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Miami Herald
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
How theater can teach kids about climate change
NEW YORK - Willow is a city kid who loves her neighborhood's tiny "pocket" park, especially the giant tree, Oakie, whose branches stretch across it. But she has a problem: The park is slated for redevelopment. And her friends and fellow park visitors - Rio, Kai, Ashe and Frankie - all have different ideas for what the park should become. Willow wants it restored to a nature-filled haven, while Rio hopes for a splash pad, Ashe a basketball court, Kai a vegetable garden and Frankie a quiet spot for accessing free Wi-Fi. In a theater near Times Square one Sunday earlier this year, my 4-year-old and I watched the young people argue, strategize and reflect, with help from a friendly parakeet who nudges them to work together to save the park. They were characters in "The Pocket Park Kids," a play for children that uses the idea of restoring a city park in disrepair as an allegory for reversing environmental degradation. The play got me thinking about how the arts, and theater in particular, can introduce kids as young as preschool to the climate crisis and ways to alleviate it. Anika Larsen, an actress and the play's co-creator, told me she sees theater as particularly effective at helping people process tough topics without dwelling in despair. "Artists have always been at the forefront of every movement because we're able to talk about things in ways that are uplifting and activating and inspiring, as opposed to demoralizing and begetting feelings of helplessness and hopelessness," she said. Of climate change, she added, "None of us really want to hear about it. It feels too overwhelming, it feels too scary." Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter. Larsen, who was nominated for a Tony for her role in "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical," said she was inspired to develop a climate-themed play after reading "yet another terrifying article about the climate crisis" and moving through feelings of panic and anger. A friend, Andrea Varga, a professor and sustainability faculty fellow at the State University of New York at New Paltz, told her she could have the biggest impact if she looked locally - which in Larsen's case was Broadway. Varga also introduced her to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, which became the frame for Larsen's play. Each character and their vision for the park represents a goal or several (Kai, who worries about his grandfather's health and wants nutritious food, represents zero hunger, while Rio, a proud Pisces, represents water and sanitation, as well as life below water). "As a framework for understanding the problems of the world, I think it is elegant," said Larsen of the global goals. "It's also a really helpful jumping-off point for taking action, because you identify what are the global goals that matter to you and how you can act within those goals." But the play itself does not mention them. "I didn't want it to be just overt teaching. I wanted it to be an entertaining and well-structured play," said Larsen. Instead, the actors break character at the end of the production and engage the audience in a discussion about sustainability. Kids in the audience raised their hands and chimed in about ideas for helping save the planet, including composting and using the subway. Roughly 800 public school students attended the play through a partnership between New York City schools and the New York City Children's Theater, which put on the Madden, a professor of elementary science education at The College of New Jersey, said that educators can experiment with ways to engage the youngest students in climate action. "While there are certainly challenges - teachers' time and resources are always stretched - integrating theater, even in small ways, can support climate education," she told me in an email. Madden said she's seen educators use short plays or skits as conversation starters around climate issues, and some schools partner with artists and theaters to supplement their curricula. Related: 'Why is the sky fuzzy?': Climate change lessons need to start as early as preschool Larsen infused her production with other sustainability lessons too. A board member of the Broadway Green Alliance, which promotes environmentally friendly practices in theater productions, she relied on reused materials for sets, props, puppets and more - "as much Broadway trash as we could," she said. Newspapers thrown onto the stage during the performance were salvaged from "Back to the Future," cardboard used on the set and for props was from "Hadestown," and - spoiler alert - the flowers that help beautify and restore the park were fashioned origami-style from discarded Playbills. "Once you think of it not as a constraint but as sort of a game," finding creative ways to reuse materials becomes fun, said Larsen. Ian Garrett, the production's lighting director who leads the nonprofit Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, initiated a carbon emissions audit of the show. And this spring, "The Pocket Park Kids" offset its emissions by a giveaway of more than 100 trees in New York City. Now, Larsen is hoping to bring the play to other communities in different parts of the country and world. She's also thinking about possibilities for telling the story in other media - a book, TV, perhaps a movie. "I think the key to solving the climate crisis is feeling good while we do it, and I do feel there can be joy in being problem solvers and change-makers," she said. Or, as the parakeet in the play puts it, "Action is the antidote to despair." The play, and more specifically the parakeet puppets, made an impression in my household. A few weeks after seeing the performance, my daughter said to me unprompted: "I really liked that puppet show." Asked about what she learned from it, she said, "You need to keep the flowers healthy" and "the trees with no garbage." Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@ This story about climate change and theater was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter on climate and education. The post How theater can teach kids about climate change appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
