"What’s driving me crazy, then, is not the idea that AI exists or that people are using AI. It’s that I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot...." (1/2)

Incredible sports moments ruined by ads ten seconds later saying “it’s never too late to place a bet”

To solve chronic absenteeism, let’s make school a place where students really want to be // hechingerreport.org/opinion-to-s...

"When decision-makers ask “what did we learn from that $5 million evaluation?” and the answer is “the report will be ready in three more years,” these critiques become hard to dismiss." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A couple weeks ago I wrote on our Substack about how the California School Dashboard still has serious problems (drawing on my recent Getting Down to Facts Report with Shira Haderlein) edpolicyhub.substack.com/p/california...

What’s happening to science in the US now? In the future? 20% fewer grad students at MIT sums it up well Our future is fewer scientists, patents, cures, discoveries Less growth, less progress, less knowledge

Got a notification from a medieval copyright lawyer

Literally looting the federal treasury to hand out more than a billion dollars to the January 6 insurrectionists and other cronies and henchmen

Unless I am misunderstanding the situation I don't really see why a D governor would turn this down. If you do, it's just giving away money to red states as opposed to keeping it in-state.

New WP: NAEP and State tests often disagree about educational progress. How much? What do we do? We show how to use these "two watches" to improve trend measurement whenever we have multiple trends. Our paper, including methods underlying our new SEDA/EOP data: edopportunity.org/papers/two_w...

This is one of the loveliest homes I've ever seen for sale in my ZIP code. www.redfin.com/CA/Los-Angel...

I absolutely love this updated @chronicle.com feature on who a college thinks its peer institutions are. It's always good for a chuckle (and a sense of status competition). www.chronicle.com/article/who-...

Annual costume party @uscrossier.bsky.social

I read this entire article and could not for the life of me figure out why it was news. They picked a speaker, some students wrote a letter saying they don’t like the speaker. This is the sum total of what happened. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/u...

If you're in the LA area, I'm going to be live on KCRW at about 12:05 Pacific to talk about the latest Opportunity Scorecard results and what they mean for California www.kcrw.com

Similar to ACA website the initial rollout was ROUGH, but it’s now become an obvious and clear improvement on the status quo ante

California can--and should--do more to build a coherent curriculum policy urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

The emerging narrative about students and AI seems to be that they hate it AND they are using it frequently for school-related matters. Not totally irreconcilable; interesting if accurate, though.

Our SEDA/EOP team released new trend data today! edopportunity.org/trends/ @upshot.nytimes.com has a nice lookup tool for districts (with apologies to AK, CO, ME, MT, NY, NV, & OR). I like the comparisons to similar districts and hope they encourage peer learning. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The school’s famous Honor Code was no match for chatbot-enabled cheating. / www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Glioblastoma also took my dad, at the same age as Jason. Terrible disease. Such a loss.

A Tennessee teenager calls her school board a group of “cowards” last week for not firing a member who hugged her and remarked that she was “hot” during a public meeting last month.

Yeah but I saw a reel from RuPaul about how everything happening now is because of school underfunding and so this can’t be true

I will never in my life understand how anyone looked at this man, looked at his history, listened to what he said, and especially in 2024, looked at what he did during 2017-2021 and thought, "This man cares about me and my problems." He'd throw you into a pool of sharks to save $10.

I guess this relates to me always describing myself as a simplifier (e.g., www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQZH...)

My brother and I were talking about this *exact* thing less than one hour ago (I proposed it as a reason for why everyone seems so unhappy all the time) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/o...

Op-ed writers rarely get a say in how their pieces are titled. So, I just have to note how much I love this one.

In light of 1) USC's $200 million AI announcement last week and 2) my conversation yesterday with a colleague about how there is no aspect of student work that can be trusted to represent their original thought anymore. open.substack.com/pub/thenewcr...

"The prevalence of AI use on college campuses is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons, and it will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined."

"'There’s no lack of qualified candidates, but previous elections had an urgency and a sense that who won really mattered,' said Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at USC. 'We don’t have that this time.'" calmatters.org/education/k-...

Just back from the Getting Down to Facts conference in Sacramento, talking about the future of education in California. Here's a quick two-minute summary of my work on California curriculum policy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKYI...

Yep. This is the best way to understand the events of the past couple weeks. They have to dispense with the artifice of principle, because the risks of Dems winning and coming to power bent on accountability are simply too great. www.offmessage.net/p/republican...

Honestly this has seemed like one of the biggest "low hanging fruit" policy changes out there. Good to see some evidence in support of my unreasonably strong priors.

Well said, @bakerdphd.bsky.social. This is a great piece on the troubles with transparency in college admissions. www.chronicle.com/article/why-...

Have you considered that you might be under-catted? Or under-dogged?

From now on, I'm going to write papers where I take an arbitrary performance metric, restrict the sample to top performers on that metric, and then hunt for negative correlations with everything else in the truncated sample. I'm at a business school, so this should be extremely lucrative.

important thing to note here is dr oz cites a current american replacement rate of 1.5, which is not true. the american replacement level in 2025 was 1.79. interestingly, the white replacement rate is in fact at 1.5 though

Better sleep = better learning. "Math and English scores in grade 8 improved by approximately 0.08–0.10 standard deviations, with the largest gains among Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students."

This was supposed to change in Miami *years* ago, but the high school start time is still an absolutely absurd 7:20am—over the years, hundreds of thousands of teenagers and their families in South Florida have suffered educationally and therefore systemically because of this.

Has anyone done this with teacher retention? I for one may have stayed longer if start times weren’t so early, and it seems like it would be extra difficult for families with young kids

Really promising evidence on the early effects of California's mandatory school start times policy (which I was a big advocate for back in the day!). Glad to see this is scaling well www.nber.org/papers/w3518...

THE SUBHEADING FOR THIS ARTICLE IS MALPRACTICE. Sweet chickens.

But more seriously to not interview someone to oppose that professor’s nonsense claim about cursive being uniquely advantageous is actually malpractice!

Why has no one tagged me in this yet??? Am I losing my edge???

There are so many things I would rather do, like nail my own foot to the floor, than read a book that ignores what the real world is like while cheerleading powerful forces operating in the real world.

I don’t understand how it was published in the first place. I mean that literally. I monitor this airspace, I knew immediately it was garbage. So what the hell was this journal doing?

This paper never passed the smell test (that is, it smelled like crap and it was).

Excited to be visiting pici, orecchiette, and paccheri this summer.

IMO a key skill of a good scientist is moving comfortably between the specific & general e.g., relentless in understand the nerdy details of the data (including its coding) WHILE holding onto the big picture of the hypotheses being tested with the data

I think I’ve been hate crimed by delta’s upgrade list.