Author: Jerry Leger

On the third weekend of February, there is a distinct difference when you stroll through downtown Madison, Wisconsin. Parents with duffel bags are crammed into the Marriott hotel lobby. There is a line outside the sports bar two blocks from the Kohl Center before noon. By nine in the morning, the parking lots are packed. It’s not a college rivalry or a professional game that’s attracting all these people. High school students are participating in WIAA state competitions, and for some reason, the city is nearly full. Rarely does this aspect of the sports economy make the front page. Researchers…

The morning she departed was not particularly dramatic. No parting words to the coworkers she had known for years, no last look at the bulletin boards covered in student artwork, no tearful farewell in the hallway. She simply turned in the letter, picked up a few items from her desk, and left. However, the events that followed were anything but peaceful. Within days, thousands of educators, parents, and former students from Alabama to Oregon were reading her resignation letter, forwarding it, and expressing their emotions in the comment sections. Some claim it was leaked, while others claim it was shared.…

A woman named Serita Taylor moved a wardrobe to one side of her son’s bedroom in a purple house on a hilltop street in Oakland, California, and dubbed it a classroom. She was able to take an early morning nap, wake up, and begin teaching by eight because of her overnight editing job. Her one-student business was called “Field City Academy.” A handwritten timetable was affixed to a wall-mounted poster board. It sounds spontaneous, almost casual. However, what Taylor created in that space is actually a part of a much bigger movement that academics, educators, and policy observers are just…

Kansas Girls Flag Football is now recognized as an official high school sport. Title IX won’t ever look the same. Just before something permanently changes, a certain kind of silence descends upon a space. When the Kansas State High School Activities Association voted 61 to 1 on girls flag football in late April, there was probably a brief period of silence before something louder took over. Something that had been developing for years in parking lots, gyms, and temporary practice fields throughout a state where football has always meant one thing, for one type of athlete. That is now changing.…

Recently, a certain type of anxiety has taken hold in American public schools; it’s not the well-known concern about test scores or teacher shortages, but rather something more difficult to identify. These days, you can sense it as soon as someone steps up to the microphone at almost any school board meeting in a contested county. Instructors move around in their seats. Administrators gaze at their notebooks. Everyone is anticipating the next demand, objection, or legal threat masquerading as a parental concern. The so-called “parents’ rights” movement has created this world. And the world is truly peculiar. Over the past…

Something seems a little strange when you stroll through the hallways of practically any American high school on a Tuesday morning. It’s just a low, constant hum of tiredness, neither dramatic nor obvious. In between classes, students are glued to their phones, their shoulders taut, and they move with a mechanical efficiency that belies their sixteen years of age. It’s possible that the majority of adults pass it without giving it any thought. However, it is now impossible to ignore the numbers. Approximately 85% of students in the 1950s scored lower on anxiety tests than the average American high school…

On a weekday morning, a certain silence descends upon the countryside of Leicestershire. One of the oldest Roman roads in Britain, the Fosse Way passes through fields that haven’t altered much over the ages. Then, almost without warning, 200 acres of parkland open up around a group of Victorian Gothic structures that resemble small stately homes rather than schools. This is Ratcliffe College, which has been operating covertly since 1845. Ratcliffe started out as a seminary under the guidance of Blessed Father Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, the Italian philosopher-priest who founded the Institute of Charity. It was transformed into an upper-class boys’…

Standing outside a university building you’ve only seen in photos and attempting to determine whether it feels right has a strangely particular quality. Exeter University’s open days are specifically intended for that moment, which is half-curious and half-nervous. And as autumn 2026 approaches, the university appears to have a better understanding of that than most. The undergraduate open days for this year have three confirmed dates. The Penryn Campus in Cornwall, close to Falmouth, will open on October 10th, while the Streatham and St Luke’s campuses in Exeter will open on October 3rd and 24th. The university is already gathering…

A certain type of institution never quite makes it into the national discourse, not because it’s failing but rather because it’s too preoccupied with its actual operations. That’s how Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, feels. Sitting on a 299-acre urban campus that most people outside Southeast Texas couldn’t locate on a map, Lamar has spent the last decade growing in ways that are genuinely difficult to ignore, enrolling over 18,000 students as of fall 2025 and earning recognition as one of the fastest-growing universities in the state. It had no lofty goals at first. In September 1923, South Park Junior…

Observing school closures in one of the world’s wealthiest metropolitan areas is subtly unsettling. Elementary schools in San Jose, the center of Silicon Valley and home to venture capital and billion-dollar campuses, are closing. Despite a room full of parents protesting, the San Jose Unified School District board voted out five of them in late March 2026. Even though it’s nearly impossible to ignore the contrast, here we are. It took time for the five schools—Lol, Empire Gardens, Terrell, Gardner, and Canoas—to vanish. For years, budget sheets that no longer added up and steadily declining enrollment numbers had been the…