WIRED
06-07-2025
- Health
- WIRED
How the Binding of Two Brain Molecules Creates Memories That Last a Lifetime
Jul 6, 2025 2:00 AM An interaction between two proteins points to a molecular basis for memory. But how do memories last when the molecules that form them turn over within days, weeks, or months? Illustration: Carlos Arrojo for Quanta Magazine The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine . When Todd Sacktor was about to turn 3, his 4-year-old sister died of leukemia. 'An empty bedroom next to mine. A swing set with two seats instead of one,' he said, recalling the lingering traces of her presence in the house. 'There was this missing person—never spoken of—for which I had only one memory.' That memory, faint but enduring, was set in the downstairs den of their home. A young Sacktor asked his sister to read him a book, and she brushed him off: 'Go ask your mother.' Sacktor glumly trudged up the stairs to the kitchen. It's remarkable that, more than 60 years later, Sacktor remembers this fleeting childhood moment at all. The astonishing nature of memory is that every recollection is a physical trace, imprinted into brain tissue by the molecular machinery of neurons. How the essence of a lived moment is encoded and later retrieved remains one of the central unanswered questions in neuroscience. Sacktor became a neuroscientist in pursuit of an answer. At the State University of New York Downstate in Brooklyn, he studies the molecules involved in maintaining the neuronal connections underlying memory. The question that has always held his attention was first articulated in 1984 by the famed biologist Francis Crick: How can memories persist for years, even decades, when the body's molecules degrade and are replaced in a matter of days, weeks or, at most, months? In 2024, working alongside a team that included his longtime collaborator André Fenton, a neuroscientist at New York University, Sacktor offered a potential explanation in a paper published in Science Advances . The researchers discovered that a persistent bond between two proteins is associated with the strengthening of synapses, which are the connections between neurons. Synaptic strengthening is thought to be fundamental to memory formation. As these proteins degrade, new ones take their place in a connected molecular swap that maintains the bond's integrity and, therefore, the memory. In 1984, Francis Crick described a biological conundrum: Memories last years, while most molecules degrade in days or weeks. 'How then is memory stored in the brain so that its trace is relatively immune to molecular turnover?' he wrote in Nature. Photograph: National Library of Medicine/Science Source The researchers present 'a very convincing case' that 'the interaction between these two molecules is needed for memory storage,' said Karl Peter Giese, a neurobiologist at King's College London who was not involved with the work. The findings offer a compelling response to Crick's dilemma, reconciling the discordant timescales to explain how ephemeral molecules maintain memories that last a lifetime. Molecular Memory Early in his career, Sacktor made a discovery that would shape the rest of his life. After studying under the molecular memory pioneer James Schwartz at Columbia University, he opened his own lab at SUNY Downstate to search for a molecule that might help explain how long-term memories persist. The molecule he was looking for would be in the brain's synapses. In 1949, the psychologist Donald Hebb proposed that repeatedly activating neurons strengthens the connections between them, or, as the neurobiologist Carla Shatz later put it: 'Cells that fire together, wire together.' In the decades since, many studies have suggested that the stronger the connection between neurons that hold memories, the better the memories persist. In the early 1990s, in a dish in his lab, Sacktor stimulated a slice of a rat's hippocampus—a small region of the brain linked to memories of events and places, such as the interaction Sacktor had with his sister in the den—to activate neural pathways in a way that mimicked memory encoding and storage. Then he searched for any molecular changes that had taken place. Every time he repeated the experiment, he saw elevated levels of a certain protein within the synapses. 