Author: Jerry Leger

You can see them if you drive through practically any struggling American city. The loading bay is painted in vivid primary colors in a converted warehouse. A storefront in a strip mall, wedged between a Family Dollar and a check-cashing establishment. Occasionally, a brand-new, shiny structure appears to have accidentally fallen from a wealthier zip code. These are charter schools that were marketed to parents, politicians, and donors as the solution to America’s most dysfunctional districts for more than thirty years. The pitch was fairly straightforward. Release the schools from central office bureaucracy, union contracts, and legacy system inertia. Allow…

The first thing you notice when you walk by a Success Academy building on a weekday morning is the silence. It’s not so much the lack of kids as it is their peculiar orderliness. With their backpacks stacked against a wall like soldiers’ gear, kindergarteners dressed in orange and navy file down the narrow sidewalks of Harlem. Parents were waiting right outside the door; some were holding coffee, others were looking at their phones, and the majority were silently optimistic. Observing this gives me the impression that something is working. Additionally, something might be breaking. Eva Moskowitz started the network…

There is most likely a cardboard box of VR headsets collecting dust somewhere in a middle school’s storage closet in central Pennsylvania. It’s likely that the foam padding is beginning to peel. If the charging cables were ever organized, they have long since become entangled in a knot that would be impossible for a substitute teacher to untangle. This is the low-key, unglamorous aftermath of one of the biggest technological bets ever placed on American education, and it provides you with nearly all the information you need to understand why teachers, the people the industry was supposed to support, never…

Almost no one in the education community anticipated that school closures in March 2020 would have a long-term impact on enrollment. It was a straightforward, almost reassuring assumption: families would re-line up with lunchboxes in hand once the buses resumed service, and the odd detour through Zoom classrooms would become pandemic folklore. That is not the case. After six years, over 3.4 million American children continue to learn at home, a number that is higher than the pre-pandemic baseline and obstinately refuses to give up. It’s difficult to ignore how quiet this shift has been. It was not propelled by…

When something goes wrong with a vaulter, a certain silence falls over a track meet. The run-up, the plant, and the snap of the pole bending are all audible to everyone. The body then began to move through the air. And occasionally, something else happens in place of the well-known thump of foam absorbing a landing. a more robust sound. The kind that forces coaches to begin walking before they have made up their minds to do so. When first-year vaulter Rohan Thota hit the ground next to the pit rather than in it in February, Grinnell College experienced something…

On a Saturday morning, you will hear it before you see it if you drive past practically any American public park. That plasticky, hollow pop. The sound of a whiffle ball striking a composite paddle reverberated off the chain-link, interspersed with occasional groans and laughter. This was primarily a retiree sport a few years ago. The gym instructors driving by are beginning to take notes, and the people on those courts are growing younger. Pickleball in high school is no longer a curiosity. In the last two years, participation among those aged 13 to 17 has more than doubled, which…

Perhaps sixty children wearing helmets are conducting drills on a recently painted turf field behind a public middle school on a soggy Saturday in suburban Columbus. That field was a soccer pitch five years ago. Most of those parents probably couldn’t have explained the difference between an attackman and a long-pole midfielder ten years ago, let alone the name of a lacrosse stick. They are now watching a sport that, until recently, was almost exclusively associated with a region of zip codes between Baltimore and Boston while sitting in folding chairs and sipping coffee on the sidelines. The oldest team…

Ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles are not typically the first questions students ask. Time is of the essence. What is the actual duration of the AP Environmental Science exam, and how much of it will be manageable? Two hours and forty minutes is the official response. After the test, the honest response—whispered in the hallways—is that those 160 minutes don’t go by at the same pace. The exam is scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. local time on Friday, May 15, 2026, according to the College Board. A lot is shaped just by that detail. The majority of students enter the…

Before the Grizzlies jersey and the All-Rookie selections, Brandon Clarke was just another lanky forward from Phoenix who was unsure of his place in the world. In the fall of 2015, he ended up at San Jose State, a school that, let’s face it, doesn’t typically host future first-round picks. Nobody considered the Spartans to be a basketball factory. Nevertheless, something began to take shape somewhere on that campus, between the empty Mountain West road trips and the practice gyms. On paper, his rookie campaign was modest. Sixth Man of the Year in the Mountain West, with three starts in…

Strongsville High School defies easy summarization. On a weekday morning, it appears to be just another suburban Ohio campus when you drive past the brick exterior on Lunn Road. Buses are parked, children are carrying backpacks, and a flag is flapping in the wind off Cuyahoga County. However, a more nuanced image begins to take shape when you spend some time there, conversing with parents in the parking lot or looking through decades’ worth of clippings. It’s a school with genuine pride, genuine wounds, and a community that appears to have reconciled both. Located within the Strongsville City School District,…