German, then turns and tells her friend something about a missing shoe in English, all without pausing. Adults find this disorienting. The children don’t. They’ve already learned something most of us forget by adulthood, which is that languages are tools, not walls. The accadis Bilingual Preschool, like a growing number of similar programs across Europe and the United States, runs on what educators call the immersion method. Each mixed-age…

Most people haven’t given it a name yet, but there is a subtle change taking place on the internet. Ask about their website when you walk into a dental office in Toronto, a boutique hotel in Marrakech, or a small bakery in Houston. Now, an increasing number of them respond in the same manner. They say, almost casually, that we have it in two languages. As though it were just like having a phone number. This wasn’t always the case. English would do the heavy lifting and everyone else would have to figure it out, according to an unwritten web…