'By the fourth time, I was like, this is it,' he said. It was protein kinase M zeta, or PKMζ for short. As the rats' hippocampal tissue was stimulated, synaptic connections strengthened and levels of PKMζ increased. By the time he published his findings in 1993, he was convinced that PKMζ was crucial for memory. Todd Sacktor has devoted his career to pursuing the molecular nature of memory. Photograph: SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University Over the next two decades, he would go on to build a body of work showing that PKMζ's presence helps maintain memories long after their initial formation. When Sacktor blocked the molecule's activity an hour after a memory was formed, he saw that synaptic strengthening was reversed. This discovery suggested that PKMζ was 'necessary and sufficient' to preserve a memory over time, he wrote in Nature Neuroscience in 2002. In contrast, hundreds of other localized molecules impacted synaptic strengthening only if disrupted within a few minutes of a memory's formation. It appeared to be a singular molecular key to long-term memory. To test his hypothesis in live animals, he teamed up with Fenton, who worked at SUNY Downstate at the time and had experience training lab animals and running behavioral experiments. In 2006, the duo published their first paper showing that blocking PKMζ could erase rats' memories a day or a month after they had formed. This suggested that the persistent activity of PKMζ is required to maintain a memory. The paper was a bombshell. Sacktor and Fenton's star protein PKMζ gained widespread attention, and labs around the world found that blocking it could erase various types of memories, including those related to fear and taste. PKMζ seemed like a sweeping explanation for how memories form and are maintained at the molecular level. But then their hypothesis lost momentum. Other researchers genetically engineered mice to lack PKMζ, and in 2013, two independent studies showed that these mice could still form memories. This cast doubt on the protein's role and brought much of the ongoing research to a halt. Sacktor and Fenton were undeterred. 'We knew we had to figure it out,' Sacktor said. In 2016, they published a rebuttal, demonstrating that in the absence of PKMζ, mice recruit a backup mechanism, involving another molecule, to strengthen synapses. The existence of a compensatory molecule wasn't a surprise. 'The biological system is not such that you lose one molecule and everything goes. That's very rare,' Giese said. But identifying this compensatory molecule prompted a new question: How did it know where to go to replace PKMζ? It would take Sacktor and Fenton nearly another decade to find out. The Maintenance Bond A classic test of a molecule's importance is to block it and see what breaks. Determined to pin down PKMζ's role once and for all, Sacktor and Fenton set out to design a way to disrupt it more precisely than ever before. They developed a new molecule to inhibit the activity of PKMζ. It 'worked beautifully,' Sacktor said. But it wasn't clear how. One day in 2020, Matteo Bernabo, a graduate student from a collaborating lab at McGill University, was presenting findings related to the PKMζ inhibitor when a clue emerged from the audience. 'I suggested that it worked by blocking the PKMζ's interaction with KIBRA,' recalled Wayne Sossin, a neuroscientist at McGill. KIBRA is a scaffolding protein. Like an anchor, it holds other proteins in place inside a synapse. In the brain, it is abundant in regions associated with learning and memory. 'It's not a protein that a lot of people work on,' Sossin said, but there is considerable 'independent evidence that KIBRA has something to do with memory'—and even that it is associated with PKMζ. Most research has focused on KIBRA's role in cancer. 'In the nervous system,' he said, 'there are only three or four of us [studying it].' Sacktor and Fenton joined them. André Fenton and his team found that an interaction between two proteins is key to keeping memory intact over time. Photograph: Lisa Robinson To find out if KIBRA and PKMζ work together in response to synaptic activity, the researchers used a technique that makes interacting proteins glow. When they applied electrical pulses to hippocampal slices, glowing dots of evidence appeared: Following bursts of synaptic activity that produced long-term synaptic strengthening, a multitude of KIBRA-PKMζ complexes formed, and they were persistent. Then the team tested the bond during real memory formation by giving mice a drug to disrupt the formation of these complexes. They saw that the mice's synaptic strength and task memory were lost—and that once the drug wore off, the erased memory did not return, but the mice could acquire and remember new memories once again. But are the KIBRA-PKMζ complexes needed to maintain memory over the long term? To find out, the researchers disrupted the complex four weeks after a memory was formed. Doing so did indeed wipe out the memory. This suggested that the interaction between KIBRA and PKMζ is crucial not only for forming memories, but also for keeping them intact over time. Illustration: Carlos Arrojo for Quanta Magazine 'It's the persistent association between two proteins that maintains the memory, rather than a protein that lasts by itself for the lifetime of the memory,' said Panayiotis Tsokas, a neuroscientist working with Sacktor and lead author on the new Science Advances paper. The KIBRA and PKMζ proteins stabilize each other by forming a bond. That way, when a protein degrades and needs to be replaced, the other remains in place. The bond itself and its location at the specific synapses that were activated during learning are preserved, allowing a new partner to slot itself in, perpetuating the alliance over time. Individually, PKMζ and KIBRA don't last a lifetime—but by binding to each other, they help ensure your memories might. The discovery addresses the conundrum first identified by Crick, namely how memories persist despite the relatively short lifetimes of all biological molecules. 