Author: Jerry Leger

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…

The scope of the operation is evident when you drive through Brampton on a weekday morning. Parents in puffer jackets shuffle kids toward low-slung brick buildings that appear to have been constructed in the same decade, school buses spread out across the suburbs, and crossing guards in neon vests stop traffic on residential streets. This is the daily routine of the Peel District School Board, which has somewhat surprisingly grown to be the nation’s second-largest school board. over 153,000 pupils. more than 259 schools. fifteen thousand employees. Even though it is by far the biggest employer in the Peel Region,…

This year, a certain silence has descended upon the offices of deans at prestigious professional schools. You’ll notice it if you stroll through the marble hallways of any of the top ten law schools in the early spring. The mission statements are still displayed on the walls. Photographs of students from clearly diverse backgrounds are still skillfully arranged in the brochures. However, the vocabulary has become thinner. Words like “equity,” “inclusion,” and “belonging” that were previously bold on landing pages have been subtly changed, switched, or hidden three clicks deep. These changes are not announced. They simply occur. Not all…

The children in the classroom, which is housed in a one-story brick structure halfway between a strip mall and a soybean field, are learning how to protect a hospital network from ransomware. Ten years ago, this kind of scene would have seemed ridiculous. At least in Indiana, where a modest but extraordinarily ambitious experiment in high school cybersecurity education is beginning to draw attention from locations that don’t typically look this far inland, it now feels almost normal. The Indiana Department of Education has partnered with the College Board, Project Lead The Way, Ivy Tech, the Indiana National Guard, the…

Behind metal detectors and a small group of guards who hardly looked up as people filed in, the room was located beneath the U.S. Capitol. Inside, executives, lawmakers, and lobbyists discussed a problem that no one in the nation has been able to solve while leaning over coffee cups. mass shootings at schools. It had an odd atmosphere, halfway between a wake and a sales floor. Noel Glacer was also present. The day a gunman entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed seventeen people, his son Jake was seated in a psychology class. Even now, Glacer’s voice has the…

On a chilly Tuesday morning, P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill appears to be just another elementary school in New York. Children wearing puffer jackets, a few anxious parents juggling tote bags and coffee cups, and a custodian pulling a recycling bin to the curb. However, the school’s parent-teacher association brought in over a million dollars last year. One million. brought up by parents. for a single public school. The combined revenue from the PTAs in District 23, which includes Ocean Hill and Brownsville, across the East River, was approximately $29,000. Not according to the school. In total. Spread over thousands…