Have heard so many staffers say this, the implication being that the people on the ground got it wrong. Again. It just feeds a cycle of distrust between policy and practice.

Evidence-based teaching is spreading, but scale remains a challenge. @hollykorbey.bsky.social examines progress in teacher prep, highlighting DFI's decade of work & our CEO, Valerie Sakimura, on policy that centers the science of learning. hollykorbey.substack.com/p/special-report-what-will-it-take

Been working through this list and highly recommended reading on curriculum, ed tech, and beyond.

You know those feel-good stories that don't make you feel good because it's about an individual trying to put a finger in the dike of a systemic injustice? We're teaching kids how to be that individual instead of teaching them how to see and fight the injustice.

I wish I didn’t know as much about the end of Reconstruction as I do. If you understood what is being unleashed now, how it will touch every aspect of our civic life, and how difficult it will be to undo it, you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.

When I was in junior high, the Klan pamphleted on my town square. This was in the 21st century. The Supreme Court’s decision this week to gut the Voting Rights Act treats the Civil Rights Era like the distant past. But it’s not. My column: www.liberalcurrents.com/the-supreme-...

@hollykorbey.bsky.social's latest has this jaw-dropping chart of the dispersion of teacher pedagogical knowledge across countries. Look at the spread on the US. We can say that's all alt cert people in the lower percentiles but I'm not convinced that's all of the explanation.

"We find that immigrant youth who acquired citizenship at birth are substantially less likely to engage in criminal activity, with estimates indicating a 70% reduction in crime." www.nber.org/papers/w3507...

A study of around 44,000 papers finds that the credibility revolution has spread unevenly beyond applied micro, driven mainly by difference-in-differences, with finance and macro lagging by roughly 15 years, from Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham www.nber.org/papers/w35051

If any other intervention produced outcomes of this size - GPA improvements of .24SD & reductions in course failure of .14SD - districts would be desperate to implement it. Instead, because ethnic studies has been labeled as "woke," efforts to scale have slowed.

Alabama passed a law in 2011 that among many things required verification of family immigration status to attend public school. Attendance plummeted, dropouts increased, schools faced (additional) financial shortfalls, and it all got functionally repealed a year later. But sure, do it nationwide.

"White evangelical Protestants (63%) and white Catholics (55%), as well as Christian nationalism Adherents (75%) and Sympathizers (62%), are the only religious groups in which a majority supports detaining immigrants in internment camps." prri.org/research/ame...

Jeff Bezos’s wealth has increased an average of $70 million every day of 2026, meaning that he could have offset The Post’s losses with what he’s made since Monday.

Berea's Pell share is so much higher than other highly selective institutions that I had to make this chart wider.

Corey DeAngelis says, "Low-income families benefit from school choice more than anybody else. This is a big deal for families who couldn’t afford private school before." That's a bald-faced lie based on every state's voucher data, not a "reasonable researchers disagree" issue.

When we focus on the "brilliance" of unaccountable perpetrators, we are forgoing the brilliance of the young people deterred from their fields bsky.app/profile/coho...

What a phenomenally concise turn of phrase to describe this era.

I have been struck in my very anecdotal experience tutoring students across multiple districts how often students are on a laptop in every class, all day. And how often they don't have a textbook, just slides to learn content from. 🤦🏼

I'm sorry what?

Heard NPR cover this last night and they said "slight increase in suspensions but test scores improved" with no mention of the disproportionate suspensions for Black boys. They are paying a much higher cost than other students for this otherwise good news. We can't lose sight of that, or them.

For context, 87% of school-aged kids are enrolled in public schools in the US.* (* a statistic we only know because of work the US Dept of ED used to do to collect vital data on our nation's schools)

Ending Black History Month & banning books by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a dark echo of the ways the military has been used in the past to advance racial rights in America. Frederick Douglass understood Black military service could help achieve citizenship. Truman saw integration as democratic necessity.

It's important to add "out" here. These are just the queer youth who are out enough to themselves or others to indicate so on a survey. There are so many more kids uncounted who are affected, so this even understates the danger of these laws.

