Author: Errica Jensen

Graduate students at Harvard’s School of Education are being asked to unlearn a belief that the majority of them have held throughout their careers on a peaceful stretch of Appian Way in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The researchers and faculty who are changing the way the school prepares its next generation of principals believe that the notion that some people are naturally creative and others just aren’t is not only incorrect. It is actively damaging. For years, Project Zero principal investigator Edward Clapp has been advancing this claim. Clapp does not think that creativity is a personal quality. He is an advocate…

On a Tuesday morning in Tulsa, you might enter a third-grade classroom that doesn’t look much like school. A child in the back row is constructing a model out of leftover cardboard while explaining her design decisions to no one in particular. Near the window, two boys are having a sincere argument about whether the conclusion of their story makes sense. Instead of responding to the questions, the instructor is shifting between tables. It appears a little disorganized. Most likely, it is. Additionally, there is a plausible argument that it is currently the most significant development in American education. For…

On any given Wednesday afternoon, a professional muralist and a twelve-year-old are crouched next to each other in a building on Milwaukee’s north side, staring at the same partially completed wall as if they were trying to solve the same puzzle. There is no sign of the instructor. In a way, that’s the point. For years, Milwaukee has been conducting one of the nation’s more genuinely fascinating experiments in arts education, but it hasn’t received nearly the national attention it merits. Working artists and arts organizations are being directly integrated into public schools and youth-serving spaces throughout the city through…

For more than a century, crayons have been manufactured in a building in Easton, Pennsylvania. The subtle scent of paraffin wax and pigment permeates the area around the factory, a detail that seems almost too obvious when writing about a business that has been subtly integrating itself into one of the more somber discussions in American education over the past few years. Most people outside of elementary school classrooms haven’t yet noticed that Crayola, the brand most adults associate with carpet stains and childhood birthday presents, has been doing something worth taking a closer look at. It’s difficult to ignore…

On a clear morning, you begin to notice things as you drive east through Tennessee. The area between Cookeville and Crossville is home to a particular type of working environment, including furniture workshops, auto parts suppliers, and small manufacturing facilities where people have made careers out of their hands in ways that are rarely discussed in discussions about education reform. Therefore, it’s an odd setting for what may be one of the more subtly fascinating experiments taking place in American public education at the moment. The first state in the nation to implement a long-term, federally recognized teacher apprenticeship program…

Some institutions function best when no one is around. It’s not because it has anything to conceal, but rather because attention tends to complicate things: funders become anxious, bureaucracies become possessive, and the meticulous, slow process of creating something genuine is disrupted by the cacophony of people suddenly vying for credit. This has always been understood by the New York Foundation, which was quietly founded in 1909 with a million-dollar bequest from a man most people have never heard of. The majority of readers have probably scrolled past its name twelve times without pausing. And it’s most likely intentional. It…

Like most terrible things these days, the notice came via email. The message was succinct and impersonal to Marie Myung-Ok Lee, a writer who had spent years preparing for an NEA fellowship application—carefully putting together a proposal about her Korean immigrant father’s imprisonment and suicide. For the fiscal year 2026, the NEA had discontinued its Creative Writing Fellowships program. The category had been eliminated. With a hint of bureaucracy, the email went on to say that “receiving this news can be disappointing.” The situation was probably understated. The official language of grant cycles and budget announcements tends to flatten into…

The wealthier families in San Antonio have quietly grown accustomed to a certain kind of humiliation. After completing the application, sending in the portfolio, and making a few phone calls, they wait. Not for a spot at any of the better-funded private schools in the city, like Keystone or the San Antonio Academy. In a public program, they wait for a seat. One with no tuition fees. The San Antonio Independent School District is home to one. And one that rejects far more families than it takes in, depending on the year. When the Advanced Learning Academy was founded in…

Early in the morning, before traffic picks up and the corner stores roll back their security gates, a certain kind of silence descends upon a neglected neighborhood. You see things that statistics can’t fully convey when you stand on one of Jacksonville’s more rugged blocks. Unfinished paint. A playground where the swings have been absent for many years. The way a block can simultaneously feel forgotten and strangely resilient. That’s about the world that Jacksonville’s burgeoning creative learning movement quietly entered—not with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a barrage of local news cameras, but with the kind of slow, methodical effort…

The timing of all of this is subtly ironic. Teachers tapped desks and gave students who couldn’t sit still a warning look for decades. It was disorder to wiggle. Tapping served as a diversion. These restless children, who rocked on their chairs and clicked their pens during every lecture, may have been doing something truly beneficial, according to evidence being produced by a Stanford research team. A study conducted by Stanford’s Accelerator for Learning, which was published in late 2025, examined the effects of allowing middle school students to move freely during class while seated on “wiggle stools” rather than…