'There had to be a very, very interesting answer, an elegant answer, for how this could come about,' Fenton said. 'And that elegant answer is the KIBRA-PKMζ interacting story.' This work also answers a question that researchers had put on the shelf. Sacktor's earlier study showed that increasing levels of PKMζ strengthened synapses and memories. But how did the molecule know where to go within the neuron? 'We figured, well, one day, maybe we'll understand that,' Sacktor said. Now, the researchers think that KIBRA acts as a synaptic tag that guides PKMζ. If true, this would help explain how only the specific synapses involved in a particular physical memory trace are strengthened, when a neuron may have thousands of synapses that connect it to various other cells. 'These experiments very nicely show that KIBRA is necessary for maintaining the activity of PKMζ at the synapse,' said David Glanzman, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. However, he cautioned that this doesn't necessarily translate to maintaining memory because synaptic strengthening is not the only model for how memory works. Glanzman's own past research on sea slugs at first appeared to show that disrupting a molecule analogous to PKMζ erases memory. 'Originally, I said it was erased,' Glanzman said, 'but later experiments showed we could bring the memory back.' These findings prompted him to reconsider whether memory is truly stored as changes in the strength of synaptic connections. Glanzman, who has worked for 40 years under the synaptic model, is a recent proponent of an alternative view called the molecular-encoding model, which posits that molecules inside a neuron store memories. While he has no doubt that synaptic strengthening follows memory formation, and that PKMζ plays a major role in this process, he remains unsure if the molecule also stores the memory itself. Still, Glanzman emphasized that this study addresses some of the challenges of the synaptic model, such as molecular turnover and synapse targeting, by 'providing evidence that KIBRA and PKMζ form a complex that is synapse-specific and persists longer than either individual molecule.' Although Sacktor and Fenton believe that this protein pair is fundamental to memory, they know that there may be other factors yet to be discovered that help memories persist. Just as PKMζ led them to KIBRA, the complex might lead them further still. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
IOL News
11-06-2025
- Science
- IOL News
If people stopped having babies, how long would it be before for humans are gone?
If no one had babies anymore, there would probably be no humans left on Earth within 100 years. Image: Pexels Very few people live beyond a century. So, if no one had babies anymore, there would probably be no humans left on Earth within 100 years. But first, the population would shrink as older folks died and no one was being born. Even if all births were to suddenly cease, this decline would start slowly. Eventually there would not be enough young people coming of age to do essential work, causing societies throughout the world to quickly fall apart. Some of these breakdowns would be in humanity's ability to produce food, provide health care and do everything else we all rely on. Food would become scarce even though there would be fewer people to feed. As an anthropology professor who has spent his career studying human behavior, biology and cultures, I readily admit that this would not be a pretty picture. Eventually, civilization would crumble. It's likely that there would not be many people left within 70 or 80 years, rather than 100, due to shortages of food, clean water, prescription drugs and everything else that you can easily buy today and need to survive. Sudden change could follow a catastrophe To be sure, an abrupt halt in births is highly unlikely unless there's a global catastrophe. Here's one potential scenario, which writer Kurt Vonnegut explored in his novel 'Galapagos': A highly contagious disease could render all people of reproductive age infertile – meaning that no one would be capable of having babies anymore. Another possibility might be a nuclear war that no one survives – a topic that's been explored in many scary movies and books. A lot of these works are science fiction involving a lot of space travel. Others seek to predict a less fanciful Earth-bound future where people can no longer reproduce easily, causing collective despair and the loss of personal freedom for those who are capable of having babies. Two of my favorite books along these lines are 'The Handmaid's Tale,' by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, and 'The Children of Men,' by British writer P.D. James. They are dystopian stories, meaning that they take place in an unpleasant future with a great deal of human suffering and disorder. And both have become the basis of television series and movies. In the 1960s and 1970s, many people also worried that there would be too many people on Earth, which would cause different kinds of catastrophes. Those scenarios also became the focus of dystopian books and movies. Michael A Little, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Binghamton University, State University of New York. Image: The Conversation Heading toward 10 billion people To be sure, the number of people in the world is still growing, even though the pace of that growth has