Author: Jerry Leger

She held a folder containing her acceptance letter while she sat in the back row of a freshman orientation at a midsize public university in Massachusetts. That morning, her mother had ironed her shirt. Because he couldn’t afford to miss his shift, her father had driven her for three hours before turning around. She was looking up the definition of a syllabus on Google by the second week. By the sixth, she was considering returning home. Since no one in the school asked, nobody knew. In this country, we have a narrative about higher education that frequently includes the word…

Like most underfunded American schools, Walter H. Dyett High School on Chicago’s South Side has a hallway that smells slightly of old paper and floor polish. The building, which bears the name of a renowned jazz educator, no longer has a band class. Nor is there a chorus. When they are offered, Advanced Placement courses are presented on a laptop screen. Seventeen-year-old Diamond McCullough is more aware of the irony than the legislators who planned her schooling. The majority of the students at her school are Black. The curriculum opens up like a foreign land twenty blocks away. This is…

The idea sounds simple enough until you start running the numbers. Double what America pays its teachers. Lift the floor, narrow the gap, end the slow bleed of talent out of the classroom. On a bumper sticker, it’s almost poetic. In a state budget meeting, it’s something else entirely — closer to a migraine. Walk into almost any public school in the country on a Tuesday morning and you notice the same things. A first-year teacher hauling a plastic crate of books down a hallway that smells faintly of floor wax. A veteran in her fifties grading papers during what’s…

Before anyone uttered the word “hantavirus,” the hallway had an unpleasant odor. Later, in the cautious, half-embarrassed manner that adults speak when they realize they’ve noticed something and dismissed it, that was the part that teachers kept bringing up. There was a slight, dry, almost dusty smell close to a second-floor storage closet. Not very dramatic. Between the cafeteria fryer and the mildew in the locker rooms, it’s exactly the kind of thing that a busy school building absorbs into its everyday noise. Then droppings were discovered by a custodian. Then more excrement. The word “rodent” was then used in…

There’s a good chance that the ground beneath the players’ feet isn’t ground at all if you walk into practically any high school stadium in America today. Thermoplastic fiber, rubber crumble, and synthetic backing make up this manufactured surface, which costs about $1 million to install and contains enough corporate fingerprints to give a school board lawyer the creeps. Although there has been a simmering debate about artificial turf since the 1960s, things have changed recently. The voice of the money has grown louder. Josh Murnane, the district’s activities director, was open about the situation when Neenah High School in…

One spring afternoon, a professor in a Massachusetts classroom discovered that twelve of her students had turned in work that wasn’t theirs. It was created by a machine, not lifted from a journal or copied from a classmate. Twelve were caught in a single class during a semester. How many she missed is unknown to her. People should be more troubled by that number than they are. After joining the academic honesty board at her university, Rebecca Hamlin, a political science and legal studies professor at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst, became aware of the pattern almost immediately. She claims to…

Driving through Panama City Beach and arriving at a campus that resembles a small college rather than a public high school in Florida is somewhat unexpected. The enormous structure, which is 330,000 square feet in size, is located in a neighborhood that is more well-known for spring break visitors than for academic success. However, J.R. Arnold High School has been accomplishing things that much older and more prestigious Bay County institutions have just not been able to. Arnold, a $34 million project created by JRA Architects, opened for business in August 2000. It is officially the youngest high school in…

In Donovan Mitchell’s high school narrative, there is a minor detail that is frequently overlooked, but it’s the kind of detail that most likely mattered more than anyone realized at the time. He wasn’t meant to be a child who only played basketball. The gym wasn’t even his first love for the majority of his early years. Mitchell’s father was a director of player relations for the New York Mets, and he spent his childhood exploring Major League Baseball locker rooms, admiring pitchers, and taping posters of David Wright to the wall of his bedroom. The family inherited baseball. The…

On a Tuesday afternoon, you can see them in any San Francisco co-working space: hoodied founders in their early twenties with laptops open, AirPods in, pitch decks loaded. Most of them are nineteen, and they are certain that the next eighteen months will either make them wealthy or turn them into a cautionary tale. Surprisingly, many of them dropped out of college. Some people use it as a credential. They’ll say, “Dropped out,” in the same way that an older generation might say “Yale ’98.” That pride has a well-known mythology. Gates departed from Harvard. Zuckerberg departed from Harvard. After…

After the last assembly, after the parents have left the parking lot, and after the last piece of crepe paper has been removed from a classroom wall, a certain kind of silence descends upon a school building in late July. Henley’s St. Mary’s Prep School will soon be aware of that silence, and it won’t end in September this time. The school is closing after almost a century. About fifty of its students and eleven staff members will walk down the street to Rupert House, another private school in the same town, to continue their education. It appears to be…