Author: Jerry Leger

The vote took place on a Tuesday, just like the majority of events in New Hampshire do: in a school gym with folding chairs, under slightly humming fluorescent lights. The town had decided to eliminate its school budget by the time the total was announced. Don’t cut it. Don’t make it tighter. Reduce its length until it is near the bone. Cuts totaling three million dollars, a closed school building, and a faculty lounge that has reportedly been becoming more and more empty ever since. These days, you see things like this in Rochester. It was evident in Concord, where…

The email appeared in inboxes on a Tuesday, as is the case with most policy changes these days. It featured a friendly product video and mild language. Google, the company that surreptitiously infiltrated almost every American classroom between the 2020 pandemic scramble and the Chromebook rollouts, announced a comprehensive update to how its educational tools will function. Before the first bell rang, teachers, half of whom were still sipping lukewarm coffee in shared staff rooms, found themselves attempting to understand what it truly meant. Despite the announcement’s seeming modesty, the change is significant. Google is reorganizing how Workspace for Education…

Antonio Luna thought he had discovered his next chapter when he left his base in North Carolina. Because recruiters were permitted to enter his base and make direct student pitches, he enrolled at DeVry University after serving in the Marines and earning his benefits. He remembered that particular detail. They had to be legitimate if the military allowed them entry. He realized that trust had cost him four years by 2018, when he had a bachelor’s degree but was unemployed in his field. His tale is not unique. It resembles a template. The reasons behind for-profit colleges’ decades-long construction of…

The contradiction strikes you as soon as you enter a Somerset ISD classroom on a Tuesday afternoon, even before anyone speaks. The lights are humming. The air conditioner is sputtering. The campus ran out of pencils two weeks ago, so a teacher in her mid-forties gives one to a child from a personal stash stored in a desk drawer. A district is starting construction on a $70 million stadium if you drive ninety minutes north. same state. the same year. The funding formula is supposedly the same. From the outside, it’s difficult to ignore how odd this appears. Comptroller Glenn…

This month, the purple and white placards reappeared in Sheffield. Despite the chilly Yorkshire wind, no one carrying one appeared to be bothered. This is becoming commonplace for Sheffield Hallam University employees. Perhaps too familiar. When the results of the vote were announced on May 5th, they were more than just a yes. It sounded more like a roar. Strike action was supported by nearly 88% of voting members, and turnout exceeded 72%, the highest level the branch has seen in recent memory. When people are indifferent, that kind of number doesn’t occur. There will now be eighteen days of…

Every May, at noon, a certain silence descends upon high school computer labs nationwide. After settling into their seats, students launch the Bluebook app and spend the next three hours staring at a screen. The AP Computer Science A exam is that long. Not two. Not four. Three. On paper, it seems straightforward enough, but anyone who has actually watched it will tell you that the number only partially captures the story. The test divides neatly in half. 42 multiple-choice questions take 90 minutes, followed by four free-response problems where students must write Java by hand—or, more recently, by keyboard—for…

In high school hallways, May 15 mornings always feel a little off. Half asleep, clutching water bottles and graphing calculators that have seen better days, students arrive earlier than usual. Some people don’t talk. Some make nervous jokes about nitrogen cycles and ecosystems. By eight in the morning, they are waiting for the start of the AP Environmental Science exam while sitting in front of laptops with the Bluebook app glowing back at them. Even though thousands of schools perform this little ritual, most students entering it are unaware of what they are about to encounter. Two hours and forty…

Only because you are standing a short distance from one of Britain’s oldest botanic gardens does a certain kind of silence fall over Royal Hospital Road in the late morning. The Chelsea Physic Garden and the English Gardening School share the same address at number 66, and the arrangement seems almost too good to be coincidental. Notebooks, secateurs, and occasionally a flask of coffee that they forgot to finish on the train are carried by students when they arrive. The school has been in operation since 1983, and it appears to have been waiting for you most mornings. It was…

On a May morning just before the start of the AP Statistics exam, a certain silence descends upon a high school gymnasium. Calculators are arranged like tiny plastic soldiers on desks. A pencil is always forgotten by someone. Three hours of an adolescent’s springtime disappear into chi-square tables and confidence intervals as a proctor reads instructions in a tone that sounds a little too formal for the setting. The exam itself is divided nearly surgically in half over the course of three hours. Forty multiple-choice questions in ninety minutes. Six free-response problems in ninety minutes. It sounds generous on paper.…

The exam lasts for three hours. This is the technical response, which College Board displays on its website in a simple, almost informal font as if it were unimportant. 12 p.m. local time on Thursday, May 7, 2026. There is a 90-minute multiple-choice period, a 90-minute free response period, and a brief intermission that students seldom recall afterward. On paper, three hours seems doable. The number doesn’t really capture the experience, as anyone who has actually sat through it will attest. The fact that the 2026 AP Statistics Exam is neither a clean digital test nor a clean paper test…