Education researchers warn budget proposals from the White House and House Republicans would impose steep cuts on some of the nation's most vulnerable students and disadvantaged school communities.

One study concluded 70% of increased electric cost across US due to AI data centers. apnews.com/article/elec...

You can use this tool to find out just how much funding your local district (or any district in the country) will be losing in the new federal budget: "DES MOINES INDEPENDENT COMMUNITY SCHOOL DISTRICT will lose $8,175,391 in federal funding." public.tableau.com/app/profile/... #EduSky #EdChat

Look at what happens to male teacher salaries (blue line) v.s. female teacher salaries (red line) after collective bargaining laws expire.

The 51st has become my go to for local reporting, in case you're wondering where to take your Post subscription...

I worry we are going to look back at the 2020's as the decade we talked way too much about phones in schools + way too little about the % of time students spend staring at a Chromebook screen in classrooms.

I actually think people are going to miss the complicated, challenging and, yes, sometimes exclusionary social graces that make society possible. You really don’t want to get rid of all metaphorical language, scripts, and lies. They grease the wheels of mutual cooperation.

Really handy data tool in this, helps clarify how much variation is happening between districts, even though the overall trend in salaries is bad news.

NAGB just voted (reluctantly) to kill several NAEP exams over the next 10 yrs. Cuts: 1) No Long-Term Trend NAEP at all until 2033. 2) No 4th grade science in 2028 and no 12th grade science in 2032. 3) Writing scrapped altogether. 4) No 12th grade history in 2030 (1/3)

What if the boat flipping orcas and the tariffed penguins formed a team

I have tariffed the penguins that are on Heard Island and which you were probably assuming did not export goods forgive me they were taking advantage of us so cunning and so cold

More of this

These Are the Students Targeted by Trump’s Immigration Enforcement Over Campus Activism time.com/7272060/inte...

To go with the news that all ED staff have been ordered to leave their offices by 6pm tonight. This is almost certainly why. #EduSky

I'm super excited to share this short brief on who has power over the Department of Education, what the ED Sec can do, and what Executive Orders can do. There's a lot of info (and links!) packed into one place. I hope it's helpful. Please share. drive.google.com/file/d/1QpeK...

"One of the craziest bits about covering the systematic dismantling of democracy is this: the people doing the dismantling frequently tell you exactly what they’re going to do. They’re almost proud of it. They just wrap it in language that makes it sound like the opposite."

I annotated the revisions to the draft email and final email that Linda McMahon sent out to ED, which I think shows that their scaling back on their ambitions. Maybe. h/t to @marisakabas.bsky.social for being the first to share the draft and the email.

SCOOP: Now that Linda McMahon is confirmed/sworn in as secretary, Trump will be imminently issuing an executive order eliminating the Department of Education. I’ve obtained a draft of an email that McMahon will be sending to staff re: the EO and the department’s “final mission”. Here is a portion:

We’re witnessing a Brexit-level instance of completely unnecessary economic destruction. A country that’s not hit by any shock, but simply chooses policy self-harm.

Another one for the flawed causality arguments file.

How exactly will they be able to do the College Scorecard without IPEDS? Or NAEP without the CCD?

Today's NAEP results—& the apparent role of chronic absenteeism—are unsurprising to any close observer What's curious to me is this evidence-based sense of calamity doesn't really shape broader public sentiment. In fact, satisfaction is rebounding!👇 Is it crisis fatigue? Biases in info & judgment?

This Marty West quote captures a lot of problem. A dismal report card in math and reading hechingerreport.org/naep-test-20...

One of my pledges to myself in leaving the bird app was to prevent doomscrolling by looking at actual birds on this app. And wolves. And otters! Join me!

Seems a great day for this reminder.

It's not everyday that I wake up to a front page article in the Boston Globe featuring a colleague of mine, complete with photo shoot. Today is that day! Fantastic coverage of the teacher workforce research that @oliviachi.bsky.social does here at BU Wheelock. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/14/b...