slowed down. Experts who study population changes predict that the total will peak at 10 billion in the 2080s, up from 8 billion today and 4 billion in 1974. The U.S. population currently stands at 342 million. That's about 200 million more people than were here when I was born in the 1930s. This is a lot of people, but both worldwide and in the U.S. these numbers could gradually fall if more people die than are born. About 3.6 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2024, down from 4.1 million in 2004. Meanwhile, about 3.3 million people died in 2022, up from 2.4 million 20 years earlier. One thing that will be important as these patterns change is whether there's a manageable balance between young people and older people. That's because the young often are the engine of society. They tend to be the ones to implement new ideas and produce everything we use. Also, many older people need help from younger people with basic activities, like cooking and getting dressed. And a wide range of jobs are more appropriate for people under 65 rather than those who have reached the typical age for retirement. Declining birth rates In many countries, women are having fewer children throughout their reproductive lives than used to be the case. That reduction is the most stark in several countries, including India and South Korea. The declines in birth rates occurring today are largely caused by people choosing not to have any children or as many as their parents did. That kind of population decline can be kept manageable through immigration from other countries, but cultural and political concerns often stop that from happening. At the same time, many men are becoming less able to father children due to fertility problems. If that situation gets much worse, it could contribute to a steep decline in population. Neanderthals went extinct Our species, Homo sapiens, has been around for at least 200,000 years. That's a long time, but like all animals on Earth we are at risk of becoming extinct. Consider what happened to the Neanderthals, a close relative of Homo sapiens. They first appeared at least 400,000 years ago. Our modern human ancestors overlapped for a while with the Neanderthals, who gradually declined to become extinct about 40,000 years ago. Some scientists have found evidence that modern humans were more successful at reproducing our numbers than the Neanderthal people. This occurred when Homo sapiens became more successful at providing food for their families and also having more babies than the Neanderthals. If humans were to go extinct, it could open up opportunities for other animals to flourish on Earth. On the other hand, it would be sad for humans to go away because we would lose all of the great achievements people have made, including in the arts and science. In my view, we need to take certain steps to ensure that we have a long future on our own planet. These include controlling climate change and avoiding wars. Also, we need to appreciate the fact that having a wide array of animals and plants makes the planet healthy for all creatures, including our own species. SUNDAY TRIBUNE
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Chancellor outlines view of SUNY system
ALBANY — The State University of New York is planning for the next academic year, and Chancellor John B. King Jr. said that the system is ready to realize another year of growth, development and scholarship despite what he described as a hostile environment for academic freedom and the principles that undergird the SUNY system. In his annual 'State of the University' address in Albany on Wednesday, King said the university system is building on four 'pillars' — research, student success, economic development and diversity. King said that despite federal attacks on the premise of diversity, equity and inclusion, SUNY is doubling down on it. 'DEI is not only one of our pillars, it's in our DNA,' King said from a podium in The Egg, a theater complex attached to the state Capitol. 'Our enabling statute, written more than 75 years ago, promises that SUNY will provide to the people of New York educational services of the highest quality, with the broadest possible access, fully representative of all segments of the population.' King said DEI is a foundational principle, guiding SUNY college curriculums, campus codes of conduct and commitments to protecting disabled and disadvantaged communities. 'DEI means continuing to make absolutely clear that there is no place for antisemitism on campuses, just as there is no place for racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia or any other form of hatred or bigotry,' he said. To combat racial, religious or other bigotry, King said SUNY will start requiring all students who run clubs on campuses to undertake federal Title VI civil rights training next semester. King said SUNY will also push back on the federal push to defund research on college and university campuses — which he said has put SUNY-led research on Alzheimer's disease, cancer detection, the health effects of the 9/11 attacks and more at risk. 'We're making steady progress toward Gov. Hochul's goal to double SUNY research, with $1.2 billion in SUNY-wide sponsored research expenditures across the system,' King said. And he noted that SUNY is leading a novel approach to artificial generative intelligence research, continuing to implement a multi-billion dollar Empire AI project that will connect the SUNY University at Buffalo with the other colleges, universities and research organizations for a publicly-led AI research and development program. 'Empire AI is making it possible for SUNY researchers to help us better understand everything from antisemitism on social media to climate change,' King said. 'Binghamton University associate professor Jeremy Blackburn's work with AI aims to, in his words, 'understand jerks on the internet.' His research uses AI applications that comb massive troves of social media data to help us understand how social media is used to spread extremist ideologies.' King proudly noted that SUNY has reversed the decade-plus-long trend of dropping enrollment across its 64 campuses, a trend that has left a handful of campuses with structural deficits and has required them to make difficult downsizing plans, including at SUNY Potsdam. King noted that for the last two years, SUNY has grown enrollment in every corner of its offerings, adding students in doctoral programs, associate degree programs and every level in between. The system has not yet returned to its peak enrollment headcount from 2008, when it served 471,184 students. Total enrollment for fall 2024, the latest semester with available data, shows the system served 376,534 students. And SUNY is on track to add many more students to its community colleges next year, as the state opens up the SUNY Reconnect program meant to offer free associate degrees to full-time students ages 25 to 55, seeking a degree in an in-demand field. King said SUNY is also expanding it's 'Ten Percent Promise,' which guarantees that 10% of select high school seniors will have guaranteed admission to the competitive SUNY universities with lower acceptance rates. The system is also expanding its ASAP and ACE programs, which connect students at risk of dropping out of college with academic, financial and personal support systems. SUNY is also rolling out a pilot program to offer evening and weekend child care on community college campuses for students. Overall, King outlined a positive view of the future of the SUNY system, keeping with the policies and priorities the system has held for decades. 'I leave here filled with optimism that's grounded in our progress, our results and our strength — that not only can we meet this moment, we already are,' King said.
New York Times
25-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Teachers Saved My Life. Why Do We Treat Them So Poorly?
I have attended commencements of all kinds throughout my career, and I can tell you that some of the best are in prisons. Over and over, I have spoken at these commencements with incarcerated men and women who acknowledge the awful choices or stupid mistakes they made, the strangers or loved ones they hurt, yet emerge from prison renewed through higher education. While 95 percent of the people incarcerated will come home one day, they often return to the same cycles that led them to prison in the first place. Through college coursework, they are able to reflect on their past, develop a clearer vision for their future and gain the skills to contribute to their families and communities. One student told me that pursuing college while incarcerated was the first time he had moral and academic credibility with his family. The potential for higher education in prison to change lives is the reason that I worked to expand these programs when I was the U.S. secretary of education and president of a national education civil rights organization, and do so now as chancellor of the State University of New York. I believe so deeply in the transformative power of education because teachers saved my life. When I was 8 years old, in October of 1983, my mother died suddenly from a heart attack. It was indescribably devastating. I then lived alone with my father, who was struggling with Alzheimer's until he died when I was 12. During those years with my father, no one outside our home knew he was sick, and I didn't know why he acted the way he did. Some nights he would talk to me; some nights he wouldn't say a word. Other nights he would be sad or angry, or even violent. Home was scary and unstable, but I was blessed to have New York City public schoolteachers who made school a place that was safe, nurturing, academically rigorous and engaging. If not for Allan Osterweil, my teacher in fourth, fifth and sixth grade at P.S. 276 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, I would be in prison or dead. Amid the darkness of my home life, Mr. Osterweil gave me a sense of hope and purpose. In his classroom, we read The New York Times every day. We learned the capital and leader of every country in the world. We did productions of Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll. The language of both plays was incredibly difficult, but the joy of learning our roles and staging the productions helped us not only to enlarge our vocabularies and hone our public speaking skills, but also to fall in love with the arts. Field trips to the American Museum of Natural History, the ballet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden adjacent to Prospect Park exposed us to a world beyond our own. But what made Mr. Osterweil's classroom magical wasn't just the content, it was also the relationships. He was genuinely curious about what 8- and 9-year-olds had to say about the Cold War or famine in Africa and engaged us in serious conversations, asking probing questions, listening carefully. He brought in fantastically elaborate seashells he had collected with his wife on beaches around the world because he wanted to help us appreciate the beauty of nature and to share his passions with us. It was very unusual in the New York City schools of the time for a teacher to stay with a single class for multiple years, but Mr. Osterweil's decision to 'loop' with us helped deepen our bonds. When I didn't feel love or security at home, I found them in Mr. Osterweil's classroom: It was a place I could be a kid, full of joy and wonder, when I couldn't be a kid at home. After my father died, I moved around between schools and family members. Thanks to great teachers, I always found solace in my schoolwork. They would help me find an escape through a novel, push me to make my way through a seemingly impossible math problem or captivate my curiosity with a pig dissection or a debate about American foreign policy in the Caribbean and Central America. And more than that, they were the adults who provided stability, the source of encouragement and reassurance that things might be OK. Even with all that support, I struggled as a teenager, as do many students who have experienced trauma, oscillating between intense sadness and seething anger. I got in so much trouble that I was kicked out of high school. It would have been easy for others to have looked at me — a Black and Latino young man with a family in crisis and no respect for authority — and given up, but I was lucky that teachers and a school counselor were willing to give me a second chance. In fact, I benefited from much the same kind of second chance prison higher education programs seek to offer: the classroom as a place of rebirth. If not for the role teachers played in my life, I would never have become a teacher, a principal or a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet. Teachers had more faith in me than I had in myself; they changed my trajectory. But my story is not unique. From our earliest days as a country, America has believed in public education as a vehicle for upward mobility. From the one-room schoolhouses of 18th century New England to the ambitious vision for public higher education in Lincoln's Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to President George W. Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy's bipartisan No Child Left Behind law, America has sought with each successive generation to expand the circle of educational opportunity. The poor student, the immigrant, the first-generation college student, the veteran or the single mother working her way through community college: We have tried to make space for them all, because we know access to education will enrich their lives, expand our economy and strengthen our democracy. Yet now the Trump administration and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency are seeking to abandon education as a national imperative. Whether it is purging half of the staff at the U.S. Department of Education, threatening to eliminate the Head Start early childhood education program, telling teachers to stop teaching the hard parts of our history or slashing funding for research at our universities, the Trump administration is trying to unravel one of our greatest national achievements. This isn't a debate about efficiency; it is a debate about what kind of country we want to live in. Should schools be improved? Of course. Are there federal education programs that haven't worked as intended that should be redesigned or eliminated? Of course. But the Trump administration's goal is to destroy, not to improve. In the face of student performance stuck below where it was before the Covid pandemic began, a national crisis of chronic absenteeism, spiking depression and anxiety among kids and teens, and yawning gaps in achievement between low-income students and their more affluent peers, we ought to be having a national conversation about how we find and keep more teachers like the ones I had. We ought to be talking not about dismantling the Department of Education but about making teaching degrees free for people who commit to working in low-income urban and rural communities or in hard-to-staff subjects. We ought to be raising teacher pay and improving working conditions, ensuring that there are enough counselors, especially in schools serving neighborhoods afflicted by poverty and violence. We ought to be figuring out how to create more space for inspiring teachers who want to create new programs or school models — focused on arts, career and technical education, learning multiple languages and more — that will spark students' passion for learning and make school a place they want to be. After all, protecting and accelerating the transformative power of education is what's essential — and irreplaceable — about the federal role. Without the funding for vulnerable students the federal government provides, teachers in schools serving low-income students will be laid off and enrichment programs will be eliminated. Without the Pell Grants and student loans the federal government administers, low- and middle-income students will be locked out of higher education. And without federal leadership safeguarding students' civil rights, identifying schools that are succeeding (so their practices can be scaled) and shining a spotlight on places that are struggling (to ensure states and districts intervene), performance gaps will never close. At a time when we desperately need leadership and innovation that values and lifts up great teaching, the Trump administration's campaign of destruction is going to make it harder to find and keep the Mr. Osterweils of the world.
